Into Africa – China: A Superpower?

China is becoming a world superpower on many fronts: a powerful economy, enormous military, and the largest population in the world.

Recently this powerhouse has started to gain captions in North American newspapers and headlines internationally about its influential state in Africa.

But you can thank Africa’s vast amount of natural resources for this colonial expansion. This has been aiding China’s booming economic growth on an exponential level. In my opinion, this is just the beginning for China’s growth, which may be contrary to what the author of the article says.

The author claims that this may be the end of on China’s investment in Africa, stating that the Chinese have discovered that economic relations cannot be disassociated from diplomacy or good corporate behaviour. I disagree for many reasons.

China is no stranger to violence. They have had a couple of dictators in their lifetime, and so the violence that is currently wreaking havoc in Sudan is of no surprise to them. This means China is involved in the countries politics, as it is urged by the UN to allow peace troops to intervene in Africa’s most public and discomforting event in modern history: the genocide of more than 200,000 people in the past four years.

This involvement, however, has been very limited. China is attempting to please both parties. Economically, Sudan provides China with a lot of oil. Therefore, China must not interfere too much in Africa’s politics if they want to maintain a healthy economic trade. This has led to China’s inactivity towards the UN’s Security Council’s effort to aid civilians in Sudan. To give the Chinese government some credit, they did convince Al-Bashir to let some peacekeepers into Sudan.

So far the neutral position China has adopted has worked in their favour. $60 billion worth of trade occurred this year alone. They have become a superpower in Africa; there is no doubt about it. Whether or not Africa’s political state is positively supported in the meantime, however, is a different story.

It is sad that Africa is in the negative political situation it is in right now. It is a shame that things in this video, below, still occur in our world today, yet cannot be stopped because of political and economic reasons.

Warning: Graphic material, view discretion advised.

Sex and Marriage with Robots?

Are you kidding me?

There’s a saying out there saying, “Don’t knock it ‘till you try it”. Pretty sure even this statement would not apply here. I completely disagree with the fact a human being could legally be married to an object that other humans have created.

Sure you could have “sex” with Jessica Simpson or Brad Pitt. But who are you fooling? It’s not a celebrity you’re getting off with, it’s a creation. It’s made with synthetic material!

I don’t care how shy or ugly you think you are, there is someone out there for you. Someone with a pulse, not a bunch of wires and computer chips. That’s right, someone that can actually feel emotions like love.

There is even some enjoyment and “challenge” in attracting someone of the opposite sex. The feeling of success from attracting that person can be a tremendous ego boost. But if you know that the “hot” robot was programmed to “love” you, wouldn’t that make you feel sort of pathetic? You want someone to love you because they truly mean it, not because they were programmed that way.

The “love” people could have for these robots could change our human social dynamics so completely, that perhaps it would even be hard to distinguish who are robots in the first place? Can you imagine entering a club, seeing an attractive person dancing, only to find out later that it was a robot? It’s kind of like seeing animals and having sexual urges. Sure animals are capable of having sex with humans, but would you like to see, or even imagine, having sex with them? Most definitely, NOT. That is just wrong on so many levels.

This could even fuel sexual predators to commit more crimes if they get used to doing child robots. As wrong as that sounds, it is certainly a possibility. What makes it even worse is that someone created this child robot with the ability to even have sex.

There are so many more negative aspects to having robots that humans could be attracted to, or even marry, that it is not worth introducing to society. Not in this manner at least. My respect level for my human counterparts would definitely be destroyed if this concept for robots was introduced.

For example, look at this guy. Tell me you don't find this ridiculously creepy. Now imagine if these dolls were robots? Could talk, move, "love"? It could get seriously creepy.

Voters Reject MMP

I’m all for changing our electoral voting process. Clearly I’m not happy with the way things turned out with this referendum.

Why?

First off, I’m legally of age to vote in Canada. However, I heard nothing about a referendum for changing our electoral process in Ontario. It was news to me the day before the election. I’m pretty aware of things that occur to Canadians, not only locally, but nationally as well. To be honest, the referendum was not publicized enough! Who do I blame for that? Election’s Ontario.

Apparently, millions were spent on the ‘advertising’ and ‘awareness campaigns’ that they executed. But when you have people at the polls asking what it’s about, obviously not enough people were notified efficiently.

Sure, you can spend millions of dollars in advertising and gaining awareness.. But you have to do it effectively. These words that start with ‘e’ are pretty accurate for something Election’s Ontario didn’t do, right? That’s a lot of dough to dish out for such poor results.

I bet that most people out of the 63% of Ontarians that rejected the vote did so because they didn’t know what the referendum was about!! Next election, I would like to see more people notified about the way our electoral process works. I really hope that more Canadians (especially Ontarians) can be sufficiently notified and educated on what’s happening in Canada.

This was pretty funny stuff. Politicians do make for good comedy!

Halo 3 - Is It Worth The Hype?

I must be crazy. Or maybe it’s just because I don’t own an XBOX 360. The thing is, I’m one of the few, young males that does not think Halo 3 is worth all the hype.

I mean, it’s hard to argue with this. Personally, a story line consisting of an alien species attacking, and very intent on destroying planet Earth due to religious reasons seems so 1999. Not to mention, when your main character’s name is “Master Chief”…. C’mon, you could’ve picked a more masculine, alpha male name than that.

I’m not a huge gamer, but I’ve played my fair share of video games (Not that I would like to admit that, but my excuse is that I was young…. and bored). I’ve always been partial towards computer games: using a mouse is key. So much easier to point and click when you shoot a weapon than use a complicated double joystick on a console game like the XBOX 360. When I did in fact play the Halo series, I wasn’t really impressed. It seems like any other First Person Shooter (FPS), just with a worse storyline. Personally, a series like Call of Duty is much better. It’s based off of WWII all the way to modern war fighting. Not only is the storyline much better, but your enemies are human too. Fighting hokey aliens gets boring quickly. I mean , here's the trailer.

Personally, I thought it was kind of boring.

The only really good thing I find about Halo 3 is the multiplayer function. There are a lot of people online, and its fun to play against friends. But realistically, there are so many games you can do that now (i.e. Call of Duty) anyways, so why the hype? Why the huge fan base?

Personally, I think it comes from the original Halo and XBOX system. The original XBOX didn’t really have any good games. Until Halo came out, there was nothing. Hence, why Microsoft loses money with the gaming console annually. Finally, when a half-decent game came out, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. People played this game non-stop.

It’s the same thing with Halo 3, except there is now a larger fan base. More people jumping on the bandwagon; I’ll admit, it’s kind of tempting to play JUST because the fact all my friends play it! But I don’t want to end up like some of the people that get just a little too excited when the new sequel comes out, you know what I mean?