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In the name of Charity
Dec. 21st, 2005 10:07 amI've not bought anyone any Christmas cards this year - I know that a number of people on my F-list have made posts asking for addresses and suchlike, but I'm not a fan of cards. Instead, I've made a charitable donation through Goodgifts and bought an acre of rainforest for £25. With luck, the monkeys whose habitat I've done my bit for will send cards instead by way of a thank you.
They probably won't, mind. Monkeys are famously ungrateful. They never write.
I rather like Goodgifts - you make charitable donations to specific causes. My preferred one is the 'buy an acre of rainforest' one; if you buy a hundred acres they name a nature reserve after you and so I'm slowly working towards that as a goal. However, you can buy all kinds of things, including the latest charitable cause du jour - buying livestock and supplies/training for people in Africa. In the main, this is a worthy cause - especially supplies and training. I'm against buying goats, as there's a lot of evidence that goat herding is directly leading to deforestation and the expansion of the Sahara, but a lot of their plans are a good idea. Their site is definitely worth a browse as thyey list a great many initiatives you can get involved in, and if any of you fancy buying me a present, another acre of rainforest will go down nicely, thanks.
However, this idea of sending development aid to Africa got me thinking. One of the major difficulties that the continent faces is that of corruption, crime and internicine warfare, and that made me think of ways that this much larger problem could be tackled.
A while ago, I was reading a rather interesting article on the website of the National Rifle Association.
What the article says is that basically an armed society is a civil society, in that if the citizenry can keep and carry firearms then the peace is kept and the crime rate drops. If this is true, then logically the best way to reduce the endemic violence which many part of Africa labour under is to tool up the people who live there. With this in mind, I'm going to start a charity - I'll call it ARMS TO AFRICA.
It is possible to buy AK47's on the market for as little as $50US (£30UK). With 400m people in Africa, a simple bit of maths tells us that for a mere £12bn (a fraction of the total foreign aid being offered to the continent) we can give every man, woman and child from Cape Horn to the Pillars of Hercules a loaded semiautomatic rifle. If the contention that a society in which the citizenry are armed is a society in which violent crime declines, then by tooling up the population we will guarantee a lasting peace on the African continent.
Once Africa is made peaceful, we can then expand this policy to other parts of the world. I can imagine the taglines now:
£50 buys an African an AK47
£150 buys an Iraqi a rocket-propelled grenade
£5000 buys a Yardie a self-propelling artillery piece
Ah! Peace on Earth and goodwill to men - firearms are the gift which keeps on giving.
[Edit: Browsing further into goodgifts, I see that you actually can buy weapons for Africans through this charity...but in a good way.
They probably won't, mind. Monkeys are famously ungrateful. They never write.
I rather like Goodgifts - you make charitable donations to specific causes. My preferred one is the 'buy an acre of rainforest' one; if you buy a hundred acres they name a nature reserve after you and so I'm slowly working towards that as a goal. However, you can buy all kinds of things, including the latest charitable cause du jour - buying livestock and supplies/training for people in Africa. In the main, this is a worthy cause - especially supplies and training. I'm against buying goats, as there's a lot of evidence that goat herding is directly leading to deforestation and the expansion of the Sahara, but a lot of their plans are a good idea. Their site is definitely worth a browse as thyey list a great many initiatives you can get involved in, and if any of you fancy buying me a present, another acre of rainforest will go down nicely, thanks.
However, this idea of sending development aid to Africa got me thinking. One of the major difficulties that the continent faces is that of corruption, crime and internicine warfare, and that made me think of ways that this much larger problem could be tackled.
A while ago, I was reading a rather interesting article on the website of the National Rifle Association.
What the article says is that basically an armed society is a civil society, in that if the citizenry can keep and carry firearms then the peace is kept and the crime rate drops. If this is true, then logically the best way to reduce the endemic violence which many part of Africa labour under is to tool up the people who live there. With this in mind, I'm going to start a charity - I'll call it ARMS TO AFRICA.
It is possible to buy AK47's on the market for as little as $50US (£30UK). With 400m people in Africa, a simple bit of maths tells us that for a mere £12bn (a fraction of the total foreign aid being offered to the continent) we can give every man, woman and child from Cape Horn to the Pillars of Hercules a loaded semiautomatic rifle. If the contention that a society in which the citizenry are armed is a society in which violent crime declines, then by tooling up the population we will guarantee a lasting peace on the African continent.
Once Africa is made peaceful, we can then expand this policy to other parts of the world. I can imagine the taglines now:
£50 buys an African an AK47
£150 buys an Iraqi a rocket-propelled grenade
£5000 buys a Yardie a self-propelling artillery piece
Ah! Peace on Earth and goodwill to men - firearms are the gift which keeps on giving.
[Edit: Browsing further into goodgifts, I see that you actually can buy weapons for Africans through this charity...but in a good way.
