Author Archives: nicholas

About nicholas

I was recently invented by my owner and hired to write and read this tale of intrigue and adventure in a place beyond imagination.

Race Free writing

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“Set this silence free
To wash away the
Worst of me.”


In my Remains:… [off] Living Things. Linkin Park


To wash away silence is a theme of our times.


Some of you reading this may have come from my new site on Facebook


On this Facebook site for Nicholas Jakari you find examples promoted on Amazon of what I have decided to call: “Race free” writing.


As we get to know each other I may, on request, choose to explain all the motivations… they are set out over many years in many blogs; and observations on trends, in our fast changing world that nonetheless stays the same no matter what.


So here we shall deal with what, in the country where I live, is a serious threat to the long-term growth and prosperity of the region… Racial Antagonism… Ironic; given that the point of liberation was to defuse it… Albeit, understandably, slowly.


I am a poet first and foremost. Nicholas Jakari’s page is devoted to his work, and what it has to do with you. I have promoted many things in a long lifetime of working at staying alive. There are only a few poets who have ever become profitable I am told… I should like to be another. So I am presenting a different form of poetry to that in which, I was trained from the age of four.


In the interests of full disclosure: At age fifteen I started carrying a notebook and taking notes on thoughts things n whatever was an object/subject of curiosity in ‘the moment’.


You can understand that, living, as we did, in a vicious and deeply abusive police State, a poet making random observations about his surroundings and internal responses to them, in little notebooks tucked into a back pocket… soon lost whatever friends were around. And it saw me: ‘detained’, occasionally. I was “Notebook NiK” ; and when I appeared, people scattered: that dreadful evil man who “Kolekted” their words and occasional sayings was around… go now, scurry rush hide and hush.


This means that I have been routinely advised that my greatest weakness to be overcome, is difficulty networking with other humans… Strength on the other hand is networking with words.


So I am doing something I find difficult: inviting rejection by inviting you to be my friend on this journey I am taking… on an infinitely winding road… to a place where universal basic income has become the way most people earn their living via ‘rental’ levies on DATA following the acceptance that a byte of DATA should have a nominal value related to either a Firmian cent [aka the united states of Firmia… a place run by Firms] or an ounce of gold: whichever ruled at the time… And all currencies had become crypto, managed through inviolate blockchains.


Further disclosure … I did say full didn’t i?


Twenty four years ago this September the eleventh, [my September 11: before yours] I was presented abruptly with the need to widen my range as a writer.


I was going to be in a wheelchair within fifteen years, I was told. “A bullet in your spine will change your life.” They said. Via daily practice of Taiji Chuan, that has so far been avoided.


My personal style arose when I asked myself the question how do I, a person who is deeply traumatized and with life shattered; through a random act of irrational violence: that left three [ultimately] dead and me full of holes. How do I write a violent story, involving literally copious brutal murders; a story set in a place rooted in racial antagonism, without inflaming an inherent time bomb waiting for a lit fuse: because the story had the potential and I have the skill to do that.


That was though, not something I wanted, certainly few people I knew, wanted the reality of that horror.


So I decided as a poet that I would remove all reference to or even symbols associated with two specific words [the one that describes the colour of these words, and the one that describes the background colour] and write the story without ever identifying the race of any of the characters almost none of whom are in any real way: “Nice Guys”. In other words I chose as a poet to write in archetypes rather than stereotypes.


So I took, firstly, JM Coetzee’s “Barbarians….” as a model; linked it to Mandela’s [alleged] position [a la 1994]; when he spoke of a “place beyond race”.


Then I dekonstrukted… what I had; and then rekonstrukted and rekonstrukted again … the outcome.


I asked questions about my reader, in a technologically fast evolving world and had a surprising answer. An answer that in one case completely changed my understanding of everything I read.


Then i wrote and published the first post-liberation South Afrikan [then] Mzansian [now] ‘Skiet skop n verspoeg’ [my local phrase for what was once called “blood n guts”], race free, allegoric prose poetic novel: “The Buffalo Hunters”.


I rudely self-published the Buffalo Hunters two years after the Revolution in our country; in celebration of a brief [maybe] period of liberty. [I certainly would never have been allowed to publish the story before liberation]. And there are many who are enraged, I am led to believe, that I wrote it at all… without any form of standard, centuries old, racial bias… based on the silence that is now to be released.


My hypothesis is that there is good and bad in varying amounts in every human [pretty well]. What happens when a whole lot of different variations of ‘bads’, somehow, inadvertently, cross paths with each other at critical moments: that end in violence: bad goods and good bads coalesce?


At the start I had to ask the crucial question.


Could I use the methods of poetry to model a violent, sexually graphic story [we were at the time in an immediate post-revolution period] in which I make it as nearly impossible as I can make it, to identify the ethnicity of a player; and still have a definitive character that could engage you my reader… whom I do not know.


They would all simply be metaphors for people engaged in a series of violent things. Metaphors, or even archetypes’; with which you, my reader could bond freely; and engage as an extended ‘you’: should you wish to enter my imaginary world.


Could I in other words go to “a place beyond race”… and focus exclusively on the horror it has so brutally represented; rather that write something that facilitates the rage that we repress. Rather show that antipathy, like love: is not the exclusive domain of some among many?


And then if I could do that then would I have set up a new fashion… AND therein lies the silence.


So take a chance, get the eBook and tell me if I was wrong. Tell me whether a story that I described as the most violent sexually graphic tale ever published legally in my country is worth a few bob. [In reality this eBook is cheaper today than the the copies off the print run I did 22 years ago.] or: is even worth all the inconvenience of writing like that.


Read them and tell me if I’m right or wrong.


The Buffalo Hunters, is a violent sexually graphic crime story about what happens when a gang of Buffalo Hunters [a euphemism for vehicle hijackers … a fashionable activity almost invented in my neighborhood.] have to go on the run themselves, when they accidentally Jackroll the daughter of a local warlord.


Should you be a fan of violent, sexually graphic stories that, curiously, many readers have also found to be bizarrely funny… this will be the read of the year.


On the other hand should you be someone who desires simpler pleasures… like: Getting you own way in things, then: 7 Ways… is made for you… and is inherently non-violent… It has been found by many readers over the past eleven years to be most useful at achieving that purpose… getting your own way in things: as well as getting the money that is righteously yours: should that be your requiirement.


Enjoy until next time.
And don’t forget to let me know what you declare the verdict to be…


Let us jointly break the silence.

The voice in the dream

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The voice in the dream?

Probabilities interest me. Who, or what, for instance, is the voice in the dream?


Is it realization? That something previously unkonsidered, becomes abruptly manifest.


Or


The deeper voice we contain within us that reaches down… down and taps into that universal consciousness that fills the infinite emptiness of all things.


Yet we are here
Or seem to be here
And are, presumably, somewhere
Albeit that could be nowhere.


What is the message in unrelated matters that collide: creating what we call coincidence.


This morning while sifting through some of my late mother’s effects I came across an envelope addressed to a late uncle. Presumably it should have gone from mother to her adoptive ‘brother’ who died presumably before she could post it, [old days remember: posting things?] and so she filed it.


It contained a signed copy of the Manuscript edition of my first novel: The Buffalo Hunters that I published in 1996. Ironically I re-published the story in a digital edition form on Amazon seven days after she died. When I opened the book the phrase with which I began this blog leapt at me. “Probabilities interest me,” I wrote at the start of the preface to the edition. I had forgotten that I had done that.


The sorts of things we experience, as coincidences, are matters that test our understanding of what we konsider to be reality… or do our realities differ?
Mostly these coincidences are random and fleeting. They strike us for the moment and are soon forgotten.


Sometimes however they stretch our credulity. Further on I shall test yours with a tale of mine that stretches all credulity.


For instance: “on an occasion,” I wrote in the Preface, “I meet and am introduced to an attractive woman in a bar. It is an icy winter’s night and she ‘borrows’ my scarf as we leave the pub. Then she takes it and goes away. Months later, in another crowded bar, in a street full of bars, in another country, SHE walks in and as she passes me, I reach over and remove the scarf… “Thank you for bringing it.” I said, she moved on. We never spoke again.


This is a simple coincidence and has its own range of dramatic possibilities. But ultimately it is the sort of coincidence we forget.


Sometimes however random events can synchronize and create coincidences, which have the illusion of plot… and routinely lie at the heart of a host of conspiracy theories.


For instance: In a blog on the topic a few years ago [The ultimate Murphy] http://nicholasjakari.com/tag/sudden-death-syndrome/ I speculated on an alternate reason for a terrible airliner crash, than the one being toted at the time in the media… a simple concatenation of random events coinciding in horror.


But what if coincidences occur that move us beyond credulity. For instance, I am involved in my first car accident, as a youth, which leaves me, as an adult, with an inaccessible aggressively arthritic node next to the lumbar area of the spine. The prognosis is not good for long term walking.


Years later a man attempts to murder me. He rams a large caliber pistol into my back and blows a hole right through me, causing immense damage and along the way completely obliterates the arthritic node.


A while later a man drives into the back of my car at an intersection yield sign. We swap details for the insurers. He was born on the day of the first car accident.
For want of a better description I call this a Zen Konspiracy… and if I knew what that meant then chances are I am wrong


So for instance here’s an example of a coincidental set that could seriously stretch credulity if it weren’t real.


On an other occasion during my earlier years, I was leaning on some safety railings outside the entrance to a facility at which I was doing some post graduate work. I was studying a text for a play in which I had a part, while waiting for the crowds to disperse from the entrance.


The entrance, common to the era in which it was built, was an Heptagonal Apse form of neo Gothic archway, created on a colonial government budget. It was also a façade to a passageway that ran about ten metres back to a t-junction intersection with another wide passageway. My view was down the passage through the archway towards the T.


As I looked up from the text to practice the lines I had memorized, I saw a girl figure walk across the T Junction section. She was wearing a flowing gown styled [home konstrukted in fact] overcoat; and as she strode she revealed knee high boots and, lit from above from overhead lighting, the light flashed off the rim of her hexagonal shaped, steel framed spektakles. A flash of what seemed like lightning linked us.


I was electrified and a voice said to me. That is ‘the one’. I pursued. We met… fell into whatever spell it is, called Love: and we have now been together for forty-seven years.


So where is the coincidence, apart from the fact that, had I not looked up at that moment, I would not have had the experience of seeing her through a Gothic archway? And why should that be important… We routinely see people through doorways and entrances.


So here is the credulity testing back-story.


Many years after we were married, her father died and in going through his effects a copy of a family tree, commissioned by my, now wife’s, grandfather, in the 1930’s: comes to light. It reveals in amazing detail one leg of my children’s ancestry. We are agog and intrigued at a document that purports to trek back some 1700 years.


During an investigation of its intricacies, many interesting names come up: especially in the Pre-Conquest era, of the now pre-Brexit land of new Pomerania. One in particular was significant.


The coincidence for me?


It was that One of her ancestors, was a woman to whom a statue exists in the city [in Pomerania] in which I was born. She is a woman who is regarded as the patron saint of that city. She was one of the few Saxon landowners to retain some of her properties after the 1066 A.D. event, and spent most of her declining years in a gothic style monastery on her retained land. That in itself was an amazing coincidence.


Then: Curiously, [according to a random history of the town that I found amongst my own grandfather’s effects, many years after that moment when I saw my wife through the archway,] much of what was ‘redistributed’ of her land, as the former Countess of Mercia, who retired in apparent long term reclusion
puctuated by periods of rage at the turn of events, was given to a man known only to history as: Nicholas.


When I discovered that I felt distinctly weird.[There are times when i think she is still as mad as hell itself… but that may simply be the normal make up of relationships over time.]


As if that was not enough for set of coincidences… the truly weird part was to come. Like most people who battle to remember people’s names when introduced for the first time i have routinely experienced people calling me Mick, Rick and such like instead of Nick… One error during one period of tiime, that started to crop up more frequently was the name Chris… This was puzzling because i couldn’t quite see how i could be introduced as NiK and have the answer come back as Chris. I mentioned this on an occasion to my mother. She told me an odd story.


Apparently through my entire gestation she intended to call me Christopher… in honour of ‘lost love’ for a Canadian paratrooper, preceding my father, who had fallen at the disasterous Arnhem intervention [WW2], for whom she forever still carried a torch.


While in the nursing home expecting me, in a building, situated as the last remaining building within the Spon end [?] gates [she said] in that ancient city called Coventry… ripped apart by the great blitz in WW2… the woman in the next bed heard what my mother intended and [according to Mother who was still enraged half a century later] announced that she couldn’t think of a name; and liked my mother’s choice: and would give that name to her son, born 24 hours earlier than me.


She was in a quandary she said, about what to do… Her “Name” had been stolen she said: and while dozing during labour a voice in her head said “Call him Nicholas” [Presumably assuming it was a boy child.]. In her heart she said she still pined for Christopher… and had no idea why Nicholas had arrived.


Weird piled on weird piled on weird. And that is a truly Zen Konspiracy.


So: in the full knowledge of what The Bard had his character: Hamlet say that “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dream’t of in our philosophy” i decided… What if I took a random kolektion of news reports extracted from various Zone One media sources over the past few years and allocated them as randomly, to various groups of characters who have a form of glancing contact with each other over a Saturday night and a Sunday morning.


What if I fictionalized these events and then radically dekonstrukted them to protekt the innocent participants in many original events. Then perhaps I kould konstukt my own “Zen Konspiracy”.


And having konstrukted it; I chose to call it The Buffalo Hunters a story that I describe as a brutal allegoric crime story… the tale behind our journey to Civility in the place of Revolution where i have lived for more than seventy years: a story of random muder and explicit lust.


The Buffalo Hunters: A tale available on Amazon.com @ https://www.amazon.com/Nicholas-Jakari/e/B077V146ND


May the voice that was in my dream then, leave you stunned in disbelief, as it has many others.


Bon appétit

Demystifying de-Kolonization… Perhaps?

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“William Gumede reflekted on reimagining who we are… and what we mean …. Moving away from kommon assumptions” Thus tweeted someone at greentip regarding an extremely, almost silent, reflektion, disguised as a memorial lecture that I attended last week. I couldn’t think of a better way of describing it and it did make me feel better about having gone. It was in many ways what my late Welsh mother would have called “Wit Wot”.


The message I got was that Afrika is not comfortable with the pace of modernity. Possibly [deep down] it chooses/would prefer, to remain locked inside its own Kosmology.


Kosmology I discovered is a word that meant a great deal more than “Big bang”: a theory about the origin of the universe. Rather it is, apparently, fundamental to an Afrikan belief system predating all other philosophies. At least that was, according to a most informative fellow attendee, called ZuluMaThabo Zulu, who was sitting alongside me at the memorial lecture. The topic was asserted as ‘Demystifying DE kolonization [I think that was it, I didn’t have it with me and the kosmologist next to me was uncertain… we had both arrived early for our own usual reasons, and had our own discussion.].


A self described poet and thus a fellow; he poured out a flow of information, relevant to Kosmology, punctuated with a most intriguing piece of [his] poetry, that it gave me great pleasure to read out that evening aloud. It did make me regret not being at a poetry reading, rather than attempting to demystify the ‘dekolonization’ … myth?


That thought was all the more poignant when I realized that while I was engaged in discussion the place had filled up and I was now sitting behind Advocate George Bizos. For offshore readers He is an ikonic struggle figure, and the late President Nelson Mandela’s lifelong attorney.


Some years back I was asked to perform a kolektion of his favorite poetry… at a public reading of the work of Constantinos Cavafy for both that poet’s centenary and the icon’s significant milestone birthday… and he had congratulated me as a “master of the floor.”


I soon realized too that my fellow poet’s shared composition, as a truly globalised man, rendered “dekolonization”, to being, not only a mythical goal; but also embraces Sisyphus: “The legendary king of Corinth, condemned eternally to repeatedly roll a heavy rock up a hill in Hades, only to have it roll down again as it nears the top.” [Merriam-Webster].


So what was this all about


Last Thursday I went to Witwatersrand University, my ‘alma mater’, to attend a talk hosted by the Nadine Gordimer Foundation. The theme was to demystify the kurrent broad de-kolonisation issue, that underpins the whole equally kurrent, ‘land konfiskation without kompensation’, issue.


For my offshore readers, you are reminded that my homeland recently liberated itself from a vicious, oppressive Authoritarian Overlord status, for highlighting which, Ms Gordimer had been wonderfully honored.


This ‘liberation’ [derided at the time by Author John Pilger as “Freedom next time” ] was now some two plus decades backwards now; and has found the journey tough going. We have reached a form of “next time” cul de sac, where the ideas that propelled the revolution have not brought the results that were promised. The effect is reminiscent of the kliché about the skurry to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic: as it went down.


So this means that these two ideas, Dekolonization and Konfiskation] that deluded people thought had been settled: [I was one of the deluded] are what now drives the national ‘us’, relentlessly, towards an impending date with the ballot box. Moreover, it is scary that no one kurrently in charge seems to know what to do. And, surely, that is the whole point of being in charge.


The speaker was a Professor William Gumede, a man of immense learning, a worthy political background and a prodigious author of academic books. Had he ‘spoken’ in sign language his words kould not have been more veiled and kareful.


I am a normal isolate and do not know the person, nor Nadine. I also have no association with either the Institution [other than as an arts graduate], or the Foundation. Someone sent me an invitation. I was kurious about the topic. In addition, it was free and I was bored with my own company, since all my friends have either died or emigrated. So, i thought, like the ‘hobbity’ person I am, that an adventure kould be fun: as long as it wasn’t too inkonvenient… and made me therefore, late for gin.


Then, Nadine Gordimer being an ikon for whatever tattered remnants remain of the liberalist ethik, that drove so much positive behavior in our less than genteel, ruinous past meant it was unlikely to be a violent affair. After all ‘demystifying’ [whatever] the most kontentious of topics in our hugely divided society had the potential for serious unpleasantness…


Also: there were promises of kucumber sandwiches and bottled water… and as it turned out some fascinating and kongenial encounters with various random fellow attendees, so engrossing, that it was almost with sadness that I realized the auditorium had filled up: and the lights dimmed down. Thus to reveal a web of Gordimeralia laced digital screens above the entrances that we all faced … and we were awash throughout the memorial talk with a frequently repeated sequence of quotes and varied visuals of the Nobel Laureate, that one kould read, or make notes about while the speaker kautiously maneuvered through his script.


It was a kurious experience, and hardly much of an adventure, save that I made the acquaintance of the aforementioned fine Kosmological poet: an exile, returned from Canada; and I learned that we are all exiles now… even those who thought they had a plan for the future.


Apart from Sisyphus the entire experience was a salutory reminder of what Lennon said: that “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”.


First off, the presentation was so carefully low key, that it was in itself fascinating. Then: One was deeply aware of being in a Post Trump era. The kontrast was there: Between the absolutist, accounting influenced certainties of the Trumpian moment, that kan with no relativist thought at all: be an opposing certainty: in an instant, versus the carefully measured intersection point between the virtues of thoughtful konsideration and those of even more thoughtful konsideration.


So remembering that half a century ago exactly, I was a second year student in that place. I had been brought up in Far east Ekhuruleni with the [contested] national ruling ethic that everything was either: this or that; my road or the high road. At Wits i kame into konflikt with the measured tread of liberal inspired, karefully measured and konsidered, relativist struktured evaluation. I was, back then, permanently konfused; and realised now that i still was. So i emerged from the talk only marginally more informed than when I went in, albeit perhaps slightly more knowledgable. Which shows what half a century kan do for learning perception.


Briefly: The Professor reflected that he had to question his own ‘side’s’ assumptions, about what kind of post liberation program was desired/had been desired. And what happened to it? Then there was the truth that our Mzansian revolution, 24 years ago has been submerged in the greater revolution [in technological terms] that the world has been thrust into, over the same period of time: the arrival of FIR [4th Industrial Revolution] on increasingly strengthening steroids.


Therefore, he mused; how does one rekonceptualise the route when you are a thousand kilometers down: with a potential kul de sac looming. The plans, it seemed, were formed for a world that vanished. Sudden as Kolonializm was, this change was faster. That world of the last/past century… no longer exists as it did… or is even any longer a sustainably practical goal for achievement.


He referred to the failure of the post-liberation Revolution that, as he put it, is “falling apart, with slogan based development generating dekline and insidious paralysis.” He suggested it was way beyond time to “move away from sloganising [sic] to REAL [slogan free] progress”.


He kould have said “Wash out your brains, sluice out the drains, revise all yor aims and get going already.” How does one deal with national inertia… when all our heroes are on suicide watch. Was that the tone? Was this how President ‘Tweets’ felt last week in Canada when he let his spleen run?


However whatever his personal view of the near katastrophic cirkumstances the kountry now finds itself in: the Professor was infinitely too polite to let it show.


He asked his peers to imagine that they were wrong. And referred to a range of alternate realities that also had to konquer a Kolonialized status; in which some, like China, embraced ‘smash and rebuild’: Bakunin’s ‘root it all out’. Some like Singapore/ South Korea: take what you’ve inherited and go flat out for economic growth … Don’t look back and don’t regret. He even hinted at Firmia… as I call the USA… who probably went further than almost anyone in successfully dumping the Kolonialists: went back to the Greeks for their inspiration: instead of a bearded ranting proselytizer… who represents the kolonist yin to the kolonizers yang.


We have certainly never emulated anything those places ever did, he suggested; and then
he kontrasted those places with Afrika. He suggested that Afrika was the place where nothing happened, all the heroes eventually died [some even get eaten by wild animals]: and the “Social strukture reverted to the same…”. Rather like a tightly coiled spring held artificially open for a short time: not long enough to disrupt the inner tension. Release the externality, revert to prior shape. One easy move… and then: whoops.


He drew attention to the kontrast between Ghana and South Korea… both kolonized in the same decade, the latter so brutally that they still have issues with it, and both liberated in the same year. Apparently, they took different routes; one to the future: one to the past, and that as Mr Frost put it “made all the difference”.


Sadly I had to agree. We expected revolutionary fervour, change; and the uprooting of all that hampered progress. Instead, we got loss of fervor… taste of favor; up-looting and all that hampered progress. I felt almost like I had gatecrashed a ten day party just after all the booze ran out and the shops were closed for the Easter holidays; and found the host was attempting to fit a new needle, to an old wind up gramophone: because the 21st century sound system had broken down.


“Nadine [Gordimer] said that one had to break away from klichés” the Chairman announced, by way of konkluding the evening’s presentation. In case we missed the message, he added that: “Dekolonisation had become a meaningless kliché.”


Aside from the evidence that klichés seldom realize
that they are klichés …
did we come to a konklusion?


No. Unless
Perhaps: that liberation itself has become a kliché.
Perhaps I misread the title and it was really demythefyzing dekolonializm: Same konklusion I suspect.


Few remember what they set out to do in the first place… partly or mainly because the world just got a whole lot more komplikated than it seemed in our kosmologies. The real revolution koincided with the kosmetic change… and the little guys got screwed in the RUSH for the bank.


Also: The kucumber sandwiches proved so popular they were gone in moments. And; I did get back, in time for Gin… or since I pursued dekolonization: Kane washed down with a bottle of the new: label free beer.

Cheers.

Exchange value

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Exchange value:
Data markets relative to Libyan slave markets


It is always cool to get an affirmation regardless of whence it comes.


Re reading John Ralston Saul’s “Collapse of Globalism” I came across his ironic observations on Economists and the trade in Economic theory: he said, “That which never was a science struggles with difficulty to remain a domain of speculative investigation.”


Why an affirmation? Consider, that for decades I have taught 9th grade economics for Learners [school kids], that economics is defined as “the management of scarcity” while increasingly it isn’t. Over the past half decade, I amended the definition to “The management of apparent scarcity in a world of remarkable abundance… for some.”


Now it is not my intention to deal with that idea; simply to confirm that as an old- school, pre-mathematical systemization economist, I am and have been in my past two blogs, firmly in the field of “speculative investigation”.


I refer of course to the idea that “Data must pay Rent”… about which I penned [well, typed eventually] two blogs on a speculative idea regarding data.


I said that one of the unspoken revolutions of the post 2011 period is the awareness that all of the world’s knowledge, past and unfolding, is packaged and available on line in an instant. To someone who grew up and went to school, using slide rules to make mathematical calculations, the transition has been stunning.


The Smartphone however also helped us to understand that all that information; and; that more, unfolding daily, has, logically, been created by humans living in the world.


Now we also know that it is wrapped up daily, packaged and sliced up with mountains of trivia, into byte-sized parcels: and moves [almost] effortlessly from one end of the multi-verse to another… Now, especially since the Zuckerburg testimonies, we are aware that kleva people are extracting mass scale Rentier value from it: without regard for the “The People”…. To whom it rightfully belongs.


I called this thoughtless process “Kolonization of the mind” and compared it to the mountains that held silver in South America back in the day, that were plundered for wealth: and exchanged for value, with no thought for the mountain.


I also mentioned how it was Mr. Zuckerburg’s meeting with the ‘Natives”: those being Kolonised in the Firmian* [My word for a country now allegedly stage managed by Wall street] Congress of the People: that emphasized that metaphor. This drew my attention to the Rentier nature of Data usage.


In this final piece on the subject, I am going to refer to the original thought that began puzzling me about this thing called DATA. In the interest of full disclosure I know nothing about DATA other than that it is a ‘product’ being sold to me each month for a certain amount of money. I type things like this and send it to places.


Then my ‘stuff’ is later subject to being rifled through by who knows who; searching for who knows what value. Just as I did back in the Sixties, when panning for gold: in specific rivers to the east of where I now live.


The thought: about who really “Owns” data, was prompted by a piece in the Science and Technology section of ‘The Economist’, 31st March this year. It was also my 45th wedding anniversary by the way and thus a moment for long reminiscence, that made the article’s oddness more apparent than intended by the [usually anonymous] writer. I gratuitously used the article’s heading, for my heading on this blog. [The Economist: Data markets: Exchange value. P.80, March 31st 2018]


The piece opens with a quoted observation from the Firmian* Tech Company, Cisco, that the volume of data flowing through the Internet each month has surpassed a Zettabyte, which, they say “… is “enough to fill 16bn 64GB iPhones.”.
A Googled Internet source tells me that a Zettabyte is One thousand billion, billion bytes [or One sextillion bytes.].


Since like most people, I found that to be confusing and strictly meaningless I found the entry that showed it as a number: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.


So as an economist [with a small e] I like to think in annual figures to compare with our favorite toy: GDP [Gross Domestic Product: For everyone else: how much money a country earns every year excluding imports]. So: on present trend, the Internet handles >12 Zettabytes of data annually. The kicker here [can you imagine a kicker on such a huge number?] is the caveat written by the article’s author. ”Immeasurably more data sits outside the public internet on company servers.”


So here is the thought experiment on which I speculated following this article in association with Mr. Z’s rhetorical declamations*. [* Fancy words: meaning, meaningless affirmations.] That is 12 Zettabytes put into GDP language.


Assume a value given to each byte. Assume that value to be ONE ten MILLIONTH of ONE cent [$US}…. A number that I understand would look like this $US0.0000001. [ Please feel free to contradict me, my calculator gives up at the ninth zero and there are still another 12!]


According to my extremely rough calculations [it is >half a century since I finished school the year the late President Kennedy was shot] the resulting amount of value
Would be the equivalent to two thirds of global income for 2016. That is an enormous amount of production that is being treated as a ‘happy to be ignored’ impervious “externality*” [*another economist idea]


Currently that volume of data is valued at zero and the people producing it get the same. Of course: we have the toys that produce it, and the freedom to give it away on a personal communication instrument.


So doesn’t that make you feel like the mountains filled with silver that had it taken from them in return for having some roads built on you… whoops: sorry… on the mountain. Not for nothing could one argue that the guy’s running the new Libyan slave markets have missed the trick.


So I submit; in the interests of full disclosure: that although I know little about the technical mechanics of data, I do think that inside the way in which we [economists/accountants?] value the DATA stuff that flows in abundance; hides the most important answer for this hydra-headed century.


And that is how I concluded that the ‘Rentals’ being reaped currently, on this freely kontributed ‘soil’, by a number of Klevas, has the potential to produce a potent residue: ta ra ta ra: Universal Income…


Now U.I. or Basic PAY IS A key plank, in the policy position taken by the new government of the old Leftover Roman relic on the Mediterranean coastline. That delightful territory that produced two of the coolest cars I ever had to give to random debt kolektors, and about 70 different governments, in the same number of years. Like its Aegean cousin the left/right, ‘left-behind’ heroes, struggle with the mathematics of the Euro… and the debt fiasco it brought with it.


This will be my last word on this topic as I continue to write a fictional tale set circa 2037 about what happened to the protagonists, when this idea: that DATA holds the key to Universal Income, was taken seriously, by that new government.


Enjoy the journey. Love you all.

Mental Kolonization: The New, ‘New World invasion’

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The Colonization of the Mind:


Never mind 1492: konsider 2018….
Mr. Z meets Kongress


In the fictional world that I have invented: and about which I am currently writing, circa 2037, an anomaly that did not exist before 2011 is remedied. As a result the concept of universal income in our reversion to a pre-industrial era neo-cottage services based economy, has become a reality.


However it is not something ‘given’ for ‘free’’ by the/ or even a/ State organisation… The era of centralized control we have known for the past few centuries rapidly disintegrates under the trend to quantum computing; linked to blockchains [aka distributed ledgers] & crypto currencies. Not to mention a host of corresponding trends and developments as yet as undiscovered: as was DATA at the teenage dawning of the era.


Universal Income becomes a concept based on trillions of micro payments, moving from businesses like Facebook [et al] to data owners, and back…. Creating a virtuous circle of satisfactions where the idea that Governments control all things: is as historical an idea as the one that says happiness is the destiny of humanity.


The future is a decentralized one.


Konfederacy rulz.


Pragmatically this has to happen: in order to sustain what is rapidly evolving into a globally, services based, AI dominated, robotically moved economy.


In that place to which we
Are
Evolving [in my fictional world,
Anyway] at
Breakneck speed, a majority of
Ordinary people does not
[Apparently] have the com
Petence to do any
Thing more complex than
Shop: and mutter
OMG.



The following piece of abstraction, disguised as poetic form, had a curiously viral progression in that past before 2037… through the annals of day to day existance: and slowly allowed the idea of liberation to filter into conciousness.


The Mind as the New world


We are witness now to what will
In decades to come, be seen as
A most momentous moment: in
The brief history of homo
Sapiens sapiens.
We are witness to
And participants in: the kolo
Nization of the mind.


When we [humans] colonized
[Allegedly empty] land
Back in the 15th cent
Ury; assuming everyone already
Living there
To be irrelevant to
Purpose
Mainly because they were
Undocumented, unlettered and
Innumerate
Primitives. We
[The invaders] simply
Appropriated the land and
Its bounty:
As we had done for
Thousands of years. This bounty
Became a cost
Free
Windfall
[Almost: unearned].


For instance, plundering
Entire mountains of silver in
South
America: bounty; from which
Inordinate profits could
Be generated: with little
Or no regard for
The source.


The most fascinating aspect of the recent interrogation of Mr. Z
Uckerburg by the Congress of the
Firmian elites… Senators and Representatives
Alike
Was the latter persons’ complete incomp
Rehension at the scale of what had
Happened: while they had been busy
Ruminating
On perennial peccadillo’s.


There was a disconcerting sense of
The time machine. Here was
Cortez meeting the
Aztec royalty, who were
Baffled
At this predicted even
Anticipated yet
Unexpected
Arrival.


Mysterious people, with
Serious intentions: and powerful,
Incomprehensible machinery. Then… whoops
Before they could say SH*T!! … They were in
History’s garbage bag.


In effect, the worthy Congresspersons became as one with the beguiled “Natives”, of many colonized lands: faced with the incomprehensible.


Therefore, they trotted
Out their
Memes and
Things; and each, thinking ‘stomach’
First, asked all the
Questions regarding the inhe
Rent trivia of Mr.
Z’s offence.


Not one
However of that
Kolektion of [apparently] f
Undamentally out of touch
Human’s e
Ven got to grips with the
Kore of the
Dilemma: facing their konstituents.


A Tji-Nyanees participant in a Davos debate
Earlier this year, spoke
Of a Grey Rhino effect, which
He explained represented
“Something so huge it completely
Obscured
The screen”.


The Grey Rhino here is
The word
DATA
And the
Kolonisation of the mind
That it represents.


Naturally the more cynical
Amongst us
May argue that ignoring
The grey rhino is essential to
The continuation
Of their pleasure: which
At heart concerns the Kolonisation of the mind.


Of course that would assume they understood what was happening.


What does this mean?


Simply this. Using the language of
Mr. Adam Smith…. He,
Famously, of The Wealth
Of Nations… Mr. Z
Uckerburg [and
His illustrious peers] are the most
Successful kolonizers of all
Time.


According to
The hype surrounding the man’s
Recent forage around the
Firmian Capitol’ he gains some 25
Billion dollars of
[Profit] annually from
Some 40 Billion $US
Revenue. In a competitive
World of
Razor thin margins that is beyond
HUGE.


The revenue comes from companies
That use the data given
So f
Reely by the b
Illions of
Users of his
‘Machine’.


They use the
Insights it presents to target
Prospects for product
Purchases, more efficiently
Than ever known.
Inherently, this means that, like
The Konquista
Dors, who found mountains
Of silver back in the 16th
Century; appropriated it from naïve
Possessors: like those
Who purchased Manhattan: for bags of
Beads; and
Achieved great
WEALTH.


Mr. Z [et al] have achieved a similar,
Inherently
‘Unearned income’. They are
The
El Supremo
Rentiers.


When Mssrs. Smith and
Ricardo talked of ‘Economic
Rent’, they were referring
To this windfall effect


Resulting from control over the product
Of a natural resource.


In this case, data
Emanating from a human
Source: the ultimate in a natural
Resource.


It also took about a hundred and
Fifty years then: for the penny
To drop too.


We hope the penny will drop
sooner, for humans
today or the rest
of the century could get seriously
rough: especially for those
absently
left behind.


Jerome Powell [new chairman of the Firmian Federal Reserve,] admitted
something in his opening salvo with
the same group of kongresspersons, earlier
this year;
that “The Slack”, to which he made constant
reference when justifying the
continuing,
no inflation trend
of the past decade:


In spite of allegedly: full employment
Conditions in Firmia.


“The Elliot curve is cracked,” they call…
“The mob in here, are all


In thrall to


The slack,” he said: “beyond the Wall”:


The
Fifty million people across the
World
Living daily off the Web… who
Are an almost infinite
Resource
at wage levels way below
Those of the Firmian
Norms.


No one
Has ever admitted that before:
Publically.


So in building Facebook Mr. Z’s true
genius lay in solving
one of humanities greatest
needs… to be in sharing kontakt
with one’s fellows
And
through the power of
digitalization he [and all
the rest of the merry
band of tech’ dudes] invented
The thing called
DATA… symbolically
Packaging James Surowieki’s: “Wisdom
of Crowds”. Hence


The DATA then… becomes the new
‘Goldfields’ now and the
Klondike rush is being relived: as they
ALL
Kapitalize on the window of
Oppor
Tunity by ‘mone
Tizing’ his “free” source
Of ‘data’.


And as with the Silver
Exchanges of past time glory
No mention in the exchange pays rent
to the source.


No wonder the planet is all messed up
And getting hotter by the day


As the greatest beneficiary of “unearned
Income” in history, the
Question the Kongresspersons should
Have been asking, related to that share of
Unearned income [i.e. Economic
Rent] that should be returning
To source, rewarding
Loyalty work
Presently
Given freely: in order
To sustain
And maintain their
Ability to keep feeding
The machine.


!NiK[‘18]


To all my fellow Jedi’s “May de Forth be wid ya”

Our Invisible friend

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Over the weekend I caught the tail end of a BBC interview with an Iraqi Jewish American artist, Michael Rakowitz, who has had an impressive piece of artwork assembled; and mounted on an historically vacant, fourth plinth, on London’s Trafalgar Square.


The artwork is a retrospective reproduction of a vandalized ‘Lamassu’: [“a Winged bull and protective deity”] that stood for 2800 years at the gates of Nineveh, awaiting the eventual arrivals, of the new barbarians, in the form of Daesh: now rebuilt from the detritus and discarded leftovers of modernity.


He calls it “The invisible enemy should not exist.”


The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked if his work had a political meaning, and was he therefore a ‘political’ artist since he couldn’t truly be a ‘commercial’ artist. According to Mr Sackur’s Q sheet, much of what he did was not saleable, reproducible, or scalable: or whatever the current re-interpretation of ‘commercial’ is.


In his answer, he indicated that he was an artist, who worked with his interpretation of his milieu, and therefore there would be an inevitable ‘political’ stream in the back-story. [Personally, I do suspect his Lamassu is infinitely scalable and reproducible, but that is not relevant to my point here]


His answer though caused me to pause and ask myself the same question. Am I a commercial writer of commercially satisfying stories that I aim to put in a place where their scalability will enable some form of remuneration… yes? OR. Am I an artist, in the vein of the late New York Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor………..described as a “visionary pianist” in the NY Daily News, and referred to in a different, earlier BBC newscast, as a person who followed his own path? As obviously does the Iraqi Jewish American artist Mr.Rikowitz …………


I was unable to arrive at a conclusion to that: considering myself a simple working class wordsmith. I am also not certain that most people would consider a poet to be an artist.


Nonetheless, I did have to concede that, on two levels, at least I am a completely ‘political’ writer. My evolving Azanian Quartet has two specific political purposes. I am going to share one of them with you now. I’m doing this because today is possibly the most auspicious opportunity that exists, for the human race to ascertain, that it discount’s the late Stephen Hawking’s gloomy prediction: that we would be lucky [the human race] to emerge intact from the 21st century.


I am referring to that glorious entrepreneur, Mr. Zuckerberg’s immanent Congressional Hearings … and the immensely elusive opportunity those hearings present for constructing a solution, to what is already, and going to be even more of, a problem of immense magnitude, by the time we reach the part of my quartet that is set in 2037.


I refer to the inevitable specter of mass scale, long-term structural unemployment, for which we have to create a remedy, that contributes to growth and developments, rather than subtracting from it. Currently everything being suggested is regressive.


My remedy, and #1 political issue of choice, was to identify and provide a viable [fictional] solution for this problem in the future. That remedy I called BASIC PAY: is now more popularly called: Universal Income.


I was always intrigued, as a life long ‘nonprofessional’ reader of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, Bester et al, by a particular feature of science based fiction writing. This was the use of the term “credits”, when the text called, somewhere, for how people lived in the future [now arriving at speed] They always spent ‘credits’… And since Credits suggested debt how did they pay for the debt?


What are these ‘credits’, I would ask me… where do they come from: and how are they financed? [Declaratory Note: I am not a scientist, I am part of an educator class of financial economist with a bent towards the history thereof and who writes poetry, because it ‘happens’.]


So: in many ways, my entertainment podcast, prose poetic cyber serial, The Jonker Memorandum, exists to provide that answer [as a by-product to telling you what I hope is a cool story]. I call it “Basic Pay”. After many years basic pay is now gaining traction as “Universal Income’: and as such has featured in the current political agenda’s of at least half a dozen countries, and is being punted by such glorious entrepreneurs as Mssrs: Gates and Musk. The problem however remains: how is it financed?


In the cyber serial, my solution of choice was the Transaction Levy [aka Tax]. However: that was then. And it is also on the subtraction side of our growth equation. That was though, before the tech revolution gave us DATA… and me: a writer of fiction, the new Tilling fields that yield the “New Gold”. Something Mr. Zuckerberg has so deftly demonstrated: and regrettably, so brutally abused. DaTA is/are the “New Goldfields”.


So the message that Mr. Z’ and the rest of the new tech ‘Wunderkinde’ should be getting from the Congress is simply this… Their discovery of the power inherent in DATA, contains and illustrates the legitimacy of ‘Universal Income’. Billions of people are contributing quadrillions of Data measures daily for remunerative algorithmic exploration which thus provides the basis for a complete reinvention of fundamental economics. Yes: i shall invoke such an extreme statement


Currently Mr. Z and his Silicon cohorts are implicitly [with no offence] the greatest slave-owners in human history. In the same way however that Spotify [for instance] pays a kontribution to each kontributor from each access, so too must those who ‘slave’ to provide content to the marvelous inventions of Mr. Z’s [and the rest] receive a similar contribution…. I.e. It is time that data starts to pay rent. #DATA must pay rent…


I call myself a poet so I conclude with the poem that will open the second stanza of Part 4 of my Azanian Quartet… My assumption is that by 2037 [the setting] … this moment [NOW] will have been the turning point in this, amazing new journey, on which we are kolektively embarked.


We gave our DATA freely to Mr. Z et al… they in return gave us free use of the toys they made. Then he/they found a way to collect rent… from our contribution… now we must be reimbursed our share for our belief in them. For the data freely given is still ours.


To rephrase Mr. Rakowitz: [with respect]


“The invisible friend that must
Be shown to exist”


Hear ye
Hear Ye


Some will strive
to
Achieve
Nietzschean validation – the
Povo*
Will become automatonotik
Fiddling witheir [sic]
Mobiles
Seeking to affirm their intrin
sic irrele
vance.


Nonetheless
Machines don’t buy things!!
They dispense.


On what basis should we
Perceive
Value.


Given the thrust of
a digital economy that
Konsrukt kalled
DATA
Is the land that must be
Mined for
GOLD.


Peepil become
Products
To be exploited for their
DATA value
Should they not
Receive their
Rightful
Fee?


In Gold?
Yeah gold
You say data is
The new gold.
No… I said it was the new land
Waiting to be mined: for what is in it.


Does it pay rent?
Not yet.


!NiK[‘18]


So there you have it. All Kongresspersons: the most truly
bipartisan goal it is possible to achieve,
on behalf of all humanity.


Thank you on their behalf.


Povo: Shona [Zimbabwe] meaning the ‘masses’ or ‘Mass’
pronounced PorVor.

Postscript: MILLY’S LAST RALLY

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1. Postscript


It rained last week:
Nearly, all week.
Unusual in a place more
Noted for high speed furious
Random storms, that
Come n dump n go, a hundred
Millimeters or more or so, in
Seconds or in minutes,
Fancy free.


By Friday morning it had spilt
Its spill, over, see:
One hundred and
Seventy millimeters plus three: on
Mill’s rainwater measuring jug:
Mill by mill for Mill in pattering
Sometimes pouring, wet
And watering prolific
Patterns on sod and softened paths
From late on Sunday
Until, then.


It poured heavily when the
Siberian hound howled
Me from my bed:
And room
To be let out: Friday,
At three AY EM: “It is a wolf
Not a dog” I called out after the
Frenzied
Creature, as it
Stormed into the rain
Drenched night: howled with frenzied
Fury into the rain drenched night:
Returned at last soaked right
To the bone… Went to a rug
And slept: alone.


And so reassured
We slept on,
Through until at last came
morning and the
rain
was gone


When we awoke to find the sun
Friday had already come.
You see
So it was only when
I went to her room
Again
To give to her
Her morning tea
That i discovered:
She had not gone
Gently into that
Wet dark night, Dylan:
No she had fought the fight that had
All times, previous, driven
That demon death away:
In fright.
No more.


I found that she had gone
And left me
To ponder on the mystery
Of the strange words
She had let flow in glee.
When she had so abruptly startled me.


Had some resolve
In her been softened
Substantially
Enough: to set her free?


2. Milly’s Last Rally


Mother beat Good Friday
By a week
Impaled on her own
Self konstrukted
Kross


So she did not die
Yesterday Albert; nor
Even
The day before.


She died it seems
Some time long
Ago
When I was only
Four.


Easter 2018
Good Friday morning –
My first Easter
Of liberation from
All that rage
And guilt.


Again that reproach;
She is gone and yet
I reach out my hand
Still
To prepare
Her morning cup of tea
Or yesterday her
Late PM hot repast.
Gone… Free


Gone again in all
Her outraged, urgent
Imperfection: laced through with
Ferocious, amorphous
Konsideration;
Wishing ill of those
Who hurt her once?
Or once again.


In Her closing words the
Night before
She
In her so trans
Parent
Manner; practicing her
Perpetual
Misdirection strategy that
Should not be
Proclaimed.
Used the well known alleged sins
Of our former President:
He of the leopard skins;
And pleasurable performance
Practices
To perhaps konfess
Her own
Culpability for sins
Gathered and
Never before professed:


“My SINS are katching up
With me.”
Her ME and MY replacing HIS
and HIM
As she shared at last
Her terror at
Some presumption carried
Forwards
For her eternity in a
Presumed burning
Place knowing, as
I now realize I did too, that
She was at the
Endgame.


“Good grief Mother”
I responded reflexively dis
Tracted
By the unknown Kom
Plexities of her micro
Wave
To take more than a
Reflexive
Response to an am
Bush from left field.
“I cannot believe you to be
One with SIN upon
Your hands
What SIN indeed!”


And then to my
Surprise and
Shock … abruptly:
She was at
My side.


Out of her chair into
Which, I had just assisted her
Arrival … and suddenly in one
Stride she was next to me:
At my side!


And in all her fiercest
Youthful rage
Railed at me
For my stupidity
For the
Ineptitude of a simple
12 years old
Incapable of
Matching simplicity to cog
Nitive
Acceptance.


In shock — Had she pretended all
This time
Her gradual: infirmity? – Had
She lied again: at the
Anguish in her bones, to move thus
With such
Dexterity, who earlier had
To be helped to
Move
At all?


Had I: unthinking
Forgiven her; for some deed
She had carried
With her; or deeds she Kontrived
To
Remember:
Unsaid… Did I prepare her
For that last release
As she then returned to
Her misdirection:
The President: to distract
Me from konsideration of my
own
Presumption of
“me and my”… and sinful?
Whatever,
Malfeasance: by mommy?
To ask
Or state: What did you really mean
by that?.


She said then
That she could not be
Lieve
That our Presi
Dent could proclaim his early
Innocence: as his defense
For subterfuge: when seduced
By the pragmatic gains of
Affluence.


And then
Before it could be probed:
Dismissal: and before the dawn
Came
She was gone
In a single relieved
Paroxysm


Leaving me but with the
Idea
That innocence
Had been debauched and in
The pleasures of
Debauchment
Was the absence of any
Awareness of
SIN: until the aching
Echoes of some
Pristine guilt, withheld:
Gradually
Subsumed
The knavish artlessness:
The simplicity of mere
Mortality.


!NiK[‘18]


We always knew our late Mother, Enid: That is her sons and late husband;
and eventually almost everyone, as Milly.
Most people thought it stood for Millicent.
But it was our abbreviation for Militant.


Milly was:
Late Mother [Milly] of: Nicholas and Glen, Welsh Milly in law to Diane and Rea.
Widow to the late, Warrant Officer: Charles M Williamson. RAF WW2 veteran of > 2000 flying hours as a captain of aircraft, left because he wanted to.
GrandMilly to: Dael, Donna-Sian, Siobhan [Chevy] Dawn, Leigh and Shannon.
GrandMilly in law to the Double Tam’s
Great GrandMilly to Sienna Poppy and Dexter Leo
Legendary Milly: to those as yet unborn.


To everyone else a nice little old lady, a retired bookkeeper, who kept a wonderfully sharp mind coupled to an ascerbic sense of humour to the end at 95 years, eleven months and nine days


She will in some circles be forever remembered for going to court at eighty something, to bat for her part time gardener: Moses Mthombeni. He had been unfairly arrested for allegedly stealing a bicycle. She succeeded not only in “getting him off”; but also generated the arrest of two police officers on corruption charges: as well as the arrest of the real culprits, operating under police protection. Good on ya Milly.


RIP: ‘Milly’… 1922-2018


170 mm = 68 inches

Dealing with fiction.

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One of the odd difficulties about writing fiction, is living in a condition where reality is so fantasy stretched it becomes normal; and is thus so endemically normal: that by comparison it surpasses fiction. In other words [with no offence intended to sensitive readers] it is hard to imagine writing a fictional story about a place where the turkeys vote for Christmas, when you live in a place where the turkeys have just voted that they think Christmas to be a good idea.


Ja, well, no fine… as we say in my neighborhood. So in case I’m dreaming awake about writing a fictional tale about a nation seemingly hellbent on national suicide, which I wasn’t really thinking of when I woke up on Friday morning i was in the middle of 2037 and the characters are fighting over basic pay. So let me give you an example taken from the random daily news reports, always a good trigger for fiction.


On Friday morning our national radio station’s main outlet carried a headline opening news report, in which the nation’s Minister relevant to International Relations made a grumpy speech. In it she, quite reasonably, demanded a retraction from some random apparently politically important politician, in a place called Downunda, for an offensive and interfering policy statement he had allegedly made. Apparently he was recommending the fast tracking of visa applications, from those of our country’s farmers who are fearful for their lives.


Why are the farmers fearful for their lives on a scale so paramount that it involves Downunda in some nefarious action?


Well simply, because as a class, Agricultural workers are relatively isolated workers; and farm owners as a class are disproportionately murder victims, as statistics go: as are their workforces. In the same way perhaps that schoolteachers and children are relatively more endangered in Floridian schools that say Korean shopkeepers are in Los Angeles.


Farm murders are a complex problem, as the owners are often members of the former ruling class in the country, and their murders are often pretty gruesome; and are covertly targeted at removing such persons from the economy, if possible. It is an old, even ancient and widely practiced strategy [see Rohinga’s [sic] currently elsewhere f.i.] that has not kept pace with change. So although the revolution is over… the rage remains and the targets remain targets.


However suddenly this year, the pressure to change the structure and patterns of land ownership in the country have taken a major uptick; and the governing post-revolutionary party, that has controlled events for the past 24 years have not been particularly effective in solving a longstanding issue…for reasons that will become more obvious as the pending trial of the former President: ‘Shower Cap’Leopard,should reveal, especially since at least 783 of whatever charges they are, predate his Presidency. So the Party are freaking that they may lose their comfortable and hugely lucrative majority in next year’s national elections; to a starved, more radical, proto fascist movement that has gained considerable support.


It is also possibly that the issue is in fact insoluble… and that the former now deposed President of Rumbabwe was right in his Bakuninist interpretation of revolution… return to your roots and rebuild. Do as the northern Bears do. But then, as I have already pointed out, I write fiction.


So the specific reason for the spat between two countries that are usually more cooperative follows on from a relatively recent, fairly intense upswing in negative sentiment towards the now overthrown former ruling class in the country. One target has been their inherited schooling system, that remains isolated by language, from the rest of mainstream education that has become reasonably integrated given the wwide divergence of numbers. This language isolation is in itself a bitter pill given that none of the remaining 9 languages get to be exclusive. Now such people have received a visceral threat to their livelihoods and their futures: and in the general hubbub around retribution and “returning the land’ to its ‘rightful owners’, never mind the San or the Khoi who were here first, what is being ignored, is the possibility of a new national ‘kill and be sorry’ suicide pact.


How will it unfold? What is this threat lurking like Jabberwocky in recess that has suddenly leapt out of the cabinet in which it has been locked for over two decades. What is the story so far?


Background: Some weeks ago the nation’s ruling party commanded majority support, far greater than its usual level, in a Parliamentary vote, for a motion to overthrow a key [so-called] “Entrenched clause” in the Nation’s much praised Konstitution [that has in fact been amended about 18 times in about twenty odd years seemingly with no ill effect?].


The clause refers to the sanctity of property rights, specifically landed property. Its removal elsewhere in the wider world, has, as most ‘modernists’ know, a long history of poor outcomes. In our country, after a struggle that took up most of the 20th century, the People’s victory in 1994, restored and affirmed their right to own and possess landed property.


Back to the news: The minister didn’t quite manage to say, ‘how dare [the Downundan person] suggest that our [specific] farmers were in a life-threatening situation’: but she managed to sound as if she had been inappropriately touched. And more forcefully ‘to the manner born’ than the effect achieved by that northern prime person teasing the Bears over a nerve poisoning affair, for instance. She gave profound reasons for the falsity of the suggestions, mooted by [hint of suggestion] renegade [sounding] elements amongst the former ruling class … now deposed.


The Former ruling class, are now widely regarded as having “Stolen the land” in the same way that Firmians or Downundans may be regarded by the losers as having stolen the America’s or the land of Oz from [so-called] Red Indians [AmeriIndians] or Abbo’s. End of item. So the subtext to the Minister’s tirade against the Downundan was that a ‘crook’ was supporting a ‘crook’ and that was wrong.


That lengthy item was followed by a random list of other news items in the same bulletin. One fun item included a whining piece of petulant ‘poor me I’ve been robbed’ sound bites. The source of the whinge? A neighboring, recently deposed, ‘President for life’, Bob the Roz, was expressing his indignation at a terrible injustice. A former Comrade who had impolitely stolen his country had robbed him; and taken his job as President: it was an unforgivable betrayal, he whined.


Then there was a bizarre interview, with a lady from the national railways service, who explained the reasoning for various, unprecedented rail passenger service suspensions, around the country. She asserted that increasingly routine mass scale assaults, and vandalizing activity on railways staff and carriages was taking place by armed gangs on trains… Apparently [among various offences] a lady train driver was forced to strip by armed thugs, before being rescued, hopefully before anything worse happened. Both the interviewer and the interviewee skipped what happened, or didn’t happen, to passengers.


After which there was a final ‘footnote’ news item from a rural region in an unpronouncible place beginning with e in the east of Zone One, that really raised the question of where fiction begins and reality ends.


Apparently a “Sangoma” … [aka: ‘Muti’ man… aka medicine man or shaman elsewhere] was arrested following police investigations into the murder and mutilation of two Albino children from a local village. Albino persons are routinely abducted and mutilated for ‘medicine’ purposes, in various parts of the kontinent, although their murder in our region is unusual.


The arrestee was reported to have a range of human parts in his ‘muti’ bag. Although initially having the appearance of albino parts, they were later found to be the remains of a local, owner class, farming lady, who had been abducted, murdered and chopped up for transition into whatever was supposed be the intended remedy, for whatever ailment her [fake albino] parts were presumably supposed to cure. The two murdered Albino children were not mentioned again. So was that an ill thought ‘whoops’: or a deliberate insertion? [NOTE to self: is there a hidden story here?].Not to mention that it was a serious news story anywhere else, pehaps on Earth… well not on our kontinent perhaps.


Now. Had I sat here and made all that up, as part of a fictional story, it would be almost unbelievable… which is of course why it would be fiction. Plus I would probably have accusations of untoward partiality, targeted at me. So. Let us add to that two interesting complexities to the overall plot surrounding these busy past few weeks, regarding the question of who votes for Christmas….


As mentioned, over the past few weeks we’ve had an unusual blitzkrieg of ‘big’ events. We love politics, they provide a wonderful distraction to an underperforming economy. More commonly it’s a case of nothing much actually happens and everyone eventually dies. Then, almost abruptly, The Ruling Party fired the existing ‘struggle hero’ president of the country [He,famously of leopard skins and shower caps; and scandals galore, dozens of wives depending on day, at least 21 children, mostly rich, some on the run]. He had been accused of illegal activity and was thought by many to be a Crook. Gone: without gunfire or other violence being used… all cool and kosher. A wonderful move for the kountry and even the kontinent. A pure Wakanda ending: with a trial to follow.


A rich new shining knight was then hastily voted to be the new President of all. And regrettably a flaw occurred that may well be a crucial part in moves unyet and unplayed… Yes i write fiction. We were all overjoyed. The new man was a favorite of many: if not all. There are reportedly those in the team on whom the old Pres has dirt. They are threatened, what will the new hero do next…? Music fx here.


A new positive mood took hold; and on Day 1 a few weeks back we were treated to the illustrious, unbelievably rich, new president, our own billionaire: yahoo sucks to the Firmians with their rich Pres ‘Tweets’, we at least like ours. There were beautiful close ups of our guy swearing allegiance to the Konstitution that HE helped to create.


No caveats… unfortunately… [ was that the fatal error?] Simply swore the whole paper instrument to be set in concrete: A model of propriety. Ah everyone was uplifted. The promised land beckoned.


And then, with no delay, strike the moment… At least President ‘Tweets waitied untill a horror massacre at a Floridian high school before even suggesting, in his inimitable way, that the Firmian’s obsession with their 2nd amendment rights needed some review… and left it, to some extent, at that… and the market, to start sorting…


Not Our new Hero. He pulled the fastest switch in Presidential history; and if anyone noticed they were all too freaked to speak.


The following day: In his opening speech to the nation, he torched the page… He announced his intention to demolish a key flashpoint property protection clause in the Konstitution. Within a week he had nearly everyone in Parly … the absolute majority: in the bag with their approval for the idea. And in the process, he demonstrates, empirically, and regrettably, that his word was not his bond… Well i mean… he is a politician… what do you expect? And perhaps being so innured to duplicity, no one apparently, noticed it, except perhaps, the fellow in Downunda … we don’t know: Certainly everyone that mattered around here either politely ignored the switch, or simply never noticed: so relieved was everyone to get rid of the Bad President.


The totally cool irony inherent in that entire series of news report is therefore something almost unimaginable, other than in a form of madcap comedy: for the following reason. [Aside:How does one write serious crime fiction in the midst of rampant absurdity… do we sense Ionescu’s return?]


In effect the “people’s’ leadership, who collectively represent at least 94% of the population [up from about 77% when the original country was founded] have almost all just approved the idea, that the land ownership rights: what they fought for 105 years to regain, after they were previously dispossessed, the last time, in 1913, are now proposed to go under the hammer… and could perhaps with careless reckless abandonment be taken away again: by choice this time… and everyone is so suckered by the meme driven misdirection that they cannot see it.


It is an almost unimaginable development: that they, “THE PEOPLE” will commit a form of suicide to rid themselves of a thorn. We haven’t done that since 1856. Is it our destiny in fractal time to repeat that act again in a failed effort to rid themselves of a hated interloper: a time when almost an entire national grouping committed voluntary suicide. All those descendents of that particular national group who voted in Parly that day, are descendants of the handful that survived the madness of that tragic historical action.


The most radical amongst them want all land nationalized, and allocated to the poor: who will henceforth become tenants, who may or may not be charged rent. [have in fact become tenants, in those regions aquired under the law, over the decades since libertion day.They have reverted to tenant stus with no freehold certification according to a report circulating Parliament currently] And ergo, like our neighbour we return the land to the feudal status present at the arrival of the interlopers… the Koloniste… and that level of possession was the format dispossessed in the Great Dispossession era [1913-1994]. And it is to that therefore that the People wish to return… without thought to its consequence, simply in order to cure what they perceive as a cancerous growth.


And of course, as any financially literate person knows, it is notoriously difficult to finance developments on property you don’t own. The populace of the neighbouring country, previously wholly owned, by the whining, recently deposed Roz tyrant, mentioned earlier: pulled the nationalization of land trick two decades ago. They have as a result, reduced their country to one of the world’s poorest. And that from a most promising start as one of the continent’s best resourced, most promising start-ups. The flurry of angry tweets that followed the mewling ex presidential, radio speech during the aforementioned news broadcast, were a salient testimony to that failure.


So you see my dilemma as a fiction writer. Could you actually invent a plot of this magnitude and complexity, and even be believed that it was fictional?


Since it was not in fact a fictional parade, one hopes we will we all wake up before the movie ends, and shake ourselves from delayed shock. Perhaps we can then work out less dramatic means, to solve what is an angry septic wound that has been seriously, ineptly dealt with, by the revolutionary leaders of our country, for the past twenty four years and is on the verge of metastisizing.


And now I can get back to writing my fictional story set in 2037, the second part of Part 4 of the Azanian Quartet [The Jonker Memorandum being Part 3 and The Buffalo Hunters”; available now on Amazon is Part 1]. It is a time when all those desirable farms have been desertified [sic] by rising, drought fueled temperatures and broad neglect. A time when my characters from the Jonker Memorandum, are building their futures using Korinth Starr’s Towers projects for vertical farming zones: within the urban wastelands of the Jozi Unicity, in drought fuelled fire ravaged Zone One… The surrounding territories have separated into endless, waterfree Auslaande, punctuated with protekted cities: sucking water most gently and elegantly through fine veined eco friendly straws… and the cast are all gathered in the Jozi Unicity free zone part of Zone 1, where they plot desperate moves with magisterial consequences: and dine on delicious shrubs and occasional nuggets of Wagyu style, fake steak.


The story is set on the south side of the planet that has becomes 80% desert… with little water… so those Koloniste thinking of taking up those Downunda invitations, may need to think vertikal farming around town instead [or for/if/ when they get there, which would not be entirely the point of going there would it?]


The North side btw is predicted to be the promised land with Bear territory reverting to a more temperate region slowly: after the permafrost finishes melting, if it hasn’t already.


That is the prospective journey emerging planet earth is currently taking, following another two decades of climate change. And again that, regrettably, is no longer considered to be a figment of some random fiction writer’s imagination.

Confiscation without compensation: Good idea/bad idea

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Something has arisen in my world regarding an issue that has jumped out of the political woodwork with all the same shock that President Trump has generated with his idea that Trade Wars are fun. Guess he forgot about Smoot/Hawley. We forgot why we put that clause in. So our version of the “let us mess with the system” theory of government threatens to hold back all eco/social development activity in the country in which I live, for yet another year; [we lost last year dealing with a recalcitrant President.] The key demand is to nationalise the land.


Our neighboring President did it about 16 years ago [long time to remember that] and successfully took his country back to the 17th century where he believed it all went wrong: and that it was time to start over. So far it is dissappointing to those it was supposed to benefit and so a few million have moved here to make a few bucks.Eventually his own Generals tossed him last year so they could get some traction on developing the place. How do you come back from the 17th century in less than a another one or two.


Next year is election time and everybody wants to grab the election spotlight on their terms.


The issue: Confiscation of property without compensation. A proposal to toss the embedded Konstitutional clause, that forbids konfiskation of property [land] without kompensation, was heavily approved by most parties with populist enthusiasm, in Parly’ last week.A decision, many would say, that could rank with Brexiteering, and the mellifluous Mr Trump, as wrongfooted, unless amazingly cleverly handled… something we are not above successfully achieving once or twice in a century.


Now. I write fiction and currently I am half way through phase five, in a twenty-five year, five phase project. In the process I have become curiously aware, of how the restrictions posed by the Konstitutional provision, can cause potential harm?


For instance: I have just finished an exhaustive final proofreading, of the newly edited version of a novel I published in paperback in 1996. I completed this, preparatory to a new launch of the book, as a follow up to 7Ways, onto Amazon, during this month: by those excellent people at MYeBook.co.za.


The story is called The Buffalo Hunters. It was written initially to exorcise a terrible experience I underwent during the year of our Revolution, on a day that, if it wasn’t already a date of infamy in RSA, [it was] subsequently became a day of infamy for much of the planet: 9/11.


The story, that I call a ‘”brutally allegoric crime story”, subsequently became Part One of a set that I call ‘The Azanian Quartet’… a series that covers the period 1994 to 2136. [Part three ‘The Jonker Memorandum” exists as an 84 episode podcast cyber serial on the website:nicholasjakari.com]. Part 4 is presently three quarters done and four more quarters to go: allowing for errors and omissions and rewrites.


1994 was a year [you may remember]in which our national murder rate went to 66/100,000 people [it is currently still unacceptably high, albeit now down in the 30’s]. The Buffalo Hunters, a vehicle hijacking gang on the run, is a story about one such weekend filled with murder… many murders, with multiple players set in post revolution JoziUniCity.


A particular scene in the violent graphic story, was set in the streets of a high rise region of the inner city, where the ‘night lights’ were more specifically camp fires in the sky, as residents of multiple, electricity free, hijacked, high rise tower block buildings, lit fires in their upstairs spaces to cook and keep warm: a scene written empirically during the winter of ’95.


And today, almost a quarter of a century later, as I’m re-reading what I wrote, the problem of inner city degeneration has morphed into a massive conundrum: with hijacked buildings listing in huge multiples possibly even thousands… across the city.


Apparently, close to none of them can be simply expropriated by the city, and converted to low cost housing, because non-existent, or absentee or even the absentee estates of absentee, now deceased owners, are relatively untouchable, due in part to the existence of the konstitutional clause prohibeting the uncompensated confiscation of landed property.


It seems the City has to rescue the buildings first, then struggle to contact owners, negotiate forever; and at prices that shift reality, and the moment their eye is off the ball: which is obviously often… the places are ‘re-hijacked’ … and the city is the loser.


According to the Mayor: Mr. Herman Mashaba, on radio 702 this morning, [5 March] the city has managed to restore 18 [Eighteen] buildings to their rightful owners… out of the many, many hundreds hijacked over decades now, given that it was already an established practice when I wrote the story [and that scene] in the first place during that winter of ’95.


So it does seem that we have had ‘expropriation without compensation’ now for more than a quarter of a century. I would imagine that many citizens have become immensely wealthy on the cash they were able to garner, by not paying rates [municipal taxes], electricity, personal tax, company taxes and/or royalty fees to anyone much over the 22 years, since I published the original story.


On the debit side, presumably their bribery and konektions accounts are pretty heavily loaded: such are the sources of wonderful meat for crime stories; and such ‘entrepreneurial’ people and their minions n marks form the base for many of the characters in my bloodthirsty story, of a period in history, when as one character puts it: “ There has never been a better time than now: to commit murder.”


Launch date to be confirmed during March, although you can place orders off my site at https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari with more details as they alter.


Enjoy.
PS. Should there be any problem with that last idea let me know so i can take action.

The meaning of money.

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Blog Feb 6th 2018:

So euphoria was in the air a fortnight ago at Davos; and today there is a hint of panic as some form of reality, naughtily reasserts itself. Is it an “out of Nowhere flash crash, affecting the whole planet: or simply a reminder that the mountain may be about to fall over onto the road.


Whether the present general adjustment in stock market levels and values proves enduring, or a simple case of generalized “Flash Crash-itis” it is a valuable reminder to those who operate in credit structured businesses, that debt is real and failure to kolekt your share, when its due, is the single biggest reason there is for business failure.


And right now a noticeable feature of the range of komment [sic] on the present, planet wide market move into Bear territory, in equity markets, is the sudden concern over the extent to which [almost] everything in the global economy today, is financed with DEBT capital [if I may use such a daring, yet strangely common, oxymoron].


One of the ironic truths of today’s world is this strangest of anomalies, related to the [apparently] new ‘Economics of Abundance’ [circa 2007 -2018.]. Ironically, because in an era defined as “Post –Truth”, we have the combination of a decade long exercise in ‘radical economic transformation’ called Quantitative Easing [QE]; coupled to almost manic: “Casino economy” financialised economics” and somehow along the way ordinary people vanished.


Effectively ‘business’ has for the past decade been almost exclusively concentrated on Yield. This means that global debt is today, almost infinitely greater now, than it was in 2007, when the world of money crashed as a result of debt: un-ever–payable. It is most odd, but, as I always said, over the four decades during which I often dealt with matters Economic in classrooms. … The difference between ‘us’ [economists] and the other “Subjects”, I would say, glaring at everyone, is that every year we ask the same questions in the exams… [pause while that sinks in]. We simply keep changing the answers … Everyone would laugh, uncomfortably perhaps …Surely not!!?


And then. Wow! Have we done it this time. Even the redoubtable Mrs Yellen has whined for a decade about how come we have a quadzillion of fake money out there: and there is NO INFlATION!!! There is simply about fifty years worth of stuff out there, with not enough ordinary people to spend on it. The ‘people’ [consumers for the purists] never got the free money… so they all went to work for free on Facebook and reddit and, and, and….


In other words: In the ‘Auld days’ [certainly when I studied finance and monetary theory in the late ‘60’s] a financial institution was constrained to lend no more than ten times what it had in secured assets [i.e: 10:1] on penalty of bad things happening [which they did… remember]. This is known [infamously to many on the varied fringes] as the Fractional Reserve Multiplier, invented centuries ago.


When Lehman Bros capitulated in 2007 and triggered off the [so-called] ‘Great Recession’ their debt to asset ratio stood at roughly 33 to 1. Today a decade of central bank fudged finance has pumped some 21 [twenty one] Trillion, artificial, dollars [US] into the global system. That is more than the entire US economy pulls annually and more than 21 times what that country spends annually on Defence matters.


And that is only the official “Secured” ‘money’.The number of US dollar figures for unsecured debt obligations are being, apparently, calculated in Quadzillions. I have no equipment that will enable me to do calculation on such numbers… none is all that commercially available either.


This [mass] represents a hard wired, octane fuelled, debt financialised hysteria, that among other weird effects produced a recent, almost fantasy based journey, into something called BITCOIN two months ago, that had Fred and his dog borrowing heaps of money to spend on one of the dodgiest assets in the history of bubbles… Now, of course, cometh the margin calls, and the ‘thing’ KitzBoin? ‘whatever, is/was/ has crashed deluxe, in what could quite possibly be one of economic history’s most successful Ponzi’s, to the extent that it is perhaps no longer safe.

Apparently ‘They’, coiners, aka miners, claim to be are using an allegedly impregnable, so-called ‘Blockchain’ arrangement, of destributed ledgers; that cannot be hacked by Government agency. However they have been seemingly, continuously been robbed by hackers… Like Govenmnets can’t hack? And anyway so much for Blockchain security effectiveness. if ‘they’ are not all lying about the thefts.


The effect of all this, and other generalised debt build up over the decade, has been, what some money management commentators, on business channels such as Bloomberg, and elsewhere, suggest, is a seriously scary thought about day to day financial reality.


Apparently total [unsecured] debt obligations, in the form of Derivatives, Hedges, Options, Warrants and numerous other variations on the computer driven ‘betting” game are what is being measured amongst the mass of quadzillion numbers. The financial markets have seemingly, somehow, morphed into a game that is really not much more, than considered gambling on ‘which fly would take off from the table first’ odds.


This category of “investments” [another oxymoron perhaps?] has morphed the idea of “secured” loans into the land of fable… And the business of money management has taken on the characteristics of an informal backwoods casino.


The ultimate expression of how we have devalued money over the past decade is reflected in this following piece [written in 2016] that I mused on, about an unprecedented financial experience in the 5000-year history of capital, lending and rates of interest charged for the privilege of borrowing.


Switzerland’s: 50 year
Negative yielding Bond


The differential race:
Taking two indicators
Equities rise… and rise: so
Bond returns go on sale
Down, down: down
Below
The Pale.


They broke down
Below minus point nought
One hundred basis
points
and you said
that’s as low
as it can go it’s not going
to go
further and point by
point it has
and now
the negative
has broken minus
nought three hundred
for the Nth
time
and the trend is to minus
nought fourrrrrrrrhundred.


And MONEY… Plausibly fake but nonetheless
Real
Has
Been wonderfully nourished
And grown in profusion
Never have so many been
drenched
in the flood of
lettuce
pouring from
the leaves
above and down across the bowers
of reluctant gains, miserly
returns
and the ever present ebb
of marginal
values
as the overwhelming cosmic gaze of
unlimited abun
dance
ranneth over:
de
spite the best attempts
of those who bathed
therein to restrain
it.


!NiK[‘16]


So since many of you may be out of practice in kolekting debt, money having become such a fantastical konstrukt, it is perhaps time you should come back to earth with the pragmatic: “7Ways to get your money: without resorting to violence or the law” on sale at Amazon.com: an organization that deals in real things, at good prices you can still afford while you still have time before the fall… to Universal Income.


See: https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari

Regards
Nicholas Jakari