Note to the editor [and now to blogreaders as well] Howzit Riaan: i would have sent this to you as an email but there is an issue with finding you that i have given up attempting to resolve ... either i'm technomoronic or you keep well hidden...anyway about how you scooped the news about the Kebble "assisted suicide" without knowing...
With all the fuss over Mr Agliotti's assertion about the assisted suicide I thought I would remind you that you effectively scooped the entire country without knowing it. If you refer to my first blog called 'the Apprentice Hit-man' you will find a reference to the Kebble alleged murder and the story dealt with a man who arranged his own death.You'll note that it was so obvious to me that it reminded me of a story i had written years before and i dug it out and presented it to all blogreaders.
While I'm here it may simply be coincidence but has the Minister of health gone into hiding since my widely read argument between me and Johan Beurain-the piece called 'Manto 1 de lille 0' . One certainly gets a sense that there have been some changes lately? I would like to think i have helped break a deadlock there.
And finally you may be happy to hear that my book '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law' sold out its first 'Beta' edition in ten days and has now just been published again [locally this time] in a second 'Alpha' edition and is moving steadily.
With all the upward interest rate movements taking place now the press is loaded with articles about how people can stagger their payments to control their debt... "7 ways" provides a balance back to the creditor. Maybe my next book should be 7 ways to buy stuff without paying for it[hee hee]
Have a happy festive experience to all blogreaders, bloggists and general humanity.
Best regards and have a happy festive experience.
Nicholas
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Leon out, Zuma plays the NPA for centre stage
The soon to be retiring self-styled 'leader of the Official Opposition' in Southern Azania [SA] must be feeling pleased with himself. Most people die before becoming such a recipient of so many eulogies from those considered to be their enemies. One could also argue that the immanent retiree has benefited from his colour coding. A man as thoroughly unpleasant as he, and of a presently more favoured hue, would quite possibly have come to the same ghastly end, as that suffered by a young rising star of impeccable connections this past week- Was that gratuitous murder a stark message, I ask? - Is it being suggested somewhere that there is no place on that right hand side of the emerging political equation for a man of aspiration. That, that side is booked?
But to return for a moment to the 'Soon-to-be-retiree'-Mr Rude and his living eulogies. At least three of the eulogising 'I am going to go and then you'll be sorry' radio presentations that I caught snatches of during the week, while driving around the city, seemed to feature the 'Retiring Leader' himself: doing a pretty good job of being 'as bossy as could be' and reminding us all why we're so glad to see him go-
Of course the whole thing about a eulogy in the first place is that it represents a summing up of an age as represented by the life of the eulogised. The well-lampooned leader of the alleged official opposition represents something that everyone other than his terrified supporters have come to accept, with the same inevitability that we accept the sunrise every morning. He represents an idea that has passed its sell by date.
We have therefore been treated to a well-spun series of bullshit media pieces about how the Official Opposition is so useful: because it in fact almost useless. It snaps away at the heels of those who would hound their enemies to their end of days, in pursuit of vengeance for past misdeeds. However his prissy opposition threatens no one, and everyone else can be bonded together in opposition to it. Perhaps that may be considered useful in the same way that burglar bars are useful even though they block out the view.
The theme of the present orchestrated spin activity tossed out to leaven the news that 'the old order hath not only 'changethed'' but hath 'changethed' irrevocably, is nostalgic: 'those were the best of times', to cannibalise Dickens. [with apologies also to Tennyson: Morte de Arthur].
They were also as Charles [also] pointed out so long ago, 'the worst of times' and this collection of sanctimonious self-seeking politicians who derive their salaries through the officious Mr L- represent that past, at its most ineffectual and gluttonous. I believe it was Cromwell who chased the 'Rump' politicians from the Parliament prior to the Glorious Revolution [1653A.D.] on the grounds that they were largely unrepresentative. 'Go' he said and thus it is repeated to the 'The Official Bookend'.
The so-called alleged 'official opposition' represents mostly terrified minorities and has no real grip on the imagination of the formerly dispossessed majority. It has no future other than what it is: a collection of little firecrackers rattling about while the big people party. Somewhere along the way they missed the moment, assuming there ever was one.
Much of the discussion that has wavered about amongst his startled opponents, centres on the idea that this, convoluted admixture comprising a collective of terrified minorities, can somehow become a national party that could, at a date in the far, far, distant never, never land of the endlessly hopeful future, become the government itself. This is a bit like IBM having been toppled from Big Blue eminence deciding to 're-invent' itself and overtake Microsoft as the global leader in IT technology. They have been attempting to do this since long before the honourable leader of the so-called 'Official Opposition' took up his own set of cudgels. I think even they have accepted that it will never happen, after all did they miss Google, You tube, and whatever the latest story is featuring some kid in sandals, jeans and a blazer?
Much is made of the toleration for the idea of an: 'Official Opposition', in what Margaret Thatcher once described as, '- the thin soil of African [Azanian] democracy'.
The truth is they are tolerated because they are of no use to the people. Their usefulness is exclusive to the 'official' government. They are a convenient element in what would otherwise be an empty charade.
The real opposition in SA political affairs is with the man everyone who matters presently hopes will 'really' go away. The man who is the de facto leader of the 'unofficial' opposition, a man who gets more headlines in a week than the honourable-soon-to-be-retiree got in a political lifetime. The government harbours its own viper. Within the governing party's own disparate, convoluted incongruencies, lie the seeds of the 'Official Opposition's' ultimate irrelevance.
It does not take a huge amount of foresight to see that the so-called 'ultra left' of the party in power is making a last ditch lunge for power. Their spear point is the formidable Mr Z. There is a tide [sorry Brutus] in our affairs currently and it is running full to the brim. The effect of it will be that the retiree's Alliance Party, cobbled together as it has been with such painstaking obsessive purpose, will scatter to the winds as minority party supporters rush to prop up the current ruling party, when this thorn eventually bursts through the Party's skin and the incongruencies papered over by the Party hierarchy are finally lanced.
The real opposition to the present Government comes from its own support base: a systemic fissure that has maintained itself and widened while all the time remaining hidden under the linoleum floor coverings, reinforced constantly by dutiful formalities: formalities that have now been breached. Ironically the inevitable long delayed split may well owe its delay to the common detestation for the honourable soon-to-be-retired leader of the Official Opposition.
It could be that in his selfless desire for political immortality-fulfilling his childhood vision perhaps of the little boy who puts his finger in the crack in the dyke, and saves the country, to become an unknown but well-sung hero-this, simple act of retiring, could become his single most successful moment.
There is a growing groundswell of rage against the obvious profiteering that increasingly seems to be the hallmark of the new regime. Other 'out' people also want to profiteer. A similar groundswell in the USA has seen 'he-who-would-be-Caesar toppled from his pedestal and facing a bleak reality-The people demand an accounting and a huge amount of pussyfooting is needed to keep them at bay and on a leash. As with the Republicans so too with the governing party in SA-Ironically the party is so riven with its own internal strife that it reveals its fear-with the 'official' opposition now denuded and leaderless the moment is at hand for the emergence of the 'informal' opposition. [Sound effects: SFX ] vuvuzela accompaniment.
Much of the pious platitudinising [sic] that has taken place this past week in those odd snatches of the day reserved for such activities has centered on how the retiree's party now should go forward with its general ragbag collection of self-serving pseuds. There is a common consensus that for some reason the party must appoint a person of colour and go forth to conquer the masses. That's like asking an elephant to become a horse. The short answer is 'NOWHERE'. There will never be a future for a party with such a heritage, as this rag and bone collective brings with it, when the stakes are so much higher than they can ever conceive of.
Fact: This party sits to the right of the ruling party no matter their blather to the contrary. That is the territory to which the ruling party must retreat if they are to handle the impossible demands of the people, in the form of a populist mechanic, propelled by those who see absolution in the abolition of the so-called 'scourge' of private property. There would seem to be many who would be in a line of fire if/when the indomitable Mr Z makes his 'Big Move' whatever it turns out to be. One suspects that Mr Z- broods somewhat, and has a long memory.
So retreat they will.
And those voters who were slower than their bosses to recognise that they should have joined the ruling party, back when the Minister of Tourism made his 'Big Move', will desert the so-called 'Official Opposition', in order to prop up the ruling party against the onslaught from the real opposition-'the people': whoever they are.
The best thing that could be said now to the soon to be dishevelled so-called-official opposition is that they have two choices. They can retreat back to their original manifesto, and position themselves as a niche minority party where their quaint views on the naughtiness of corruption and the thieving attitudes of the present, increasingly venal and materially overloaded official 'ruling class', can be viewed as an irritation, rather than a threat; while the real bloodletting gets underway on the other side of the stage. This way they could [possibly] end up holding sufficient voting power to be the kingmakers [feudal irony intended] in much the same way that the redoubtable, albeit unsuitable, Madam Z- balances Lemmer's 'Visdorpie' on the end of a pendulum.
Alternatively they can roll up their socks and join their former leader who, rumour has it, has his heart set on 'ruling' Australia. The masses of the dispossessed and the alienated and the marginalised see many of their own becoming rich and well fed and envy looms larger on their horizons. They cannot respond to the cold logic of market economics. They have already lost that struggle.
Our own 'Ugo Chavez' is no longer on the sidelines, he is strong enough to push a curiously apathetic President off the mike, to calm what may, or may not be, his followers-a significant act given the almost feudal structure of the 'ruling' party.
Note: Those perceptive citizens who listen to 'The Master's Voice' SABC radio news broadcasts will have noted the increasing use of the word 'rule' eg: President Mbeki will attend the inauguration ceremony in Kinshasa of President Kabila who's rule begins today-' No wonder Bemba is miffed. Rule-a feudal term with minimal democratic credibility. The appropriate term would be 'govern': with the consent of the people, to whom they are answerable.
[Q-. Why is the President so seemingly paralysed by the foment that is alleged to be raging within his party-?]
Okay, to get back to the point. The only thing now stranding between Mr Z- and his own populist interpretation of Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution' is the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] and what they decide to do about his controversial relationship with a well-known, convicted fraudster. This action [should it occur] will be evaluated against what action is taken against a police chief who is also alleged to have a controversial relationship with an accused, alleged murderer, something about which we are reminded daily by the SABC.
Mr Z- a man who seems to have no ideological baggage, could well gamble that people will punt always for the seductive lies represented by the collectivist left, the one that says vote for me and you get everything for free. Who would not want that? 'Vote for ME and I will give you all BASIC PAY'*.
His supporters have also given notice that IF HE IS NOT charged they would create 'hell'. Could the present upsurge in particularly brutal violent crime be associated with that 'hell' on wonders? Everybody wants BASIC PAY.
Should Mr Z's gamble pay off, and that is itself arguable, then there will be a panic movement amongst the supporters of all parties to the right of the ruling party to prevent an even greater perceived enemy from further left from moving in and hogging centre stage.
Thus the 'official [fake] opposition' has now passed its sell-by-date, representing an increasingly out-of-touch set of delusions. They will gradually fade from the scene, to become as obscure as all the rest of the little fishies out there, but nonetheless speaking for special interest groups, as is their right.
The curtain will then open on the long delayed main event - Will the real opposition come out of the closet please. Ah sorry: I forgot. You can't make a move until your leader is out of leg irons. The President's silence becomes less inscrutable.
We will soon discover whether the sinister murder of a talented and upcoming young politically connected star this week was simply part of the random chaos that is enveloping us in bloody violence in our country, threatening our future hopes and aspirations with greater and greater urgency; or part of a fairly low key but longstanding pattern of unsolved, politically associated murders, previously restricted [albeit not exclusively] to the more feudal outlying territories of the country, parts of which are being claimed by an even more feudal entity than the one to which we do not wish to become accustomed..
Will this show therefore have a valid denouement?
And why should we be deprived of that to which we are entitled, by virtue of having bought a ticket?
Cheers-.
'¢ 'Basic Pay' A concept developed in my Prelude piece to the Yonka Memorandum. In the Azanian Konfederacy, Corinth Starr [The Elder] comes from nowhere to win overwhelming success in the 2009 election in SA. She runs initially on a Gender ticket, which brings her the majority vote-Women outnumber men at the polls. She exploits the rage against the rising tide of rape prevailing in the country to capture the vote of those who want it stopped. [and she has a radical programme for stopping it.] She also converts the somewhat discredited idea of a Basic Income Grant [aka BIG] to the idea of BASIC PAY- 'Grant me no favours'-was her rallying slogan. She registered a huge number of dispossessed former voters who turn out and vote for her Gender party in massive numbers, sufficient to overthrow the existing order that realises too late that they are under threat. [I had to cobble together some form of economic theory based on Hernando de Soto's work to give the idea some credence].
'¢ This act [storming to electoral victory] was seen by later historians to demonstrate the extent to which history imitates history; referring in many headlines of the time how a previous leader of the country spent so much time outside the country that he lost touch with the trends, and failed to perceive the threat to his own 'rule'.
But to return for a moment to the 'Soon-to-be-retiree'-Mr Rude and his living eulogies. At least three of the eulogising 'I am going to go and then you'll be sorry' radio presentations that I caught snatches of during the week, while driving around the city, seemed to feature the 'Retiring Leader' himself: doing a pretty good job of being 'as bossy as could be' and reminding us all why we're so glad to see him go-
Of course the whole thing about a eulogy in the first place is that it represents a summing up of an age as represented by the life of the eulogised. The well-lampooned leader of the alleged official opposition represents something that everyone other than his terrified supporters have come to accept, with the same inevitability that we accept the sunrise every morning. He represents an idea that has passed its sell by date.
We have therefore been treated to a well-spun series of bullshit media pieces about how the Official Opposition is so useful: because it in fact almost useless. It snaps away at the heels of those who would hound their enemies to their end of days, in pursuit of vengeance for past misdeeds. However his prissy opposition threatens no one, and everyone else can be bonded together in opposition to it. Perhaps that may be considered useful in the same way that burglar bars are useful even though they block out the view.
The theme of the present orchestrated spin activity tossed out to leaven the news that 'the old order hath not only 'changethed'' but hath 'changethed' irrevocably, is nostalgic: 'those were the best of times', to cannibalise Dickens. [with apologies also to Tennyson: Morte de Arthur].
They were also as Charles [also] pointed out so long ago, 'the worst of times' and this collection of sanctimonious self-seeking politicians who derive their salaries through the officious Mr L- represent that past, at its most ineffectual and gluttonous. I believe it was Cromwell who chased the 'Rump' politicians from the Parliament prior to the Glorious Revolution [1653A.D.] on the grounds that they were largely unrepresentative. 'Go' he said and thus it is repeated to the 'The Official Bookend'.
The so-called alleged 'official opposition' represents mostly terrified minorities and has no real grip on the imagination of the formerly dispossessed majority. It has no future other than what it is: a collection of little firecrackers rattling about while the big people party. Somewhere along the way they missed the moment, assuming there ever was one.
Much of the discussion that has wavered about amongst his startled opponents, centres on the idea that this, convoluted admixture comprising a collective of terrified minorities, can somehow become a national party that could, at a date in the far, far, distant never, never land of the endlessly hopeful future, become the government itself. This is a bit like IBM having been toppled from Big Blue eminence deciding to 're-invent' itself and overtake Microsoft as the global leader in IT technology. They have been attempting to do this since long before the honourable leader of the so-called 'Official Opposition' took up his own set of cudgels. I think even they have accepted that it will never happen, after all did they miss Google, You tube, and whatever the latest story is featuring some kid in sandals, jeans and a blazer?
Much is made of the toleration for the idea of an: 'Official Opposition', in what Margaret Thatcher once described as, '- the thin soil of African [Azanian] democracy'.
The truth is they are tolerated because they are of no use to the people. Their usefulness is exclusive to the 'official' government. They are a convenient element in what would otherwise be an empty charade.
The real opposition in SA political affairs is with the man everyone who matters presently hopes will 'really' go away. The man who is the de facto leader of the 'unofficial' opposition, a man who gets more headlines in a week than the honourable-soon-to-be-retiree got in a political lifetime. The government harbours its own viper. Within the governing party's own disparate, convoluted incongruencies, lie the seeds of the 'Official Opposition's' ultimate irrelevance.
It does not take a huge amount of foresight to see that the so-called 'ultra left' of the party in power is making a last ditch lunge for power. Their spear point is the formidable Mr Z. There is a tide [sorry Brutus] in our affairs currently and it is running full to the brim. The effect of it will be that the retiree's Alliance Party, cobbled together as it has been with such painstaking obsessive purpose, will scatter to the winds as minority party supporters rush to prop up the current ruling party, when this thorn eventually bursts through the Party's skin and the incongruencies papered over by the Party hierarchy are finally lanced.
The real opposition to the present Government comes from its own support base: a systemic fissure that has maintained itself and widened while all the time remaining hidden under the linoleum floor coverings, reinforced constantly by dutiful formalities: formalities that have now been breached. Ironically the inevitable long delayed split may well owe its delay to the common detestation for the honourable soon-to-be-retired leader of the Official Opposition.
It could be that in his selfless desire for political immortality-fulfilling his childhood vision perhaps of the little boy who puts his finger in the crack in the dyke, and saves the country, to become an unknown but well-sung hero-this, simple act of retiring, could become his single most successful moment.
There is a growing groundswell of rage against the obvious profiteering that increasingly seems to be the hallmark of the new regime. Other 'out' people also want to profiteer. A similar groundswell in the USA has seen 'he-who-would-be-Caesar toppled from his pedestal and facing a bleak reality-The people demand an accounting and a huge amount of pussyfooting is needed to keep them at bay and on a leash. As with the Republicans so too with the governing party in SA-Ironically the party is so riven with its own internal strife that it reveals its fear-with the 'official' opposition now denuded and leaderless the moment is at hand for the emergence of the 'informal' opposition. [Sound effects: SFX ] vuvuzela accompaniment.
Much of the pious platitudinising [sic] that has taken place this past week in those odd snatches of the day reserved for such activities has centered on how the retiree's party now should go forward with its general ragbag collection of self-serving pseuds. There is a common consensus that for some reason the party must appoint a person of colour and go forth to conquer the masses. That's like asking an elephant to become a horse. The short answer is 'NOWHERE'. There will never be a future for a party with such a heritage, as this rag and bone collective brings with it, when the stakes are so much higher than they can ever conceive of.
Fact: This party sits to the right of the ruling party no matter their blather to the contrary. That is the territory to which the ruling party must retreat if they are to handle the impossible demands of the people, in the form of a populist mechanic, propelled by those who see absolution in the abolition of the so-called 'scourge' of private property. There would seem to be many who would be in a line of fire if/when the indomitable Mr Z makes his 'Big Move' whatever it turns out to be. One suspects that Mr Z- broods somewhat, and has a long memory.
So retreat they will.
And those voters who were slower than their bosses to recognise that they should have joined the ruling party, back when the Minister of Tourism made his 'Big Move', will desert the so-called 'Official Opposition', in order to prop up the ruling party against the onslaught from the real opposition-'the people': whoever they are.
The best thing that could be said now to the soon to be dishevelled so-called-official opposition is that they have two choices. They can retreat back to their original manifesto, and position themselves as a niche minority party where their quaint views on the naughtiness of corruption and the thieving attitudes of the present, increasingly venal and materially overloaded official 'ruling class', can be viewed as an irritation, rather than a threat; while the real bloodletting gets underway on the other side of the stage. This way they could [possibly] end up holding sufficient voting power to be the kingmakers [feudal irony intended] in much the same way that the redoubtable, albeit unsuitable, Madam Z- balances Lemmer's 'Visdorpie' on the end of a pendulum.
Alternatively they can roll up their socks and join their former leader who, rumour has it, has his heart set on 'ruling' Australia. The masses of the dispossessed and the alienated and the marginalised see many of their own becoming rich and well fed and envy looms larger on their horizons. They cannot respond to the cold logic of market economics. They have already lost that struggle.
Our own 'Ugo Chavez' is no longer on the sidelines, he is strong enough to push a curiously apathetic President off the mike, to calm what may, or may not be, his followers-a significant act given the almost feudal structure of the 'ruling' party.
Note: Those perceptive citizens who listen to 'The Master's Voice' SABC radio news broadcasts will have noted the increasing use of the word 'rule' eg: President Mbeki will attend the inauguration ceremony in Kinshasa of President Kabila who's rule begins today-' No wonder Bemba is miffed. Rule-a feudal term with minimal democratic credibility. The appropriate term would be 'govern': with the consent of the people, to whom they are answerable.
[Q-. Why is the President so seemingly paralysed by the foment that is alleged to be raging within his party-?]
Okay, to get back to the point. The only thing now stranding between Mr Z- and his own populist interpretation of Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution' is the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] and what they decide to do about his controversial relationship with a well-known, convicted fraudster. This action [should it occur] will be evaluated against what action is taken against a police chief who is also alleged to have a controversial relationship with an accused, alleged murderer, something about which we are reminded daily by the SABC.
Mr Z- a man who seems to have no ideological baggage, could well gamble that people will punt always for the seductive lies represented by the collectivist left, the one that says vote for me and you get everything for free. Who would not want that? 'Vote for ME and I will give you all BASIC PAY'*.
His supporters have also given notice that IF HE IS NOT charged they would create 'hell'. Could the present upsurge in particularly brutal violent crime be associated with that 'hell' on wonders? Everybody wants BASIC PAY.
Should Mr Z's gamble pay off, and that is itself arguable, then there will be a panic movement amongst the supporters of all parties to the right of the ruling party to prevent an even greater perceived enemy from further left from moving in and hogging centre stage.
Thus the 'official [fake] opposition' has now passed its sell-by-date, representing an increasingly out-of-touch set of delusions. They will gradually fade from the scene, to become as obscure as all the rest of the little fishies out there, but nonetheless speaking for special interest groups, as is their right.
The curtain will then open on the long delayed main event - Will the real opposition come out of the closet please. Ah sorry: I forgot. You can't make a move until your leader is out of leg irons. The President's silence becomes less inscrutable.
We will soon discover whether the sinister murder of a talented and upcoming young politically connected star this week was simply part of the random chaos that is enveloping us in bloody violence in our country, threatening our future hopes and aspirations with greater and greater urgency; or part of a fairly low key but longstanding pattern of unsolved, politically associated murders, previously restricted [albeit not exclusively] to the more feudal outlying territories of the country, parts of which are being claimed by an even more feudal entity than the one to which we do not wish to become accustomed..
Will this show therefore have a valid denouement?
And why should we be deprived of that to which we are entitled, by virtue of having bought a ticket?
Cheers-.
'¢ 'Basic Pay' A concept developed in my Prelude piece to the Yonka Memorandum. In the Azanian Konfederacy, Corinth Starr [The Elder] comes from nowhere to win overwhelming success in the 2009 election in SA. She runs initially on a Gender ticket, which brings her the majority vote-Women outnumber men at the polls. She exploits the rage against the rising tide of rape prevailing in the country to capture the vote of those who want it stopped. [and she has a radical programme for stopping it.] She also converts the somewhat discredited idea of a Basic Income Grant [aka BIG] to the idea of BASIC PAY- 'Grant me no favours'-was her rallying slogan. She registered a huge number of dispossessed former voters who turn out and vote for her Gender party in massive numbers, sufficient to overthrow the existing order that realises too late that they are under threat. [I had to cobble together some form of economic theory based on Hernando de Soto's work to give the idea some credence].
'¢ This act [storming to electoral victory] was seen by later historians to demonstrate the extent to which history imitates history; referring in many headlines of the time how a previous leader of the country spent so much time outside the country that he lost touch with the trends, and failed to perceive the threat to his own 'rule'.
Monday, December 4, 2006
Denialsim, Al Gore and the 'End of Days'
How do we describe denialism? - If a litany of evidence arose that consistently indicates that someone is not being entirely truthful would it be sensible to continue to implicitly believe what they say as if the evidence did not exist?
Should we then in the interests of self-interest pretend that all such damming evidence must await an ultimate disaster that may overthrow our enterprise?
During this week I [and you perhaps] have been presented with two instances of evidence being piled up and being absorbed by an ocean of indifferent denial. We have also had [or missed] our opportunities to act according to what we wanted.
The first of these involves a media blitz [in my home turf] regarding the chief of police. Evidence seems to exist that indicates that the chief may have been less than generous with the truth in his earlier observations relating to an ongoing murder investigation, and his involvement with elements incongruous with his status: in other words that he was [allegedly] hanging out with bad guys.
The mainstream media are screaming for the police chief's suspension pending further investigation. The authorities are suggesting that the rules of evidence [innocence 'till proven- ] require that he continue to investigate the crime in which he is alleged to be complicit until he proves himself guilty [or innocent, as the case may transpire-]. The idea that the wolf could well be in the henhouse seems to have been ignored. In being ignored it will only fuel the manifest tensions implicit in our increasingly riven society. On the other hand does anyone really care? Denialism is 'not-caring' in action
The same thought about denialism came to me when I saw Al Gore's movie this week at the cinema nouveaux [sic]. For those readers who missed it, Al Gore, the self-styled former, almost-President, of the USA, whose ancestors, I believe, once owned the land on which Washington was built, presumably after having 'removed' any previous inhabitants somehow, and who has some form of familial relationship to both the writer Gore Vidal and Mrs Jackie Onassis; this same Al Gore has produced a 'wunderkind' movie called 'an inconvenient truth' which makes a most plausible case for an impending global catastrophe of the likes unheard of since I wrote my [far less heralded] 21 episode piece called the Azanian Konfederacy some years ago.
I went to see the movie loaded with scepticism-In mind I had the recollection of my distaste at the so-thoroughly propagandistic [sic] piece of filmmaking -Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by that fellow Moore- I appreciated his basic movie- its style intent and argument, but found the absence of balance irritating. Ultimately. I was left less than convinced by the fellow's virulently partisan argument. In a sense he went so far over the top that his case simply imploded, and his vested interest was exposed for all too see.
By contrast Gore's message is all too real-The power being in the visuals...certainly one of the more impressive PowerPoint presentations I've seen over the years, and much of it validated [to me] by my own research over the past fifteen years leading up to my 'Azanian Konfederacy' Web presentations, January 2004.
With the Azanian Konfederacy I was setting out to construct a world that would be the context for the serialising cybersoapie [as I call it] the Yonka Memorandum, which is a giant 'work-in-progress' thing that I shall now return to: having finally signed off on the definitive Alpha edition of my book ' 7 Ways to get your money'-a handbook for debt collecting, which is proving as popular and entertaining as I had hoped and intended.
In order to write that story -the Yonka, - which I have been fooling around with now for more than twenty years [time flies while you're having fun raising families and garnering wealth while words plod unexceptionally along] - I had to answer the question how did the world of my futuristic story [the Yonka Memorandum] come to be. Was it a dystopian world -it certainly is not utopian- but is it perhaps just a normal world like the one we know now but different because the values of that time [in the future] were different?
What I wanted for part three of my series: the Azanian Quartet, [the Yonka is part three], was/is a world in which a woman could [if she chose] walk naked the length and breadth of the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head and not be molested.
There is an alleged precedent for this. Apparently the short-lived Mongol Empire was such a place. But there the basis was terror. The awful fate that befell anyone who molested a traveller combined with the awful fate of all that person's relatives and extending associates who were all put to death in a most uncongenial way [not that I'm implying that there is a 'congenial' way to put anyone to death] so completely terrorise the local [wherever that was] citizenry that years went by without a traveller being molested, thereby giving rise the myth about the naked wanderer and the purse of gold
A simple requirement you may think. Just write about that world. My purpose was to write an adventure story set in a time when violence generally was exceptional not normal [by contrast to parts one and two where violence was standard] and how did one create such a world given that when I was writing all this I was living in one of the world's most dangerous cities; a place in which I had had my own brushes with death, on many occasions?
My solution was to generate a catastrophe of such proportions that the world would be changed utterly by its outcome-It would in fact be the much heralded Armageddon-except that it came in the form of Tsunamis, earthquakes and all the horrors predicted by Nostradamus, Siener, the Mayans and of course Revelations, followed of course by all sorts of nasty genocidal activcities on the part of the survivors...escaping the drowning Indonesian archipeligoes and the freezing northern hemisphere.
Over a lifetime of shacking up in 'one night stand' hotels across the continent I have found myself reading Revelations on many occasions, in the wee hours, when unfamiliar surroundings drive out sleep; and, having read the local rag, I would toss and turn with the Gibbons standby bibles that proliferate, in hotel bedrooms, just about everywhere I've ever been.
I am an inherently secular person but nonetheless found myself asking the question-could such things be plausible? I thought this, back then in the early eighties when I first contrived this plot, that has not yet been written to completion-Then I was too early, like the fax machines I used to sell then-now it seems, according to Gore, that I may be too late, like those fax machines that are now obsolete.
Everything I have researched over the past two decades is reinforced by Gore's conclusions. The world is in peril and the most important part of the problem [Gore seems to imply ] is the fact that there are more and more people pouring onto the planet and demanding shit.
Which brings us back to denialism.
When I drive about the city, which I do daily, I see no signs of the impending chaos predicted equally daily by the mainstream media. Over the past month for instance three, formerly inconvenient and time consuming intersections along my route have been quietly and efficiently upgraded, to facilitate effective traffic movement. The pavement outside my house [and the rest of the street] was recently demolished by the city council; to lay new electrical piping. They also ripped up my brick [paved] driveway and promised they would 'fix it later'. Well it was later-later came-
they said about five weeks and about five weeks later people came and fixed the driveway- and now the trench that marred its beauty it is almost unnoticeable.
The streetlights go out and are fixed. Most weeks the garbage collectors collect the garbage -sometimes it takes all day for them to arrive and occasionally they are travelling the suburb at 21.oo but it is usually collected-I also heard only two gunshots in the night this week and it has been some months since I heard the last, compared to fifteen years ago when the gunfire was continuous.
Nonetheless Mr Gore assures us that we have about ten years to make important changes to the world or face catastrophe and we all know that we [the human race] can barely cope with the effects of living now, never mind living in a never land of the future, which may, or may not occur. And there are many who dispute with considerable substance that the problem described by Mr Gore is either real or inevitable. Others argue with disturbing conviction that the real issue is that there as a proliferation of poor people and that no programmes can cope and that perhaps the real programme requires unpleasant action..
My novel, the Yonka Memorandum is set in a future age well after the events that caused so many catastrophes; when the participants in the story have only the sketchiest knowledge or understanding of what happened, except that it was the time the world changed. In effect I was contemplating what happens when we reach the end of the script- in this case the script represented by 'Revelations' the arch- document of the gloom and doomists-
Imagine if you would, interviewing ten citizens at random: about an event today, and you would perhaps get some solid committed answers. Ask about an event ten years ago, say, the assassination of the person I call Konstant Mann, an event that almost caused our emerging democracy to come unstuck, and most of the ten would be a tad hasty although they may recollect the event. Ask about the Bambata Rebellion or the battle of Isandlwana, the so-called Third Frontier War, or even the war of 1899-1902 and their eyes will glaze over; and they will either puzzle or remain blank
This is the condition of the characters in my novel-The world picked itself up after the disaster and continued as it may well have done in the dim and distant past--[or if you prefer to be more real...as we all did after the great tsunami a few years back...
We have no real knowledge of our extreme past-10,000 years back but we do have a planet full of unexplained and inexplicable architectural artefacts; and as many inexplicable folk tales. People just get on with their lives irrespective of the chaos apparently reigning all about: the way those road workers put up those useful traffic circles last month and the other worker fellows who eventually, working their plod, plod way, along behind the diggers, reached my house and fixed the driveway. The idea that the sky is falling down and everything is about to end is too ridiculous for words: superstitious nonsense really...isn't it?
In my preparations for the world-to-come in my novel I explored the role of the so called Atlantic Conveyer system, and found, as Mr Gore now proclaims, that it has been under threat for so long now the damage is probably irreversible and Europe stares a Newfoundland style climate in the face within Mr Gore's decade without being able to do anything about it.
In my story I created a catastrophe that decimates the East coast of the United States and another that implodes the U S West coast, reducing the United States to a non-player in planetary affairs. The extended catastrophe decimates Japan and sets China back a decade during which time all the pent up rage stored as Yang energy by the infinitely suffering Chinese citizen, explodes in rage; and the forty million men deprived of access to a woman through the outcome of the one child policies of the present regime in China, rampage and consume all.
In our own world [here in the place i call Zone One ]we come face to face with the water supply crisis that is Zone One's Achilles heel [Zone one is my fiction name for the "hard-to-pronounce" term Gauteng] and my heroine, taking her cue from similar projects in Spain and Australia undertakes to build the five, one kilometre high, Towers, that come to dominate the North Western corner of the tiny province and which supplement the water supplies to the city through evaporation and also provide for massive scale horticulture.
What freaked me out watching an 'inconvenient truth' was not that the subject may be pure propaganda for the eco-fascist movement. [This movement apparently tacitly concedes that for the world to survive the coming eco-meltdown predicted with such glee by so many for so long now, it will be necessary to reduce the global population by about four fifths. They assume this will occur through natural selection and perhaps much of it will.] Gore makes no such suggestions. He simply presents an accumulation of facts that have been piling up, according to my own delving, for decades now, and demonstrates the visual imagery that makes his case so profoundly real.
For instance he reveals footage of buildings sinking into the melting permafrost of Siberia. I scene I found to be almost incredible. I had read recently that Siberia was melting and saw some footage on a recent BBC programme but the visuals of what is happening were profound. The poignancy for me was also astounding:
During 1978 I gave a lecture at the now University of Zimbabwe. I spoke to a hostile audience, generally sourced from the various departments of the social sciences. The subject of my presentation related to the inevitable and impending collapse of the [now] former Soviet Union. As we now know the place collapsed eleven years later.
I have never considered the likelihood of a communist style repressive State surviving and prospering to be anything but inherently implausible, and so part of my argument in my speech related to rumours [now known to be well founded] that the Russian drive to exploit the oil reserves of Siberia were being thwarted by their inability to develop home grown drilling technology to facilitate access to the oil through 600 feet of rock solid permafrost.
This revelation proved too disingenuous for my audience who accused me of being a "Smith stooge" and a "capitalist lackey", a "fascist" and other uncool stuff and I had to be escorted off the campus by the campus security for my own safety. In fact I was lucky to get off the stage undamaged by flying chairs and other missiles. It was good practice for the many bullets dodged on another occasion later.
Now here we are, not thirty years gone past and that solid, multi millenia old, permafrost that arguably proved the undoing of the Soviet Union is melting- why? - What happened? Gore suggests that centuries of climate affecting carbon emissions have finally reached a tipping point and the effect of warming is on an accelerating curve.
In my fictional world I suggested that the tipping point was accelerated by an event that precipitated what I called: 'The Ringing'. Gore doesn't mention this, perhaps because the two country's concerned are now American allies and Mr Gore's presentation is an inherently bi-partisan one [in an American sense]. Perhaps he doesn't mention it because he gives it no credence, or perhaps none of his advisers, being scientific fellows, have given it credence.
As we know [and I have mentioned before] in 1998 India and Pakistan exploded a flurry of underground nuclear devices over a period of six months in a tit for tat episode in their serialised half-century conflict. Now, notwithstanding the arguments presented by numerous scientific types that the planet is too big to be affected by six nuclear explosions, even allowing for the cumulative shock wave effect, and that the idea that the earth's axial rotation process was disrupted by the patterning of the explosions, I will persist in my hypothesis that what is affected is the resonance's of the planet.
Mr Gore spends some of his movie referring to the many expert opinions that global warming was an illusion, and how they have been debunked; and my contention is that our knowledge of how the planet works is so inherently rudimentary that the idea that the planet 'biorhythms' if you like could have been abruptly disrupted by the compounding impact of nuclear energy patterns can not be simply ignored out of hand-So in the classic tradition of the 'dime store novel' I asked 'what if' - the planet's biorhythms were fatally [from our limited perspective] wounded by the combined effect of a triple nuclear double-tap [see my piece 'The triple nuclear double-tap'] and the vibration patterns became disruptive in some way. [In the same way that your car's wheel's 'bounce' and the steering wheel shudders at particular speeds when your tyres are not properly balanced.]
Reviewing Mr Gore's presentation the idea that long standing trends are now accelerating to and beyond [perhaps] a tipping point seems more plausible than my dramatic Nuclear Ringing option-Either way the eight years since those explosions have been wracked with global disasters on an unprecedented scale many of them, almost disproportionately in the tectonic plate regions served by India and Pakistan.
In my fictional world the clouded memories of my characters have only a blurred recollection of the horror that came one night, generations earlier, on the 23rd of December 2012. My deadline is earlier than Mr Gore's and it could be a race as to whether my fiction or his fact turns out to be the Planet's truth. What is certain is that we may know the real story behind the present wave of denials about the actions [or inactions] of our police chief, long before we know whether Mr Gore or I, proved right or wrong.
In the meantime I have hedged my bets. I own property high above the projected new sea levels on a large piece of ground in Zone One. In my fictional world I wiped out Cape Town and the entire coastline of the country [following a secondary disaster actually hinted at but not explored by Mr Gore], which raised the global sea level by twenty metres. When I contrived this concept back in the nineties, I was being expansive -common wisdom prevailing only half a decade ago put sea level rising at about a metre over a century. Mr Gore now suggests far more than my generous twenty metres, and by twenty twenty nogal.
I also wiped out Mozambique, much of which is below 200 metres [above sea level] and had a tsunami scoop a giant land bridge between Africa and Madagascar. Indonesians invade Africa across the land bridge from Madagascar, to which millions of Indonesians fled after the great flooding, claiming ancient kinship ties of language as the basis of their claim to rights over Madagascar. [Ironically internally in South Africa [Southern Azania] the North West province secedes from the Republic and joins their blood brothers in Botswana in culmination of an ancient claim by that country on the territory .. I never referred in my text to the recent Swazi claim on the province of Mpumalanga, but based on the Mugabe precedent affirmed by the South African government, which as we know upholds the reasonable right to reclaim land arbitrarily confiscated by earlier regimes. Such claims were regarded by the International court to have credence.
[In other words if Robert Mugabe can seriously and legitimately claim back the confiscated farmlands of his despised former colonialist citizens on the grounds that the lands were originally misappropriated by ancestors of said colonialists, who is to gainsay the veracity of Swaziland's claims that the same circumstances apply to the loss of their South African holdings in the nineteenth centuries, and that the Mugabe precedent, in fact the Israeli precedent as well, opens the door to retrospective claimants..]
Okay- I think that I have made my point- If Mr Gore is right [and the jury is still in deliberation] the rules of denial so manifest in the official response to the news about the police chief will make it a certainty that the impending catastrophe he is predicting for us shall come to pass and that as biblical types would have it, we are truly, living in 'the end of days,' and that it is therefore time to Party, Party, Party-
-.
Cheers.
Should we then in the interests of self-interest pretend that all such damming evidence must await an ultimate disaster that may overthrow our enterprise?
During this week I [and you perhaps] have been presented with two instances of evidence being piled up and being absorbed by an ocean of indifferent denial. We have also had [or missed] our opportunities to act according to what we wanted.
The first of these involves a media blitz [in my home turf] regarding the chief of police. Evidence seems to exist that indicates that the chief may have been less than generous with the truth in his earlier observations relating to an ongoing murder investigation, and his involvement with elements incongruous with his status: in other words that he was [allegedly] hanging out with bad guys.
The mainstream media are screaming for the police chief's suspension pending further investigation. The authorities are suggesting that the rules of evidence [innocence 'till proven- ] require that he continue to investigate the crime in which he is alleged to be complicit until he proves himself guilty [or innocent, as the case may transpire-]. The idea that the wolf could well be in the henhouse seems to have been ignored. In being ignored it will only fuel the manifest tensions implicit in our increasingly riven society. On the other hand does anyone really care? Denialism is 'not-caring' in action
The same thought about denialism came to me when I saw Al Gore's movie this week at the cinema nouveaux [sic]. For those readers who missed it, Al Gore, the self-styled former, almost-President, of the USA, whose ancestors, I believe, once owned the land on which Washington was built, presumably after having 'removed' any previous inhabitants somehow, and who has some form of familial relationship to both the writer Gore Vidal and Mrs Jackie Onassis; this same Al Gore has produced a 'wunderkind' movie called 'an inconvenient truth' which makes a most plausible case for an impending global catastrophe of the likes unheard of since I wrote my [far less heralded] 21 episode piece called the Azanian Konfederacy some years ago.
I went to see the movie loaded with scepticism-In mind I had the recollection of my distaste at the so-thoroughly propagandistic [sic] piece of filmmaking -Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by that fellow Moore- I appreciated his basic movie- its style intent and argument, but found the absence of balance irritating. Ultimately. I was left less than convinced by the fellow's virulently partisan argument. In a sense he went so far over the top that his case simply imploded, and his vested interest was exposed for all too see.
By contrast Gore's message is all too real-The power being in the visuals...certainly one of the more impressive PowerPoint presentations I've seen over the years, and much of it validated [to me] by my own research over the past fifteen years leading up to my 'Azanian Konfederacy' Web presentations, January 2004.
With the Azanian Konfederacy I was setting out to construct a world that would be the context for the serialising cybersoapie [as I call it] the Yonka Memorandum, which is a giant 'work-in-progress' thing that I shall now return to: having finally signed off on the definitive Alpha edition of my book ' 7 Ways to get your money'-a handbook for debt collecting, which is proving as popular and entertaining as I had hoped and intended.
In order to write that story -the Yonka, - which I have been fooling around with now for more than twenty years [time flies while you're having fun raising families and garnering wealth while words plod unexceptionally along] - I had to answer the question how did the world of my futuristic story [the Yonka Memorandum] come to be. Was it a dystopian world -it certainly is not utopian- but is it perhaps just a normal world like the one we know now but different because the values of that time [in the future] were different?
What I wanted for part three of my series: the Azanian Quartet, [the Yonka is part three], was/is a world in which a woman could [if she chose] walk naked the length and breadth of the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head and not be molested.
There is an alleged precedent for this. Apparently the short-lived Mongol Empire was such a place. But there the basis was terror. The awful fate that befell anyone who molested a traveller combined with the awful fate of all that person's relatives and extending associates who were all put to death in a most uncongenial way [not that I'm implying that there is a 'congenial' way to put anyone to death] so completely terrorise the local [wherever that was] citizenry that years went by without a traveller being molested, thereby giving rise the myth about the naked wanderer and the purse of gold
A simple requirement you may think. Just write about that world. My purpose was to write an adventure story set in a time when violence generally was exceptional not normal [by contrast to parts one and two where violence was standard] and how did one create such a world given that when I was writing all this I was living in one of the world's most dangerous cities; a place in which I had had my own brushes with death, on many occasions?
My solution was to generate a catastrophe of such proportions that the world would be changed utterly by its outcome-It would in fact be the much heralded Armageddon-except that it came in the form of Tsunamis, earthquakes and all the horrors predicted by Nostradamus, Siener, the Mayans and of course Revelations, followed of course by all sorts of nasty genocidal activcities on the part of the survivors...escaping the drowning Indonesian archipeligoes and the freezing northern hemisphere.
Over a lifetime of shacking up in 'one night stand' hotels across the continent I have found myself reading Revelations on many occasions, in the wee hours, when unfamiliar surroundings drive out sleep; and, having read the local rag, I would toss and turn with the Gibbons standby bibles that proliferate, in hotel bedrooms, just about everywhere I've ever been.
I am an inherently secular person but nonetheless found myself asking the question-could such things be plausible? I thought this, back then in the early eighties when I first contrived this plot, that has not yet been written to completion-Then I was too early, like the fax machines I used to sell then-now it seems, according to Gore, that I may be too late, like those fax machines that are now obsolete.
Everything I have researched over the past two decades is reinforced by Gore's conclusions. The world is in peril and the most important part of the problem [Gore seems to imply ] is the fact that there are more and more people pouring onto the planet and demanding shit.
Which brings us back to denialism.
When I drive about the city, which I do daily, I see no signs of the impending chaos predicted equally daily by the mainstream media. Over the past month for instance three, formerly inconvenient and time consuming intersections along my route have been quietly and efficiently upgraded, to facilitate effective traffic movement. The pavement outside my house [and the rest of the street] was recently demolished by the city council; to lay new electrical piping. They also ripped up my brick [paved] driveway and promised they would 'fix it later'. Well it was later-later came-
they said about five weeks and about five weeks later people came and fixed the driveway- and now the trench that marred its beauty it is almost unnoticeable.
The streetlights go out and are fixed. Most weeks the garbage collectors collect the garbage -sometimes it takes all day for them to arrive and occasionally they are travelling the suburb at 21.oo but it is usually collected-I also heard only two gunshots in the night this week and it has been some months since I heard the last, compared to fifteen years ago when the gunfire was continuous.
Nonetheless Mr Gore assures us that we have about ten years to make important changes to the world or face catastrophe and we all know that we [the human race] can barely cope with the effects of living now, never mind living in a never land of the future, which may, or may not occur. And there are many who dispute with considerable substance that the problem described by Mr Gore is either real or inevitable. Others argue with disturbing conviction that the real issue is that there as a proliferation of poor people and that no programmes can cope and that perhaps the real programme requires unpleasant action..
My novel, the Yonka Memorandum is set in a future age well after the events that caused so many catastrophes; when the participants in the story have only the sketchiest knowledge or understanding of what happened, except that it was the time the world changed. In effect I was contemplating what happens when we reach the end of the script- in this case the script represented by 'Revelations' the arch- document of the gloom and doomists-
Imagine if you would, interviewing ten citizens at random: about an event today, and you would perhaps get some solid committed answers. Ask about an event ten years ago, say, the assassination of the person I call Konstant Mann, an event that almost caused our emerging democracy to come unstuck, and most of the ten would be a tad hasty although they may recollect the event. Ask about the Bambata Rebellion or the battle of Isandlwana, the so-called Third Frontier War, or even the war of 1899-1902 and their eyes will glaze over; and they will either puzzle or remain blank
This is the condition of the characters in my novel-The world picked itself up after the disaster and continued as it may well have done in the dim and distant past--[or if you prefer to be more real...as we all did after the great tsunami a few years back...
We have no real knowledge of our extreme past-10,000 years back but we do have a planet full of unexplained and inexplicable architectural artefacts; and as many inexplicable folk tales. People just get on with their lives irrespective of the chaos apparently reigning all about: the way those road workers put up those useful traffic circles last month and the other worker fellows who eventually, working their plod, plod way, along behind the diggers, reached my house and fixed the driveway. The idea that the sky is falling down and everything is about to end is too ridiculous for words: superstitious nonsense really...isn't it?
In my preparations for the world-to-come in my novel I explored the role of the so called Atlantic Conveyer system, and found, as Mr Gore now proclaims, that it has been under threat for so long now the damage is probably irreversible and Europe stares a Newfoundland style climate in the face within Mr Gore's decade without being able to do anything about it.
In my story I created a catastrophe that decimates the East coast of the United States and another that implodes the U S West coast, reducing the United States to a non-player in planetary affairs. The extended catastrophe decimates Japan and sets China back a decade during which time all the pent up rage stored as Yang energy by the infinitely suffering Chinese citizen, explodes in rage; and the forty million men deprived of access to a woman through the outcome of the one child policies of the present regime in China, rampage and consume all.
In our own world [here in the place i call Zone One ]we come face to face with the water supply crisis that is Zone One's Achilles heel [Zone one is my fiction name for the "hard-to-pronounce" term Gauteng] and my heroine, taking her cue from similar projects in Spain and Australia undertakes to build the five, one kilometre high, Towers, that come to dominate the North Western corner of the tiny province and which supplement the water supplies to the city through evaporation and also provide for massive scale horticulture.
What freaked me out watching an 'inconvenient truth' was not that the subject may be pure propaganda for the eco-fascist movement. [This movement apparently tacitly concedes that for the world to survive the coming eco-meltdown predicted with such glee by so many for so long now, it will be necessary to reduce the global population by about four fifths. They assume this will occur through natural selection and perhaps much of it will.] Gore makes no such suggestions. He simply presents an accumulation of facts that have been piling up, according to my own delving, for decades now, and demonstrates the visual imagery that makes his case so profoundly real.
For instance he reveals footage of buildings sinking into the melting permafrost of Siberia. I scene I found to be almost incredible. I had read recently that Siberia was melting and saw some footage on a recent BBC programme but the visuals of what is happening were profound. The poignancy for me was also astounding:
During 1978 I gave a lecture at the now University of Zimbabwe. I spoke to a hostile audience, generally sourced from the various departments of the social sciences. The subject of my presentation related to the inevitable and impending collapse of the [now] former Soviet Union. As we now know the place collapsed eleven years later.
I have never considered the likelihood of a communist style repressive State surviving and prospering to be anything but inherently implausible, and so part of my argument in my speech related to rumours [now known to be well founded] that the Russian drive to exploit the oil reserves of Siberia were being thwarted by their inability to develop home grown drilling technology to facilitate access to the oil through 600 feet of rock solid permafrost.
This revelation proved too disingenuous for my audience who accused me of being a "Smith stooge" and a "capitalist lackey", a "fascist" and other uncool stuff and I had to be escorted off the campus by the campus security for my own safety. In fact I was lucky to get off the stage undamaged by flying chairs and other missiles. It was good practice for the many bullets dodged on another occasion later.
Now here we are, not thirty years gone past and that solid, multi millenia old, permafrost that arguably proved the undoing of the Soviet Union is melting- why? - What happened? Gore suggests that centuries of climate affecting carbon emissions have finally reached a tipping point and the effect of warming is on an accelerating curve.
In my fictional world I suggested that the tipping point was accelerated by an event that precipitated what I called: 'The Ringing'. Gore doesn't mention this, perhaps because the two country's concerned are now American allies and Mr Gore's presentation is an inherently bi-partisan one [in an American sense]. Perhaps he doesn't mention it because he gives it no credence, or perhaps none of his advisers, being scientific fellows, have given it credence.
As we know [and I have mentioned before] in 1998 India and Pakistan exploded a flurry of underground nuclear devices over a period of six months in a tit for tat episode in their serialised half-century conflict. Now, notwithstanding the arguments presented by numerous scientific types that the planet is too big to be affected by six nuclear explosions, even allowing for the cumulative shock wave effect, and that the idea that the earth's axial rotation process was disrupted by the patterning of the explosions, I will persist in my hypothesis that what is affected is the resonance's of the planet.
Mr Gore spends some of his movie referring to the many expert opinions that global warming was an illusion, and how they have been debunked; and my contention is that our knowledge of how the planet works is so inherently rudimentary that the idea that the planet 'biorhythms' if you like could have been abruptly disrupted by the compounding impact of nuclear energy patterns can not be simply ignored out of hand-So in the classic tradition of the 'dime store novel' I asked 'what if' - the planet's biorhythms were fatally [from our limited perspective] wounded by the combined effect of a triple nuclear double-tap [see my piece 'The triple nuclear double-tap'] and the vibration patterns became disruptive in some way. [In the same way that your car's wheel's 'bounce' and the steering wheel shudders at particular speeds when your tyres are not properly balanced.]
Reviewing Mr Gore's presentation the idea that long standing trends are now accelerating to and beyond [perhaps] a tipping point seems more plausible than my dramatic Nuclear Ringing option-Either way the eight years since those explosions have been wracked with global disasters on an unprecedented scale many of them, almost disproportionately in the tectonic plate regions served by India and Pakistan.
In my fictional world the clouded memories of my characters have only a blurred recollection of the horror that came one night, generations earlier, on the 23rd of December 2012. My deadline is earlier than Mr Gore's and it could be a race as to whether my fiction or his fact turns out to be the Planet's truth. What is certain is that we may know the real story behind the present wave of denials about the actions [or inactions] of our police chief, long before we know whether Mr Gore or I, proved right or wrong.
In the meantime I have hedged my bets. I own property high above the projected new sea levels on a large piece of ground in Zone One. In my fictional world I wiped out Cape Town and the entire coastline of the country [following a secondary disaster actually hinted at but not explored by Mr Gore], which raised the global sea level by twenty metres. When I contrived this concept back in the nineties, I was being expansive -common wisdom prevailing only half a decade ago put sea level rising at about a metre over a century. Mr Gore now suggests far more than my generous twenty metres, and by twenty twenty nogal.
I also wiped out Mozambique, much of which is below 200 metres [above sea level] and had a tsunami scoop a giant land bridge between Africa and Madagascar. Indonesians invade Africa across the land bridge from Madagascar, to which millions of Indonesians fled after the great flooding, claiming ancient kinship ties of language as the basis of their claim to rights over Madagascar. [Ironically internally in South Africa [Southern Azania] the North West province secedes from the Republic and joins their blood brothers in Botswana in culmination of an ancient claim by that country on the territory .. I never referred in my text to the recent Swazi claim on the province of Mpumalanga, but based on the Mugabe precedent affirmed by the South African government, which as we know upholds the reasonable right to reclaim land arbitrarily confiscated by earlier regimes. Such claims were regarded by the International court to have credence.
[In other words if Robert Mugabe can seriously and legitimately claim back the confiscated farmlands of his despised former colonialist citizens on the grounds that the lands were originally misappropriated by ancestors of said colonialists, who is to gainsay the veracity of Swaziland's claims that the same circumstances apply to the loss of their South African holdings in the nineteenth centuries, and that the Mugabe precedent, in fact the Israeli precedent as well, opens the door to retrospective claimants..]
Okay- I think that I have made my point- If Mr Gore is right [and the jury is still in deliberation] the rules of denial so manifest in the official response to the news about the police chief will make it a certainty that the impending catastrophe he is predicting for us shall come to pass and that as biblical types would have it, we are truly, living in 'the end of days,' and that it is therefore time to Party, Party, Party-
-.
Cheers.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The vexatious issue of Mr Zuma
Undoubtedly Mr Jacob Zuma, former Deputy President of the region some might wish to call Southern Azania, has been placed in an invidious position. The recent brouhaha over who is or was not the author of the phrase 'a generally corrupt relationship' only lends emphasis to the extent to which Mr Zuma's civil rights have been abused by the failure of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] to try Mr Zuma at the same time as they tried Mr Shaik.
One understands from various media reports that Mr Shaik is going to make a further attempt this time to convince the Constitutional court that this case was procedurally flawed and his rights were violated. For as long as this attempt is currency, for that long must Mr Zuma wait before the NPA can conclude whether or not they are going to pursue their case against Mr Zuma. Again this inherently violates his right to campaign fairly for the Presidency of the country.
It could also be that his ability to campaign is now fatally flawed in any event since there will inevitably be a stigma hanging over his head like the proverbial sword of Damocles [whoever he was]. This says that Mr Zuma is dammed if he doesn't fight the case and may well be dammed if he does. In a sense this is the Knight's gambit from chess-whereby Mr Zuma is in check and any move he makes costs him his Queen and it's checkmate.
Aside from all the knowledge that is out in the marketplace that indicates that Mr Zuma is in serious trouble the problem is inherently one that we all know now that he received R1.3 million bucks from a man who was not his employer and that notwithstanding all the allegations that the money was a loan no loan documentation was led and no evidence accepted that supported that idea. So we the public were left with two questions.
The first asks what was the payback for the alleged loan since no paperwork existed. A loan is by definition something that must be paid back-so since the arrangement that I have for instance with my mortgage bond holder requires financial payback and there was no evidence of financial payback conditions then some other payback must have been in their minds, and we the voting public need to know what that arrangement was to have been.
This leads us to the idea of 'intention' as a caller to the Perlman debate on the issue this week referred-[I only caught a smidgeon of this debate driving across town avoiding the morning gridlock and surfing between Gareth Cliff, UJFM and SAFM ].
The caller, who sounded like an accomplished autodidact and announced he was from the Eastern Cape, referred to the term 'delict'.
I looked this up later and in the margins of an old textbook on Roman law I found what I had written back in 1967 that there is reference to 'declarations of intent' or 'expressions of will' and the caller suggested we explore the events that transpired over the course of the less than flavoursome relationship between Mssrs Shaik and Zuma.
The debate team pondered the inherent complexity of demonstrating intention. I agreed with them in that personal internal debate that got going in me as I drove or rather snailed in creeping traffic.
How can we assess Mr Zuma's state of mind without having had the opportunity to hear whether MR Zuma saw Mr Shaik as an opportunistic fool from whose money Mr Zuma soon parted him; with NO INTENTION OF EVER GIVING HIM ANYTHING IN RETURN.
In other words we don't know whether Mr Zuma simply saw Shaik as a useful source of revenue, and if some schmuck wanted to trade on past association and give him a million bucks or so then who was he to object-I would see that as a perfectly reasonable position for a man who has no particular code of ethics other than self-enhancement and 2who is desperately attempting to play catch on the years stolen from him by the former evil regime. The alleged evidence that demonstrates anything to the contrary has not been tested and is therefore wanting.
The other thing that we should all need to test in a courtroom to establish some indication of intent may be found in the same place that Eliot Ness found regarding Al Capone in his great movie 'The Untouchables': violations of the Income Tax act.
The simple assessment of intent may be construed through the answer to the second question. Did Mr Zuma declare the 1,3 million bucks he received from Mr Shaik to the Southern Azanian Revenue Service [SARS], irrespective of how he defined it, and was he legally able to do this [or not do so] in terms of the rules of procedure prevailing at that time?
The taxman has always grabbed as much of my money as the market can bear and I'm sure he has grabbed chunks of yours too, my reader. Did her get his rightful chunk of Mr Z's 'informally accrued' money, and assuming he did, did he get it timeously. Or was the declaration retrospective?
One understands from various media reports that Mr Shaik is going to make a further attempt this time to convince the Constitutional court that this case was procedurally flawed and his rights were violated. For as long as this attempt is currency, for that long must Mr Zuma wait before the NPA can conclude whether or not they are going to pursue their case against Mr Zuma. Again this inherently violates his right to campaign fairly for the Presidency of the country.
It could also be that his ability to campaign is now fatally flawed in any event since there will inevitably be a stigma hanging over his head like the proverbial sword of Damocles [whoever he was]. This says that Mr Zuma is dammed if he doesn't fight the case and may well be dammed if he does. In a sense this is the Knight's gambit from chess-whereby Mr Zuma is in check and any move he makes costs him his Queen and it's checkmate.
Aside from all the knowledge that is out in the marketplace that indicates that Mr Zuma is in serious trouble the problem is inherently one that we all know now that he received R1.3 million bucks from a man who was not his employer and that notwithstanding all the allegations that the money was a loan no loan documentation was led and no evidence accepted that supported that idea. So we the public were left with two questions.
The first asks what was the payback for the alleged loan since no paperwork existed. A loan is by definition something that must be paid back-so since the arrangement that I have for instance with my mortgage bond holder requires financial payback and there was no evidence of financial payback conditions then some other payback must have been in their minds, and we the voting public need to know what that arrangement was to have been.
This leads us to the idea of 'intention' as a caller to the Perlman debate on the issue this week referred-[I only caught a smidgeon of this debate driving across town avoiding the morning gridlock and surfing between Gareth Cliff, UJFM and SAFM ].
The caller, who sounded like an accomplished autodidact and announced he was from the Eastern Cape, referred to the term 'delict'.
I looked this up later and in the margins of an old textbook on Roman law I found what I had written back in 1967 that there is reference to 'declarations of intent' or 'expressions of will' and the caller suggested we explore the events that transpired over the course of the less than flavoursome relationship between Mssrs Shaik and Zuma.
The debate team pondered the inherent complexity of demonstrating intention. I agreed with them in that personal internal debate that got going in me as I drove or rather snailed in creeping traffic.
How can we assess Mr Zuma's state of mind without having had the opportunity to hear whether MR Zuma saw Mr Shaik as an opportunistic fool from whose money Mr Zuma soon parted him; with NO INTENTION OF EVER GIVING HIM ANYTHING IN RETURN.
In other words we don't know whether Mr Zuma simply saw Shaik as a useful source of revenue, and if some schmuck wanted to trade on past association and give him a million bucks or so then who was he to object-I would see that as a perfectly reasonable position for a man who has no particular code of ethics other than self-enhancement and 2who is desperately attempting to play catch on the years stolen from him by the former evil regime. The alleged evidence that demonstrates anything to the contrary has not been tested and is therefore wanting.
The other thing that we should all need to test in a courtroom to establish some indication of intent may be found in the same place that Eliot Ness found regarding Al Capone in his great movie 'The Untouchables': violations of the Income Tax act.
The simple assessment of intent may be construed through the answer to the second question. Did Mr Zuma declare the 1,3 million bucks he received from Mr Shaik to the Southern Azanian Revenue Service [SARS], irrespective of how he defined it, and was he legally able to do this [or not do so] in terms of the rules of procedure prevailing at that time?
The taxman has always grabbed as much of my money as the market can bear and I'm sure he has grabbed chunks of yours too, my reader. Did her get his rightful chunk of Mr Z's 'informally accrued' money, and assuming he did, did he get it timeously. Or was the declaration retrospective?
Friday, November 17, 2006
The Oppenheimer whimper
Remember that cliche about a week being a long time in the world of moving action, this was never more true than now, here, in our town Jozi-
Now and again I read newspapers from such august places as Vancouver, Auckland and Toronto; the Emirates even and other places in between. I'm always struck by their lack of drama and what drama there is, is worked to death, almost instantly. By contrast we have so much news that most of it is buried instantly-sometimes the most buried stories contain intriguing meat-
I see that the pre-current issue of my Auckland news focuses on public response to an artist's impression of what a new proposed world cup rugby stadium would look like should the Newies ever decide to give it the go ahead. This, and the associated parking issue, will be headline news for months. In Dubai the issue is the quad-bike and the hooligans who wield them, while the Toronto press is mainly concerned with tax issues and the cost of things.
The most serious crime reported in the Toronto press concerns the travails of a man in a Toronto suburb who was relieved of his wallet after being 'swarmed' by a gang of [undefined] men. A week later the headlines are roughly similar, and there is some risidual mumbling about a school shooting that took place months ago... the biggest event in a decade i gather.
Compare this to our own more fecund experience. Headlines of the past week deal with a man convicted of having an undesirable relationship with the [former] deputy president, who goes to jail, and is immediately, and controversially, moved to a more comfortable jail stocked to the gunnels with young boys. Earmark a debate, says Perlman, before his chat show is swamped with urgent matters..
The beginnings of comment on this are snuffed out by routine news of murder and mayhem, as heist gangs roam the suburbs, wreck cars, kill citizen, shoot babies off their mother's backs, burn their enemies [those who guard mobile money boxes] and wipe out any of the forces of good in their paths-These have become 'pop-up' headlines recurring with such frequency that they barely arouse comment. Laced through these is the start of a rape trial involving TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE COUNTS OF RAPE One would imagine a koke routine at least but- the headlines are barely dry and the story is obsolete- the funeral of a former tyrant barely merits a byline and both pale before the next story to the effect that -
A leading politician, jailed for fraud or something, is enjoying boozy weekends at home and his four-year jail sentence has miraculously morphed into a four-month sentence with time off for good behaviour -I'll bet the system will be inundated with requests from other criminals for such miraculous events to occur to their sentences. We'll earmark a debate, says Perlman, again- more plaintive this time- there are days when Perlman's qualities are stretched to breaking point-. The debate proved 'chattery' when it did happen- It was quickly superseded though-
By midmorning relieved officials could announce the mass slaughter of 17 farm workers whose transport was whacked by a passing train-politicians raced to be first with the usual clutch of empty rhetoric and meaningless promises.
In the middle of all this a report leaks on Classic radio that the richest family in the country has sold off one third of their holdings in the country's biggest company: the business founded by their ancestors back in the nineteenth century. Further news confirms that a fat cat Chinese businessman has bought their shares. A simpatico story in the Sunday Crimes suggests [unconvincingly] charitable motives involving the wider continent.
After this we cut to Parliament where that august institution passes a new Civil Union Bill that bypasses marriage in a controversy loaded half-an-hour-before-tea. The Union Bill enables same sex couples to join together in unholy - well - Union. And while an instant of controversy drips all over the pages of various media someone leaked a few million litres of jet fuel into a bird sanctuary in a wild takeover bid that was immediately ignored because-.
All this news is immediately swamped by a discursive furore that erupts like a hasty storm in a fragile teacup when the presiding judge in an aforementioned corruption trial announces that he has been misquoted and the entire country erupts in fury.
And then while ten debates are roaring away like a series of fast moving volcanoes the news breaks that a prominent citizen has been arrested in connection with the murder last year of a controversial mining figure, the so-called "Fat MAn"- So Friday brings the 'Spotlight' that, according to Perlman, now falls on Glenn Agliotti [an alleged drug kingpin, according to SAFM, who is associated in some smeary way with the chief of police in the country] and Mr Selebi [the police chief] .
With the prospect of a juicy distraction in the form of a celebrity murder-Gosh we haven't had a real celeb' type murder since that girl-whatsername-was kidnapped from a university car park a while back, and the "last" socialite Hazel Crane [what! we used to have socialites ] was assassinated on her way to court- Perlman is having a field day.
Delete consciousness rules and no one, other than the brief aforementioned simpatico moment in the Sunday Crimes, has given a second thought to the significance of the tucked away tale of the Oppenheimer's retreat from Anglo. In fact in retrospect the non-announcement of the Oppenheimer sell-off is reminiscent once again with remarkable poignancy of Eliot's catch phrase 'not with a bang but a whimper". Have these rich nobs become so peripheral to our day to day existence that their pending disembarkation leaves us stone cold- or are we just to busy to notice or even care.
Nonetheless it is curious that there have been no public pronouncements from the usual firebrands, of the ilk that reacted so vehemently to the judge's misquotation,So much for misdirection.
So it seems no-one wants to talk much about the news that the Oppenheimer family has apparently sold off one third of its holdings in Anglo-American to an organisation that has the word China in its name. One would have assumed the Liberation lobby would have been leaping for glee that the old imperialist capitalist rich nobs, hated by som many for their 'taking' ways, who exploited the people for the past century or so, are moving on and have 'done' a most intriguing 'empowerment' deal with the new partners for African development who are forging deals all over the continent.
Strange to think that Anglo-American once owned about 90 percent of the listed companies on the JSE. It is certainly a shadow today of that former self-Now it's main operations have moved offshore, the company has morphed like Mr Yengini's sentence into another unanticipated form and the local branch is now rapidly vanishing. Within two years it will have ceased to exist- It has apparently served its purpose and now it is on its way out. Talk is rife that the company is positioning itself as a takeover target.
Presumably, well according to the sub texts in the Crimes article, the Oppenheimer's are selling up their concentrated holdings in our world in order to liberate themselves to play the greater world markets with far greater anonymity than they can manage being the big fish in our local pond. This is a sensible idea. These are global citizens and it is best that like all global citizens they hide themselves in comfortable places where rich people abound and they will not be noticed while they move their money to where it makes the most 'more money' - Regular readers may recollect my blog on going liquid sometime back [Staying liquid 9/03/06] in which I dealt with the trend against owning hijackable assets in a world increasingly mobilising to steal them a la Chavez, or Morales or who knows who may be lurking like the cobra Mugabe in our own shadows. In a world that rationalises the theft of assets sensible people follow Mr Micawbers advice: 'Keep they property portable' [Great Expectations: Charles Dickens]
Maybe no one wants to talk about the Oppenheimer decision to move a chunk of their assets into other extra-territorial venues. It's as your favourite raconteur playboy uncle announces that he's secretly gay [and doesn't seek 'Union']. Nonetheless the truth is they are leaving the party and have been for some time. So why are we hearing no cheers of joy?
And then there was that other piece of news that never made headlines. This according to a brief radio news report was from a conference in Cape Town where, apparently, concerns were raised about the declining levels of foreign investment in the local, recently hijacked, mining industry. [The details of this report were unclear- it is never to easy to get an intelligible news report on UJFM where the music is great, and the station is, as they regularly affirm, young enough to get away with inarticulate and broadly incoherent news reporting.]
This [decline in investment] is understandable. In a world where the rules regarding investments have become flexible money also becomes flexible. Smart money avoids those places where moral outrage rules. Headlines confirming this will continue to play a low profile in our moment to moment existence.
On a flippant note perhaps the Oppenheimers are feeling chastened that none of their garden parties [assuming they still have garden parties] have made the society pages lately [mainly because there is so little 'Society' left in our news saturated town]; and such news is reduced to the occasional byline, unlike Vancouver and Toronto [for instance] where their society pages are the only news worth reading in such places where people 'have it all' and are left to obsess over the occasional pothole and dog litter left on pavements.
So if no one is going to say nice things about one's little soirees then it must be time for a new venue. After all what's the point of having money if bragging about it is so inconvenient.
Now and again I read newspapers from such august places as Vancouver, Auckland and Toronto; the Emirates even and other places in between. I'm always struck by their lack of drama and what drama there is, is worked to death, almost instantly. By contrast we have so much news that most of it is buried instantly-sometimes the most buried stories contain intriguing meat-
I see that the pre-current issue of my Auckland news focuses on public response to an artist's impression of what a new proposed world cup rugby stadium would look like should the Newies ever decide to give it the go ahead. This, and the associated parking issue, will be headline news for months. In Dubai the issue is the quad-bike and the hooligans who wield them, while the Toronto press is mainly concerned with tax issues and the cost of things.
The most serious crime reported in the Toronto press concerns the travails of a man in a Toronto suburb who was relieved of his wallet after being 'swarmed' by a gang of [undefined] men. A week later the headlines are roughly similar, and there is some risidual mumbling about a school shooting that took place months ago... the biggest event in a decade i gather.
Compare this to our own more fecund experience. Headlines of the past week deal with a man convicted of having an undesirable relationship with the [former] deputy president, who goes to jail, and is immediately, and controversially, moved to a more comfortable jail stocked to the gunnels with young boys. Earmark a debate, says Perlman, before his chat show is swamped with urgent matters..
The beginnings of comment on this are snuffed out by routine news of murder and mayhem, as heist gangs roam the suburbs, wreck cars, kill citizen, shoot babies off their mother's backs, burn their enemies [those who guard mobile money boxes] and wipe out any of the forces of good in their paths-These have become 'pop-up' headlines recurring with such frequency that they barely arouse comment. Laced through these is the start of a rape trial involving TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE COUNTS OF RAPE One would imagine a koke routine at least but- the headlines are barely dry and the story is obsolete- the funeral of a former tyrant barely merits a byline and both pale before the next story to the effect that -
A leading politician, jailed for fraud or something, is enjoying boozy weekends at home and his four-year jail sentence has miraculously morphed into a four-month sentence with time off for good behaviour -I'll bet the system will be inundated with requests from other criminals for such miraculous events to occur to their sentences. We'll earmark a debate, says Perlman, again- more plaintive this time- there are days when Perlman's qualities are stretched to breaking point-. The debate proved 'chattery' when it did happen- It was quickly superseded though-
By midmorning relieved officials could announce the mass slaughter of 17 farm workers whose transport was whacked by a passing train-politicians raced to be first with the usual clutch of empty rhetoric and meaningless promises.
In the middle of all this a report leaks on Classic radio that the richest family in the country has sold off one third of their holdings in the country's biggest company: the business founded by their ancestors back in the nineteenth century. Further news confirms that a fat cat Chinese businessman has bought their shares. A simpatico story in the Sunday Crimes suggests [unconvincingly] charitable motives involving the wider continent.
After this we cut to Parliament where that august institution passes a new Civil Union Bill that bypasses marriage in a controversy loaded half-an-hour-before-tea. The Union Bill enables same sex couples to join together in unholy - well - Union. And while an instant of controversy drips all over the pages of various media someone leaked a few million litres of jet fuel into a bird sanctuary in a wild takeover bid that was immediately ignored because-.
All this news is immediately swamped by a discursive furore that erupts like a hasty storm in a fragile teacup when the presiding judge in an aforementioned corruption trial announces that he has been misquoted and the entire country erupts in fury.
And then while ten debates are roaring away like a series of fast moving volcanoes the news breaks that a prominent citizen has been arrested in connection with the murder last year of a controversial mining figure, the so-called "Fat MAn"- So Friday brings the 'Spotlight' that, according to Perlman, now falls on Glenn Agliotti [an alleged drug kingpin, according to SAFM, who is associated in some smeary way with the chief of police in the country] and Mr Selebi [the police chief] .
With the prospect of a juicy distraction in the form of a celebrity murder-Gosh we haven't had a real celeb' type murder since that girl-whatsername-was kidnapped from a university car park a while back, and the "last" socialite Hazel Crane [what! we used to have socialites ] was assassinated on her way to court- Perlman is having a field day.
Delete consciousness rules and no one, other than the brief aforementioned simpatico moment in the Sunday Crimes, has given a second thought to the significance of the tucked away tale of the Oppenheimer's retreat from Anglo. In fact in retrospect the non-announcement of the Oppenheimer sell-off is reminiscent once again with remarkable poignancy of Eliot's catch phrase 'not with a bang but a whimper". Have these rich nobs become so peripheral to our day to day existence that their pending disembarkation leaves us stone cold- or are we just to busy to notice or even care.
Nonetheless it is curious that there have been no public pronouncements from the usual firebrands, of the ilk that reacted so vehemently to the judge's misquotation,So much for misdirection.
So it seems no-one wants to talk much about the news that the Oppenheimer family has apparently sold off one third of its holdings in Anglo-American to an organisation that has the word China in its name. One would have assumed the Liberation lobby would have been leaping for glee that the old imperialist capitalist rich nobs, hated by som many for their 'taking' ways, who exploited the people for the past century or so, are moving on and have 'done' a most intriguing 'empowerment' deal with the new partners for African development who are forging deals all over the continent.
Strange to think that Anglo-American once owned about 90 percent of the listed companies on the JSE. It is certainly a shadow today of that former self-Now it's main operations have moved offshore, the company has morphed like Mr Yengini's sentence into another unanticipated form and the local branch is now rapidly vanishing. Within two years it will have ceased to exist- It has apparently served its purpose and now it is on its way out. Talk is rife that the company is positioning itself as a takeover target.
Presumably, well according to the sub texts in the Crimes article, the Oppenheimer's are selling up their concentrated holdings in our world in order to liberate themselves to play the greater world markets with far greater anonymity than they can manage being the big fish in our local pond. This is a sensible idea. These are global citizens and it is best that like all global citizens they hide themselves in comfortable places where rich people abound and they will not be noticed while they move their money to where it makes the most 'more money' - Regular readers may recollect my blog on going liquid sometime back [Staying liquid 9/03/06] in which I dealt with the trend against owning hijackable assets in a world increasingly mobilising to steal them a la Chavez, or Morales or who knows who may be lurking like the cobra Mugabe in our own shadows. In a world that rationalises the theft of assets sensible people follow Mr Micawbers advice: 'Keep they property portable' [Great Expectations: Charles Dickens]
Maybe no one wants to talk about the Oppenheimer decision to move a chunk of their assets into other extra-territorial venues. It's as your favourite raconteur playboy uncle announces that he's secretly gay [and doesn't seek 'Union']. Nonetheless the truth is they are leaving the party and have been for some time. So why are we hearing no cheers of joy?
And then there was that other piece of news that never made headlines. This according to a brief radio news report was from a conference in Cape Town where, apparently, concerns were raised about the declining levels of foreign investment in the local, recently hijacked, mining industry. [The details of this report were unclear- it is never to easy to get an intelligible news report on UJFM where the music is great, and the station is, as they regularly affirm, young enough to get away with inarticulate and broadly incoherent news reporting.]
This [decline in investment] is understandable. In a world where the rules regarding investments have become flexible money also becomes flexible. Smart money avoids those places where moral outrage rules. Headlines confirming this will continue to play a low profile in our moment to moment existence.
On a flippant note perhaps the Oppenheimers are feeling chastened that none of their garden parties [assuming they still have garden parties] have made the society pages lately [mainly because there is so little 'Society' left in our news saturated town]; and such news is reduced to the occasional byline, unlike Vancouver and Toronto [for instance] where their society pages are the only news worth reading in such places where people 'have it all' and are left to obsess over the occasional pothole and dog litter left on pavements.
So if no one is going to say nice things about one's little soirees then it must be time for a new venue. After all what's the point of having money if bragging about it is so inconvenient.
Monday, November 13, 2006
The man who complained about home affairs
Home affairs hostage-taker Kabelo Thibedi is apparently suffering from depression. He just received a five year jail sentence for losing his patience after failing for four years to get an identity book and taking some of the non-performing staff at that august institution hostage with a toy gun to make his point.
What a schmuck
According to recent reports Kabelo is a schmuck for not having simply bribed someone to get an identity document. According to a recent TV programme this is easier than applying through the normal channels.
Secondly he must have got the worst legal aid counsel available that day for his trial-Last month a bunch of murderers were fined twenty grand each and received a two-year sentence each for butchering someone-and Kabelo gets five years for complaining too loudly about poor service delivery. Double schmuck.
I'll bet Kabello wont get a nice comfortable personalised cell in a juicy juvenile facility like Mr Shabir Shaik who is guaranteed a supply of youngsters for his fifteen year sojourn behind bars in a private cell...or will it turn out to be fifteen months?. Nor will he be going home for partying weekends with his parliamentary buddies like Mr Yengeni whose four-year sentence has mysteriously morphed into a four-month sentence, soon to be converted to sentence under correctional supervision, whatever that implies.
No. More likely the poor innocent prick will find himself in a cell with 50 convicted rapists, murderers and general riff raff in the University of crime, where he will either learn to kill, rape and pillage or be fucked to death with the now traditional slow puncture. Treble schmuck Kabello.
At least his mother still loves him and will put flowers on the grave dug for him by the skivers at Home affairs.
Perhaps he should get smart and employ Winnie's lawyer and go for an appeal against his sentence-After all, the wonderful Winnie has been patiently awaiting the opportunity to appeal for about five years now against a minor sentence for committing some sixty criminal counts of fraud, deception and who remembers what.
On the other side of the planet the Dalai Lama has called for the Iraqi authorities to leaven their rage at Saddam Hussein and not kill the fellow for having murdered millions. Those of you who read my fictitious tale about Saddam on the run in a reworking of Bradbury's [I think] Great Lorenzo will remember that I doubted that this was the real Saddam: he was alleged to have had so many doubles.
Given the terrible legacy of incompetence demonstrated by the American authorities over the past years of the invasion it would not surprise me to discover thirty years from now that the real Saddam disappeared into Mexico City or somewhere similar and continues his auld ways in a dentists chair or some other place.
It hardly seems fair that Saddam, whoever it turns out to be, should get a quick death for murdering a few million people and destroying the lives of millions more and that poor schmuck Kabelo gets nailed five years and death by slow puncture for complaining too vociferously about a violation of his civil rights by the State.
Wasn't the struggle supposed to end in fair dibs for all?
What a schmuck
According to recent reports Kabelo is a schmuck for not having simply bribed someone to get an identity document. According to a recent TV programme this is easier than applying through the normal channels.
Secondly he must have got the worst legal aid counsel available that day for his trial-Last month a bunch of murderers were fined twenty grand each and received a two-year sentence each for butchering someone-and Kabelo gets five years for complaining too loudly about poor service delivery. Double schmuck.
I'll bet Kabello wont get a nice comfortable personalised cell in a juicy juvenile facility like Mr Shabir Shaik who is guaranteed a supply of youngsters for his fifteen year sojourn behind bars in a private cell...or will it turn out to be fifteen months?. Nor will he be going home for partying weekends with his parliamentary buddies like Mr Yengeni whose four-year sentence has mysteriously morphed into a four-month sentence, soon to be converted to sentence under correctional supervision, whatever that implies.
No. More likely the poor innocent prick will find himself in a cell with 50 convicted rapists, murderers and general riff raff in the University of crime, where he will either learn to kill, rape and pillage or be fucked to death with the now traditional slow puncture. Treble schmuck Kabello.
At least his mother still loves him and will put flowers on the grave dug for him by the skivers at Home affairs.
Perhaps he should get smart and employ Winnie's lawyer and go for an appeal against his sentence-After all, the wonderful Winnie has been patiently awaiting the opportunity to appeal for about five years now against a minor sentence for committing some sixty criminal counts of fraud, deception and who remembers what.
On the other side of the planet the Dalai Lama has called for the Iraqi authorities to leaven their rage at Saddam Hussein and not kill the fellow for having murdered millions. Those of you who read my fictitious tale about Saddam on the run in a reworking of Bradbury's [I think] Great Lorenzo will remember that I doubted that this was the real Saddam: he was alleged to have had so many doubles.
Given the terrible legacy of incompetence demonstrated by the American authorities over the past years of the invasion it would not surprise me to discover thirty years from now that the real Saddam disappeared into Mexico City or somewhere similar and continues his auld ways in a dentists chair or some other place.
It hardly seems fair that Saddam, whoever it turns out to be, should get a quick death for murdering a few million people and destroying the lives of millions more and that poor schmuck Kabelo gets nailed five years and death by slow puncture for complaining too vociferously about a violation of his civil rights by the State.
Wasn't the struggle supposed to end in fair dibs for all?
Sunday, October 29, 2006
7 Ways to get your money...a luta continua
When I retired from active day- to-day business at the end of the last century to concentrate on Tai Chi; and [among other things] on researching, writing, polishing, revising and editing my book '7 Ways to get your money'-from unwilling payment bilking customers, one of the things that bothered me was whether my market place would still be relevant when I was finished. I needn't have worried....
In other words would the problem of extracting payments from elusive customers still be a valid basis for a product devoted to aggressively combating this scourge. Alternatively, would the newly, rights oriented environment, in which we allegedly now live, have contributed to an amelioration of what is a terminally deadly disease that has debilitating cumulative effects on an economy. In other words would my book have become obsolete? Would we have become a more honest society?
Again i say: I needn't have worried.
My first corporate customer for my book: an allegedly respectable company, has not only proved the need still exists, but has demonstrated that non-payment for goods received could well have become a basic principle of business performance: a part of 'the business model' to use current jargon.
I don't know whether to be enraged that I have been proved right, or overjoyed to find that the market for my new book could be bigger than I ever anticipated. Or perhaps I am overjoyed to find that I have been proved right-which is not much of a discovery after all. I always knew I was right. When I muttered to my bank manager about it last Wednesday she reminded me that I had planned for delayed payment back in July when the order had first been mooted.
Proving that people and corporations duck on their responsibility to pay their debts is like proving that the sun comes up daily. The real problem is how to reduce the amount of time and money you lose hassling after outstanding payments when you could be doing something more productive. I am pissed off that I had to wait an excessive time for my money because my customer has issues-so we'll have a count down here to 'Name and Shame' day. They have shown some evidence of compliance and I have no desire to burn one of my customers-If I don't have my money in the next few days which they have belately promised will occur then I can burn them for being unworthy.
What this means is that I am satisfied at this stage that the strategies outlined in my book have proved effective and so the point of this blog is to tell you: that after testing and proving okay, the second phase of the launch of my now not so new book '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law' got under way on Friday 27th October. On the occasion of my sixtieth birthday I set the programme for the arrival of 7 Ways edition two -The Alpha edition.
I have to tell you that we were caught by surprise at the immediate popularity of 7 Ways-It looks good, it is set out in easy to read prose-much easier than anything I ever put on the blog-which is mostly just typing as Mr Capote once observed of Mr Kerouack, and it provides a highly readable and entertaining tale with some seriously usable information, not only according to me but now also according to a number of happy readers.
And this immediate episode with a non-paying customer, apart from shifting my blood around in a way that has been absent for awhile, simply means that more and more people are going to want to read my collection of fables called '7 ways to get your money' -
What I know now having had to field test my book and find that it is not wanting, is that this book is set to be the hottest book published this decade in this country and you reading this have the opportunity to be in on the ground floor-You can one of the first to read a revolutionary piece of writing on a subject that the corporate sector, for apparently now obvious reasons, would have preferred not to have been written..
However because I have unresolved doubts about the integrity of those who operate in the public sphere [i.e. I have no interest in dealing with people who fuck me around on payments] there is no way at present that you can get this book other than through the address below-my previously identified web outlet has had unclarified issues of its own, possibly as a result of the exchange rate shift lately, and is no longer able to function effectively apparently-[this means that the web address I gave you in a previous blog should be regarded as dysfunctional for the time being from the point of view of this book.]
I have also revised the book slightly following feedback from readers and the 2nd edition will be the definitive Alpha edition, which will also have a limited print run. I may assume that a few million people will eventually own this book but right now I shall settle for a few thousand. So order yours before stocks run out, and remember that people are reading this blog in Vladivostok and they also have problems collecting money there. So I'm told by a guy who ordered 7 Ways off one of my web sites.
To purchase a copy of '7 ways to get your money' in the revised, Azanian produced, new Alpha edition [available from mid-November]
Send R135.00 plus R25.00 for postage to
Leofric House Publishing,
P O Box 891224
Lyndhurst, 2106 RSA/Azania.
Allow ten days for cheque clearance and if you want some other way to pay that's quicker then tell me and I'll tell you.
In other words would the problem of extracting payments from elusive customers still be a valid basis for a product devoted to aggressively combating this scourge. Alternatively, would the newly, rights oriented environment, in which we allegedly now live, have contributed to an amelioration of what is a terminally deadly disease that has debilitating cumulative effects on an economy. In other words would my book have become obsolete? Would we have become a more honest society?
Again i say: I needn't have worried.
My first corporate customer for my book: an allegedly respectable company, has not only proved the need still exists, but has demonstrated that non-payment for goods received could well have become a basic principle of business performance: a part of 'the business model' to use current jargon.
I don't know whether to be enraged that I have been proved right, or overjoyed to find that the market for my new book could be bigger than I ever anticipated. Or perhaps I am overjoyed to find that I have been proved right-which is not much of a discovery after all. I always knew I was right. When I muttered to my bank manager about it last Wednesday she reminded me that I had planned for delayed payment back in July when the order had first been mooted.
Proving that people and corporations duck on their responsibility to pay their debts is like proving that the sun comes up daily. The real problem is how to reduce the amount of time and money you lose hassling after outstanding payments when you could be doing something more productive. I am pissed off that I had to wait an excessive time for my money because my customer has issues-so we'll have a count down here to 'Name and Shame' day. They have shown some evidence of compliance and I have no desire to burn one of my customers-If I don't have my money in the next few days which they have belately promised will occur then I can burn them for being unworthy.
What this means is that I am satisfied at this stage that the strategies outlined in my book have proved effective and so the point of this blog is to tell you: that after testing and proving okay, the second phase of the launch of my now not so new book '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law' got under way on Friday 27th October. On the occasion of my sixtieth birthday I set the programme for the arrival of 7 Ways edition two -The Alpha edition.
I have to tell you that we were caught by surprise at the immediate popularity of 7 Ways-It looks good, it is set out in easy to read prose-much easier than anything I ever put on the blog-which is mostly just typing as Mr Capote once observed of Mr Kerouack, and it provides a highly readable and entertaining tale with some seriously usable information, not only according to me but now also according to a number of happy readers.
And this immediate episode with a non-paying customer, apart from shifting my blood around in a way that has been absent for awhile, simply means that more and more people are going to want to read my collection of fables called '7 ways to get your money' -
What I know now having had to field test my book and find that it is not wanting, is that this book is set to be the hottest book published this decade in this country and you reading this have the opportunity to be in on the ground floor-You can one of the first to read a revolutionary piece of writing on a subject that the corporate sector, for apparently now obvious reasons, would have preferred not to have been written..
However because I have unresolved doubts about the integrity of those who operate in the public sphere [i.e. I have no interest in dealing with people who fuck me around on payments] there is no way at present that you can get this book other than through the address below-my previously identified web outlet has had unclarified issues of its own, possibly as a result of the exchange rate shift lately, and is no longer able to function effectively apparently-[this means that the web address I gave you in a previous blog should be regarded as dysfunctional for the time being from the point of view of this book.]
I have also revised the book slightly following feedback from readers and the 2nd edition will be the definitive Alpha edition, which will also have a limited print run. I may assume that a few million people will eventually own this book but right now I shall settle for a few thousand. So order yours before stocks run out, and remember that people are reading this blog in Vladivostok and they also have problems collecting money there. So I'm told by a guy who ordered 7 Ways off one of my web sites.
To purchase a copy of '7 ways to get your money' in the revised, Azanian produced, new Alpha edition [available from mid-November]
Send R135.00 plus R25.00 for postage to
Leofric House Publishing,
P O Box 891224
Lyndhurst, 2106 RSA/Azania.
Allow ten days for cheque clearance and if you want some other way to pay that's quicker then tell me and I'll tell you.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Will they spit on George W Bush
Thomas Stearns Eliot observed in one of his most famous poems 'this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper'. It is beginning to look as though this is the way the 'Bush' era in world history will end.
The probability that Mr Bush will lose his overall majority in the political oligopoly that passes for democracy in the American world, is becoming all too possible-and as a result Uncle Dubya will eke out his remaining days in office as a lame duck deluxe; not only for being powerless but for having ruined the careers of many of his party honchos due to sheer incompetence, many of whom will spit at the sound at the sound of his name.
It has always been one of the great fascinations [to me] of our post-velvet revolution era that we could experience the back-to-back phenomena of witnessing arguably America's smartest president: the fellatio dependant Mr Clinton, and the inept, bumbling, morally uptight Mr Bush junior: he of the prep school smirk.
And now it's over.
All bar the shouting.
Well. A week is a long time and maybe the latest 'spin' on the mess of pottage that is Iraq may tune over a few lost souls - As I observed in my previous blog some 90 plus million American are apparently so inherently 'Alzheimeresque' in their functioning that arcane political argument is incapable of penetration and those people -if they vote, would simply vote by reflex-When you live in a world in which you are bombarded daily with a cornucopia of messages then forgetfulness is not even an issue-getting your intention for a split second before you forget is critical.
George Bush's spin on Iraq can be measured against the progress in New Orleans-there are probably some peripheral successes but overall its been something of a failure.
People who have read my blog for years will know that I supported the invasion of Iraq and considered it to be a useful strategic move in the overarching struggle to combat the irrational use of force and violence to enforce rule over human beings by other bullying thug type dictator type humans. We conveniently forget that Saddam Hussein was a bellicose man given to loud threats and bluster and who failed when called out. Others like Kim Jong Il in North Korea are still scaring the suited people with their empty vessel noisiness.
Pre-emption as a matter of Imperialist policy was revolutionary and Bush believes himself to be a revolutionary for the American Way-itself a revolutionary concept under immense strain, as he has paradoxically reached out to promote American style democracy abroad while restraining it at home. Being a change agent is always problematic. It is compounded when the participants drag their feet-and having taken the leap Uncle Dubya went 'schnorra' and simply never put enough human bodies in harm's way to make the job happen.
And of course we reckoned without the greed factor.
The entire exercise allegedly became a grooming ground for boosting the profits of particular corporations, and the people doing the occupying put no resources, only self serving administrators into the job of reinstating Iraq into a proper place: if that was ever possible and it could be that it is not.
Perhaps Iraq should be three interdependent independent regions each linked in a confederal arrangement that allows for considerable internal autonomy-Now that would be an American revolutionary process, given the extent to which State Rights rule in the USA. However as part of a series of cynical trade off's, to rationalise the revolution that George Bush chickened out over, this sensible arrangement has been resisted by the parties involved to satisfy external powers eg: Turkey, which resists the idea of a quasi-independent Kurdish homeland [I've never really understood why everyone hates the Kurds or even what the Kurds are apart from reminding me of 'little miss Muffet who sat on her tuffet-.']
The Sunni whatever Iraqis dominate Baghdad I understand but wont let the Shia whatever Iraqis who apparently dominate the oil rich south have their own turf because that would mean that they would have to do something radical to maintain their standards of living in oil poor Baghdad without all the freebies that come from having manna in your backyard. [There's another thing. What is this with Sunni and Shia that makes these two apparent branches of Islam resemble the warring factions of the Reformation? One presumes the difference is as absurd as that point of principle that apparently divides the Roman Catholic from Eastern Orthodox. Whatever it is it is a murderous difference.]
Obviously these Sunnis whatever lack the imagination that made Hong Kong thrive and that drives Dubai to become a dominant trading centre where everyone practises useful skills, instead of living off oil revenue like a nation of remittance men. Perhaps the problem of having manna in your backyard is a core problem in development.
Whatever it is that motivates all these people is unclear. What is not unclear is that the USA is over-militarily. Now that may sound a tad bizarre and I am having difficulty myself in dealing with the concept. According to our understanding of human history the Egyptian empire lasted for thousands of years. The Roman era lasted about eight hundred and the British era less than half of that. The rucial development over these eras was the slow acceptance of asymmetrical forms of warfare,
In those past eras were a town to behave badly towards, say the Romans, the Persians or the Mongols then the entire region would simply have ceased to be. For instance cities like Merv, Nishapur, and Balkh in North Eastern Iran never recovered apparently after the Mongols extracted revenge for the gratuitous murder of traders travelling under the protection of Genghis Khan. The records indicate wholesale slaughter in revenge. Quite correctly this genocidal behaviour is frowned upon these days unless it is happening in places like Darfur or Rwanda where we dither about long enough to facilitate the murder of the odd few million people. So the scope is ripe for the excesses of asymmetric suicide bombers and they have demonstrated all to well how restrictive it is for the huge USA to handle this type of warfare and simultaneously remain the 'good guys'.
What was billed a few years back as 'The American century' has become the American decade. What the bombers of Baghdad have done [and the Taliban in Afghanistan for that matter] is checkmate the most powerful military structure the world has ever known and George Bush is the patsy that allowed it to happen. Perhaps he should re-spin his story to suggest he intended, through his pre emptive act, to by-pass the consensus seeking appeasement structured U.N., to wreck the global oil consensus and affect the hydrogen revolution-or failing that, the alternate energy revolution-and he did make that topic the theme of his State of the Union speech immediately prior to the invasion and which I blogged about then.
A schoolmaster to whom I was speaking at a recent sports function said that he never went out of his way to catch kids smoking because he preferred the kids not to find out that there was in reality nothing that could be done about it. The punishment was so structured to follow rules of fairness and give the child the right of due process that consequence became shredded and meaningless. One could say that the Alzheimer effect had become rooted. Once the knowledge of human toothlessness in the absence of violence got out and about then this became bad for the long-term morale of the entire show, if that cryptic statement was meaningful, he added, as an aside. What was needed he concluded was the form of rules, without anything of substance taking place to revel the emptiness of the form.
There are people abuse this system, seeing democracy's greatest strength: the wilful cooperation in a vast public experiment to achieve a common purpose, a better life for all, as a weakness open to exploitation as a tool for overthrowing systemic order and introducing a new vision.
There are people who describe George Bush as a 'revolutionary' and notwithstanding that most of those people are his loving acolytes there is a certain truth in what he attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 'Neocon' vision of exporting democracy via the medium of American imperialism was a grandiose vision that has been universally rejected and soundly trounced. With luck the Neocon vision has been set back by a century. George who would be Caesar simply had no concept of the cost-unlike the schoolmaster he failed to grasp how ephemeral the whisk of power has become in a world where everyone can have a nuke and how your very lifestyle can be used as a weapon of war by those who would resist the change Bush allegedly sought, and when those who resist don't have an issue with using themselves as the weapons..
Ultimately though GB comes across as something of a whiner. Outraged by 9/11, which was undeniably something to be enraged over, it seemed he lost all reason and sense of proportion if indeed he ever had them. In retrospect he reacted like a spoilt kid whose toys have just been confiscated by some poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. One always has a sense with George Bush that he is playing in his own movie-and John Wayne is his lodestar. Having taken Iraq without so much as a fight [the revolutionary guard and other elite corps such as they were just evaporated and seeped into the underground], el Gaucho needed to avoid Washington pressure so he parked off and went home to the ranch, surrounded by protesting grieving mothers never imagining for one moment that he was anything but a beloved hero-his delusions seem so much more grandiose even than those of Robert Mugabe.
If you rode on an elephant against a pack of wolfhounds you would prevail but as Hannibal discovered when he crossed the Alps with his elephants, wolfhounds can often trump elephants especially if you shortchange the elephants, and leave the flanks exposed-presumably we once hunted mammoths that way.
The British Empire eventually ended because the costs of maintaining it were prohibitive. The Monroe doctrine recognised that reality and used financial muscle to control America's sphere of influence, and left the troops at home: available for quick sorties. George Bush thought he had a new doctrine: Go in quick and light, take the capital declare freedom reigns facilitate new compliant government and leave the liberated nation to bond fall in love and stay married ever after and it hasn't worked that way. Maybe it never could have.
In all probability the voting public [of America] will vote their disapproval about the poor war results over this next ten days. The death rate is now mounting by the minute. The transformation process, what one hears of it, seems patchy and sporadic. So far George Bush is barely maintaining even a façade of successful achievement engaging now in semantic wordplay relating to timetables and benchmarks as an excuse for political inaction.
Watching some clips of his presentations this week on CNBC I had the sense that he was more than ordinarily baffled at the reverses he was having. What do you do with those wolfhounds that tear at your flanks with such determined ferocity that any escalation on your part is like to blow your own legs off? From the crinkly way he furrows his brow under pressure he manages to convey the idea that thought is painful: like shitting with haemorrhoids. He looks more and more like the loser he appeared to be against John Kerry.
One of my children once worked for a year as a childminder for a wealthy American Midwest family where one spouse was a democrat and the other a republican and she reported that her hosts would intermittently have bitter arguments over dinner about arcane actions perpetrated by this or that 'failed' president. Some of these events apparently occurred sometimes sixty or seventy years ago, in some cases back to the civil war; which was still the subject of bitter wrangling. I also know that on our home front here I was once chased out of a Free State home by an enraged homeowner, to whom I was selling something, because I mentioned the name 'Jan Smuts'. The man exploded into rage. So incensed was he that he shivered with instant apoplexy, ordered me summarily from the house, and when, in shock, I didn't move fast enough went for a .303 rifle that I'd earlier seen standing in a corner of the room. I broke the world record for the mile by about three and a half minutes, with the sound of gunfire blasting around the neighbourhood in pursuit of me.
I have a sense the George Bush junior is about to get himself into the history books for the wrong reasons and that there will be many-republicans specifically, who will want to reach for the old Winchester when the name George Bush comes up in conversation in the future. Very few people seem to know what George Bush studied when he was on his path to glory but apparently history was not part of his curriculum.
He could well be remembered as a strutting rooster: the self styled revolutionary in an ill fitting suit, with a silly smirk always teasing the corners of his lips; and who failed the country when he was most needed by providing less than competent leadership completely proving that the whole point about form and substance is that the insubstantial should never be sorely tested.
A successful alternate energy revolution, which I believe to be well under way now, massked by the noise made by Iraq, will eventually be spun to justify his journey, which like Caesar's before him was ended when he was stabbed in the back, in his case by the Iraq quagmire, and by a litany of self serving underlings. But it may be thirty years before the full significance of Bush's revolution can be assessed. After all it took about that long for us to get used to the demonetisations of gold in 1971.
Then of course the voters may see something completely different: and endorse him again-overwhelmingly: for no better reason than that the alternative seems too ghastly to contemplate.
The probability that Mr Bush will lose his overall majority in the political oligopoly that passes for democracy in the American world, is becoming all too possible-and as a result Uncle Dubya will eke out his remaining days in office as a lame duck deluxe; not only for being powerless but for having ruined the careers of many of his party honchos due to sheer incompetence, many of whom will spit at the sound at the sound of his name.
It has always been one of the great fascinations [to me] of our post-velvet revolution era that we could experience the back-to-back phenomena of witnessing arguably America's smartest president: the fellatio dependant Mr Clinton, and the inept, bumbling, morally uptight Mr Bush junior: he of the prep school smirk.
And now it's over.
All bar the shouting.
Well. A week is a long time and maybe the latest 'spin' on the mess of pottage that is Iraq may tune over a few lost souls - As I observed in my previous blog some 90 plus million American are apparently so inherently 'Alzheimeresque' in their functioning that arcane political argument is incapable of penetration and those people -if they vote, would simply vote by reflex-When you live in a world in which you are bombarded daily with a cornucopia of messages then forgetfulness is not even an issue-getting your intention for a split second before you forget is critical.
George Bush's spin on Iraq can be measured against the progress in New Orleans-there are probably some peripheral successes but overall its been something of a failure.
People who have read my blog for years will know that I supported the invasion of Iraq and considered it to be a useful strategic move in the overarching struggle to combat the irrational use of force and violence to enforce rule over human beings by other bullying thug type dictator type humans. We conveniently forget that Saddam Hussein was a bellicose man given to loud threats and bluster and who failed when called out. Others like Kim Jong Il in North Korea are still scaring the suited people with their empty vessel noisiness.
Pre-emption as a matter of Imperialist policy was revolutionary and Bush believes himself to be a revolutionary for the American Way-itself a revolutionary concept under immense strain, as he has paradoxically reached out to promote American style democracy abroad while restraining it at home. Being a change agent is always problematic. It is compounded when the participants drag their feet-and having taken the leap Uncle Dubya went 'schnorra' and simply never put enough human bodies in harm's way to make the job happen.
And of course we reckoned without the greed factor.
The entire exercise allegedly became a grooming ground for boosting the profits of particular corporations, and the people doing the occupying put no resources, only self serving administrators into the job of reinstating Iraq into a proper place: if that was ever possible and it could be that it is not.
Perhaps Iraq should be three interdependent independent regions each linked in a confederal arrangement that allows for considerable internal autonomy-Now that would be an American revolutionary process, given the extent to which State Rights rule in the USA. However as part of a series of cynical trade off's, to rationalise the revolution that George Bush chickened out over, this sensible arrangement has been resisted by the parties involved to satisfy external powers eg: Turkey, which resists the idea of a quasi-independent Kurdish homeland [I've never really understood why everyone hates the Kurds or even what the Kurds are apart from reminding me of 'little miss Muffet who sat on her tuffet-.']
The Sunni whatever Iraqis dominate Baghdad I understand but wont let the Shia whatever Iraqis who apparently dominate the oil rich south have their own turf because that would mean that they would have to do something radical to maintain their standards of living in oil poor Baghdad without all the freebies that come from having manna in your backyard. [There's another thing. What is this with Sunni and Shia that makes these two apparent branches of Islam resemble the warring factions of the Reformation? One presumes the difference is as absurd as that point of principle that apparently divides the Roman Catholic from Eastern Orthodox. Whatever it is it is a murderous difference.]
Obviously these Sunnis whatever lack the imagination that made Hong Kong thrive and that drives Dubai to become a dominant trading centre where everyone practises useful skills, instead of living off oil revenue like a nation of remittance men. Perhaps the problem of having manna in your backyard is a core problem in development.
Whatever it is that motivates all these people is unclear. What is not unclear is that the USA is over-militarily. Now that may sound a tad bizarre and I am having difficulty myself in dealing with the concept. According to our understanding of human history the Egyptian empire lasted for thousands of years. The Roman era lasted about eight hundred and the British era less than half of that. The rucial development over these eras was the slow acceptance of asymmetrical forms of warfare,
In those past eras were a town to behave badly towards, say the Romans, the Persians or the Mongols then the entire region would simply have ceased to be. For instance cities like Merv, Nishapur, and Balkh in North Eastern Iran never recovered apparently after the Mongols extracted revenge for the gratuitous murder of traders travelling under the protection of Genghis Khan. The records indicate wholesale slaughter in revenge. Quite correctly this genocidal behaviour is frowned upon these days unless it is happening in places like Darfur or Rwanda where we dither about long enough to facilitate the murder of the odd few million people. So the scope is ripe for the excesses of asymmetric suicide bombers and they have demonstrated all to well how restrictive it is for the huge USA to handle this type of warfare and simultaneously remain the 'good guys'.
What was billed a few years back as 'The American century' has become the American decade. What the bombers of Baghdad have done [and the Taliban in Afghanistan for that matter] is checkmate the most powerful military structure the world has ever known and George Bush is the patsy that allowed it to happen. Perhaps he should re-spin his story to suggest he intended, through his pre emptive act, to by-pass the consensus seeking appeasement structured U.N., to wreck the global oil consensus and affect the hydrogen revolution-or failing that, the alternate energy revolution-and he did make that topic the theme of his State of the Union speech immediately prior to the invasion and which I blogged about then.
A schoolmaster to whom I was speaking at a recent sports function said that he never went out of his way to catch kids smoking because he preferred the kids not to find out that there was in reality nothing that could be done about it. The punishment was so structured to follow rules of fairness and give the child the right of due process that consequence became shredded and meaningless. One could say that the Alzheimer effect had become rooted. Once the knowledge of human toothlessness in the absence of violence got out and about then this became bad for the long-term morale of the entire show, if that cryptic statement was meaningful, he added, as an aside. What was needed he concluded was the form of rules, without anything of substance taking place to revel the emptiness of the form.
There are people abuse this system, seeing democracy's greatest strength: the wilful cooperation in a vast public experiment to achieve a common purpose, a better life for all, as a weakness open to exploitation as a tool for overthrowing systemic order and introducing a new vision.
There are people who describe George Bush as a 'revolutionary' and notwithstanding that most of those people are his loving acolytes there is a certain truth in what he attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 'Neocon' vision of exporting democracy via the medium of American imperialism was a grandiose vision that has been universally rejected and soundly trounced. With luck the Neocon vision has been set back by a century. George who would be Caesar simply had no concept of the cost-unlike the schoolmaster he failed to grasp how ephemeral the whisk of power has become in a world where everyone can have a nuke and how your very lifestyle can be used as a weapon of war by those who would resist the change Bush allegedly sought, and when those who resist don't have an issue with using themselves as the weapons..
Ultimately though GB comes across as something of a whiner. Outraged by 9/11, which was undeniably something to be enraged over, it seemed he lost all reason and sense of proportion if indeed he ever had them. In retrospect he reacted like a spoilt kid whose toys have just been confiscated by some poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. One always has a sense with George Bush that he is playing in his own movie-and John Wayne is his lodestar. Having taken Iraq without so much as a fight [the revolutionary guard and other elite corps such as they were just evaporated and seeped into the underground], el Gaucho needed to avoid Washington pressure so he parked off and went home to the ranch, surrounded by protesting grieving mothers never imagining for one moment that he was anything but a beloved hero-his delusions seem so much more grandiose even than those of Robert Mugabe.
If you rode on an elephant against a pack of wolfhounds you would prevail but as Hannibal discovered when he crossed the Alps with his elephants, wolfhounds can often trump elephants especially if you shortchange the elephants, and leave the flanks exposed-presumably we once hunted mammoths that way.
The British Empire eventually ended because the costs of maintaining it were prohibitive. The Monroe doctrine recognised that reality and used financial muscle to control America's sphere of influence, and left the troops at home: available for quick sorties. George Bush thought he had a new doctrine: Go in quick and light, take the capital declare freedom reigns facilitate new compliant government and leave the liberated nation to bond fall in love and stay married ever after and it hasn't worked that way. Maybe it never could have.
In all probability the voting public [of America] will vote their disapproval about the poor war results over this next ten days. The death rate is now mounting by the minute. The transformation process, what one hears of it, seems patchy and sporadic. So far George Bush is barely maintaining even a façade of successful achievement engaging now in semantic wordplay relating to timetables and benchmarks as an excuse for political inaction.
Watching some clips of his presentations this week on CNBC I had the sense that he was more than ordinarily baffled at the reverses he was having. What do you do with those wolfhounds that tear at your flanks with such determined ferocity that any escalation on your part is like to blow your own legs off? From the crinkly way he furrows his brow under pressure he manages to convey the idea that thought is painful: like shitting with haemorrhoids. He looks more and more like the loser he appeared to be against John Kerry.
One of my children once worked for a year as a childminder for a wealthy American Midwest family where one spouse was a democrat and the other a republican and she reported that her hosts would intermittently have bitter arguments over dinner about arcane actions perpetrated by this or that 'failed' president. Some of these events apparently occurred sometimes sixty or seventy years ago, in some cases back to the civil war; which was still the subject of bitter wrangling. I also know that on our home front here I was once chased out of a Free State home by an enraged homeowner, to whom I was selling something, because I mentioned the name 'Jan Smuts'. The man exploded into rage. So incensed was he that he shivered with instant apoplexy, ordered me summarily from the house, and when, in shock, I didn't move fast enough went for a .303 rifle that I'd earlier seen standing in a corner of the room. I broke the world record for the mile by about three and a half minutes, with the sound of gunfire blasting around the neighbourhood in pursuit of me.
I have a sense the George Bush junior is about to get himself into the history books for the wrong reasons and that there will be many-republicans specifically, who will want to reach for the old Winchester when the name George Bush comes up in conversation in the future. Very few people seem to know what George Bush studied when he was on his path to glory but apparently history was not part of his curriculum.
He could well be remembered as a strutting rooster: the self styled revolutionary in an ill fitting suit, with a silly smirk always teasing the corners of his lips; and who failed the country when he was most needed by providing less than competent leadership completely proving that the whole point about form and substance is that the insubstantial should never be sorely tested.
A successful alternate energy revolution, which I believe to be well under way now, massked by the noise made by Iraq, will eventually be spun to justify his journey, which like Caesar's before him was ended when he was stabbed in the back, in his case by the Iraq quagmire, and by a litany of self serving underlings. But it may be thirty years before the full significance of Bush's revolution can be assessed. After all it took about that long for us to get used to the demonetisations of gold in 1971.
Then of course the voters may see something completely different: and endorse him again-overwhelmingly: for no better reason than that the alternative seems too ghastly to contemplate.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
More playground violence is inevitable
We have a new hysteria to add to our pattern of things the mass media finds to be a grand seller. Playground violence. Kids are murdering each other at school. In this general hysteria we immediately revert back reflexively to the era of State induced violence. This would be pointless. The violence exhibited by the children grows from unintended outcomes within the new OBE system that has replaced the old Apartheid education thing. Like the sun comes up in the morning we will have escalating levels of violence in our schools we have designed it into the new system-get real and get used to it.
The day that some kid arrives in the classroom carrying a Kalashnikov and we have our first full scale school massacre is probably less than two years away
The overwhelming masses of teenage schoolchildren have learned all too well by the age of 14 that the promise [of education] is an illusion. Maybe one in six who start in Grade one reaches grade twelve and the not-too-useful Matric certificate, and that may well be a generous estimate since we don't know how many kids drop out along the way. The sheer weight of performance demanded of the individual under a system called Continuous Assessment means that each schoolchild has to produce assessable material at varying levels of competence continuously throughout the year: more or less every three schooldays. Boys in particular are not adept at this continuous assessment stuff, being more spontaneous and last minute chaotic by nature: so boys are falling behind in the new system. And boys are where the violence is.
This OBE system favours the swots and the well resourced kids from well resourced homes. For them it is paradise gained. For the rest the system may be compared to the process of sieving and grinding that takes place on our mines between extracting the ore and arriving at the final gold bar. A lot of raw stuff gets sloughed off. So has it become with schoolkids. The drop out rate from school is huge. This new system is paper heavy it, chews up resources and coping with the paper flood has demolished extra mural activity across the country and is going to gradually force out all activity in schools that is not specifically geared to the construction of that fiendish new gadget -The PORTFOLIO-a collection of work, produced by the 'learner', assessed by the 'educator' and weighed by the educator's peers in a range of "cluster" schools before being sent in to a central place for overall evaluation by the 'big assessors'. This immense amount of paperwork is worth twenty five percent of the year mark. The other 75% is then determined by an exam-The so called 'teachers' cannot cope with the workload and classrooms with 35 kid per lesson if they are lucky compound their circumstance..
The execution of the OBE concept is irrational in its demands; and is weighed down by the sense that the reluctant educator must be forced to perform to a standard that few can meet.
Simultaneously however the system does allow for a massively more enriched learning experience for the lucky ones than in previous times; so it is simultaneously huge -exciting even, for those who 'school' in functional environments and can respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by the new system..
But most environments are dysfunctional; in part because of sheer work pressure: mostly due to inadequate funding and large-scale theft of those resources that were present. For instance, a press story last year reported the loss of an entire school walls n all in the Eastern Cape. When times were more leisurely 'one could observe one's young human charges and be aware that things had happened to them and the radar would anticipate the storm cloud' as my late Grandfather a retired headmaster once observed. Now the alleged 'educator' scurries thru its day, numbed with the shock of reporting: exactly what was done, with whom, for how long, and how often, if not daily. And then: what was achieved, specifically? What was quantified, measured, weighed and evaluated? And have you done this every day: for each of the 250 young humans you process daily?
The era when a schoolteacher would prepare a lesson on an event of the day-Say the fate of Lebo Mathosa and its relationship to the idea of seizing the day-is all but over. Once the educator has prepped a series of learning environments the more rational will simply apply the same programme year in and year out with increasing tedium for those on the receiving end and all the more reason to rebel.
At this stage the entire impervious education establishment is dogmatically committed to this system. The idea is good-Basically children teach themselves-educators make sure they have a direction and materials to find out stuff and there is no doubt in my mind that the concept presents a enhanced potential system of education than the one we've left behind-for a larger pool of winners.
But to make sure it's done the 'establishment' demands an extraordinary volume of control reports. The old system also had its winners and losers and the whole lot were kept in line through the brutal application of corporal punishment. This tamed the naturally violent 'gangster' era in childhood that is normal and best blown out in some energetic way. We have decided that this [the use of violence] is not the way to school children and the child is now free to do or not to do-. The ones who decide not to do are now running the playgrounds apparently.
What does one do when one has so completely tied ones own hands with sensible kind loving democratic rules and is faced with socially maladjusted behaviour of a violent and brutal kind. Children have limited compassion especially those between 14 and 19. That's what motivated Golding to write Lord of the Flies: the observations of children at play in school playgrounds.
It's not a local phenomenon either: Thirty years ago I knew a schoolteacher from Racine outside Chicago who told me he [and his colleagues allegedly] always carried two guns to school-one was backup in case the kids managed to disarm him of his principal weapon. And last year I met a visiting English schoolteacher in a doctor's waiting room in Hyde Park who asserted that the place where he taught in the north part of England was so full of 'hostile losers' [his words] in the great education sieve out game that he had a screen of some kind between himself and 'them' which he said with an appropriate amount of venom.
The authorities must recognise that this is a policing problem not a school learner education problem. The educator has been removed from the policing equation, no matter the blather from the establishment to the contrary. Maintaining reasonable levels of order in a learning environment is a necessary skill yes-searching children for weapons, drugs or stolen cellphones is not part of the relationship.
Searching people is inherently a violation of civil rights and so, since it must be done- schools are inherently violent places which mostly manage to remain defused- the act of enforcing weapons control and regulation of illegal substances like alcohol and drugs has to be under police supervision. This is apparently normal in mild mannered places like Vancouver where my expat' friends tell me you have to apply in writing six months in advance if you want to be mugged.
I asked a young schoolboy recently why he carried a knife to school; he had it strapped to his ankle under his trouser leg. It was because the journey between school and home was so dangerous, he said, and who was I to say he wasn't right. Others have told me they carried guns or knives to school because the schools themselves were dangerous places. They were when I was at school, there were plenty of gang fights then and weapons were used. Most of the people I talk too about their schooldays remember some times with horror-I personally detested my schooldays and couldn't wait to get rid of them-and for huge numbers of kids they still are awful places. The difference is the introduction of the equaliser. In the past you would not ordinarily have had a 19 year old and a 14 year old in the same grade-now it is apparently normal. The little guy in the equation needs an equaliser - a knife is useful a gun is better and there is no concept of conscience to deflect the blade or the bullet.
So under conditions of liberty, school violence is inevitable. Schools are cruel environments for many kids and the work ethic has changed in this significant way. There are many more kids today who feel the dice are loaded against them and that they can't keep up with the system.
Under the old system if you knew the textbook [assuming you could lay hands on one] backwards, forwards, inside out, round the edges and sideways you could get 100%. The overwhelming majority struggled to get past 40, their key target. Today the best you can manage with all that 100% knowing would be 60%.
Because we live in a world where the rules of life can change overnight [think about the current You Tube.com revolution]society needs thinkers. So the important thing to demonstrate is that you can use that 100/60% of knowledge to access the other 40%. You can only do that if you have practised the 60% part for months- this ability to transfer knowledge is subtle and can only work spontaneously due to natural talent for a limited time -11 or 12 years of age. After that the 'slow traveller' is left with bigger and bigger gaps, demoralised self-esteem and declining performance. It is an old story now revealing its next metamorphosis.
It is also insoluble because the new emerging society is desperate for whatever skills are being turned out-The OBE concept is a morally bankrupt system which substitutes bureaucracy for childhood in order to control the work performance of an allegedly mediocre and demoralised workforce, a considerable part of the workforce does the job now because in the past they were permitted no alternative road out of poverty due to previous discrimination.
Ironically a Party supporting the aspirations of the working class has opted for a 'new' system of education modelled on a mass production concept that has recreated all the inherent alienation Marx attributed to the mass production model that was to be perfected by Henry Ford: and this new system has arrived at precisely the moment that the production line became redundant.
This violence reflects the boredom produced by a system that requires that the LEARNERS go to school each day and TEACH THEMSELVES something useful. Why -why, they keep asking. Why are we doing this? So that you develop the skills of learning to learn that's why. You only get 60 % for memory power because the evolving requirements of our new society no longer needs you to prove that you are smarter than your cellphone.
At the best of times, historically, only a tiny proportion of people were natural change agents. This system should raise those numbers slightly. But most kids are superfluous to need. We will only begin to tell in about another decade just how superfluous they are. In the meantime what are we doing about the vast amount of dross: those children who are superfluous to needs and know it-and who are disrupting the programme with knife fights, drug running, money laundering and doing whatever else sells for a buck or two. We aren't doing anything.
Compounding the tragedy is an apathetic workforce whose conditions of employment have been unilaterally altered by a new brand of methodology. Today's educator is [for the most part] inherently obsolete: desperately attempting, with no help from their employer, to cope with the changes to their very founding philosophies. The limited range of knowledge of even the best of them is a constraint within which the learning fields must be tilled. And on top of it all is the infernal blizzard of paperwork-Entire forest are being consumed in this madness-The destiny of all this paperwork lies in technology -a technology that will make the very concept of 'being at school' along with the 'teachers' that prepare learning environments obsolete. Ultimately and ironically the State sponsored Telkom monopoly has conspired to stifle the march to technological excellence demanded by the self same State.
Was this intentional- I am sure it wasn't. It just happened because only a few radicals realised that the future of Learning lies in exploiting the advantages of Google and YouTube by following a programme on a machine that automatically measures the continuous assessments data that is so easily collected, without driving the teaching corps to the brink of emotional extinction. If the State intends to spend money on a new system then this is the logical way to go.
There is of course one serious drawback-It will make tens of thousands of 'education administrators' redundant.
If I ever thought Ivan Illich was right before I am doubly certain now that he was right. The kids are reacting against 'growing up absurd'. This is the freeborn generation that is consumed with this confusion and rage...given the way the dice are rolling here-I would be enraged too.
Before I conclude this blog on the inevitability of a rising tide of violence in our classrooms let me quote from the study 'Adult literacy in America' commissioned by the US Education department in the early 1990's: '90 million Americans cannot write a letter, fathom a bus schedule, or even do addition and subtraction ON A CALCULATOR [my capitals].'
'This is what you would expect if 90 million Americans were progressing through various stages of Alzheimer's disease. Thirty million were judged so incompetent that they could not even respond to questions.' [William Rees-Mogg: The Sovereign Individual 1997 P 323]commenting on the above.
This is the bankrupt system we have adopted for our country without one word of objection from any relevant educator union. Since then there is no evidence to suggest that the American situation has improved, in fact the evidence indicates the opposite and there have been nearly a dozen 'Columbines' this year alone. A U.S. Secretary of Education stated that 'The vast majority of Americans DO NOT KNOW THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE' the skills necessary to survive in the modern world.[Rees-Mogg The Sovereign Individual]
I would also suggest that the billions being poured in so called SETA adult education does not change the adult illiteracy situation in our country by even one percent. We can't be more specific because we have no idea what is happening to the billions.
The American are also now producing less maths and science graduates than they need and are increasingly dependent on China where teaching is still done in the old fashioned way. Massive amounts of 'complex' I T work is also being outsourced to India not just because its cheaper but because their 'old fashioned ' system also produces a higher than expected number of science and maths graduates. Curiously an article on 'home schoolers' in the Weekender last suggested that kids being 'educated' at home were outperforming those in the average school- and the average school is awful.
We are using a quarter of the education budget to 'diseducate' our children and we are doing this without debate. It is therefore inevitable that this new 'lost' generation is going to become more and more violent. Get used to it.
NiK
The day that some kid arrives in the classroom carrying a Kalashnikov and we have our first full scale school massacre is probably less than two years away
The overwhelming masses of teenage schoolchildren have learned all too well by the age of 14 that the promise [of education] is an illusion. Maybe one in six who start in Grade one reaches grade twelve and the not-too-useful Matric certificate, and that may well be a generous estimate since we don't know how many kids drop out along the way. The sheer weight of performance demanded of the individual under a system called Continuous Assessment means that each schoolchild has to produce assessable material at varying levels of competence continuously throughout the year: more or less every three schooldays. Boys in particular are not adept at this continuous assessment stuff, being more spontaneous and last minute chaotic by nature: so boys are falling behind in the new system. And boys are where the violence is.
This OBE system favours the swots and the well resourced kids from well resourced homes. For them it is paradise gained. For the rest the system may be compared to the process of sieving and grinding that takes place on our mines between extracting the ore and arriving at the final gold bar. A lot of raw stuff gets sloughed off. So has it become with schoolkids. The drop out rate from school is huge. This new system is paper heavy it, chews up resources and coping with the paper flood has demolished extra mural activity across the country and is going to gradually force out all activity in schools that is not specifically geared to the construction of that fiendish new gadget -The PORTFOLIO-a collection of work, produced by the 'learner', assessed by the 'educator' and weighed by the educator's peers in a range of "cluster" schools before being sent in to a central place for overall evaluation by the 'big assessors'. This immense amount of paperwork is worth twenty five percent of the year mark. The other 75% is then determined by an exam-The so called 'teachers' cannot cope with the workload and classrooms with 35 kid per lesson if they are lucky compound their circumstance..
The execution of the OBE concept is irrational in its demands; and is weighed down by the sense that the reluctant educator must be forced to perform to a standard that few can meet.
Simultaneously however the system does allow for a massively more enriched learning experience for the lucky ones than in previous times; so it is simultaneously huge -exciting even, for those who 'school' in functional environments and can respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by the new system..
But most environments are dysfunctional; in part because of sheer work pressure: mostly due to inadequate funding and large-scale theft of those resources that were present. For instance, a press story last year reported the loss of an entire school walls n all in the Eastern Cape. When times were more leisurely 'one could observe one's young human charges and be aware that things had happened to them and the radar would anticipate the storm cloud' as my late Grandfather a retired headmaster once observed. Now the alleged 'educator' scurries thru its day, numbed with the shock of reporting: exactly what was done, with whom, for how long, and how often, if not daily. And then: what was achieved, specifically? What was quantified, measured, weighed and evaluated? And have you done this every day: for each of the 250 young humans you process daily?
The era when a schoolteacher would prepare a lesson on an event of the day-Say the fate of Lebo Mathosa and its relationship to the idea of seizing the day-is all but over. Once the educator has prepped a series of learning environments the more rational will simply apply the same programme year in and year out with increasing tedium for those on the receiving end and all the more reason to rebel.
At this stage the entire impervious education establishment is dogmatically committed to this system. The idea is good-Basically children teach themselves-educators make sure they have a direction and materials to find out stuff and there is no doubt in my mind that the concept presents a enhanced potential system of education than the one we've left behind-for a larger pool of winners.
But to make sure it's done the 'establishment' demands an extraordinary volume of control reports. The old system also had its winners and losers and the whole lot were kept in line through the brutal application of corporal punishment. This tamed the naturally violent 'gangster' era in childhood that is normal and best blown out in some energetic way. We have decided that this [the use of violence] is not the way to school children and the child is now free to do or not to do-. The ones who decide not to do are now running the playgrounds apparently.
What does one do when one has so completely tied ones own hands with sensible kind loving democratic rules and is faced with socially maladjusted behaviour of a violent and brutal kind. Children have limited compassion especially those between 14 and 19. That's what motivated Golding to write Lord of the Flies: the observations of children at play in school playgrounds.
It's not a local phenomenon either: Thirty years ago I knew a schoolteacher from Racine outside Chicago who told me he [and his colleagues allegedly] always carried two guns to school-one was backup in case the kids managed to disarm him of his principal weapon. And last year I met a visiting English schoolteacher in a doctor's waiting room in Hyde Park who asserted that the place where he taught in the north part of England was so full of 'hostile losers' [his words] in the great education sieve out game that he had a screen of some kind between himself and 'them' which he said with an appropriate amount of venom.
The authorities must recognise that this is a policing problem not a school learner education problem. The educator has been removed from the policing equation, no matter the blather from the establishment to the contrary. Maintaining reasonable levels of order in a learning environment is a necessary skill yes-searching children for weapons, drugs or stolen cellphones is not part of the relationship.
Searching people is inherently a violation of civil rights and so, since it must be done- schools are inherently violent places which mostly manage to remain defused- the act of enforcing weapons control and regulation of illegal substances like alcohol and drugs has to be under police supervision. This is apparently normal in mild mannered places like Vancouver where my expat' friends tell me you have to apply in writing six months in advance if you want to be mugged.
I asked a young schoolboy recently why he carried a knife to school; he had it strapped to his ankle under his trouser leg. It was because the journey between school and home was so dangerous, he said, and who was I to say he wasn't right. Others have told me they carried guns or knives to school because the schools themselves were dangerous places. They were when I was at school, there were plenty of gang fights then and weapons were used. Most of the people I talk too about their schooldays remember some times with horror-I personally detested my schooldays and couldn't wait to get rid of them-and for huge numbers of kids they still are awful places. The difference is the introduction of the equaliser. In the past you would not ordinarily have had a 19 year old and a 14 year old in the same grade-now it is apparently normal. The little guy in the equation needs an equaliser - a knife is useful a gun is better and there is no concept of conscience to deflect the blade or the bullet.
So under conditions of liberty, school violence is inevitable. Schools are cruel environments for many kids and the work ethic has changed in this significant way. There are many more kids today who feel the dice are loaded against them and that they can't keep up with the system.
Under the old system if you knew the textbook [assuming you could lay hands on one] backwards, forwards, inside out, round the edges and sideways you could get 100%. The overwhelming majority struggled to get past 40, their key target. Today the best you can manage with all that 100% knowing would be 60%.
Because we live in a world where the rules of life can change overnight [think about the current You Tube.com revolution]society needs thinkers. So the important thing to demonstrate is that you can use that 100/60% of knowledge to access the other 40%. You can only do that if you have practised the 60% part for months- this ability to transfer knowledge is subtle and can only work spontaneously due to natural talent for a limited time -11 or 12 years of age. After that the 'slow traveller' is left with bigger and bigger gaps, demoralised self-esteem and declining performance. It is an old story now revealing its next metamorphosis.
It is also insoluble because the new emerging society is desperate for whatever skills are being turned out-The OBE concept is a morally bankrupt system which substitutes bureaucracy for childhood in order to control the work performance of an allegedly mediocre and demoralised workforce, a considerable part of the workforce does the job now because in the past they were permitted no alternative road out of poverty due to previous discrimination.
Ironically a Party supporting the aspirations of the working class has opted for a 'new' system of education modelled on a mass production concept that has recreated all the inherent alienation Marx attributed to the mass production model that was to be perfected by Henry Ford: and this new system has arrived at precisely the moment that the production line became redundant.
This violence reflects the boredom produced by a system that requires that the LEARNERS go to school each day and TEACH THEMSELVES something useful. Why -why, they keep asking. Why are we doing this? So that you develop the skills of learning to learn that's why. You only get 60 % for memory power because the evolving requirements of our new society no longer needs you to prove that you are smarter than your cellphone.
At the best of times, historically, only a tiny proportion of people were natural change agents. This system should raise those numbers slightly. But most kids are superfluous to need. We will only begin to tell in about another decade just how superfluous they are. In the meantime what are we doing about the vast amount of dross: those children who are superfluous to needs and know it-and who are disrupting the programme with knife fights, drug running, money laundering and doing whatever else sells for a buck or two. We aren't doing anything.
Compounding the tragedy is an apathetic workforce whose conditions of employment have been unilaterally altered by a new brand of methodology. Today's educator is [for the most part] inherently obsolete: desperately attempting, with no help from their employer, to cope with the changes to their very founding philosophies. The limited range of knowledge of even the best of them is a constraint within which the learning fields must be tilled. And on top of it all is the infernal blizzard of paperwork-Entire forest are being consumed in this madness-The destiny of all this paperwork lies in technology -a technology that will make the very concept of 'being at school' along with the 'teachers' that prepare learning environments obsolete. Ultimately and ironically the State sponsored Telkom monopoly has conspired to stifle the march to technological excellence demanded by the self same State.
Was this intentional- I am sure it wasn't. It just happened because only a few radicals realised that the future of Learning lies in exploiting the advantages of Google and YouTube by following a programme on a machine that automatically measures the continuous assessments data that is so easily collected, without driving the teaching corps to the brink of emotional extinction. If the State intends to spend money on a new system then this is the logical way to go.
There is of course one serious drawback-It will make tens of thousands of 'education administrators' redundant.
If I ever thought Ivan Illich was right before I am doubly certain now that he was right. The kids are reacting against 'growing up absurd'. This is the freeborn generation that is consumed with this confusion and rage...given the way the dice are rolling here-I would be enraged too.
Before I conclude this blog on the inevitability of a rising tide of violence in our classrooms let me quote from the study 'Adult literacy in America' commissioned by the US Education department in the early 1990's: '90 million Americans cannot write a letter, fathom a bus schedule, or even do addition and subtraction ON A CALCULATOR [my capitals].'
'This is what you would expect if 90 million Americans were progressing through various stages of Alzheimer's disease. Thirty million were judged so incompetent that they could not even respond to questions.' [William Rees-Mogg: The Sovereign Individual 1997 P 323]commenting on the above.
This is the bankrupt system we have adopted for our country without one word of objection from any relevant educator union. Since then there is no evidence to suggest that the American situation has improved, in fact the evidence indicates the opposite and there have been nearly a dozen 'Columbines' this year alone. A U.S. Secretary of Education stated that 'The vast majority of Americans DO NOT KNOW THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE' the skills necessary to survive in the modern world.[Rees-Mogg The Sovereign Individual]
I would also suggest that the billions being poured in so called SETA adult education does not change the adult illiteracy situation in our country by even one percent. We can't be more specific because we have no idea what is happening to the billions.
The American are also now producing less maths and science graduates than they need and are increasingly dependent on China where teaching is still done in the old fashioned way. Massive amounts of 'complex' I T work is also being outsourced to India not just because its cheaper but because their 'old fashioned ' system also produces a higher than expected number of science and maths graduates. Curiously an article on 'home schoolers' in the Weekender last suggested that kids being 'educated' at home were outperforming those in the average school- and the average school is awful.
We are using a quarter of the education budget to 'diseducate' our children and we are doing this without debate. It is therefore inevitable that this new 'lost' generation is going to become more and more violent. Get used to it.
NiK
Saturday, October 7, 2006
The great migration birthday blues saga
SAFM does run some pretty bizarre 'after-eight' debates from time to time and this week's keynote event on Monday was no exception. Monday's debate concerned the sudden awakening and 'discovery' that more than 20 % of the 1992, so called 'White' population, have left South Africa over the post-revolution period. They called their debate 'Whitey's who leave: Victims or villains' and the debate convenor, Nikiwe Bikitsha demonstrated her own sub-texts to the topic by her enraged response to a caller's objection to the title-
The topic was once again revealing of the schizophrenia that afflicts out new society. The regular battery of callers who usually phone in denouncing 'Whitey' for past 'evil deeds' with declamatory demands that all whiteys be deported, dispossessed or inflicted with whatever other particular hellish punishment they want to vent on those who abused them for so long, were now phoning in to denounce said villains for having left.
I thought the whole fruitless debate a glorious demonstration of the principle that one is dammed if one does- and dammed if one doesn't. It certainly brought our all the fundamental reasons why 'the frogs' have hopped out of a warming pan before they lost the use of their muscles. [It was also an intriguing comment on the tense nature of the 'news' topic that it has take some years for this particular 'olds' to actually make the SABC headlines, given that the Economist first published this story about the huge exodus of so-called "white" skills, more than two years ago.] Evolving from the programme though was the realisation of how much I had been personally affected by this evacuation process-
Later this month I will reach the sixtieth anniversary of my birth and had pondered the idea of having a celebratory bash-I am not too keen on the idea-my father only made 61 and my granddad 66 so I thought it would be prudent to lie low and shut up until I hit 67, if ever, and have actually got something to brag about.
On the other hand the kids thought I should rip the arse out of things and have a party. So I sat down a few days ago and started to list who would be there. It was a sobering exercise. Going through the lists from old birthday anniversaries I eventually realised that after sixty years of living I barely know enough people around here, that I would call kith or kin, to fill a small table at the old Zoo Lake Bowling club where I like to hang out now and again.
Of the 57 members of my family who could have attended my fiftieth birthday non-party [I was too busy with the launch of my first novel to care about such rudimentary things as birthdays] one has since died [aged 98] and only eight still live anywhere in South Africa-the rest have evaporated into a planet wide diaspora.
So to friends-I've never been a person that encouraged friendships having had many bad friendship experiences growing up. So I was always pretty low on friends at the best of times -.I have many acquaintances, some associates but few friends. Nonetheless I did manage to rustle up about fifty people [friends, colleagues and associates] who came to my fortieth birthday bash which involved the roasting of sheep and oceans of liquid refreshments, and which turned into a three day hooligan affair, with some people even staying until tuesday.
Only five of those people would still be around to make my sixtieth. Some have died, in itself a disturbing piece of knowledge, the rest-gone offshore-three this year alone.
Even in my own immediate family we mirror the trend with one of my children gone already. She went to a place where she expected only to make some real money, an experience increasingly fantasy driven in our own neck of the woods. But now she makes so much its falling out of her ears, and she enjoys opportunities she knows from harsh experience that she is being denied in South Africa. She recently told us that she wont come back except to visit her aging parents, which she did one weekend last month for her birthday. Plus maturing romance with an offshore citizen from some exotic island will in all likelihood cement that probably.
So there we are-as one grows older one is more likely to make enemies than friends and one has also passed that time when anyone who more or less knew your name could be called a friend and so one's circle of associates grows smaller-I've also carefully avoided cultivating 'invite people to my home' type friendships amongst my work associates at the place where I have worked part-time as a 'casualised wakker' for nearly a decade. So I'm not suddenly going to break the mould by getting a bunch of them together for drinkies-I've always held to the view that one should keep one's work and one's play separate: not to mention the politics of who to ask and who not to.
Then to add a cherry to the top of what may be called the 'Migration birthday invitation blues saga' my nearest local pub, where i have stopped off for year to nourish my aching soul before breaching the last few hundred metres to the homestead, closed down last month and migrated to a 'larnier' part of town where they have less demand for 'takeaways' and they can charge more for healthier rounds-So I can't even down a few celebratory down downs with that collection of congenial neighbourhood businessmen that used to mooch around there on a Friday afternoon to chew over the week's events and who were always such a minefield source of useful information.
Ja boet, this migration business is hell on anniversary stuff hey-Were those who left victims of villains, as Ms Bikitsha stridently demanded we decide [with venomous emphasis on the latter choice] and I would say neither-I know of few returnees -most who have left have turned out to be winners in the places where they have gone and those who didn't 'win' did no worse than many of us who have remained to endure the various poison tipped slings and arrows of this new outrageous fortune. [with apologies to old 'Bill Spokeshave'].
So I guess I'll have a quiet birthday 'bash' with me n the missus, who is a serious workaholic, so I hope I can induce her to abandon work for an hour or two. Nope- I've just mentioned this to her and she tells me she is organising a Sports Dinner that night with 'Whatisname': some important celebrity person as the speaker- So tough on the birthday shit; and my son says he's going to be in Cape Town, and my matriculating baby reckons she has other plans.
So I shall dig out my dusty copies of the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath both of whom share my 'Day' and together we'll guzzle liquids at some congenial café: maybe the Blue Naartjie up in the 'Grove' if they haven't also moved to larnier pastures in the meantime; and I'll stand a round or two [it's not usually too crowded] and drink a wee snifter to all those absent persons.
Then I'll blast the airwaves around us with the poetry of my best buddies: Sylvia, Dylan and me-and if no one listens, I'm officially old enough and ugly enough that I don't really care.
Cheers
The topic was once again revealing of the schizophrenia that afflicts out new society. The regular battery of callers who usually phone in denouncing 'Whitey' for past 'evil deeds' with declamatory demands that all whiteys be deported, dispossessed or inflicted with whatever other particular hellish punishment they want to vent on those who abused them for so long, were now phoning in to denounce said villains for having left.
I thought the whole fruitless debate a glorious demonstration of the principle that one is dammed if one does- and dammed if one doesn't. It certainly brought our all the fundamental reasons why 'the frogs' have hopped out of a warming pan before they lost the use of their muscles. [It was also an intriguing comment on the tense nature of the 'news' topic that it has take some years for this particular 'olds' to actually make the SABC headlines, given that the Economist first published this story about the huge exodus of so-called "white" skills, more than two years ago.] Evolving from the programme though was the realisation of how much I had been personally affected by this evacuation process-
Later this month I will reach the sixtieth anniversary of my birth and had pondered the idea of having a celebratory bash-I am not too keen on the idea-my father only made 61 and my granddad 66 so I thought it would be prudent to lie low and shut up until I hit 67, if ever, and have actually got something to brag about.
On the other hand the kids thought I should rip the arse out of things and have a party. So I sat down a few days ago and started to list who would be there. It was a sobering exercise. Going through the lists from old birthday anniversaries I eventually realised that after sixty years of living I barely know enough people around here, that I would call kith or kin, to fill a small table at the old Zoo Lake Bowling club where I like to hang out now and again.
Of the 57 members of my family who could have attended my fiftieth birthday non-party [I was too busy with the launch of my first novel to care about such rudimentary things as birthdays] one has since died [aged 98] and only eight still live anywhere in South Africa-the rest have evaporated into a planet wide diaspora.
So to friends-I've never been a person that encouraged friendships having had many bad friendship experiences growing up. So I was always pretty low on friends at the best of times -.I have many acquaintances, some associates but few friends. Nonetheless I did manage to rustle up about fifty people [friends, colleagues and associates] who came to my fortieth birthday bash which involved the roasting of sheep and oceans of liquid refreshments, and which turned into a three day hooligan affair, with some people even staying until tuesday.
Only five of those people would still be around to make my sixtieth. Some have died, in itself a disturbing piece of knowledge, the rest-gone offshore-three this year alone.
Even in my own immediate family we mirror the trend with one of my children gone already. She went to a place where she expected only to make some real money, an experience increasingly fantasy driven in our own neck of the woods. But now she makes so much its falling out of her ears, and she enjoys opportunities she knows from harsh experience that she is being denied in South Africa. She recently told us that she wont come back except to visit her aging parents, which she did one weekend last month for her birthday. Plus maturing romance with an offshore citizen from some exotic island will in all likelihood cement that probably.
So there we are-as one grows older one is more likely to make enemies than friends and one has also passed that time when anyone who more or less knew your name could be called a friend and so one's circle of associates grows smaller-I've also carefully avoided cultivating 'invite people to my home' type friendships amongst my work associates at the place where I have worked part-time as a 'casualised wakker' for nearly a decade. So I'm not suddenly going to break the mould by getting a bunch of them together for drinkies-I've always held to the view that one should keep one's work and one's play separate: not to mention the politics of who to ask and who not to.
Then to add a cherry to the top of what may be called the 'Migration birthday invitation blues saga' my nearest local pub, where i have stopped off for year to nourish my aching soul before breaching the last few hundred metres to the homestead, closed down last month and migrated to a 'larnier' part of town where they have less demand for 'takeaways' and they can charge more for healthier rounds-So I can't even down a few celebratory down downs with that collection of congenial neighbourhood businessmen that used to mooch around there on a Friday afternoon to chew over the week's events and who were always such a minefield source of useful information.
Ja boet, this migration business is hell on anniversary stuff hey-Were those who left victims of villains, as Ms Bikitsha stridently demanded we decide [with venomous emphasis on the latter choice] and I would say neither-I know of few returnees -most who have left have turned out to be winners in the places where they have gone and those who didn't 'win' did no worse than many of us who have remained to endure the various poison tipped slings and arrows of this new outrageous fortune. [with apologies to old 'Bill Spokeshave'].
So I guess I'll have a quiet birthday 'bash' with me n the missus, who is a serious workaholic, so I hope I can induce her to abandon work for an hour or two. Nope- I've just mentioned this to her and she tells me she is organising a Sports Dinner that night with 'Whatisname': some important celebrity person as the speaker- So tough on the birthday shit; and my son says he's going to be in Cape Town, and my matriculating baby reckons she has other plans.
So I shall dig out my dusty copies of the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath both of whom share my 'Day' and together we'll guzzle liquids at some congenial café: maybe the Blue Naartjie up in the 'Grove' if they haven't also moved to larnier pastures in the meantime; and I'll stand a round or two [it's not usually too crowded] and drink a wee snifter to all those absent persons.
Then I'll blast the airwaves around us with the poetry of my best buddies: Sylvia, Dylan and me-and if no one listens, I'm officially old enough and ugly enough that I don't really care.
Cheers
Assuming reality
I have been thinking about those strange paranoiacs that assume the world to be a conspiracy which only you/i/he/she or it is able to spot.
As some of you have noted there was a strange attack recently on something I wrote prompted by an assumed state of reality that was only speculative. What does that mean.
In this case the conspiracy related to the HIV virus, which a fellow bloggist regarded as an invalid hypothesis.HIV is a media sponsored "Big Pharma" conspiracy he said...and continues to say....
Another favourite is the Moon thing. There are those who believe [the operative term being belief] that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon and that props and set construction could be seen on the original footage. This conspiracy theory is facilitated by the fact that the original footage has vanished into the labyrinth that is apparently the NASA filing system [according to a recent press report]
One of my favourites is the Global banking conspiracy theory involving the alleged 'Illuminati' of Dan Browne speculation. I was forcibly introduced to this theory once on a Saturday afternoon in the late '70's when I and an associate was held at gunpoint for some three hours by a crazed self-styled 'Christian crusader against communism' and forced at gunpoint to listen to his harangue about someone called Quigley and how something called the 'Council for Foreign relations' was orchestrating a bid to take over the world and how all those who didn't follow the true path [the nature of which was a tad vague] were doomed to remain after the event called 'the Raptures' during which all those who were chosen would suddenly disappear leaving behind all the sinners who would then rot in hell forever. It was visceral stuff especially when viewed from the wrong side of a nine-millimetre pistol held by an apparent madman.
It is bizarre [albeit democratically okay] that there are those who confuse their worst nightmares with reality. If only our worst nightmares were reality then all would be so simple.
This seems to have been the bizarre conjecture pondered by the dissenting human who murdered a screed of little girls in some freak village full of antediluvian social misfits gathered up in sombre kit to face their own definition of reality. I refer to the slaughter this week of primary school kids in an Amish village.
I wondered at first if the assailant had confused the Amish with some profoundly orthodox Muslim sect since there are some cvisual similarities between the participant in either.
Why would a man do this? His perceptions had apparently become confused? Allegedly he had suddenly begun having nightmares about sexual acts committed when he was twelve. In some way this speculative entity called 'god' was involved, only this poor fool didn't realise that god is simply a conjecture . He considered the world of the irrational to be real and therefore was guided by further irrationality to kill little girls for some inchoate purpose.
I am reminded here though with this Amish massacre of the vast cornucopia of conspiracy theories I have imbibed since childhood, the most compulsive of which is this irrational idea of 'god' itself. This poisonous 'conspiracy' is matched by the religious paranoia represented by that mad 'Christian' soldier who held me and that other guy hostage for hours at gunpoint lecturing us on the dangers of the illuminati decades before Dan Brown made them notorious. Others are simpler, like those of a certain Mr Ikey who has contrived a belief that we [humans] are in thrall to those amongst us [specifically George Bush, Queen Elizabeth and even Phony Hair himself ] who are [according to Mr Ikey] descended from aliens who came here from Sirius of all places.
My favourite part of Mr Ikey's hypothesis is that a sign of being descended from aliens is the O Rh negative blood group-an unusual group that is notable for being the universal blood donor. I am O Rh negative and I am hugely entertained by the thought that I am allegedly descended from aliens-.I also don't seem to have ever benefited in any obvious way from this alleged circumstance.
Part of Mr Ikey's paranoia involves 'Manchurian candidate' type zombies. Sleeper's pre-programmed to go out and commit random acts of violence: acts that are often out of character. I always think of these fellows [conspiracy theorists] as grand story makers imposing trends on violence that do not belong, because violence is so inherently random. Nonetheless what if the otherwise ordinary fellow who suddenly develops lust feelings over little girls that motivate him to rush out suddenly and murder a party of Amish kids was a 'sleeper' pre-programmed to trigger off at a moment's notice. It does seem that these random acts of violence that 'suddenly' afflict otherwise normal people are becoming more prevalent-this is either the act of an insane human or a pre-programmed "ikey" type zombie.
So I have to ask who has what to gain from this irrational act by a pre-programmed madman? I am unable to answer this question. Instead I take the view that the standard pressures of living in this increasingly complex and simultaneously increasingly incompetent world are enough to drive all rational persons to commit acts of irrational violence. Consider the simple frequency of road rage, or even the nightmare of rectifying an invalid electricity account, something that recently took me three years to achieve-there were frequently occasions when I could quite happily have wreaked havoc on the electricity people.
Then there is the bizarre fact that my name was misspelt fifteen years ago when my telephone was installed and no amount of requests have ever been able to rectify the thing; meaning that no one wanting to call me by using the phone book to access my number will find me listed-I am, but in a different place motivated by the misspelled name-Our conspiracy theorist would see this as a plot. I see universal apathy and bureaucratic ineptitude spreading out across the planet like an unseen cancer.
I do nonetheless enjoy the random nature of the error. If the end of the world is nigh then as TS Eliot once observed it will not be with a bang but rather with the whimper of indifference and incompetence
As some of you have noted there was a strange attack recently on something I wrote prompted by an assumed state of reality that was only speculative. What does that mean.
In this case the conspiracy related to the HIV virus, which a fellow bloggist regarded as an invalid hypothesis.HIV is a media sponsored "Big Pharma" conspiracy he said...and continues to say....
Another favourite is the Moon thing. There are those who believe [the operative term being belief] that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon and that props and set construction could be seen on the original footage. This conspiracy theory is facilitated by the fact that the original footage has vanished into the labyrinth that is apparently the NASA filing system [according to a recent press report]
One of my favourites is the Global banking conspiracy theory involving the alleged 'Illuminati' of Dan Browne speculation. I was forcibly introduced to this theory once on a Saturday afternoon in the late '70's when I and an associate was held at gunpoint for some three hours by a crazed self-styled 'Christian crusader against communism' and forced at gunpoint to listen to his harangue about someone called Quigley and how something called the 'Council for Foreign relations' was orchestrating a bid to take over the world and how all those who didn't follow the true path [the nature of which was a tad vague] were doomed to remain after the event called 'the Raptures' during which all those who were chosen would suddenly disappear leaving behind all the sinners who would then rot in hell forever. It was visceral stuff especially when viewed from the wrong side of a nine-millimetre pistol held by an apparent madman.
It is bizarre [albeit democratically okay] that there are those who confuse their worst nightmares with reality. If only our worst nightmares were reality then all would be so simple.
This seems to have been the bizarre conjecture pondered by the dissenting human who murdered a screed of little girls in some freak village full of antediluvian social misfits gathered up in sombre kit to face their own definition of reality. I refer to the slaughter this week of primary school kids in an Amish village.
I wondered at first if the assailant had confused the Amish with some profoundly orthodox Muslim sect since there are some cvisual similarities between the participant in either.
Why would a man do this? His perceptions had apparently become confused? Allegedly he had suddenly begun having nightmares about sexual acts committed when he was twelve. In some way this speculative entity called 'god' was involved, only this poor fool didn't realise that god is simply a conjecture . He considered the world of the irrational to be real and therefore was guided by further irrationality to kill little girls for some inchoate purpose.
I am reminded here though with this Amish massacre of the vast cornucopia of conspiracy theories I have imbibed since childhood, the most compulsive of which is this irrational idea of 'god' itself. This poisonous 'conspiracy' is matched by the religious paranoia represented by that mad 'Christian' soldier who held me and that other guy hostage for hours at gunpoint lecturing us on the dangers of the illuminati decades before Dan Brown made them notorious. Others are simpler, like those of a certain Mr Ikey who has contrived a belief that we [humans] are in thrall to those amongst us [specifically George Bush, Queen Elizabeth and even Phony Hair himself ] who are [according to Mr Ikey] descended from aliens who came here from Sirius of all places.
My favourite part of Mr Ikey's hypothesis is that a sign of being descended from aliens is the O Rh negative blood group-an unusual group that is notable for being the universal blood donor. I am O Rh negative and I am hugely entertained by the thought that I am allegedly descended from aliens-.I also don't seem to have ever benefited in any obvious way from this alleged circumstance.
Part of Mr Ikey's paranoia involves 'Manchurian candidate' type zombies. Sleeper's pre-programmed to go out and commit random acts of violence: acts that are often out of character. I always think of these fellows [conspiracy theorists] as grand story makers imposing trends on violence that do not belong, because violence is so inherently random. Nonetheless what if the otherwise ordinary fellow who suddenly develops lust feelings over little girls that motivate him to rush out suddenly and murder a party of Amish kids was a 'sleeper' pre-programmed to trigger off at a moment's notice. It does seem that these random acts of violence that 'suddenly' afflict otherwise normal people are becoming more prevalent-this is either the act of an insane human or a pre-programmed "ikey" type zombie.
So I have to ask who has what to gain from this irrational act by a pre-programmed madman? I am unable to answer this question. Instead I take the view that the standard pressures of living in this increasingly complex and simultaneously increasingly incompetent world are enough to drive all rational persons to commit acts of irrational violence. Consider the simple frequency of road rage, or even the nightmare of rectifying an invalid electricity account, something that recently took me three years to achieve-there were frequently occasions when I could quite happily have wreaked havoc on the electricity people.
Then there is the bizarre fact that my name was misspelt fifteen years ago when my telephone was installed and no amount of requests have ever been able to rectify the thing; meaning that no one wanting to call me by using the phone book to access my number will find me listed-I am, but in a different place motivated by the misspelled name-Our conspiracy theorist would see this as a plot. I see universal apathy and bureaucratic ineptitude spreading out across the planet like an unseen cancer.
I do nonetheless enjoy the random nature of the error. If the end of the world is nigh then as TS Eliot once observed it will not be with a bang but rather with the whimper of indifference and incompetence
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