Lil Wayne is not the name that appears on his birth certificate, he is in fact known as Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.  He insisted on disowning his birth name in sheer malevolence against his father.  He started off in the music industry aged 9 signing on to Cash Money Labels.  He released his first song at 15 and went solo at 17.  Since then, he has released eight albums, the most successful entitled Tha Carter III, the highest selling album of 2008. He is well known for never writing down any of his lyrics, rolling them off the tongue from memory.  He also confesses to being a sports enthusiast, having made an appearance on ESPN to add to his already impressive CV.  Philanthropic ventures have included donating $200,000 in the re-building of a local park in New Orleans, where Lil Wayne grew up, after the Hurricane Katrina disaster and setting up his own Non-Profit Organisation called One Family Foundation.  According to its website, it is designed “to empower urban youth by engaging them in opportunities to cultivate their talents and skills”.

There is more to Lil Wayne that meets the eye and his personal life is certainly very colourful.  He is well renowned for his recreational use of prescription cough medicine, otherwise known as Purple Drank, alongside marijuana.  He has been busted several times on possession of dangerous drugs including one incident where his tour bus was packed with 105g worth of Marijuana, 29g of cocaine, 41g of Ecstasy, and a further $22,000 in cash.  Not to mention being caught on many occasions with illegally possessing a firearm which managed to get him sentenced for a year in March 2010 only to be released four months early in November of last year.

I’m not sure whether to laugh at the illogicality of it all or to cry in sheer despair but Lil Wayne also admitted on the Jimmy Kimmel Show that he managed to lose his virginity at 11!  Quite how he did that would baffle most of us I’m sure.  He replaced his natural teeth with diamond plated teeth worth a staggering $150,000.  Lil Wayne managed to give his dentist more reasons to laugh all the way to the bank when he had to get eight root canals done, replace many tooth implants, along with more work on his natural teeth.  He professes to be a committed Christian having read the bible regularly during jail time and yet raps about “the almighty power of Allah” in his first original release of A Millie.  He has a huge variety of tattoos all over his body from Fear God written on each eyelid, to the Rolls Royce symbol on his left bicep, to Cash Money Records on his chest.

His attitude in life generally is one of sheer defiance.  In an intimate interview with Katie Couric he mentions that “I am a gangster…I do what I wanna do”.  That is also backed up by his constant law-breaking antics including possessing narcotics for sale, misconduct involving weapons, possession of dangerous drugs, and possession of drug paraphernalia.  His suggestive lyrics are not exactly morally sound and his use of autotune is not sweet to every ear.

It is quite clear that with all this mounting evidence, Lil Wayne is not exactly a very stable human being with any long term aims or moral code.  He lives for carnal pleasure and nothing more, and it is blindingly obvious to see how his attitude is replicated in his music for all to see.

“Hip-hop has no requirements, you deal with people that have the least intelligence on the planet”- 50 Cent.

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Charles Krauthammer, writing for the Washington Post on the 3rd December last year writes “Think creatively. The WikiLeaks document dump is sabotage, however quaint that term may seem…. Franklin Roosevelt had German saboteurs tried by military tribunal and shot. Assange has done more damage to the United States than all six of those Germans combined.”  “Want to prevent this from happening again? Let the world see a man who can’t sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice. I’m not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But it would be nice if people like Assange were made to worry every time they go out in the rain.”  Apologies for the long quote but it was needed.  Describing the WikiLeaks document dump as “sabotage” is opinion, not fact.  The word sabotage is used to make it sound illegal which it certainly wasn’t.  The next line, Krauthammer equates Assange to the Nazi regime and then goes on to suggest threatening Mr. Assange?  He doesn’t explicit advocate threatening the WikiLeaks founder but it is heavily insinuated.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist writes, “Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a non state actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians–the families and employers of the militants–to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”  Killing civilians as a military tactic is the work of dictators, human rights abusers, and democracy deniers.  Mr. Friedman is blatantly calling for the killing of Lebanese civilians.  To call Hezbollah a non state actor when it single handedly caused the collapse of the government in Lebanon when ten of its ministers resigned from the government, is rather crass.

Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly recommended strikes on targets inside Afghanistan a week after 9/11 including “bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble–the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads”.  He later went on to say that:  “This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don’t rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.”  This is so wrong on so many levels.  By encouraging the destruction of vital facilities like airports, power plants, and roads, you are destroying civilian life and providing pages and pages of material for the Taliban to use to brainwash the people.  On top of which, you don’t expect every person to be responsible for electing an awful leader.  I certainly don’t blame Americans for the actions of George W. Bush.

The moral of the story here is quite simple.  Don’t take anything the media says at face value.  Do your own research, filter out fact from fiction, and get to the root of the story.

“The media is the most powerful entity on earth.  They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.  Because they control the minds of the masses.”

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Lying in the back of the cupboard or in the bottom of your drawer are your t-shirts, in hibernation waiting to be worn for those lovely summer days.  The vast majority of the t-shirts you buy are likely to be made in the U.S.A.  The main reason being that the U.S. government vastly subsidises the cotton industry.  Of course, this is not the only country to subsidise vital commodities, Iran being a great example.  The Iranian Government heavily subsidises yeast and flour so the price of a naan bread is enough so every man in Iran never goes hungry.  The U.S. in fact spends $3 billion on its cotton industry to effectively make the price of cotton artificially cheap.  Since the major market player and largest exporter of cotton is America, the price of cotton falls everywhere.  All good right?  Well, for the American cotton farmers it certainly is but for other cotton producers, this isn’t great as they are simply priced out of the market.  At the same time, those Americans who aren’t cotton farmers aren’t having the sweet end of the deal either.  For $3 billion worth of taxes paid for this, all they get is slightly cheaper t-shirts.

Under certain international agreements, some agricultural subsidies are legal but a nation cannot artificially lower the price of the product.  So, enter Brazil.  In 2002, Brazil filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation about the U.S. doing exactly what they’re not allowed to do.  The price of cotton is so ridiculously cheap, that Brazilians are even struggling to sell cotton to other brazilians!  Brazil eventually won the case and in 2004, the WTO made it illegal for the Americans to subsidise cotton farms.  The Americans aren’t happy about this and so use inevitable appeal delay tactics, and by the time they lose their last appeal in 2008, they decided not to comply anyway!  Turns out, there isn’t even a penalty to pay if the rule isn’t abided by.

The brazilians now decide to retaliate.  If a small economy decided to retaliate by taxing all American imports, it isn’t a problem as it is just loose change in the back of the proverbial American sofa.  This would have been the case ten years ago, but now Brazil’s economy has done incredibly well for itself.  Of course, it can’t compete with the gargantuan proportions of the U.S.A. but at least it has an audible voice.  Threatening to tax U.S. imports like cosmetics and pharmaceuticals caused panic in these corporations.  Phone calls were made to the U.S. government by pharmaceutical companies and cosmetic industry giants putting pressure on the government to do something.

At long last, the U.S. finally gave in and in April 2010, the U.S. agreed to pay out $147 million a year to Brazilian cotton farmers in order to illegally subsdise their own farmers to the comparably astronomical tune of $3 billion.  If the Americans were to play fair, they should really be subsidising every other cotton industry in the developing world, however Brazil was the only country big enough to scare them and smart enough to sue them.

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”- James A. Garfield

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The French have had a great impact on the way the world has been shaped today.  Heavy influence in many parts of Northern and Western African as well as parts of the Caribbean, have caused great resentment in these Francophone nations, none more so than the Ivory Coast.  A country once heralded as the model French colony, is sliding towards civil war.  President Laurent Gbagbo decided not to follow the result of the election which didn’t turn out in his favour and has been kept in power by force.  The stand-off now between the Mr. Gbagbo and Mr. Alassane Ouattara, the election winner, has been typical of the split between north and south.  With ethnic and racial tensions, youth unemployment, and a slump in cocoa prices thrown into the already bubbling cauldron, you have a recipe for violence and bloodshed in true African-style (do I smell a coup?).

Cynicism aside, French colonisation and its effects are also to be blamed for this.  Over the past 50 years, the British have come to terms with their dwindling influence and have shed their colonial skin, in a way that the French continue to cling to.  Ivory Coast was once seen as France’s “window to West Africa”.  Under the dictatorship of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the richest Ivorians sent their children to French educational establishments.  Mr. Gbagbo himself is a graduate of Sorbonne University.  With French money constantly being pumped in and invested, this was easy proof that the French system worked off maintaining profits and power while paying lip-service to independence seekers.

Known as the “Francafrique” policy, it kept up relations between France and Francophone africa through personal favours showing so-called close cultural ties.  However, the fact of the matter is, all this meant economic leverage, military and political interference, and under-the-table trading monopolies for Cote d’Ivoire.  For over 40 years, french presidents have propped up tyrant after tyrant in Africa to maintain French credibility as an international power to be reckoned with, while providing African dictators with bank accounts and shopping trips to Paris.  Of course, a safe-haven was provided too when the all-too-familiar coup d’etat turns up on the doorstep.

France has taken 19 military actions in Africa over a three decade period including destroying Ivory Coast’s entire air force when civil war broke out in 2002.  Typically, Mr. Sarkozy has been firing pro-African rhetoric saying that with Africa changing, France must change too, and yet on his first visit to Africa, Mr. Sarkozy makes a point to stop off in Gabon and meet President Omar Bongo (Ah yes, oil interests of course!).  Mr. Bongo put it eloquently, “Gabon without France is like a car without a driver; France without Gabon is like a car without gas”.  This reliance on each other has left France in the rather precarious position of protecting its 600 companies and 13,000 citizens residing in Ivory Coast without physically intervening.  Instead, France is backing sanctions and is pushing the EU in ousting Mr. Gbagbo.

If Mr. Gbagbo can be made to resign through diplomatic methods, then perhaps it would spell a new triumph for the Ivory Coast and a new way for France to handle Africa.  Colonialism is a sad part of both British and French history but for France to exorcise their demons in the way that the British have done, neo-colonialism must be accepted as a big mistake on France’s part and be abandoned altogether.

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10.  The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest man-made structure is opened on January 4th after much speculation and controversy when the state ran out of money and had to embarrassingly receive a bail-out from next door oil-rich Abu Dhabi.  As a consequence and gesture of good will, the building was renamed Burj Khalifa (originally to be called Burj Dubai) in honour of the president of the UAE, Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

9.  Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest after having been detained there for a total of 15 years.  The pro-democracy leader in Burma had faced a long grueling sentence after the military Junta imprisoned her after her election victory in 1990.  Her release marked a global celebration and potential hope for the future of Burma.  This however remains to be seen in a country where the military establishment still pulls the strings.

8.  In April, two huge events will be in the minds of many.  One of them was the complete shut-down of Heathrow Airport by force which couldn’t even be seen.  The volcanic ash cloud of course.  Spreading its way through Europe, it had a tremendous impact in Britain preventing the export and import of goods worrying supermarket supplies, teachers on Easter Holidays were delayed resulting in school classes being cancelled, and some of the most beautiful sunsets this country has seen in a while.

7.  October the 13th saw 33 miners become the face of human triumph over adversity when they were finally rescued from a Capiapo mine in Chile after it had collapsed.  Having spent 69 days underground, they were all winched up to safety and all had their own wonderful story to tell.

6.  Nine activists were killed on board the infamous Mavi Marmara in international waters when Israeli forces stormed the boat.  The boat, full of basic supplies for the people of Gaza, had attempted to break the illegal siege which has been imposed from 2007.

5.  July saw Pakistan suffer in a deluge of water after unusually heavy monsoon rain that season.  This resulted in an estimated 1,600 people dying as a result, one million displaced from their home, and 1 in 4 people affected throughout Pakistan.  It has affected more people than the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake combined.

4.  Africa hosted their first World Cup ever in beautiful South Africa.  Before the tournament had even started, there were inevitable rumours of security problems but in the end, South Africa did a spectacular job despite the damp squib of a World Cup that it was.  England’s outrageous performance, those bloody vuvuzelas, and the Ghanians (the most loved team of the quarter finals) being knocked out in despicable fashion.

3.  Taking the bronze, the Deepwater Horizon disaster springs to my mind.  Oil spewing forth from a well 2.5miles below the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico causing havoc to the U.S. administration, BP shareholders, and those fishermen of Louisiana.  Let’s not forget that it highlighted some of the ignorance still being held within the American public blaming Britain for what had happened simply because BP stands for British Petroleum.

2.  The death of the King of Pop brought back Michael Jackson to the public spotlight after years of controversy.  He defined a generation with his unique dance moves, iconic videos, and stunning sense of showmanship.  He truly will be remembered for all of these despite being mired in allegations of child sex abuse, broken marriages, child custody issues,  and failed rhinoplastic surgeries.  I may not be his biggest admirer but I respect the impact he made on the world.

1.  For me, this is certainly number 1.  In late November this year, Wikileaks managed to get a hold of 250,000 American diplomatic cable leaks including over 100,000 “secret” or “confidential” files.  As a writer and a proponent of free speech and the public’s right to know what is actually happening, this is certainly the most important event to happen this year.  Julian Assange, to me is a hero.  An ordinary person doing extraordinary things and shedding light on what the American Government truly is.  A fantastic person who deserves nothing than the superlative.

So a top 10 list of major events this year that I remember.  I’m more than happy to take suggestions to more events that I may have missed out or not considered.  Leave a comment below.  Have a great new year.

“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.”- Benjamin Franklin.

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Marketing according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) is “The Management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”  The key word there is ‘profitably’ and as long as a company is making profit, it is happy as discussed in a previous article.    The way a company goes about finding out the buying habits of consumers is truly fascinating in itself and there are a number of tools that marketeers have at their disposal.  A very simple example is a SWOT test, designed to find out an organisation’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, an internal audit if you will.  This provides a company with a sense of direction and purpose.  A bit dull one might think but it gets more interesting then that.

Time and time again, we see great advertising, packaging, or promotional offers whether it be Apple’s flawless packaging for the Macbook Pro or advertising as large a scale as T-mobile.  All these brilliant schemes and ideas are down to the Marketer planning and creating the perfect way to sell a product.  In order to know what audience to sell to, marketeers use a very easy 3-step process.  First, they segment.  Dividing their audience (known as market) into segments based on a variety of factors such as age, purchasing behaviour, cultural background, or gender.  As a result, they can now see who they can target their product at and what they are most likely to buy.  They then target which market to go for in step 2, and in step 3, they position their product within that particular market to suit the need of that particular market.  A great example would be a mobile phone shop.  They would give certain plans to target either frequent texters like teenagers, frequent callers like working mums, or maybe not-so frequent callers or texters like dear old grans.  By doing this very simple 3-step process, companies know who to target with what.

Finally, a very straight forward scenario.  You are the head of the company and you come to learn that sales are not as high as they once were, the brand has a bad image, and the company is starting to look financially unstable.  What do you do?  Well, as any marketeer would tell you, it may not be the product itself that is the problem but maybe you may need to target a completely different market, and this is known as rebranding. Lucozade throughout the 90s was well known as energy drink for the sick.  On every hospital bedside, a Lucozade was bound to sit at the table and even today, I still see people with a bottle of Lucozade by their bedside table in hospital.  However, it realised that it could do a lot better and so made the decision that it would rebrand itself as a fuel for athletes in a market where there wasn’t much competition.  They relaunched themselves into the sports drinks market, and the rest is history.

It is quite clear that one of the keys to a successfully run business is shrewd Marketeers who can get your product to look brilliant.  I would be the first to say that selling a product or managing the right promotion is an art in itself, to achieve that balance of not going overboard against under-promoting requires a certain amount of genius and to imagine any organisation without a Marketeer, would be untenable.

“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”- Milan Kundera

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A great example of heroism in the confines of a media firestorm was the Chilean Miners story. Trapped underground for 69 days, 33 Chilean Miners clutched to the bare threads of hope and the strings of freedom until they were finally rescued and reunited one by one with their families, each tale a reminder of how wonderful and lovely life can be at its greatest. It is a fantastic story of overcoming the odds, and riding sheer luck to be found alive in the first place but to me, they aren’t my heroes. They didn’t do something extraordinary for others, this was all their making. The hope, the taste of freedom, the national anthems, the hugs and the tears, it was all for them. For those who were reminded of the little things in life like family and space and sunlight (!), it wasn’t the intention of these people to remind the world of these things in the first place, it was thrust upon them. To me, the Chilean Miners served as a great tale of triumph against adversity and courage in the face of pure terror, but being rescued in itself, is not heroic.

Heroism is something that needs to be taught to the children of the future. They need to be taught that they are heroes in waiting and that at the right moment, they will act heroically. These are the thoughts of Philip Zimbardo, a leading social psychologist famous around the world for his prison experiments. This really struck me as something that is looked over quite often. Heroism is indeed the antidote to evil, but not in the way Hollywood or Marvel put it. The banality of evil is that it is in fact the ordinary people that do extraordinary things. Batman, Superman, and Spiderman (I realise only Spiderman is a Marvel character) are all ordinary people but they have supernatural abilities which give them this so-called “heroic entity” when in fact this is not the case. Since they can create sophisticated technology to fight evil, fly, and shoot webs respectively, this doesn’t make them superheroes because they are no longer ordinary.

At the same time, there are exceptions to the rule as well. According to Zimbardo, traditional societal heroes like Gandhi, Mandela, Luther King are exceptions to the rule because they organise their lives around sacrifice for a cause. These are in the extreme minority and you can only find a couple of diamonds in a ton of ore. We have to make our kids realise that most heroes are everyday people who emerge as heroes only in particular situations. Private Joe Darby is a great example of a hero. He was the one who stopped the Abu Ghuraib prison abuses and turned the photos in to a senior investigative officer when he was only a low-level Private. Anyone heard his name before? I highly doubt it because thereafter he went into hiding for three years because people wanted to kill him, his mother, and his wife. Salman Hamdani was a 23 year old paramedic and a member of the NYPD’s cadet programme. He was on his way to work from his home in Queens when he saw the World Trade Center in flames on September 11th 2001. He rushed to help save lives there. He never made it home.

These are examples of ordinary heroes who have done something, anything to help change the world in their own little way. Heroism at its core is acting when others are passive, people who give up egocentrism for socio-centrism and it tends to be people like this who are deviants from the norm. Be different, be the change, be a hero!

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”- Arthur Ashe

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While listening to the radio on the school run just the other morning, I was quite surprised when I got the news about your comments regarding bloggers and citizen journalists at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.  Having described these people as “socially inadequate, pimpled, and single”, I thought it was a rather harsh analysis of people who take the time and the effort to actually write their passionate views into coherent writing.

Mr. Marr, I take personal offense to this vile description of citizen journalists in particular as I’d consider myself one of them.  You went further and described us as “slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting.”  I suppose you would be accurate in describing the likes of me as being a single young man however the fact that I have well and truly gone over the pubescent barrier, have over 350 friends on Facebook, and have enough hair on my head to be considered hirsute doesn’t warrant me being labelled as socially inadequate, pimpled, or bald at all.  Perhaps you should take a long hard look in the mirror and take note of a receding hairline, but I’m not childish enough to point out people’s hereditary fallacies.

You see Mr. Marr, you cannot judge an entire community based on the actions of one person.  I’m sure on the blogs of other fellow BBC Journalists such as Nick Robinson, you may have seen the filth that spews forth from people who have already made up their minds and are only commenting to ridicule you.  However, this is not the face of bloggers or citizen journalists at all.  These are what are known in cyberspace as “trolls” and are simply to be ignored, a bit like religious fundamentalists shouting at you as you stroll past Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

At YourTwoCents, we are a testament to what writing can do to people, and the impact it has on readers across the globe.  Quality articles are posted here every week from people of all backgrounds simply because they have the passion to write and that also in an eloquent manner.  Perhaps it is about time that you get your head out of the clouds and take a look at writing websites like ours and see the potential that is bursting from within the UK especially.

Yours Sincerely,

Ammar A. Farishta OMT

http://www.yourtwocents.co.uk

“Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain and most fools do.”- Benjamin Franklin

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Judging others is a topic I’ve discussed in a previous article, and I think it is pertinent here as well.  Classifying whether someone is beautiful or not is not something we should be doing in the first place, simply because beauty has many strands.  The most obvious strand being physical beauty.  It is the first thing you notice in a person, and for that matter in the opposite gender.  Other more subtle strands include intellectual beauty, sporting beauty, even psychological beauty.  Noam Chomsky is a wonderful example of intellectual beauty personified.  It isn’t just the length to which he will answer a question or dabble around a subject but the sheer depth of knowledge, and more importantly wisdom, is just astounding.  For me, I’ve always seen Test Cricket as a very graceful sport and no player have I seen more graceful than Mohammed Yousuf of Pakistan.  Whether it be an immaculate cover drive, a no-nonsense sweep, or an exquisite late cut down to third man he is simply a pleasure to watch in the world of Test Cricket.  Even in the ugliest circumstances of war, there are flashes of beauty.  The sacrifice of the Spartans and Arcadians against the invading Persian army at the hotgates of Thermopylae is in itself a strand of beauty.

As we can see, beauty isn’t as black-and-white as it seems but the question remains; what is it?  Physical beauty in particular is what people today are most interested in and the obsessive nature of the fashion industry to have ultra skinny models is slowly being dealt with.  A great example of this combativeness against the status quo is the launch of Just As Beautiful Magazine, a magazine dedicated to having models which will be between size 14 and 20 only.  Could one say these models aren’t beautiful?  I’m certainly not encouraging people to spend their time ogling over these all day, but the question still stands.  It would be grotesque to even suggest that beauty is quite simply looking “fit”.  Being physically attractive and being physically beautiful do overlap to an extent but to equate attractiveness and beauty is simply criminal.

The nature of beauty itself is beyond the description of mere words; it is action.  Other concepts like love and charity are on a parity with beauty in the sense that it can only be conceptualised in the form of doing.  One can even go to the extent of arguing that love and charity are themselves forms of beauty.  It all boils down to how you perceive beauty to be, and what you believe in your heart to be the true essence and manifestation of beauty.

“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.”- Confucius

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Positive Pranking can be anything you want it to be, as long as it’s exciting for not just you but the person who you are pulling the prank on.  For now I suppose it is all about turning a negative prank into a positive one.  So for instance, take Doorbell Ditching.  It does exactly what it says on the tin.  Go up to a random stranger’s house, ring the doorbell, and run.  The stranger opens the door to find no one there, thus inconveniencing that person and you get a hilarious side-effect at the other person’s expense.  Downright dastardly.  However, why not leave a large box of chocolates instead on the front door.  The person opening the door finds out to his surprise that not only is there no one out the door (initial depression) but instead there is a large box of chocolates with a nifty note attached to it (emotional joy).  They’re happy for a random gift and you’re happy for pranking them.  All’s good.

Another classic prank is phone calls.  Phone up some random person and start chatting jibberish to them.  Childish one might say.  The more positive alternative is just call someone random and tell them a positive fact-of-the-day, something that our very dull and glass-half-empty media tend not to focus on.  The fact that the number of teenage pregnancies in London have been actually on the decrease in recent years or that since 1990, global poverty rates have decreased by more than 30%. And they’re on-track to have decreased 40% by 2015.

Some might think, well what is the point?  It’s quite simple really.  Happiness.  Happiness is the eventual goal for pranks in general, whether they be negative (for yourself i.e. Hedonistic pleasure) or positive (for both parties i.e. altruistic pleasure).  I suppose the debate on what makes you happy is an article for another day, but for now Positive Pranking is good way of achieving that for anyone.  It is something that can be done by anyone on anybody.  So for any regular YourTwoCents readers, my challenge to you is this.  Make someone happy this week by positively pranking them.  Whether it be Delightful Doorbell Ditching, Positive Prank Phone Calls, or Nice Notes.  Do it, write about it, and share it with all of us.  Get creative about your pranks and let’s see what happens.

“Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”- Anne Herbert

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