I started this blog with the 'Aha!' thing.
According to the BBC on Sunday morning [18/02/07] Britain is experiencing a crime wave, represented by a cluster of murders of children by apparently random and motiveless gunshot violence. A hushed Beeb voice intoned unctiously "murder by gunshot" against a stock background photo shot representing an arsenal of the firearms, which we are to believe now litter the streets of England.
Ever since the British P.M. [Phony Haire] almost unilaterally outlawed private handgun ownership in Britain, in the wake of the Dunblaine kindergarten massacre about eight of nine years ago, gun related crime has apparently increased inexorably, from a time when there was not very much to a time when Sky television reported in a year end summary in 2005 that there had been ten thousand such incidents in 2004; thereby proving the old -- 'can't we discredit the idea somehow'-- axiom that 'when you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them'.
I have raised this before and on each occasion my position was refuted by anti-gun lobbyists on grounds that have never made sense[to me].
Various reports by amongst others Sky Television, have over the past years been reporting this rising trend in gun related incidents, not all of which result in murder.
Another report, in a British women's magazine that I have in front of me states: 'Is your child carrying a knife?'. Apparently a sizable number of British kids routinely carry knives to school to protect themselves from other kids, who intend to attack people and may choose them. Bullying is a huge and omnipresent threat to schoolkids as any Harry Potter fan can attest, in fact school bullying is an integral part of English youth literature ranging all the way back to 'Tom Brown's Schooldays', and forms a pretty substantial theme in 'teen' movies. According to Sky increasing numbers of kids allegedly carry illegal guns to and from school [in Britain] to protect themselves against knife wielding school thugs.
Then on top of this a recent report on a survey of so-called 'rich nations' published by the UN child agency UNICEF carried in The Star newspaper on Valentines Day painted a grim picture of life for, [presumably] 'disadvantaged' children in Britain ranking them 18th out of 21 countries- The headline reads, 'UK the worst place for kids to grow up'. Apparently Britain is a terrible place for a kid to find trustworthy friends with whom to hang out.
Now for all the hysteria in the POM media none of this apparent rise in violence is remotely on the scale that we experience in our own territory, but it is not what would be expected in a place dedicated to human rights, with an allegedly left wing, bunny hugging, single mother oriented government intent on cushioning all its weaker citizens from the alleged worst evils of living in a market based economy. What has gone wrong?
In the mid nineties when I published the Buffalo Hunters, a crime adventure novel set in Jozi, Zone One, during the post-revolution upheaval, the whole of Britain experienced some 1100 murders a year while that was roughly the number of murders in the police neighbourhood where I live, which at that time covered roughly 350,000 people. Nonetheless there are intriguing parallels between the rise of apparently random and almost motiveless violence in Britain that I keep reading about and what seems to be happening here. [Presumably we shall soon begin to hear the familiar argument that Britain may lose the Olympics because of the high levels of gun violence in the country.]
The policies followed broadly in our country [SA] are modelled on the dominant social philosophy of that country[ Britain]. That philosophy seems to be promoting a culture of alienation so extreme that Karl Marx would have had to write another entire book to rationalise why this happy ending to the Socialist vision is proving so darned elusive. British New Labour policies do certainly seem to be having a negative effect on the poor and the dispossessed, because all the aggression and violence reported constantly seems to engage the poor and the dispossessed or the estranged. Perhaps it has something to do with living in a 'rights' based society that is simultaneously perceived as 'rightless' by those whose destiny is society's dustbin- here I come ready or not.
On the few occasions I ever visited that curious island on which I was born and from which I migrated at the age of six months to live [inadvertently] in an urban Afrikaner slum neighbourhood amongst people who's sole objective was to 'Slaan die soutie' I found the average youthful inhabitant of most places to be as aggressive and prone to violence as those where I grew up uncomfortably for the most part. Sixty years of Social Massaging has not softened that inherent streak of violence in what AJP Taylor once described as the most bloodthirsty tribe to have ever walked the planet. The Yobbos rule it seems.
In our country we are embarked on a complex scheme to effectively disarm the private civilian population, largely prompted by a century's old desire to prevent so- called 'black' people from having guns. We have also, perversely, introduced a new 'education' system that has just successfully produced its first harvest of failed kids from its first post-revolutionary matric crop [remember 3,000,000, plus/minus started in 1995 and 360,000 finished twelve years later in 2006- leaving the rest [89%] on the rubbish heap] What happened to all those kids? We don't know- the politicians are too busy enriching themselves while the going's good to have time to notice the messy shit piling up on the blanket. Could they be out 'robbin, killin, rapin n lootin': stoned out of their minds on Tik.
We signally failed to deal with the Grade 11 'failures' from last year [as predicted] so now we are producing the second crop of 'failures' - the new school drop out generation - What do we do with all these surplus people given that even with their relatively sophisticated welfare state the POMS are failing their own kids? This is the seriously vexatious question to which none of us [me included] has any answer- save [in my case] that presented by Nietzsche in the guise of King Midas and his associate Silenus.
'King Midas: What is man's [a person's] greatest happiness
Silenus: NOT TO BE. TO BE NOTHING. But the second best is TO DIE SOON.
What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach- NOT TO HAVE BEEN BORN.
Interestingly Steven Levitt the new 'Wunderkind' of the Economics world recently aroused a storm of controversy with a brilliantly executed piece of research in which he set out to discover the real source of the unexpected decline in serious crime in the United States during the 1990's after the rising trend throughout the eighties had pundits of the time predicting anarchy and chaos [and incidently provided a much needed boost to the non-career of the indefatigable Charles Bronson with his 'Death Wish' series 1-5].
Levitt proved as conclusively as it is possible to prove anything in the social sciences that the fifteen million aborted entities [those who were never born] that occurred between the Roe v Wade decision in the mid sixties and the BEGINNING OF THE decline in criminal behaviour in the nineties coincide to form an inescapable [and extensively validated] conclusion. Unwanted children grow up to become social misfits and latent criminals. [See Steven Levitt: Freakonomics: 'Where did all the criminals go?']. Curiously Levitt's conclusions have been the subject of massive assault by both sides in the Abortion controversy: the religious right are freaked out with denial and the liberal left are horrified at the eugenic implications of their fondly held position.
I wouldn't know whether Levitt could carry out a similar exercise here, and anyway his conclusions indicate that it is still a decade and a half too early to identify whether the allegedly factory-scale abortion process that we carry out now in our own country will eventually contribute to a similar decline. Anyway with half the country's population under the age of 21 we do not have the same demographics as the USA. In the meantime we are handling the living dead by churning out unwanted drop-out children daily, and when life on the streets, or the suburbs or in the traditional 'hoods becomes terminally commoditised then life itself is so meaningless as to be random, arbitrary and, for a continent still awash with real wild animals quite normal- Killing becomes prosaic.
So one thing I can predict with some certainty however is that the amount of gun related violence will continue to rise. Disarming the citizen will not help to reduce the violence and may act as a spur given that the gunmen can then go about their business unmolested, as it were. Certainly that is the increasingly obvious inference to be drawn by the rise in gun crime in the UK. The Brazilians recognised that logic in a recent referendum on the issue, on which subject I blogged last year, in which the Brazilian citizen rejected gun control as a solution to gun violence.
We are in an age when rage knows no ending, until eventually the citizen will re-arm itself against that rage. Whether this re-arming takes the form of active armed self defence, the development of 'Safety Firearms', or a shift to a new moral paradigm is open to whatever comes- but ultimately we will be forced to accept reality or this magnificent bubble we have contrived, called the global economy, will come crashing down around our ears like the glorious fantasy that it is.
'Remember to move your head, the bad guys are always shooting at the Moustache.'
Jean Bultot. Belgian.
Alleged mass murderer, former bodyguard to Panamanian dictoator Albert Stroesser, and sometime firing range instructor to Tembisa Hi-jack gangsters.
Keep on blogging
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Zimbabwe's reality cop out or Howzit China
Every so often I go chow down in Chinatown with family or friends. In the auld days Chinatown was down near the old John Vorster Square downtown at the beginnings of Commissioner street, west of central. Number 5 was a particular favourite and a scene of many gloriously uproarious feasts back in those days before the appetites were well satisfied, and consumption capacity was still vast and never showed on the waistline-remember those days? Now Chinatown is exploding into the near east side of Jozi.
I read the other day that the Chinese population in the country has risen above 200,000 now from about a tenth of that figure in the past during the evil days. The headquarters of the China drift is in the old shopping strip in Cyrildene on the east side of Jozi, which has been transformed from a declining and increasingly run down suburban superfluity into a vibrant, gently pulsating and nourishment filled, dining exploration zone.
Notwithstanding the proliferation of eating houses my favorite parts of the 'new' journey through Chinatown al la Cyrildene are the big watch towers dotted throughout, with their machine gun toting guards known as Bad Boy'z [sic]. I always hope that a visit to the place will be okay because this brazen display of firepower keeps the real bad boyz from invading one's meal time privacy which is inclined to happen elsewhere from time to time.
A man I know with whom I have done business over the years, has premises in an industrial park on the south side of Jozi and one entire side of the park consist of warehouses that are occupied by Chinese traders who are frequently the targets of audacious raiding parties. These gangs rock up over open ground to the southeast wall of the complex, which also doubles as the exterior wall of the Chinese tenanted warehouses.
Apparently these insolent gangs drive across the open former mining land using what in Northern parts of our continent are known as "Technicals" [heavily armoured bakkies]. These heavily armed gangs smash through the walls in much the way our daily heist gangs smash the targets off the road before robbing them. I am always disconcerted, when leaving my associate's premises later than usual of a merry Friday evening, to see men armed with pump action shotguns and semi automatic rifles [AK47's even] standing on the roofs of the warehouses guarding against raiders. I hear from different sources that the new émigré Chinese traders are regarded as opportunistic targets because they have a high concentration of cash business. So I assume that Chinese traders in China town would need to have the Bad Boyz][sic] on hand, to prevent similar raiding occurrences in their more public environments.
So it didn't surprise me to read a hastily tucked piece in the press last week about discontented workers 'doing an Mbeki' on the visiting. Chinese Premier Hu Jintao up on the Zambian Copper-belt Apparently they were agitated. Chinese bosses had apparently shot workers, for unspecified reasons. A closer read on the Internet revealed that the Chinese bosses apparently own a number of the famous and formerly fabulous Zambian copper mines.
In case you have forgotten. Back in the 60's the newly emancipated Zambians pre empted the Chavez strategy for the new millennium and in the interests of socialist upliftment nationalized the copper mines. Subsequently the entire enterprise had fallen on hard times because the Zambians [like Hugo Chavez today] forgot about the market fluctuations to which all commodities are subject. Copper was in a long period of decline until China suddenly reared up on the screen and has obviously bought into the moribund Zambian enterprises.
Consider that after thirty or more years of attempting to mine copper on the Copper belt the Zambians threw in the towel and enticed those 'noice Liberals' at Anglo-American and sundry other dispossessed mine owners to repossess their stolen assets in an apparently futile attempt to get blood out of a rotting carcass.
Anglo it seems also threw in the towel, soon afterwards and either they or others offloaded their mines to those whose standards were not expected to be so discerning. Now these run-down mining operations are being squeezed for every cent of profit.
Copper prices were in a bad way for a long time and the entire industry had become moribund fuelled in part by the shift away from copper to fibre optics; and the fact that they are on a roll at the moment doesn't mean that the long term profit lines are strictly warranted in financial terms. According to the argument presented by one Michael Powers, co author of the recently published 'Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century' the mines probably yield a real return on Capital employed that is below opportunity cost. In other words the only people who may be able to afford the cost of mining for scraps of copper are those representing an unaccountable State such as China.
The simple message chapters two and three of the above mentioned book stress are that in a Commoditised market there is only one determinant of success- costs must be contained and shaved continuously. [a commoditised product is one that shows no real tangible difference to its competitors... a lump of gold is a lump of gold is a lump of gold etc] Where Africa is concerned almost everything the continent produces is commoditised. In other words when something becomes commoditised then the real cost of producing goods is lower than the best risk free alternative use to which the same capital used in the production could be used elsewhere. Only the Chinese have truly demonstrated an ability to do this in this new age and we know that their thrust into the world is devastating traditional relationships and markets all over the world.
For non-economicly literate readers this idea [opportunity cost] is best understood as follows: You take a 'date' to a fashionable dinner party where you meet the person of your dreams. But, to get that person you would have to forego the mundane certainty of your existing date. Conversely loyalty to the 'date' costs you the 'opportunity' for beautiful person you fancy at the party. Sometimes you lose both because you can't forego either- Like the soon to be totally evicted Zim farmers.
So since the only mines that are likely to be functioning in Zambia are refurbished old mines with defective infrastructure and having been owned and run down by a variety of miners they probably have to produce at below cost to make the entire venture worthwhile. Zambian mines versus the declined opportunity to invest the capital in something more profitable. Naturally the workers are squeezed. One suspects that the Chinese would prefer to bring their own workers into the equation: their productive output is legendary- Presumably these workers are equally indefatigable come sun or snow- and we don't get much snow.
Zambian workers are discovering that globalization means Commoditisation of labour. According to legend Chinese workers work eight hours a day for a bowl of rice. Naturally Zambian workers fed on a different variation of Socialist dogma and long years of State protection are not enthusiastic to entertain their new owner's views on worker solidarity. This is not a popular idea anywhere and the backlash is building on the sidelines and in the margins. Zambian workers therefore trashed the Chinese Presidential party and behaved with similar rudeness to that recently meted out to our own beloved 'Thabo the Great' by disgruntled Amazulu.
In their thoroughly absorbing analysis of Africa's 'opportunistic shot' at resuscitated glory in the wake of the rise of China in which they suggest that 'Africa is to China today what Australia and Argentina were to the United States and - Europe in the late 19th century-.' The author's fall short of noting that in both cases colonial expansion into those countries involved the eradication of the indigenous population and its replacement by the sons and daughters of the colonizers who then created the thriving society's they are today- This suggests a latently sinister caveat to Africa's ' once-in-a-century opportunity to hitch its resource rich wagon to that rising eastern star' although the authors seem unaware of this.
Last Thursday I dined with a Zim farmer who had decided to go off to London for a few weeks to celebrate a family birthday with some of his émigré kids and wait until the dust settles on the latest round of evictions of White Zimbabwean farmers. The fellow said that the latest available evidence indicated that there are more Chinese citizens living and working in Zimbabwe today than there are of the former hated Colonialist Whiteys. There were once close to 300,000 'colonialists', and coincidently a relatively prosperous base for a progressively dynamic and developmental State. As recently as 1999 that same farmer was able to observe that his Zimbabwean 'Gold' card could be spent anywhere on earth, and we could not say that in this country then.
Now inflation is 1500 % percent and rising. The Reserve bank governor has just been fired, much to his relief I believe and there are now only about 10,000 of the much-despised 'whiteys'.
Conversely there were almost no Chinese residents in the auld 'Rhodesia' and today there are allegedly more than 10,000. A man who confessed to being 'an old China hand', a most congenial German traveller with whom I also guzzled nutritious liquids on a different occasion last week, said he'd felt nostalgic hearing familiar Chinese music being fed 'musak' style into the shopping mall at the Victoria Falls although he did find it 'weird'.
What he also found weird was that many items of 'tourist kit': shirts, tee shirts, scarves etc on sale with African ethnic motifs were made in China. He was unaware that at one time both Zimbabwe and Zambia had superb domestic clothing industries*. He did insist though that most of the places that have large Chinese populations are prosperous: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver; so may it work for Zimbabwe.
On the other hand this may be only a temporary situation. [* In fairness to the Chinese those clothing industries were badly damaged way back when- when it became possible to import second hand clothing into southern Africa from Europe's affluent consumer 'thro away' society, where much clothing is worn only occasionally before being discarded. High quality second hand European suits trumped local simply by 'brand' power.]
Now what is the point of this?
Now that I have read the thoroughly enlightening Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century I understand that Mugabe, acting on an impulse only accessible to the truly aged in both mind and spirit has chosen [on behalf of his now scattered people] to opt out of the modern world. Instinctively recognizing the epiphanous thesis now proposed by Michael Powers he has acknowledged defeat and he has chosen a route in complete contrast to that supposedly optimistic message promoted by our own beloved President's 'African Union' idea.
Mbeki's 'big idea' is that people are worth saving, especially so called 'African' people. Further: given the present brief opportunity presented by this sudden explosion of China into the Global equation we may, by garnering our every advantage, be able to catapult ourselves [Africa] into the mainstream global economy. This mainstream global economy is entirely based on an ever more sophisticated manipulation of knowledge. Extrapolating from the Powers Thesis we could see the advanced world leapfrogging into the new, post-information, post fossil-fuel era while the developing world plods on towards post-industrialism-
For Africa to prosper in the future, Africa itself must leapfrog that range of products that can be produced more inexpensively by the Chinese [or Vietnamese for that measure]. The model here [presented by the authors] is SASOL with its advanced fuel technology. It is a daring vision and provided we resist the new, left inspired drift to Chavez style 'new Socialism', under a future more 'populist' premier it may just come off, and anyway if we don't take our shot then we are truly doomed to trade minerals and sheepskins for the luxuries of life.
Mugabe on the other hand has done the 'doom' thing. He has decided that Development is an ignoble dream and a fantasy and he has opted out of modernity and is retreating back to the strategy of his seventeenth century forbears after they had evicted the Mozambiquans [aka white Portugese in those days] [circa 1650 AD after the famous 'Battle of Christmas Day' for those who are interested] and may yet evict the Chinese some eight or ten years from now.
Mugabe's 'big idea' is that Africa is terminally commoditised: so drive out all the 'superfluous' people. Then, allow those who don't go to die off from untreated disease- what various commentators have recently described as 'genocide by stealth'. Then grab all the sweetest growing places, hunker down and sit out the modern age until global warming brings the whole global house of cards tumbling down, or until the north pole melts or the next band of colonialist arrive to mess with reality: whatever.
The authors of 'Scramble for Africa' present a rosy hypothesis that Africa will somehow be a beneficiary of the new Chinese factor on planet earth- So far the signs are the familiar ones. Mugabe seems to have decided that 'all things being equal' the aspirations of his particular clique are caught in a time warp between the ultra-snotty Anglos and the super workaholic, haughty Chinos and the best thing to do is to retire from the game, sit op die plaas, and trade Chinese rice grown in Zim for 'I love Zim' tee shirts made in China.
The authors don't seem to have considered that by their own thesis China is our [African] deadliest competitor in almost our every field of economic excellence, and because of their well known ruthless disregard for human rights they can under-price us in every field where we do not have some unique added-value advantage to give us an edge- and anyone with the slightest understanding of the Product Life Cycle concept that is at the core Michael Power's thesis, as presented in those two excellent chapters 2& 3 [the heart of their book], will know that- advantage is a brief flung thing.
It once took a few thousand years for the knowledge of iron working to spread so widely as to render bronze weapons obsolete. Recently Stephen King proved empirically with his Internet 'book' [product] 'The Plant', that a product's life cycle from launch to commoditised death could be as little as three hours and dropping.
I see little real advantage to Africa from this present love affair with China. I see plenty of advantage for China. [ I also have some reservations about China's ongoing capacity to handle this interminable period of expansion but that is not going to help us] Economic reality suggests that the terms of trade have remained constant for millennia. Primary products such as agricultural goods, mined minerals, logs, enjoy a lower return than secondary goods produced in factories and other production facilities and value added products, branded goods and services yield a greater return on capital employed as a rule than that on primary goods and even than mass produced commodity goods.
The exceptions to these rules are usually derived from some form of artificial monopoly imposed through some form of authority and are not valid in a global market place where skills and capital are mobile and synthetics can trump natural resource monopolies such as the increasingly marginalised OPEC.
The primary producer who remains rooted in the primaries is doomed to despair in an evolving world notwithstanding the brave argument proposed by the authors. What we see currently is Chinese traders not Chinese industrialists although that may well come later [and of course we do have industrialists from that other rapidly emerging giant on the world economy India-. According to various outraged press reports Mittal Steel is not being nice to the local industry-. Oh really!]
It was the emergence of a huge and growing Industrial class in Australia and Argentina that generated the industrial expansion of those regions. Our need in Africa is to leapfrog into the post-industrial age or we shall have nothing to sell to the Chinese other than manganese, platinum, copper and gold. They may even be making BMW's for less than we currently sell them in Australia.
What bothers me most about this love affair we are experiencing with the rising eastern hegemon is that 'they' seem to be following a seriously thought out plan that doesn't measure time the way we do. We however are running out of electricity because it takes us too long to act and too long to choose a course of action.
The recent series of violent assaults on citizens of Somali extraction in parts of our country is not a happy harbinger of how tolerant incumbent opinion will be once a 'tipping point' occurs and the newcomers become overtly noticeable and local unemployment fails to decline from its presently high levels.
In the auld days one heard the mantra- 'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' [why Greeks? Who knows?] Perhaps a new interpretation for African success should go: 'beware of Chinese fortune cookies'.
Keep on blogging
I read the other day that the Chinese population in the country has risen above 200,000 now from about a tenth of that figure in the past during the evil days. The headquarters of the China drift is in the old shopping strip in Cyrildene on the east side of Jozi, which has been transformed from a declining and increasingly run down suburban superfluity into a vibrant, gently pulsating and nourishment filled, dining exploration zone.
Notwithstanding the proliferation of eating houses my favorite parts of the 'new' journey through Chinatown al la Cyrildene are the big watch towers dotted throughout, with their machine gun toting guards known as Bad Boy'z [sic]. I always hope that a visit to the place will be okay because this brazen display of firepower keeps the real bad boyz from invading one's meal time privacy which is inclined to happen elsewhere from time to time.
A man I know with whom I have done business over the years, has premises in an industrial park on the south side of Jozi and one entire side of the park consist of warehouses that are occupied by Chinese traders who are frequently the targets of audacious raiding parties. These gangs rock up over open ground to the southeast wall of the complex, which also doubles as the exterior wall of the Chinese tenanted warehouses.
Apparently these insolent gangs drive across the open former mining land using what in Northern parts of our continent are known as "Technicals" [heavily armoured bakkies]. These heavily armed gangs smash through the walls in much the way our daily heist gangs smash the targets off the road before robbing them. I am always disconcerted, when leaving my associate's premises later than usual of a merry Friday evening, to see men armed with pump action shotguns and semi automatic rifles [AK47's even] standing on the roofs of the warehouses guarding against raiders. I hear from different sources that the new émigré Chinese traders are regarded as opportunistic targets because they have a high concentration of cash business. So I assume that Chinese traders in China town would need to have the Bad Boyz][sic] on hand, to prevent similar raiding occurrences in their more public environments.
So it didn't surprise me to read a hastily tucked piece in the press last week about discontented workers 'doing an Mbeki' on the visiting. Chinese Premier Hu Jintao up on the Zambian Copper-belt Apparently they were agitated. Chinese bosses had apparently shot workers, for unspecified reasons. A closer read on the Internet revealed that the Chinese bosses apparently own a number of the famous and formerly fabulous Zambian copper mines.
In case you have forgotten. Back in the 60's the newly emancipated Zambians pre empted the Chavez strategy for the new millennium and in the interests of socialist upliftment nationalized the copper mines. Subsequently the entire enterprise had fallen on hard times because the Zambians [like Hugo Chavez today] forgot about the market fluctuations to which all commodities are subject. Copper was in a long period of decline until China suddenly reared up on the screen and has obviously bought into the moribund Zambian enterprises.
Consider that after thirty or more years of attempting to mine copper on the Copper belt the Zambians threw in the towel and enticed those 'noice Liberals' at Anglo-American and sundry other dispossessed mine owners to repossess their stolen assets in an apparently futile attempt to get blood out of a rotting carcass.
Anglo it seems also threw in the towel, soon afterwards and either they or others offloaded their mines to those whose standards were not expected to be so discerning. Now these run-down mining operations are being squeezed for every cent of profit.
Copper prices were in a bad way for a long time and the entire industry had become moribund fuelled in part by the shift away from copper to fibre optics; and the fact that they are on a roll at the moment doesn't mean that the long term profit lines are strictly warranted in financial terms. According to the argument presented by one Michael Powers, co author of the recently published 'Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century' the mines probably yield a real return on Capital employed that is below opportunity cost. In other words the only people who may be able to afford the cost of mining for scraps of copper are those representing an unaccountable State such as China.
The simple message chapters two and three of the above mentioned book stress are that in a Commoditised market there is only one determinant of success- costs must be contained and shaved continuously. [a commoditised product is one that shows no real tangible difference to its competitors... a lump of gold is a lump of gold is a lump of gold etc] Where Africa is concerned almost everything the continent produces is commoditised. In other words when something becomes commoditised then the real cost of producing goods is lower than the best risk free alternative use to which the same capital used in the production could be used elsewhere. Only the Chinese have truly demonstrated an ability to do this in this new age and we know that their thrust into the world is devastating traditional relationships and markets all over the world.
For non-economicly literate readers this idea [opportunity cost] is best understood as follows: You take a 'date' to a fashionable dinner party where you meet the person of your dreams. But, to get that person you would have to forego the mundane certainty of your existing date. Conversely loyalty to the 'date' costs you the 'opportunity' for beautiful person you fancy at the party. Sometimes you lose both because you can't forego either- Like the soon to be totally evicted Zim farmers.
So since the only mines that are likely to be functioning in Zambia are refurbished old mines with defective infrastructure and having been owned and run down by a variety of miners they probably have to produce at below cost to make the entire venture worthwhile. Zambian mines versus the declined opportunity to invest the capital in something more profitable. Naturally the workers are squeezed. One suspects that the Chinese would prefer to bring their own workers into the equation: their productive output is legendary- Presumably these workers are equally indefatigable come sun or snow- and we don't get much snow.
Zambian workers are discovering that globalization means Commoditisation of labour. According to legend Chinese workers work eight hours a day for a bowl of rice. Naturally Zambian workers fed on a different variation of Socialist dogma and long years of State protection are not enthusiastic to entertain their new owner's views on worker solidarity. This is not a popular idea anywhere and the backlash is building on the sidelines and in the margins. Zambian workers therefore trashed the Chinese Presidential party and behaved with similar rudeness to that recently meted out to our own beloved 'Thabo the Great' by disgruntled Amazulu.
In their thoroughly absorbing analysis of Africa's 'opportunistic shot' at resuscitated glory in the wake of the rise of China in which they suggest that 'Africa is to China today what Australia and Argentina were to the United States and - Europe in the late 19th century-.' The author's fall short of noting that in both cases colonial expansion into those countries involved the eradication of the indigenous population and its replacement by the sons and daughters of the colonizers who then created the thriving society's they are today- This suggests a latently sinister caveat to Africa's ' once-in-a-century opportunity to hitch its resource rich wagon to that rising eastern star' although the authors seem unaware of this.
Last Thursday I dined with a Zim farmer who had decided to go off to London for a few weeks to celebrate a family birthday with some of his émigré kids and wait until the dust settles on the latest round of evictions of White Zimbabwean farmers. The fellow said that the latest available evidence indicated that there are more Chinese citizens living and working in Zimbabwe today than there are of the former hated Colonialist Whiteys. There were once close to 300,000 'colonialists', and coincidently a relatively prosperous base for a progressively dynamic and developmental State. As recently as 1999 that same farmer was able to observe that his Zimbabwean 'Gold' card could be spent anywhere on earth, and we could not say that in this country then.
Now inflation is 1500 % percent and rising. The Reserve bank governor has just been fired, much to his relief I believe and there are now only about 10,000 of the much-despised 'whiteys'.
Conversely there were almost no Chinese residents in the auld 'Rhodesia' and today there are allegedly more than 10,000. A man who confessed to being 'an old China hand', a most congenial German traveller with whom I also guzzled nutritious liquids on a different occasion last week, said he'd felt nostalgic hearing familiar Chinese music being fed 'musak' style into the shopping mall at the Victoria Falls although he did find it 'weird'.
What he also found weird was that many items of 'tourist kit': shirts, tee shirts, scarves etc on sale with African ethnic motifs were made in China. He was unaware that at one time both Zimbabwe and Zambia had superb domestic clothing industries*. He did insist though that most of the places that have large Chinese populations are prosperous: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver; so may it work for Zimbabwe.
On the other hand this may be only a temporary situation. [* In fairness to the Chinese those clothing industries were badly damaged way back when- when it became possible to import second hand clothing into southern Africa from Europe's affluent consumer 'thro away' society, where much clothing is worn only occasionally before being discarded. High quality second hand European suits trumped local simply by 'brand' power.]
Now what is the point of this?
Now that I have read the thoroughly enlightening Scramble for Africa in the 21st Century I understand that Mugabe, acting on an impulse only accessible to the truly aged in both mind and spirit has chosen [on behalf of his now scattered people] to opt out of the modern world. Instinctively recognizing the epiphanous thesis now proposed by Michael Powers he has acknowledged defeat and he has chosen a route in complete contrast to that supposedly optimistic message promoted by our own beloved President's 'African Union' idea.
Mbeki's 'big idea' is that people are worth saving, especially so called 'African' people. Further: given the present brief opportunity presented by this sudden explosion of China into the Global equation we may, by garnering our every advantage, be able to catapult ourselves [Africa] into the mainstream global economy. This mainstream global economy is entirely based on an ever more sophisticated manipulation of knowledge. Extrapolating from the Powers Thesis we could see the advanced world leapfrogging into the new, post-information, post fossil-fuel era while the developing world plods on towards post-industrialism-
For Africa to prosper in the future, Africa itself must leapfrog that range of products that can be produced more inexpensively by the Chinese [or Vietnamese for that measure]. The model here [presented by the authors] is SASOL with its advanced fuel technology. It is a daring vision and provided we resist the new, left inspired drift to Chavez style 'new Socialism', under a future more 'populist' premier it may just come off, and anyway if we don't take our shot then we are truly doomed to trade minerals and sheepskins for the luxuries of life.
Mugabe on the other hand has done the 'doom' thing. He has decided that Development is an ignoble dream and a fantasy and he has opted out of modernity and is retreating back to the strategy of his seventeenth century forbears after they had evicted the Mozambiquans [aka white Portugese in those days] [circa 1650 AD after the famous 'Battle of Christmas Day' for those who are interested] and may yet evict the Chinese some eight or ten years from now.
Mugabe's 'big idea' is that Africa is terminally commoditised: so drive out all the 'superfluous' people. Then, allow those who don't go to die off from untreated disease- what various commentators have recently described as 'genocide by stealth'. Then grab all the sweetest growing places, hunker down and sit out the modern age until global warming brings the whole global house of cards tumbling down, or until the north pole melts or the next band of colonialist arrive to mess with reality: whatever.
The authors of 'Scramble for Africa' present a rosy hypothesis that Africa will somehow be a beneficiary of the new Chinese factor on planet earth- So far the signs are the familiar ones. Mugabe seems to have decided that 'all things being equal' the aspirations of his particular clique are caught in a time warp between the ultra-snotty Anglos and the super workaholic, haughty Chinos and the best thing to do is to retire from the game, sit op die plaas, and trade Chinese rice grown in Zim for 'I love Zim' tee shirts made in China.
The authors don't seem to have considered that by their own thesis China is our [African] deadliest competitor in almost our every field of economic excellence, and because of their well known ruthless disregard for human rights they can under-price us in every field where we do not have some unique added-value advantage to give us an edge- and anyone with the slightest understanding of the Product Life Cycle concept that is at the core Michael Power's thesis, as presented in those two excellent chapters 2& 3 [the heart of their book], will know that- advantage is a brief flung thing.
It once took a few thousand years for the knowledge of iron working to spread so widely as to render bronze weapons obsolete. Recently Stephen King proved empirically with his Internet 'book' [product] 'The Plant', that a product's life cycle from launch to commoditised death could be as little as three hours and dropping.
I see little real advantage to Africa from this present love affair with China. I see plenty of advantage for China. [ I also have some reservations about China's ongoing capacity to handle this interminable period of expansion but that is not going to help us] Economic reality suggests that the terms of trade have remained constant for millennia. Primary products such as agricultural goods, mined minerals, logs, enjoy a lower return than secondary goods produced in factories and other production facilities and value added products, branded goods and services yield a greater return on capital employed as a rule than that on primary goods and even than mass produced commodity goods.
The exceptions to these rules are usually derived from some form of artificial monopoly imposed through some form of authority and are not valid in a global market place where skills and capital are mobile and synthetics can trump natural resource monopolies such as the increasingly marginalised OPEC.
The primary producer who remains rooted in the primaries is doomed to despair in an evolving world notwithstanding the brave argument proposed by the authors. What we see currently is Chinese traders not Chinese industrialists although that may well come later [and of course we do have industrialists from that other rapidly emerging giant on the world economy India-. According to various outraged press reports Mittal Steel is not being nice to the local industry-. Oh really!]
It was the emergence of a huge and growing Industrial class in Australia and Argentina that generated the industrial expansion of those regions. Our need in Africa is to leapfrog into the post-industrial age or we shall have nothing to sell to the Chinese other than manganese, platinum, copper and gold. They may even be making BMW's for less than we currently sell them in Australia.
What bothers me most about this love affair we are experiencing with the rising eastern hegemon is that 'they' seem to be following a seriously thought out plan that doesn't measure time the way we do. We however are running out of electricity because it takes us too long to act and too long to choose a course of action.
The recent series of violent assaults on citizens of Somali extraction in parts of our country is not a happy harbinger of how tolerant incumbent opinion will be once a 'tipping point' occurs and the newcomers become overtly noticeable and local unemployment fails to decline from its presently high levels.
In the auld days one heard the mantra- 'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' [why Greeks? Who knows?] Perhaps a new interpretation for African success should go: 'beware of Chinese fortune cookies'.
Keep on blogging
Saturday, February 10, 2007
The trouble with crowds
While pondering the meaning of life and the great exstasies of existance this past month i gradually came to realise the wisdom of a goon show character. I too feel, more and more, that the real problem of our planet is not the question of poverty, not the problem of insufficient capacity, not the problem of crime, corruption, or venal abuse. There are plenty of schools. There are plenty of hospitals.There are enough police and police stations-. The real problem is none of these things.The real problem ...
The real problem is that there are too many people.
In the rising tide of rage that is being promoted and fanned by wave after wave of death, destruction, rape, slaughter, mayhem, chaotic response rates, there are all kinds of messages being sent in many ways; and many of these messages are confusing to say the least. It is my sense that it is the sheer profusion of superfluous people in many parts of the planet, that is in part responsible for a rising tide of incivility in our society while simultaneously the entire society seems to be bedding down and becoming more civilised.
After the past century the planet's population has trebled and we don't need to see Al Gore's seriously impressive 'doccie' to know that. We have done as much as possible to encourage more people but it is only those places where the levels have become catastrophic that any serious attempt has been made to discourage more people from coming into existence and the resistance to this latter process has been massive and the dislocation potentially even more catastrophic. So, for instance in our own country we have increasingly a system originally designed to service the needs of about five million people with expanded capacity under duress to about eight million people, now in our wonderfully more democratic times having to service the needs of forty five million people and possibly an unaccounted for [alleged] ten million extras: the so called 'illegals'. That the system continues to work as well as it does, and it does work reasonably well, is testimony to its inherent strengths- whether it can continue indefinitely without serious compromise is part of our challenge.
So first amongst these challenges: among the confusing signals being put out consistently in our perplexing system not least is the strange contrast between the response rates we have been used to and the response rates we are getting now [on occasion.] when we survive in increasingly violent brush with the law of the jungle.
For instance thirteen years ago [on September the eleventh] this writer was attacked and shot many time by a gang of unknown persons. I survived [obviously] and twelve days later after an intervention with the provincial minister of the time, one Ms Duarte, an interview with the police took place. Part of the police issue then, as they pointed out at the time was that there were eleven of us in the intensive care section of the best local hospital in the North east part of Jozi and that was just that weekend's toll at one of a few dozen medical facilities in the city. A year or so later I went to court and my testimony sent one of the surviving members of the gang, a man who had attempted to chop me up with a huge, sharpened, yellow handled screwdriver, to jail for ten years [where I understand he later died in a fight over the use of his rear end for carnal purposes.]
Now I read that a man was arrested for murdering a fellow raconteur and general imbiber of congenial tales [fellow of mine that is in the abstract since I never met or knew of the historian chap, 'Rattray' before this furore over his murder erupted]. Not only was a 'bad guy' arrested within the week, [good stuff] but he was TRIED, CONVICTED AND CONDEMMED to twenty five years 'inside' [and may inevitably be involved in male rape either as rapist or rapee or both and die of a mysterious unacknowledged [formally] ailment loosely referred to as HIVAids within a decade.]
And all this happened within ten days
As an historian myself albeit economic rather then military I have always enjoyed the story of Isandlwana and like the late Mr Rattray attribute its success to African/ Zulu genius as much as to Pom folly. So it is possible that the community that was the major beneficiary [in terms of kudos] of his apparently legendary oral skills, would have been sufficiently outraged by the murder of a most unusual 'whitey' to give up [one of] the baddies. In my readings of the universal truth of day-to-day reality there are not many such instances although the almost equally speedy arrest of a group of young men who violated, despoiled and then stabbed and stoned to death a 14 year old schoolgirl in my city this past week, Ms Thato Radebe, lends credence to the possibility that the system is functional, it is simply that there are too many people, that there is more crime than is absolutely normal. Presumably the actual trial will take a year or two.
I have no recollection of such speedy justice as that in the Rattray murder since reading Athol Fugard's moving testimonies about the trials of Pass law offenders during the fifties and sixties- which according to his testimony as a former courtroom employee lasted on average two minutes. We are all agreed that those trials hardly represented justice at all, rather they were the epitome of injustice. .
While I rejoice that some justice has been served I am concerned as to whether the prisoner's rights were fully respected. Yeah I know, I'm sorry- I think the bad guy is a scumbag too, I just prefer to know that I have the real scumbag and not an accidental one, or one put into my space to placate me, or even [further horror] to misdirect me- Abracadabra!!!
The question. Does the news that the illustrious Charles Windsor had a hand in the foreword to Mr Rattray's forthcoming new definitive history of things Zulu-ish have anything to do with this almost unseemly speed? There is a sense of the Imperial response in this post-haste affair. Justice has not really been served perhaps; so much as vengeance has been extracted.
What kind of power can intervene to cause a single case to proceed at such speed that we are bedazzled at its speed and overjoyed to know what the dimension of the possible truly is; while recognising its almost criminal haste in the wake of a common enough reality: which is that it can take twelve days for someone in authority to even answer the phone..
Again the problem seems to be, not the absence of functional systems but rather an excess of people. This has given rise to a disproportionate number of people in our liberated age who avail themselves of the opportunity to behave without regard to civility. And one suspects that it is this rising tide of brutality accompanying the crime rather than the actual crimes themselves that is as much the problem as the nature of criminality itself, which face has been endemic for decades.
It is this constant litany of stories of brutality and random gratuitous murder that keep making headline news and they are horrible and real. A single day's news is equal to a year in some parts of the world: babies are butchered before breakfast, young girls eviscerated over lunch, old men are beaten with bricks and crushed and strangled as a dinner aperitif. Torture of bystanders has become a standard accompaniment to assault, burglary and robbery. Security guards are burnt to death in their vehicles, young men hijacked and burnt to death locked into the boots of their cars, a young man of my acquaintance gratuitously shot down while walking in a public park- no robbery took place, the list is endless- We are at war with ourselves as some commentators have suggested.
On the other hand last Sunday I drove some 350 kilometres around the region North West of my home city, Jozi up to Platinum country and back, on a circular rural route and never saw one single patrolling police vehicle on the entire journey that in any way intruded on my consciousness. My entire journey took place on normal roads not highways and I encountered no violence, aggression, hostility, rage or any other suppressed bullshit on the part of the presumably thousands of other road users that day. It was a most excellent drive and a most congenial day.
Then there is the empirical evidence provided by my neighbouring suburb- the once fiendish 'Dark City' [although no longer dark by night but well lit with modern streetlight-] I have a note in my diary for June 1992 that I stopped counting the gunshots, and had only been doing so randomly anyway, when the gunfire subsided for a moment and then resumed and one caught the clutter of rounds blasting across the horizon line.
Nowadays I hear almost no gunfire at all sometimes resounding through the neighbourhood for weeks at a time-. And even then it could simply be firecrackers.
This past week I drove past a young woman, running, or should one rather say jogging, down the street in which I live. I wouldn't do it, but her perception of risk indicated that she saw no problem, notwithstanding that it was dusk and darkness was almost upon us. Perhaps she ran on faith. My own daughter has on a few occasions ventured into the streets of our suburbs and made it up the hill and back without incident- I wouldn't do it myself but I am happy that others more vulnerable than me can do it with alacrity.
I also had a pleasant conversation with a man in another suburb about twenty kilometres from mine, that also borders on a traditional zone for the formerly dispossessed. I was guarding the car while my director general was organising something with a resident, and looking about me I was struck by the absence of barbed wire and electric fencing and commented about it when the opportunity arose to one of the residents. He seemed puzzled by my question and referred to some incidents a decade ago. It seemed his was a neighbourhood without the plague of random criminality
My point here is that there are many messages that indicate that the worst of the post-revolution era is over and that South Africa is becoming a normal society- perhaps this is why the high profile stuff that does happen is so freaky there are now more than twice as many people as there were fifteen years ago who have everything to lose from random violence; and perhaps it is in this element of transformation that our seemingly oblivious leadership is most retarded. Fifteen years ago life was 'nasty brutal and short' for most citizens with no glimmer of hope on the horizon. Today life is sweet for a huge number of people: maybe half the citizenry- and the reminder that it is often also nasty, brutish and can be cut short at a moment's notice is an increasing source of rage and extreme anxiety.
Another thing that bothers me about many of these more high profile murders is that they so often seem to be orchestrated by employees, or rather disgruntled employees of their victims- Take that Rattray fellow for instance. He was allegedly murdered by a disgruntled employee.
A while back a disgruntled employee murdered an old acquaintance, Ian Gillies, outside his restaurant in Craighall Park [one of two people I knew last year who were murdered ]. In between this I'm sure I've read of a few hundred cases where a disgruntled employee murders his ex- boss, or other person representing the boss. Recently a farm manager, one 'Eva', was butchered by dozens of humans in Natal who may or may not have been employees. I haven't read anything about a speedy trial in that case but maybe I missed an edition or two. There's even been more than a few murders of bosses and colleagues in a wave of post-disciplinary hearing fury.
On the other hand I haven't read anything much on the possible sequel to the so-called 'laundry murders' where the employers on this occasion were alleged to have murdered disgruntled employees, first [their bodies were discovered by other employees in assembled laundry baskets when the came to work]. This case somehow died through mal-collected evidence: rather the way some of Mr Zuma's most damming evidence was discounted in his recent alleged rape trial, due to failure of due process.
So what can we make of this - A system that can be devastatingly quick when it wants to be but generally cramps along, because no one can sustain that level of output over the total spread of human cases.
There is the conspiracy theory part as well of course but as you all know by now I generally believe, from a lifetime of dedicated interaction with humans, that we are as a species too stupid to be able to sustain anything but a tacit unthinking conspiracy. {I don't intend to be rude about my more clever fellow humans I am simply restating well known facts about the overwhelming number of sub-normal intelligence abounding on the planet] This alleged conspiracy holds that the future [of our country] would be best served by the disappearance of the most disliked colonialists. This is not an overt wish it is covert, locked into the very fabric of struggle politics, and the resistance, which is still being felt.
Perhaps it is not in the interests of the new ruling class that they have to continue indefinitely to deal with an arrogant and inherently intransigent deposed former ruling class. If in your heart of heats you don't truly believe the cake will ever become large enough to feed the growing tide of humans wanting a piece for themselves then perhaps it is inevitable that the lemming mindset that dominates human mass action will lead to an exclusionist future. Perhaps it is this that is represented in the feral images on ancient San rock paintings- the feral knowledge of impending engulfment.
Some commentators have got the picture this week- this violent climaxing is inevitable and has less to do with poverty than it has to do with the chaotic space that erupts during a pitched all out turf war. There are faceless forces at work here the random agents of chaos who seek out new turf in the vacuum left by the collapse of the old order- We are perhaps entering an era of barbarism similar to that, which engulfed the civilized world after the sacking of Rome. We are in the era of incivility promoted by the seemingly endless stream of additional humanity that has poured into our space to overwhelm inadequate infrastructures.
I suspect that our beloved leader and his favourite party apparatchiks are as much spectators to this unfolding crime drama as the rest of us, for there are forces of history at work here which we are almost powerless to overcome so divided are we between ourselves and between our range of conflicting sub-texts.
Nonetheless i do think it ios interesting that we have just had this bedding down business with the visiting Chinese Premier. If ever a place represents what to do with too many people it is that place.
Cheers: keep on blogging
The real problem is that there are too many people.
In the rising tide of rage that is being promoted and fanned by wave after wave of death, destruction, rape, slaughter, mayhem, chaotic response rates, there are all kinds of messages being sent in many ways; and many of these messages are confusing to say the least. It is my sense that it is the sheer profusion of superfluous people in many parts of the planet, that is in part responsible for a rising tide of incivility in our society while simultaneously the entire society seems to be bedding down and becoming more civilised.
After the past century the planet's population has trebled and we don't need to see Al Gore's seriously impressive 'doccie' to know that. We have done as much as possible to encourage more people but it is only those places where the levels have become catastrophic that any serious attempt has been made to discourage more people from coming into existence and the resistance to this latter process has been massive and the dislocation potentially even more catastrophic. So, for instance in our own country we have increasingly a system originally designed to service the needs of about five million people with expanded capacity under duress to about eight million people, now in our wonderfully more democratic times having to service the needs of forty five million people and possibly an unaccounted for [alleged] ten million extras: the so called 'illegals'. That the system continues to work as well as it does, and it does work reasonably well, is testimony to its inherent strengths- whether it can continue indefinitely without serious compromise is part of our challenge.
So first amongst these challenges: among the confusing signals being put out consistently in our perplexing system not least is the strange contrast between the response rates we have been used to and the response rates we are getting now [on occasion.] when we survive in increasingly violent brush with the law of the jungle.
For instance thirteen years ago [on September the eleventh] this writer was attacked and shot many time by a gang of unknown persons. I survived [obviously] and twelve days later after an intervention with the provincial minister of the time, one Ms Duarte, an interview with the police took place. Part of the police issue then, as they pointed out at the time was that there were eleven of us in the intensive care section of the best local hospital in the North east part of Jozi and that was just that weekend's toll at one of a few dozen medical facilities in the city. A year or so later I went to court and my testimony sent one of the surviving members of the gang, a man who had attempted to chop me up with a huge, sharpened, yellow handled screwdriver, to jail for ten years [where I understand he later died in a fight over the use of his rear end for carnal purposes.]
Now I read that a man was arrested for murdering a fellow raconteur and general imbiber of congenial tales [fellow of mine that is in the abstract since I never met or knew of the historian chap, 'Rattray' before this furore over his murder erupted]. Not only was a 'bad guy' arrested within the week, [good stuff] but he was TRIED, CONVICTED AND CONDEMMED to twenty five years 'inside' [and may inevitably be involved in male rape either as rapist or rapee or both and die of a mysterious unacknowledged [formally] ailment loosely referred to as HIVAids within a decade.]
And all this happened within ten days
As an historian myself albeit economic rather then military I have always enjoyed the story of Isandlwana and like the late Mr Rattray attribute its success to African/ Zulu genius as much as to Pom folly. So it is possible that the community that was the major beneficiary [in terms of kudos] of his apparently legendary oral skills, would have been sufficiently outraged by the murder of a most unusual 'whitey' to give up [one of] the baddies. In my readings of the universal truth of day-to-day reality there are not many such instances although the almost equally speedy arrest of a group of young men who violated, despoiled and then stabbed and stoned to death a 14 year old schoolgirl in my city this past week, Ms Thato Radebe, lends credence to the possibility that the system is functional, it is simply that there are too many people, that there is more crime than is absolutely normal. Presumably the actual trial will take a year or two.
I have no recollection of such speedy justice as that in the Rattray murder since reading Athol Fugard's moving testimonies about the trials of Pass law offenders during the fifties and sixties- which according to his testimony as a former courtroom employee lasted on average two minutes. We are all agreed that those trials hardly represented justice at all, rather they were the epitome of injustice. .
While I rejoice that some justice has been served I am concerned as to whether the prisoner's rights were fully respected. Yeah I know, I'm sorry- I think the bad guy is a scumbag too, I just prefer to know that I have the real scumbag and not an accidental one, or one put into my space to placate me, or even [further horror] to misdirect me- Abracadabra!!!
The question. Does the news that the illustrious Charles Windsor had a hand in the foreword to Mr Rattray's forthcoming new definitive history of things Zulu-ish have anything to do with this almost unseemly speed? There is a sense of the Imperial response in this post-haste affair. Justice has not really been served perhaps; so much as vengeance has been extracted.
What kind of power can intervene to cause a single case to proceed at such speed that we are bedazzled at its speed and overjoyed to know what the dimension of the possible truly is; while recognising its almost criminal haste in the wake of a common enough reality: which is that it can take twelve days for someone in authority to even answer the phone..
Again the problem seems to be, not the absence of functional systems but rather an excess of people. This has given rise to a disproportionate number of people in our liberated age who avail themselves of the opportunity to behave without regard to civility. And one suspects that it is this rising tide of brutality accompanying the crime rather than the actual crimes themselves that is as much the problem as the nature of criminality itself, which face has been endemic for decades.
It is this constant litany of stories of brutality and random gratuitous murder that keep making headline news and they are horrible and real. A single day's news is equal to a year in some parts of the world: babies are butchered before breakfast, young girls eviscerated over lunch, old men are beaten with bricks and crushed and strangled as a dinner aperitif. Torture of bystanders has become a standard accompaniment to assault, burglary and robbery. Security guards are burnt to death in their vehicles, young men hijacked and burnt to death locked into the boots of their cars, a young man of my acquaintance gratuitously shot down while walking in a public park- no robbery took place, the list is endless- We are at war with ourselves as some commentators have suggested.
On the other hand last Sunday I drove some 350 kilometres around the region North West of my home city, Jozi up to Platinum country and back, on a circular rural route and never saw one single patrolling police vehicle on the entire journey that in any way intruded on my consciousness. My entire journey took place on normal roads not highways and I encountered no violence, aggression, hostility, rage or any other suppressed bullshit on the part of the presumably thousands of other road users that day. It was a most excellent drive and a most congenial day.
Then there is the empirical evidence provided by my neighbouring suburb- the once fiendish 'Dark City' [although no longer dark by night but well lit with modern streetlight-] I have a note in my diary for June 1992 that I stopped counting the gunshots, and had only been doing so randomly anyway, when the gunfire subsided for a moment and then resumed and one caught the clutter of rounds blasting across the horizon line.
Nowadays I hear almost no gunfire at all sometimes resounding through the neighbourhood for weeks at a time-. And even then it could simply be firecrackers.
This past week I drove past a young woman, running, or should one rather say jogging, down the street in which I live. I wouldn't do it, but her perception of risk indicated that she saw no problem, notwithstanding that it was dusk and darkness was almost upon us. Perhaps she ran on faith. My own daughter has on a few occasions ventured into the streets of our suburbs and made it up the hill and back without incident- I wouldn't do it myself but I am happy that others more vulnerable than me can do it with alacrity.
I also had a pleasant conversation with a man in another suburb about twenty kilometres from mine, that also borders on a traditional zone for the formerly dispossessed. I was guarding the car while my director general was organising something with a resident, and looking about me I was struck by the absence of barbed wire and electric fencing and commented about it when the opportunity arose to one of the residents. He seemed puzzled by my question and referred to some incidents a decade ago. It seemed his was a neighbourhood without the plague of random criminality
My point here is that there are many messages that indicate that the worst of the post-revolution era is over and that South Africa is becoming a normal society- perhaps this is why the high profile stuff that does happen is so freaky there are now more than twice as many people as there were fifteen years ago who have everything to lose from random violence; and perhaps it is in this element of transformation that our seemingly oblivious leadership is most retarded. Fifteen years ago life was 'nasty brutal and short' for most citizens with no glimmer of hope on the horizon. Today life is sweet for a huge number of people: maybe half the citizenry- and the reminder that it is often also nasty, brutish and can be cut short at a moment's notice is an increasing source of rage and extreme anxiety.
Another thing that bothers me about many of these more high profile murders is that they so often seem to be orchestrated by employees, or rather disgruntled employees of their victims- Take that Rattray fellow for instance. He was allegedly murdered by a disgruntled employee.
A while back a disgruntled employee murdered an old acquaintance, Ian Gillies, outside his restaurant in Craighall Park [one of two people I knew last year who were murdered ]. In between this I'm sure I've read of a few hundred cases where a disgruntled employee murders his ex- boss, or other person representing the boss. Recently a farm manager, one 'Eva', was butchered by dozens of humans in Natal who may or may not have been employees. I haven't read anything about a speedy trial in that case but maybe I missed an edition or two. There's even been more than a few murders of bosses and colleagues in a wave of post-disciplinary hearing fury.
On the other hand I haven't read anything much on the possible sequel to the so-called 'laundry murders' where the employers on this occasion were alleged to have murdered disgruntled employees, first [their bodies were discovered by other employees in assembled laundry baskets when the came to work]. This case somehow died through mal-collected evidence: rather the way some of Mr Zuma's most damming evidence was discounted in his recent alleged rape trial, due to failure of due process.
So what can we make of this - A system that can be devastatingly quick when it wants to be but generally cramps along, because no one can sustain that level of output over the total spread of human cases.
There is the conspiracy theory part as well of course but as you all know by now I generally believe, from a lifetime of dedicated interaction with humans, that we are as a species too stupid to be able to sustain anything but a tacit unthinking conspiracy. {I don't intend to be rude about my more clever fellow humans I am simply restating well known facts about the overwhelming number of sub-normal intelligence abounding on the planet] This alleged conspiracy holds that the future [of our country] would be best served by the disappearance of the most disliked colonialists. This is not an overt wish it is covert, locked into the very fabric of struggle politics, and the resistance, which is still being felt.
Perhaps it is not in the interests of the new ruling class that they have to continue indefinitely to deal with an arrogant and inherently intransigent deposed former ruling class. If in your heart of heats you don't truly believe the cake will ever become large enough to feed the growing tide of humans wanting a piece for themselves then perhaps it is inevitable that the lemming mindset that dominates human mass action will lead to an exclusionist future. Perhaps it is this that is represented in the feral images on ancient San rock paintings- the feral knowledge of impending engulfment.
Some commentators have got the picture this week- this violent climaxing is inevitable and has less to do with poverty than it has to do with the chaotic space that erupts during a pitched all out turf war. There are faceless forces at work here the random agents of chaos who seek out new turf in the vacuum left by the collapse of the old order- We are perhaps entering an era of barbarism similar to that, which engulfed the civilized world after the sacking of Rome. We are in the era of incivility promoted by the seemingly endless stream of additional humanity that has poured into our space to overwhelm inadequate infrastructures.
I suspect that our beloved leader and his favourite party apparatchiks are as much spectators to this unfolding crime drama as the rest of us, for there are forces of history at work here which we are almost powerless to overcome so divided are we between ourselves and between our range of conflicting sub-texts.
Nonetheless i do think it ios interesting that we have just had this bedding down business with the visiting Chinese Premier. If ever a place represents what to do with too many people it is that place.
Cheers: keep on blogging
Never look back - something....
Weblog 10/02/07
Last year I wrote about resolving to resolve when it came to making changes to one's life as part of the New Year renewal thing that it has become fashionable now to avoid. I did none of that now. In fact I completely avoided January and have even managed to avoid nearly half of February.
I just took a five-to ten-week break from the world of careful caring about the day to dayness of living. Just went out and about around the city eating here, there and in many other places- hardly turned the computer on, never mind actually sat down and wrote something.
And I lounged around for days at a time and read books. Not many, a dozen overall and four of them in great detail. Enough to shift focus and discover new ideas; and confirm existing suspicions and also give shape, to ideas I have been formulating for awhile-It was a great break. I did get bad sunburn sitting in my Jacuzzi one morning reading Steven Levitt's Freakonomics; so bad that I gave myself a basal carcinoma on the chest, which has had to be painfully treated with blade and fire. Ag sis.
One of the more bureaucratic things that I did was to get into my office which has been gradually overwhelming me, revise that, it had overwhelmed me; and I carried out a ruthless 'fat paper' explosion, mainly relating to the notes I use for my day job; and threw almost everything away- There was catharsis: both a cleansing and a renewal.
Somewhere in the mass of stuff I gathered up from the copious drawers of past experience was a faded sheet of A4 paper on which I had once scrawled out a collection of 'rules for right living' handed down by one Satchel Paige.
The once lined now faded sheet of otherwise yellowed paper is pocked with pinholes from all the times it has been pinned up somewhere and then taken down again. On the other hand maybe they are holes caused by some paper-eating insect that may have lived behind the place where the page was pinned? -. Naaa: pin holes.
I had no idea who Satchel Paige was when I collected his dictums and it seems to have predated the internet when one is daily bombarded with cute axioms and pithy saying of all kinds of people daily by one's associates with nothing else to do except play on the Internet daily and farm for such trivia. So I presume I saw it somewhere and liked it and wrote it down and have been broadly following them ever since - amongst following a few hundred other dictums as well.
Later I discovered that he was a famous American baseball player noted for breaking the existing mould of his times and coming out triumphant over terrible odds. What I read about him made me happy that I had chosen his words as my resolve for that particular year whenever it was back when.
I also cant remember why I decided to note down these dictums or what I expected to have happen as a result of reading them and acting upon them- save that it has always proved useful advice. I do remember that my life seemed like a head on collision with reality most of the time. What was going on and how the fujck did one cope with a world of continuous and coruscating changes in the stream of hassling insanity that buzzed through each day's uncertainties.
Maybe it was a bizarre form of mentorship.
Satchel Paige's Rules for right living:
'¢ Avoid fried foods which angry up the blood.
'¢ If your stomach disputes you lie down and pacify it with cooling thoughts.
'¢ Keep the juice flowing by jangling around gently while you move
'¢ Go lightly on the vices such as 'carrying on in society' The social ramble ain't restful.
'¢ Avoid running at all times.
'¢ Don't look back something may be gaining on you.
The next piece is also written on the same piece of paper, but after a separating zig- zag scrawl and was not, i believe, one of Paige's dictum's it may have been one of mine, or maybe it came from somewhere else, who knows. It may have been a response to the seemingly constant battering from the universe in the form of adverse daily life that one experiences sometimes. And you have to slow it down somehow and take hold of it.
'¢ Do not become attached. Do not identify with what you do turn down the noise in your mind.
This is going to be a different year to what we expect [should we be expecting something, rather than complacently taking what comes on the chin] So I'll repeat what I said about coping with the blast that is to come.
'¢ Practice cheerfulness daily in 2007
Then there are three vexatious little affirmations that I embarked on in 1998 derived from a book dropped into my letterbox by a human who was stalking me for about a year once, during an insane period of attrition. No. Don't ask why: I don't know. It just happened and it was weird. I also don't remember which book it was of the thousands in my library other than that it had something to do with Joy. It was a difficult year.
'¢ Avoid judgements.
'¢ Avoid comparisons
'¢ And most vexatiously- Delete the need to understand..
Keep on blogging
Cheers.
NiK
Resolving to resolve
Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.
Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.
Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.
Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.
However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.
For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.
The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..
So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.
Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.
They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.
Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.
The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.
I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a negative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.
I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.
In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.
It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.
So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.
Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.
One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.
As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.
So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.
Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK
Last year I wrote about resolving to resolve when it came to making changes to one's life as part of the New Year renewal thing that it has become fashionable now to avoid. I did none of that now. In fact I completely avoided January and have even managed to avoid nearly half of February.
I just took a five-to ten-week break from the world of careful caring about the day to dayness of living. Just went out and about around the city eating here, there and in many other places- hardly turned the computer on, never mind actually sat down and wrote something.
And I lounged around for days at a time and read books. Not many, a dozen overall and four of them in great detail. Enough to shift focus and discover new ideas; and confirm existing suspicions and also give shape, to ideas I have been formulating for awhile-It was a great break. I did get bad sunburn sitting in my Jacuzzi one morning reading Steven Levitt's Freakonomics; so bad that I gave myself a basal carcinoma on the chest, which has had to be painfully treated with blade and fire. Ag sis.
One of the more bureaucratic things that I did was to get into my office which has been gradually overwhelming me, revise that, it had overwhelmed me; and I carried out a ruthless 'fat paper' explosion, mainly relating to the notes I use for my day job; and threw almost everything away- There was catharsis: both a cleansing and a renewal.
Somewhere in the mass of stuff I gathered up from the copious drawers of past experience was a faded sheet of A4 paper on which I had once scrawled out a collection of 'rules for right living' handed down by one Satchel Paige.
The once lined now faded sheet of otherwise yellowed paper is pocked with pinholes from all the times it has been pinned up somewhere and then taken down again. On the other hand maybe they are holes caused by some paper-eating insect that may have lived behind the place where the page was pinned? -. Naaa: pin holes.
I had no idea who Satchel Paige was when I collected his dictums and it seems to have predated the internet when one is daily bombarded with cute axioms and pithy saying of all kinds of people daily by one's associates with nothing else to do except play on the Internet daily and farm for such trivia. So I presume I saw it somewhere and liked it and wrote it down and have been broadly following them ever since - amongst following a few hundred other dictums as well.
Later I discovered that he was a famous American baseball player noted for breaking the existing mould of his times and coming out triumphant over terrible odds. What I read about him made me happy that I had chosen his words as my resolve for that particular year whenever it was back when.
I also cant remember why I decided to note down these dictums or what I expected to have happen as a result of reading them and acting upon them- save that it has always proved useful advice. I do remember that my life seemed like a head on collision with reality most of the time. What was going on and how the fujck did one cope with a world of continuous and coruscating changes in the stream of hassling insanity that buzzed through each day's uncertainties.
Maybe it was a bizarre form of mentorship.
Satchel Paige's Rules for right living:
'¢ Avoid fried foods which angry up the blood.
'¢ If your stomach disputes you lie down and pacify it with cooling thoughts.
'¢ Keep the juice flowing by jangling around gently while you move
'¢ Go lightly on the vices such as 'carrying on in society' The social ramble ain't restful.
'¢ Avoid running at all times.
'¢ Don't look back something may be gaining on you.
The next piece is also written on the same piece of paper, but after a separating zig- zag scrawl and was not, i believe, one of Paige's dictum's it may have been one of mine, or maybe it came from somewhere else, who knows. It may have been a response to the seemingly constant battering from the universe in the form of adverse daily life that one experiences sometimes. And you have to slow it down somehow and take hold of it.
'¢ Do not become attached. Do not identify with what you do turn down the noise in your mind.
This is going to be a different year to what we expect [should we be expecting something, rather than complacently taking what comes on the chin] So I'll repeat what I said about coping with the blast that is to come.
'¢ Practice cheerfulness daily in 2007
Then there are three vexatious little affirmations that I embarked on in 1998 derived from a book dropped into my letterbox by a human who was stalking me for about a year once, during an insane period of attrition. No. Don't ask why: I don't know. It just happened and it was weird. I also don't remember which book it was of the thousands in my library other than that it had something to do with Joy. It was a difficult year.
'¢ Avoid judgements.
'¢ Avoid comparisons
'¢ And most vexatiously- Delete the need to understand..
Keep on blogging
Cheers.
NiK
Resolving to resolve
Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.
Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.
Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.
Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.
However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.
For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.
The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..
So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.
Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.
They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.
Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.
The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.
I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a negative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.
I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.
In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.
It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.
So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.
Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.
One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.
As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.
So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.
Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK
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