Juan, the long standing CEO and social butterfly of Karate Party has crafted some nuggets of knowledge that he believes will make the world, and in particular, your world (the bit that floats around your head) a better place. So read on, learn, and make a million dollars or handsome friends!

Read and Learn!

Gentrification

Gentrification is a nice way of saying “we kicked all the poor people out, bar that guy who runs the neat little shop selling stuff that we think is kitsch and cool then put a load of cafes selling espresso where all the shops used to be”.

Cutting social commentary aside, everyone likes clean streets, some people make a lot of money on real estate and the coffee does improve. Basically, it is all about a matter of perspective and Juan recommends being either a money making property seller or a fashionable coffee drinker. Being a dispossessed former resident isn’t really advisable.

Ways to encourage gentrification –

1)    Constantly talk or refer to the “vibrant [insert suburb name] scene” while hanging around with rich, status seeking types or lazy reporters
2)    Encourage artists to congregate in said place
3)    Make a film
4)    Open a gallery / espresso joint in said suburb, hold regular openings and parties – minor celebrities are begging for opportunity to show their class in public

Ways to fight gentrification –

1)    Urinate in public places or spray prepared urine bottles in public places that look to be attracting the wrong set
2)    Pretend to be a rubbish collector then dump all your loot outside potentially fashionable spots – e.g. galleries, espresso cafes and book stores
3)    Make up statistics about racism, abuse and deaths by radon poisoning and issue press releases
4)    Start using the name of the suburb as a synonym for frottage

Eating Burgers

When eating a takeaway burger from a respectable burger joint one should always take two key precautions:

First – check the liquidity of said burger, to see if it flows with the juices of an over-mighty selection of vegetables or greasy meat patty. If it exudes a dangerously high liquidity then take care to drain regularly, lest your pants or shirt sleeve be the recipient of an unwelcome dampness.

Secondly, take care with your burger-eating grip, use your little fingers and possibly one thumb to hold the rear of the burger firmly level and in place before you begin eating. Of course, if one has fat fingers then certain liberties can be taken, although you will have to endure taunts about never being a surgeon or piano player.

Having fine, well-shaped fingers and being neither of the former occupations Juan can relate to misplaced expectation. The real lesson is that burgers may seem convenient but they are really a dirty treasonous plot to make your shirt smell like meat juice.

Trend picking

It is so nice to have one’s crackpot theories proven right, and especially so when you have made a big deal about said theories to friends, work mates and family. So it is vitally important to be maximising one’s success ratio, in order to feel the warm glow of “I called that” often.

The big problem is that truly original thinking is harder than it sounds, and while people might at first giggle when you mention how neat it would be to see a puppy kiss a kitten on a small wooden bridge, they will soon expect more profound outpourings from your cakehole. Happily for you Juan has come up with a solution - 

Reissuing of trends that have so far failed to actually work!

Every year we see huge numbers of predictions made about society, economics, politics, international relations, the environment, etc and most of them never come to pass, or if they do, not till far after the fact. Now once upon a time they’d be trapped in academic journals, stupid books you’d never read, or some other magical place, but happily for us all, the Internet has loosed the chains that shackle the mouth and made everything belong to everyone. Copyright is for losers.

So anyway never before have the lazy or unoriginal had such access to a wealth of ideas, uploaded then forgotten. You must troll the forgotten byways of the Interneto and seek out its dark secrets.

Status

Status is a strange beast that lurks in the back of the minds of Men, that causes them to do strange yet hopefully admirable things in order to climb an invisible ladder. To be near the top of this ladder is a wonderful thing, but what is even more wonderful is to be the person selling the electric ladder-climbing boots* to the desperate.

The CEO advises that status can be a useful aid when undertaking explorations for future business concepts and/or sex finding. Finding a powerful, immediately obvious demonstrator of one's desired status is the key so harnassing the power. However this can be hard to do when trying to appeal to a cross cultural market. The best plan is to be both rich and handsome, this has been found to work guaranteed across the world.

*Note – The CEO owns the IP of any boot-related powered products for climbing ladders or ladderlike objects.

The North American Union

Keeping abreast of the latest paranoid theories is important in this day and age. You will loose much needed e-credibility if you are caught out without knowing about this crap in the pub or on your [insert internet place you like] thing. So forget Kennedy, 9/11 (lolz@loose change) or the CIA killing (insert leftwing national politician of your country), the real meat is now the North American Union or NAU.

The North American Union is apparently an attempt to turn the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) states (plus a couple more) into something that resembles a cross between the EU (at least according to the British newspapers) and the Roman Empire. The eventual goal to form a superstate that will preserve the power of the elites ruling those three states, especially your favourite President and mine, George W. Bush. Otherwise the latter will face censure after he leaves. So it comes down to a fear of Bush becoming King, well for some people anyway.  For others, well, they fear the loss of sovereignty like any good American, but they especially fear that Queen Elizabeth will gain control over the US, since so many of the members of the NAU will be part of the Commonwealth. Which to anyone who has any idea of how the Commonwealth actually works is rather laughable. But then unreasonable paranoia is unreasonable, right?

Of course the real question - why the hell are some of the citizens of the world's most powerful country so bloody paranoid?