The Simple Life

A little while ago I noticed a particularly catching headline on one of the women’s glossy magazines.  Don’t worry, I hadn’t bought it or anything, but the bold red font practically leaped off the cover, wrapped it’s tendrils around my face, and laid it’s horrible eggs in my oesophagus.  The magazine’s main article was named “The Secret Life Of Men”, with the tagline “How to decode his signals”.

This made me snigger, which turned into a chortle, then a guffaw, and before long I was asked to leave the store as I was howling over their lucrative publications.

Ladies, you have been force fed a great myth.  All your lives you have been drip fed tips and tricks on reading your man’s secret signals, his body language, or the perturbing excretions from his sweat glands.  You have been duped into believing that the male gender is a complex whirlwind of valiant honour, nobility, and meat.  You have been taught that a vast array of firing synapses lie behind his eyes, scrutinising your attire choices and social cues. 

Typical lazy man, if he was a cat.

Well, this revelation may be akin to waking up from The Matrix, but men are remarkably simple.  Their problems are generally straightforward to the point of childishness.  I would wager that 75% of men’s problems would disappear if you gave them a biscuit.  I’ll take a custard cream, if it’s not too much trouble.

This is why the world would be a much better place if it was run by women.  As things stand, men have done a pretty lousy job of running everything so far.  We’ve had a global financial crisis, rioting in the Middle East, and the continued existence of Marmite.  Our record is less than dazzling to say the least.  We destroy, pillage, dump, raze, dismantle and poo on everything we come across.  We can’t be trusted with these big red buttons and shiny things, especially when those tempting interfaces are linked up to mass destruction devices.  We’ve run it into the ground, and it’s up to you, my sisters from other misters, to heal the world.  You are the true creators, and only your patience and understanding can stop us from suffocating underneath a mound of bacon.

Inventive, yet useless

Of course, when the ovarian revolution comes, men will be required to stay at home.  We’ll lay on the couch in our pants, letting our paunches loll over into a bowl of semi-fresh popcorn.  We’ll have to stay inside and take mental notes on the bikini volleyball championships while you go around fixing everything for us.  Because that’s what we’re like.  We’re sorry.  We didn’t mean to make such a mess. 

Just remember to wake us up when you’ve finished.  Once you’ve cured cancer, solved global poverty, and weaved a brand new ozone layer out of our discarded beer cans, let us know.  We’ll stumble outside, blinking, dazed by the glorious illumination of our green and loving Earth, and we’ll immediately start a war about cheese or something.

Fate Of The World (Or How I Learned To Stop Vegetarianism And Love The Bomb)

Let me preface this by saying, I try not to talk about video games that often here on Muppets For Justice. It’s not that I don’t like them (that’s far from the truth), but I thought that if I allowed myself to write about them, I’d end up with a very dull Blog about graphical quality or who is the best out of Sonic and the guy who deals the cards on Microsoft Hearts. Regardless, I simply have to flag up a  fascinating game called Fate Of The World, and I'm not even being paid to do so.

Fate Of The World is not a traditional game in that you don’t shoot or stab anyone. I understand that some of you might feel slightly nauseous at this thought, but it is a beautiful simulation game with a simple interface, but a magnificently delicate model working behind the scenes.  It’s a strategy game which puts you in control of a fictional organisation (The GEO) tasked with combating global warming and improving the lives of the planet’s ever expanding population. To do this, you select policy cards ranging from improving healthcare and education, to reforestation and stopping the use of coal or oil in a region. Then you advance five years and see what effects your policies have had.

The fate of this thing is in your hands

Sounds pretty easy right? Give people access to aspirin and plant a few trees, job done. Wrong. Every action in Fate Of The World has an equal and opposite reaction and if left unchecked, what seem like sensible policies for a greener Earth can cause mass genocide.

I thought I’d talk about my first experiences of the game to help you understand how disastrously bad events can turn. After a short tutorial mission which was disarmingly easy, I chose the first main mission which required me to reduce global oil consumption whilst keeping the HDI (Human Development Index, a figure which shows people’s quality of life based on wealth, life expectancy, health, etc.) above 0.7 across the board.

My strategy was clear in my mind. I would improve healthcare across the poorest regions such as North and South Africa, then move onto compulsory education in those regions. For the wealthier regions like Europe, North America and Japan, I’d concentrate on renewable energy, planting trees, and stopping deep water oil drilling. An eco warrior’s dream world, right? Being the liberal lefty that I am, I thought I’d be able to finally prove that the world could exist peacefully if everyone had access to health and education, and all power was generated by wind farms.

Play your cards right

Right from turn one I realised that North Africa was basically spoiling for a fight. Mass outbreaks of violent protests and rioting were cropping up all over the region, forcing me to spend a little too much money on providing security to the continent. The whole continent was turning into Fight Club, only someone must have forgotten the first two rules as news of this brawl spread faster than Katie Price's vaginal butter.  I started by building a welfare office, whilst funding peacekeeping troops to try and keep dissent at bay. This escalated further when I found myself having to impose martial law to stop people from killing each other (one of my agents was even kidnapped and killed during this conflict). In a the space of about 15 years I’d personally transformed from a pacifist into a militaristic fascist, and found that I hadn’t even started my higher education program yet. This was disappointing, but inconsequential compared to what was happening elsewhere.

In order to fund my projects in other areas of the globe, I decided to raise a little extra cash in richer areas. I introduced a tobin tax in Europe and Japan (this is basically the Robin Hood tax which takes a cut of all financial transactions). I noticed in Europe that after five years, businesses were threatening to leave the region, so I removed the tax to try and avoid a similar situation to North Africa. However, I forgot to remove it from Japan. The very next turn, Japan removed all support for me and pulled out of the GEO. When a region does this, it takes a substantial chunk of your funding away, so I was starting to feel the financial pinch.

However, my main issues were cropping up in India. This is a perfect example of how a fantastic plan can go horrendously wrong in Fate Of The World. From early on I noticed that, due to the massive population (which was still growing at an alarming rate), farming and agriculture was under immense pressure to supply food to the region. To alleviate this issue, I flicked through my policy cards to find a suitable solution. It was then I came across the brilliant idea of encouraging vegetarianism. This would relieve pressures on farming as they won’t be required to keep expensive animals, and Indian people love a good vegetable curry, right? So, I played my Vegetarian Revolution card and waited for my utopian iron-deficient society to emerge.




The orangutans were learning to use tools?!  Damn, they could have propped up the economy!

 A couple of turns later, I was alerted to the fact that people weren’t pleased about the reduction in meat. I figured that they were just suffering the last of their meat sweats and that they’d soon settle down. How wrong I was. The situation escalated to a point where I couldn’t contain it with peacekeeping forces. Conflicts were arising, people were trading arms, bacon was being imported on the black market (presumably), and then someone dropped the N word. Nuclear bombs. That’s right, people were so upset by the lack of minced beef that they decided to annihilate themselves in a nuclear armageddon.

So, thanks to what I thought was probably the meekest and most peaceful policy I could have enforced, I bought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Nearly 600 million people were wiped out of existence in the space of 5 years, the HDI in India fell to 0.2 and worst of all, the world’s supply of naan bread was totally destroyed. I have failed the world.

If you’d like to watch the Earth crumble around you for fun, please visit developer Red Redemption’s website. The game along with all the DLC is £15, and I’d heartily recommend it for those of you who think they know what it takes to save the world.

http://fateoftheworld.net/

Too Many Fucks

The UN has announced that the population of Earth has reached a staggering 7 billion.  If you're having trouble picturing that number, that's 7,000,000,000, or the equivalent of the combined IQ rating of 3.5 Billion P.E. teachers.

So, what does this mean?  Well, for starters, it's going to be easier to meet new people.  You'll probably meet a lot of folks when you're scrabbling around a dust pit, fighting over the last withered, irradiated carrot in a post-apocalyptic wonderland.  Also, it will increase your chances of bumping into someone in a doorway, so you'll move to the side to let them pass, only for them to do the same thing out of politeness.  Then you'll try again and, what a to do, they also move with you.  You both smile, and then do the exact same thing a third time.  It's a miracle our species has survived this long when we stuck in the doorways of doom until the day we die, but I digress.

In other words, we're overpopulated.  About 2 billion over the ideal amount, to be exact.  Ever since Hitler selfishly stopped having war with everyone, the population has exploded (in a numerical sense, not in a bombing sense).  Advances in science, medicine, and lingerie means that people are living longer and having children at an exponential rate.  This means that, if current consumption rates continue to rise in this manner, the planet will run out of cookies by the year 2024.  If this doesn't force the UN to come up with a solution, then perhaps the lesser side effects of running out room, food, fuel, and everyone boiling to death might sway their decision.

Simon Cowell's tooth whitening treatment, as seen from space.

So what can we do to curb population growth?  Apparently, mass genocide isn't an option, so we need to educate people about safe sex.  In developing countries where the birth rates are highest, there are a lot women who don't have access to family planning advice and medicine.  We need a celebrity campaign to get the word out and stop people breeding so prolifically. Perhaps promoting prophylactics is the way forward.  We can hire a sexy celebrity, like Beyonce, and get her to promote sexual health.  We could even retool some of her songs for this purpose:

"If you like it (The Earth), then you should have put a thing (A condom) on it (your penis)."

Perhaps not quite as snappy as the original, but I think the message is clear.  It's also not quite as confusing as "my body's too bootilicious for stretch marks, baby".

Speaking of number of births, those of us in Western civilisation have started to view children as tiny parasitic monstrosities who hold us back and stop us from achieving great things, and as such, our birth rates have dropped.  In England in the near future, there will be more old people than young in a ratio of 5:1.  That's 5 complaints to the BBC for every 1 viewer of a slightly antagonistic comedy, or 10 purchases of Werther's Originals compared to...actually, I like Werther's Originals.  People in the Pacific Basin don't seem to share these views, and this is where most new people are being born.

For you stats fans out there, 19.3% of the World's population live in China, whilst 17% live in India.  That's 36.3% of everyone living in just 2 countries.  This means that the average name must surely be Sanjeev Chang as opposed to John Smith.  Also, Singapore is the most densely populated country, with 6,535 people packed into every square kilometer.  Luckily for these people, neighbour disputes can be conducted at a whisper.  In terms of density, the UK ranks in at 255 per square kilometer, which seems really rather high.  Of course, we could spread out and reduce this statistic if we were allowed to live in the nearest Tesco, but the managers wouldn't accept this excuse when I climbed into the bed section just after closing time.

A typical Indian scene.  The only time British people gather in numbers like this is for a murder trial.

Back in the annals of time, before agriculture was invented, and when flag semaphore was the preferred method of communication, the human population stood at a steady 1 million people.  Doesn't that sound fantastic?  It would have been a lot easier to be a unique trend setter back in those days.  Simply putting a shoe on your head would have been a stroke of genius, and emos might have seemed quirky.

This suggests to me that there is only one way forward, and that is the banishment agriculture.  Anyone caught growing a plant on purpose, cultivating the land, or running water through man-made constructs, will be blasted into the atmosphere.  It's the humane thing to do.