weblog
jozi
22/2/09On the face of it the moral argument for South Africa/Azania to give the new Unity Government of Zimbabwe/Rumbabwe a billion dollars [US] to kick start their economy is overwhelming. The South African government has stubbornly refused to hold the Zimbabwean/Rumbabwean [Z/R] tyrant Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe [aka The Roz], dictator of the ancient State of Rozwi now aka Z/R, accountable for the damage, destruction and huge unnecessary loss of life in that country since the Roz and his gangster cronies embarked on a petulant spoiling spree ten years ago.
“I don’t care if the cat is colour A or colour B,” the new pity-me-face of the newest begging bowl kid on the block Morgan ‘Unspellable and Forgettable’ Tsvangirai [sic] whined breezily yesterday morning on E-News, “as long as it catches mice.” A wonderfully displaced statement, under the circumstances.
He arrived in town clutching his new finance minister and not a gangster was in sight.
Buried out of sight though is a hostage to fortune. And thereby hangs a curious hiatus this past week in the strange mercurial politics of Africa… a tale of two white men in a black man’s world.
The strange admixed fortunes of a pair of odd “White man cometh” adventurers came to a sticky and gruesome end this week: well given the nature of both, more like a moment of super spin-fall-over.
The hostage to fortune in Z/R, a man Jane Austin called Mr Bennett was arrested on, allegedly, trumped up charges this week by the dictator Mugabe’s goon squad in a ‘finger in your eye’ act of political intimidation. He followed it up with one in the other eye when he appointed ministers he wasn’t supposed to… except no one told him.
The intimidatee [sic] the man called Morgan T’, was basically told [one presumes] that if he expects to see the fellow Bennett in one piece again, plus a dozen or so, more anonymous hostages, he had better get his smooth talking arse out into the limelight and hustle for some pocket money for Bob’s inevitable retirement to the north of some sunny refuge.
Since we effectively forced Morgan T to get into bed with The Roz’ it is reasonable that we pay the lobola for the marriage. In fact if it hastens Bob’s retirement so much the better.
But we must know that it won’t.
%
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Last ‘White” man standing … down
Weblog
Jozi
22 Feb 2009
On the face of it the moral argument for South Africa/Azania to give the new Unity Government of Zimbabwe/Rumbabwe a billion dollars [US] to kick start their economy is overwhelming. The South African government has stubbornly refused to hold the Zimbabwean/Rumbabwean [Z/R] tyrant Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe [aka The Roz], dictator of the ancient State of Rozwi now aka Z/R, accountable for the damage, destruction and huge unnecessary loss of life in that country since the Roz and his gangster cronies embarked on a petulant spoiling spree ten years ago.
“I don’t care if the cat is colour A or colour B,” the new pity-me-face of the newest begging bowl kid on the block Morgan ‘Unspellable and Forgettable’ Tsvangirai [sic] whined breezily yesterday morning on E-News, “as long as it catches mice.” A wonderfully displaced statement, under the circumstances.
He arrived in town clutching his new finance minister and not a gangster was in sight.
Buried out of sight though is a hostage to fortune. And thereby hangs a curious hiatus this past week in the strange mercurial politics of Africa… a tale of two white men in a black man’s world.
The strange admixed fortunes of a pair of odd “White man cometh” adventurers came to a sticky and gruesome end this week: well given the nature of both, more like a moment of super spin-fall-over.
The hostage to fortune in Z/R, a man Jane Austin called Mr Bennett was arrested on, allegedly, trumped up charges this week by the dictator Mugabe’s goon squad in a ‘finger in your eye’ act of political intimidation. He followed it up with one in the other eye when he appointed ministers he wasn’t supposed to… except no one told him.
The intimidatee [sic] the man called Morgan T’, was basically told [one presumes] that if he expects to see the fellow Bennett in one piece again, plus a dozen or so, more anonymous hostages, he had better get his smooth talking arse out into the limelight and hustle for some pocket money for Bob’s inevitable retirement to the north of some sunny refuge.
Since we effectively forced Morgan T to get into bed with The Roz’ it is reasonable that we pay the lobola for the marriage. In fact if it hastens Bob’s retirement so much the better.
But we must know that it won’t.
Nothing has changed in Zimbabwe. The Roz and his thugs are the political equivalent of Cancer. Giving money to the Mugabe-regime-by- any-other-name-is-the-Mugabe- regime would be like pumping hormones into the disease zone rather than excising the tumour and battering the wound with Chemo. The patient is close to dead now and is hardly likely to get better by increasing the size of the mortgage. [My apologies for the mixed metaphors].
Undoubtedly we shall see the ANC led SA government attempt to “spin” their reasons for handing over the billion bucks of taxpayer money to the really poor next door as a vain attempt to arrest the flow of citizens fleeing South. As I observed the moral argument for support is overwhelming albeit futile.
However the ANC [the ruling party in South Africa/Azania] this week lost its ‘spinmeister’. By a bizarre stroke of irony another of the few so-called “White” Afrikans who choose to involve themselves in so called “black” men’s [and seriously tough black women’s] politics saw his career come to a sticky end this week, and like Mr Bennett, he had to be cut from the party.
For years Karl Niehaus has presided, covertly and otherwise, around the fortunes of particular persons within the ruling party. His absence this week after being busted from the party after admitting fraud, publically, on radio, and then television was however, noticeable. A strident lady attempted to defend the Party’s moral and legal position regarding fraud admissions by Mr Niehaus, during an ‘after 8’ debate on SAFM last week: and her lack of plausibility was painfully evident.
Presumably the relevant lady lives in the real world when not in the studio. A Spindoctor should have a flair for metaphor and the spokeslady for the ruling Party was a literalist. She was also most enraged when some rival lady phoned in and called her “poor woman’. She was no longer poor we heard for what it had to do with the message being presented… but then as I observed Mr Niehaus has gone and the truth will manage itself. There are many who agree with the infamous observation some years ago by a well known and generally respected activist that he didn’t join the struggle to stay poor. Getting rich is definitely in and rthe new spokeslady made that obvious.
Mr Niehaus on the other hand was/is a master of sleight of hand duplicity; and as we discovered this week he also lived in La la land where you don’t have to do anything useful [apart from polishing lies] and you can live the life of your dreams. He was finally busted for so much dodgy debt that had he been a Dickensian character he would languish for years in Debtors Gaol… Now of course a month or two of penance and it will be back in the saddle for Karl … he hopes.
If Mr Niehaus’s electric fall from grace this week demonstrated anything it was that the politics of corruption undo the citizen as effectively as the politics of corruption destroyed Zimbabwe; and, lest it be thought we are being too parochial; how the politics of corruption have undone the planet: given our current almost unstoppable momentum towards the abyss of a global depression. [He also demonstrated that, like Mr Bennett languishing in jail, that when the chips come down hard the honky in our region is more expendable than many other of dubious degree who languish instead in the various ‘Politburos’ of the ruling parties.].
I put the ‘almost’ and ‘seemingly’ in those last two pre-italicised sentences because, like most of my fellow humans I like to give optimism a marginal break.
That this is a bleak break rests on an almost certain economic assumption. Tossing a billion dollars[US] into the arid production-free hell that is Z/R today would simply fuel the rampant inflation. The present trickle of goods flowing into the country would swell to a small stream and be swallowed by an ocean of demand… Inflation is as inevitable in this situation as debt is. We also have a litany of role models now to know that reconstruction will take most of this century… assuming the human race survives the century in its present form.
In fact Mr T’s ‘cat and mice’ analogy is off the mark. It is true that the size, shape or colour of the cat is irrelevant but not because they all catch mice. Rather because not even the legendary pied piper could stem the tidal wave of rodent power pouring out of every patch of shadow, bent on overwhelming the poor lonely ‘moggie’. Zimbabwe is still the same dishonest place it has been for the past 30 years: donate maybe, lend never.
Perhaps it is apposite that the farmer who would repair the farms in Z/R and the ‘spin meister’ who would make lemmings relish their journey of doom have both been abruptly removed from their tasks… free now to watch the sunset.
Cheers
The Blog’
Jozi
22 Feb 2009
On the face of it the moral argument for South Africa/Azania to give the new Unity Government of Zimbabwe/Rumbabwe a billion dollars [US] to kick start their economy is overwhelming. The South African government has stubbornly refused to hold the Zimbabwean/Rumbabwean [Z/R] tyrant Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe [aka The Roz], dictator of the ancient State of Rozwi now aka Z/R, accountable for the damage, destruction and huge unnecessary loss of life in that country since the Roz and his gangster cronies embarked on a petulant spoiling spree ten years ago.
“I don’t care if the cat is colour A or colour B,” the new pity-me-face of the newest begging bowl kid on the block Morgan ‘Unspellable and Forgettable’ Tsvangirai [sic] whined breezily yesterday morning on E-News, “as long as it catches mice.” A wonderfully displaced statement, under the circumstances.
He arrived in town clutching his new finance minister and not a gangster was in sight.
Buried out of sight though is a hostage to fortune. And thereby hangs a curious hiatus this past week in the strange mercurial politics of Africa… a tale of two white men in a black man’s world.
The strange admixed fortunes of a pair of odd “White man cometh” adventurers came to a sticky and gruesome end this week: well given the nature of both, more like a moment of super spin-fall-over.
The hostage to fortune in Z/R, a man Jane Austin called Mr Bennett was arrested on, allegedly, trumped up charges this week by the dictator Mugabe’s goon squad in a ‘finger in your eye’ act of political intimidation. He followed it up with one in the other eye when he appointed ministers he wasn’t supposed to… except no one told him.
The intimidatee [sic] the man called Morgan T’, was basically told [one presumes] that if he expects to see the fellow Bennett in one piece again, plus a dozen or so, more anonymous hostages, he had better get his smooth talking arse out into the limelight and hustle for some pocket money for Bob’s inevitable retirement to the north of some sunny refuge.
Since we effectively forced Morgan T to get into bed with The Roz’ it is reasonable that we pay the lobola for the marriage. In fact if it hastens Bob’s retirement so much the better.
But we must know that it won’t.
Nothing has changed in Zimbabwe. The Roz and his thugs are the political equivalent of Cancer. Giving money to the Mugabe-regime-by- any-other-name-is-the-Mugabe- regime would be like pumping hormones into the disease zone rather than excising the tumour and battering the wound with Chemo. The patient is close to dead now and is hardly likely to get better by increasing the size of the mortgage. [My apologies for the mixed metaphors].
Undoubtedly we shall see the ANC led SA government attempt to “spin” their reasons for handing over the billion bucks of taxpayer money to the really poor next door as a vain attempt to arrest the flow of citizens fleeing South. As I observed the moral argument for support is overwhelming albeit futile.
However the ANC [the ruling party in South Africa/Azania] this week lost its ‘spinmeister’. By a bizarre stroke of irony another of the few so-called “White” Afrikans who choose to involve themselves in so called “black” men’s [and seriously tough black women’s] politics saw his career come to a sticky end this week, and like Mr Bennett, he had to be cut from the party.
For years Karl Niehaus has presided, covertly and otherwise, around the fortunes of particular persons within the ruling party. His absence this week after being busted from the party after admitting fraud, publically, on radio, and then television was however, noticeable. A strident lady attempted to defend the Party’s moral and legal position regarding fraud admissions by Mr Niehaus, during an ‘after 8’ debate on SAFM last week: and her lack of plausibility was painfully evident.
Presumably the relevant lady lives in the real world when not in the studio. A Spindoctor should have a flair for metaphor and the spokeslady for the ruling Party was a literalist. She was also most enraged when some rival lady phoned in and called her “poor woman’. She was no longer poor we heard for what it had to do with the message being presented… but then as I observed Mr Niehaus has gone and the truth will manage itself. There are many who agree with the infamous observation some years ago by a well known and generally respected activist that he didn’t join the struggle to stay poor. Getting rich is definitely in and rthe new spokeslady made that obvious.
Mr Niehaus on the other hand was/is a master of sleight of hand duplicity; and as we discovered this week he also lived in La la land where you don’t have to do anything useful [apart from polishing lies] and you can live the life of your dreams. He was finally busted for so much dodgy debt that had he been a Dickensian character he would languish for years in Debtors Gaol… Now of course a month or two of penance and it will be back in the saddle for Karl … he hopes.
If Mr Niehaus’s electric fall from grace this week demonstrated anything it was that the politics of corruption undo the citizen as effectively as the politics of corruption destroyed Zimbabwe; and, lest it be thought we are being too parochial; how the politics of corruption have undone the planet: given our current almost unstoppable momentum towards the abyss of a global depression. [He also demonstrated that, like Mr Bennett languishing in jail, that when the chips come down hard the honky in our region is more expendable than many other of dubious degree who languish instead in the various ‘Politburos’ of the ruling parties.].
I put the ‘almost’ and ‘seemingly’ in those last two pre-italicised sentences because, like most of my fellow humans I like to give optimism a marginal break.
That this is a bleak break rests on an almost certain economic assumption. Tossing a billion dollars[US] into the arid production-free hell that is Z/R today would simply fuel the rampant inflation. The present trickle of goods flowing into the country would swell to a small stream and be swallowed by an ocean of demand… Inflation is as inevitable in this situation as debt is. We also have a litany of role models now to know that reconstruction will take most of this century… assuming the human race survives the century in its present form.
In fact Mr T’s ‘cat and mice’ analogy is off the mark. It is true that the size, shape or colour of the cat is irrelevant but not because they all catch mice. Rather because not even the legendary pied piper could stem the tidal wave of rodent power pouring out of every patch of shadow, bent on overwhelming the poor lonely ‘moggie’. Zimbabwe is still the same dishonest place it has been for the past 30 years: donate maybe, lend never.
Perhaps it is apposite that the farmer who would repair the farms in Z/R and the ‘spin meister’ who would make lemmings relish their journey of doom have both been abruptly removed from their tasks… free now to watch the sunset.
Cheers
The Blog’
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Malema's no Feudal flunky
A moment’s silence for the victims of the Victorian bushfires.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was, apparently, to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely an, allegedly, corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other cronies to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Perhaps the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do?
Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not timeously attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic, or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type Received English presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position which seems difficult to achieve then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it [and I really don’t. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else],Ubuntu is all about our essential humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go.
Is he however a “Naughty Boy” as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite. This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage. Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation, to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip-hop dance. The moves were mostly good, slick and given what propaganda we are fed regardinbg Model T schools, surprisingly professional in timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were ultimately same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I envisaged squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s Model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was, apparently, to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely an, allegedly, corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other cronies to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Perhaps the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do?
Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not timeously attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic, or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type Received English presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position which seems difficult to achieve then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it [and I really don’t. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else],Ubuntu is all about our essential humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go.
Is he however a “Naughty Boy” as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite. This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage. Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation, to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip-hop dance. The moves were mostly good, slick and given what propaganda we are fed regardinbg Model T schools, surprisingly professional in timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were ultimately same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I envisaged squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s Model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
Big Julies chat show remorse.
A moment’s silence for the victims of the Victorian bushfires.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely a corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other cronies to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Presumably the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do? Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type 'Received English' presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position which seems difficult to achieve then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant, insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it [and I really don’t. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else], ubuntu is all about our essential common humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go.
Is Julius Malema however, a “Naughty Boy” as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite. This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it, in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance, to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage.
Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip hop-dance. The moves were mostly good, slick and given what we are led to believe about 'poor Model T' schools surprisingly professional in timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were inevitably, ultimately, same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I envisaged squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.
The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.
However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.
All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.
Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:
Mr Pikoli’s sin was to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely a corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]
During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.
Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.
Again during the week the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other cronies to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Presumably the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.
Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do? Can you understand the conundrum I face here?
I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.
On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]
He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type 'Received English' presentation to be a fake American accent.
He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.
Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position which seems difficult to achieve then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.
Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant, insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it [and I really don’t. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else], ubuntu is all about our essential common humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go.
Is Julius Malema however, a “Naughty Boy” as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?
Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite. This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.
Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].
Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it, in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance, to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.
They all understand rage.
Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.
While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.
Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip hop-dance. The moves were mostly good, slick and given what we are led to believe about 'poor Model T' schools surprisingly professional in timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were inevitably, ultimately, same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.
I envisaged squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..
Have a great week
Nik.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
BO Panics?
Weblog Feb 7 2009
Jozi
What if The Package fails! Why should it?
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked it and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.]
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt., and secondly because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who wanted the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] included understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy. We haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of panic.
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years, had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic [to coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the jewish state and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta-reality prevails in the minds of madmen.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on good old god what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
Jozi
What if The Package fails! Why should it?
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked it and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.]
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt., and secondly because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who wanted the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] included understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy. We haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of panic.
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years, had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic [to coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the jewish state and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta-reality prevails in the minds of madmen.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on good old god what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
Friday, February 6, 2009
What if The Package fails! Why should it?
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked it and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.]
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt., and secondly because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who wanted the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] included understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy. We haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of panic.
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic o coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the jewish state and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational, as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist, seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta- reality prevails in the minds of madmen.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on good old god what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked it and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.]
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt., and secondly because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who wanted the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] included understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy. We haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of panic.
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic o coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the jewish state and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational, as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist, seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta- reality prevails in the minds of madmen.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on good old god what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
What if the package fails?
Weblog 7 Ferbruary 2009
Jozi.
What if The Package fails!
Why should it?
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked Mr Obama's hurriedly cobbled together rescue package that it to save the Firmian economy from obsolecnce; and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.] We don't know how much of Mr Obama's package is a repackage of Mr Bush's last Novemebr package and hjow much is cumulativce and separate.
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision, ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt. And, secondly, because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who included the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] , understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line, requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power. China t5he world's most successful communist state could simply nationalise all US businesses in the country and cut off the US supply of their goods. This latter may seem extreme but we know that humans havwe a staggering propensity for the irrational.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy then the pressure to put the line back in will grow. The US public sector is not particularly adept at being proactive anymore; we haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of... panic?
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic [to coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the Jewish State of the latter day Khazers and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist, seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta-reality prevails in the minds of those madmen who take fiction to be reality.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on 'good ole god' what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
Jozi.
What if The Package fails!
Why should it?
At last viewing, [TV] the senate [the US alt’ Firmian] had blocked Mr Obama's hurriedly cobbled together rescue package that it to save the Firmian economy from obsolecnce; and reduced it to $780,000,000,000 [And no, these are not Rumbabwean dollars.] By my reckoning the US debt is now calculatedly at plus minus $2.100,000,000,000,000 [Two thousand one hundred trillion dollars]. The US last year earned about 13,000,000,000,000. [Thirteen trillion dollars.] We don't know how much of Mr Obama's package is a repackage of Mr Bush's last Novemebr package and hjow much is cumulativce and separate.
The Senate blocked the provision presumably because someone started doing their maths and remebeering their history books. Firstly there was a sneaky protectionist provision, ‘porked’ in by some lurkish Democrat no doubt. And, secondly, because, one imagines, of two much such ‘pork.’ The record is blurry on our side of the planet on exactly how much of the now assaulted bail out pack was linked to either. Does it matter?
Mr Obama didn’t get a honeymoon.
Did the people who included the protectionist provision [linked to giving inefficient American/Firmian steel manufacturers a preferential right of sale in all preferred projects thereby representing an onerous cost-raising burden on steel users] , understand the inevitable outcome.
Given what we now officially know about the 1930’s and the sudden hint we are getting that what we heard from our grandparents was all true and horrible should we take lightly this chauvinistic behaviour on the part of the President’s Party to ignorantly plunge the world into a global trade war.
Frankly the outcome for the United States would be catastrophic. The outcome for the rest of the world could be immensely beneficial. [It could equally be more than catastrophic.].
Had that single line provision sneaked through the Senate unnoticed, and it almost did reminding us of the observations in Fahrenheit 9/11 [sic] concerning the absence of due diligence with respect to reading the Bills before they became Law. Mr Obama is so filled with enthusiasm for the mission he has to accomplish that he may well have simply signed it into law without having himself noted the destructive potential of that line, requiring that all beneficiaries of the largest civic reconstruction project embarked on in a few generations make exclusive use of US produced Steel.
Consider the implications of a global trade war sparked by such a provision. The United States could be excluded from a new “charmed circle” The BRIC countries, we Southern Azanians, plus Europe [Groland] … [and the reluctant Britain/Pomerania ] would be beneficiary of a shift in the world’s focus of power. China t5he world's most successful communist state could simply nationalise all US businesses in the country and cut off the US supply of their goods. This latter may seem extreme but we know that humans havwe a staggering propensity for the irrational.
That single line reflects the core of the potential disaster that lies in wait for us. The thought is now out. This Democrat government is a natural sucker for protectionist seduction. Protect yourself against the possibility that two years from now the Democrats consolidate their hold on the Senate and put the line back in. Should Mr Obams’s ‘bold plan’ bomb because of the endemic corruption in the United States polity, which it can do, bogging down in obfuscatory bureaucracy then the pressure to put the line back in will grow. The US public sector is not particularly adept at being proactive anymore; we haven’t noticed, for instance; that New Orleans is booming back into life. At last viewing at still looked like an abandoned city.
No wonder then that Mr Obama’s campaign speech oratory had a hint of more, higher, octaves, and a shriller timbre this week: the merest hint of... panic?
Why is he panicking? Should we be panicking? Or should we rather grasp the multilateral opportunity presented by a discredited American performance
**************************************
I found it repugnant that ‘Phoney Haire’ the former Pomeranian Prime Minister, the person Bob [the Roz]Mugabe, the recently rehabilitated dictator of Rumbabwe, refers to as a “moffie”, and the man who’s profligate attitude helped fuel the now imploded “boom” of the past years had only this to say this week.
In the face of a global disaster such as that presented by the current Shumperterian- Capitalist-period-of-creative-chaos episode. Phony Haire called for a return to a conjectural entity called God.
Apparently god is not dead as predicted by Mr Nietzsche but is fully represented by Phoney Haire.
Phoney is also chief negotiator of something equally sinecurotic [to coin a word] [sinecure plus sclerotic] for the middle east so called peace talks or whatever.
What impartial role can a Christian fundamentalist with a vested interest in the “raptures’, and the “running of the script” neurosis [the Revelations script if you’re confused] seriously play in such a zero option scenario as that playing out between the Jewish State of the latter day Khazers and the Muslim ‘hordes’ surrounding them.
The script cannot play without Armageddon.
The irrational as represented here by a Christian fundamentalist, seek Armageddon to achieve their “rapturous” return to whatever deluded meta-reality prevails in the minds of those madmen who take fiction to be reality.
With Mr Obama’s panicking and Mr Haire calling on 'good ole god' what makes you think that the era of managerial bureaucratic pedantry could really end with Mr Eliot’s whimper?
****************
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Happy birthday to a fine man*.
Weblog 2 Feb 2009
Jozi
So here we are. It is already the 31st day of the first month of 2009… a trite observation perhaps. It is, for the Bloggist, the 31st anniversary of the birth of the grand fellow: our eldest child and son, Dayglo the magnificent, presently somewhere off the coast of Uruguay, we believe, on route south. Happy Birthday, Dayglo.
The day he was born, 31 years ago, the hospital in which he was born was devoid of paediatric staff. They had all been rushed to the site of a mission hospital out of town where a massacre had taken place. Insurgent liberation fighters had stormed the place and brutally slaughtered many of the staff and violated the bodies of infants in the paediatric [child care] section: a large section, we understood. A skeleton staff remained and hence I volunteered assistance and it was at a moment in history when the idea that a husband should facilitate in the birth was newly fashionable. Thus I assisted a competent midwife in the birth of our boy: about whom I wrote:
Covered in aspic
You emerge from the womb…
To stare with quiet incomprehension
At the sterile confinesOf your first awareness
Now 31 years later the man who’s gangster’s committed the atrocity out of town [during which, an Australian medical worker with whom we were acquainted, in the small expat community amongst whom we lived, was raped and murdered…RIP] has allowed himself to be snared into an alliance with a hated enemy One hopes the political opposition has not just committed suicide. There are few things more dangerous than a cunning cornered buffalo and if anyone is a buffalo it’s Robert [Bob the R%oz] Mugabe.
The place where the incident happened was called Rhodesia, a country that is now a footnote in history. That place died in 1980 and our time living there ended. It was obvious that when you facilitate a transformation that puts baby murderers in power, things would be ugly and they were. We knew what was coming and left immediately.
The first act was the introduction of the Central Intelligence Organisation [CIO], associated with the murder of another acquaintance: a small, introverted, hunchbacked man who always came to see our shows and then hung around in the bar feasting on crumbs of information and gradually becoming a friend to many. The CIO picked him up at Beit Bridge for no particular reason and decided to “straighten” his back: with a mallet.The rest of the butchery and the rest, thieving and buggary is now still unfolding history.
Yes; we assumed the reign of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe; a complex, manipulative example of the world’s most insidious disease: the warlord species. Now 31 years later he has agreed, reluctantly, to share power after having lost the last election and then cheating the presidential vote so blatantly that it has quite taken the breath [to trot out an old cliché] of a pretty aghast world, dealing with the greatest general economic meltdown in financial history and really rather distracted anyway: Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Congo, Tibet: no one is innocent so there shall be no accusation.
And now, abruptly, those complacent millions clambering their way out of the piss and grime that is, and has been human existence since forever, face the spectacle of a Sisyphean slide back into miserable oblivion. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] has just predicted the loss of as many as 51million jobs, this year… Few are thinking about next year most hope the saviour, Obama, will pull us out of the shit.
The result of course will be a rising clarion call to the forces of so-called reason to end the Capitalist system that gave us a glimpse of what could be, and return us to the sterile confines of socialist awareness with it’s inevitable degeneration into the Mugabe world of putrefying decay and catastrophic descent into starvation and disease… the place we humans lived in from time immemorial [to use another cliché… sorry]. Even Mr Putin, the Stalinist KGB Russian Strongman and Mugabe wannabee has warned this week [ingenuously?] against this strident demand.
We have to resist this call. We must remember Socrates’ observation “people would put a man to death if they could and bring him back to life again with equal indifference to reason”
Mugabe is not unique: he is normal. It is our decision to live in harmony, those of us fortunate enough to live in reasonably operative democracies, and reject extremists from all sides of the political spectrum in favour of a stable interpretation of the market economic system, that is abnormal.
So 31 years ago when the grand lad whom we love, adore and cherish with all the fervour of any proud parent I know arrived when the world was in a state of “cold” war. The surrogates of extreme rage were in emerging meltdown…
I went from the birthing ward to make a speech at a respected institution in the town. My audience mostly those who favoured liberation from the white settler oppressors. There in a review of options for an independent Zimbabwe I predicted the immanent, inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned by endemic corruption and rampant looting by the horror thugs who ruled the region, to the collapse so long predicted by that frank assessment of Ayn Rand: represented in Atlas Shrugged; her terrifying masterpiece, which echoes hauntingly around our present halls of catastrophe. I argued that emerging evidence, suggesting that the place was incapable of producing equipment that would mine the frozen Siberian wastes for oil, represented the tip of a skills shortage thatr would inevitably paralyse the region's potential. Slaves cannot be proactive. I was, as we know now, proved right.
I was chased from the lecture room, escorted from the buildings by armed guards. I spoke heresy. How dare I point to the emperor’s naked frame!
It was a truly momentous day: that one the day our boy was born.
I put a note in the newspaper “welcome to the rat race.”. It caused a stir amongst those with whom we were acquainted. Our son noted my concern for his wellbeing and now sails around the world as a substitute for the clinical cubicle.
The world however is discovering what happens to the machine when the grease clogs up. Who needs Al Quaeda [sic] when you have the international banking community deciding to turn their lubricant into a product: and then developing sclerosis?
The beginning of the Kondratieff cycle that started with the abolition of the gold standard back in ’71 or so, is now gathered apace and seems to have peaked in the early noughties. Mr Mugabe shows us the way. Can we all arrest our own slide, can we grasp Mr Obama’s ring and launch ourselves into yet another Brave New World [clichés abounding hey].
For all our sakes I hope so.
As an aside; I hear that Toyota is recalling its Yaris brand of vehicle for a seat belt adjustment. Now: is that half a million Yarii or half a million Yaris’[s]?
• *This was written in the early hours of the 31st Jan, and then due to a quirk of Murphy: that irascible wrecker of plans, the Internet was inaccessible; and the day’s momentum was lost. The impending Xstrata sponsored Platinum Mile race, a major inland water one mile swim event, followed on the first of Feb and was being organised and co-ordinated by Mrs Blog, assisted by moi [amongst a hundred others or so, excellent helpers all] on the day pitching the event from the Coca Cola sponsored “Gigrig” rapping with the gathered crowd, which was certainly large enough to stretch our accommodating skills to the edge of their elasticity. … The internet went back into it’s cyber box for the next 48 hours.
• The sun came out, as requested, on the 1st Feb, after two weeks of persistent rain and it was a glorious day. What a wonderful birthday weekend … Wherever on earth Dael is we wish you a wonderful 32nd year and good sailing.
Jozi
So here we are. It is already the 31st day of the first month of 2009… a trite observation perhaps. It is, for the Bloggist, the 31st anniversary of the birth of the grand fellow: our eldest child and son, Dayglo the magnificent, presently somewhere off the coast of Uruguay, we believe, on route south. Happy Birthday, Dayglo.
The day he was born, 31 years ago, the hospital in which he was born was devoid of paediatric staff. They had all been rushed to the site of a mission hospital out of town where a massacre had taken place. Insurgent liberation fighters had stormed the place and brutally slaughtered many of the staff and violated the bodies of infants in the paediatric [child care] section: a large section, we understood. A skeleton staff remained and hence I volunteered assistance and it was at a moment in history when the idea that a husband should facilitate in the birth was newly fashionable. Thus I assisted a competent midwife in the birth of our boy: about whom I wrote:
Covered in aspic
You emerge from the womb…
To stare with quiet incomprehension
At the sterile confinesOf your first awareness
Now 31 years later the man who’s gangster’s committed the atrocity out of town [during which, an Australian medical worker with whom we were acquainted, in the small expat community amongst whom we lived, was raped and murdered…RIP] has allowed himself to be snared into an alliance with a hated enemy One hopes the political opposition has not just committed suicide. There are few things more dangerous than a cunning cornered buffalo and if anyone is a buffalo it’s Robert [Bob the R%oz] Mugabe.
The place where the incident happened was called Rhodesia, a country that is now a footnote in history. That place died in 1980 and our time living there ended. It was obvious that when you facilitate a transformation that puts baby murderers in power, things would be ugly and they were. We knew what was coming and left immediately.
The first act was the introduction of the Central Intelligence Organisation [CIO], associated with the murder of another acquaintance: a small, introverted, hunchbacked man who always came to see our shows and then hung around in the bar feasting on crumbs of information and gradually becoming a friend to many. The CIO picked him up at Beit Bridge for no particular reason and decided to “straighten” his back: with a mallet.The rest of the butchery and the rest, thieving and buggary is now still unfolding history.
Yes; we assumed the reign of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe; a complex, manipulative example of the world’s most insidious disease: the warlord species. Now 31 years later he has agreed, reluctantly, to share power after having lost the last election and then cheating the presidential vote so blatantly that it has quite taken the breath [to trot out an old cliché] of a pretty aghast world, dealing with the greatest general economic meltdown in financial history and really rather distracted anyway: Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Congo, Tibet: no one is innocent so there shall be no accusation.
And now, abruptly, those complacent millions clambering their way out of the piss and grime that is, and has been human existence since forever, face the spectacle of a Sisyphean slide back into miserable oblivion. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] has just predicted the loss of as many as 51million jobs, this year… Few are thinking about next year most hope the saviour, Obama, will pull us out of the shit.
The result of course will be a rising clarion call to the forces of so-called reason to end the Capitalist system that gave us a glimpse of what could be, and return us to the sterile confines of socialist awareness with it’s inevitable degeneration into the Mugabe world of putrefying decay and catastrophic descent into starvation and disease… the place we humans lived in from time immemorial [to use another cliché… sorry]. Even Mr Putin, the Stalinist KGB Russian Strongman and Mugabe wannabee has warned this week [ingenuously?] against this strident demand.
We have to resist this call. We must remember Socrates’ observation “people would put a man to death if they could and bring him back to life again with equal indifference to reason”
Mugabe is not unique: he is normal. It is our decision to live in harmony, those of us fortunate enough to live in reasonably operative democracies, and reject extremists from all sides of the political spectrum in favour of a stable interpretation of the market economic system, that is abnormal.
So 31 years ago when the grand lad whom we love, adore and cherish with all the fervour of any proud parent I know arrived when the world was in a state of “cold” war. The surrogates of extreme rage were in emerging meltdown…
I went from the birthing ward to make a speech at a respected institution in the town. My audience mostly those who favoured liberation from the white settler oppressors. There in a review of options for an independent Zimbabwe I predicted the immanent, inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned by endemic corruption and rampant looting by the horror thugs who ruled the region, to the collapse so long predicted by that frank assessment of Ayn Rand: represented in Atlas Shrugged; her terrifying masterpiece, which echoes hauntingly around our present halls of catastrophe. I argued that emerging evidence, suggesting that the place was incapable of producing equipment that would mine the frozen Siberian wastes for oil, represented the tip of a skills shortage thatr would inevitably paralyse the region's potential. Slaves cannot be proactive. I was, as we know now, proved right.
I was chased from the lecture room, escorted from the buildings by armed guards. I spoke heresy. How dare I point to the emperor’s naked frame!
It was a truly momentous day: that one the day our boy was born.
I put a note in the newspaper “welcome to the rat race.”. It caused a stir amongst those with whom we were acquainted. Our son noted my concern for his wellbeing and now sails around the world as a substitute for the clinical cubicle.
The world however is discovering what happens to the machine when the grease clogs up. Who needs Al Quaeda [sic] when you have the international banking community deciding to turn their lubricant into a product: and then developing sclerosis?
The beginning of the Kondratieff cycle that started with the abolition of the gold standard back in ’71 or so, is now gathered apace and seems to have peaked in the early noughties. Mr Mugabe shows us the way. Can we all arrest our own slide, can we grasp Mr Obama’s ring and launch ourselves into yet another Brave New World [clichés abounding hey].
For all our sakes I hope so.
As an aside; I hear that Toyota is recalling its Yaris brand of vehicle for a seat belt adjustment. Now: is that half a million Yarii or half a million Yaris’[s]?
• *This was written in the early hours of the 31st Jan, and then due to a quirk of Murphy: that irascible wrecker of plans, the Internet was inaccessible; and the day’s momentum was lost. The impending Xstrata sponsored Platinum Mile race, a major inland water one mile swim event, followed on the first of Feb and was being organised and co-ordinated by Mrs Blog, assisted by moi [amongst a hundred others or so, excellent helpers all] on the day pitching the event from the Coca Cola sponsored “Gigrig” rapping with the gathered crowd, which was certainly large enough to stretch our accommodating skills to the edge of their elasticity. … The internet went back into it’s cyber box for the next 48 hours.
• The sun came out, as requested, on the 1st Feb, after two weeks of persistent rain and it was a glorious day. What a wonderful birthday weekend … Wherever on earth Dael is we wish you a wonderful 32nd year and good sailing.
Happy birthday to a fine man*.
weblog Feb 2nd 2009
Jozi
So here we are. It is already the 31st day of the first month of 2009… a trite observation perhaps. It is, for the Blogospherian, the 31st anniversary of the birth of the grand fellow: our eldest child and son, Dayglo the magnificent, presently somewhere off the coast of Uruguay, we believe, on route south. Happy Birthday, Dayglo.
The day he was born 31 years ago the hospital in which he was born was devoid of paediatric staff. They had all been rushed to the site of a mission hospital out of town where a massacre had taken place. Insurgent liberation fighters had stormed the place and brutally slaughtered many of the staff and violated the bodies of infants in the paediatric [child care] section: a large section, we understood. A skeleton staff remained and hence I volunteered assistance and it was at a moment in history when the idea that a husband should facilitate in the birth was newly fashionable. Thus I assisted a competent midwife in the birth of our boy: about whom I wrote:
Covered in aspic
You emerge from the womb…
To stare with quiet incomprehension
At the sterile confines
Of your first awareness
Now 31 years later the man who’s gangster’s committed the atrocity out of town [during which, an Australian medical worker with whom we were acquainted, in the small expat community amongst whom we lived, was raped and murdered…RIP] has allowed himself to be snared into an alliance with a hated enemy One hopes the political opposition has not just committed suicide. There are few things more dangerous than a cunning cornered buffalo and if anyone is a buffalo it’s Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe.
The place where the incident happened was called Rhodesia, a country that is now a footnote in history. That place died in 1980 and our time living there ended. It was obvious that when you facilitate a transformation that puts baby murderers in power, things would be ugly and they were. We knew what was coming and left immediately.
The first act was the introduction of the Central Intelligence Organisation, associated with the murder of another acquaintance: a small hunchbacked man who always came to see our shows and then hung around in the bar feasting on crumbs of information and gradually becoming a friend to many. The CIO picked him up at Beit Bridge for no particular reason and decided to “straighten” his back: with a mallet.The rest of the butchery and the rest, thieving and buggary is now still unfolding history.
Yes; we assumed the reign of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe; a complex, manipulative example of the world’s most insidious disease: the warlord species would be nasty brutal and long [to restate Hobbes]. Now 31 years later he has agreed, reluctantly, to share power after having lost the last election and then cheating the presidential vote so blatantly that it has quite taken the breath [to trot out an old cliché] of a pretty aghast world, dealing with the greatest general economic meltdown in financial history and really rather distracted anyway: Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Congo, Tibet: no one is innocent so there shall be no accusation.
And now, abruptly, those complacent millions clambering their way out of the piss and grime that is, and has been human existence since forever, face the spectacle of a Sisyphean slide back into miserable oblivion. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] has just predicted the loss of as many as 51million jobs, this year… Now one’s thinking about next year everyone hopes the saviour Obama will pull us out of the shit.
The result of course will be a rising clarion call to the forces of so-called reason to end the Capitalist system that gave us a glimpse of what could be, and return us to the sterile confines of socialist awareness with it’s inevitable degeneration into the Mugabe world of putrefying decay and catastrophic descent into starvation and disease… the place we humans lived in from time immemorial [to use another cliché… sorry]. Even Mr Putin, the Stalinist KGB Russian Strongman and Mugabe wannabee has warned this week [ingenuously?] against this strident demand.
We have to resist this call. We must remember Socrates’ observation “people would put a man to death if they could and bring him back to life again with equal indifference to reason”
Mugabe is not unique: he is normal. It is our decision to live in harmony, those of us fortunate enough to live in reasonably operative democracies, and reject extremists from all sides of the political spectrum in favour of a stable interpretation of the market economic system, that is abnormal.
So 31 years ago when the grand lad whom we love adore and cherish with all the fervour of any proud parent I know arrived the world was in a state of “cold” war. The surrogates of extreme rage were in emerging meltdown…
I went from the birthing ward to make a speech at a respected institution. My audience those who favoured liberation... and what form of economic system would be the most desirable to pursue the dream offered by kliberation. I predicted the immanent collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned by endemic corruption and rampant looting by the horror thugs who ruled the region, to the collapse so long predicted by that frank assessment of Ayn Rand: represented in Atlas Shrugged; her terrifying masterpiece, which echoes hauntingly around our present halls of catastrophe.This was not popular notwithstanding that subsequent events proved me right.
I was chased from the lecture room, escorted from the buildings by armed guards. I spoke heresy. How dare I point to the emperor’s naked frame!
It was a truly momentous day that one the day our boy was born.
I put a note in the newspaper “welcome to the rat race.”
He noted my concern for his wellbeing and now sails around the world as a substitute for the clinical cubicle.
The world however iscurrwently discovering what happens to the machine when the 'grease' clogs up. Who needs Al Quaeda [sic] when you have the international banking community deciding to turn their lubricant into a product: and then developing sclerosis?
The beginning of the Kondratieff cycle that started with the abolition of the gold standard back in ’71 or so is now gathered apace and seems to have peaked in the early noughties. Mr Mugabe shows us the way. Can we all arrest our own slide, or can we grasp Mr Obama’s ring and launch ourselves into yet another Brave New World [clichés abounding hey].
For all our sakes I hope so.
As an aside; I hear that Toyota is recalling its Yaris brand of vehicle for a seat belt adjustment. Now: is that half a million Yarii or half a million Yaris’[s]?
· *This was written in the ear4ly hours of the 31st and then due to a quirk of Murphy that irascible wrecker of plans the Internet was inaccessible and the day’s momentum was lost. The impending Xstrata sponsored Platinum Mile race, a major inland water one mile swim event, followed on the first of Feb and was being organised and co-ordinated by Mrs Blog, assisted by moi [amongst a hundred others or so: excellent helpers all] on the day pitching the event from the Coca Cola sponsored “Gigrig” rapping with the gathered crowd, which was certainly large enough to stretch our accommodating skills to the edge of their elasticity. … The internet went back into it’s cyber box for the next 48 hours.
· The sun came out as requested after two weeks of persistent rain and it was a glorious day, as a considerable crowd of swimmers drank their way across the cleanest dam in Southern Afrika.. What a wonderful birthday weekend … Wherever on earth Dael is we wish you a wonderful 32nd year and good sailing.
Jozi
So here we are. It is already the 31st day of the first month of 2009… a trite observation perhaps. It is, for the Blogospherian, the 31st anniversary of the birth of the grand fellow: our eldest child and son, Dayglo the magnificent, presently somewhere off the coast of Uruguay, we believe, on route south. Happy Birthday, Dayglo.
The day he was born 31 years ago the hospital in which he was born was devoid of paediatric staff. They had all been rushed to the site of a mission hospital out of town where a massacre had taken place. Insurgent liberation fighters had stormed the place and brutally slaughtered many of the staff and violated the bodies of infants in the paediatric [child care] section: a large section, we understood. A skeleton staff remained and hence I volunteered assistance and it was at a moment in history when the idea that a husband should facilitate in the birth was newly fashionable. Thus I assisted a competent midwife in the birth of our boy: about whom I wrote:
Covered in aspic
You emerge from the womb…
To stare with quiet incomprehension
At the sterile confines
Of your first awareness
Now 31 years later the man who’s gangster’s committed the atrocity out of town [during which, an Australian medical worker with whom we were acquainted, in the small expat community amongst whom we lived, was raped and murdered…RIP] has allowed himself to be snared into an alliance with a hated enemy One hopes the political opposition has not just committed suicide. There are few things more dangerous than a cunning cornered buffalo and if anyone is a buffalo it’s Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe.
The place where the incident happened was called Rhodesia, a country that is now a footnote in history. That place died in 1980 and our time living there ended. It was obvious that when you facilitate a transformation that puts baby murderers in power, things would be ugly and they were. We knew what was coming and left immediately.
The first act was the introduction of the Central Intelligence Organisation, associated with the murder of another acquaintance: a small hunchbacked man who always came to see our shows and then hung around in the bar feasting on crumbs of information and gradually becoming a friend to many. The CIO picked him up at Beit Bridge for no particular reason and decided to “straighten” his back: with a mallet.The rest of the butchery and the rest, thieving and buggary is now still unfolding history.
Yes; we assumed the reign of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe; a complex, manipulative example of the world’s most insidious disease: the warlord species would be nasty brutal and long [to restate Hobbes]. Now 31 years later he has agreed, reluctantly, to share power after having lost the last election and then cheating the presidential vote so blatantly that it has quite taken the breath [to trot out an old cliché] of a pretty aghast world, dealing with the greatest general economic meltdown in financial history and really rather distracted anyway: Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Congo, Tibet: no one is innocent so there shall be no accusation.
And now, abruptly, those complacent millions clambering their way out of the piss and grime that is, and has been human existence since forever, face the spectacle of a Sisyphean slide back into miserable oblivion. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] has just predicted the loss of as many as 51million jobs, this year… Now one’s thinking about next year everyone hopes the saviour Obama will pull us out of the shit.
The result of course will be a rising clarion call to the forces of so-called reason to end the Capitalist system that gave us a glimpse of what could be, and return us to the sterile confines of socialist awareness with it’s inevitable degeneration into the Mugabe world of putrefying decay and catastrophic descent into starvation and disease… the place we humans lived in from time immemorial [to use another cliché… sorry]. Even Mr Putin, the Stalinist KGB Russian Strongman and Mugabe wannabee has warned this week [ingenuously?] against this strident demand.
We have to resist this call. We must remember Socrates’ observation “people would put a man to death if they could and bring him back to life again with equal indifference to reason”
Mugabe is not unique: he is normal. It is our decision to live in harmony, those of us fortunate enough to live in reasonably operative democracies, and reject extremists from all sides of the political spectrum in favour of a stable interpretation of the market economic system, that is abnormal.
So 31 years ago when the grand lad whom we love adore and cherish with all the fervour of any proud parent I know arrived the world was in a state of “cold” war. The surrogates of extreme rage were in emerging meltdown…
I went from the birthing ward to make a speech at a respected institution. My audience those who favoured liberation... and what form of economic system would be the most desirable to pursue the dream offered by kliberation. I predicted the immanent collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned by endemic corruption and rampant looting by the horror thugs who ruled the region, to the collapse so long predicted by that frank assessment of Ayn Rand: represented in Atlas Shrugged; her terrifying masterpiece, which echoes hauntingly around our present halls of catastrophe.This was not popular notwithstanding that subsequent events proved me right.
I was chased from the lecture room, escorted from the buildings by armed guards. I spoke heresy. How dare I point to the emperor’s naked frame!
It was a truly momentous day that one the day our boy was born.
I put a note in the newspaper “welcome to the rat race.”
He noted my concern for his wellbeing and now sails around the world as a substitute for the clinical cubicle.
The world however iscurrwently discovering what happens to the machine when the 'grease' clogs up. Who needs Al Quaeda [sic] when you have the international banking community deciding to turn their lubricant into a product: and then developing sclerosis?
The beginning of the Kondratieff cycle that started with the abolition of the gold standard back in ’71 or so is now gathered apace and seems to have peaked in the early noughties. Mr Mugabe shows us the way. Can we all arrest our own slide, or can we grasp Mr Obama’s ring and launch ourselves into yet another Brave New World [clichés abounding hey].
For all our sakes I hope so.
As an aside; I hear that Toyota is recalling its Yaris brand of vehicle for a seat belt adjustment. Now: is that half a million Yarii or half a million Yaris’[s]?
· *This was written in the ear4ly hours of the 31st and then due to a quirk of Murphy that irascible wrecker of plans the Internet was inaccessible and the day’s momentum was lost. The impending Xstrata sponsored Platinum Mile race, a major inland water one mile swim event, followed on the first of Feb and was being organised and co-ordinated by Mrs Blog, assisted by moi [amongst a hundred others or so: excellent helpers all] on the day pitching the event from the Coca Cola sponsored “Gigrig” rapping with the gathered crowd, which was certainly large enough to stretch our accommodating skills to the edge of their elasticity. … The internet went back into it’s cyber box for the next 48 hours.
· The sun came out as requested after two weeks of persistent rain and it was a glorious day, as a considerable crowd of swimmers drank their way across the cleanest dam in Southern Afrika.. What a wonderful birthday weekend … Wherever on earth Dael is we wish you a wonderful 32nd year and good sailing.
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