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.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
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
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
Reason and unreason. Living with the outcomes of secularism
One of the perplexing features of our day to day existance is the way so many people who have had access to education persist in treating the irrational as though it were fact and truth while that which is rationally determined is despised as lies. So we have murder committed daily in the name of that which cannot be proven to exist while the evidence we collect to rationalise the way we alleviate pain is discarded as mere conjecture. This has been the curious experience of the "HIV is an Illusion" debate that took place on my blog over the past month...for those who missed the debate the conclusion follows.
In my blog Manto vs de Lille i set out to defend the rational basis for Manto's unpopular position while accepting the horror implied by the ANC's choice to deny huge numbers access to ARV's. I anticipated that some would consider my support cruel or even unusual...i did not expect to encounter denial that there is even a problem...
To my amazement my blog uncovered a wealth of so-called dissidents [denialists] who are unable to accept the reasoned outcomes of thousands of researchers preferring instead to "believe" the fantasies of irrational response. Eventually i wrote what follows. The original blog Manto 1 de Lille 0 can be found through the search engine on blogmark
You are ducking the point Johan. response to a response 1 Oct 2006
I know that there was a time not too long ago when there was no funeral parlour on so many street corners. I see them daily as I drive around this megacity of ours. Johan you would have me believe that they are an illusion.
There is a place where we stopped once on our way to shoot a forgettable movie at the then newly opened Sun City where I was accidentally assigned to the dressing room of a lady I later saw decorously decorating the pages of Playboy. She was enraged and we certainly didn't 'hit it off'.
On our way to my failed assignation with Ms Kriel we had to collect a load of extras at that place where we stopped, and there was much excitement amongst the citizens of that place. We parked in a huge open space between two civic entities: a space big enough for a few football fields and change. We were between old and new: a relatively new village that was grafted onto an old village as part of the development programme for the region.
I went that way again recently: perhaps the first time in a decade. To my horror, those open fields where we had parked the bus and stretched our legs back in '80 were now a wall-to-wall graveyard filled to overflowing. How could such a small place acquire such a vast cemetery in such a short space of time?
Had there been war in this place? I asked.
They all became thin and died-Johan, they all became thin, wasted away, lost the use of their faculties and died. Had they all been murdered then we could have evaluated the bullet holes checked the cartridge remains and concluded that they had been shot. The same process applies when people grow thin and die. The broader world has concluded that there is a virus a large-you are suggesting these people died of cell' phone poisoning or having been uprooted from their homes and moved around-My ancestors were dispossessed of their commonage holdings back in the sixteenth century and have moved every generation since-We haven't all rolled over and died.
I have worked with people who were the scions of the newly emergent funeral business. I have read in appalled horror the regular Friday editions of the Sowetan with their page upon page of micro photos of the dead about to be buried. The numbers who are not living to a 'ripe old age' is statistically abnormal. The young are outnumbering the old on those pages. That is abnormal. It is the common sign of sickness in the tribe.
We humans have a need to invent gods and now that we know the ancient God of our historical consciousness is dead-'we have killed 'him' you and I' we seek to create new gods. Attributing godlike powers to empty corporations called collectively 'The Media', 'Big Pharma' the CIA and the general range of other alleged co-conspirators in this our 'Grande Illusion' is a symptom of this 'will to order' that is affecting you, Johan, by the looks of it..
This is the stuff of fiction. It is not the stuff of science.
The bottom line is this Johan. There is an overwhelming body of conclusive evidence that people are dying in unprecedented numbers in particular places on the planet. The broadly accepted culprit seems to be an entity which rigorous scientific evaluation functioning in the tyrannical world of peer assessment has chosen to call HIV.
There is also an overwhelming body of evidence ranging from the basic scientific stuff to the body counts, that suggests that a specific commonly accepted battery of symptoms is associated with the condition known as full blown AIDS, one of these is the presence of identifiable particles in the blood [see early blogs 'Manto 1 de Lille 0' for details].
Taking anti-retrovirals does seem to help a great many people notwithstanding their chemical side effects. Our issue in giving them to people on-masse, and the source of my support for Manto's position is the real problem of multi-drug resistance allied to cost. We know that almost all chemically based drugs have unwanted side effects: it is part of the problem of managing life under a drug regime.
This historic failure of the chemical based part of the wellness industry has been something of an Achilles heel [to the industry] and has spurred its own response, as evidenced by fairly wholesale firing of top executives recently for failing to be up to speed with latest trends- hardly bold conspirators here. The Economist [Sept' 16th 2006 p77] quotes Viren Mehta a pharmaceutical industry analyst and commentator who says that' The pharmaceutical industry is in the midst of a journey from 'old science' to 'new science'. The industry's traditional model based chiefly on chemistry and basic biology is giving way to a new approach based on biotechnology, computing [ aka bio-informatics][and] advanced chemistry-' Molecular medicine promises the possibility of personal design drugs for specific persons and ailments. Holistic chemical healthcare lies ahead.
Nonetheless overt and objective evidence suggests that ARV's prolong life. Like all products in competitive markets if they fail to perform the opposition overwhelms them. So they must work. Why there are alleged discrepancies in reports between Canada and the USA could be as much due to differences in the health care regimes between the two places as to any bureaucratic conspiracy-as if Bureaucrats actually had the imagination to engage in conspiracies at the level of complexity implied by you.
Then there is the rise of the funeral industry, in our country; the rising sales of coffins above century trend lines-There's customers there Johan, not some inchoate conspiracy.
So Johan, there is broadly all this evidence, which I, an interested layperson, can observe around me.
Against this I must place your battery of conspiracy language: beautiful stuff in something like the Da Vinci Code, but ultimately fiction. The fiction writer is literally god and can mould the plot to suit the given objective of the story, which typically has a finite climax and denouement. We are not living in a movie or a literary plot unless we choose to be. This is real. As the Buddhists put it 'all life is suffering'.
Maybe there is a denouement here-pending. Except as I said: this is real. There are no conspiracies. There is only random chaos to which we desperately seek to ascribe meaning. You seek meaning by pretending that a dysfunctional world in which we encounter nothing in our day to day lives that can remotely be called competent or even enthusiastic, can contain people of such superhuman foresight, ingenuity and adroitness, not to mention social cohesion, that they can mould and put together some unspeakably 'grande plan' for global domination-this is the world of 'Pinky and the Brain' Johan. This is John Gault in Ayn Rand's glorious confection 'Atlas Shrugged'. Empires come and go - and as Thomas could have suggested 'They no longer speak of Michaelangelo. We could as easily argue that we humans are the deadly virus that has overrun our planet and rendered its resources dysfunctional and that this disease is nature fighting back- burning off those superfluous human entities who cannot cope,
According to your notes you have decided after reading Orwell's 1984 that there is a plot afoot, and now find masses of wonderfully plausible evidence to reinforce your 'belief'-BELIEF IS NOT SCIENCE IT IS THE MURDER OF SCIENCE. Science is concerned with the provable. If it can't be proved it isn't science. The medical profession says they have proof that HIV exists and works its deadly way. They claim there is a flood of evidence available to satisfy a serious researcher. You say they are all lying and are part of a plot to do who knows what.
What you are presenting in your vast cornucopian collection of activist anti-HIV data is the speculation you accused me of. You mix Fiction writers and their fantasies with your own anxieties and 'create proof' of a conspiracy. You find legal disclaimers and create conspiracies. You are an immensely clever person with an obvious interest in alternate health remedies and yet you are in danger of becoming the 'crackpot theorist' you fear being labelled.
To avoid this you have to prove your contention. This wonderfully oratorical and random concatenation of curious facts and earnest observations you have cobbled together by judges and advocates and other non-medical wellness wannabees is gloriously persuasive in a Goebbels-ish kind of way, and reminds me of the character, Dorfling that I created in my new book: ' 7 Ways to get your money'.
HIV is an illusion! You say. To simply assert this over and over again backed up with poorly substantiated, low credibility sources does not equal a valid argument. You are losing on points.Your argument consists of simple unsupported salesmanship. Claiming that some advocate-some legal practitioner, says that HIV does not exists is not, frankly, particularly credible as a source of reference for an entire philosophy. Implying that a reputable magazine like, say, Nature, is deliberately part of a plot to publish screeds of documentation substantiating the existence of a viral pandemic is an irrational act. You're suggesting that only morons read the journal. Next you will be telling us that their groundbreaking publication of the DNA story some fifty years ago was also an imaginary act about an imaginary concept, and that Watson and Crick got the Nobel prize for fraudulent research.
You are further suggesting that every AIDS researcher, worker and medical practitioner world wide is covertly participating in a giant hoax to trick the gullible poor into believing they are dying in unprecedented numbers and voila on cue-they die-Presumably you also consider that the Bubonic Plague, the so called 'Black death', that wiped out about one third of the population of Europe in the late medieval era was also an illusion- What about the 'holocaust'? Where did all those people go if that was also an illusion?
You are presenting a curious and provocative critique to our interrogation of this great national calamity we are experiencing: with real and tangible and widespread grief. Ignoring this you are hoping to be Hegel's anti-thesis to the Medical profession's thesis-for your plot to now retain credibility you must give us scientific proof not literary flummery.
If you are right and HIV is an illusion, then tell us what is killing all these people. And I don't want anymore of this random conspiracy crap that you are chucking around; and all this 'conditions of life ' bullshit- these are invalid arguments and do not withstand rational scrutiny and have been disproved by the evidence of day-to-day life all over the planet. Do the work, take a few hundred people and test them. Do the comparative testing and all the other scientific stuff with controls and blinds and so on-and don't whine about someone not giving you a chance as part of your conspiracy profile, that's a game-find an experimental venue. And find out what it is-prove it's not that HIV, find out what it is.
In his book 'The H factor' Patrick Holford tells the remarkable story of Dr Killmer Mc Cully and his decades long journey through the medical wilderness to prove his revolutionary breakthrough theory about the role of homocysteine in health care management. The edition of the Economist to which I referred above also contains a provocative review in its literary section into the way Quantum String theory may be inhibiting the development of Physics. Undoubtedly indifference and complacency can create the illusion of conspiracy but determined people have triumphed over such adversity on innumerable previous occasions, Galileo being one of the pre-emptive early examples.. If you believe there is some other cause of all these deaths, and you obviously do, then prove it using the tools of science not the mechanics of populist appeal.
In my world as a social scientist I have always believed that a number of credible sources add up to reasonable evidence. You are quoting as your core source an obscure Canadian backwoods website that functions in a country where by your own admission this 'thins' disease is hardly known and probably kills fewer people than there are murders in that country. I am told by my medical contacts that the battery of credible sources for the proof of HIV are legion and are accessible by any sufficiently interested party. You need to provide your own credible proof to substantiate your hypothesis Johan-otherwise stop wasting your life.
Find out and tell us what is it Johan that is killing all these people, because they are definitely dying?
In my blog Manto vs de Lille i set out to defend the rational basis for Manto's unpopular position while accepting the horror implied by the ANC's choice to deny huge numbers access to ARV's. I anticipated that some would consider my support cruel or even unusual...i did not expect to encounter denial that there is even a problem...
To my amazement my blog uncovered a wealth of so-called dissidents [denialists] who are unable to accept the reasoned outcomes of thousands of researchers preferring instead to "believe" the fantasies of irrational response. Eventually i wrote what follows. The original blog Manto 1 de Lille 0 can be found through the search engine on blogmark
You are ducking the point Johan. response to a response 1 Oct 2006
I know that there was a time not too long ago when there was no funeral parlour on so many street corners. I see them daily as I drive around this megacity of ours. Johan you would have me believe that they are an illusion.
There is a place where we stopped once on our way to shoot a forgettable movie at the then newly opened Sun City where I was accidentally assigned to the dressing room of a lady I later saw decorously decorating the pages of Playboy. She was enraged and we certainly didn't 'hit it off'.
On our way to my failed assignation with Ms Kriel we had to collect a load of extras at that place where we stopped, and there was much excitement amongst the citizens of that place. We parked in a huge open space between two civic entities: a space big enough for a few football fields and change. We were between old and new: a relatively new village that was grafted onto an old village as part of the development programme for the region.
I went that way again recently: perhaps the first time in a decade. To my horror, those open fields where we had parked the bus and stretched our legs back in '80 were now a wall-to-wall graveyard filled to overflowing. How could such a small place acquire such a vast cemetery in such a short space of time?
Had there been war in this place? I asked.
They all became thin and died-Johan, they all became thin, wasted away, lost the use of their faculties and died. Had they all been murdered then we could have evaluated the bullet holes checked the cartridge remains and concluded that they had been shot. The same process applies when people grow thin and die. The broader world has concluded that there is a virus a large-you are suggesting these people died of cell' phone poisoning or having been uprooted from their homes and moved around-My ancestors were dispossessed of their commonage holdings back in the sixteenth century and have moved every generation since-We haven't all rolled over and died.
I have worked with people who were the scions of the newly emergent funeral business. I have read in appalled horror the regular Friday editions of the Sowetan with their page upon page of micro photos of the dead about to be buried. The numbers who are not living to a 'ripe old age' is statistically abnormal. The young are outnumbering the old on those pages. That is abnormal. It is the common sign of sickness in the tribe.
We humans have a need to invent gods and now that we know the ancient God of our historical consciousness is dead-'we have killed 'him' you and I' we seek to create new gods. Attributing godlike powers to empty corporations called collectively 'The Media', 'Big Pharma' the CIA and the general range of other alleged co-conspirators in this our 'Grande Illusion' is a symptom of this 'will to order' that is affecting you, Johan, by the looks of it..
This is the stuff of fiction. It is not the stuff of science.
The bottom line is this Johan. There is an overwhelming body of conclusive evidence that people are dying in unprecedented numbers in particular places on the planet. The broadly accepted culprit seems to be an entity which rigorous scientific evaluation functioning in the tyrannical world of peer assessment has chosen to call HIV.
There is also an overwhelming body of evidence ranging from the basic scientific stuff to the body counts, that suggests that a specific commonly accepted battery of symptoms is associated with the condition known as full blown AIDS, one of these is the presence of identifiable particles in the blood [see early blogs 'Manto 1 de Lille 0' for details].
Taking anti-retrovirals does seem to help a great many people notwithstanding their chemical side effects. Our issue in giving them to people on-masse, and the source of my support for Manto's position is the real problem of multi-drug resistance allied to cost. We know that almost all chemically based drugs have unwanted side effects: it is part of the problem of managing life under a drug regime.
This historic failure of the chemical based part of the wellness industry has been something of an Achilles heel [to the industry] and has spurred its own response, as evidenced by fairly wholesale firing of top executives recently for failing to be up to speed with latest trends- hardly bold conspirators here. The Economist [Sept' 16th 2006 p77] quotes Viren Mehta a pharmaceutical industry analyst and commentator who says that' The pharmaceutical industry is in the midst of a journey from 'old science' to 'new science'. The industry's traditional model based chiefly on chemistry and basic biology is giving way to a new approach based on biotechnology, computing [ aka bio-informatics][and] advanced chemistry-' Molecular medicine promises the possibility of personal design drugs for specific persons and ailments. Holistic chemical healthcare lies ahead.
Nonetheless overt and objective evidence suggests that ARV's prolong life. Like all products in competitive markets if they fail to perform the opposition overwhelms them. So they must work. Why there are alleged discrepancies in reports between Canada and the USA could be as much due to differences in the health care regimes between the two places as to any bureaucratic conspiracy-as if Bureaucrats actually had the imagination to engage in conspiracies at the level of complexity implied by you.
Then there is the rise of the funeral industry, in our country; the rising sales of coffins above century trend lines-There's customers there Johan, not some inchoate conspiracy.
So Johan, there is broadly all this evidence, which I, an interested layperson, can observe around me.
Against this I must place your battery of conspiracy language: beautiful stuff in something like the Da Vinci Code, but ultimately fiction. The fiction writer is literally god and can mould the plot to suit the given objective of the story, which typically has a finite climax and denouement. We are not living in a movie or a literary plot unless we choose to be. This is real. As the Buddhists put it 'all life is suffering'.
Maybe there is a denouement here-pending. Except as I said: this is real. There are no conspiracies. There is only random chaos to which we desperately seek to ascribe meaning. You seek meaning by pretending that a dysfunctional world in which we encounter nothing in our day to day lives that can remotely be called competent or even enthusiastic, can contain people of such superhuman foresight, ingenuity and adroitness, not to mention social cohesion, that they can mould and put together some unspeakably 'grande plan' for global domination-this is the world of 'Pinky and the Brain' Johan. This is John Gault in Ayn Rand's glorious confection 'Atlas Shrugged'. Empires come and go - and as Thomas could have suggested 'They no longer speak of Michaelangelo. We could as easily argue that we humans are the deadly virus that has overrun our planet and rendered its resources dysfunctional and that this disease is nature fighting back- burning off those superfluous human entities who cannot cope,
According to your notes you have decided after reading Orwell's 1984 that there is a plot afoot, and now find masses of wonderfully plausible evidence to reinforce your 'belief'-BELIEF IS NOT SCIENCE IT IS THE MURDER OF SCIENCE. Science is concerned with the provable. If it can't be proved it isn't science. The medical profession says they have proof that HIV exists and works its deadly way. They claim there is a flood of evidence available to satisfy a serious researcher. You say they are all lying and are part of a plot to do who knows what.
What you are presenting in your vast cornucopian collection of activist anti-HIV data is the speculation you accused me of. You mix Fiction writers and their fantasies with your own anxieties and 'create proof' of a conspiracy. You find legal disclaimers and create conspiracies. You are an immensely clever person with an obvious interest in alternate health remedies and yet you are in danger of becoming the 'crackpot theorist' you fear being labelled.
To avoid this you have to prove your contention. This wonderfully oratorical and random concatenation of curious facts and earnest observations you have cobbled together by judges and advocates and other non-medical wellness wannabees is gloriously persuasive in a Goebbels-ish kind of way, and reminds me of the character, Dorfling that I created in my new book: ' 7 Ways to get your money'.
HIV is an illusion! You say. To simply assert this over and over again backed up with poorly substantiated, low credibility sources does not equal a valid argument. You are losing on points.Your argument consists of simple unsupported salesmanship. Claiming that some advocate-some legal practitioner, says that HIV does not exists is not, frankly, particularly credible as a source of reference for an entire philosophy. Implying that a reputable magazine like, say, Nature, is deliberately part of a plot to publish screeds of documentation substantiating the existence of a viral pandemic is an irrational act. You're suggesting that only morons read the journal. Next you will be telling us that their groundbreaking publication of the DNA story some fifty years ago was also an imaginary act about an imaginary concept, and that Watson and Crick got the Nobel prize for fraudulent research.
You are further suggesting that every AIDS researcher, worker and medical practitioner world wide is covertly participating in a giant hoax to trick the gullible poor into believing they are dying in unprecedented numbers and voila on cue-they die-Presumably you also consider that the Bubonic Plague, the so called 'Black death', that wiped out about one third of the population of Europe in the late medieval era was also an illusion- What about the 'holocaust'? Where did all those people go if that was also an illusion?
You are presenting a curious and provocative critique to our interrogation of this great national calamity we are experiencing: with real and tangible and widespread grief. Ignoring this you are hoping to be Hegel's anti-thesis to the Medical profession's thesis-for your plot to now retain credibility you must give us scientific proof not literary flummery.
If you are right and HIV is an illusion, then tell us what is killing all these people. And I don't want anymore of this random conspiracy crap that you are chucking around; and all this 'conditions of life ' bullshit- these are invalid arguments and do not withstand rational scrutiny and have been disproved by the evidence of day-to-day life all over the planet. Do the work, take a few hundred people and test them. Do the comparative testing and all the other scientific stuff with controls and blinds and so on-and don't whine about someone not giving you a chance as part of your conspiracy profile, that's a game-find an experimental venue. And find out what it is-prove it's not that HIV, find out what it is.
In his book 'The H factor' Patrick Holford tells the remarkable story of Dr Killmer Mc Cully and his decades long journey through the medical wilderness to prove his revolutionary breakthrough theory about the role of homocysteine in health care management. The edition of the Economist to which I referred above also contains a provocative review in its literary section into the way Quantum String theory may be inhibiting the development of Physics. Undoubtedly indifference and complacency can create the illusion of conspiracy but determined people have triumphed over such adversity on innumerable previous occasions, Galileo being one of the pre-emptive early examples.. If you believe there is some other cause of all these deaths, and you obviously do, then prove it using the tools of science not the mechanics of populist appeal.
In my world as a social scientist I have always believed that a number of credible sources add up to reasonable evidence. You are quoting as your core source an obscure Canadian backwoods website that functions in a country where by your own admission this 'thins' disease is hardly known and probably kills fewer people than there are murders in that country. I am told by my medical contacts that the battery of credible sources for the proof of HIV are legion and are accessible by any sufficiently interested party. You need to provide your own credible proof to substantiate your hypothesis Johan-otherwise stop wasting your life.
Find out and tell us what is it Johan that is killing all these people, because they are definitely dying?
Monday, October 2, 2006
It was a 'Tarantino' type of day
Making movies is a compulsion, not a reasoned act.
It was a 'Tarantino' line he said to me
I'd asked him what my attitude was towards the
lines and the subtexts of my character's life. He said the man was pissed off; and someone else said: 'think spotted dick,'
Think some horrendous poisonous pudding from a boarding school horror story:
You are pissed off, to keep it simple. the Director said again.
Okay. Three Takes and it was a wrap. It was cool. Maybe it was Saturday and the shot was perfectly as the Director had envisaged it
From his robot the actor: and he didn't want to confuse himself with a range of variable options: each differing by a nuance. They always take a second take
because they can't trust the first, and why should they.
The second is rarely satisfactory, most commonly for technical reasons.
It is always the third one that was the clincher. I am proud of my rep: Three takes and it's in the can.
My fellow workers: members of the cast against whom I played, then
said they had played with Burton and I was too stunned to respond: I have been compared to Connery, Burton was an accolade above belief: like being compared to a god.
I was in the bring down phase then. A day's work well-rewarded, completed in three, six or seven second takes. It was a short scene delivered with unspeakable menace. I heard the Director mumbling a profound 'ominous'. I had done my job the way I like it to be done, perfectly. We'd had lunch, I had performed my lines and then I left: well wrapped. OJ was closer to his rendezvous with the 'Bucs' for the big game of the day at six. And everybody was happy.
The pay is the same if you do three takes or thirty three-and I have been on a Set on occasions when it took that many takes to get the result the Director wanted. I was on a Set for some other purpose earlier in the week where the lead actor 'fell' down a flight of stairs at a Buddhist temple about twelve times while they slowly got what was wanted and then the stunt man had to do it for real at least eight times before they were all happy. I felt good that I'd only needed three takes to menace the room.
I look forward to seeing me on the drama series, which I understand is called Angel's Song, and should be appearing on a TV channel in your neighbourhood one day, in some undefined immediate maybe intermediate future. I say that [I look forward to seeing me] because I do these things only occasionally as a retreat from our common mundane dreariness of fighting with a decaying city with an exasperating work ethic, day after day.
Most commonly I'm simply part of the wallpaper of our times-I missed me when I was the bad guy in Boomspruit some years ago: that took a few day's work and required a whole lot of action shots and plenty of bang, bang. The guys were happy. We shot the takes more slowly, there being more people in the scenes. Then the business of maintaining the economic flows of life became too demanding to afford the luxury of working almost for free, and I took a gap from the lines.
So when the opportunity arises to actually say some lines I must use everything I ever learned to make the shot perfect: to fulfil the empty randomness of our material existence as defined by our director and the fellow with Spotted Dick.
Mostly though I want to see how I played, a 'Tarantino' take.
It was a 'Tarantino' line he said to me
I'd asked him what my attitude was towards the
lines and the subtexts of my character's life. He said the man was pissed off; and someone else said: 'think spotted dick,'
Think some horrendous poisonous pudding from a boarding school horror story:
You are pissed off, to keep it simple. the Director said again.
Okay. Three Takes and it was a wrap. It was cool. Maybe it was Saturday and the shot was perfectly as the Director had envisaged it
From his robot the actor: and he didn't want to confuse himself with a range of variable options: each differing by a nuance. They always take a second take
because they can't trust the first, and why should they.
The second is rarely satisfactory, most commonly for technical reasons.
It is always the third one that was the clincher. I am proud of my rep: Three takes and it's in the can.
My fellow workers: members of the cast against whom I played, then
said they had played with Burton and I was too stunned to respond: I have been compared to Connery, Burton was an accolade above belief: like being compared to a god.
I was in the bring down phase then. A day's work well-rewarded, completed in three, six or seven second takes. It was a short scene delivered with unspeakable menace. I heard the Director mumbling a profound 'ominous'. I had done my job the way I like it to be done, perfectly. We'd had lunch, I had performed my lines and then I left: well wrapped. OJ was closer to his rendezvous with the 'Bucs' for the big game of the day at six. And everybody was happy.
The pay is the same if you do three takes or thirty three-and I have been on a Set on occasions when it took that many takes to get the result the Director wanted. I was on a Set for some other purpose earlier in the week where the lead actor 'fell' down a flight of stairs at a Buddhist temple about twelve times while they slowly got what was wanted and then the stunt man had to do it for real at least eight times before they were all happy. I felt good that I'd only needed three takes to menace the room.
I look forward to seeing me on the drama series, which I understand is called Angel's Song, and should be appearing on a TV channel in your neighbourhood one day, in some undefined immediate maybe intermediate future. I say that [I look forward to seeing me] because I do these things only occasionally as a retreat from our common mundane dreariness of fighting with a decaying city with an exasperating work ethic, day after day.
Most commonly I'm simply part of the wallpaper of our times-I missed me when I was the bad guy in Boomspruit some years ago: that took a few day's work and required a whole lot of action shots and plenty of bang, bang. The guys were happy. We shot the takes more slowly, there being more people in the scenes. Then the business of maintaining the economic flows of life became too demanding to afford the luxury of working almost for free, and I took a gap from the lines.
So when the opportunity arises to actually say some lines I must use everything I ever learned to make the shot perfect: to fulfil the empty randomness of our material existence as defined by our director and the fellow with Spotted Dick.
Mostly though I want to see how I played, a 'Tarantino' take.
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