blogospherian - deconstructing the multiverse

The Mail & Guardian Race Issue

2009-09-28T01:07:00.001-07:00

The Mail & Guardian newspaper published what they called “the Race Issue” over the Heritage Day long weekend. Reading it one had a rather surreal feeling that the key issue was the “White Issue” or even “the Wit Gevaar” [danger from persons known as “White”, for offshore readers{O.R.}]. It was rather a shock fifteen years after the revolution to discover that white people still apparently controlled all important aspects of life…and blacks were really no more than servants. I hadn’t realised that. I, we, thought we were just getting on with the pursuit of happiness in a post democratic dispensation.

Watching the news channels one so rarely sees a white person in any position of apparent influence these days it was all to easy to forget that the entire edifice of post liberation South Africa is apparently really a giant smokescreen behind which evil white elites still determine all the real truths of our existence.

I found that the big elephants: Xenophobic race attacks and their aftermath mostly unresolved, Lindela detention camp race profiling, unresolved Somali trader murders, 3500 unresolved [mainly] Afrikaner farm murders for instance contemporary race issues were ignored, in favour of beating an old, old, old drum. I worry that some ‘Truman’s World/ Matrix” miasma has swept us all along into a state of suspended belief: that we are frozen like yoghurt, in a time warp. I suppose it was Heritage Day after all… not Outcome day.

So I wrote a short letter to the M&G, well after I had written a long letter and then one somewhere in between. You my dear reader can browse through whichever you wish and ignore what you don’t like.

To the Editor [Letter #3]
Thank you for this interesting Heritage Day: “Race Issue”, edition of your newspaper, which has had me stomping around all weekend pondering how to react without gaaning on and on. My final conclusion is that the entire edifice is little more than a well-wrought navel gazing retrospective, in which you focus mainly on beating a cripple called Hubris cowering prostrate on the floor, while carefully ignoring the big mean elephants who are making sure s/he never gets up again.

Eventually I felt immensely sad thinking about how a ballsy sharp fanged pit bull newspaper called the Weekly Mail, has in our older years morphed into a rather long winded elderly, timid bulldog, with worn down chompers and a bad case of grumpy old man syndrome.

Sincerely

theblogospherian
PS: I did arrive at this conclusion after writing a long ‘gaan aan’ denotative discursive piece in the belief that most modern readers lack the imagination to understand anything unless it is spelt out in laborious detail… this after all being your trademark style, and me being a probably pedantic schoolteacher [whoops sorry forgot the Newspeak: ie; learning skills outcomes mediator] .
Afterwards, since the weekend was dragging on interminably and I was procrastinating on the real tasks in front of me, I wrote a more connotative exploration of your contribution … well admittedly I had consumed a great deal of congenial liquids.

I am not going to bore you with those possibly predictably tedious insights, or more probably tendentious perorations. I understand you are a busy person and I am probably the real grumpy old man.

So I’ll put them instead on the new unknown blog I’ve had to compile since you did away with Amagama and it’s unremembered [better] predecessor Blogspot; and I’ll thank you at the same time for your courtesy in sending me my entire file from those sites in a form that even an aging technomoron like myself was able to reproduce, even if I am still stumbling around trying to figure out how it all works. If you are interested you’ll find it all on: Http://theblogospherian.blogspot.com … If I had the faintest idea of how to get it onto your Thoughtleader, I may well have gone that route instead: assuming I would have been ‘invited’.

Best regards

Nicholas

Letter #1
This is the long tendentious discursive letter: warning: this may become boring.

The Editor
The Mail & Guardian 26/9/09 Re: The “race Issue”.

To whom it concerns
I have just ploughed through your Race Issue supplement and am left with a deep sense of depression and not a little puzzlement at what seems to be a profound depth of denial on the part of most of your contributors. I hope that what follows does not seem to be a rant… it is not intended to be.

First: the depression. Some fourteen years ago I [self] published a crime novel called The Buffalo Hunters, in which, under the misguided influence of [pre-Disgrace] J M Coetzee, I set out to completely obliterate the words White and Black from my 98,000 word text… The reasons for this are not germane to this contribution, although I have no issue with discussing it at some other occasion and they were in any event published in the Penguin collection “Soweto inside out” some years ago. The Buffalo Hunters sold a thousand copies, mostly by me, door-to-door, and attracted bemused responses from local critics most of whom pretended it hadn’t been written. So, for instance I eliminated white lies, black eyes, black marks and white knights and any other reference, however oblique, that associated those colours with people and values. I thought, mistakenly, I also admit now, especially in the light of this disturbing “Race Issue”, that we were entering a non-racial era, and that i was writing for an emerging non-racial audience that never actually materialised: as your correspondent Mr Ngcobo so poignantly observed in his recent Sunday Times peeve.

Later I wrote and published [on the Internet under the pen name Jakari] a follow up novel on the same lines… In the Ashanti Raider no key character was racially profiled, I carefully mixed up all the metaphors so that no one amongst the cast could be readily identified as one race or the other; and in our new non-racial society no publisher would even glance at the text, since, apparently, it had no generic stereotypes upon which “the reader” could hang its prejudices, and pre-determined interpretations… In this I ran deeply into ingrained behaviour and became effectively a social pariah.

Foolishly, then, I believed, along with many others, who supported the 1992, Yes vote, and the subsequent constitutional dispensation, that we were on our way to a non-racial society and a rosy future in which all persons would be equal and we could go forth and conquer the world. We know now of course that this idea was an illusion, that we [naively perhaps and equally perhaps, for many, in rat trapped desperation] negotiated with those who carefully masked their [understandable] hatred and, like Mr Mugabe, simply bided their time until that rage, pent up over 300 years, could not be suppressed any longer; and burst out in the form of a racially enraged President, and the emerging vindictive, retributive onslaught of a newly empowered elite, as a result of which that part of the White community that could do so, fled.

This means, to move from my sense of depression to my sense that many of your contributors are in a state of denial that the population demographic figure you quote on page 23 is of dubious veracity. In other words the idea that the white population [of post-democratic South Africa] is [now] as much as 9.1% of the total is an old and somewhat Potemkinist statistic… the more likely probability is hinted at by the figure for the decline in white tertiary enrolments to 23%. It is more likely that the [so-called] White population is now closer to 7% and falling [ironically in 1952 it was 23% by the way, although that too may have been more Potemkinist than we are wont to imagine]. As evidence in support of this contention the Economist newspaper published a reasonably verifiable report five years ago, to the effect that an evaluation of immigration statistics into five English speaking countries revealed that some 1,3 million persons had migrated from SA between 1994-2000. Of course not all of this entire exodus was White, and the Economist report was never mentioned in our media. At the time of the 1992 Referendum the White population was put at 5, 2 million. Adding, conservatively, another 500,000 émigré’s to the Economist evaluation over the intervening nine years, would give us a current figure of under four million honkeys even allowing for natural increase.

There is also a curiously prevalent assumption that the rest of the greater population’s growth has remained stagnant for at least a decade which, notwithstanding the HIV/AIDS toll, is absurd given the relatively greater birth-rate of the greater Black community, [which actually doubled in size between ’74 and ’94, so great was the level of oppression that no one had anything else to do], plus the [unacknowledged] high level of black refugee migration into South Africa over the past fifteen years.

To elaborate; for instance, fifteen years ago I had four black kids in my matric class [final school leaving year class for O.R.] plus one Chinese, and the rest were white. In 2010 I won’t have a single white kid in my final year matric Business class and only a handful in my lower grades: although the school would nominally be classed as a former ‘white’, so-called ‘private’ school.

By the way these kids along with hundreds of other black kids I have the pleasure of working with over the past fifteen years in a variety of social environments as a temporary part time teacher, all seemed pretty well fed, and frequently sport elaborate and expensive hairstyles; and while some don’t have cell’phones they can all find their way around Facebook more efficiently than I can, and are for the most part better informed than most of their white peers, who increasingly reveal the deleterious effects of large scale loss of complementary peers. I don’t want to add to that because I have no wish nor need to offend anyone.

To continue: Twenty years ago there were no black families living on my street. Three years ago when I helped draft a street petition to obliterate an unruly, abusive, disruptive, informal drinking establishment, operating from hijacked premises in the street, mine was one of only four white families out of the 140 households in the street. Never mind Mr Brandon Huntley, I can tell you when I walk down my street I stand out like a “sore thumb”.

Presumably the 136 new households have traded Mr Mngxitama’s [a correspondent] rather obscure “grammar of black suffering”, which I presume to reside somewhere in the experience of pre-colonial feudal Africa, for the “white grammar of suffering” in the form of mortgage bonds, hire purchase debt, pension schemes, medical aids and rapid upward mobility aspirations [In every respect of which, I might add they have one up on me, who still poddles about in a rusted decrepit 1978 Volksie Beetle on long term loan from an old friend, who now functions as a migrant surgical worker in a euro zone country hospital, having become unemployable in his homeland as a result of the new anti-white person discrimination.]

Now it may be that I’m wrong, and that all the former white residents just moved across town; but frankly I think you are all in deep denial about this “white” thing. My point here is that the game is over… You don’t need this “beat on whitey’ “Race Issue” series, because the game has been played, and we are simply in extra time, before the penalty shoot out with a crook goalie on the white side. Black won this event…BEE…[Black economic empowerment] rulz. The current ‘struggle’ is a sleight of hand illusion… an exercise in misdirection… the sands of time are moving inexorably towards the overwhelming black hegemony no matter how tightly whitey seems to be keeping his fist on the tiller.

Confusingly the strange problem today is less, white residual knee jerk, and often born-again, racism, but emerging, hotly denied, black racism, black exceptionalism, exclusivism and general xenophobia, in the face of huge competition for elusive opportunity.

The main reason why you still seem intent on fighting the issue is because the final ramparts have not yet been breached, or as Mr Ngcobo [a correspondent] asserts with a bravely un African allusion: “…before we storm the Bastille”. Nonetheless this will happen… 15 years is but a blink in the eye of history. Another 15 and the white component will reach around five percent before drifting lower. Then, whiteys you will see will either be those standing at robots [OR: SA speak for traffic lights] holding placards saying: “I am Hungry”, or more probably, Mr Mashele’s * residual white working class grimly smiling our shit eating smiles and trading with each other; or they will be his super rich ‘Weberian’ economically empowered minority who don’t need to leave their compounds, except to hang out in places that only other rich [but black] people can afford to go to. Either way both white groups will be relatively invisible, as are the whites in Kenya, Uganda and other more francophone regions of the continent. [* another correspondent][This idea incidentally that “secret cabals of elites” control the country’s destiny is so old it dates back to before Rhodes and provides… like religion, a comfortable scapegoat for idle thought.]
To conclude: Your grandchildren will look at you with incredulity when you tell them 30 years from now that the whole place was once run by whiteys… because the only whiteys they’ll be familiar with will most probably be tourists and the Robot sentries. And it’s no use trotting out the old “we love South Africa it’s our home” bit… Surplus people have migrated for centuries in pursuit of opportunity, that’s how we all got here in the first place.

Thus the newly superfluous white middle class is pretty well on its way. Mr Mashele’s alleged ‘white elites’ no longer need them, they seem to have “the new black grammar of suffering” to exploit. So the white exodus is not going to stop, short of the Apocalypse: it can’t; they have no choice: the economy is effectively shrinking, a fact masked by stealth inflation, massive debt funded State expenditure and inadequate electricity supply. This together with the expanding nature of BEE means that opportunities for white upwardly mobile aspirants who don’t have access to connections or hereditary wealth are shrinking even faster, while the outside world is truly “alive with possibility’”: current recession notwithstanding.

The trend line is irreversible. The decision to re-racialise our country [with racially prescriptive legislation] has been taken and the die is well cast. The fact that the M&G has seen fit to run this ‘Race Issue’ series is testimony to it. It cannot be stopped; and won’t be stopped because the Africanist agenda rules and the vested interests it carries with it are absolute until the next revolution [which, as we have been told will not happen until after the arrival of the next Messiah]. Those who witnessed the recent film version of Coetzee’s novel: Disgrace” know what the [foreign] director saw, more clearly than we want to: White people are today, in reality, no more than spectators now, at this final feast where the goodies are being redistributed. This is notwithstanding the pretentious “skaam* making” toy toying* Western Cape Premier, Helen “Queen Canute” Zille [someone for whom I did not vote by the way, Ms Dodd*.] [*another contributor][OR Skaam = Afrikaans= shame ,embarrassment… what your kids feel when you take them to school in an inappropriate motor vehicle. Toy toying: a curious shuffle type dance movement that characterizes protest demonstration behaviors in SA]
In case you think I’m being a negative alarmist, bear in mind that the present, post- Africanist-agenda, white population of Zimbabwe is today less than five percent of the 1970 pre-independence figure. Anecdotally there are more Chinese citizens in Zimbabwe today than white people. The Black agenda has triumphed gloriously and now needs to prove it can deliver on the promise of the better life without the honkeys, very few of whom, will ever return, no matter how much nostalgia they feel: that for which they are nostalgic no longer exists… And anyway Africa doesn’t have a monopoly on trees even if it does have one on sunsets.

I could gaan aan but I won’t, this is all well-worn territory. [* OR: Gaan aan: Afr: to agonise endlessly beyond a point of tedium]
What should be really worrying you’re various contributors, is not, whether White people are polite to you in the workplace Mr Mateboge* [we aren’t actually polite to anyone really, why do you think the motivation industry never runs out of customers?] because that is really not important: we are no longer important. What is important is what you think of yourselves, as Mr Mngxitama so confusingly, post-structurally asserts.

The real issue behind the misdirected handshake is why all the black guys who have become obscenely wealthy over the past fifteen years on the untold billions that have evaporated from the public purse since 1994, have not been piling more black owned and empowered businesses onto the JSE, which, in case you didn’t notice [again], has declined from some 700 listed companies in 1994 to about 360 now. Or, why black controlled competition commissions are unable/unwilling to tackle the growth strangling oligopolies that reinforce “the grammar of black suffering” [whatever that evocative phrase means].
There are no rules, I believe, other than the chains in your own minds, to stop black owned businesses from achieving success in a black owned country run exclusively by black people are there? There don’t seem to be any that apply to former black universities, which seem to this casual observer, to be carefully avoiding any [so-called: OR] ‘transformation’ agendas. There are black clubs that refuse to admit white patrons albeit no putative ‘white’ one is allowed to refuse anyone, [in fact so-called ‘white’ clubs no longer exist by law] so why shouldn’t we have many more exclusively black businesses? [Denial again, perhaps]. Of course there is the sub-textual open conspiracy of socialist trade union/big business collaborationist agenda to make life so impossible for small, emerging [especially black] businesses that many are stillborn at birth, or, later, strangled by embittered and corrupt State officials… at least according to many of my many new black neighbours.

Then what else should be really worrying your contributors in our post Polokwane [O.R. see earlier blogs] era where we Whitey’s are reduced to mere spectators, is that, Mr Manuel aside, there is no apparent plan to deal with the post 2010 story, which is almost here and gone. Does no one perhaps want to acknowledge that Mr Manual’s vision for 2025 could be the year of total Black ascendancy… all the hated whiteys gone at last, or at least, relegated to oblivion? I am sure you could just pay us all to leave; [there’s a vision] it would be so much less angst filled, and probably cheaper than struggling with this dubious Africanist agenda, which, like its Afrikaner inspired Apartheid forbear, promises only extended misery, in a forthcoming era of low to stagnant economic growth. At least you would be able to focus on where we are going rather than endlessly agonising over where we have been.

The primary reason why your various contributors have angst about whitey and his alleged control of the working environment is simply because the decision that was taken years ago, to go for the re-distribution of the existing pie, instead of building the biggest pie possible, has been successful; and the shrunken residue is now being grudgingly fought over by those who are still on the outside trying to oust those grimly hanging onto the inside. The yawning wage gap between elites and the rest of us has more to do with an historical undersupply of clever, talented, skilled black management workers, relative to the artificial demand created by legislative fiat, bidding up the price of their labour, than it has to do with white intransigence: [just the iron, economic law of scarcity in practice that we teach in 9th grade]. It also has more to do with the reality that political connections and cadre deployment are more important than knowledge, for emerging black management workers.

However when Mr Manyi* has his way, and he will; and the fat cat Corporates are forced to shed white knowledge workers, because the shrunken pie does not allow for growth, then gradually, but inevitably, the truth, that this resurgent race issue is simply a smokescreen, will become apparent. [* Manyi: new political commissar of Labour: intent on bulldozing demographic employment quotas on all ‘non-compliant’ businesses ie 93 % all level must be ‘black’]

Thus the 2019 September Heritage weekend edition of your newspaper [assuming it survives a possible democracy meltdown, when black opposition parties become strong enough, to challenge the current hegemonic dispensation, as they will; and/or the world itself does not succumb to the post-depression apocalypse predicted in my new novel “The Jonker Memorandum”] will be about the issue between those workers who belong to the Party [limited membership only] and those who do not. Race will no longer be an issue at all, except as an ongoing knee jerk diversion for those who are too blind to notice that [again regrettably] almost the only whites left are the tourists.

So can you please prove me wrong?
Sincerely:

theblogospherian

Letter # 2

This was the final straw: written in a state of delusional hysteria

My Grandmother’s cousin
My late grandmother had a first cousin who played violin in an orchestra on a ship called the Titanic, and according to family legend the band played on while the ship went down with most of the passengers because, as is well known, the boat didn’t have enough lifeboats for everyone

After reading the M&G “Race Issue” supplement, with its curiously old fashioned ranting on the issue of ‘bad whitey’s, in bed on Heritage Day, over a few guzzles of vodka, I fell into an exhausted and deeply troubled sleep during which I had a most disturbed dream. In my dream my extended, late violinist, relative came to me and told me, what he said, was the real story, about the sinking of the Titanic.

He said, that some time before that fateful meeting with a largely submerged iceberg there had been a revolt on board the ship. Apparently the poor people who travelled in the lower decks, known as “steerage”, were incensed. It seems they had not been invited to a concert on the upper decks being held to celebrate the current state of the ‘Blue Riband’ record-breaking journey, at that particular point in time. They took over the ship and deposed the captain and most of the older members of the crew.

At the precise moment when the iceberg alarm was sounded, a huge debate was raging amongst the newly emancipated passengers, regarding who should qualify to sit in the front seats at the concert. The main point of unanimity was that all the deposed rich folk on the upper decks should be expelled, and stand on the wind exposed deck, while those who had been disadvantaged by the absence of music in their lives, got to see the concert instead.

Therefore at the time of the ignored warning, but before the ship hit the iceberg, orders had already been issued that the expelled passengers, were not wanted on board at all; and were to leave the ship; they were thus busy being loaded onto the lifeboats when the actual impact occurred.

Meanwhile down n the ballroom the argument continued to rage over which were the best chairs; and whether they should be repainted into the newly fashionable red toned hues that were being touted as the future of design, by the more militant members. The departee’s: Colonels John Astor and Archibald Gracie attempted to convince the steerage passengers that they were in immanent danger, but they ignored him and insisted that the orchestra play the Marseillaise, which struck up just as the icy ocean poured across the ballroom. The band being trapped with all the steerage passengers simply played on

Colonel Archibald was later rescued hanging onto a newly painted railing: the rest went down with the ship… The rich people who were tossed out of the ballroom onto the main upper decks were rescued by passing ships.

Then my grandmother’s cousin went on to tell me that Ninety-seven years later, a country on the south end of the remote African continent found itself sailing in the troubled waters of the greatest financial meltdown in the history of the human race. Leaders everywhere on the planet were desperately seeking ways to stave off universal bankruptcy, and the treacherous under tips of the ravaging icebergs of financial failure were littered about like corpses on a battlefield. Simultaneously the world’s climates were everywhere undergoing terrifying changes. The general chaos of the financial meltdown was exacerbated by constant flooding, fires and terrible storms. The world, he said, was entering a time prophesied as Apocalyptic.

Fortunately though, the country’s leadership had substituted grand lies for bold action. The populace, knowing that their leaders lied about most things chose to believe them anyway. Lying was fashionable and acceptable, a comfortable legacy of the politics of resistance to oppression..

The global dilemma was declared irrelevant to their own agendas. Most importantly, they had to argue over who should have the best seats at a forthcoming concert at the country’s most important airport. They were going to welcome home a victorious, albeit troubled young suffragette, who had recently won a gruelling contest against embittered and jealous opposition.

The country’s most promising young firebrand leader had sworn to rally support against those who were the enemies of the young person and therefore the State, and had plotted against them both. These people were publicly castigated for their non-attendance at the concert, notwithstanding that they were not invited anyway. Other leaders distracted the populace from global floods with the issue of generous promissory notes while knowing they had left the doors open, to allow the water in: and the people cheered and called for the doors to be opened wider….

I woke up in a cold detoxifying sweat and fell off the bed reaching blindly for the vodka bottle that had fallen onto the floor.

Farewell cruel world

Theblogospherian.

Path dependency, trends and other viral connectivities.

2009-09-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

weblog September 24 2009
Jozi
Every month or so I go off to a chiropractor who adjusts my neck and straightens out the odd kink, and for a day or two everything is clear, my eyeballs see without strain and the energy flow through my body is as it should be. Then gradually [or even suddenly as the case may be] the old fault lines reassert themselves, and I fall out of alignment, until the old headaches return, the toothaches grow more bold; the sinuses re-block themselves, and it becomes time again to have it all adjusted again. I call it routine maintenance.

So is it with our society. We can lower the top, raise the bottom, squeeze the middle: but all the old kinks return, because there are always so many actions we take without noticing their effect; so many little steps that are taken without conscious thought. Like trees we just grow, and without the splints of corrective force our natures will take us where we are wont to go. So the paths we choose become the paths we know, and to say otherwise is to forget we made a choice somewhere, sometime: thinking we were going somewhere else, when our paths converged upon a choice of destination

Thus without knowing, we take the gentlest paths down the most convenient slopes, to the bottom where the going is easiest.

In a forest only the tallest trees can reach the sun: thrusting through the crowded thickets.

So it is with humans… Lies and denials through the politics of resistance, ill fit the aspirations of assertive growth, and like the kinks in my neck they will return at every unconscious moment when our awareness slips, and when we find ourselves baulked..

I have just finished a first browse through a new book called ‘False Economy’ by one
Alan Beattie of the Financial Times [London]. The basis of Mr Beattie’s premise is
that the difference between success and failure or atrophy, for the countries of the
world lies in the effectiveness with which they iron out the kinks and/ or the choices
they make in economic policy, that ultimately determine whether the country goes
forward or remains mired in a depressed state of stasis. Sometimes these choices are
recent as they would be with say, South Africa [which he doesn’t discuss], and more
often they are ancient, as they are with Russia, which he does.

His central image is the difference between the Giant Panda, a creature that somehow
morphed into an evolutionary cul de sac, and which cannot survive without state
support, and the household moggie[pussycat]; that super adaptive creature that has
become a ubiquitous part of all the world’s societies… the ultimate survivalist.

In his entertaining, and seemingly well researched tome [albeit poorly referenced] Mr
Beattie reminds us that it is the power of vested interest that supplies the almost
insurmountable “kinks” that prevent the movement of a society towards its holy grail
of super-development. He draws on a series of examples from, for instance the power
of an absentee landed gentry in Argentina, putting limits on that country’s growth, so
that the country, at one time, quite recently, the potential competitive equivalent of the
USA, has gradually stagnated into a third class power. At the other end of the scale he
describes how the vested interests of corrupt border customs procedures limit the
development of African states, particularly those that are landlocked.

His key phrase is a concept called ‘Path Dependence’ a phrase that rings resonantly of
Robert Frost’s classic piece “The road not taken”… “Two roads diverged in a wood”
and we took the path, unlike Frost, that was more travelled on… and that “has made
all the difference.”

Beattie made no comment in his exhaustive range of analysis regarding the paths that
the newly democratised South African State opted for in its post apartheid evolution.
Had he done so he would certainly have found fruitful ‘grist to his mill’ in the body of
racially inspired legislation that have epitomised the new State’s route to the future a
route predicated on past experience, and which seem more than likely to mire the
country in stagnation and frustration.

South Africa is a country that, unable to shake of its heritage of discriminative
legislation, passed new legislation to affirm those previously disadvantaged by the
racist apartheid era. Thus it has created an elite class of so-called “black diamonds’
who have racked up their pay to astronomical levels, exploiting to the full the
immutable laws of supply and demand … ie legislation requires that [so-called] black
empowered executives fill upper level positions in all organisations. However for
historical reasons the supply of such persons is extremely limited [and will continue
to be, see below].

Thus all manner of managerial workers now enjoy pay levels that even modestly
successful entrepreneurs can only dream of… For instance: the former Town Clerk of
old whose pay scale was on a par with the local school headmaster has now been
retitled as a Town Manager and earns five or six time the wage of the luckless
schoolmaster… some even earn more than the State President..

There is of course no real shortage of [so-called] black persons to take the post of
Headmaster, [or more appropriately in our enlightened times: head teacher] so
Headmasters remain poorly paid as do all educators, and other low
level workers, who are generally in ample supply, relative to demand.

In fact, in order to cement the place at the top of those persons fortunate enough to
have acquired some body of qualification somewhere, the education system has itself
been carefully demolished in the guise of an “improved” new post revolutionary
system. This system is so brilliant at developing the country’s potential that of some
two million children who started school under the new system in 1996 fewer than one
thousand were found to be sufficiently numerate to cope with the demands of a
university science education 13 years later. Not more than six thousand were of a
literate enough standard to cope with the demands of a university career.

Not only is the new system unable to produce school leavers of a reasonable standard
but all the teacher training institutions were closed, the technical colleges were
merged into universities and the national system of apprenticeships tossed out in
favour of an army of tax financed training bodies, that, to date, have [allegedly] barely
trained as many citizens in fifteen years as were produced in a single year under the
old discredited system. The party apparatchiks [known as “cadres”] who have been
seconded to run all these training bodies, and most other training institutions [and just
about everything else that qualifies as a sinecure], have what Beattie would describe
as an unacknowledged vested interest in ‘failure’ since too many well trained black
citizens will bring down the price of black managerial labour. An unwillingness to
compete is identified as a contributing source of atrophy in the existence of many less
successful economies.

Interestingly South Africa would represent a fascinating example to Mr Beatty of a
developing State that is in fact un-developing or de-developing. Over a period of
seventy years the country, at one time poised to compete favourably with the
emerging Australian State in the 1940’s, has morphed into an under-developing state
as a direct result of just such an unwillingness to compete firstly in the form of the
Apartheid State and now more latterly in the form of the new Affirmative State.

For instance: over the period 1994- 2009, the contribution of the manufacturing
sector to the Gross domestic product has declined from 24% to 14% and falling. The
country has become a net food importing country. The only sectors of the economy
showing signs of growth are those in government services. Even commodity output,
Beattie’s notorious “Resource curse” is in net decline. Routinely higher inflation rates
than those of trading partners means higher than standard interest rate patterns which
inhibit local investment and damage export opportunities, by causing an abnormal
strengthening of the exchange rates.

In 2008, the country was driven into recession principally because the electricity
supply agency failed to upgrade its supply capacity, to cope with even the modest
growth target that were achieved at the height of an [in retrospect] artificial “boom”,
inspired more by the circular process of selling off assets to comply with the legal
requirement for [so-called] Black ownership, than because of any real investment
growth.

The conclusions Beattie arrives at in his “surprising economic history of the world” is
that the various success stories that punctuate the path of human development are
almost exceptions to the rule, that once a vested interest group gains control over a
decision path, the probability of a change is so remote that stagnation is almost
fore-ordained. There is a good reason why my chiropractor can afford to send his kids
across the world to go to school; he knows that my neck will continue to be
troublesome no matter that he straightens it out every few weeks or so, and that I and
the rest of his customers, will have a continuing need for his services.

On viewing the film "Disgrace": J M Coetzee

2009-09-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

August 2009
In the brief “film guide” summations, Theresa Smith, film critic for the Star Tonite newspaper in Jozi writes about the film version of J M Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, that it is “Bleak and austere, but gripping because of nuanced performances and … it’s just as depressing.”

Having recently seen the film I cannot improve much on that summation. Nonetheless I cannot remember the last time an entire audience sat in stunned silence right through to the end of the credits and then left the cinema without a sound. This was our collective experience a few nights ago after witnessing this disturbing and haunting piece of work.

Notwithstanding this the screenwriter and director have tweaked Coetzee’s original prophetic vision of the white dilemma in a black controlled South Africa. When the book was first published in 1999 South Africa was still the “rainbow Nation” in which it was believed by the relatively unconscious white community that the future belonged to all its inhabitants.

A decade later that illusion has been shattered and to be a so-called “Lily-White is to be the subject of increasing discrimination and resentment as the great expectations that accompanied the transition to a democratic society have been shattered on the backwash of reality and in the aftermath of Polokwane that great ‘shattering’ which is still resonating through our post revolutionary society heralding the next phase of the “struggle”: that between the latent dark force of African feudalism: Coetzee’s theme and the driving forces of African liberation.

And this new phase of the struggle excludes the beleaguered white community much to the confusion of those sleepyheads who did not understand Coetzee’s “impertinent” message in the first place. Such “whitey’s” who appear in the film version of the book [excluding Professor Lurie and his daughter Lucy: the central characters] are either rapidly degenerating bit part players: Bill n Bev oscillating toward their trailer trash destination or as spectral spectators at a cape town farce… the window dressage extras, playing out their role in the shadows. There is no sense of the second revolution under way to the north.

But the violence is real. Thousands of unspeakably brutal farm murders since the book’s debut, underlined by the gratuitous murder of a young ‘Lucy clone’ woman on an isolated smallholding north of Jozi last week: slaughtered for her cellphone and her television set, underlined the reality of white powerlessness in the face of black rage and retribution and the empty awful Horror, that so completely destroyed Conrad’s character nearly a century earlier .

Since the publication of Disgrace, as many as one and a half million whites have fled South Africa for uneasy and discomforted security in other lands, and a million more will reluctantly vanish over the next fifteen years leaving only the rich established extras with too much to lose and the emerging trailer trash with nothing to hope for. [This is not something ever mentioned in polite media circles of course]

No wonder the audience sat rooted in horror at the awful truth our own dilemma. Movies are supposed to suspend reality not drive it home and so one cannot see this movie ever making to the general circuit. White sleepyheads will resist seeing it and the black majority will find it incomprehensible at best and racist at worst.

Theresa Smith’s summation was too kind: the movie is not just depressing it is a formula for suicide; which for many white aging South African’s will ultimately represent their only escape from Conrad’s “horror”, as it is unfortunately for increasing numbers of isolated beached white Zimbabweans, a country where the remaining white citizenry is now considerably outnumbered by the formerly non-existent, now rapidly growing Chinese community..

When I first read Disgrace I reeled in my own horror at the awful bleakness of Coetzee’s vision and I wrote a short review of my own in a poetic form and published it on my website at that time.It was a year [2000] when I was on a “write a poem a day” mission. I published it again later, in 2005, as part of my collection “Rehearsing Nietzsche” [ now also published on Blogroid.wordpress and eventually on this blogger site]

Watching the film I had the sense I had been Googled by the screen-writer, for reasons that are only evident to poets. Because the reason for this would not be evident to you my dear reader, i have re-published the blog i first published at the beginning of the decade on my original website Williamsonreport, and it now follows on this blog under the heading "On first reading J M Coetzee's Disgrace". I discontinued that website after some five years partly because of irreconcilable differences with the service provider and mainly because of legislation changes in my country of origin that would have subjected me to possible censorship and other State controls.

Happy blogging

On first reading Disgrace.

2009-09-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

December 2000
What follows is a repeat of my december 2000 blog on a former now defunct websiteHello destiny.

“JM Coetzee has sold out to the literary establishment.” That was my first reaction on reading Disgrace some years ago.

Along with many others of his admirers I felt, perhaps unfairly, that his shift from post- structuralist to modern poetic realist was possibly more motivated by the need for a pension than the demands of his craft.

I had not read Disgrace, when it first came out for the same reason that I don’t read Harry Potter, because I was wrapping up some work of my own. However late in 2000, some of my colleagues from the English department, at the school where I teach part-time in the business department, asked me if I would please read Coetzee’s new novel, and help them out with some thoughts, perhaps, for teaching the book to the Matrics [School leaving class] the following year. The book had, as you know simply ‘leapt’ into prominence, and there was, it seemed, a shortage of reviews, ‘n things said about it.

I was at that time engaged in a personal goal quest, I called the “Millennium Gap”©, to give me space between one book and the next. So I was recording my own history of that memorable year, by writing some piece of poetic construction each day through the year 2000: often in response to the events of the day, sometimes other things. In December, after the year had ended, Disgrace became part of my daily fodder in a voracious drive to feed that anxious need. It produced two pieces of work (of the 826 for the year) the first on the 17th of December 2000, and the following final piece on the 20th December that year.

I don’t think that my colleagues, who are sensible ladies, found my pieces enjoyable. I heard that the occasional student who got hold of them found them weird, and perhaps they are. I don’t know. I liked them. They were the responses of a poet (myself) who found an influential voice suddenly singing off key…Like Mick Jagger deciding to do a country concert with Dolly Parton: why would he do that?

It was also a poetic response to a piece of work that ‘klapped’ me at a visceral level.

I recognised the rage, had felt it before, in 1980…and was disturbed by the highly specific denotative brutality of its imagery. I felt ultimately that the shift from post-structuralism, with its presentation of meaning through use of archetypes had been displaced by a populist dispersal of less than useful stereotypes: the presentation of the easily accessible sign, so accessible it is unnoticed and serves to reinforce those concepts we seek to undermine.

I could also say that, naturally, I would feel this. When I decided to write a series of novels, as a way of displacing the effects of a bad incident in my life, and because I was finding myself reaching a dark place as a poet, I found inspiration in Coetzee’s style (and that of Milan Kundera, Herman Charles Bosman and Elmore Leonard, not to mention Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and some others on a list too long to mention.) His style is that of a poet and seemed to me the most natural way for a poet to write prose.

On the other hand, were I an arrogant, self serving, self centred writer, who promotes his own work on the Internet, to anyone who can still read, then I cannot speak ill of a man who finally after many years moved over to the place where the big bucks are. After all he leaves me as the only remaining (self-styled) post-structuralist writer left on the South African (non- Afrikaner) writer’s block (pun intended) (Unless there are a few others out there like me plumbing the empty reaches of cyberspace…Howzit dudes.)

So what does this mean…Since JM Coetzee has achieved his purpose, and more power to his elbow, I felt I would resuscitate my poem essays from the back end of December 2000 and pop them onto today’s ‘Bloggo’ for your tastelessy literary pleasure. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary that may be represented in the two pieces (which contain overlapping images by the way) I do wish him well to enjoy the long hard fruits of labour.

Enjoy

17/12/00

On First reading JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.
I have just recoiled from
Reading a section of this Disgrace.
Recoiled from the horror of
Professor Lurie’s search
For truth; an unintelligible search
As most searches of this nature tend to be.

The search has immobilised him
He has become a voyeur of his own life,
Watched in slow motion. He is immobilized
In a way reminiscent of Camus’ Outsider…”Mother died yes-
Terday, or perhaps it was the day before, I don’t remember.”
Or was that my recollection of a recollection.

This man’s passive response to the urgings of his nature
As opposed to his intellect
May represent a rejection through awareness
Of the endless repetition of the events in his
Otherwise dreary day.

An empty man inhabiting
the sterile confines of Apollonian Cape Town:
the place where life is an illusion.

Sex severs his connection. Bad sex severs it badly,
And he retreats from his intellectual void to
The Chthonian* origins
Of the Eastern Cape- metaphorical place of struggle.
A place of wildest nature and societal absence.

There he experiences the Dionysian night, coming
Face to face with his karma
As his burning body transforms him into a
Physical outcast to mirror his
Inner disgrace.

He seems though to be as unaffected by this trauma as he
Was by the one which exiled him to this place,
Where the fruits of acquisition are being redistributed
Amongst the newly victorious.

The death of the Apollonian nightmare and
The return to chthonian primitivism as Paglia
May have termed it
Is Coetzee’s vision of the New South Africa, some years
Down
The
Line.

Rape is the deed that reflects
An absence of society: society in decay in Cape Town,
Society fizzling about in violence and disarray, in the Eastern Cape.
The absence of society brings out the dogs in man.

In Coetzee’s vision Society must not
be confused with Community, they may be different.

Coetzee’s Community is Patrilineal.
Petrus becomes a metaphor for the ‘primitive archetype’ but
Denotatively, African, chief, presiding over his subjects
Whom he can apparently order
To be fucked at will.

The Eastern Cape represents that return to African despotism
Which is ‘our’ (white/Coetzee’s) sole knowledge
Of pre-colonial, feudal Africa…There is no democracy
where a man has the right to be born
a king.

In this place our protagonist must pay obeisance to the
New gods of liberation…his guilt…a trivial fuck- not a grand fuck
Basically a fuckless fuck; for never does
A man fuck with less enthusiasm than does the abstract professor.

In his state of dispassion he is most passionate about a prostitute;
The student Melanie is his Lolita with spots
and stained
underwear. He has “congress” whatever that is
with a vet, who “succours’ him.

The man is dead. He
Studies, desultorily, the life
Of a dead romantic poet, Byron, who went
Off to die in a fit of ennui.

An abstract intellectual he has seen through the superfluity
Of Apollonian western society, and like the virgin
Who believed in father Charismas and the truth of the universe,
He sulks at his own revelation and sets out to spoil the illusion.

Coetzee’s Barbarians are now within
The walls…their ways those of the dark Chthonian night
Underground and in the full grip of
Nature.
They shoot the raging dogs, fuck white lesbians, impregnate them and turn them into subservient vassals.

Lurie’s sole response to all the chaos about him
Is to prep the corpses of dogs for burial: dealing
With death in the most brutal
Of its manifestations.
We are all vassals of a sort: true freedom is impossible
And so Lurie too becomes a vassal.

.NiK(00)

Later, after I had digested the book in its totality and admired the perfectly crafted images, I wrote a second piece, again, like the first, under the simultaneous influence of Camille Paglia, who’s monumental works I was reading contemporaneously, also voraciously, also feeding the poetic grist.

It came as no surprise to hear this week that Coetzee had moved offshore to that land of eternal retirement, Australia.

On Further reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee under
the influence of Camille PagliaColleague Carla demands
to know
“Why the dogs?”
in a note, written on the back inside
cover of the book.

“What’s with the dogs?”
Be they: dogs of war,
loyal dogs, kraal dogs, “my dog goes
before me for the crocodile” expendable
dogs,
mark out territory dogs?

Lurie’s daughter is marked out territory. Allegedly,
black men have come to her house, (Coetzee emerges here from
the closet – the Barbarians at the
gate are now demonstrably BLACK)
and have, apparently against her will,
entered the ‘chthonian’ darkness
of her vagina: thus has she possessed
them… and Coetzee reveals the ancient angst;
“will you let your daughter marry blacks!”:
a trusty
theme.

Who stakes a claim on whom, when the territory
is marked?

Then. The Lurie girl, is more than just a White woman.
While Lurie is a common enough name for birds,
Lurie is more archetypically Jewish, as is Isaacs;
Boerjood, perhaps, but the flavour is
Jewish nonetheless.
Is Ms Lurie a sign for a new addition
to the ranks of castaway minorities:
the marginalized and temporary sojourner?

Of course Isaacs could be a “Kaapse man”; we
know him only as another emasculated male, along with the pathetic Bill Shaw,
who
cowers from the ‘Groot Baas’*, Lurie…himself (Lurie) so emasculated,
he is reduced to fucking whores and post-adolescent
infants.

Both father, an aging homme fatale, and his phlegmatic earth-mother
incarnate daughter, screw up catastrophically
over sex.

The centrality of the story hovers around variations on a fuck: an
almost trite metaphor.
This activity is sometimes coyly referred to as “making love”,
there is an occasional ‘congress’, and
an alluded rape is dealt with
at a level of equally coy disassociation.

Lurie fucks (“makes love to”) a prostitute
in the opening scene he then proceeds to “spend the night”
with a young student who demonstrates a
most marginal degree
of satisfactory compliance. Not really knowing what to do
the apparently shell-shocked/ impressionable,
tentative, acolyte submits to
passionless penetration…in a sense she lets
him ‘fuck her a bit’. For a while; she plays Patty Hearst to his
Lord of the Manor: she possesses him
and then spews him out as less than before, as Paglia may have put it.

In the process of his engagement with Melanie
(his Lolita) we
discover that Lurie
fucks serially: secretaries, colleagues, wives of colleagues
random veterinary surgeons, friends of his wife’s,
auntie Joan Cobbley n all.

Curiously these are desolate encounters: they are
entered into with joyless abandon: it is his ‘job’,
which he performs on autopilot.

This sense of detached fornication is extended to
a “square” object called ‘Bev’, which has a useful hole in it and
which,
“succours” him.
It is a “show” thing.
a duty fuck: Lurie, the Labrador
hovering around a bitch long enough to generate a pity fuck,
before commencing to kill off the competition.

Luries’ sex drive demands rhythmic routine:
obeisance to a programme churning in his drivers:
almost if not quite, “fuck by numbers”.

By contrast his daughter is a doughy lump…a featureless
failed lesbian who is well and truly, allegedly, raped;
an act performed offstage and hinted at:
a level of discretion more commonly associated
with the
lavatory into which
Lurie is thrust to burn, smothered in lighter fuel:
something not at all cooll: burn baby burn..

Strangely Lurie does not become traumatized by this event (being burned). Like
Camus’ Outsider he
has become so anaesthetized from
existence that he has lost any sense of self.

Instead he tyrannizes over detail. He becomes
immersed in perceived inconsistencies
in the behaviour
of
one,
Petrus:
a newly advantaged, previously disadvantaged, person
who now, it seems, has exercised rights
of Prima Nocte…Droit de Seigneur: the new
lord is evident, “nou maak n lě vir die
swart baas*.” .

There is, after all, no overwhelming
evidence
to suggest that anybody else did it, is there?
there are implications: men who came and shot the dogs
and went off with
the woman. Nonetheless they are
Only accusations. No further evidence is led.
No charges laid. Lurie however assumes that Petrus had gone away
and accuses him of lying. Petrus a guileful,
disingenuous yet engaging man quite reasonably allows, that
one may suspect what one wishes…if you do not
ask the right questions then the answers you receive
will deceive those who wish to be deceived.

The issue of the boy Pollux, ironically named
for a mythical hero, and of course, a ‘bright
star’,
is then a red herring, diverting
Lurie away from the probable real truth: that Petrus
penetrated the Lurie persona.
The dogs are shot, so that they
will not trouble the new owner, no longer a guest, in future,
when day has dawned.

It is obvious that access to David’s daughter’s
chthonian stronghold (cunt, for those who are still confused)
is the key to her continued existence
on the farm…she is reduced to a vassal, another irony, in a cycle of
abuse and abusing:
a shift in role, doubly pernicious with that Jewish moniker.

In (my novel) the Buffalo Hunters*, Jodas defends his decision
to shoot his own, semi-feral, cat; on grounds that using a vet desensitises
us to the real world…the real ‘chthonian night’ as Paglia*
would call it, and also call it a
‘shit place’, in need of society.
By these standards the
man who shoots the dogs
is a MAN in the most traditional sense .

Similarly, Lurie also has a need to prove that he is a man, his sex drive notwithstanding:
so he helps a local vet, the square object called Bev,
(which is only two letters away from box…a familiar metaphor for cunt)
kill stray dogs by anaesthetic process, moving somnambulistically by chthonian
degrees from the anaesthesia
of Communication 101…The professor has
graduated to god’s assistant, fucking the instrument of death itself,
in place of some other, spotty, in-exuberant, post-pubescent, country piece.

So what about the failed former lesbian post-modern-crypto-hippie-
allegedly-raped daughter?
Well she’s ok. Whomsoever it turned out to be, should she choose to
fine tune her ‘surviving victim’
personae then
she has access to someone who will
(perhaps regularly or inevitably) want to come around
on a doggish jaunt
and give her what she may or may not want.
Assuming she could (reluctantly) drop her victim attitude of passive acceptance
she could sequentially begin to exploit her power,
generate Kugelish demands and
the unnamed ‘rapist/s’ will KAK.

Most probably this will not happen.
Coetzee is taking us on a journey into Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence:
the past eternally doomed to repeat itself. “again and again times
without number...***”
Lurie is Coetzee’s Prufrock
extended to purposeless extinction.
He is left finally to deal with issues of death
and dissolution neither of which interfere
with, nor interface with, his deterministic dispassion.

Do we care…at the end we are exhausted and dispirited: the
crumbs we [assuming I write/read in my capacity as ‘honky’) are offered
in this tale
are meagre indeed: acceptance of a new Feudalism and
dealing with dead dogs. Wow

This Coetzee, out in the open
with the ‘in your face
ness’ of Disgrace is yet another version of the “horror”.
Conrad’s ghost haunts Coetzee, revealed in the “slim Jan”
mechanisms of his paranoia with Petrus whose ‘truth’
consists in the deliberate alteration of a ‘lie’.

Lies are important to Coetzee’s theme, lies papering on older lies on further
lies burnishing
the grandest lie of all: that elegant illusion we call, Civilization.

Petrus the “dark person” lies, specifically over
Pollux. Otherwise he is evasive...the archetypical ‘shifty’ darkie telling the former oppressor
what the oppressor needs to know: Rresistance politics – truth: subject to expedience.

Lurie, at his ‘trial’ asserts that “the girls statement
is right.”
He exercises his right to say no more, to say
nothing that may incriminate him further
or less: the truth, but not the whole truth.
He will say nothing to confess motive, and therefore guilt.
Petrus simply lies and thus obviates guilt.
They are both men after all and a “fuck’s a fuck ou pelly”* except of course
that it isn’t: there’s all that old eternal family history stuff
Clogging up the old chthonian pipes.

This central theme, the relativity of truth, remains the most profound
regarding the conundrum in
which Lurie has found himself. Self absorption
in a world of illusions is fatal to
professional well being.
Coetzee implies this to be the Achilles heel of the former, now
It seems, doomed,
Neo-Appolonia: metaphorically depicted through Cape Town and
it’s not so, too so, Liberal Arts University.

Some years into the revolution
the Luries have discovered the expendable nature of truth:
that they (assume former oppressor) lived forever in Carroll’s Alicetown
with people whom they (oppressor) did not and do not know;
and who ‘lie’ to prevent access to who they are, or aren’t,
as the case may be.

Ultimately therefore we discover that there are no codes in
Luries’ former relationships with entities of
“Colour”, which can facilitate his ability to
identify a good ‘dog’, from a bad ‘dog’ in his
transfixed escape to a ‘new’ pre-democratic
neighbourhood.
So he disposes of them all in his new preoccupation
with different minutae:
technoman fucks dogs in an emerging neo-Feudalist society…that
which was temporarily
intruded upon
by the Apollonian transforming dream.

.NiK(00)

 Nicholas Williamson. aka .NiK. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst, 2106. RSA/Azania.
formerly blogged on www.Williamsonreport.co.za [now transformed to http://blogroid.wordpress.com and theblogospherian.blogspot.com ]
•Buffalo Hunters, The: Zone One (Gauteng) crime fiction poetry by Nicholas Williamson see: Blogroid
•Paglia. Camille: Sex and Violence. The Sexual Personae. See also Chthonian.
•Chthonian: Paglian term used to denote the rich all pervading attractiveness and compulsion of things ‘natural’ and preferably unmentionable in polite society: viz: piss, shit, menstruation, childbirth: the curse of nature’s monthly call in the case of woman, dragging her back from the lofty heights of imagination to the wracked intensity of bodily function and the dark functioning of body fluid exchanges.
•Nietzsche, Friederich (Fritz): Thus also Spake Zarathustra. Birth of Tragedy.
•Carroll. Lewis; Alice in Wonderland.
•A fuck’s a fuck ou pelly: slang SA it doesn't matter where or how you get it it's good.
•Appolonia: after Apollo…God of Reason, purity and beauty. Near first of the “sky cults” (Paglia) see Nietzsche…Birth of Tragedy.
•***The Gay (now called Joyous) Science: F. Nietzsche Ch 341
•* Groot baas…Afr: main person seriously important
•“Maak n le vir die ****baas” Afr metaphor repr: “Open your legs and let this important person fuck you.”
•Kaapse man: a man of the Cape, of mixed racial heritage..

2009-04-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

Weblog
Jozi
22 April 2009There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.

For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.

Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.

It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated publicly sponsored mass transport system and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.

Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage where it is over -commoditised and the return on capital is negative. It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens lined. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].

Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.

Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.

The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross town routes linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again, we are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an edge city and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.

A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.

The great BRT Taxi war.

2009-04-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Weblog
Jozi
21 April 2009
There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.

For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.

Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.

It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated, publicly sponsored, mass transport system; and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.

Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage, where it is over-commoditised and the return on capital is negative.

It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane [known as Gautrain] by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens linked. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].

Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.

Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.

The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means, mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross-town routes, linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again. We are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an Edge city so is Tswane, and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.

A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.

The Knowledge economy and SA's election

2009-04-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Knowledge Economy Rulz

I was struck the other day by a news item that in a nutshell summarised the opportunity and dilemmas inherent in this great global economic meltdown.

First though let me say that I didn’t feel that the current election campaign was turning out to be anything other than an anti-climax. There is no point in listening to the welter of messages being sent out by our motley crew of parties and contenders.

Perhaps there is a contest and the election date itself will reveal a ‘moment of truth’ as we like to pander it, but at this moment there are about a dozen parties all sounding the same as the current ruling party and one party that seems to be marginally different… By this time next week we will know that the majority will rule and that one swimming upstream will either have been brutally rejected or surprisingly strengthened.

I find everyone’s policies incoherent. I presume they are deliberately incoherent. They reflect the truth of our age: a truth we hate to acknowledge. There are no solutions to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

The reason why there are no solutions is because ‘we’ [those who are in public office] are not working for the common good, as would be supposed, when remunerated from the common pot, but rather every opportunity seeking individual who joined the Struggle with the intention of achieving personal enrichment, seeks to build a lavish lifestyle [according to their fancies] from controlling access to real opportunity. This can only occur at the expense of the poor and ultimately it will cripple the nation no less than has been empirically demonstrated so many times over the past century in so many failed states, that it is actually boring.

The news item that caught my attention in a puzzled way was broadcast out of Bloomberg TV. Briefly it consisted of a story and an interview. The subject, a mid-life American male former construction company owner who had seen his business collapse following the real estate bust in the U.S. and had re-skilled as an independent currency trader.

I was forcibly struck in full force by the reality that we live in a knowledge based economy. The story explained how currency trading had become a big field of endeavour and the volume of daily trades in a wide range of such financial instruments as the euro, yen, ruble, sterling and of course dollars, had doubled over the past few years, and was a huge sum by any of today’s inflated standards.

As recently as a decade or so ago currency dealing, or as it was more arcanely known “arbitrage”, was a skill passed down from father to son over generations and was always a source of huge wealth to a limited pool of people who sensibly did not display their wealth [much] and thus were able to live happy rich and anonymous lives, unlike the vast mass of humanity who live poor and anonymously whether happy or not. George Soros, for instance also interviewed this past weekend on Bloomberg, will always inspire awe as the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, such was the rarity of the skill.

Now a construction entrepreneur can 'take a course', he said, learn the ropes from expert sources and when interviewed was up at some 03.00 hours trading euros in an Australian market which he later sold somewhere else in the world. Now that is serious re-skilling and the market is providing the man with his opportunity as it always did… he simply shifted markets because he had access to knowledge.

America being what it is with a sluice way full of funny money pouring into the economy in tranches of trillions, a huge percentage of those losing jobs in the old pre-2009 economy will re-skill within the year and be re constructing their lives in a new, emerging and completely different world. There is something odd about trading a productive lifestyle building homes for people, to becoming one of an army living symbiotically off certain core lubrication points in the non-real part of the economy: the money part, but ultimately that is what the knowledge economy is all about.

The dilemma for those of us in developing country’s where the majority of our voters will never even conceptualise arbitrage, albeit they could all confuse it with arbitration, is that the Chinese strategy of undermining the American dollar by pricing their currency at about a twenty percent discount to the dollar; and then fixing the price so the dollar couldn’t shake it off, was to annihilate our [S.A’s] rather subsidy dependent textile industry, through flooding the country with ridiculously cheap, Chinese imports at the expense of both the Chinese worker and ours.

There is no quick fix, like learning currency manipulation to solve the employment conditions of former machinists and other clothing industry workers wiped out by the Chinese invasion. Sadly most will never work again. Similarly the hosts of warlike men dancing and chanting about our new emerging President may well find that like front line troops in all conflicts once the war is over they become superfluous to need; and while some may become remittance men, the rest will subside back into a sea of workless anonymity without the skills to construct their own lives out of nothing, as the construction man [and a million or so of his peers] will be able to do.

We are in recession now and have during boom times been barely creating enough jobs to even marginally dent the army of aspirant work seeking persons, who otherwise have no way out of poverty other than through criminal activities. We are no longer a society, which sees self-development as the solution to unemployment, those who now control the fortunes of the ruling party are of an essentially kollektivist mindset; and we are about to elect a populist leader who is promising things that cannot be under our present circumstances other than through actions that may well destroy the State itself, in any seriously productive form.

We remember I think that the last election was noted for posters proclaiming: “ vote for us we’ll bring jobs and wealth”. It was true that some people gained immense wealth beyond all dreams of avarice. For the rest it was ‘tata ma chance’ with the State controlled lottery with its State controlled winners. And that hasn’t happened on a scale sufficient to have any lasting impact. Right now we are shedding jobs much faster than they can be “created”: as entire industries struggle to survive the greatest financial meltdown in recorded history.

Frankly the last thing this country needs right now is a government that wants to emulate Hugo Chavez or worse and the only way that cannot happen is if every eligible voter goes to the polls next Wednesday and votes for change.

As many of you know this blog’s cynical definition of democracy enlarges on Churchill’s famous assertion that all government is bad, democracy is simply the best form of bad, by widening the frame to include the idea that democracy is about the citizen having an implicit, enforceable right to routinely change the gathered vultures who flock daily to the largesse table in search of easy pickings. [I would call them thieves but there is an election brewing and I wouldn’t like to be rude to those few people of integrity who, I am certain, exist in every party.] And it is time for a feeding frenzy adjustment.

Frankly I think it is time for a total change of government, even if it ends up as a coalition type of relatively unstable government… After all, Italy for instance, has virtually had no stable government for about sixty years and managed to be prosperous and successful; that is, until a couple of months ago when Sylvio [their prime Fatcat] passed a law making him immune to prosecution; and look at the shock wave that caused: an entire town fell down.

The Americans proved last year that they could vote for a dramatic change. Now is not the time to vote for a party with a covert Kollektivist agenda. We have no choice but to go with the market economy, it is the only form of economic activity that even partially solves the problem of superfluous human lives, and the market economy in the 21st century is a knowledge economy. So go and vote for change next Wednesday.

Wot a shower

2009-04-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

I thought of writing about the end of the never, never trial of Mr Jacob Zuma, President-in-waiting of South Africa but it was such an anti climax i was left thougthtless.

I wondered instead about the Brian Rix farce qualities of the entire affair, but a Rix farce always has a plausible resolution, which is known beforehand to the audience. Does Mo Shaik’s revelation to the nation at some place in Tschwane [sic] count as bringing the audience into the unravelling plot, or was that too close to the denouement to count as creating farce: hmm more commonly used with tragedy.

And then there is this anti-climatic discovery that the entire case was a fabrication conspired by our own Rosenkranz and Guildenstern [sic]. This strange conclusion, whereby about a hundred million rand [not really much money is it?] is spent to discover via a random mysterious audio tape delivered via unofficial/unorthodox means that the entire business was an NPA conspiracy, hatched by a couple of flunkeys in the system and not the Butler everyone has suspected all along. No wonder the man is now sitting in an aggrieved circumstance offstage albeit not yet in the Green Room. This ending was not at all farce like. It has a distinctly continental even French touch. It’s more like the kind of ending one should have in a pink panther movie, where credulity has already been so overstretched that R&G are simply the comic relief.

So: the unanswered questions. Why was there a rumour that the NPA was proposing to charge Mr Z with more than 700 counts of what should now, appropriately in our newly transformed society, be [so-called] Black-collar-crimes? Did those huge files we kept seeing in foto glimpses on Tee vee in the hands of the prosecution simply contain malicious gossip? Was telling the nation about it all over these years that we have been bored with this saga also malicious gossip and shouldn’t those who perpetrated and broadcast such gossip be hunted down and apprehended? Will Rosenkranz and Guildenstern be hunted down? Will they mysteriously become, as they were in Hamlet? Or will they simply have to lay low in exile for awhile until everyone has forgotten that there were ever unfavourable thoughts about the new beloved leader, say by later today?

When Mr Shaik was found guilty of supplying more than R2,000,000 bucks to Mr Z did this not imply that the money had been received by the latter, or is that, unproven and therefore, he is innocent of using the money to finance the school fees of his many children [which is of course as it should be shouldn’t it ] and maintaining a lifestyle, in conflict with his declared income… Ah that too is unproven and therefore like the personal affairs of all persons a private matter [again as it should be] is out of bounds for discussion.

The great thing about winning this marathon struggle is the ten-year After-party that is our forcoming attraction. Have a great life Msholozi [sic] with your wondrous Machini wami [sic] Those guys in the G20 are all lining up to have a foto-op with you at the next big summit. They would have all buckled under the strain, well maybe not Mr Putin or that tough little Frenchman, but you are undoubtedly "The man": chutzpah deluxe..

Better to be a man about whom questions are asked than one about whom the answers are known.
Final question. Could this oddball ending be improved with a close out shot of Mr Z taking a shower?

Blogroid

Prevaricating over the Dalai Lama

2009-03-26T02:39:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama
Weblog 25th March 2009-03-25
Dateline Jozi

It is hard to imagine a governing party in a working democracy taking the kind of liberties with public credibility in the run up to a national election that the ruling party is taking in South Africa’s immanent election, and getting away with it. Perhaps though South Africa is no longer a working democracy?

Some would say in retrospect that 2009 was when politics really got dirty, with fingers in the eyes to opponents, following a spray of dust to block the nostrils. Others argue that a country is only truly a democracy once the voter has changed the ruling party on a few occasions. Until then it is simply an emerging democracy.

This campaign of the ruling party is a defensive fighter’s response to some very real problems that no main persons want to deal with, yet. This is throwing dust in the face of your enemy as it advances. Distraction and misdirection: Keep all opposition in reaction mode so you never have to defend your record and no one else gets around to presenting their plan. In the meantime advance your troops.

It is a mean dust trail and one that rightly cannot be ignored. The ruling party must be most certain that they will walk this election again and again time without plunder to show such disregard for the State constructed out of the Struggle.

For us oldies the past month or so reeks of the old days when the Apartheid Regime would make some outrageous contribution to our daily fair … and then bluster their way through a series of denials backed up with fists and whatever for those too persistent in pursuit of transparent clarity.

The Minister of Foreign affairs [Mrs Dlamini-Zuma] this morning made a defence of the idea that sport and politics don’t mix that would have done her predecessor [Mr Botha] proud, and would undoubtedly confuse the hell out of Mr Peter Hain who organised umpteen campaigns against Apartheid sport, presumably with Mrs Zuma’s blessing, back in the bad old days. I imagine that Ms Zola Budd, wherever she is, feels a sense of chagrin that the people who destroyed her more than promising career would now be protecting her participation.

Or was there a difference between the apartheid regime’s violation of human rights in South Africa and the Chinese Government’s violation of the rights of Tibetans following their occupation of the Tibetan State for the past half century. The head of the SA Communist Party believes so.

Presumably the taxi drivers who this week vowed on the national news to disrupt the world cup because [apparently] their rights to terrorise motorists are being violated by the bus rapid transport system coming into being are ok, because they are not mixing politics with sport: their grievances are purely commercial.

The ruling party’s silence on the threats of taxi drivers contrasts curiously with their rudeness to one of the planet’s most revered figures. Nonetheless this strange disinterest in the affairs of the world pales compared to the way the Party has behaved recently over a range of issues that should affect voter responses but quite obviously are not going to, perhaps because the voter base of the party approves of their positions.

To mention a few: The shock release on medical parole, from a fifteen-year prison sentence of the Presidential candidate’s benefactor, Mr Shabir Shaik. The circumstances become murkier under cross-examination and the apparent fairness gap between his treatment and the plight of thousands of other alleged terminally ill prisoners is largely ignored, both by the government and its supporters..

Then there is a red herring, soften- them- up- for- bad –news report that the national prosecuting authority intends to drop its always-pending-[alleged corruption and racketeering ] case against Mr Zuma the prime Presidential candidate in the election…

Then there was is the brief ‘uproar’ over the listing of struggle icon, and convicted fraudster, Mrs Madikazela –Mandela for the national assembly. At number 5 there is no question that this formidable woman will take her rightful place in the national assembly, and the volume of antipathy over this is at a lower level of confusion. As was the bizarre endgame played out by another [lesser] struggle icon Karl Niehouse the ruling party’s answer to Karl Rove the Bush fixit man, who confessed tearfully to a stunned nation that he was a lying crook who deceived people over money. The list of circumstances in which the ruling party demonstrates it disinterest in the things that bother ordinary people is almost endless, and so ingrained has dismissive behaviour become that few people even bother to take note of it anymore aside from uptight opponents and reject larneys.

Nonetheless all this was light dust indeed in retrospect, when played out against their latest attempt to test how far they can fool all of the people and still win an absolute majority from the suckers.

To enlarge on my opening observation: This week the government of South Africa defended its commercial interests in the 2010 World Cup by playing the most bizarre card played by this capricious government in its fifteen year history in office. They banned the Dalai Lama from attending a world Peace conference organised to promote the World Cup competition.

Their reasoning: The Dalai Lama’s attendance was not in the country’s national interest. This phrase that has popped up a few times lately is again reminiscent of the Auld days and usually meant not in the ruling party’s interests.

It is hard to imagine how the Dalai Lama, more than likely the world’s most elegiac figure now that Mother Theresa has died could cause a rift in South Africa’s national interests.
I also have no recollection of a time when the public response to a ruling party decision was so overwhelmingly negative.

Fortunately for the ruling party the psychographics of soccer supporters is so diametrically different to the psychographics of Dalai Lama supporters with only marginal areas of overlap that most of those who intend to party at the world cup have only one world piece in mind, and it’s not the Dalai Lama, bless his withered buttocks.

What remains to be tested is whether the ruling party supporters numbered in any quantity amongst the unaccustomed outpouring of unhappiness at the bizarre behaviour of the government of the huge response to Tim Modisa’s after eight debate yesterday..

Top honours for the day go to the fellow [who may have been called] Thabo, who had the unenviable task of multi-tasking his defence for the Government while seemingly taking his daughters to school: to judge by the happy squealing backgrounds [one was reminded of Perlman’s great interview with a cabinet minister in some remote part of the continent discoursing on his country’s chances while feeding the chickens.].

The Party Spokesperson, remained firmly stoic in the face of a tirade of rage and confusion that had even the redoubtable Mr Tim Modisa amazed. If ever one had evidence that the national broadcaster’s prime radio station has some credibility it was the after eight debate on the Dalai Lama’s rejection. Even a cabinet minister was appalled [Mrs Hogan Min of Health]

… Will she be fired is the next question. She should be is my answer.

Thabo handled her betrayal with stunning fortitude. Even the loquacious Mr Leon, a well known, fellow guest with Thabo X , was silenced by the fellow’s dogged fortitude.

Of course the Party spokesperson was never able to give a direct NO to the repeated question. Did the Chinese government exert pressure on the Government to silence the meddlesome monk? Did the master prevaricator of the week draw the line at outright lying?

Perhaps he worked on a need to know basis and he didn’t need to know that. Perhaps these are the troops?

A day later the head of the Communist Party came on line to defend the decision, and the public was subjected to a delightful exercise in prevarication whereby the forcible takeover [in 1950]of the independent [Theistic] Kingdom of Tibet by China was represented as reclaiming an intransigent part of “one China”, and the efforts of the Tibetans to reclaim their independence was in effect likened to the behaviour of the late Ian Smith in unilaterally declaring Rhodesian independence.

The takeover of Tibet by China was a colonial act equivalent to South Africa deciding to annex Lesotho on the ground that it is surrounded by that country and subject to a “One South Africa” policy, and far from the Dalai Lama being a dissident priest he, like Nelson Mandela with whom he was to share the podium at the aborted Peace Conference, is a liberation leader. Obviously the communist party of South Africa can’t get it head around the fact that people want to be rid of communist rule where it still applies.

Anyway none of this had any effect on the voters who, in a series of extreme low poll by-elections on the 25th March sent the ruling party back into office by huge margins… If anything the ruling party seems more popular than ever, and so I stick by my prediction that the ruling party will win the by a landslide in a low poll election with the possible loss of the Western Cape.

Is COPE a Trojan Horse

2009-03-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

The beloved country is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries. I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.

For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.

On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.

Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..

So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.

And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.

Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades.

We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.

How have they not “learned their lesson”? Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.

Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.

There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.

I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.

NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair [former Pom PM aka Phoney Haire]admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..

Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.

It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”….

I refer here to those proponents of the completely utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism; the perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America, and providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by the socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people that lacked the means to service them.

We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.

Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.

Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.

As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.

This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.

Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.

So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing of beneficiaries of AA, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and far more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.

These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful... Being incompetent in Governmnent has trained them to be incompetent as campaigners for a new party.

They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing form their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.

Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.

Oh yes I forgot… the ANC is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence. One reads about “purging” and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… and may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.

So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.]COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
% Poll 61%

This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.

In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They [the authors]present an intriguing essay [they [the a of IT Party]do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.

Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much will the general public swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.

This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.

Is COPE a Trojan Horse

2009-03-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

Can Cope cope?

The beloved country [SA] is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries.

I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.

For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They [the ruling party] have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.

On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.

Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..

So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.

And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.

Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades. We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.

How have they not “learned their lesson”?

Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.

Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.

There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.

I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.

NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..

Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.

It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”…. I refer here to those proponents of the completely, utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism. The perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America./ The same philosophy now providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people, that lacked the means to service them.

We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.

Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.

Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.

Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.

Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.

As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.

This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.

Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.

So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing off beneficiaries, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and for more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.

These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful..

They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing from their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.

Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.

Oh yes I forgot… the ANC [ruling party] is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence like for instanc e in the civil service. One reads about “purging”; and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… said person may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.

So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.
COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
%age Poll 61%

This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.

In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They present an intriguing essay [they do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.

Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.

I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much the general public will swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.

This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.

You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.

Last ‘White” man standing … down

2009-02-22T08:32:00.000-08:00

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.

%

Last ‘White” man standing … down

2009-02-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

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’

Malema's no Feudal flunky

2009-02-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Big Julies chat show remorse.

2009-02-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

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.

BO Panics?

2009-02-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

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?

****************

2009-02-06T23:40:00.001-08:00

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?

****************

What if the package fails?

2009-02-06T23:17:00.000-08:00

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?

****************

Happy birthday to a fine man*.

2009-02-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Happy birthday to a fine man*.

2009-02-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-01-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

Weblog 17 0109
Jozi: Southern Azania/ SA

It’s the middle of the month and Mr O is about to take over the ‘saving of the world’ job in the USA and is aided in his task by a miraculous piece of demonstrable flying skill on the part of an airline pilot called ‘Sully’, not to be confused with a tv character called Scully from a tv series about miraculous and awesome feats. Mazel tov Sully.

In the Middle–east the Israelis have reached the end of their free time, and in order not to rain on Mr O’s parade are declaring a unilateral ceasefire in their Armageddon prelude. Perhaps they are hoping against hope that the stunned Palestinians of Gaza will be cowed into some form of agreement to live better lives than they presently enjoy. I for one shall not hold my breath in anticipation. The ‘rapture’ mob are out calling ‘the end of days’.

The whole Baghdad, Grozny rerun has been an interesting media blitz really. The world stopped while we watched toleaven the vicissitudes of the so-called “silly season”. It didn’t have the same sense of heart-warming joy we all got a few years back from pouring in aid [presumably largely “evaporated” by now] when that wonderfully scripted and timed Tsunami, swamped the south-east Asian region. There are people who have just lost all their money, who are still paying off that largesse, I believe.

No: this was nasty and brutal and gained the Israelis few friends, even amongst those who understand that brutalising someone is an effective form of deterrence, and must occasionally be given free rein, in situations that are otherwise intractable. Logic and reason suggests that the place should be shared. Nonetheless, precedence, evidence: well beyond circumstantial, common histories and uncommon histories all indicate that this is an improbable event. What happened in South Africa was a one-off event. The Afrikaner hegemony was broken, the nation split and has been absorbed into a collectivist mindset that has devalued their position considerably. In practice there are many winners, philosophically there are more losers. Who would want to emulate that without causing unspeakable pain for the winners?

Anyway my main thought is about the 800 billion dollars that President O is going to chisel out of the US Congress. Ostensibly the point is to kick-start the American economy with a huge ‘jobs for upgrade’ scheme. It sounds like and is, a huge amount. However, City Bank took about 300 billion from the State a month or two ago, and now we discover that it has vanished, simply vanished, into Accounting heaven and the hand is out for more: precedents having been set let us milk the cow.

I can’t help thinking therefore that if 300 billion can simply vanish without trace into this steaming cauldron of global financial stew then what will be the fate of a figure only two and a half times greater.

As a consequence I am sceptical that Mr O’s scheme can have any impact on the American economy, the tide is flowing… coming in, and just because the king has been replaced on the beach there is no reason for the tide to ebb. I don’t think 800 billion will even touch the surface, and will be gobbled by more as Mr O attempts to inflate his way out of trouble. In a year, more or less he will have to raise taxes and then we will understand a slowdown.

At home the interminable saga over the aspirant president in waiting Mr J Z has moved like a bad soapie into extra time and will no doubt drag on. It is either back to court for Mr Z to face more than 700 charges, according to press reports, or toss his case to the Constitutional Court for final adjudication. On the principle espoused by the late WC Fields [I think] that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” I predict a solid win for Mr Z in the forthcoming election, the date of which is yet to be announced… but may be before the Constitutional court deliberates…

I also think there is a possibility that the governing party could lose the key provinces in the country: Gauteng [aka Zone One] and also the Western Cape. These are not strong possibilities you understand, more like medium odds, depending on what rabbits the Government can bring out of the woodpile before election day: or what bad news they fail to bury.

I would imagine that anyone attempting to get something as parochial and mundane as a driving licence test appointment, for instance, would vote for anybody but the government. And then once you get one [an appointment that is] imagine standing in a queue at a place like the Germiston testing grounds from 13.45 to 16.20 hoping to pay to confirm said hard won appointment.

The line was interminable. It drudged on waiting to be served by a single cashier who was wilting under the stress. Then at 16.40… after long boring hours of nudging forward one at a time, a supervisor appears and boldly asks why no other cashier point is open… There were a number of points occupied by slow moving uninvolved people, none of which were serving the public. Of course they needed to clear the day’s haul of abused citizens from the halls by 16.30 so they could all go home.

Now I can’t imagine too many people wanting to vote for a party that puts incompetent people in charge of important functions, and then abuses the citizen… however as we know memory is paper thin, and as the old cliché goes “Time will tell”.

Like it’s doing in Zimbabwe which has just launched a one Hundred? Trillion dollar note. How does one even begin to figure out that? Presumably a matchstick costs about a hundred million. The idea of even printing currency in those denominations is a joke… the country is a slave state by default. I remember once hearin Carl ASagan say that it would take forty year to count to one billion, how does one count to a hundred trillion.

I can only imagine we need to poach Zimbabwean talent, since we are apparently doing an ineffectual job of producing our own. It can only be this short sighted idea that provides a sub text for the curious unwillingness to engage Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe and clouds our inaction. Our failure to remonstrate with the bad guy Mugabe has brought catastrophe to our borders and the idea that it can all be fixed with a few aid packages from the UN and a couple of donors, once The Roz is nudged aside is a delusion. Like the delusion that 800 billion is going to repair America.

The good news is that we all had another day of loving.

Cheers.

Gas chambers, Gaza & new global rubrics

2009-01-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

Weblog 80109
Jozi

There is something Pyrrhic about Israel’s current activities in the Middle East. It is hard not to see the citizens of Gaza in much the same position as the Jews of Warsaw some sixty odd years ago.

Israel keeps hoping that their presence will come to be accepted forgetting that it was their intransigent obsession with non-assimilation that has always [unfairly] condemned them to being the planet’s pariahs.

I have nothing to say about Gaza that has not already been said and chewed over. Intrinsically Israel has to implement the same “final solution” thing on the Palestinians that was wished on them by the evil Nazi regime back then when monsters ruled. Frankly I think they have as much real heart for a final solution as the average Hutu Intera-hamwe [sic] warrior has for a Tutsi Rwandan.

While I don’t doubt for a moment that the Palestinians have just cause for grievance I don’t think they help their case by electing a government that decides to go to war with their biggest enemy, firstly by refusing to recognise the place’s existence and then by engaging in pestilential and inherently futile terror activities which are guaranteed to provoke the world’s sympathy and force the enemy to overeact and overplay their hand. One is reminded of the outcome of the Lopez War back in the 19th Century when Paraguay lost more than 90% of its population in an irrational clash with the triple alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Peru.

These are the politics of Gengis Khan and Israel has to decide what it is going to do… They seem to have two choices: exterminate the Palestinians the way the ruling regime in Namibia wiped out the Herero in the first 20th century genocide a century ago, which seems to be on their agenda notwithstanding that Gaza [apparently] has a spectacular birth-rate Or like the Afrikaner before them they can concede defeat and negotiate the best terms they can while they prepare for a new Diaspora.

This is an endgame and this global depression that is beginning to appear immanent is going to distract many people from the foolishness of playing silly games while the floods rage.

Much play is made of the democratic right of the Palesitinians top vote in the most violent party they can… Like the activities of the late President Lopez their strategy appears overplayed.

************************************************************

At home we had the Matric results for what is no longer supposed to be called Matric.

For offshore readers this refers to the final, nationally supervised national examination to finish school at grade 12.

The 2008 finalists were the first to complete and write the new highly controversial Outcomes Based education syllabus, which has the confused purpose of assessing a battery of learning skills that are learned not taught and presenting content that is neither learned nor taught.

The examinations are more complex than before with red fire engine questions [what colour is the red fire engine?] for those who are intellectually disadvantaged to garner some precious points; to seriously complex analysis and synthesis answers, to critical questions requiring complex dimensions of acquired knowledge.

In the event 62% of kids passed the State Exam with about 20% of those qualifying to enter a higher education institution like a University. Generally fewer candidates passed than under the previous system but a higher percentage of those who passed can enter university.

According to the theory of the system universities should experience a considerable decline in first years failures as these “matriculants” are allegedly better prepared for the rigours of University life than was previously the case.

So as I pointed out in last January’s blog we shall wait until the end of 2009 to find out if the experiment is /has been effective.

Judging by the panicked sound accompanying the voices of education hierarchy fat cats during the hotly reported results delivery process with the reedy whine of denial ringing with strident clarity through their respective radio interviews one can expect adjustments to the programme.

****************************************************************
There is undoubtedly a sense of an historical turning point in the air as we progress into 2009. Mr Obama {BO] takes over the helm in the USA [Firmia] and has the Herculanean task of changing the course of history. The Bank of England today lowed its Interest rate to the lowest level since it came into existence hundreds of years ago. We hover on the edge of hovering. The global managerial class reeks of panic.
****************************************************
In December each year we celebrate a day [in South Afrika] called ‘Reconciliation Day’. This historical day has existed in many forms for about 170 years and originally had little to do with reconciliation. Now it is hoped that the contending parties to power in SA will bond in the post revolution era and make their journey together into a bold future; except that the interest of empowerment for past wrongs collide with the interests of reconciliation.

Those who wielded power for so long have gone and are replaced. Those who are replaced are denied opportunity in the interest as of Affirmative Action. On a reconciliation day in the millennium year of 2000 I spent time in and out of various privatised informal drinking venues to which former rulers have retreated: beaten back by a new wave of discriminatory legislation with the boot now firmly on another foot.

What follows from my collection: Border Crossings, is the outcome of that day: it is not so much a poem as a polemic, which, I believe, has as much relevance to the Palestinians and Israelis as it does to the defeated Afrikaner.

Since this was written in 2000 the “white” South African diaspora has accelerated. We don’t acknowledge this and therefore it is a shock that awaits… something. One suspects, we will only discover in verity, in the post-election recriminations just how widespread this diaspora has been. We have a general election due this year for a new government in SA. It promises to be momentous. It also promises electoral sidelines for the so-called “Whitey” parties.

161200

Reconciliation DayIn our new society it is not enough that
we were sorry about Apartheid;
we: the Whitey, the scumbag honky males who
Gotitall: have now to make a reckoning.
Without Apartheid we would have been nothing
is the claim, implicit in the demand.
We must pay the piper, now we have called the tune.
Perhaps the truth we seek to hide from
is that we became nothing because of Apartheid.

We have the credit side and the debit side.
On the credit side we were the beneficiaries
of Apartheid: then.
We being whitey; this meant we got
To live in the biggest houses, had all the best jobs
And had the wonderful opportunities in the world which
We had invented in the first place.
We also got
to go on long holidays often, to handle our
state of permanent insecurity and everyone we knew (other whitey’s)
gradually disappeared off to some place
where they
Could all make
a living without enduring the poverty inducing
manic depressive morass
of living in an economy that jumped
around with all the frantic uncertainty
of a virgin on initiation night.

That was the credit side of
Apartheid.
On the debit side
were the costs of that benefit.

The apparent benefit was Western Society with all its warts and
plum pudding delights.
The absence of that benefit: the Chthonian night,
stripped of feudal niceties.

We (the perpetrators) of the benefit did
It to make our own lives easier; with Apartheid we sought to combine
the benefits of western society
with the benefits of Feudalism.
Western society prevailed and our feudal system
collapsed
to reveal your own covert feudal structures.

We had found these, lurking in
your shadows when we came here, to this savage paradise
and
imposed this terrible rule
of colonialist apartheid (which resulted in a more
than four fold increase in the population:
such was the reduced nature of our
reign of terror compared to those
you had imposed upon yourselves).
Of course we never realised, that just before
we came in and wrecked your lives, you had just been involved in wars
and catastrophes and all the general shit
that goes with a fucked up world.
We thought that was how you normally lived
Coming here after the Deficane* or Rinderpest* or the
National Suicide*
Was our equivalent of meeting the survivors of Auschwitz
Or Nagasaki.
But we didn’t know,
You never wrote things down and seemed to
Make up all your history, to suit the momentary occasion
We never knew you had all sorts of cities and fabulous
foundations which had temporarily dissipated in the African mist; in
pursuit of some or other disaster.
No we just came here and built our vision of paradise and rudely
shut you out, because you, continually, in our eyes,
insisted on bringing your
own expropriatory darkness to our
Dinner tables.

What was the cost of this Apartheid benefit?
One, practical, was
to pour hundreds of millions of tax bucks
[which we were faking anyway
so the millions subtly became billions]
down a long forgotten chute: water
to a leaking drum, constantly drained;
to be impoverished to the extend
that today, white south Africans (me) list amongst
the world’s poorest white people
where once, before apartheid we were almost
the richest.
Makes you wonder just how rich everybody else
became while we
were
busy hogging what was left
of our redistributed wealth, doesn’t it.

This is not a benefit.
To have lived in Africa as I have for more than half a century
has left me impoverished, robbed of most of my possessions,
robbed of job opportunities,
robbed of my youth, thrown away on lies. My children live in foreign places
and I am
robbed of their pleasures.

It seems we were all robbed by Apartheid;
although there may be people who would never
have been what they became, under a free system:
the compradors, the lackeys, the flunkies and the minions who now
bleat for alms where once before they stole them.

Do not look at me for a man who has benefited from Apartheid;
the best part of this country was here before Apartheid:
the best weather (Gauteng) in the world, few earthquakes,
grand raging ocean shores: all here before people.

I pay my taxes and more.
All else is the price
Of our presence… Without us this place would be
shrouded in darkness as it
was before we came here.
From where I stand
The only beneficiaries of Apartheid have been Black people
(Not the suffering masses perhaps, not those brutalized
by living as they always had, in a world
that suddenly changed)Notice how the traffic light cash collection agents
seldom go to larney cars driven by blacks.
They know the truth:
that black men have inherited the earth
and they are jealous.

Benefit cannot be seen as a then thing
Who cares about then?
We don’t remember then
Which was whatever we conveniently
Presume it to have been. Then I wasn’t married, then I was young.
Then I did foolish things like getting drunk and getting laid.
Then I never had a teevee
or a newspaper
in which the news wasn’t days old
Then I never had a car so I never went far
Then I never had them, in my face, all the time;
Stealing my stuff: shooting me twice in the back.

Or was that the benefit?
Was that the real benefit?
Have I discovered the truth?
Was the real benefit of Apartheid that we didn’t have You?

The real benefit was that i could pretend that You did not exist.
You are angry with me today because now you have learned to hate
Yourself, and me, for making you aware that you were different
and, at that time, undesirable competition
in a world you yearned to share.

I cannot repair this wound, it was made inadvertently through my own ignorance
of the true nature of the benefit.
No one can bring light to those who choose to remain in the dark.
This wound may be a cancer which
eats away
the soul of all our reckoning.
This wound can no longer be licked lest
like an old dog we put ourselves down.

When I realise that you feel, that I still seek now that benefit again:
that I seek to push away the darkness you embody
the sturdy pit of horror in the piss and blood of nightmares that
we can never quite escape,
explain to me again, what it is you feel that I have gained; what this benefit should be
for which I must atone.

Tell me once again so that we can move on.

.NiK(00)
from the collection: Border crossings
• Difecane: also known as Mfecane: a period of time in Southern Afrika during the 1830’s when violence raged across the region prompted by the expansionist behaviour of the mighty general Chaka, prompting genocidal massacres of tribe by tribe took place in a time of consequent population dispersal. And it was a time of lamentation and weeping.
• Rinderpest: A viral disease introduced [inadvertently?] into Africa by Italian military planners who brough live cattel containing the virus into Africa from the Crimea to feed their soldiers during the African expansion campaigns of the late nineteenth century. The effect was the almost entire destruction of all African livestock in the form of cattle horse etc. A holocaust if ever there was one.
• The National Suicide: A time 1820’s when an entire tribe/nation ie The Xhosas, starved themselves to death in the belief that all white people would thus vanish.

Gas chambers, Gaza and the new global rubric

2009-01-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

Weblog 80109
Jozi

There is something Pyrrhic about Israel’s current activities in the Middle East. It is hard not to see the citizens of Gaza in much the same position as the Jews of Warsaw some sixty odd years ago.

Israel keeps hoping that their presence in the Middle East will come to be accepted forgetting that it was their intransigent obsession with non-assimilation that has always [unfairly] condemned them to being the planet’s pariahs.

I have nothing to say about Gaza that has not already been said and chewed over. Intrinsically Israel has to implement the same “final solution” thing on the Palestinians that was wished on them by the evil Nazi regime back then when monsters ruled. Frankly I think they have as much real heart for a final solution as the average Hutu Intera-hamwe [sic] warrior has for a Tutsi Rwandan.

While I don’t doubt for a moment that the Palestinians have just cause for grievance, I don’t think they help their case by electing a government that decides to go to war with their biggest enemy. Firstly by refusing to recognise the place’s existence and then by engaging in pestilential and inherently futile terror activities, which are guaranteed to provoke the world’s sympathy through forcing the enemy to overeact and overplay their hand. Ultimately the Palestinian position is irrational.

One is reminded of the outcome of the Lopez War back in the 19th Century when Paraguay lost more than 90% of its population in an irrational clash with the triple alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Peru.

This invasion of Gaza represents the politics of Gengis Khan. Israel has to decide what it is going to do… They seem to have two choices: exterminate the Palestinians, the way the ruling regime in Namibia wiped out the Herero in the first 20th century genocide, a century ago. This seems to be on their agenda notwithstanding that Gaza [apparently] has a spectacular birth-rate; Or like the Afrikaner before them they can concede defeat and negotiate the best terms they can while they prepare for a new Diaspora.

This is an endgame and this global depression that is beginning to appear immanent is going to distract many people from the foolishness of playing silly games while the floods rage.

Much play is made of the democratic right of the Palesitinians to vote in the most violent party they can… Like the activities of the late President Lopez their strategy appears overplayed.

********************************************************************

At home we had the Matric results for what is no longer supposed to be called Matric.

For offshore readers this refers to the final, nationally supervised national examination to finish school at grade 12.

The 2008 finalists were the first to complete and write the new highly controversial Outcomes Based education syllabus, which has the confused purpose of assessing a battery of learning skills that are learned not taught and presenting content that is neither learned nor taught.

The examinations are more complex than before with red fire engine questions [what colour is the red fire engine?] for those who are intellectually disadvantaged to garner some precious points; to seriously complex analysis and synthesis answers, to critical questions requiring complex dimensions of acquired knowledge.

In the event 62% of kids passed the State Exam with about 20% of those qualifying to enter a higher education institution like a University. Generally fewer candidates passed than under the previous system but a higher percentage of those who passed can enter university.

According to the theory of the system, universities should experience a considerable decline in first year's failures as these “matriculants” are allegedly better prepared for the rigours of University life than was previously the case.

So as I pointed out in last January’s blog we shall wait until the end of 2009 to find out if the experiment is /has been effective.

Judging by the panicked sound accompanying the voices of education hierarchy fat cats, during the hotly reported, results delivery process, with the reedy whine of denial ringing with strident clarity through their respective radio interviews, one can expect adjustments to the programme.

******************************************************************************

There is undoubtedly a sense of an historical turning point in the air as we progress into 2009. Mr Obama {BO] takes over the helm in the USA [Firmia] and has the Herculanean task of changing the course of history. The Bank of England today lowed its Interest rate to the lowest level since it came into existence hundreds of years ago. We hover on the edge of hovering. The global managerial class' current behaviour reeks of panic.

*************************************************************************

In December each year we celebrate a day called ‘Reconciliation Day’. This historical day has existed in many forms for about 170 years and originally had little to do with reconciliation. Now it is hoped that the contending parties to power in SA will bond in the post revolution era and make their journey together into a bold future; except that the interest of empowerment for past wrongs collide with the interests of reconciliation.

Those who wielded power for so long have gone and are replaced. Those who are replaced are denied opportunity in the interest as of Affirmative Action. On a reconciliation day in the millennium year of 2000 I spent time in and out of various privatised informal drinking venues to which former rulers have retreated: beaten back by a new wave of discriminatory legislation with the boot now firmly on another foot.

What follows from my collection: Border Crossings, is the outcome of that day: it is not so much a poem as a polemic, which, I believe, has as much relevance to the Palestinians and Israelis as it does to the defeated Afrikaner. Since this was written the “white” South African diaspora has accelerated. We don’t acknowledge this and therefore it is a shock that awaits… something, which one suspects, we will only discover in verity, in the post-election recriminations. We have a general election due this year for a new government in SA. It promises to be momentous. It also promises electoral sidelines for the so-called “Whitey” parties.

161200

Reconciliation Day

In our new society it is not enough that
we were sorry about Apartheid;
we: the Whitey, the scumbag honky males who
Gotitall: have now to make a reckoning.
Without Apartheid we would have been nothing
is the claim, implicit in the demand.
We must pay the piper, now we have called the tune.
Perhaps the truth we seek to hide from
is that we became nothing because of Apartheid.

We have the credit side and the debit side.
On the credit side we were the beneficiaries
of Apartheid: then.
We being whitey; this meant we got
To live in the biggest houses, had all the best jobs
And had the wonderful opportunities in the world which
We had invented in the first place.
We also got
to go on long holidays often, to handle our
state of permanent insecurity and everyone we knew (other whitey’s)
gradually disappeared off to some place
where they
Could all make
a living without enduring the poverty inducing
manic depressive morass
of living in an economy that jumped
around with all the frantic uncertainty
of a virgin on initiation night.

That was the credit side of
Apartheid.
On the debit side
were the costs of that benefit.

The apparent benefit was Western Society with all its warts and
plum pudding delights.
The absence of that benefit: the Chthonian night,
stripped of feudal niceties.

We (the perpetrators) of the benefit did
It to make our own lives easier; with Apartheid we sought to combine
the benefits of western society
with the benefits of Feudalism.
Western society prevailed and our feudal system
collapsed
to reveal your own covert feudal structures.

We had found these, lurking in
your shadows when we came here, to this savage paradise
and
imposed this terrible rule
of colonialist apartheid (which resulted in a more
than four fold increase in the population:
such was the reduced nature of our
reign of terror compared to those
you had imposed upon yourselves).

Of course we never realised, that just before
we came in and wrecked your lives, you had just been involved in wars
and catastrophes and all the general shit
that goes with a fucked up world.
We thought that was how you normally lived
Coming here after the Deficane* or Rinderpest* or the
National Suicide*
Was our equivalent of meeting the survivors of Auschwitz
Or Nagasaki.
But we didn’t know,
You never wrote things down and seemed to
Make up all your history, to suit the momentary occasion
We never knew you had all sorts of cities and fabulous
foundations which had temporarily dissipated in the African mist; in
pursuit of some or other disaster.
No we just came here and built our vision of paradise and rudely
shut you out, because you, continually, in our eyes,
insisted on bringing your
own expropriatory darkness to our
Dinner tables.

What was the cost of this Apartheid benefit?
One, practical, was
to pour hundreds of millions of tax bucks
[which we were faking anyway
so the millions subtly became billions]
down a long forgotten chute: water
to a leaking drum, constantly drained;
to be impoverished to the extend
that today, white south Africans (me) list amongst
the world’s poorest white people
where once, before apartheid we were almost
the richest.
Makes you wonder just how rich everybody else
became while we
were
busy hogging what was left
of our redistributed wealth, doesn’t it.

This is not a benefit.
To have lived in Africa as I have for more than half a century
has left me impoverished, robbed of most of my possessions,
robbed of job opportunities,
robbed of my youth, thrown away on lies. My children live in foreign places
and I am
robbed of their pleasures.

It seems we were all robbed by Apartheid;
although there may be people who would never
have been what they became, under a free system:
the compradors, the lackeys, the flunkies and the minions who now
bleat for alms where once before they stole them.

Do not look at me for a man who has benefited from Apartheid;
the best part of this country was here before Apartheid:
the best weather (Gauteng) in the world, few earthquakes,
grand raging ocean shores: all here before people.

I pay my taxes and more.
All else is the price
Of our presence… Without us this place would be
shrouded in darkness as it
was before we came here.
From where I stand
The only beneficiaries of Apartheid have been Black people
(Not the suffering masses perhaps, not those brutalized
by living as they always had, in a world
that suddenly changed)
Notice how the traffic light cash collection agents
seldom go to larney cars driven by blacks.
They know the truth:
that black men have inherited the earth
and they are jealous.

Benefit cannot be seen as a then thing
Who cares about then?
We don’t remember then
Which was whatever we conveniently
Presume it to have been. Then I wasn’t married, then I was young.
Then I did foolish things like getting drunk and getting laid.
Then I never had a teevee
or a newspaper
in which the news wasn’t days old
Then I never had a car so I never went far
Then I never had them, in my face, all the time;
Stealing my stuff: shooting me twice in the back.

Or was that the benefit?
Was that the real benefit?
Have I discovered the truth?
Was the real benefit of Apartheid that we didn’t have You?

The real benefit was that i could pretend that You did not exist.
You are angry with me today because now you have learned to hate
Yourself, and me, for making you aware that you were different
and, at that time, undesirable competition
in a world you yearned to share.

I cannot repair this wound, it was made inadvertently through my own ignorance
of the true nature of the benefit.
No one can bring light to those who choose to remain in the dark.
This wound may be a cancer which
eats away
the soul of all our reckoning.
This wound can no longer be licked lest
like an old dog we put ourselves down.

When I realise that you feel, that I still seek now that benefit again:
that I seek to push away the darkness you embody
the sturdy pit of horror in the piss and blood of nightmares that
we can never quite escape,
explain to me again, what it is you feel that I have gained; what this benefit should be
for which I must atone.

Tell me once again so that we can move on.

.NiK(00)

from the collection: Border crossings

• Difecane: also known as Mfecane: a period of time in Southern Afrika during the 1830’s when violence raged across the region prompted by the expansionist behaviour of the mighty general Chaka, prompting genocidal massacres of tribe by tribe took place in a time of consequent population dispersal. And it was a time of lamentation and weeping.
• Rinderpest: A viral disease introduced [inadvertently?] into Africa by Italian military planners who brough live cattel containing the virus into Africa from the Crimea to feed their soldiers during the African expansion campaigns of the late nineteenth century. The effect was the almost entire destruction of all African livestock in the form of cattle horse etc. A holocaust if ever there was one.
• The National Suicide: A time 1820’s when an entire tribe/nation ie The Xhosas, starved themselves to death in the belief that all white people would thus vanish.

The blog after Christmas

2008-12-26T22:51:00.000-08:00

This is the blog after Christmas and all through the land
not a pay cheque is rustling
nor a till going Ka ching.
What is it that has caused this terrible thing?

In a nutshell bru: trustbust

A credit crunch that persists for over a year and shows no significant sign of ending is
a prime indicator. Who ever heard of an institutional memory that lasted longer than about seven seconds? … That it has lasted so long as a year is a sign that the core signifier Trust is mortally wounded.

The financial industry is not noted for integrity.

Perhaps bankers were once noted for integrity but that was in the days when they controlled money
Today any business with a huge and consistent cash flow is also a banker and the rules have become blurred.

Then bankers had the bright idea that if supermarkets could become bankers then why shouldn’t bankers become supermarkets where they market money as a product…. and the rest is history.

John Ralston Saul argues that the core of our modern crisis is that the world of finance, money and the products they grease on their way has become managerialised: if I may coin a word.

Managers manage problems they don’t solve them.

If he is right then settle down for a prolonged recession [He says that today’s “managerial” class [of both politicians and business leaders] refuse to acknowledge that the world is in an economic DEPRESSION because it implies something that cannot be “managed” but rather has top be “solved”.

For myself I shall ignore it all and hope it goes away by the time I die eventually of serious old age in about a century or so.

Trust is the basic cornerstone of a thriving society. Capitalism is founded on two core human vices: Self interest and greed. The people who hold the money are not supposed to be motivated by these vices. For them self interest requires absolute integrity. Is this possible in a freebooting market economy in which the bankers are also product merchants and their business model requires a diet of mergers and acquisitions that have now outpaced the market’s natural ability to generate businesses that are available to acquire, or with which to merge.

The downside is that these behemoth businesses have faltering models. They cannot get the finance from the places that traditionally supply credit and it may be too late for many by the time a modicum of trust re emerges.

Ho hum

***********************************************

The poet ruminates on an endemic
cycle of poverty

Buying Christmas presents
And
The rule
Of
BuyaChristmas
Presentorbedammed
applied
And dammed I
Was.
Save all year ‘till
Come December
Granny grandpa mom n dad
Little brother, cousins: bad
Aunty’s gone
All money’s gone, squandered
And spent in
Lieue
Of Santa:
Out dammed cash
'till we have none.

!Nik[08]

Now here’s a word from my sponsor [me]

The following piece is extracted from my forthcoming novel The Jonker Memorandum. Toward the end of the first quarter I shall begin the readings of my new novel on You Tube: address to be advised.

I believe that I have more chance in today’s climate of getting listeners to my book rather than readers. Hopefully my listeners will also become readers thereby justifying my faith in the universe/multiverse.

A Superfluity of rights.

The human being may be described as the
lowest form of life on earth.
Since it [human being] is the most recent form to evolve.
It is therefore the one most likely to be capable
of further mutation [one step two step];
to become as much as it can be, through
application of mind - Or

it can choose to discard the mind as many do
in pursuit of the transient instant as
was done in their turn by all
the other living entities on the planet.

What if we are here
to consume the planet
and in some way through our
growth
and development
we achieve a critical mass that will spark off
The next phase in our
Evolution… our revelation of transformation: the moment of our fabled
Rapture

Shall we ask then… come back later please?

Professor Oram Mangosti !0th Freedom lecture 2130 AD.
From the Jonker Memeorandum
By !NiK[08]

Obama and Hobson's choice

2008-12-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

Emotion aside and notwithstanding the vast debts that he will inherit Mr Barak Obama has only two choices. He has to spend more money he doesn't have to solve a problem he did not create OR ....

Oh gosh is there another choice?
Oh yes he can raise taxes to pay for the cost of the big repair job he has to pull on the USA, if the place is to have a prosperous future... The US market economy is, in many key areas too Oligopolistic for its own good and it needs to get back to the core principles.

And Gosh again, that will take us back to where we have been... If you burn your hand once putting it on the hot stove [and we have probably put our hands on the stove often] should we demonstrate stupidity by doing it again/

However we need taxes, and Mr Obama a tech savvy man one understands has got a lever no national leader in the so - called free world has ever had before ... HE HAS HIS FOOT ON THE THROAT OF THE FINANCIAL SPECULATOR PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE COLLECTION OF WOEFUL MISBEGOTTEN THIEVING MISFIT BANKERS LIKE NO LEADER HAS HAD IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

This means that he can do something no political leader has ever been really able to do ... dip directly in the fast flowing financial stream.

By tapping into the national payments system with a democratatically controlled micro levy on all financial transactions BO is in a position to effect a revolution in taxation theory on a par with discovering theat the world was not flat.

A micro levy on payments through the system places the burden of tax on all who use the system according to the size of the transaction. This relaeses money at the present end; where its existance is a haemorrage scale wound on upwardly mobile aspirants. How can the state take taxes from a person [citizen] and then allow the money that could have saved the mortgage not be used to help that person out... [sic] on enterprise?

Mr Obama can do what others have done: vast socialist type public works exercises have been successful in the past and will undoubtedly be so again... especally since the advent of the [un] free [oligopoly prone] mass marketing era has seen financial rape of the people become de rigeur [sic].

Logic suggests that the switch of core taxation from an "earner pays" to a "user pays" format would be more efficient than the present system and would involve less conflict wityh the presently overburdened taxpayer and would therefopre facilitate a faster turnaround in the coming New Depression... the word that no one dares to name..

We have recently learned that the USA has been in recession for a year now and shows no immediate signs of remediation... How many months do the facile "coupon clipping" managers of our managerial capitalist bureacratic "sclerotic" global economic system have to let pass by, before they realise that this probnlem needs a permanent solution... These solutions that have us prey to the booms and busts caused by predatory hordes of gloriously well fed and nourished piranha class financial speculators must come to an end, now that we have entered the era of elecronic funds transfers.

Unless you think it is all going to end in a year or two in the "end of days" event long heralded, by the irrationalist class, with its magisterial final cataclism... In which case then lets us by all means follow the same path as that which has stood us well for a few thousand years.

2008-12-19T04:54:00.001-08:00

I posted the following pi9ece on my archive blog: nik.amagama.com last year in April and suddenly in the past few weeks i have received more than 4000 pieces of highly targeted [ito source and nature of sender] spam mail off the site. No response to requests has prevailed so i am goimng to amputate the piece from my old now redundant blog and i'm moving it here so i remember what brought the biggest heap of spam to break through all the filters.

“To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment
April 17th, 2007 by nik
A story running on M & G online [to the average joe blogs aren't cutting it April 14] suggests that the blogging phenomenon has perhaps peaked. According to the writer [quoting the agency Technorati]the total number of bloggists in English has remained static at around 24 million bloggers, many of whom are probably duplicate bloggers like myself. The writer also comments [sourly]on the limited number of journalism students who routinely blog and states that it [the writer] has tired of asked for a ‘hands up’ from classes, regarding ‘who blogs?’, because the response is so piss poor. The writer concludes that blogging is a minority occupation. Coincidentally I have also noted that I have encountered very few ‘hands ups’ from anybody who even knows what blogging is, in my own routine probing of the subject over the past few years.
Curiously by contrast ‘click online’ the BBC’s weekly analysis of Internet affairs, headlines, this week, the way that bloggers successfully thwart all Internet attempts at censorship. So while blogging may be a minority activity it is certainly an influential one, influential enough that the mainstream media are desperately appropriating the concept in an attempt to smother its effectiveness..
What is of interest to me however is the idea that the number of bloggists has peaked at around 24 million [English speakers] The writer does refer to another 50 million or so bloggers who write in other languages: these are not of concern to me in this blog. I would be inclined to agree with the M&G writer that blogging could actually be in decline, once one accepts that huge numbers of bloggers are not regular bloggers nor are all bloggers separate individuals, but like myself may well blog under many separate names in different places.
It seems to me though that there could be various reasons why blogging appears to have peaked [or may have peaked] in the English-speaking world: declining levels of literacy, the appropriation of blogging by the mainstream corporatocracy, the loneliness of the random bloggist and the sheer lack of any serious recognition, point, purpose or reward for what is after all a certain amount of intellectual effort.
It is possible that 20 odd million is about the limit of effective literacy in the English speaking world: a world that appears to have been typified by rising levels of Alliteracy over the past couple of decades. Reader surveys seem to have been routinely noting the decline in reading behaviour over the past decades by those beneficiaries of a modern education system. Apparently the US booksellers association reported recently that the number of Americans who admit to reading a novel in 2005 had declined to below 50% for the first time after hovering around the 50% mark for a number of years. Television viewing is the single biggest ‘participatory’ activity in the modern world.
In another report it seems that the 300 million Americans who populate that country only manage to consume 15 million daily newspapers now which is far less that a century ago when there were much fewer people. In South Africa, where this blogger lives, the biggest selling newspaper manages about 250,000 copies a day and one would be hard pressed to call the Daily Sun reading matter, notwithstanding that is a master of the pithy headline. Neither the most serious daily newspaper: Business Day, nor weekly newspaper, The Mail and Guardian can claim much more than 30,000 copies sold each; and even with a modest three readers per copy [a doubtful speculation] 90,000 readers out of a population of some 45 million is readership at its most elitist. The evidence throughout the English speaking world for the decline in reading activity is widely documented and has been happening for some decades now. I have myself written on the subject as far back as 1976.
As an aside comment… Yesterday I stood in a ’round- the-block’ queue for an hour and a half waiting for the licence office in Loveday street [Jozi} to open [ it never did]. I passed the time reading a novel by Carl Hiaasen [Skin Tight, for those who are interested].
Various people around me commented on my strange activity- they simply stood, passively waiting. An old man who was moving up and down the two hundred-metre line of people [selling document folders] told me I was the only person dumb enough to be reading when everyone else was watching out for pickpockets. I did however notice a few people [two] reading one or other of the daily newspapers. The man in front of me was puzzled when I laughed at something I had read, and commented gratuitously, even smugly, accompanied with serious halitosis, that he had never read a thing since he finished school. Other chaps around him agreed that reading was an unhealthy activity- ‘Bad for the eyes’ one said, to general agreement. So much for 25% of the national budget going to educate people in how to stop reading.
When one contrasts all this above evidence with the truism that the most popular activity on the Internet is [apparently] gawping at dirty pictures on a proliferation of porn sites; with the next most common activity being the deletion of spam emails from one’s email account then it is unsurprising that blogging would be an extreme minority activity.
Notwithstanding this, blogging has proved to be a potent force for prising apart the insidious grip of the mainstream media’s ‘gate-keeping’ function. Bloggers tell that part of the world that cares, about the other ways in which the news may be interpreted, whether real, quirky, fictional, self indulgent or fiercely accurate.
For this reason the Mainstream media are striking back and blogging has been appropriated by almost all worthy media as a way of reinforcing corporate messages using the blind credibility that blogging has acquired. In effect the corporate response to the Blog phenomena has been to attach Blogging to the Public Relations function that so powerfully attempts to mould opinion to conform to corporate needs and wants. In this way ‘authoritive’ voices can be given media supported space to crowd out the more ‘hysterical’ messages of the independent blogger.
Which gives us the third element that must inevitably crowd out the independent voice: The loneliness of the long distance Internet. Anyone who has attempted to present a message on the World Wide Web knows that the experience is similar, in a way, to what would happen if one farted on the centre line of a crowded football stadium. Perhaps a few people nearby might get the message about the state of one’s bowels but the vast mass of the gathered crowd would remain oblivious.
I routinely use the Internet, and specifically Google, for teaching purposes with my classes at the high school where I facilitate the learning of business practice. For instance I may start with a fun statement like ‘business games’: a request to Google that will pull 300 million pages of choices. Given that each page contains 10 entries that is THREE BILLION choices available at the press of a button. We keep refining the question until we find a game, for instance, that is appropriate to what we are studying. Even then our choices run to the thousands.
The random bloggist is lost with such choice. The core problem of the Internet has always been ‘How does one target the untargetable’. To date the best solution is Google and that is hardly a solution.
So inevitably the random bloggist who forms a part of that amorphous 20 million odd bloggers allegedly out there stating their purpose will operate without pay in an environment where they will be lucky if they can attract a few hundred readers. And these readers are so spoilt for choice that they will soon move on in search of greater novelty.
At best blogging is a self-indulgent activity that seeks no reward other than the knowledge that like Kilroy ‘they were there’ and have some small measure of fame in an elusive fame-free world and this must be the ultimate minority activity. Why spend time writing something that almost no one will ever read or even care about.
And as for journalism students blogging on the web, I also suspect that blogging could only be a ancillary activity for such journalism students who choose to operate without editorial control; which is hardly something a good journalism school would teach would they?
The essence of blogging is founded in taking the initiative to say what one wants to say without any form of interference from anyone at all- These are my undiluted, unmediated words, and fuck you if you don’t like what I say. There are no advertisers to offend, no vested interests to protect, and no subtextural hidden agendas to covertly promote. The very idea that journalism students should be practiced Bloggers is almost a complete contradiction of their terms of [future] employment. Too much independence would compromise their employment potential as ‘Hacks’ to the corporatocracy. Aah but then I am ignoring the fact aren’t I that the corporate blogs That have appropriated our invention are probably as carefully edited and proofread as any piece of writing that goes in a piece of mainstream media. If a blog has a corporate logo it can be sued.
Ultimately when one thinks about the problem of figuring out how to say something coherent enough to be read by a third party without an editorial intermediary; and then being able to do this consistently, for no financial reward, to an ultimately indifferent, jaded, communication saturated, marginally committed reader, with an eight word attention span, then we know that what is really surprising is that there are as many as 24 million of us at all.
Viva Bloggers.
Category : Uncategorized
3 Responses to ““To the average joe…blogs aren’t cutting it”…M&G a comment”
kchasu, on April 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am Said:
I was talking to a seasoned PR person the other day. He is terribly out of touch with any actual work, or the Internet for that matter.
Nevertheless he is telling his clients that his agency will set up blogs for them.
I was pissed off. Who the hell are they kidding? Would any of us on here read anything that was blatantly advertising of one sort or another?
No.
And PR is my business. But blogs or chatrooms are no place for it. i used to think they might be. but they are not. the small population that is literate enough to produce online, is not going to be influenced by that kind of crap. therefore, for me, this blog is the last outpost of civilisation.
i see Duncan Mcleod has started a blog. it’s press releases!!!! i know this, because we send him some. and there is a big fuss made because this journo “launches a blog”. crap.
utter shite.
corporates are the politicians of this century in terms of propaganda. it’s fine. but they don’t understand the Internet. they just see a medium and can’t believe they can’t use it.
i immediately steer clients away from “corporate blogging”. it will be a monstrous mess. they would be flamed. it’s harmful.
brandon96end, on April 18th, 2007 at 6:47 am Said:
Unless you have a cpative audience and a really articulate person handling the blog, it can just become a mess… even then, a blog is not the place to advertise. Unless, of course, you can back everything up… all the time.
Данил, on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 am Said:
Very useful and informative text !

OBE founders on 'Sub-Prime' meltdown

2008-11-17T04:32:00.000-08:00

OBE founders on Sub-Prime meltdown
Weblog
17 November

I heard on the radio that the government was reviewing the idea of the outcomes based education [OBE] system that reaches its climax this year with the so-called Matric Exam in South Africa. This is the final exam that sets out to evaluate and assess the performance of 600,000 kids who have just finished what was to all intents and purposes a storm of learning. That is it assesses the quality of the 6 out of 20 kids who made it through the grid from grade 1 to grade 12 in order to find the 1 % who will become the kernels of tomorrows leadership cadres

I find I have mixed feelings. I am filled with admiration for the sheer volume of work that this years Matrics represent. At the same time I am reminded of that classic comedy movie if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. Then I see a potentially fatal flaw in this scheme of things. The new matric curriculum is rather like a smorgasbord dinner where the guests taste a little bit of everything, remember, perhaps, the odd stand out dish, and then collapse exhausted into a deep sleep… from which they awaken with post-binge amnesia, and remember almost nothing of the meal other than whether it was fun or not.

The main difference between the smorgasbord dinner and our new smorgasbord education process is that every mouthful is to be assessed in terms of whether it was competently chosen, selected, tasted, spat out or eaten, as my friend Bergie puts it, having been involved with the process since its inception: “Too much emphasis is placed on correct administration, instead of ensuring that the outcomes have actually been met.” I’m sure that the organisers of the system would say that correct administration would ensure correct outcomes: for most of the learners. We will soon find out.

The kids are known formally as Learners, because they are there to learn… preferably by themselves and/or by co operation with others in their groups, with guidance, and help from the class manager, which completely changes their job from what it was in, say 1971, or even 1993. Then the Teacher led the learning process. Now the ‘classroom outcomes mediator’ sets the journey and then follows it. This in itself is a transformational change so radical that most of our society is unaware of its progress. One thing for which little credit has been shown is that the new ‘teacher’ needs to know vastly more about their designated learning area [‘subject’: in old language] than most ‘old school’, inaptly named “teachers”, are able to deliver.

There are more fancy words like facilitation and mediation, which apply to what they do. These suggest a more hands off approach to the schooling process than we are familiar with in our popular mythology of the classroom. So a modern ‘teacher’ is like a big classroom monitor who also manages the process and extracts learning excellence from the young humans in their charge… [And still has to be a teacher in the old fashioned sense because that is what they do…]. It is a fascinating and truly inspirational journey.

In effect the kids should be left alone to puzzle through things and figure out what they mean. Anyway no matter how it goes the results will not show up for years and by the time they do there will be almost no one who remembers how it was when the system produced the kinds of skills and knowledge needed for the old society.

This system is supposed to produce the minds and skills needed to make a high tech 21st century society work and function and adapt to the range of changes that face us; from alternate fuel transformation and biotechnology, to the greening of the planet: and coping with those shifts in the planets alignment with the multiverse that have induced so-called climate change.

So for now this is the system we have got and the authority is going to have to learn how to achieve the outcomes with eighty percent less paperwork because the outcome if they don’t is that they will have no classroom managers by 2020. As it is South Africa’s schools are coping, with the help of an increasing number of well-trained Zimbabwean teachers who, ironically do not follow the OBE system.

Will it work… will it produce that 5 –10 percent of future leaders and separate out the dross that is doomed to go nowhere… and what about the super-dross, those who fell by the wayside. And what happens to them? How does this almost unbelievable expense, about a quarter of the national budget, help the 1,4 million kids who stopped being learner on the way from grade 1… and who have just vanished into a collectivist maw?

Right now, notwithstanding an unemployment rate that sits in the upper twenty percent range the economy is short of about a quarter million trained and skilled personnel in all walks from accountants to aircraft technicians, electricians, plumbers, teachers and medical workers. The rate of attrition outweighs the rate of replacement by a considerable margin. Curiously the shortages of labour have not resulted in higher wages in those categories, if anything wages have declined: but that is another story altogether not to mention that it is a puzzle.

After years of figuring it out I declare that this super-controlled, elitist oriented, OBE system is too complicated, too soon, to produce the desired result. I also accept that the model that it replaced was too awful to remember. The results we are about to be shown will be massaged to make them credible and we know that we [the world] face a global economic meltdown because of a universal desire to ignore reality in the face of the inevitability of a sub prime meltdown.

OBE is in fact foundering on a sub-prime meltdown as millions of kids abandon the system and wreak their unruly revenge. By the time we have figured that out it may well be too late to be useful. Perhaps the philanthropic Mr Shuttleworth, who’s efforts in the field of digital education have featured in the press recently, will find a way to automate the learning and assessment process and leave everyone time for the real learning that takes place in schools.

KISS… the word that means, “Keep it Simple… Stupid” applies here.

Can Barak Obama change the world?

2008-11-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi

In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.

I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly had other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned through our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible, but prosaic.

So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.

One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.

So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.

The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system: which is at heart, an illusion..

Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.

The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.

But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.

Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm.

Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.

So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:

Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.

There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.

To which…

BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.

He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.

So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.

Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.

Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.

So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?

What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.

Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.

My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… does contribute significantly to making this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.

Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.

His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.

1. The [US] Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.

It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. It's like cutting off a leg to service the body. The blind revenge factor is high, and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].

It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.

For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.

So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.Cheers
!nik is the Blogospherian.

The emperor is dead all hail the emperor.

2008-11-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi

In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.

I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.

So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.

One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.

So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.

The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..

Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.

The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.

But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.

Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.

So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:

Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.

There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.

To which…

BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.

He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.

So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.

Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.

Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.

So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?

What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.

Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.

My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.

Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.

His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.

He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.

1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.

2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.

The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.

It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.

Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].

It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.

Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.

For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.

So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.

Cheers
The Blogospherian.

In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood

2008-11-02T04:03:00.000-08:00

I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.

It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.

At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.

However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.

I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed and i count few people as friend.

I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to market networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.

Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, from many different places: all 'outies', who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.

Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.

He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.

Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the "wild fastnesses" of the region meet the equally "wild fastnesses" of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.

He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.

After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins; speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings; and nourished ourselves on healthy libations of nutricious liquids... I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again in this world.

Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.

Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.

Splitting Rooikrans Logs

Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma

Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP

In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood.

2008-11-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.

It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.

At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.

However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.

I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.

I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.

Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.

Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.

He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.

Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.

He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.

After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.

Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.

Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.

Splitting Rooikrans Logs

Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma

Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.

Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP

Joe the Plumber: the great American meltdown

2008-10-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Weblog
17 October 2008

Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.

Talk about pride before the fall.

No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?

It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptiansm, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians the Greeks the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America. The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?

What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.

Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.

To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.

The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.

Joe the Plumber: the great American meltdown

2008-10-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Weblog
17 October 2008

Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.

Talk about pride before the fall.

No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?

It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptians, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America.

The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines; while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?

What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.

Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought, gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.

To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.

The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.

After the Crash - blame the poor

2008-10-13T04:50:00.000-07:00

Weblog 11 October 2008
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor

Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining satire called the 'Fable of the Bees' in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.

The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept: that of lending money to the poor.

For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.

Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum the idea, that lending money to poor people who had no real means of long term support was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun”, to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.

The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.

Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.

What comfort now then for the moralists.
Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Whatever, there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today notwithstanding that the whole idea that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade was floored as well as flawed.

If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.

In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.

After the Crash... Blame the Poor

2008-10-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

Weblog 11 October 2008
The week the world crashed
Jozi.
Blame the Poor

Some centuries ago an economist named Bernard Mandeville wrote an entertaining piece called the Fable of the Bees in which he illustrated the reality that our glorious market based, individualist driven, self interest motivated, slaughterhouse of an economy has given us prosperity, comfort and joy: such that a 21st century citizen of modest class lives better today, than his wealthiest ancestors of only a few centuries back.

The moralising class has never been fond of this truth, and has persisted with the kollektivist ideal of subjugating the common citizenry into a hive, in which incentives were modest and the work dull and tedious, repetitive, and without seeming purpose. Thus it is in this most Klensed of weeks; as the global, illusory financial edifice, crashes down around our ears, that the moralising class will come into its own and they will rant and rage; and take over all our former activities and drive us through the Depression that must certainly follow the folly, of adhering to a moralist precept and lending money to the poor.

For ironically it is ultimately the Poor who have brought this apocalyptic catastrophe down upon our heads.

Under pressure from the leftish side of the American political spectrum, the idea, that lending money to poor people, who had no real means of long term support, was counter to historical banking policy, was somehow “spun” to equate with being a “bad” person. So a new industry came into existence inspired by a new generation of MBA driven, substance enthusiast sustained financial manipulators. And did they have a party: and did the poor get their houses.

The inspired market was driven to heights never before experienced until ultimately the market snapped back. Reality check deluxe.

Those moralists who believed that all economics is inspired by relativity have just discovered that it isn’t. As long as resources are finite so too are the iron laws of economics immutable.

What comfort now then for the moralists?

Somewhere in America will be some citizens who benefited from the plan to flood the market with the so-called Ninja loans [Ninja: no income no jobs atall].
Some will have survived to lift themselves above the poverty datum line through religiously inspired thriftiness, and others through a more secularly inspired gift for self-advancement. Some may well have have sold out at the hight of the property boom and taken the great gift of money back to a reconstituted trailer park and enjoyed a cosy retirement. Whatever; there will be those whose lives are immeasurably better off today, notwithstanding that the whole idea, that underpinned the massive boom of the past half decade, was floored as well as flawed.

If the idea of lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back was a flawed one then the idea itself was ultimately floored by something we so completely took for granted that its very speed has shattered our illusion.

In the same way that that 1987 caught the world by surprise so has the crash of 2008 been accelerated by information processors that now move millions of times faster than human beings can think or even respond… let alone agree on strategies that, until they occurred, were treated with denialist disdain.

Happy blogging

A hard day's week

2008-09-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

The late Harold Wilson famously observed that “a week is a long time in politics.”. We have just had a week where a day was a long time in politics.

At home we achieved an African first a bloodless and relatively constitutional “coup-de-etat”. A man who has hogged the headlines for the past few years has, in a fell swoop been nudged towards the margins in the slightest of slights. In protocol terms it was a stunning strategic move. In addition the left in the ruling Party [and without, in the alliance partnership], seem for the moment to have outflanked the radical cadres that poured rage in the name of Jacob Zuma.

Simultaneously the conciliatory position of the victorious faction has moderated any serious schism that underlies the inherent tensions between the desire to serve oneself and the need to serve others; with those who seek office to achieve enrichment perhaps having to lie low for a while...

A signal for those was the summary, contact termination, of the police chief in a local metro region. The man had apparently developed an unsavoury penchant for becoming embroiled in controversial events, often involving alcohol. He was always controversial but under the regime of former, now disgraced, president Thabo Mbeki he led a charmed life and proved that you are what you practice apparently, since his political masters have told him to go.

Now of course its time to produce something other than rabbits from a hat and the Party needs to see some serious performance on key issues before the election is upon them and they fail to achieve the 80% majority they so richly desire. [The number of registered voters in the country has remained relatively static since ’94. The proportion of registered voters to potential voters seems to be on the decline, and the percentage that actually vote is similarly declining. What this means is unexplored.]

As big and momentous an event as this was, it barely merited a total of five minutes across all global news channels routinely monitored be this bloggist. The political opposition and the press are fuelling the idea of a split in the Party and it may yet come to pass… but frankly, the moment seems to have passed. The left have captured the Brand ANC, and all other political parties are doomed to live on the margins for a while longer. +Anyone breaking away from the ANC to form a new party at this time is walking into political and probable economic extinction.

From the world’s p.o.v. a bigger event has hogged the headlines: the great economic meltdown predicted buy this bloggist for many years has finally arrived. Until this past week I would have said that the septuagenarian republican contender for the Presidency in the USA [the one with the scary, huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ lady running mate] was in with a chance. But he was the one saying that the past excess could be managed without a tax increase… The dark contender was pragmatic enough to recognise that a tax increase was inevitable.

And truth will out. As I write this this the 700 billion dollar rescue package proposed by the Bush Administration as a panacea for all ills is stalled in congress; and the world’s stockmarkets are collapsing. It is also more than possible that 700 billion will not be sufficient to ballast the markets against a de-leveraging meltdown. I now predict that Mr Obama will walk this election and that the USA will enter a period of economic difficulty unprecedented in decades. [He has been handed a poisoned chalice much like the way the eternally declining Zimbabwe was handed such a chalice by Mr Mbeki.]

The American taxpayer has just been landed with a trillion dollar debt to pay off. And more than likely another trillion dollar debt to come. It was sneaked up on them and they fully deserve it because they have sucked merrily off the hind tit for 8 years in one of the biggest greed splurges in history. And now they and many others will pay with their mortgages.

Happy blogging

Exit the President

2008-09-23T00:23:00.000-07:00

Weblog 23 September 2008-09-23
Dateline Jozi
Zone One/Gauteng
Afrika/Azania

So exit Thabo Mbeki, former South African President and social networker par excellence from Stage right.
Enter Interim President K.M [spelling and pronunciation to be ascertained] from Stage Left.

According to the morning news the ex-president is applying to the Constitutional court for the right to co-join with the National Prosecuting Authority in an appeal against the judgement that overthrew the case against the wannabee President Mr Jacob Zuma, and opened the way for his enemies in the party to mount an unassailable assault against him.

In the meantime the party has chosen the less controversial Mr ‘K.M’ as its preferred interim President subject to the wannabee presidential pretender [Mr Jacob Zuma] gaining a mandate from the people. This is expected to happen next year when the party [ the only real contender] walks the general election; and proves conclusively [they hope] that they can fool most of the people most of the time.

In the final analysis this was a bloodless coup of considerable political elegance. President Mbeki has been “recalled” because he was unpopular with his supporters and increasingly divisive to the party; and without him the country can begin to deal with many outstanding issues, not least of which is the vexing problem of service delivery and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Whether the strategy pays off remains to be seen. In the meantime though newly enlightened self-interest should see most of the key players coalesce around the interim man, there will be a few casualties and the feeding frenzy may see a shift of players as those who have fed well at the trough depart for other pastures and a collection of newbies toi toi from left to centre: on their pilgrimage to the right hand side. Hopeful new ideologues with pockets filled to merry clinking for those adroit enough to grasp the ring while simultaneously keeping their backs covered.

Should we feel sorry for Thabo… This writer doesn’t. He will still be Thabo the Great to me because of his success in bringing the African Parliament to Gauteng. With his passage the entire African Union project may well move off set for awhile and their may be attempts by others to hijack the parliament for some other preferred place and we would do well to resist that.

As for the rest? As I said before Thabo Mbeki was a Smutsian figure. I know that the newly empowered will find the comparison odious but tough: perception is all. [For offshore readers South Africa/Azania had a former leader called Jan Smuts, as controversial a leader as ever existed. This writer was once chased from a man’s house with covering rifle fire after inadvertently mentioning the man’s name in an inappropriate context. Said Mr Smuts also sported a little goatee beard such as was favoured by Mr Mbeki and was more fond of being on the world stage than sitting around the fireside at home]. Mr Mbeki was such an absentee leader.

He won't be missed by the people because the people rarely saw him; and when they did, he read them speeches full of empty rhetoric in a uniquely robotic style… Ironically the only time we saw him out of Stoic mode was in his farewell speech.

He also presided over the longest period of economic expansion in the country’s history, thereby demonstrating one of economic history’s profound truths: that leaders who choose not to meddle in the economics of a country too overtly, facilitate considerable growth.

From a prosperity perspective Mr Mbeki oversaw a period of unprecedented growth in his country. So did Tony Blair and George Bush in theirs. We know that those men are leaving a legacy of wealth destruction on a scale not witnessed since the Great Depression as the bubble they helped to inflate, on an ocean of deceit, lies and deception, burst under the strain of dishonesty; and that has revealed the inherently moral streak that lines all self interest.

It remains to be seen what the shift from a relatively hands-off period of near, mercantilist inspired, laissez faire economics in South Africa; fuelling the empowerment transfer of wealth, to a more redistributionist policy, under the inspiration of the newly dominant Communist Party associations in the ruling party, will do for the country’s prospects. It is even possible that Mr Zuma may not make it to president. Now that the so-called ‘ultra-left’ have control of the Party thanks to Mr Zuma's machinations and Mr Mbeki's flawed strategies, do they really need a maverick populist who could well have his own less congenial [to them] agenda.

For the moments we have hove-to in the lee of the storm.

The Blogospherian

2008-09-23T00:22:00.000-07:00

Exit the

2008-08-22T03:15:00.001-07:00

Inkambabeyibuza:

You can either be a part
Of the power
Or apart
From the power.
Parcelling tradition
Or facing
Madness
Never
Believing that anyone
Could believe.
So Inkambabeyibuza -
By this scar then you shall remember me
And this.

From the notes of Joy.
The Jonker Memorandum.
.NiK(05)

Carthage then Georgia now.

2008-08-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Weblog
21th August 2008
Presumably China was not amused that the resurgent wannabee Russian Bear chose the opening of the Olympics in Beijing as the cover for an assault on the southern oil pipelines from Baku, through Turkey via Georgia.

The best assaults are always those that catch the world by surprise and the proto- soviet assault on the free republic of Georgia is a classic of the species. George “the schmuck” Bush was found with a mouthful of overcooked sushi while out mounting Vladimir Putin… Put in he is rumoured to have said. The photo-op of Bush fawning over Putin in Beijing must represent an all time low in the waning fortunes of the USA.

As a strategic move the clamp on Georgia is brilliant . The oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey is a key supply route for Euroland’s growing energy needs. We have already seen what happens with the northern supply line from Russian through Ukraine when Gazprom flexed its muscles a year or so ago. Ukraine stopped. Europe fulminated against the move then, and now with the move to [potentially] cut off oil from Buku almost a fait accompli Europe is on an uneasy precipice… as is the free world.

Will this little invasion prove to be the 21st century’s equivalent of Munich 1938 … Appeasement today brings conflict tomorrow? There is certainly an amusing comparison between the way the Russians have taken out Georgia and the way the Vandals wiped out the Romans back in 439AD by snatching Carthage from the empire while the citizens were at the Games and then holding their grain supplies to ransom.

As of right now the only real beneficiary of the Georgian affair seems to be the Republican candidate for office in the USA… for the rest it is the unaccustomed sight of light skinned refugees on their way to the latest ‘trailer park’ refugee camp.

So much for Darfur

Talking of downtime

2008-07-29T01:15:00.000-07:00

This has not been a good year, neither for my blogging nor my life. My significant other of 37 years standing went down with Breast cancer last November. Although now, hopefully, in recovery, the journey has been a brutal reminder, that, notwithstanding the many glorious medical achievements of the 20th century and beyond, the road to cancer recovery is nasty, brutish and painfully excruciating for the sufferer: and hell for those who care. The crisis for me is that Madame has been my muse, in a serious sense. I started writing poetry soon after meeting her, and the shock of her unexpected illness has driven all inspiration from my soul.

Then as if that was not enough for a year; to add misery to horror, the main computer went down to one unscheduled loadshedding experience too many; and the main drive self-destructed. Forensic investigators have been able to find no trace that the hard drive ever contained anything of interest. That was a sobering experience. To be robbed twice, more efficiently than by any casual thief, is indeed a brutal reminder that we exist by the whims of politicians and the exigencies of nature. [Exigencies = circumstantial necessities: New Webster.]

This was a pair of low blows, followed in rapid succession by a [automatic] gearbox breakdown in the Nissan Maxima… not an easy model to repair, and then some cockpit meltdown in the dashboard of Madame’s beloved Audi: meaning the thing showed that boiling point was reached ten seconds after take off. When something like that happens on my old ’78 beetle I just change a fuse. Now there’s a whole dashboard change plus some thing to do with a computer. If the new part is not matched to the original computer configuration of the original vehicle then the car mal-performs.

That in itself was an interesting discovery: a practical demonstration of how the manufacturer seeks to exclude competition from the lucrative repair business. It’s an intriguing twist really on the supply chain consolidation that is bedevilling our contemporary global economy: and contributing to commodity price speculation. Should I ever buy another car, and strictly speaking I loath the unreliable things, I shall buy one that has a ten year warranty.

However it is enough already, Oyh!

But wait that was only the hardware part…

Along the way it became necessary to get a [non-local] passport for the baby [now 19 years old]. To get the passport in this post-9/11 polarising world, we now have to have the original birth certificate to demonstrate the causal [blood] relationship between father and daughter. That meant “home affairs”. You’ve dealt with home affairs: you know what is coming.

To cut a long story short after two and a half years and umpteen visits this child, who has an ID book, has passed matric and is a 2nd year uni’ student has just been recorded as a ‘late birth registration’ entry. This, it was decided was the most expedient way that a pleasantly helpful Home Affairs service person could suggest, to solve the dilemma of an apparently non-existent birth document. It must have existed once since someone once issued the abbreviated local variant. And of course we still don’t actually have the thing; meaning another trip to Disneyland to establish if this palliative has been effective. As for getting a vault copy of a marriage certificate… that is an even more complex task to which we have yet to find a solution. A luta continua.

The experience highlights for me one of the unspoken ironies of our post-liberation era: that young people [us: then] who struggled for years under the old regime with a lack of mobility, as far as gaining global work exposure and experience was concerned, are now, it seems, even worse off than ever. A South African passport, I discover, is so widely regarded as suspect, that our citizens are now being actively discriminated against, in an ever-widening range of situations: something that may, of course, be strategically useful for a region experiencing a severe skills exodus, exacerbated by the ongoing discrimination experienced routinely by all three of my children [and most of the people I know].

The increasingly onerous conditions applying generally to mobility seems also to be representative of a drift apart at the global level… The more we are together the more we are apart. There is a definite sense that the world is polarising into potentially acrimonious regional blocs.

So the result is that I have been distracted from my bloggish affairs; and have neglected you my reader who, I would have hang on my every syllable: I apologise for this.

In my all-consuming struggle to cope with disaster upon disaster, as well as perform the many duties relating to my everlasting day job, I have thus written fewer blogs and struggled with an inadequately restored computer network to upload what I have written. This means I have not dealt, for instance, with Russia’s unexplained volte-face over Zimbabwe. Apparently it was a lover’s meeting in Japan for the G8 ‘thing’, that saw Russia’s Medvedev agree to support sanctions against Zim [Rum ] babwe; only to step aside, presumably on orders from Csar Putin, as ole “porky” Brown went for the shot, missed, and was left in such an embarrassed heap that he just lost [one of ] the safest seat in British [Pomeranian] politics… Glasgow nogal a seat the labour party held since the beginning of the party’s history.

At this rate Brown will be gone before Mugabe, which should make Mugabe chuckle. And of course Mugabe hasn’t even begun to be gone.

Then of course there is that other dubious support base for governments that abuse their citizenry: China.
China’s snot drenched human rights record has prevailed notwithstanding all their bullshit pitch to get the Beijing Olympic Games. These games are a demonstration that notwithstanding their stated intent, and emotionally driven by the aspirations of the performers, expediency rules: circumstantial necessity requires that we deal with the reality that is China: and pay it the ultimate homage of hosting the great games even though the place is inherently a gangster State little removed from Hitler’s in ’36 and the equally late Soviet Union in ’80.

There is no real evidence however that China has done what it said it would, with regard to improving human rights [in China], and embracing democratic values. This was demonstrated most revealingly in the recent Tibetan uprising. In the lead-up we also had, for instance, the abusive eviction of citizens to make way for the Olympic paraphernalia, suppression of opposition bloggists, and the evidence that they are [apparently] suppressing some 30,000 outbreaks of civil unrest annually. The Chinese position on Climate abuse is also seriously flawed.

In my view China has cheated. They have cheated over the Olympics, an event dedicated to honesty and fair play. This is one more thumb in the eye of freedom, and reinforced by the country’s support for evil regimes in Africa lends credence to a cynical contempt, that is gnawing at the fruits of freedom worldwide. While shopping for goods made in China we should remember that the great discoveries of our age were made by free people … little of use has emerged from the totalitarian dictatorships of the past ten decades and that is unlikely to change soon.

How can I make my displeasure felt?

The only thing I can do apart from writing this blog is to withhold my consent to the Games. This means that I shall boycott the Games… I will listen to nothing relevant to the games, watch nothing and discuss nothing, and any joy I feel regarding the participation of our own household’s special entrant, one who had to leave home to gain recognition, and whom we truly hope will attain the accolades she has worked for, will be communicated privately.

Will this matter to the Chinese… I am sure it won’t, nor will it matter to anybody else I guess other than me. It is not as if this will even be a punishment [to me or them] since there is so much else happening also that is more interesting… like the Tri Nations, CSI and Classic FM.

So: not only will I boycott the broadcasting of the games, I shall also boycott the products that have made these “disgraceful games” possible. Any organisation that has sponsored the games, or is appearing to profit, at the expense of Tibetan liberty, shall never receive my endorsement ever again. If it’s a soft drink I shall guzzle down their worst enemy. If it is a fast food chain, I shall do the same. And ditto for shoes, tracksuits, coffee, tea and booze, airlines and whatever else. Each one has a competitor who is not at the Games: and to them we say Farewell Olympia: we do not sponsor horror. Sell us your goods instead.

Down with tyranny and those who would sponsor it.

The slow death of a tyrant

2008-07-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

This blog was written weeks ago after the Au conference in Egypt at which Mugabe appeared in search of affirmation. It was n't published for technical reasons which i don't understand and ended up stored in the drafts pages.

Nothing that has subsequently taken place has changed sufficiently to negate what i said then regarding the inevitable disintegration of the Mugabe regime and the probability that what comes next will be worse.

It is now a week later and i still had not been able to load this blogpiece to my blogsite due to technical reasons which i do not understand... this is an attempt to load from a different machine to my usual one which was loadshedded earlier this year... thus sending me into a frenzy of inactivity
Maybe i can begin my path to understanding along this alternate route...
********************
In the meantime Mr Bob the roz Mugabe has been playing a deadly game of possum. He is pretending to negotiate and has even shaken hands with his enemy.

*******************************

Original Blog written on eve of AU appearance by Bob in Egypt.

Weblog 1 July 08
Jozi

Perhaps Mr Mugabe fears the repercussions of losing power. He knows what he has done to his enemies and knows what his enemies will do to him. And it is obvious that he sees almost everyone as an enemy.

The African Union has debating whether he should form a government of national unity and whatever he may say in Egypt he will renege when he returns home because although he is the President he is no longer in power. The country is controlled by gangsters and thugs, and they will turn on him in an instant if they suspect he will ruin their game. In reality the AU indulged Mr Mugabe by even deigning to debate a government of national unity since his presidency is illegal and it is questionable that he should have been allowed to speak. By giving him the right to speak they gave him de facto recognition.

The leader of the opposition lacked the intestinal fortitude necessary to take power through the ballot and now, it seems, wants others to do his work for him. He justifies this by commenting that the situation is too dangerous to stand and he is probably right. His life hangs on a whim.

Rationally there is no reason why the AU should rebuke Mr Mugabe. He won the election. The fact that it was rigged was inconvenient but the margin of inconvenience is not sufficient to cause serious discomfort. There has never been any significant indication that the members of the Au are anything other than they have always been, and there were always unsavoury elements whose position was stolen, even in this era of greater democratic representivity. This is also an era steeped in expediency.

Modern politics like those of auld are based on expediency and expediency suggests that the sum total of development aid being dispensed to all the beggar nations that make up the AU is currently uncertain. The global economy is currently insecure and uncertain.

What is certain though is that a settlement in Zimbabwe will see [possible] massive amounts of reconstruction aid going to the place in an attempt to repair the enormous capital drain wreaked by a decade of suicidal politics. The country‘s mining industry is chaotic and they have just experienced the worst harvest since the 1940’s. That heap of development money will probably be money that doesn’t go to the rest. In economic language the opportunity cost of solving Zimbabwe’s problem is the diversion of hard to get aid from the other AU members.

At the same time the world is in a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. Climate change, extreme weather conditions, food consumption generated food price increases plus famines and rampantly exploding cost of energy are wreaking creeping havoc on our global society and that means one thing… less largesse to go around.

Therefore the members of the AU will take the inherently rational position that they do not individually stand to gain from the addition of one damm hungry beggar to their alms conference. Collectively they will placate Mugabe and let well alone… If it’s broken why fix it?

The Blogospherian.

The Buffalo Hunters

2008-06-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Buffalo Hunters

By Nicholas Williamson

An allegoric prose poetic cyber story, regarding murder, brutal lust and equally brutal retribution: from Zone One in the
emerging Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika
Publisher’s warning: this text contains material that is sexually explicit and violently graphic. Thus the text is not suitable for those who are not yet adult.

NOte: The full text of Williamson's cult novel: The Buffalo Hunters, will be found under that heading [Buffalo Hunters] in the "categories" section of the blog. What follows here in this section is a brief introduction to the novel.

Synopsis

The Buffalo Hunters are a murderous gang of motorcar hijackers: modern hunters who hunt
the urban savannahs of Zone One for BMW’s, Merc’s and Audi’s…Afrika’s new “Buffaloes”

They are on the run, after offending a local warlord in their area, and need to hide out across town. They cross to the east side of South Central Zone One aka Jozi and stop off at a bar in the neighbourhood in search of a hostage: a tribute for whoever gives them sanctuary.

It is Saturday night at the Battered Connection, a bar in a post-gentrified neighbourhood where men plot murder inside, drug gangs menace the streets beyond; where modern day trackers stalk the stalkers, and ‘nice’ girls walk at their peril of being jackrolled, i.e. hijacked into a passing vehicle, gang raped and murdered.

The reader will encounter five separate casts of characters in five unrelated stories, which together generate a “Rashomon” style plot, where each cast plays out its own drama oblivious of the loops and intersections with the other parallel players.

During an intense twelve hours the lives of these many unrelated players intersect in a masterly collection of interwoven stories that collide collectively to a bloody and violent confrontation.

Publisher’s note
The Buffalo Hunters is a brutal piece of poetic metaphor and is not recommended for children or those of a squeamish disposition.
Some readers have found it funny and ironic while others read it the first time with distrust and then once they realised what they had read went back and read it again. Some wrote to say they found the violent imagery poetically beautiful.

The Buffalo Hunters is a landmark piece of
South African writing.

October 1996

Note for the offshore Reader

This prose poem disguised as crime fiction is set in post-revolutionary Azania in the heart of the great gold yielding province Zone One in Afrika. Every attempt has been made to modify the use of Azanian specific English language but this may have been a failure because we live in Zone One and so may not know that you don’t know our words. Therefore provision will be made to deal with your questions and a glossary is attached [see main file]for those words that we are sure you may not find in your local dictionary. If we miss any let us know on yonkamemo@gmail.com and we’ll update the glossary.

For those who are unfamiliar with Zone One.
Zone One is an urban state in the southern part of Afrika. It is often called the Place of Gold.

In 1885 when gold was first discovered there, Zone One did not exist. By 2001 it had more than seven million residents, all of whom came in search of fortune which most failed to find.

Thus Zone One is one of Earth’s most urbanized political zones. It is the wealthiest, most industrialized, most politically aware; suburbanized yet radicalized and revolutionary place in sub-Saharan Afrika.

Above all things, Zone One is a place of opportunity. This is a rare thing for Afrika (and also, presumably, in much of the offshore world); where progress in life is more commonly determined by relationships to, or with, the great and/or important persons of society. Notwithstanding that, these relationships do of course count too in Zone One, as they would count for instance in New York even though New York is, according to legend, a place of opportunity.

Zone One is a unique Megalopolis for two reasons: It is situated two thousand metres above sea level on a plain [called the Highveld] dotted with low level rolling hills. Its centre is watered by a multitude of small, now choked, streams that turn into raging torrents after a lightning thrashed Highveld storm, and pour from their highest points along a two hundred-kilometre crescent shaped ridge, the Ridge of Gold, which bisects Zone One. Because of the altitude little other than sparsely treed thorn bush punctuates its natural surface.

As a result of this, when the first, modern, successful, gold seekers plundered the hills of their new domain, following the great gold rush of 1886, they did what successful people always do: they displayed their newly acquired wealth. Those who built mansions on the north facing ridges found themselves facing a barren treeless landscape. So a group of disgruntled (rich) women in South Central Zone One, aka Jozi, decided to give themselves a better view from the ridge tops and hired a gang of woodcutters who planted three million trees. Those who came later, and built homes on the northern plains of South Central Zone One have planted more than three million more. In a deforesting world Jozi is a rare place.

Modern Zone One is a Mall infested, mining/ industrial complex: experienced, wealthy and sophisticated. It has also, huge pockets of urbanised poor: many homeless, destitute and desperate, many simply working poor, who supplement their lifestyles doing crime. Whole regions of Zone One are little more than shopping malls for stolen goods. Speaking of shopping there are those who say that Zone One is simply one big Shopping Mall: that Zone One is a place where people work, gamble and shop.

The region has also always been violent. In 1896, at the height of the great gold rush, which brought it into existence, the ‘Star’ (a still extant newspaper of the region) described Jozi as “a place without law”. More people are murdered daily in Zone One than anywhere else on earth (except perhaps Bogotá). Rape is a way of life. Freedom and democracy, so hard won in 1994 now include the right to kill, maim and pillage and to restrict these things means curbing liberty and a return to the hated police state that residents had before: and to do such a thing would require great subtlety.

So it will be a while before we can do that. In the meantime, in an attempt to curb violent lawlessness, whole suburban regions of Zone One are sealed off from their neighbours and passing traffic in a mass, voluntary act of totalitarian restriction. These trends are hinted at in the Buffalo Hunters which is set in the period immediately after the revolution.

Until the last decade of the twentieth century Zone One was also the heart of the world’s last, sanctioned “Slave State”. Power may now be in the hands of the people, names have been changed; the place has the most humane Constitution on Earth and a flood of laws have been passed outlawing a range of things from the use of racial epithets, to tobacco smoking in public, or using mobile phones (Zonies call them cell'phones) while driving in your “buffalo”; but much else remains unchanged and Zone One is still a place without much law, although it now has many more lawyers. It is not a place for the squeamish.

Of course those who love “Jozi” or the “Big J” as South Central Zone One is also often called, figure it to be the coolest place on earth with year round sunshine, (well most of the time), blue skies (mostly), the worlds greatest cultivated forest, awesome casino’s and a shopaholic’s paradise. They do not, however, forget about the shadows that lurk, as they always have, in the deepest recesses of revolutionary night.

Note about the writer

Nicholas Williamson is an Anglo-Afrikan poet, who lives in the African Union with his wife and daughter and a pack of dogs. Two adult children live elsewhere.

In the year of the Revolution, 1994 in the most southern part of Afrika; he survived a full-on close quarter gunfight with a gang of radicals-turned-criminals: a gunfight in which his assailants fired seventeen bullets at him at point blank range and hit him four times, and he fired thirteen back at them, also at point blank range, and hit them nine times: so he won: a Pyrric victory. The Buffalo Hunters was written as an exorcism of that event.

His injuries though, meant a change of lifestyle in a most absolute sense and while recovering in the Intensive care ward of a local hospital he conceived of The Azanian Quartet© a body of work which would span the reach of the Revolution in Azania [or if you are uncomfortable with this: South Africa]using the ways of poetry to write a fictional prose set, starting with the Buffalo Hunters.

Nicholas is an ‘Anglo’ because he was born in Britain in October 1946; his parents migrated to Southern Africa in the Winter of 1947 so it was 1948 before he knew that a year had a summer in it; and that particular summer a fascist government, which had as its purpose the formal enslavement of a large part of its citizenry, took control of the territory. As a result they took the place where he lived unwillingly, on a forty-six year journey into wintery futility: violent and nugatory.

The journey culminated in the capitulation of that regime and in the People’s Revolution of 1994 a Revolution that marked one of the great liberating revolutions of the modern age: it is also a revolution that is incomplete… and like all revolutions it has unleashed a frenzy of violence that may well take a century to abate…if it ever does.

In that year (1994), in the spring, the author was born again, in Afrika, after he was cut down by a fusillade of bullets in a gunfight with a gang of disturbed humans. No rational reason for the assault was ever determined. The event took place on the 11th of September: the anniversary of the assassination, by the former fascist police, of one of the liberation struggle’s greatest heroes and a date which has subsequently become a general date of infamy on the planet.

So the writer is suspended between two personae: the one which grew up and survived as an Outsider in a Police State, through the second half of the twentieth century, a condition which eviscerates the soul; and the one that survived attempted murder, at the hands of those who were liberated.

Nicholas Williamson is an economics graduate and former businessperson who no longer practices those arcane arts, preferring instead the greater truth in fiction.

The Buffalo Hunters© is Part One of the Azanian Quartet. Part Two: The Ashanti Raider© will be available shortly and Part three: the futuristic Jonker Memorandum© will be available later this year in serialised form.

What is the Azanian Quartet?

The Azanian Quartet is generally inspired by Nietzsche’s idea of “Eternal Recurrence” and was specifically inspired by what happened during a neighbourhood gunfight one Sunday morning at seven thirty: and by a series of dreams that followed.

Azania is the name given to Southern Africa on ancient Ptolemaic maps.

Random notes of a marginalised man

2008-06-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

This collection has had various homes over the years and is now moving to my blogspot here on amagama. Enjoy.

The
Random
Notes
of
a
Marginalised
Man

By .NiK©…

aka Nicholas Williamson

Published by Leofric House Publications.
PO Box 891224
Lyndhurst 2106
South Central Gauteng
The Afrikan Union

All rights reserved.

The author, Nicholas Williamson also known variously as .NiK or Nicholas or even as Nicholas Jakari asserts his moral right to all the work contained in this collection. It may not be reproduced without acknowledging the poet, and it may not be reproduced for gainful purposes.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system for purposes of duplication, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and/ or the the publisher of this cyberstory.

Leofric House Publishing. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst 2106 South Africa/Azania.
ISBN 0-620-23292-7 The Random Notes of a Marginalised Man by Nicholas Williamson also known as .NiK .

The pieces in this anthology include both previously published and unpublished works
and span the period 1973 to 2000. With thanks to Gazebo Press, Two Tone Magazine, Upstream, Bedford.

There is no theme, no conscious drift to holistic order; the pieces contained in this small collection are selected from the Random notes of a poet who lived through those years and wrote down some thoughts and continues to live.

For all the poets.

With thanks to Di, to Dagmar and to Gordon, Leigh, Craig and the guys at PC Inn

Contents
.NiK 4
Satori 5
Performance Poetry 7
Election Manifesto. 8
the Man who never shot Mugabe 9
To Wilfred Owen, 10
Gingindluvu....A vision at Easter 12
Some Moments from a Sheltered Courtyard 15
AM LIVE on Malperformance* 17
Captured from an Instant in Johannesburg Road. 18
Ex Jo'burg: South Central Gauteng 20
The Pity Fuck Theory of Marketing. 22
K's Reminiscence on an Absence of 23
On the Morning after Diane’s Birthday Feast. 25
On The Hill 26
Conversation with Diana: 27
Intimations of Alex’ * 29
If you see Buddha on the road, then kill him. 30
Deconstructions 33
February 1990: 33
The Extended Now: Playing Nietzsche. 36
The Last White Night: 38
Thoughts of Dylan Thomas 41
Not the Valentine’s Day Massacre 42
A Vision of Agincourt: 43
Notes of a Dreamcatcher 45
Khaboloading: Rwandan salads. 47
Chalkdown in Alex* 2000 48
All Tax is Theft 51
The twelve bar globalisation break down Stalinist blues song. 51
For one of our girls: murdered for her handbag. 55
Four Haikus 58
Meyersdal* 59
August 31, 1997. 60
From the Stonehaven collection. 61
Trappe.* 61
Stonehaven #3 62
A locked gate at Stonehaven. 63
Cobwebs 64
Scotch Carts* 65
Thoughts of a long dead Greek philosopher on 66
crossing a stream. 66
Flutterings 67
1991...The First Hours...Port St Johns 68
Transactions 70
The Fat Tailed Curve* 71
Some doggerel nonsense which may or may not 73
be on the subject of sex 73
Gravity 74
Roadkill 75
About the Poet 77

.NiK
is an Anglo Afrikan poet. He was born in the United Kingdom of Anglo-Welsh parentage in 1946, and migrated to South Africa with his parents in 1947. There he grew up in a gold mining town as a member of a despised, newly side-lined, Anglo-Celtic minority community, in a society controlled by fanatical, god-consumed zealots who sought out every opportunity possible to beat the hell out of everyone who wasn’t in their club, at any and every opportunity.

To give his life some kind of balance .NiK began giving poetry readings when he was four, continuing from then on. He grew up to the sound of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Euripides, Shakespeare, Owen Glendower and almost every other poet of significance. By seven he was roaring out Gilgamesh and Beowulf and at the age of fifty four, in 2000, he performed the work of Freidrich Nietzsche for that poets centenary, and as his own fiftieth anniversary performance as a performing and secular poet. He started to write down his own poetry in 1973.

He read political science and economics at the University of the Witwatersrand during the turbulent end of the sixties and later trained as a schoolteacher: then ‘dropped out’. He travelled in Europe, at first alone, then later with his wife, Diane, with whom he has also worked in various parts of Afrika, in a variety of occupations. Amongst these they spent some years working in the former Rhodesia where he was part owner of the Sundown Theatre Company, and where two of his three children were born. He returned to South Africa in the early eighties to generate family sustaining revenue via a variety of opportunities in the field of direct marketing, writing, selling, debt collecting, writing and, doing whatever else went with urban survival…

In the ‘Year of the Revolution’ in 1994, on a fateful 11th of September .NiK was ‘reborn’ in Afrika, when he survived an assault by armed murderers, killing at least one of his attackers, and wounding two others in a wild and frenzied close quarter gunfight. No reason for the attack was ever given.

The injuries he sustained though, changed his life; returned him to the classroom, as a substitute teacher in a variety of State high schools, teaching many subjects and experimenting with methods of accelerating awareness and insight amongst young humans.

Eventually, in about 1998, he was declared permanently redundant in the State sector, as part of a process that favours the appointment, to State teaching posts, of citizens who were, in pre-revolution days, disadvantaged by discriminatory hiring policies. He now teaches part time in the private sector; and writes full time, when he is not busy doing something else entirely: living in the only time we know…now. Editor.

Satori
‘Truth knocks upon the door
and you say
go away I am looking for
the truth.’
zen koan

I was an
old fragile man
it seemed to them then.
They were young
fragile men when
the business began
and I felt a gathering
of angels
swirling through the dust
of our berserk
denouement:
to fetch us
to our destiny,
amongst the anthills
of urban renewal?

There were we
and
those three, who
threw
their lead
at me; striving
through such
imprecation
to burn
their way to
the centre
of my station;
convinced I
should fall
to their
sanctified
call.

Unannounced.
They came;
unheralded they left,
the way stoned men
cry
for mitigation.

The circle closed
the loop was done:
sanitised
in blood:
bonded
to links of lead.

In the dark soul of that instant,
the moment of
karma,
at the place
of convergence,
where
I slipped into
no
ness
I slew one of them
then.

And he was not even my enemy,
was never
the one in the swirling mass
of our
ancestors
who have howled for
the bullets
of our darkest desires:

I have made life
and I
have taken it
away.
And yet do
I know
I am not
some deity
awaiting frantic offerings
upon the essence
of our darker rhetoric.

It is simply this:
I have killed
a man
and now
know the
passage of life;
breathed first
upon my arm,
and last as well.
.NiK(1995)

Performance Poetry
Sitting in the park
one blustery day
I noticed the distant
figure
of a man
jumping
from the roof
of a building.

At first I thought it
was a
leaf
tossed
by the wind,
then heard his
voice crying out;
a primal song of joy:
rapturous
to seek eternity.
.NiK(1993)

Election Manifesto.

It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.

No it's
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They've all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre................

.NiK(1980)
Publ...Sting Mag, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now Zimbabwe)
Banned by the British Interim Administration...1980:
A faceless flunky fellow told me it was “bad form”.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “ Lobster Quadrille.”
Some lines spoken by a long distance
shooter about:
the Man who never shot Mugabe

Doping the wind
Depends on the
Angles.
Like Pool you know
Or Billiards even.

When you play
Pool you have to think at once
Of angles;
Subjectively nominating
Places on the cushions:
Angles to strike
A glancing blow to fetch up at a given point
Over there at the right edge of some other target
Which heads off to the pocket.

Feel the wind.
Feel the wind inside your head.
Stand in the weather:
Stand in the weather.
Standintheweatherletthebullets
Flowaccordingtothewindripplinginsideyourhead.
Rippling through your last remaining years;
Swirling around the backstretch of your ears,
Rippling tangentially, across the back stretch of your ears.

Lining up the barrel
On a heap of reckless sandbags.
Lining up your energy,
Between your finger and the wind.

.NiK(00)
To Wilfred Owen,
On the death of
Fourteen civilians,
May,1976.
We saw your pity of war
Wilfred Owen
distilled in the mine
blasted corpse.

Where laughter had been
there was now only death;
the horror of love
on a quiet afternoon
torn apart for
no reason at all.

No dignity here;
no graceful repose:
an arm
or a leg
are all that return
a vague
personal form,
stamped by the arbitrary bomb.

This charred human meat;
remnants of life,
converted to something obscene.
A shadow of hate
links us with you,
and that implacable darkness,
born in the vile
savage
slaughtering
time.

Freedom, enriched
with a harvest of blood;
and maniac
slanderous metal,
tears the smile from the eyes
of a child who survives:
and grows
old
in a gurgle of tears....

.NiK(1976)
Publ. Maze...1978.
Gingindluvu....A vision at Easter
While rehearsing Marc AnthonyAcross the veld
the horsemen rode,
they rode behind the light.
they rode from far
to rendezvous,
and end a ceaseless fight.

Never trust the horsemen
howled the man
with the bones,
never trust their solemn
hymns of praise.

The horsemen come from far
he called
and lust to take the land.
Never trust the words
they call,
or scribble
with the hand.

All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling
as the daylight died.

Never meet the savage
warned the man
with the book,
Never trust the savage
warned the one
with the word.

But the feasting group
of horsemen sat bemused
beyond the fire;
they never heard the
intonation
heeded not
the warning:
never saw the shadow
in the flames..

And as they sat
and gorged themselves
the old temptations flew
the assegais were sharpened
and the battlelines formed true.

Then when the pounding
reached the top and
the whirling dancers flared:
lightning flashed
across the gap
the waiting vultures reared.

Never trust the savage
warned the one with the book
Never trust the horsemen
warned the ones with the bones,
never trust their solemn hymns
of praise.

Then the Man screamed out instructions
‘Bulala abathakathi!’
And then they looked,
and heard the warning:
called upon the word...

All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling as the daylight died..............

.NiK...(1978)
• Bulala abathakathi…kill the wizards. (zulu)
• Gingingdlovu. HQ of Dingaan, Zulu king who succeeded Shaka. Vision: refers to the murder of a Settler party in 1838, an event which has bedevilled race relations in South Africa right into the present day.
Some Moments from a Sheltered CourtyardInside a sheltered courtyard
We built a little house
With a window in the rafters
And very little else.

We must have been out somewhere then
Down near the ocean side;
And all the furniture walked down
Along a great steel slide.

Then all of us walked into town
Attending us, a dapper clown
Who sported, with some dashing glee
Two overcoats down to his knee.

And I was there with Deedle Don
My grey coat, and her bald crown.

While we walked across the square
Nibbling on some cold jugged Hare
We heard a happy singer's voice
Come wafting past an old Rolls Royce.

We noted same as Clem of old
And rushed across, ever bold
To an ageing red brick station house
Guarded well by a gnarled old Scouse.

But he refused to let us through
Unless we had a song to do
And though I pleaded, none I knew!
He was quite adamant, it's true.

So we sang the old `Nying Tong'*
A happy sound for all that throng
We played it on some borrowed hack
With three strings on, and one was slack.

By plucking loosely at that thing
We eventually all contrived to sing
A song of praise for dinner time,
And Auld Lang Syne.
.NiK(1983)* Nying Tong: song from the 1950’s BBC series ‘The Goon Show’.
Anal
y
sis
Left hand right hand
who’s concealing what
as we plan or is it dream about
a meeting we must hold to discuss
the new agenda for the subsequent and
intermediary meeting where all the topics
under discussion by all the multiplicity of stake
holders, celeryholders, relevant associates and all
our absent friends will also be contributing their contribu
tions to the next stage of the evolution of a modified agenda
about the final major workshop where we will address not too
much
at
all.
.NiK(00)
27/7/00
AM LIVE on Malperformance*
If you construct your
Worldview from a place
Within the confines of a
Conjecture then
Getting things done means
Sublimating a self, of which
You are in any event unaware
In an attempt to deal with the world
As it isn’t.

This work done by all the
Armies of “help uplift the helpless”
Specialists: whether Aid, AIDS or other
Community outreach activities which now
Proliferate become ultimately self serving by
Default of eternal recurrence. How to change this
Is the dilemma faced by the individual in society. The
Individual in a free society is free to live as it was or change
Only we ourselves
Can decide whether
We should change.
And then, change to what?
From where? And how do we keep moving.

To call for instant change
To habits which took generations to construct
Is as irrational as tossing grains
Of sand one by one into a leaky forty gallon drum
And then demanding to know ten
minutes later why the job is incomplete.

The job’s the thing. The pay is always
Incomplete; There is no such thing as
Enough
Money
And all these people who are
Organizing these myriad fruitlessly
Ineffective batteries of commissions,
Committees, stakeholders, revolver holders,
Card holders and general handholders have
Involved themselves precisely in order to solve
Their own personal employment problems
By inventing the ‘issue solving’ mechanism in the
First place. No rational person would seriously attempt
To truly ‘solve’ the problem being addressed so intimately.

.NiK(2000)
* The morning host for a popular radio news programme is
prone to tetchiness when self serving systemic flunkeys rationalise their
failure to deliver on political promises. Some days the failures pile up: he
forgets that his role is largely symbolic
Captured from an Instant in Johannesburg Road.People are in a hurry
to get home.
The sun breaks low,
smiling malevolently
through
scalloped banks
of clustered
clouds.

A flustery, flurry of busy
busy Mamas, flouncy
with enormous
puff sleeves
puff
slowly; stentorious,
up the hill
to Lyndhurst
and Alexandra View
bellowing beer
and happy day’s
cheer.

They pull
their overcoats
and baby battered
blanket shawls
closer
to
their skin and jeer
at a poor man
waltzing by.

Idiot man:
Eyes agape;
arms rolling
from emaciated nape to
ankle bone:
rolling gait
rolling tongue
happy man?
Happy mamas?
People in a hurry to get home.

.NiK(1997)
Ex Jo'burg: South Central Gauteng
Could I have ever loved you
gold mining town,
with your faceless grey concrete
piled up to the sky,
and that vile yellow dust
coating my eyes?

A frantic pin cushion
of sparkling hope,
marketing dreams
to children who grope
in the garbage
that never quite
seems to go
from your gold
shrouded pavements
and cold
narrow roads.

They're all poor
and forgotten
who wander the valleys
through mountains of brick
and the gutters are filled
with the mouldering
tricks
of the maddening, eternal
mr big.

You measure with gold
the value of man
and specify virtues he holds;
and when you have sapped
the juice from the brains
of the people
you're pretending
to serve,
you dispose of them all
down insanitary lanes;
then ram straws
in the marrows of youth.

An
alien place
in an island of hate
where lovers
love only today,
and strangers stand staring
about in despair
at your drab
filtered
neon lit
lair.

Sometimes,
for a moment
you lift
up your blinds,
to show envy
and greed in the dark;
where the man from the bush
from the conical hut
is as lost
as the sons of the park.

.NiK(1978)
Original Publ....Maze...1978. Now reworked
The Pity Fuck Theory of Marketing.
We recently used this approach
In an attempt to pitch ourselves
As a world class venue
For a grand fuck of a party:
The Soccer World Cup.

It is our turn, we said, we are
Entitled to have a fuck from the
Nutritious bone of international capital,
Which we otherwise
Despise but which on this occasion
Appears tolerable and is
In the form of a big soccer match.
We know about soccer and play it
And have soccer teams and
They would benefit
From the game with all the big guys
And it would be cool and inject jobs into our
Otherwise idealess employment
Strategy. Things would happen
And because we were treated so badly
For so long we
Would like you to
Let us have a fuck, for luck.

You know you have been exploiting us
For a long time; mining our resources: nourished
By our pain
We also need to have a turn;
A chance, to get
Us up and moving in the morning.

And in return for letting us
Hold this synthetically eroticaerobicexperience,
We will let you all
Come here and fuckforrealaswell;
With wall-to-wall-non-virtual-pussy-fucks-for-bucks-fucks-for-real-
Best fucks you’ll ever feel; of course a Deutsche Mark will buy you
Less fucks than a pound although
For the price of a sandwich
You can fuck to the ground
Dripping with juices and Henry the Fourth:
So slimming, you’ll never find better in hell.
So slimming you’d never be able to tell, when you’ve
Gone back, gone back, gone back North.

.NiK(2000)
* Refers to the original bid to host the World Cdup tournament that was held in Germany in 2006. The failed bid due to some strange machinations by a New Zealander member of th fifa voting committee aroused immense resentment. Notwithstanding the sentiments expressed in this poem the Cup has subsequently been awarded the 2010 games which we anticipate will be successful in promoting things we prefer to deny.
K's Reminiscence on an Absence of
Salutation upon Leave-taking.

It was a most amazing ride
Through fields of grass
In some old park;
over pitted marshland
cleared by a mower into
neat cut bales
and uncut clumps.

The sun was bursting down
in the sky
while I cycled on
haphazardly
in the solitary
quiet.

And while I wove
in that rutted track
I saw behind me
on the path
that I had rode
a lonely little figure
stark
against the gold
of fading day
small
against the world.

Then,
before
I reached the other side,
where the earth
was torn
and overturned:
I rode through miles
the mower missed!
Submerged
in towering banks
of yellow tinted stalks.
Blindly
following by instinct
where,
before,
I'd never walked.

Meeting
at last, where a path
crossed mine,
an old black man
who guided me
on a route
he thought would
go
my way.
And while we
spun
the silence
fell
as deep as all of time.
As though infinity
had held
her breath to watch
the colours, mime
their slow
inevitable change
to starlit
darkness
.NiK(1977)
From the play "K" written and performed by .NiK (1987)
Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts 1987

On the morning after Diane's birthday feast
Going over forty
going on and out
met some guy the other day
transmogrified beyond a doubt.

Wotcher mate I asked him
‘ow’d you get to ‘ere,
via some bank out somewhere else
cashiered for guzzling beer.

He stayed with some Sri Lankans
where Blondie sniffed blue death
and told about the bank card
with eyeballs dripping meth’.

Reached up to the counter
here I am again
furtive little gestures
go away in pain.

We really do not want you
crushing ice with glee
go back and cast your shadow
queue up to go free.

.NiK(1988)publ. Upstream 1989
On The Hill

Dry hot dust covered world,
fat, Baobab, littered world:
little, tattered scraps of earth,
where tufted roofs
point, picturesque.

Bricks surround an open fire
where black men sit
and eat charred meat,
where hands shade eyes
to watch our passing.
Heads nod reflectively;
shake,
at the strangeness of us:
murmuring voices comment,
judge?

And we sigh; not quite at home
in this strange place
where we are
the record
of events.

Three searchers come, proud
resentful;
one to suffer,
one to punish
one to hate.
A cycle of despair once started
never ending
perhaps to flash in bitterness
and greedily consume.

While down below the watchers wait, patient;
laughing.
Drums throb,
voices join with feet,
beer runs, roosters ruffle;
a quiet time is ending.

.NiK..(1973)
Pub. Two Tone. Dec 1975, Maze...1978.

Conversation with Diana:
from a classroom exercise in deconstructive poetry with forty seven grade eight girls on the morning that we all heard the news of the tragic death of ‘Lady Di’. Were you making love
then
happy again;
indiscreet in
the arms of a man you would meet
in the fast flowing flood
of eternity’s beat:
were you rocking to the rhythm
of Freddie’s
“Friends will be friends”
or was it Frankie’s “Strangers in the night”.

Your people now say
you were maligned; that
they didn’t treat you right.
They say
they’ll make amends,
call you, ‘…a
beacon of light’.

Better to be
alive in the sea,
said the Indian guide
to the ingenue,
than a bloated dead dolphin
adrift
on the shore.

We were always strangers
playing at the table,
then i was sent away,
vaporised
upon a cradle.
Given far too many kisses
and no hugs,
anymore.

Don’t ask me what the ‘sounds’ were
when i went to stay.
It could never have been Queen,
i did it ‘My way’.

.NiK(1997)

Intimations of Alex’ *
on a Warm Saturday Night.
We are standing in a
Video shop
Deciding on some
Or other
Diet of celluloid
Escapist violence.

While eight hundred metres
Down the road
Free, Gratis and verniet**
A war ekes out its pain
Real people
Killed
With real bombs
In real battles.

And we stand
In the video
Shop
And idly watch
The video news
Reel clips of the
Real violence
While we pay
For the
Simulation.

.NiK(1992)

*Alex’ (Alexandra): a residential area in south central Gauteng which was the scene of considerable violence during “the Struggle of the Dispossession” (1948-1994) when rival groups fought pitched battles in the so called ‘Beirut’ section.
** verniet…for nothing. (Afr)

If you see Buddha on the road, then kill him.
He was there
with a Lincoln Continental
waiting at the door
for the driver
to show up.

And He
said
that
the meek shall inherit the earth.
But that when the time
came
the meek
obstinately declined
and reached back into
the pain
of freedom's cage,
to pluck forth
the overwhelming
Daddy.

And so diminuendo,
to the Fathers of Nintendo
and the
Constitution's rolling on the
floor......

You cannot defect
He came and said to them
from an insight
you have taken to the show.
Nor can you with ease
un-see
what you have seen.

Searching 'round
inside yourself
for the innocence and
joy
remembering
some chances
strutting the toi, toi*

He said,
i dreamt i
met my father
hiding underneath
a leaf
asking
would i be
a sailor,
a tinker or a thief.

And i knew,
i would set out to
be
all of them,
all of them,
all of them.
i set out in thrall to them
before i came to grief.

We are impotent
he told me
in the face of this
collision
and i would rather
be in Teksas
than
Soweto.

Death he was
asserting
is a dirty
rotten trick
played by bureaucratic
mystics,
in Rayban
holographics
who say the meek can't
cherish freedom, nor a
Rastafarian chin;
they fear seeming somewhat
different,
vaccinated from their kin

So Armageddon’s coming
and we'll burn and burn
and burn; vanquished through
ineptitude
selling off our turn
for the
Lincoln Continental
and Buddha's walking with the driver
chanting;

So what diminuendo
to the Father's of Nintendo
and the Constitution's
rolling
on the floor.
NiK(1992)

Deconstructions
I am beginning to grasp
At the secular nature of
Consciousness .

Is this what I mean?
Or did the message alter from
The hand
Up
To the brain or
Even vice
Versa.
Did the paper change it
Or did the pen
Or did I
And
Why?
.NiK(00)

February 1990:

A report on breaking through the ceiling:
A praise prose poem for Nelson Mandela.

The world came
to watch a
spectacle;
a man who had
been locked away
for twenty-seven years
was to be released.
And the spokespeople
for the media
and the great,
came from afar to hear
the wisdom
which it was
believed
this old man
had gained
during his incarceration.

After waiting
uncertainly
for hours
in the hot February
glare;
He finally emerged
blinking
into the sunlight.
Was led to a podium
around which
a Hundred Thousand people
had gathered and
onwhichtheeyesofFiveHundredMillion
faces
werefocussedviatelevisionsetsina
hundred and eighty
countriesbeamedbyinstantsatellite.

With a great sense of Majesty
All awaited
his unique insights, which,
his publicists claimed,
andwhichallwhocamewould
have
themselves
believe he had gained
through years of
incarcerated
introspection

The great buzz
was that this man
had
through his
suffering
acquired unsullied
wisdom and would
unitethecountryandleadhisto
rmentorsandhispeople
toapromisedland:
freed
of all the pain borne
by the suffering
for millennia.

Slowly
he ascended the steps
and trod
with unaccustomed grace
toward
the podium.

A hush
fell
uponhalfaBillionhouseholds.
Fathers
shushed their children
andbeatthosewhospokewhilethegreat
Man
began to speak.

And the sound of wonder
amongst
the gathered dignitaries
and the watching multitudes
turned
to
consternation.

For he spoke yet
anancientanditwasbelievedarecently
discreditedlanguage
and none had thought
to expect
it.

And so they sat
in bewildered
and bemused
consideration
ofwhattheywerehearing
while
a
howlingmobofjubilantsupporters
soon turned their joy
to rapturous
violence
smashingallthewindowsonthesquare.

.NiK(1990) Publ. 1995. Bedford Yearbook

The Extended Now: Playing Nietzsche.

an admonition to my children

Nietzsche’s conjectures are
Like the objects of his
Conjectures
No more than
Conjectures albeit even a two
Percent
Conjecture.
This position is absolute; even a point
Nought to the power of n
Does not turn the conjecture into a
Relative conjecture.

His position is that the probability
That “God” is not a conjecture
Is so remote
That the total focus
Of the individual
Must be on the Now (perhaps)
In preparation for the
Extended Now
Which is to come (and perhaps not).

There is no such place
As ‘the future’ when we shall
Do something:
Only
The conjecture of
Eternal recurrence
With changing images and backdrops.

The purpose must be
To get more
“Bang for the bounce” out of each passing second
Anticipating only in the sense of
Expectation.
At the same time knowing
Only that we live now:
That we/you/i have created a personal
Destiny and yours is one
Only you
Can fulfil.
You cannot live in anyone else.

And so it’s one step two step three step
Four, five step six step another step more.
.NiK(00)

The Last White Night:27 April 1994*
an eerie calm
came over
the country
when
thenationlinedup
at
the
check out
counter
the day
we
all
went to vote

and a few bombs
went
off
here and there

a few people
died
here
and there

and old men
and
women
who had
waited
all
their
livesforthismoment
stood
for hours
inthesun
until their crosses
werecharredandblistered

then as the
dawn
broke
on the last white night
those who
were
liberated
felttheirchains
fallaway

while those
who
werefreed
smelttheairforthefirsttime

and cried! Peace on Earth...!

for
a
time
the guns
fell silent

in counterpoint
the blasting
thumping
thunder
of
the bombs
flaredthen
rolled
elliptically
across some new
horizon.

andthosewhocould
watchedit
ontelevision
until their eyeballs
glazed over
while those who
listened
went deaf
with the news
that the day
which everyone
hadanticipatedforcenturies
hadfinallyarrived.

and we awoke to the
smell
of freedom
andanotherworkingday
.NiK (1994)

*Refers to South Africa’s first fully democratic elections which
brought to an end three centuries of rule by ‘elitist’ racially based
oligarchies.

2/6/00
Thoughts of Dylan Thomas
On rolling west through the Gauteng Lake District
On the R22 highway

Fire roaring on dry
winterveld illuminates
smoke
stacks
of cloud rolling dark across a backdrop
formed by the setting sun
a distant horizon
flames roared angrily
as we travellers all passed them by
flaring suddenly at us they erupted
from the sunlight’s shadow
lit the darkness in the empty
rear view mirror etched out on distant pylons
which windroared as flames beat against the metal
uprights whipping the wires heating up the messages which knew
little of the world
through which they passed.

i am disturbed by the images i see in those flames
bursting at the edges of the highway
seeking greedy satisfaction from my perhaps immanent collision with a
thirsty thirty six wheeler bearing rapidly on me: hurtling then past
rampaging past: sucked into the smoke and the dying of the light.
.NiK(00)

Not the Valentine’s Day Massacre

I bought a Valentine
from ‘Bambi”
at the Bambi Café
and I told him
I’d seen a rainbow
slashing to the east.

He said he’d always loved rainbows
since the time he’d been a kid
and he hoped he’d never be
the pot, nor the fatted beast.

We laughed; he handed me
the Weekly Mail which
he would always
keep for me
just like the guy before
had always done.

Then later when the rain
began again
and while the shop
was filled
with people
some hunters came and shot him:
took away
the paltry contents
of his till.
.NiK(Feb’96)

A Vision of Agincourt:
while standing in a clearing
at the edge of a desperate rain forest."Ouderhoud!" *
An ancient, fragmented bow:
Mildewed,
Lies in a glorious grassy
Glade;
The centre stage
To a symphony
Of serried ranks;
Soft in the evening light.

Last day sun
Glazes
The gentle, mist
Layered amphitheatre
Where Thuja Plicata's
Feathered
Snow-flaked arms
Play "Gods" to the troops
In the gullet
Valley.

Pinus Roxburgh, ex Himalayas
Pinus Pseudostrobus
Pinus Radiata
Thrusting interjacent
For the fulcrum
Bulkhead.

To the left ridge
Flanking cavalry:
Pinus "Variegatus"
Comprising
Pinus Oocarpa, Sentraal Amerika,
Stark, aquiline;
Consummate, hard scaled with
Jagged spikes
For thrust and joust.

While next to him
His cousin Patular,
Leering
Mocking
Bowing from the waist upon
An outstretched strengthened stirrup.

Behind?
Gathered throngs
Of Archers;
Acacia Melanoxilon,
Orchestrating occupation of
The last remaining ridge

Then bank on bank
On further banks
Behind
Till that far reaching
Point.

While here in lonely opposition
from the last
beleaguered crest
a vagrant
mercenary
from up Messina way:
some bold Machado.

At its back
huddled down below
amidst the moss
and bracken-fern,
a shrouded hospice:
an ancient sanctuary......
.NiK(1989)

1/6/00
Notes off a Dreamcatcher
We were on a journey
It seemed to me
With someone who may have
been a friend to me.

Our journey was over open
Country interspersed with low hills
Dotted like anthills
Over a flat expense of ground.

My companion told me the place
was called Canader and he told
me a tale
about how, the original discoverer of the place:
himself,
had sent off the necessary documentation
to a registry office somewhere and a bureaucrat
in that place had assumed bad spelling and
changed the name to the more familiar form
and that this accounted
for the fact
that the place remained unknown.
It was, he said, one of the great issues
In the public affairs of the country.

As we passed through Canader seemed a place of rolling
Hillsides as the anthills grew more numerous
And there were many clean rivers
And bright clear skies: all generally inaccessible
Through glacier-like passes.

We came at last again to level country
Where we were attacked by a pack
Of wolf-sized lions who at first
It seemed wanted to play with and then later
To eat us.

I winded one when it sprang at me and
I rolled back onto the ground
And threw the creature via a
Perfectly executed
Backward overhead kick which
Ripped my shins
Apart
When I caught it on the chest
To fling off over my head.

They then ran away but afterwards
Continued to hang about
Believing we would ultimately
Weaken: while we were concerned
That they would be revealed to hunters
And be killed….

.NiK(00)

Khaboloading: Rwandan salads.

A grudge is not held,
it was said,
against
a dead person.
Nor can the dead,
forgive
the living.
It was further said,
that success
could distort pleasure.
This was said,
from the darkest time,
that, the goal betrays the purpose
That both weave
holograph
illusions
weft to smoke
and mirror-back pretensions
of what is
there, and
what
never was.
So follow the stars and follow the cash
find out who’s eating who.
Find out;
who is dressed
with feet.
.NiK(1998)from: The Ashanti Raider: aka The Girl in the Golden Kushĕshĕ.
from the notebook of Kermit Sing
a story by NiK.(1997..2000.)

Chalkdown in Alex* 2000
Any learning that emanates from
space perception
derives from operations we have performed in
the past:
Thus began a curious incident.

I drove into Wynberg, light industrial city
in pursuit
of mouldings, ultraboard
and gas
against the freezing
aftermath of
all that earlier
rain.

It was already late afternoon
not a moment too
soon before closing up time
for the day.

Space circumscribed, best response? Take a gap
at the mouth of a short piece of roadway joining
the Old Pretoria Road
to Carey Str next to Sandton Auto
and opposite one of the main
entrances to Alex’: the so called ‘Soul City’.

At this incongruous juncture
a wandering group of excited senior
schoolchildren
walked in the centre of the
road, uncaringly away from me:
bags on uniformed backs.

They blocked my passage
and it was late
and I had much to do
before returning to my gate.
Haste dictated that I hoot at them,
move them from the roadway
before they were run down.

Then I felt
A coruscating prickle
of electrons, shifting gears
defensive
down the centre of my neck:
sensing wipe-out
on the surf board of my universe.

So I changed gear, threaded
myself
inn
ocu
ously
into their momentum
felt them
gradually
in
sin
uate
themselves apart from me.
Moving with such subtlety
that they seemed unaware of me.
I sensed some issue;
saw from the corner of my eye
as I went by:
gesticulation, faces torn
by distorting, frantic emotions,
which seemed so general
amongst the nine or so of them,
that it seemed beyond some
particular romantic disinclination.

I was aware of their exuberance;
an adrenaline high, that familiar catharsis,
in excitation: engrossed
they never noticed
me.

When I reached home again later
I heard on the radio
how the schoolchildren of Alex’
rioted during the day…again…against
in
justice then…against injustice now.

It seems they argued with those who once
called on them to riot in the name of freedom that
the Revolution was being ripped off;
and murder was unrequited:
so they burned houses, and cars, and the police
shot one schoolchild dead
and wounded
seventeen more.
.NiK(00)
30/5/00• Alex: suburb on the former northeastern edges of the old city: noted for its assertive activism.

All Tax is Theft
A response to a strident call from a stakhanovite style apparatchik for ‘poems about the economy ‘ made in the context of confiscatory “take it all back” tax proposals:
Alternatively :

The twelve bar globalisation break down Stalinist blues song. 29500

Tax, history, computers, investors
and the concept of delete consciousness:
the issues of today.

The world of today is the world of
Delete consciousness,
Nay!
I never heard of that.

Those who live today
Are not the same as those
People who lived here yesterday!
The people of today have deleted
The people
Of yesterday
From their consciousness, in order to cope
With today

To demand of the world of today that it should pay for the
Deeds of yesterday
Is an idea which can only
Begin to work if people decide to love
A Demander today.
It is no longer enough to be loved
Then
It has to be now.

On the Dow. The product must have
Credibility,
And unspeakably sharp and acute
Marketing methods to get good attention
That attracts velvet paws
And a favourable mention.
Ok.

The idea of taxing anyone
Especially
As a form of reparation
Is a demand,
Which must be analysed
In the context of what happened to
Other similar taxes in the growing of the nation:
The general state of the tax inflation
Process,
The treatment of corrupt tax thieving officials
Caught, as it were, during recess:
Generally what the
Taxpayer gets after the promises have been
Deducted from the bill;
Instead of “fuck you, stand back,
I haven’t emptied the till”.

Securing invested money: that is
Securing other people’s money, honey
Extends through risk evaluation
To the limits of gradation, mixed
To bland computerised credulity
Impacts upon the premium
We have to pay
For nice clean offshore money:
Instead of dirty honey, hey, where
The anti collective collectors
Karry Kalashnikovs and K….

All Tax is Theft. Especially those bereft and
Confiscatory deductions
Like capital gains disruptions
Which are scary to all those marys
Who seriously dispose with
“Other people’s” woes, by handling their cash
To demo’ overwhelming dash:
At the same time, with great care ,
Beneath an open stare.

Investors are owners of money.
They are not politicians or something
Else funny.
It may be in doubt they are human at all;
Concepts wired up
With a screen for a wall to show memory:
Spewing out models of risk
And uncertainty.
Measuring the loot of the world’s
Aging billions:
Cash that adds up to hundreds of trillions.
What you did last month doesn’t matter a jot
It’s what happening now that counts for the lot.

When a butterfly tumbles
And performs in Peru
The red card is flagged from computer to you. The
Risk model says the risk
Factors have altered:
That risk you took last week has now
Gone and faltered.
So follow instructions: delete from the programme
That order we called
And that hold put on Put.
The rate must go up
Or the cash go on out.

Perceived expectations: perceived quantum
Risk
Modified market uncertainties
Frisk
Down our hopes
Batters our fears
Causes the money to stop
And change gears.

Perennial problems perplex perceived risk.
Confusion of outcomes presents the most risk
To one who man’s mountains of money: to plan and to
Do and to follow things through to
The end:
Which should always be happy.

Should this Hollywood twitch
Suffer a glitch…should heaven transform into hell
When success equals misery,
Inconsolable outrage,
Mixed in with
Anger
As
Well.
Then confusion will reign
The markets feel pain
And the cash is away before
losseswillclaimallthegain.

In other words: In the world of money
Something is done; which is not at all funny:
A result is achieved, expected or not.
There are no relative gains
For corporate aims,
But returns, as predicted.
If results are in doubt,
Then someone with clout
Changes course,
Before loss is addictive.

When bosses complain, cash workers feel pain
And the outcome is bad for the homeowner’s loan and the girl
Who was Jill becomes Jane.

Alt.F1 delete part one: next transaction please.

.NiK(2000)

For one of our girls: murdered for her handbag.

It was a cold day
to put a child in the ground;
the sky wept and you
swept,
wet, wild, windswept,
raging, through
the icy, midsummer morning
so that the heavens,
mourned
with us:
remembering perhaps, that time,
when we all lay down
and studied Scorpio.

We counted out the stars
that
formed the tail
and talked about
the pictures in the sky.
We talked about the archer, Sagittarius,
checked out the flying star
it somewhere learned to shoot:
we wondered at the marvel,
of that Comet,
that Bopped out after Haley,
trailing out a
solar
vapour
route.

Then we talked about the
Universe
and all
our trifling
bankruptcies,
Talked about the
meanings
in the stars.
Awed, by the auld milky way;
untroubled, by remorse,
or whether there is an answer
to the shuffling and the snuffling and that time
when paradise is lost.

Now
we have passed
that vantage point
behind the etched
out
cross,
depicting the
reflection
of your
own
steadfast
intention.
To follow through the route you called, ‘your way’.

The ‘flower girl’
walks
all night
towards her mother’s grave,
reaffirmed,
as some one
we had lost, along the way.

Sing a song of paradise
within our bloody wounds
sing a song of paradise, with me.

Farewell to the winds,
which bring premeditation,
farewell, to the winds of all.

Sing a song of paradise
within your bloody triumph.
Sing a song of paradise with me.

We settled first, then stood,
and
waited
for the bell.
Settled first, then waited for the summons:
crucified
against a
deep,
sad silence,
we
repaired
our faith, and
sang a song of paradise, with you.

.NiK(1998) R.I.P. Shannon Leigh Whittall.
14-7-1981 - 28-11-1998.

Four Haikus

Anger is depression with
Out enthusiasm
Highly illogical: spring buds burst.

Father vacuums grey
Hair following spring cut
Years melt like blossoms.

Red flower burs
ts from naked bra
nch: fillagrees of coral.

Ripping out ingrown
Toenail on warm Saturday
Night: old blood runs cold.

.NiK(00)

Meyersdal*

Sanitised
Romanticised
Democratised
Suburbanised.

Your nightmares are real,
The bars made of steel.
The roads are not paved with gold.

You drive down some street,
Where the people you meet
Do not watch each other grow old.

Now you live in an age
Where you hide in your cage
Play the game of suburbanite life.

Flaunting and skulking and lurking in there
Dreaming out fantasies you’d love to dare
Paranoid, bored, class-ossified, wife.

You’re not rich, you’re not poor
Your debts line the floor
You’re so scared you are barely alive

Begetting tax avoiding perks,
To dull the pain which always lurks,
In the lawn and the ritual burning meat.

You take a course of rough brick,
And some occasional trick
Turned with glass and the hot plate on heat

To match the sound of your fate.
The latch on your gate.
The jungle outside your front door…

.NiK ( circa.1992)
* Meyersdal is an upmarket suburb.

August 31, 1997.
I am sitting in space myself
at the moment
thinking that you’re
not here
and it’s Friday afternoon.

I’ve worked all month
and have no beer,
no vodka, sherry, gin
or anything.

I do find coffee
and guzzling that,
thought this.

.NiK(1997)

From the Stonehaven collection.

Trappe.*

Up behind me,
in a splendid, secret gorge
tucked up between a krans or two,
frothing,
ice sparkling manna
rushes down
a time worn path
tumbling along at last
quite uproariously
across the final trappe
to find
its well grooved route.

Some to end in stagnant pools
much
to race with rippling joy
across the open
flood plain:
rushing off to see the world:
coruscating drops.

.NiK(1996) * Trappe: Afr: steps

Stonehaven #3
Remembering
how the silence hung,
tremulously,
between distant chirruping,
and cawing;
the flapping of a sudden
flurried
wing,
and the ripened innuendo
humming from a swarm of bees,
tending to their nectar.

Faraway,
that crashing roar
of gentle water, foaming
for a brief and frenzied
moment,
drowns out all sound.

I’ll brave the bees
and move on,
slowly, down an avenue
of motley trees
each one , I’m told,
to mark the passing of a promise:
each one a metaphor
for those who passed here
once.

.NiK(1996)

A locked gate at Stonehaven.

A bull blocks my way;
he is on the other side
of a farm gate
and he glares at me
ferociously;
lowers his head
folds an ear
to the largest gap
in the wired barrier.

When I come too
close,
he breaks away, snorts
gives a grunt
circles, tosses head
rubs his horns
against a stump.

Then he chews awhile
on juicy
clumps of lawn
while half-a-dozen calves
of variable vintages
approach
to see what I will do.

Soon I’ve gathered such
a crowd
as others came to watch
expectantly.

Then father, feels the turf,
scrapes a fetlock,
moves up
behind
a youngish calf,
and snorts an intemperate command
into its ear.
They all break away
leaving but two younger bulls
to bar my way:
and of course,
Big bad dad.
.NiK(1996)

Cobwebs
The back -end of the lawn
is dotted
here and there
with glistening cobwebs.

Fine, crennelated wisps
of spittle
sparkle
in the early sun.

Some murky creature
lurks inside an aperture
hollowed
at the centre.

It peers out at me,
looming
from its
gently ruffled canopy.

.NiK (1996)

Scotch Carts*

How many poems,
I wonder,
have been written about
Scotch carts
pulled
by spans of donkeys.

In this case
there is
no cart;
only a troop
of foolish asses
poised
to draw…nothing.

Ears pointed
perpendicular
to their heads in
alert proximity.

An attendee
sneezes
voraciously,
shakes his head,
and walks away.

Two further donkeys
stand to
disorder;
In a field, beyond a gate
and watch him:
are startled for a moment
as another attendee,
runs purposefully
by;
reaches the gate
and leaves them, again,
waiting:
patiently.

.NiK(1996)
*Scotch Cart: Two wheeled cart drawn by donkeys:
ubiquitous to Africa

Thoughts of a long dead Greek philosopher on
crossing a stream.I step into the water
and
the
stream
slips
through
me

Its unfragmented melody
ripples
as it runs around
a bend
between some
dark
dank
copse of Wattles.

I walked on through
and
left
no
footprint even
once
in that
crystal
place.

.NiK(1996)

Flutterings
A butterfly,
seeming black,
with red markings
flutters to a roadside
rock as I approach, then
as I walk closer it floats above
my path, across a stretch of grass
filled gully to a low lying krans, and a
bigger
rock.

.NiK(1996)

Thus endeth the Stonehaven poems which are dedicated to the American poet, Robert Frost.

1991...The First Hours...Port St Johns
A school of Porpoise
cruise off
Second beach.
We saw them
yesterday
from Sugarloaf.

Two dozen
more
swam offshore
elegant
in unison.

Then
standing high upon
a bank
we saw them
all
again
metaphors for
peace
and sanctity
heralds to
the point
beyond the bay.

While down below us
on the beach
secure in Lemming
fantasy,
stream multitudes of
revellers
to purge out
obsolescences.

Shouting words of joy
at the dawning
of the year; they cast
beyond
the breakers,
beyond
the white frothblasted
waves;
streaming out
until the scene
was black
with bobbing heads
'til
when,they fell,
exhausted,
cleansed,
onto the sand.

Then
(as in parenthesis)
a girl;
sandsplay running
herald
companions at her heels
disordered,
and dishevelled;
quite unlike stately Porpoises:
nonetheless
in unison
as in an ancient chorus
they cried out...

Haaaaappy...!
Haaappy…. !

.NiK (1991)

Transactions
He told me the cost
and how much back
on the empties
I worked it out
in my head
slotting the figures
neatly together
he calculates with care
on his hand.

One twenty eight
the tally read
and eighty back
on the bottles.
The very same answer
he called back
quite soft.

We're accurate hey!
in a bluff hearty way.
Yes, came the answer
then, added in softness,
unless of course
we're both wrong

.NiK (circa 1970.s)Publ: Two Tone (circa 1980)

The Fat Tailed Curve*
On reading the London ‘Economist’.

The thing had a memory
Of the past, he said,
Speaking of the Nile.
He called it the ‘Hurst Exponent’:
The probability that one event
Would be followed by another
Similar event; and then to
Explore this route, how often
And at what interval in time can
We learn to arbitrage
Our opportunities.

The ever present rules
Of the bureaucrat’s procedures,
Demonstrated how some
Favoured theories were overturned;
Trendy concepts
(Like capital asset ratios)
Were all invalidated, or at
Worst called into
Question since those insights were a perv’
Dependent on a standard deviation
From a norm
Now we simply cannot form
A valid construct
From a leptokurtotic curve*.

Then there was that notion
That the
River could remember and
If the river could
Then so could something else
Like a stock market curve or the idea
That order
And randomness
Can co-exist in a place
Of Zen-no-ness.

And the truth: that herds follow
Fashion was hence validated
And we all knew that,
Before it was proved, provided
We knew it all before we saw
The time horizon,
Lyapunov’s* point
Where we could forget entirely.

.NiK(2000)
*The Fat Tailed Curve & Hurst Exponent:
Statistical evaluation instruments for measuring
probabilities. H.E.Hurst.
**Leptokurtotic: “The more Leptokurtotic a curve is, the more
misleading the notion of a standard deviation….”
Economist Oct 9, 1993
.***Lyapunov Time Horizon (LTH). Like the ripples on a pool which
eventually merge with the surrounding water the LTH
measures the point where risidual memory evaporates.

Some doggerel nonsense which may or may not
be on the subject of sex
We had a most eventful day
In a Warwick* flown out for a play,
Which She did fly with great aplomb
And later landed, like a bomb
On a jetty spewed with clouds of dust
And thick red soil that smelled of rust.

Some lads came by to bawl us out,
From a yacht they’d hired to fish for trout
Which we’d disturbed by flying so low
That now they’d gone all gills aglow.

They asked us why we flew the thing
I shrugged and spoke of some old sting
When the Warwick flew with a different crew
Earlier on, before we knew
About some age old Venda Gold
Which the ancients ate to stop the mould
Of dust to dust: carefully rolled.

And then we heard of things banal
On that yacht they’d parked in some canal
(A deal they’d pulled in old J’town);
When one remembered with a frown
The Venda Gold, a plot too bold.

When we left we said we must
Arrest that mould of dust to dust.
We took off from a ragged cliff,
With paper bags to give us lift;
While the sailor’s moll and all her kin
Pushed us ‘till we came right in
To a void: clear bright open spin.

“Till then She soared aloft at last
Above a highway, flying past
A place we came to land at length;
A place we’d seen before the tenth
Remaining time torn obelisk
Where the treasure lay, all wreathed in mist.

.NiK(circa 1982)*Warwick: Air sea rescue aircraft, WW2

Gravity

If an Avalanche is
Crashing
Down a mountainside
Shall we believe
That the atomised snowflakes are engaged in
A tacit
Conspiracy to crash
Through
Their destination
Or would
It be rational to conclude
The destination to be
Inevitable: a result of
Critical mass.

.NiK(00)

30/5/00
Roadkill

Driving without brakes
On a highway
In heavy morning traffic
Is a sublime exercise in
Stress management, espec
Ially when the
Journey
Started
With “all systems go”.

The class awaits, kids don’t
Go on hold; they cannot
Be filed or even
Postponed.
Being ‘all systems go’
Means the glass in the class
May be honed,
Humans may be broken or
Roughly deboned.

I would have to fill out a form
Accounting for a lapse in fiduciary
Responsibility
And
There
Are
Few
Exercises on earththataremorestress
Fullthanfillingoutforms:
More stressfull even than
Driving a ’78 Volksie Beetle
In the fast lane
With no brakes
At
All
Downacrowdedhighway
Intherushhour.

I shifted left;
Shouted at the traffic
Which parted, unaccountably;
And found a comfort
Zone
In the emergency lane:
Slowed down, thought of home,
Whether I should phone.

I worked out how much
Actual
Play
There was between my foot
and my brain
and wondered if that most
bodacious gearbox
would still rise up
to take the
strain
of
crashing , double de-clutch
down
to
first…..whether I should
take some
alternate route
viasomedeviationlesslikelytobefullofcars

There was one.

And then
there was still time
for half a cup of
coffee
before
class.

.NiK(2000)
About the Poet
On rare occasions I leave town and go into the country, or around the country and the only reason that I go there is because someone asked me to, or else pays me to do it. I am an urban poet: I imbibe the spirit of Thoreau not his milieu.

My wife, Diane, describes me as a man who lives obsessively under a pile of words which scatter all about like autumn leaves. Beyond that she is non committal. My youngest daughter says I am kind, loving, huggable and mad. My eldest children have left home. They still email me now and again, which I take to be good news.

I can only agree with Nietzsche that the past is a dead hand upon the present.

I am what I am because that is what I have chosen to be, whether I realised it or not and whether the synchronicities that have teased me to this place are only obvious in hindsight and probably not obvious at all. I am here as the compounded consequence of all the millions of decisions (and indecisions…Thomas) taken by me and others across a lifetime, and for which I have no explanation. I am no longer even remotely certain whether cause predates effect or vice versa.

Basically as long as all my most important people are ok and there is food in the fridge when I want it, life is cool.

Nicholas.

Other work by .Nicholas Williamson.

The Buffalo Hunters …Cyberstories: Allegoric crime fiction prose poetry:
The Ashanti Raider…Cyberstory: Allegoric crime fiction prosepoetry:
Rehearsing Nietzsche…. Poetry based on a year of playing Nietzsche
7 Ways to get your money… Survival handbook for debt colleting… a novel under pseudonym Nicholas Jakari : now retitled: Tales of a tickey line trader