This is the blog after Christmas and all through the land
not a pay cheque is rustling
nor a till going Ka ching.
What is it that has caused this terrible thing?
In a nutshell bru: trustbust
A credit crunch that persists for over a year and shows no significant sign of ending is
a prime indicator. Who ever heard of an institutional memory that lasted longer than about seven seconds? … That it has lasted so long as a year is a sign that the core signifier Trust is mortally wounded.
The financial industry is not noted for integrity.
Perhaps bankers were once noted for integrity but that was in the days when they controlled money
Today any business with a huge and consistent cash flow is also a banker and the rules have become blurred.
Then bankers had the bright idea that if supermarkets could become bankers then why shouldn’t bankers become supermarkets where they market money as a product…. and the rest is history.
John Ralston Saul argues that the core of our modern crisis is that the world of finance, money and the products they grease on their way has become managerialised: if I may coin a word.
Managers manage problems they don’t solve them.
If he is right then settle down for a prolonged recession [He says that today’s “managerial” class [of both politicians and business leaders] refuse to acknowledge that the world is in an economic DEPRESSION because it implies something that cannot be “managed” but rather has top be “solved”.
For myself I shall ignore it all and hope it goes away by the time I die eventually of serious old age in about a century or so.
Trust is the basic cornerstone of a thriving society. Capitalism is founded on two core human vices: Self interest and greed. The people who hold the money are not supposed to be motivated by these vices. For them self interest requires absolute integrity. Is this possible in a freebooting market economy in which the bankers are also product merchants and their business model requires a diet of mergers and acquisitions that have now outpaced the market’s natural ability to generate businesses that are available to acquire, or with which to merge.
The downside is that these behemoth businesses have faltering models. They cannot get the finance from the places that traditionally supply credit and it may be too late for many by the time a modicum of trust re emerges.
Ho hum
***********************************************
The poet ruminates on an endemic
cycle of poverty
Buying Christmas presents
And
The rule
Of
BuyaChristmas
Presentorbedammed
applied
And dammed I
Was.
Save all year ‘till
Come December
Granny grandpa mom n dad
Little brother, cousins: bad
Aunty’s gone
All money’s gone, squandered
And spent in
Lieue
Of Santa:
Out dammed cash
'till we have none.
!Nik[08]
Now here’s a word from my sponsor [me]
The following piece is extracted from my forthcoming novel The Jonker Memorandum. Toward the end of the first quarter I shall begin the readings of my new novel on You Tube: address to be advised.
I believe that I have more chance in today’s climate of getting listeners to my book rather than readers. Hopefully my listeners will also become readers thereby justifying my faith in the universe/multiverse.
A Superfluity of rights.
The human being may be described as the
lowest form of life on earth.
Since it [human being] is the most recent form to evolve.
It is therefore the one most likely to be capable
of further mutation [one step two step];
to become as much as it can be, through
application of mind - Or
it can choose to discard the mind as many do
in pursuit of the transient instant as
was done in their turn by all
the other living entities on the planet.
What if we are here
to consume the planet
and in some way through our
growth
and development
we achieve a critical mass that will spark off
The next phase in our
Evolution… our revelation of transformation: the moment of our fabled
Rapture
Shall we ask then… come back later please?
Professor Oram Mangosti !0th Freedom lecture 2130 AD.
From the Jonker Memeorandum
By !NiK[08]
Friday, December 26, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Obama and Hobson's choice
Emotion aside and notwithstanding the vast debts that he will inherit Mr Barak Obama has only two choices. He has to spend more money he doesn't have to solve a problem he did not create OR ....
Oh gosh is there another choice?
Oh yes he can raise taxes to pay for the cost of the big repair job he has to pull on the USA, if the place is to have a prosperous future... The US market economy is, in many key areas too Oligopolistic for its own good and it needs to get back to the core principles.
And Gosh again, that will take us back to where we have been... If you burn your hand once putting it on the hot stove [and we have probably put our hands on the stove often] should we demonstrate stupidity by doing it again/
However we need taxes, and Mr Obama a tech savvy man one understands has got a lever no national leader in the so - called free world has ever had before ... HE HAS HIS FOOT ON THE THROAT OF THE FINANCIAL SPECULATOR PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE COLLECTION OF WOEFUL MISBEGOTTEN THIEVING MISFIT BANKERS LIKE NO LEADER HAS HAD IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
This means that he can do something no political leader has ever been really able to do ... dip directly in the fast flowing financial stream.
By tapping into the national payments system with a democratatically controlled micro levy on all financial transactions BO is in a position to effect a revolution in taxation theory on a par with discovering theat the world was not flat.
A micro levy on payments through the system places the burden of tax on all who use the system according to the size of the transaction. This relaeses money at the present end; where its existance is a haemorrage scale wound on upwardly mobile aspirants. How can the state take taxes from a person [citizen] and then allow the money that could have saved the mortgage not be used to help that person out... [sic] on enterprise?
Mr Obama can do what others have done: vast socialist type public works exercises have been successful in the past and will undoubtedly be so again... especally since the advent of the [un] free [oligopoly prone] mass marketing era has seen financial rape of the people become de rigeur [sic].
Logic suggests that the switch of core taxation from an "earner pays" to a "user pays" format would be more efficient than the present system and would involve less conflict wityh the presently overburdened taxpayer and would therefopre facilitate a faster turnaround in the coming New Depression... the word that no one dares to name..
We have recently learned that the USA has been in recession for a year now and shows no immediate signs of remediation... How many months do the facile "coupon clipping" managers of our managerial capitalist bureacratic "sclerotic" global economic system have to let pass by, before they realise that this probnlem needs a permanent solution... These solutions that have us prey to the booms and busts caused by predatory hordes of gloriously well fed and nourished piranha class financial speculators must come to an end, now that we have entered the era of elecronic funds transfers.
Unless you think it is all going to end in a year or two in the "end of days" event long heralded, by the irrationalist class, with its magisterial final cataclism... In which case then lets us by all means follow the same path as that which has stood us well for a few thousand years.
Oh gosh is there another choice?
Oh yes he can raise taxes to pay for the cost of the big repair job he has to pull on the USA, if the place is to have a prosperous future... The US market economy is, in many key areas too Oligopolistic for its own good and it needs to get back to the core principles.
And Gosh again, that will take us back to where we have been... If you burn your hand once putting it on the hot stove [and we have probably put our hands on the stove often] should we demonstrate stupidity by doing it again/
However we need taxes, and Mr Obama a tech savvy man one understands has got a lever no national leader in the so - called free world has ever had before ... HE HAS HIS FOOT ON THE THROAT OF THE FINANCIAL SPECULATOR PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE COLLECTION OF WOEFUL MISBEGOTTEN THIEVING MISFIT BANKERS LIKE NO LEADER HAS HAD IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
This means that he can do something no political leader has ever been really able to do ... dip directly in the fast flowing financial stream.
By tapping into the national payments system with a democratatically controlled micro levy on all financial transactions BO is in a position to effect a revolution in taxation theory on a par with discovering theat the world was not flat.
A micro levy on payments through the system places the burden of tax on all who use the system according to the size of the transaction. This relaeses money at the present end; where its existance is a haemorrage scale wound on upwardly mobile aspirants. How can the state take taxes from a person [citizen] and then allow the money that could have saved the mortgage not be used to help that person out... [sic] on enterprise?
Mr Obama can do what others have done: vast socialist type public works exercises have been successful in the past and will undoubtedly be so again... especally since the advent of the [un] free [oligopoly prone] mass marketing era has seen financial rape of the people become de rigeur [sic].
Logic suggests that the switch of core taxation from an "earner pays" to a "user pays" format would be more efficient than the present system and would involve less conflict wityh the presently overburdened taxpayer and would therefopre facilitate a faster turnaround in the coming New Depression... the word that no one dares to name..
We have recently learned that the USA has been in recession for a year now and shows no immediate signs of remediation... How many months do the facile "coupon clipping" managers of our managerial capitalist bureacratic "sclerotic" global economic system have to let pass by, before they realise that this probnlem needs a permanent solution... These solutions that have us prey to the booms and busts caused by predatory hordes of gloriously well fed and nourished piranha class financial speculators must come to an end, now that we have entered the era of elecronic funds transfers.
Unless you think it is all going to end in a year or two in the "end of days" event long heralded, by the irrationalist class, with its magisterial final cataclism... In which case then lets us by all means follow the same path as that which has stood us well for a few thousand years.
I posted the following pi9ece on my archive blog: nik.amagama.com last year in April and suddenly in the past few weeks i have received more than 4000 pieces of highly targeted [ito source and nature of sender] spam mail off the site. No response to requests has prevailed so i am goimng to amputate the piece from my old now redundant blog and i'm moving it here so i remember what brought the biggest heap of spam to break through all the filters.
“To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment
April 17th, 2007 by nik
A story running on M & G online [to the average joe blogs aren't cutting it April 14] suggests that the blogging phenomenon has perhaps peaked. According to the writer [quoting the agency Technorati]the total number of bloggists in English has remained static at around 24 million bloggers, many of whom are probably duplicate bloggers like myself. The writer also comments [sourly]on the limited number of journalism students who routinely blog and states that it [the writer] has tired of asked for a ‘hands up’ from classes, regarding ‘who blogs?’, because the response is so piss poor. The writer concludes that blogging is a minority occupation. Coincidentally I have also noted that I have encountered very few ‘hands ups’ from anybody who even knows what blogging is, in my own routine probing of the subject over the past few years.
Curiously by contrast ‘click online’ the BBC’s weekly analysis of Internet affairs, headlines, this week, the way that bloggers successfully thwart all Internet attempts at censorship. So while blogging may be a minority activity it is certainly an influential one, influential enough that the mainstream media are desperately appropriating the concept in an attempt to smother its effectiveness..
What is of interest to me however is the idea that the number of bloggists has peaked at around 24 million [English speakers] The writer does refer to another 50 million or so bloggers who write in other languages: these are not of concern to me in this blog. I would be inclined to agree with the M&G writer that blogging could actually be in decline, once one accepts that huge numbers of bloggers are not regular bloggers nor are all bloggers separate individuals, but like myself may well blog under many separate names in different places.
It seems to me though that there could be various reasons why blogging appears to have peaked [or may have peaked] in the English-speaking world: declining levels of literacy, the appropriation of blogging by the mainstream corporatocracy, the loneliness of the random bloggist and the sheer lack of any serious recognition, point, purpose or reward for what is after all a certain amount of intellectual effort.
It is possible that 20 odd million is about the limit of effective literacy in the English speaking world: a world that appears to have been typified by rising levels of Alliteracy over the past couple of decades. Reader surveys seem to have been routinely noting the decline in reading behaviour over the past decades by those beneficiaries of a modern education system. Apparently the US booksellers association reported recently that the number of Americans who admit to reading a novel in 2005 had declined to below 50% for the first time after hovering around the 50% mark for a number of years. Television viewing is the single biggest ‘participatory’ activity in the modern world.
In another report it seems that the 300 million Americans who populate that country only manage to consume 15 million daily newspapers now which is far less that a century ago when there were much fewer people. In South Africa, where this blogger lives, the biggest selling newspaper manages about 250,000 copies a day and one would be hard pressed to call the Daily Sun reading matter, notwithstanding that is a master of the pithy headline. Neither the most serious daily newspaper: Business Day, nor weekly newspaper, The Mail and Guardian can claim much more than 30,000 copies sold each; and even with a modest three readers per copy [a doubtful speculation] 90,000 readers out of a population of some 45 million is readership at its most elitist. The evidence throughout the English speaking world for the decline in reading activity is widely documented and has been happening for some decades now. I have myself written on the subject as far back as 1976.
As an aside comment… Yesterday I stood in a ’round- the-block’ queue for an hour and a half waiting for the licence office in Loveday street [Jozi} to open [ it never did]. I passed the time reading a novel by Carl Hiaasen [Skin Tight, for those who are interested].
Various people around me commented on my strange activity- they simply stood, passively waiting. An old man who was moving up and down the two hundred-metre line of people [selling document folders] told me I was the only person dumb enough to be reading when everyone else was watching out for pickpockets. I did however notice a few people [two] reading one or other of the daily newspapers. The man in front of me was puzzled when I laughed at something I had read, and commented gratuitously, even smugly, accompanied with serious halitosis, that he had never read a thing since he finished school. Other chaps around him agreed that reading was an unhealthy activity- ‘Bad for the eyes’ one said, to general agreement. So much for 25% of the national budget going to educate people in how to stop reading.
When one contrasts all this above evidence with the truism that the most popular activity on the Internet is [apparently] gawping at dirty pictures on a proliferation of porn sites; with the next most common activity being the deletion of spam emails from one’s email account then it is unsurprising that blogging would be an extreme minority activity.
Notwithstanding this, blogging has proved to be a potent force for prising apart the insidious grip of the mainstream media’s ‘gate-keeping’ function. Bloggers tell that part of the world that cares, about the other ways in which the news may be interpreted, whether real, quirky, fictional, self indulgent or fiercely accurate.
For this reason the Mainstream media are striking back and blogging has been appropriated by almost all worthy media as a way of reinforcing corporate messages using the blind credibility that blogging has acquired. In effect the corporate response to the Blog phenomena has been to attach Blogging to the Public Relations function that so powerfully attempts to mould opinion to conform to corporate needs and wants. In this way ‘authoritive’ voices can be given media supported space to crowd out the more ‘hysterical’ messages of the independent blogger.
Which gives us the third element that must inevitably crowd out the independent voice: The loneliness of the long distance Internet. Anyone who has attempted to present a message on the World Wide Web knows that the experience is similar, in a way, to what would happen if one farted on the centre line of a crowded football stadium. Perhaps a few people nearby might get the message about the state of one’s bowels but the vast mass of the gathered crowd would remain oblivious.
I routinely use the Internet, and specifically Google, for teaching purposes with my classes at the high school where I facilitate the learning of business practice. For instance I may start with a fun statement like ‘business games’: a request to Google that will pull 300 million pages of choices. Given that each page contains 10 entries that is THREE BILLION choices available at the press of a button. We keep refining the question until we find a game, for instance, that is appropriate to what we are studying. Even then our choices run to the thousands.
The random bloggist is lost with such choice. The core problem of the Internet has always been ‘How does one target the untargetable’. To date the best solution is Google and that is hardly a solution.
So inevitably the random bloggist who forms a part of that amorphous 20 million odd bloggers allegedly out there stating their purpose will operate without pay in an environment where they will be lucky if they can attract a few hundred readers. And these readers are so spoilt for choice that they will soon move on in search of greater novelty.
At best blogging is a self-indulgent activity that seeks no reward other than the knowledge that like Kilroy ‘they were there’ and have some small measure of fame in an elusive fame-free world and this must be the ultimate minority activity. Why spend time writing something that almost no one will ever read or even care about.
And as for journalism students blogging on the web, I also suspect that blogging could only be a ancillary activity for such journalism students who choose to operate without editorial control; which is hardly something a good journalism school would teach would they?
The essence of blogging is founded in taking the initiative to say what one wants to say without any form of interference from anyone at all- These are my undiluted, unmediated words, and fuck you if you don’t like what I say. There are no advertisers to offend, no vested interests to protect, and no subtextural hidden agendas to covertly promote. The very idea that journalism students should be practiced Bloggers is almost a complete contradiction of their terms of [future] employment. Too much independence would compromise their employment potential as ‘Hacks’ to the corporatocracy. Aah but then I am ignoring the fact aren’t I that the corporate blogs That have appropriated our invention are probably as carefully edited and proofread as any piece of writing that goes in a piece of mainstream media. If a blog has a corporate logo it can be sued.
Ultimately when one thinks about the problem of figuring out how to say something coherent enough to be read by a third party without an editorial intermediary; and then being able to do this consistently, for no financial reward, to an ultimately indifferent, jaded, communication saturated, marginally committed reader, with an eight word attention span, then we know that what is really surprising is that there are as many as 24 million of us at all.
Viva Bloggers.
Category : Uncategorized
3 Responses to ““To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment”
kchasu, on April 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am Said:
I was talking to a seasoned PR person the other day. He is terribly out of touch with any actual work, or the Internet for that matter.
Nevertheless he is telling his clients that his agency will set up blogs for them.
I was pissed off. Who the hell are they kidding? Would any of us on here read anything that was blatantly advertising of one sort or another?
No.
And PR is my business. But blogs or chatrooms are no place for it. i used to think they might be. but they are not. the small population that is literate enough to produce online, is not going to be influenced by that kind of crap. therefore, for me, this blog is the last outpost of civilisation.
i see Duncan Mcleod has started a blog. it’s press releases!!!! i know this, because we send him some. and there is a big fuss made because this journo “launches a blog”. crap.
utter shite.
corporates are the politicians of this century in terms of propaganda. it’s fine. but they don’t understand the Internet. they just see a medium and can’t believe they can’t use it.
i immediately steer clients away from “corporate blogging”. it will be a monstrous mess. they would be flamed. it’s harmful.
brandon96end, on April 18th, 2007 at 6:47 am Said:
Unless you have a cpative audience and a really articulate person handling the blog, it can just become a mess… even then, a blog is not the place to advertise. Unless, of course, you can back everything up… all the time.
Данил, on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 am Said:
Very useful and informative text !
“To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment
April 17th, 2007 by nik
A story running on M & G online [to the average joe blogs aren't cutting it April 14] suggests that the blogging phenomenon has perhaps peaked. According to the writer [quoting the agency Technorati]the total number of bloggists in English has remained static at around 24 million bloggers, many of whom are probably duplicate bloggers like myself. The writer also comments [sourly]on the limited number of journalism students who routinely blog and states that it [the writer] has tired of asked for a ‘hands up’ from classes, regarding ‘who blogs?’, because the response is so piss poor. The writer concludes that blogging is a minority occupation. Coincidentally I have also noted that I have encountered very few ‘hands ups’ from anybody who even knows what blogging is, in my own routine probing of the subject over the past few years.
Curiously by contrast ‘click online’ the BBC’s weekly analysis of Internet affairs, headlines, this week, the way that bloggers successfully thwart all Internet attempts at censorship. So while blogging may be a minority activity it is certainly an influential one, influential enough that the mainstream media are desperately appropriating the concept in an attempt to smother its effectiveness..
What is of interest to me however is the idea that the number of bloggists has peaked at around 24 million [English speakers] The writer does refer to another 50 million or so bloggers who write in other languages: these are not of concern to me in this blog. I would be inclined to agree with the M&G writer that blogging could actually be in decline, once one accepts that huge numbers of bloggers are not regular bloggers nor are all bloggers separate individuals, but like myself may well blog under many separate names in different places.
It seems to me though that there could be various reasons why blogging appears to have peaked [or may have peaked] in the English-speaking world: declining levels of literacy, the appropriation of blogging by the mainstream corporatocracy, the loneliness of the random bloggist and the sheer lack of any serious recognition, point, purpose or reward for what is after all a certain amount of intellectual effort.
It is possible that 20 odd million is about the limit of effective literacy in the English speaking world: a world that appears to have been typified by rising levels of Alliteracy over the past couple of decades. Reader surveys seem to have been routinely noting the decline in reading behaviour over the past decades by those beneficiaries of a modern education system. Apparently the US booksellers association reported recently that the number of Americans who admit to reading a novel in 2005 had declined to below 50% for the first time after hovering around the 50% mark for a number of years. Television viewing is the single biggest ‘participatory’ activity in the modern world.
In another report it seems that the 300 million Americans who populate that country only manage to consume 15 million daily newspapers now which is far less that a century ago when there were much fewer people. In South Africa, where this blogger lives, the biggest selling newspaper manages about 250,000 copies a day and one would be hard pressed to call the Daily Sun reading matter, notwithstanding that is a master of the pithy headline. Neither the most serious daily newspaper: Business Day, nor weekly newspaper, The Mail and Guardian can claim much more than 30,000 copies sold each; and even with a modest three readers per copy [a doubtful speculation] 90,000 readers out of a population of some 45 million is readership at its most elitist. The evidence throughout the English speaking world for the decline in reading activity is widely documented and has been happening for some decades now. I have myself written on the subject as far back as 1976.
As an aside comment… Yesterday I stood in a ’round- the-block’ queue for an hour and a half waiting for the licence office in Loveday street [Jozi} to open [ it never did]. I passed the time reading a novel by Carl Hiaasen [Skin Tight, for those who are interested].
Various people around me commented on my strange activity- they simply stood, passively waiting. An old man who was moving up and down the two hundred-metre line of people [selling document folders] told me I was the only person dumb enough to be reading when everyone else was watching out for pickpockets. I did however notice a few people [two] reading one or other of the daily newspapers. The man in front of me was puzzled when I laughed at something I had read, and commented gratuitously, even smugly, accompanied with serious halitosis, that he had never read a thing since he finished school. Other chaps around him agreed that reading was an unhealthy activity- ‘Bad for the eyes’ one said, to general agreement. So much for 25% of the national budget going to educate people in how to stop reading.
When one contrasts all this above evidence with the truism that the most popular activity on the Internet is [apparently] gawping at dirty pictures on a proliferation of porn sites; with the next most common activity being the deletion of spam emails from one’s email account then it is unsurprising that blogging would be an extreme minority activity.
Notwithstanding this, blogging has proved to be a potent force for prising apart the insidious grip of the mainstream media’s ‘gate-keeping’ function. Bloggers tell that part of the world that cares, about the other ways in which the news may be interpreted, whether real, quirky, fictional, self indulgent or fiercely accurate.
For this reason the Mainstream media are striking back and blogging has been appropriated by almost all worthy media as a way of reinforcing corporate messages using the blind credibility that blogging has acquired. In effect the corporate response to the Blog phenomena has been to attach Blogging to the Public Relations function that so powerfully attempts to mould opinion to conform to corporate needs and wants. In this way ‘authoritive’ voices can be given media supported space to crowd out the more ‘hysterical’ messages of the independent blogger.
Which gives us the third element that must inevitably crowd out the independent voice: The loneliness of the long distance Internet. Anyone who has attempted to present a message on the World Wide Web knows that the experience is similar, in a way, to what would happen if one farted on the centre line of a crowded football stadium. Perhaps a few people nearby might get the message about the state of one’s bowels but the vast mass of the gathered crowd would remain oblivious.
I routinely use the Internet, and specifically Google, for teaching purposes with my classes at the high school where I facilitate the learning of business practice. For instance I may start with a fun statement like ‘business games’: a request to Google that will pull 300 million pages of choices. Given that each page contains 10 entries that is THREE BILLION choices available at the press of a button. We keep refining the question until we find a game, for instance, that is appropriate to what we are studying. Even then our choices run to the thousands.
The random bloggist is lost with such choice. The core problem of the Internet has always been ‘How does one target the untargetable’. To date the best solution is Google and that is hardly a solution.
So inevitably the random bloggist who forms a part of that amorphous 20 million odd bloggers allegedly out there stating their purpose will operate without pay in an environment where they will be lucky if they can attract a few hundred readers. And these readers are so spoilt for choice that they will soon move on in search of greater novelty.
At best blogging is a self-indulgent activity that seeks no reward other than the knowledge that like Kilroy ‘they were there’ and have some small measure of fame in an elusive fame-free world and this must be the ultimate minority activity. Why spend time writing something that almost no one will ever read or even care about.
And as for journalism students blogging on the web, I also suspect that blogging could only be a ancillary activity for such journalism students who choose to operate without editorial control; which is hardly something a good journalism school would teach would they?
The essence of blogging is founded in taking the initiative to say what one wants to say without any form of interference from anyone at all- These are my undiluted, unmediated words, and fuck you if you don’t like what I say. There are no advertisers to offend, no vested interests to protect, and no subtextural hidden agendas to covertly promote. The very idea that journalism students should be practiced Bloggers is almost a complete contradiction of their terms of [future] employment. Too much independence would compromise their employment potential as ‘Hacks’ to the corporatocracy. Aah but then I am ignoring the fact aren’t I that the corporate blogs That have appropriated our invention are probably as carefully edited and proofread as any piece of writing that goes in a piece of mainstream media. If a blog has a corporate logo it can be sued.
Ultimately when one thinks about the problem of figuring out how to say something coherent enough to be read by a third party without an editorial intermediary; and then being able to do this consistently, for no financial reward, to an ultimately indifferent, jaded, communication saturated, marginally committed reader, with an eight word attention span, then we know that what is really surprising is that there are as many as 24 million of us at all.
Viva Bloggers.
Category : Uncategorized
3 Responses to ““To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment”
kchasu, on April 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am Said:
I was talking to a seasoned PR person the other day. He is terribly out of touch with any actual work, or the Internet for that matter.
Nevertheless he is telling his clients that his agency will set up blogs for them.
I was pissed off. Who the hell are they kidding? Would any of us on here read anything that was blatantly advertising of one sort or another?
No.
And PR is my business. But blogs or chatrooms are no place for it. i used to think they might be. but they are not. the small population that is literate enough to produce online, is not going to be influenced by that kind of crap. therefore, for me, this blog is the last outpost of civilisation.
i see Duncan Mcleod has started a blog. it’s press releases!!!! i know this, because we send him some. and there is a big fuss made because this journo “launches a blog”. crap.
utter shite.
corporates are the politicians of this century in terms of propaganda. it’s fine. but they don’t understand the Internet. they just see a medium and can’t believe they can’t use it.
i immediately steer clients away from “corporate blogging”. it will be a monstrous mess. they would be flamed. it’s harmful.
brandon96end, on April 18th, 2007 at 6:47 am Said:
Unless you have a cpative audience and a really articulate person handling the blog, it can just become a mess… even then, a blog is not the place to advertise. Unless, of course, you can back everything up… all the time.
Данил, on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 am Said:
Very useful and informative text !
Monday, November 17, 2008
OBE founders on 'Sub-Prime' meltdown
OBE founders on Sub-Prime meltdown
Weblog
17 November
I heard on the radio that the government was reviewing the idea of the outcomes based education [OBE] system that reaches its climax this year with the so-called Matric Exam in South Africa. This is the final exam that sets out to evaluate and assess the performance of 600,000 kids who have just finished what was to all intents and purposes a storm of learning. That is it assesses the quality of the 6 out of 20 kids who made it through the grid from grade 1 to grade 12 in order to find the 1 % who will become the kernels of tomorrows leadership cadres
I find I have mixed feelings. I am filled with admiration for the sheer volume of work that this years Matrics represent. At the same time I am reminded of that classic comedy movie if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. Then I see a potentially fatal flaw in this scheme of things. The new matric curriculum is rather like a smorgasbord dinner where the guests taste a little bit of everything, remember, perhaps, the odd stand out dish, and then collapse exhausted into a deep sleep… from which they awaken with post-binge amnesia, and remember almost nothing of the meal other than whether it was fun or not.
The main difference between the smorgasbord dinner and our new smorgasbord education process is that every mouthful is to be assessed in terms of whether it was competently chosen, selected, tasted, spat out or eaten, as my friend Bergie puts it, having been involved with the process since its inception: “Too much emphasis is placed on correct administration, instead of ensuring that the outcomes have actually been met.” I’m sure that the organisers of the system would say that correct administration would ensure correct outcomes: for most of the learners. We will soon find out.
The kids are known formally as Learners, because they are there to learn… preferably by themselves and/or by co operation with others in their groups, with guidance, and help from the class manager, which completely changes their job from what it was in, say 1971, or even 1993. Then the Teacher led the learning process. Now the ‘classroom outcomes mediator’ sets the journey and then follows it. This in itself is a transformational change so radical that most of our society is unaware of its progress. One thing for which little credit has been shown is that the new ‘teacher’ needs to know vastly more about their designated learning area [‘subject’: in old language] than most ‘old school’, inaptly named “teachers”, are able to deliver.
There are more fancy words like facilitation and mediation, which apply to what they do. These suggest a more hands off approach to the schooling process than we are familiar with in our popular mythology of the classroom. So a modern ‘teacher’ is like a big classroom monitor who also manages the process and extracts learning excellence from the young humans in their charge… [And still has to be a teacher in the old fashioned sense because that is what they do…]. It is a fascinating and truly inspirational journey.
In effect the kids should be left alone to puzzle through things and figure out what they mean. Anyway no matter how it goes the results will not show up for years and by the time they do there will be almost no one who remembers how it was when the system produced the kinds of skills and knowledge needed for the old society.
This system is supposed to produce the minds and skills needed to make a high tech 21st century society work and function and adapt to the range of changes that face us; from alternate fuel transformation and biotechnology, to the greening of the planet: and coping with those shifts in the planets alignment with the multiverse that have induced so-called climate change.
So for now this is the system we have got and the authority is going to have to learn how to achieve the outcomes with eighty percent less paperwork because the outcome if they don’t is that they will have no classroom managers by 2020. As it is South Africa’s schools are coping, with the help of an increasing number of well-trained Zimbabwean teachers who, ironically do not follow the OBE system.
Will it work… will it produce that 5 –10 percent of future leaders and separate out the dross that is doomed to go nowhere… and what about the super-dross, those who fell by the wayside. And what happens to them? How does this almost unbelievable expense, about a quarter of the national budget, help the 1,4 million kids who stopped being learner on the way from grade 1… and who have just vanished into a collectivist maw?
Right now, notwithstanding an unemployment rate that sits in the upper twenty percent range the economy is short of about a quarter million trained and skilled personnel in all walks from accountants to aircraft technicians, electricians, plumbers, teachers and medical workers. The rate of attrition outweighs the rate of replacement by a considerable margin. Curiously the shortages of labour have not resulted in higher wages in those categories, if anything wages have declined: but that is another story altogether not to mention that it is a puzzle.
After years of figuring it out I declare that this super-controlled, elitist oriented, OBE system is too complicated, too soon, to produce the desired result. I also accept that the model that it replaced was too awful to remember. The results we are about to be shown will be massaged to make them credible and we know that we [the world] face a global economic meltdown because of a universal desire to ignore reality in the face of the inevitability of a sub prime meltdown.
OBE is in fact foundering on a sub-prime meltdown as millions of kids abandon the system and wreak their unruly revenge. By the time we have figured that out it may well be too late to be useful. Perhaps the philanthropic Mr Shuttleworth, who’s efforts in the field of digital education have featured in the press recently, will find a way to automate the learning and assessment process and leave everyone time for the real learning that takes place in schools.
KISS… the word that means, “Keep it Simple… Stupid” applies here.
Weblog
17 November
I heard on the radio that the government was reviewing the idea of the outcomes based education [OBE] system that reaches its climax this year with the so-called Matric Exam in South Africa. This is the final exam that sets out to evaluate and assess the performance of 600,000 kids who have just finished what was to all intents and purposes a storm of learning. That is it assesses the quality of the 6 out of 20 kids who made it through the grid from grade 1 to grade 12 in order to find the 1 % who will become the kernels of tomorrows leadership cadres
I find I have mixed feelings. I am filled with admiration for the sheer volume of work that this years Matrics represent. At the same time I am reminded of that classic comedy movie if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. Then I see a potentially fatal flaw in this scheme of things. The new matric curriculum is rather like a smorgasbord dinner where the guests taste a little bit of everything, remember, perhaps, the odd stand out dish, and then collapse exhausted into a deep sleep… from which they awaken with post-binge amnesia, and remember almost nothing of the meal other than whether it was fun or not.
The main difference between the smorgasbord dinner and our new smorgasbord education process is that every mouthful is to be assessed in terms of whether it was competently chosen, selected, tasted, spat out or eaten, as my friend Bergie puts it, having been involved with the process since its inception: “Too much emphasis is placed on correct administration, instead of ensuring that the outcomes have actually been met.” I’m sure that the organisers of the system would say that correct administration would ensure correct outcomes: for most of the learners. We will soon find out.
The kids are known formally as Learners, because they are there to learn… preferably by themselves and/or by co operation with others in their groups, with guidance, and help from the class manager, which completely changes their job from what it was in, say 1971, or even 1993. Then the Teacher led the learning process. Now the ‘classroom outcomes mediator’ sets the journey and then follows it. This in itself is a transformational change so radical that most of our society is unaware of its progress. One thing for which little credit has been shown is that the new ‘teacher’ needs to know vastly more about their designated learning area [‘subject’: in old language] than most ‘old school’, inaptly named “teachers”, are able to deliver.
There are more fancy words like facilitation and mediation, which apply to what they do. These suggest a more hands off approach to the schooling process than we are familiar with in our popular mythology of the classroom. So a modern ‘teacher’ is like a big classroom monitor who also manages the process and extracts learning excellence from the young humans in their charge… [And still has to be a teacher in the old fashioned sense because that is what they do…]. It is a fascinating and truly inspirational journey.
In effect the kids should be left alone to puzzle through things and figure out what they mean. Anyway no matter how it goes the results will not show up for years and by the time they do there will be almost no one who remembers how it was when the system produced the kinds of skills and knowledge needed for the old society.
This system is supposed to produce the minds and skills needed to make a high tech 21st century society work and function and adapt to the range of changes that face us; from alternate fuel transformation and biotechnology, to the greening of the planet: and coping with those shifts in the planets alignment with the multiverse that have induced so-called climate change.
So for now this is the system we have got and the authority is going to have to learn how to achieve the outcomes with eighty percent less paperwork because the outcome if they don’t is that they will have no classroom managers by 2020. As it is South Africa’s schools are coping, with the help of an increasing number of well-trained Zimbabwean teachers who, ironically do not follow the OBE system.
Will it work… will it produce that 5 –10 percent of future leaders and separate out the dross that is doomed to go nowhere… and what about the super-dross, those who fell by the wayside. And what happens to them? How does this almost unbelievable expense, about a quarter of the national budget, help the 1,4 million kids who stopped being learner on the way from grade 1… and who have just vanished into a collectivist maw?
Right now, notwithstanding an unemployment rate that sits in the upper twenty percent range the economy is short of about a quarter million trained and skilled personnel in all walks from accountants to aircraft technicians, electricians, plumbers, teachers and medical workers. The rate of attrition outweighs the rate of replacement by a considerable margin. Curiously the shortages of labour have not resulted in higher wages in those categories, if anything wages have declined: but that is another story altogether not to mention that it is a puzzle.
After years of figuring it out I declare that this super-controlled, elitist oriented, OBE system is too complicated, too soon, to produce the desired result. I also accept that the model that it replaced was too awful to remember. The results we are about to be shown will be massaged to make them credible and we know that we [the world] face a global economic meltdown because of a universal desire to ignore reality in the face of the inevitability of a sub prime meltdown.
OBE is in fact foundering on a sub-prime meltdown as millions of kids abandon the system and wreak their unruly revenge. By the time we have figured that out it may well be too late to be useful. Perhaps the philanthropic Mr Shuttleworth, who’s efforts in the field of digital education have featured in the press recently, will find a way to automate the learning and assessment process and leave everyone time for the real learning that takes place in schools.
KISS… the word that means, “Keep it Simple… Stupid” applies here.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Can Barak Obama change the world?
Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly had other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned through our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible, but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system: which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm.
Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… does contribute significantly to making this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The [US] Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. It's like cutting off a leg to service the body. The blind revenge factor is high, and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.Cheers
!nik is the Blogospherian.
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly had other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned through our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible, but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system: which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm.
Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… does contribute significantly to making this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The [US] Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. It's like cutting off a leg to service the body. The blind revenge factor is high, and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.Cheers
!nik is the Blogospherian.
The emperor is dead all hail the emperor.
Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.
2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.
The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.
Cheers
The Blogospherian.
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.
2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.
The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.
Cheers
The Blogospherian.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood
I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed and i count few people as friend.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to market networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, from many different places: all 'outies', who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the "wild fastnesses" of the region meet the equally "wild fastnesses" of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins; speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings; and nourished ourselves on healthy libations of nutricious liquids... I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again in this world.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed and i count few people as friend.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to market networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, from many different places: all 'outies', who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the "wild fastnesses" of the region meet the equally "wild fastnesses" of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins; speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings; and nourished ourselves on healthy libations of nutricious liquids... I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again in this world.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood.
I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Joe the Plumber: the great American meltdown
Weblog
17 October 2008
Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.
Talk about pride before the fall.
No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?
It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptiansm, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians the Greeks the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America. The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?
What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.
Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.
To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.
The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.
17 October 2008
Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.
Talk about pride before the fall.
No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?
It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptiansm, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians the Greeks the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America. The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?
What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.
Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.
To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.
The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.
Joe the Plumber: the great American meltdown
Weblog
17 October 2008
Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.
Talk about pride before the fall.
No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?
It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptians, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America.
The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines; while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?
What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.
Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought, gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.
To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.
The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.
17 October 2008
Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.
Talk about pride before the fall.
No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?
It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptians, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America.
The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines; while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?
What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.
Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought, gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.
To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.
The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.
Monday, October 13, 2008
After the Crash - blame the poor
Weblog 11 October 2008
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor
Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining satire called the 'Fable of the Bees' in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.
The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept: that of lending money to the poor.
For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.
Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum the idea, that lending money to poor people who had no real means of long term support was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun”, to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.
The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.
Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.
What comfort now then for the moralists.
Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Whatever, there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today notwithstanding that the whole idea that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade was floored as well as flawed.
If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.
In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor
Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining satire called the 'Fable of the Bees' in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.
The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept: that of lending money to the poor.
For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.
Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum the idea, that lending money to poor people who had no real means of long term support was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun”, to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.
The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.
Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.
What comfort now then for the moralists.
Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Whatever, there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today notwithstanding that the whole idea that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade was floored as well as flawed.
If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.
In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
After the Crash... Blame the Poor
Weblog 11 October 2008
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor
Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining piece called the Fable of the Bees in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.
The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage; and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept and lending money to the poor.
For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.
Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum, the idea, that lending money to poor people, who had no real means of long term support, was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun” to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.
The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.
Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.
What comfort now then for the moralists?
Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Some may well have have sold out at the hight of the property boom and taken the great gift of money back to a reconstituted trailer park and enjoyed a cosy retirement. Whatever; there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today, notwithstanding that the whole idea, that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade, was floored as well as flawed.
If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.
In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.
Happy blogging
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor
Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining piece called the Fable of the Bees in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.
The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage; and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept and lending money to the poor.
For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.
Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum, the idea, that lending money to poor people, who had no real means of long term support, was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun” to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.
The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.
Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.
What comfort now then for the moralists?
Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Some may well have have sold out at the hight of the property boom and taken the great gift of money back to a reconstituted trailer park and enjoyed a cosy retirement. Whatever; there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today, notwithstanding that the whole idea, that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade, was floored as well as flawed.
If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.
In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.
Happy blogging
Monday, September 29, 2008
A hard day's week
The late Harold Wilson famously observed that “a week is a long time in politics.”. We have just had a week where a day was a long time in politics.
At home we achieved an African first a bloodless and relatively constitutional “coup-de-etat”. A man who has hogged the headlines for the past few years has, in a fell swoop been nudged towards the margins in the slightest of slights. In protocol terms it was a stunning strategic move. In addition the left in the ruling Party [and without, in the alliance partnership], seem for the moment to have outflanked the radical cadres that poured rage in the name of Jacob Zuma.
Simultaneously the conciliatory position of the victorious faction has moderated any serious schism that underlies the inherent tensions between the desire to serve oneself and the need to serve others; with those who seek office to achieve enrichment perhaps having to lie low for a while...
A signal for those was the summary, contact termination, of the police chief in a local metro region. The man had apparently developed an unsavoury penchant for becoming embroiled in controversial events, often involving alcohol. He was always controversial but under the regime of former, now disgraced, president Thabo Mbeki he led a charmed life and proved that you are what you practice apparently, since his political masters have told him to go.
Now of course its time to produce something other than rabbits from a hat and the Party needs to see some serious performance on key issues before the election is upon them and they fail to achieve the 80% majority they so richly desire. [The number of registered voters in the country has remained relatively static since ’94. The proportion of registered voters to potential voters seems to be on the decline, and the percentage that actually vote is similarly declining. What this means is unexplored.]
As big and momentous an event as this was, it barely merited a total of five minutes across all global news channels routinely monitored be this bloggist. The political opposition and the press are fuelling the idea of a split in the Party and it may yet come to pass… but frankly, the moment seems to have passed. The left have captured the Brand ANC, and all other political parties are doomed to live on the margins for a while longer. +Anyone breaking away from the ANC to form a new party at this time is walking into political and probable economic extinction.
From the world’s p.o.v. a bigger event has hogged the headlines: the great economic meltdown predicted buy this bloggist for many years has finally arrived. Until this past week I would have said that the septuagenarian republican contender for the Presidency in the USA [the one with the scary, huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ lady running mate] was in with a chance. But he was the one saying that the past excess could be managed without a tax increase… The dark contender was pragmatic enough to recognise that a tax increase was inevitable.
And truth will out. As I write this this the 700 billion dollar rescue package proposed by the Bush Administration as a panacea for all ills is stalled in congress; and the world’s stockmarkets are collapsing. It is also more than possible that 700 billion will not be sufficient to ballast the markets against a de-leveraging meltdown. I now predict that Mr Obama will walk this election and that the USA will enter a period of economic difficulty unprecedented in decades. [He has been handed a poisoned chalice much like the way the eternally declining Zimbabwe was handed such a chalice by Mr Mbeki.]
The American taxpayer has just been landed with a trillion dollar debt to pay off. And more than likely another trillion dollar debt to come. It was sneaked up on them and they fully deserve it because they have sucked merrily off the hind tit for 8 years in one of the biggest greed splurges in history. And now they and many others will pay with their mortgages.
Happy blogging
At home we achieved an African first a bloodless and relatively constitutional “coup-de-etat”. A man who has hogged the headlines for the past few years has, in a fell swoop been nudged towards the margins in the slightest of slights. In protocol terms it was a stunning strategic move. In addition the left in the ruling Party [and without, in the alliance partnership], seem for the moment to have outflanked the radical cadres that poured rage in the name of Jacob Zuma.
Simultaneously the conciliatory position of the victorious faction has moderated any serious schism that underlies the inherent tensions between the desire to serve oneself and the need to serve others; with those who seek office to achieve enrichment perhaps having to lie low for a while...
A signal for those was the summary, contact termination, of the police chief in a local metro region. The man had apparently developed an unsavoury penchant for becoming embroiled in controversial events, often involving alcohol. He was always controversial but under the regime of former, now disgraced, president Thabo Mbeki he led a charmed life and proved that you are what you practice apparently, since his political masters have told him to go.
Now of course its time to produce something other than rabbits from a hat and the Party needs to see some serious performance on key issues before the election is upon them and they fail to achieve the 80% majority they so richly desire. [The number of registered voters in the country has remained relatively static since ’94. The proportion of registered voters to potential voters seems to be on the decline, and the percentage that actually vote is similarly declining. What this means is unexplored.]
As big and momentous an event as this was, it barely merited a total of five minutes across all global news channels routinely monitored be this bloggist. The political opposition and the press are fuelling the idea of a split in the Party and it may yet come to pass… but frankly, the moment seems to have passed. The left have captured the Brand ANC, and all other political parties are doomed to live on the margins for a while longer. +Anyone breaking away from the ANC to form a new party at this time is walking into political and probable economic extinction.
From the world’s p.o.v. a bigger event has hogged the headlines: the great economic meltdown predicted buy this bloggist for many years has finally arrived. Until this past week I would have said that the septuagenarian republican contender for the Presidency in the USA [the one with the scary, huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ lady running mate] was in with a chance. But he was the one saying that the past excess could be managed without a tax increase… The dark contender was pragmatic enough to recognise that a tax increase was inevitable.
And truth will out. As I write this this the 700 billion dollar rescue package proposed by the Bush Administration as a panacea for all ills is stalled in congress; and the world’s stockmarkets are collapsing. It is also more than possible that 700 billion will not be sufficient to ballast the markets against a de-leveraging meltdown. I now predict that Mr Obama will walk this election and that the USA will enter a period of economic difficulty unprecedented in decades. [He has been handed a poisoned chalice much like the way the eternally declining Zimbabwe was handed such a chalice by Mr Mbeki.]
The American taxpayer has just been landed with a trillion dollar debt to pay off. And more than likely another trillion dollar debt to come. It was sneaked up on them and they fully deserve it because they have sucked merrily off the hind tit for 8 years in one of the biggest greed splurges in history. And now they and many others will pay with their mortgages.
Happy blogging
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Exit the President
Weblog 23 September 2008-09-23
Dateline Jozi
Zone One/Gauteng
Afrika/Azania
So exit Thabo Mbeki, former South African President and social networker par excellence from Stage right.
Enter Interim President K.M [spelling and pronunciation to be ascertained] from Stage Left.
According to the morning news the ex-president is applying to the Constitutional court for the right to co-join with the National Prosecuting Authority in an appeal against the judgement that overthrew the case against the wannabee President Mr Jacob Zuma, and opened the way for his enemies in the party to mount an unassailable assault against him.
In the meantime the party has chosen the less controversial Mr ‘K.M’ as its preferred interim President subject to the wannabee presidential pretender [Mr Jacob Zuma] gaining a mandate from the people. This is expected to happen next year when the party [ the only real contender] walks the general election; and proves conclusively [they hope] that they can fool most of the people most of the time.
In the final analysis this was a bloodless coup of considerable political elegance. President Mbeki has been “recalled” because he was unpopular with his supporters and increasingly divisive to the party; and without him the country can begin to deal with many outstanding issues, not least of which is the vexing problem of service delivery and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Whether the strategy pays off remains to be seen. In the meantime though newly enlightened self-interest should see most of the key players coalesce around the interim man, there will be a few casualties and the feeding frenzy may see a shift of players as those who have fed well at the trough depart for other pastures and a collection of newbies toi toi from left to centre: on their pilgrimage to the right hand side. Hopeful new ideologues with pockets filled to merry clinking for those adroit enough to grasp the ring while simultaneously keeping their backs covered.
Should we feel sorry for Thabo… This writer doesn’t. He will still be Thabo the Great to me because of his success in bringing the African Parliament to Gauteng. With his passage the entire African Union project may well move off set for awhile and their may be attempts by others to hijack the parliament for some other preferred place and we would do well to resist that.
As for the rest? As I said before Thabo Mbeki was a Smutsian figure. I know that the newly empowered will find the comparison odious but tough: perception is all. [For offshore readers South Africa/Azania had a former leader called Jan Smuts, as controversial a leader as ever existed. This writer was once chased from a man’s house with covering rifle fire after inadvertently mentioning the man’s name in an inappropriate context. Said Mr Smuts also sported a little goatee beard such as was favoured by Mr Mbeki and was more fond of being on the world stage than sitting around the fireside at home]. Mr Mbeki was such an absentee leader.
He won't be missed by the people because the people rarely saw him; and when they did, he read them speeches full of empty rhetoric in a uniquely robotic style… Ironically the only time we saw him out of Stoic mode was in his farewell speech.
He also presided over the longest period of economic expansion in the country’s history, thereby demonstrating one of economic history’s profound truths: that leaders who choose not to meddle in the economics of a country too overtly, facilitate considerable growth.
From a prosperity perspective Mr Mbeki oversaw a period of unprecedented growth in his country. So did Tony Blair and George Bush in theirs. We know that those men are leaving a legacy of wealth destruction on a scale not witnessed since the Great Depression as the bubble they helped to inflate, on an ocean of deceit, lies and deception, burst under the strain of dishonesty; and that has revealed the inherently moral streak that lines all self interest.
It remains to be seen what the shift from a relatively hands-off period of near, mercantilist inspired, laissez faire economics in South Africa; fuelling the empowerment transfer of wealth, to a more redistributionist policy, under the inspiration of the newly dominant Communist Party associations in the ruling party, will do for the country’s prospects. It is even possible that Mr Zuma may not make it to president. Now that the so-called ‘ultra-left’ have control of the Party thanks to Mr Zuma's machinations and Mr Mbeki's flawed strategies, do they really need a maverick populist who could well have his own less congenial [to them] agenda.
For the moments we have hove-to in the lee of the storm.
The Blogospherian
Dateline Jozi
Zone One/Gauteng
Afrika/Azania
So exit Thabo Mbeki, former South African President and social networker par excellence from Stage right.
Enter Interim President K.M [spelling and pronunciation to be ascertained] from Stage Left.
According to the morning news the ex-president is applying to the Constitutional court for the right to co-join with the National Prosecuting Authority in an appeal against the judgement that overthrew the case against the wannabee President Mr Jacob Zuma, and opened the way for his enemies in the party to mount an unassailable assault against him.
In the meantime the party has chosen the less controversial Mr ‘K.M’ as its preferred interim President subject to the wannabee presidential pretender [Mr Jacob Zuma] gaining a mandate from the people. This is expected to happen next year when the party [ the only real contender] walks the general election; and proves conclusively [they hope] that they can fool most of the people most of the time.
In the final analysis this was a bloodless coup of considerable political elegance. President Mbeki has been “recalled” because he was unpopular with his supporters and increasingly divisive to the party; and without him the country can begin to deal with many outstanding issues, not least of which is the vexing problem of service delivery and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Whether the strategy pays off remains to be seen. In the meantime though newly enlightened self-interest should see most of the key players coalesce around the interim man, there will be a few casualties and the feeding frenzy may see a shift of players as those who have fed well at the trough depart for other pastures and a collection of newbies toi toi from left to centre: on their pilgrimage to the right hand side. Hopeful new ideologues with pockets filled to merry clinking for those adroit enough to grasp the ring while simultaneously keeping their backs covered.
Should we feel sorry for Thabo… This writer doesn’t. He will still be Thabo the Great to me because of his success in bringing the African Parliament to Gauteng. With his passage the entire African Union project may well move off set for awhile and their may be attempts by others to hijack the parliament for some other preferred place and we would do well to resist that.
As for the rest? As I said before Thabo Mbeki was a Smutsian figure. I know that the newly empowered will find the comparison odious but tough: perception is all. [For offshore readers South Africa/Azania had a former leader called Jan Smuts, as controversial a leader as ever existed. This writer was once chased from a man’s house with covering rifle fire after inadvertently mentioning the man’s name in an inappropriate context. Said Mr Smuts also sported a little goatee beard such as was favoured by Mr Mbeki and was more fond of being on the world stage than sitting around the fireside at home]. Mr Mbeki was such an absentee leader.
He won't be missed by the people because the people rarely saw him; and when they did, he read them speeches full of empty rhetoric in a uniquely robotic style… Ironically the only time we saw him out of Stoic mode was in his farewell speech.
He also presided over the longest period of economic expansion in the country’s history, thereby demonstrating one of economic history’s profound truths: that leaders who choose not to meddle in the economics of a country too overtly, facilitate considerable growth.
From a prosperity perspective Mr Mbeki oversaw a period of unprecedented growth in his country. So did Tony Blair and George Bush in theirs. We know that those men are leaving a legacy of wealth destruction on a scale not witnessed since the Great Depression as the bubble they helped to inflate, on an ocean of deceit, lies and deception, burst under the strain of dishonesty; and that has revealed the inherently moral streak that lines all self interest.
It remains to be seen what the shift from a relatively hands-off period of near, mercantilist inspired, laissez faire economics in South Africa; fuelling the empowerment transfer of wealth, to a more redistributionist policy, under the inspiration of the newly dominant Communist Party associations in the ruling party, will do for the country’s prospects. It is even possible that Mr Zuma may not make it to president. Now that the so-called ‘ultra-left’ have control of the Party thanks to Mr Zuma's machinations and Mr Mbeki's flawed strategies, do they really need a maverick populist who could well have his own less congenial [to them] agenda.
For the moments we have hove-to in the lee of the storm.
The Blogospherian
Friday, August 22, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Carthage then Georgia now.
Weblog
21th August 2008
Presumably China was not amused that the resurgent wannabee Russian Bear chose the opening of the Olympics in Beijing as the cover for an assault on the southern oil pipelines from Baku, through Turkey via Georgia.
The best assaults are always those that catch the world by surprise and the proto- soviet assault on the free republic of Georgia is a classic of the species. George “the schmuck” Bush was found with a mouthful of overcooked sushi while out mounting Vladimir Putin… Put in he is rumoured to have said. The photo-op of Bush fawning over Putin in Beijing must represent an all time low in the waning fortunes of the USA.
As a strategic move the clamp on Georgia is brilliant . The oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey is a key supply route for Euroland’s growing energy needs. We have already seen what happens with the northern supply line from Russian through Ukraine when Gazprom flexed its muscles a year or so ago. Ukraine stopped. Europe fulminated against the move then, and now with the move to [potentially] cut off oil from Buku almost a fait accompli Europe is on an uneasy precipice… as is the free world.
Will this little invasion prove to be the 21st century’s equivalent of Munich 1938 … Appeasement today brings conflict tomorrow? There is certainly an amusing comparison between the way the Russians have taken out Georgia and the way the Vandals wiped out the Romans back in 439AD by snatching Carthage from the empire while the citizens were at the Games and then holding their grain supplies to ransom.
As of right now the only real beneficiary of the Georgian affair seems to be the Republican candidate for office in the USA… for the rest it is the unaccustomed sight of light skinned refugees on their way to the latest ‘trailer park’ refugee camp.
So much for Darfur
21th August 2008
Presumably China was not amused that the resurgent wannabee Russian Bear chose the opening of the Olympics in Beijing as the cover for an assault on the southern oil pipelines from Baku, through Turkey via Georgia.
The best assaults are always those that catch the world by surprise and the proto- soviet assault on the free republic of Georgia is a classic of the species. George “the schmuck” Bush was found with a mouthful of overcooked sushi while out mounting Vladimir Putin… Put in he is rumoured to have said. The photo-op of Bush fawning over Putin in Beijing must represent an all time low in the waning fortunes of the USA.
As a strategic move the clamp on Georgia is brilliant . The oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey is a key supply route for Euroland’s growing energy needs. We have already seen what happens with the northern supply line from Russian through Ukraine when Gazprom flexed its muscles a year or so ago. Ukraine stopped. Europe fulminated against the move then, and now with the move to [potentially] cut off oil from Buku almost a fait accompli Europe is on an uneasy precipice… as is the free world.
Will this little invasion prove to be the 21st century’s equivalent of Munich 1938 … Appeasement today brings conflict tomorrow? There is certainly an amusing comparison between the way the Russians have taken out Georgia and the way the Vandals wiped out the Romans back in 439AD by snatching Carthage from the empire while the citizens were at the Games and then holding their grain supplies to ransom.
As of right now the only real beneficiary of the Georgian affair seems to be the Republican candidate for office in the USA… for the rest it is the unaccustomed sight of light skinned refugees on their way to the latest ‘trailer park’ refugee camp.
So much for Darfur
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Talking of downtime
This has not been a good year, neither for my blogging nor my life. My significant other of 37 years standing went down with Breast cancer last November. Although now, hopefully, in recovery, the journey has been a brutal reminder, that, notwithstanding the many glorious medical achievements of the 20th century and beyond, the road to cancer recovery is nasty, brutish and painfully excruciating for the sufferer: and hell for those who care. The crisis for me is that Madame has been my muse, in a serious sense. I started writing poetry soon after meeting her, and the shock of her unexpected illness has driven all inspiration from my soul.
Then as if that was not enough for a year; to add misery to horror, the main computer went down to one unscheduled loadshedding experience too many; and the main drive self-destructed. Forensic investigators have been able to find no trace that the hard drive ever contained anything of interest. That was a sobering experience. To be robbed twice, more efficiently than by any casual thief, is indeed a brutal reminder that we exist by the whims of politicians and the exigencies of nature. [Exigencies = circumstantial necessities: New Webster.]
This was a pair of low blows, followed in rapid succession by a [automatic] gearbox breakdown in the Nissan Maxima… not an easy model to repair, and then some cockpit meltdown in the dashboard of Madame’s beloved Audi: meaning the thing showed that boiling point was reached ten seconds after take off. When something like that happens on my old ’78 beetle I just change a fuse. Now there’s a whole dashboard change plus some thing to do with a computer. If the new part is not matched to the original computer configuration of the original vehicle then the car mal-performs.
That in itself was an interesting discovery: a practical demonstration of how the manufacturer seeks to exclude competition from the lucrative repair business. It’s an intriguing twist really on the supply chain consolidation that is bedevilling our contemporary global economy: and contributing to commodity price speculation. Should I ever buy another car, and strictly speaking I loath the unreliable things, I shall buy one that has a ten year warranty.
However it is enough already, Oyh!
But wait that was only the hardware part…
Along the way it became necessary to get a [non-local] passport for the baby [now 19 years old]. To get the passport in this post-9/11 polarising world, we now have to have the original birth certificate to demonstrate the causal [blood] relationship between father and daughter. That meant “home affairs”. You’ve dealt with home affairs: you know what is coming.
To cut a long story short after two and a half years and umpteen visits this child, who has an ID book, has passed matric and is a 2nd year uni’ student has just been recorded as a ‘late birth registration’ entry. This, it was decided was the most expedient way that a pleasantly helpful Home Affairs service person could suggest, to solve the dilemma of an apparently non-existent birth document. It must have existed once since someone once issued the abbreviated local variant. And of course we still don’t actually have the thing; meaning another trip to Disneyland to establish if this palliative has been effective. As for getting a vault copy of a marriage certificate… that is an even more complex task to which we have yet to find a solution. A luta continua.
The experience highlights for me one of the unspoken ironies of our post-liberation era: that young people [us: then] who struggled for years under the old regime with a lack of mobility, as far as gaining global work exposure and experience was concerned, are now, it seems, even worse off than ever. A South African passport, I discover, is so widely regarded as suspect, that our citizens are now being actively discriminated against, in an ever-widening range of situations: something that may, of course, be strategically useful for a region experiencing a severe skills exodus, exacerbated by the ongoing discrimination experienced routinely by all three of my children [and most of the people I know].
The increasingly onerous conditions applying generally to mobility seems also to be representative of a drift apart at the global level… The more we are together the more we are apart. There is a definite sense that the world is polarising into potentially acrimonious regional blocs.
So the result is that I have been distracted from my bloggish affairs; and have neglected you my reader who, I would have hang on my every syllable: I apologise for this.
In my all-consuming struggle to cope with disaster upon disaster, as well as perform the many duties relating to my everlasting day job, I have thus written fewer blogs and struggled with an inadequately restored computer network to upload what I have written. This means I have not dealt, for instance, with Russia’s unexplained volte-face over Zimbabwe. Apparently it was a lover’s meeting in Japan for the G8 ‘thing’, that saw Russia’s Medvedev agree to support sanctions against Zim [Rum ] babwe; only to step aside, presumably on orders from Csar Putin, as ole “porky” Brown went for the shot, missed, and was left in such an embarrassed heap that he just lost [one of ] the safest seat in British [Pomeranian] politics… Glasgow nogal a seat the labour party held since the beginning of the party’s history.
At this rate Brown will be gone before Mugabe, which should make Mugabe chuckle. And of course Mugabe hasn’t even begun to be gone.
Then of course there is that other dubious support base for governments that abuse their citizenry: China.
China’s snot drenched human rights record has prevailed notwithstanding all their bullshit pitch to get the Beijing Olympic Games. These games are a demonstration that notwithstanding their stated intent, and emotionally driven by the aspirations of the performers, expediency rules: circumstantial necessity requires that we deal with the reality that is China: and pay it the ultimate homage of hosting the great games even though the place is inherently a gangster State little removed from Hitler’s in ’36 and the equally late Soviet Union in ’80.
There is no real evidence however that China has done what it said it would, with regard to improving human rights [in China], and embracing democratic values. This was demonstrated most revealingly in the recent Tibetan uprising. In the lead-up we also had, for instance, the abusive eviction of citizens to make way for the Olympic paraphernalia, suppression of opposition bloggists, and the evidence that they are [apparently] suppressing some 30,000 outbreaks of civil unrest annually. The Chinese position on Climate abuse is also seriously flawed.
In my view China has cheated. They have cheated over the Olympics, an event dedicated to honesty and fair play. This is one more thumb in the eye of freedom, and reinforced by the country’s support for evil regimes in Africa lends credence to a cynical contempt, that is gnawing at the fruits of freedom worldwide. While shopping for goods made in China we should remember that the great discoveries of our age were made by free people … little of use has emerged from the totalitarian dictatorships of the past ten decades and that is unlikely to change soon.
How can I make my displeasure felt?
The only thing I can do apart from writing this blog is to withhold my consent to the Games. This means that I shall boycott the Games… I will listen to nothing relevant to the games, watch nothing and discuss nothing, and any joy I feel regarding the participation of our own household’s special entrant, one who had to leave home to gain recognition, and whom we truly hope will attain the accolades she has worked for, will be communicated privately.
Will this matter to the Chinese… I am sure it won’t, nor will it matter to anybody else I guess other than me. It is not as if this will even be a punishment [to me or them] since there is so much else happening also that is more interesting… like the Tri Nations, CSI and Classic FM.
So: not only will I boycott the broadcasting of the games, I shall also boycott the products that have made these “disgraceful games” possible. Any organisation that has sponsored the games, or is appearing to profit, at the expense of Tibetan liberty, shall never receive my endorsement ever again. If it’s a soft drink I shall guzzle down their worst enemy. If it is a fast food chain, I shall do the same. And ditto for shoes, tracksuits, coffee, tea and booze, airlines and whatever else. Each one has a competitor who is not at the Games: and to them we say Farewell Olympia: we do not sponsor horror. Sell us your goods instead.
Down with tyranny and those who would sponsor it.
Then as if that was not enough for a year; to add misery to horror, the main computer went down to one unscheduled loadshedding experience too many; and the main drive self-destructed. Forensic investigators have been able to find no trace that the hard drive ever contained anything of interest. That was a sobering experience. To be robbed twice, more efficiently than by any casual thief, is indeed a brutal reminder that we exist by the whims of politicians and the exigencies of nature. [Exigencies = circumstantial necessities: New Webster.]
This was a pair of low blows, followed in rapid succession by a [automatic] gearbox breakdown in the Nissan Maxima… not an easy model to repair, and then some cockpit meltdown in the dashboard of Madame’s beloved Audi: meaning the thing showed that boiling point was reached ten seconds after take off. When something like that happens on my old ’78 beetle I just change a fuse. Now there’s a whole dashboard change plus some thing to do with a computer. If the new part is not matched to the original computer configuration of the original vehicle then the car mal-performs.
That in itself was an interesting discovery: a practical demonstration of how the manufacturer seeks to exclude competition from the lucrative repair business. It’s an intriguing twist really on the supply chain consolidation that is bedevilling our contemporary global economy: and contributing to commodity price speculation. Should I ever buy another car, and strictly speaking I loath the unreliable things, I shall buy one that has a ten year warranty.
However it is enough already, Oyh!
But wait that was only the hardware part…
Along the way it became necessary to get a [non-local] passport for the baby [now 19 years old]. To get the passport in this post-9/11 polarising world, we now have to have the original birth certificate to demonstrate the causal [blood] relationship between father and daughter. That meant “home affairs”. You’ve dealt with home affairs: you know what is coming.
To cut a long story short after two and a half years and umpteen visits this child, who has an ID book, has passed matric and is a 2nd year uni’ student has just been recorded as a ‘late birth registration’ entry. This, it was decided was the most expedient way that a pleasantly helpful Home Affairs service person could suggest, to solve the dilemma of an apparently non-existent birth document. It must have existed once since someone once issued the abbreviated local variant. And of course we still don’t actually have the thing; meaning another trip to Disneyland to establish if this palliative has been effective. As for getting a vault copy of a marriage certificate… that is an even more complex task to which we have yet to find a solution. A luta continua.
The experience highlights for me one of the unspoken ironies of our post-liberation era: that young people [us: then] who struggled for years under the old regime with a lack of mobility, as far as gaining global work exposure and experience was concerned, are now, it seems, even worse off than ever. A South African passport, I discover, is so widely regarded as suspect, that our citizens are now being actively discriminated against, in an ever-widening range of situations: something that may, of course, be strategically useful for a region experiencing a severe skills exodus, exacerbated by the ongoing discrimination experienced routinely by all three of my children [and most of the people I know].
The increasingly onerous conditions applying generally to mobility seems also to be representative of a drift apart at the global level… The more we are together the more we are apart. There is a definite sense that the world is polarising into potentially acrimonious regional blocs.
So the result is that I have been distracted from my bloggish affairs; and have neglected you my reader who, I would have hang on my every syllable: I apologise for this.
In my all-consuming struggle to cope with disaster upon disaster, as well as perform the many duties relating to my everlasting day job, I have thus written fewer blogs and struggled with an inadequately restored computer network to upload what I have written. This means I have not dealt, for instance, with Russia’s unexplained volte-face over Zimbabwe. Apparently it was a lover’s meeting in Japan for the G8 ‘thing’, that saw Russia’s Medvedev agree to support sanctions against Zim [Rum ] babwe; only to step aside, presumably on orders from Csar Putin, as ole “porky” Brown went for the shot, missed, and was left in such an embarrassed heap that he just lost [one of ] the safest seat in British [Pomeranian] politics… Glasgow nogal a seat the labour party held since the beginning of the party’s history.
At this rate Brown will be gone before Mugabe, which should make Mugabe chuckle. And of course Mugabe hasn’t even begun to be gone.
Then of course there is that other dubious support base for governments that abuse their citizenry: China.
China’s snot drenched human rights record has prevailed notwithstanding all their bullshit pitch to get the Beijing Olympic Games. These games are a demonstration that notwithstanding their stated intent, and emotionally driven by the aspirations of the performers, expediency rules: circumstantial necessity requires that we deal with the reality that is China: and pay it the ultimate homage of hosting the great games even though the place is inherently a gangster State little removed from Hitler’s in ’36 and the equally late Soviet Union in ’80.
There is no real evidence however that China has done what it said it would, with regard to improving human rights [in China], and embracing democratic values. This was demonstrated most revealingly in the recent Tibetan uprising. In the lead-up we also had, for instance, the abusive eviction of citizens to make way for the Olympic paraphernalia, suppression of opposition bloggists, and the evidence that they are [apparently] suppressing some 30,000 outbreaks of civil unrest annually. The Chinese position on Climate abuse is also seriously flawed.
In my view China has cheated. They have cheated over the Olympics, an event dedicated to honesty and fair play. This is one more thumb in the eye of freedom, and reinforced by the country’s support for evil regimes in Africa lends credence to a cynical contempt, that is gnawing at the fruits of freedom worldwide. While shopping for goods made in China we should remember that the great discoveries of our age were made by free people … little of use has emerged from the totalitarian dictatorships of the past ten decades and that is unlikely to change soon.
How can I make my displeasure felt?
The only thing I can do apart from writing this blog is to withhold my consent to the Games. This means that I shall boycott the Games… I will listen to nothing relevant to the games, watch nothing and discuss nothing, and any joy I feel regarding the participation of our own household’s special entrant, one who had to leave home to gain recognition, and whom we truly hope will attain the accolades she has worked for, will be communicated privately.
Will this matter to the Chinese… I am sure it won’t, nor will it matter to anybody else I guess other than me. It is not as if this will even be a punishment [to me or them] since there is so much else happening also that is more interesting… like the Tri Nations, CSI and Classic FM.
So: not only will I boycott the broadcasting of the games, I shall also boycott the products that have made these “disgraceful games” possible. Any organisation that has sponsored the games, or is appearing to profit, at the expense of Tibetan liberty, shall never receive my endorsement ever again. If it’s a soft drink I shall guzzle down their worst enemy. If it is a fast food chain, I shall do the same. And ditto for shoes, tracksuits, coffee, tea and booze, airlines and whatever else. Each one has a competitor who is not at the Games: and to them we say Farewell Olympia: we do not sponsor horror. Sell us your goods instead.
Down with tyranny and those who would sponsor it.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The slow death of a tyrant
This blog was written weeks ago after the Au conference in Egypt at which Mugabe appeared in search of affirmation. It was n't published for technical reasons which i don't understand and ended up stored in the drafts pages.
Nothing that has subsequently taken place has changed sufficiently to negate what i said then regarding the inevitable disintegration of the Mugabe regime and the probability that what comes next will be worse.
It is now a week later and i still had not been able to load this blogpiece to my blogsite due to technical reasons which i do not understand... this is an attempt to load from a different machine to my usual one which was loadshedded earlier this year... thus sending me into a frenzy of inactivity
Maybe i can begin my path to understanding along this alternate route...
********************
In the meantime Mr Bob the roz Mugabe has been playing a deadly game of possum. He is pretending to negotiate and has even shaken hands with his enemy.
*******************************
Original Blog written on eve of AU appearance by Bob in Egypt.
Weblog 1 July 08
Jozi
Perhaps Mr Mugabe fears the repercussions of losing power. He knows what he has done to his enemies and knows what his enemies will do to him. And it is obvious that he sees almost everyone as an enemy.
The African Union has debating whether he should form a government of national unity and whatever he may say in Egypt he will renege when he returns home because although he is the President he is no longer in power. The country is controlled by gangsters and thugs, and they will turn on him in an instant if they suspect he will ruin their game. In reality the AU indulged Mr Mugabe by even deigning to debate a government of national unity since his presidency is illegal and it is questionable that he should have been allowed to speak. By giving him the right to speak they gave him de facto recognition.
The leader of the opposition lacked the intestinal fortitude necessary to take power through the ballot and now, it seems, wants others to do his work for him. He justifies this by commenting that the situation is too dangerous to stand and he is probably right. His life hangs on a whim.
Rationally there is no reason why the AU should rebuke Mr Mugabe. He won the election. The fact that it was rigged was inconvenient but the margin of inconvenience is not sufficient to cause serious discomfort. There has never been any significant indication that the members of the Au are anything other than they have always been, and there were always unsavoury elements whose position was stolen, even in this era of greater democratic representivity. This is also an era steeped in expediency.
Modern politics like those of auld are based on expediency and expediency suggests that the sum total of development aid being dispensed to all the beggar nations that make up the AU is currently uncertain. The global economy is currently insecure and uncertain.
What is certain though is that a settlement in Zimbabwe will see [possible] massive amounts of reconstruction aid going to the place in an attempt to repair the enormous capital drain wreaked by a decade of suicidal politics. The country‘s mining industry is chaotic and they have just experienced the worst harvest since the 1940’s. That heap of development money will probably be money that doesn’t go to the rest. In economic language the opportunity cost of solving Zimbabwe’s problem is the diversion of hard to get aid from the other AU members.
At the same time the world is in a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. Climate change, extreme weather conditions, food consumption generated food price increases plus famines and rampantly exploding cost of energy are wreaking creeping havoc on our global society and that means one thing… less largesse to go around.
Therefore the members of the AU will take the inherently rational position that they do not individually stand to gain from the addition of one damm hungry beggar to their alms conference. Collectively they will placate Mugabe and let well alone… If it’s broken why fix it?
The Blogospherian.
Nothing that has subsequently taken place has changed sufficiently to negate what i said then regarding the inevitable disintegration of the Mugabe regime and the probability that what comes next will be worse.
It is now a week later and i still had not been able to load this blogpiece to my blogsite due to technical reasons which i do not understand... this is an attempt to load from a different machine to my usual one which was loadshedded earlier this year... thus sending me into a frenzy of inactivity
Maybe i can begin my path to understanding along this alternate route...
********************
In the meantime Mr Bob the roz Mugabe has been playing a deadly game of possum. He is pretending to negotiate and has even shaken hands with his enemy.
*******************************
Original Blog written on eve of AU appearance by Bob in Egypt.
Weblog 1 July 08
Jozi
Perhaps Mr Mugabe fears the repercussions of losing power. He knows what he has done to his enemies and knows what his enemies will do to him. And it is obvious that he sees almost everyone as an enemy.
The African Union has debating whether he should form a government of national unity and whatever he may say in Egypt he will renege when he returns home because although he is the President he is no longer in power. The country is controlled by gangsters and thugs, and they will turn on him in an instant if they suspect he will ruin their game. In reality the AU indulged Mr Mugabe by even deigning to debate a government of national unity since his presidency is illegal and it is questionable that he should have been allowed to speak. By giving him the right to speak they gave him de facto recognition.
The leader of the opposition lacked the intestinal fortitude necessary to take power through the ballot and now, it seems, wants others to do his work for him. He justifies this by commenting that the situation is too dangerous to stand and he is probably right. His life hangs on a whim.
Rationally there is no reason why the AU should rebuke Mr Mugabe. He won the election. The fact that it was rigged was inconvenient but the margin of inconvenience is not sufficient to cause serious discomfort. There has never been any significant indication that the members of the Au are anything other than they have always been, and there were always unsavoury elements whose position was stolen, even in this era of greater democratic representivity. This is also an era steeped in expediency.
Modern politics like those of auld are based on expediency and expediency suggests that the sum total of development aid being dispensed to all the beggar nations that make up the AU is currently uncertain. The global economy is currently insecure and uncertain.
What is certain though is that a settlement in Zimbabwe will see [possible] massive amounts of reconstruction aid going to the place in an attempt to repair the enormous capital drain wreaked by a decade of suicidal politics. The country‘s mining industry is chaotic and they have just experienced the worst harvest since the 1940’s. That heap of development money will probably be money that doesn’t go to the rest. In economic language the opportunity cost of solving Zimbabwe’s problem is the diversion of hard to get aid from the other AU members.
At the same time the world is in a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. Climate change, extreme weather conditions, food consumption generated food price increases plus famines and rampantly exploding cost of energy are wreaking creeping havoc on our global society and that means one thing… less largesse to go around.
Therefore the members of the AU will take the inherently rational position that they do not individually stand to gain from the addition of one damm hungry beggar to their alms conference. Collectively they will placate Mugabe and let well alone… If it’s broken why fix it?
The Blogospherian.
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