I grew up telling stories, i made a good living telling stories and stories have always been the staple of my life, blurring truth, adapting imagination and praised, by some politically incorrect characters, that i was a “great lie writer.”

And of course fiction is all about lying on a grand scale.

The germ of the idea for the Jonker [pronounced Yonka] came from notes i made during a drunken discussion with an elderly stranger in The Rand International barroom. Much later it was shocked into life through a gunfight that woke me up and provided a stream of hallucinogenic, prophetic dreams that may or may not have been morphine induced.

Add to that the random bric a brac of day to day life… stories from the daily press, random eavesdroppings in public places, snippets off TV and radio: and a world emerges and patterns can be constructed to reveal a reality that is a possibility… or not.

 
In the most absolute sense this story took my whole life to konstrukt. I started telling stories to audiences in the Town Halls up and down the region where i grew up; and which have since morphed into a mega-metro-urban zone and changed their kollektive names. So the places where i told tales no longer exist: and the audiences have all died.

 
So now faced with the ultimate story… about how the world ended and what happened afterwards: combined with the magic of Mayan prophecy, an opportunity has arisen where i shall read this more abstract global village a bedtime story and i look forward to you coming in to listen.

 
In launching this venture i would appreciate some donations to assist with costs should you feel the story is worth an ending … this will eventually have a formal process whereby it happens which i presently don’t quite know how to expedite… one of many new things one learns daily… And in closing i would like to thank my family, my students, my friends, both living and regretfully those who are posthumous: especially Ed and David, for their unfailing contributions to this venture over a long period.A full summary of these thank you’s can be found, associated with podcast: episode 1.

From:

The Testimonies of an Enumerator …….

Ring a ring of roses
All fall down
One down, two down
All onto our noses.

Theme refrain for Corinth Starr the elder’s
Media campaign

[The random reader is reminded that this episode is part of a 19 part series, leading into 200 part series. It is a faithful interpretation of a series of textual documents discovered by a geological survey party who were prospecting for Olivine on the planet Urdos, in the !Kung region of the multiverse. The text is produced faithfully with comment where appropriate for clarification purposes. The reader is also reminded that information about Urdos is limited, for until the discovery of the “Testimonies of an enumerator” and a number of other associated texts including the book of Koz, it was believed that the planet was dead and that all incarnate beings thereon had vanished or more importantly had never existed.

The reader is also reminded that the Testimonies” which set out a series of “legends of auld Azania” seem to deal with a culminating event known as the Apocalypse, and what happened afterwards. Information, derived mainly from the book of Koz, will be provided to supplement the story where appropriate.]


…………………
Our story continues….

No one knows for certain what took place on that 23/11 moment. The idea of dominoes dominated the thinking of the world up until that point; and so it is widely believed that the suicidal struggle between the forces of unreason that had become uppermost in the polities of both the Grimmderians and the Grabbastanians “ set the bell ringing”. According to a popular song at the time, appropriated (with suitable compensation) by Corinth Starr the elder for her post electoral victory campaign, a campaign aimed at mobilising the entire part of the electorate that supported her, to move at full speed towards achieving the transformational objectives of her mandate, it was.

“Ring a ring of roses, all fall down, one down, two down, all onto our noses´.

What is known is that on 23/11 a culminating set of events took place: an island blew up to the northwest of the main bulge on the Azanian mainland sending powerful waves, the height of small hills, sweeping across the ocean towards the Firmian mainland.

Firmia was at the time experiencing its worst winter on record: snowfall and blizzards had disrupted communications that in those days were still heavily dependent on fragile infrastructures: and those infrastructures had also been neglected over time. When the wave hit the famous city of New York where the 9/11 incidents had taken place they were still higher than 30 peeple standing on each other’s shoulders and what they didn’t level on their way in they dragged out on their way back to their more usual habitat.

Coinciding with this, it seems, the entire western coastline of Firmia or the region south of Firmia fell into the ocean. How this happened is unclear since it was not supposed to be able to happen. It was speculated by peeple, known as ‘experts’, that the ‘ringing of the bell’ had been resounding, since the war between the Grimmdeers and the Grabbastanians and that this had triggered off what was known as “The Jeriko effect”. It is possible that the ringing accelerated a series of natural settling processes as the planet cooled and ebbed.

Therefore within days of the first disaster another struck Firmia.
One of the Firmian powerhouse regions on the western side of Firmia was reduced to nothing. The effect of this was as cataclysmic as the earlier island explosion had been; save that the wave was higher and the distance it travelled was not far enough to bring down that height to any great extent. A so-called 70-metre wave swept across the island of Keiiretsu and devastated the mainland beyond.

According to a headline at that time it was a day that: “the earth stopped”. .

Fortunately for Corinth Starr she had just borrowed an immense sum from the Keiiretsu, to finance the digital infrastructural requirements for the implementation of the Basic Pay system. Even more importantly, due to the extremely complex nature of the software infrastructure, that would be needed, she had imported some two thousand top-level technical specialists. These were specialists in advanced robotics, quantum physics and binary programming, amongst other things, to facilitate at an immense conference, organised to clarify how the program would be constructed and would function and to set up the basic processing structures to enable the whole system to be coordinated into the lives of the citizen..

It was the most complex neurologically structured Binary programmed model that had ever been conceived at that time and had the purpose of facilitating the complete monitoring of all citizens at all times.

“Big Brother looms” ran one major headline of the time.

Because of the threat to civil rights proposed by any monitoring system, this one was designed with multiple failsafe mechanisms built-in. These took the form of legally structured barriers in the form of procedural requirements, to protect at all times the civil rights of all citizens. The purpose of the neural programming was to enable the entire system to be self- managed and regulated with the end purpose being to have no human* intervention at all.

The prophets of unreason proclaimed loudly that her scheme was inspired by those who would enslave peeple and introduce 1000 years of terror into the lives of citizen. They proclamed that the number 666 was going to be stamped on everyone’s foreheads and so some enterprising person patented the number conmbination and the prophets of unreason had to pay a fee everytime they used the number. There was huge litigation with many claiming that the number was already copyright protected through being referenced in a fabled book of wisdom. Others countered that the copyright had expired and the number was now open game.

Whatever.In response she ordered that the news media companies reveal the hell that peeple already lived under…”Is this the truth that you would sooner have than the space that comes from mature control”, she demanded. The prophets of unreason proclaimed the world to be in its ‘end days” and mounted increasing pressure against her.

Corinth Starr was close to reaching the end of her tether. She had been in power for two and a half years and her campaign on the rape front had been amazingly successful, especially her use of the Virtuality game. Paranoia about the virtual;ity game was the stuff of urban legend.*[*Urban legend: we do not understand the meaning of this term. we assume it to imply uncertainty about some subject matter. Contributor.]

However civil right activists were hounding her. There was a drawn out legal issue pending at the Constitutional court that sought to forbid the use of the Virtuality game for criminal control. The grounds were that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. As a populist she knew that the people considered tearing rapists apart, limb from limb, may just about constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Compared to that the Virtuality game was an emotional holiday. Her case was ready but she nonetheless sought by every means to deflect it and somehow had managed to keep it at the low end of the Court lists.It was a mandatory political strategy perfected by her predecessors*.[*We have no comprehensive information on her predecessors and Koz refers to such insinuations as being possibly unfounded allegations. Contributor.]

Nonetheless while people were reasonably placated by the arrest of thousands of alleged rapists the fact that they were only allegations, and that the Basic Pay issue was still an unfulfilled promise was putting her under immense pressure. So she had set January 2013 as the day the Basic Pay programme would launch, with intention to encompass every citizen by late 2014 [in time for the next election, which she duly won with an enhanced majority.] .

We shall launch “come hell or high water” she announced, little realising how prophetic those words were.

She had her team in place and was handling the more recalcitrant and, obviously about to be sidelined, existing bureaucrat class, with what a peeple at the time called “Ball ripping malevolence.” [? Contr:]The conference was scheduled for the week before a traditional feast period, which she had decided to forgo in the interests of launching the entire package by her, self-proclaimed, deadline some two weeks later at the start of the New Year*. [ New Year: Refers to an infinitely repetitive, iterative, numerator defining the passage of universe and all its inhabitants. The Multiverse as you would know refers to a multi – time passage.] of The urgency with which her teams were working was unprecedented and there were many who said later that she must have known what was going to happen.

For instance she had imported a similar block of multi-national genius level technicians into Zone One, six months before her election victory, to implement a scheme to run the Virtuality shows. It was her intention to commercialise the Virtuality games in order to preempt the accusation that the game constituted cruel and unusual punishment by making it a popular sport.

This was how she intended to solve the various difficulties associated with the plagues, these were Starr’s answer to the “Feelies” conceptualised by a philosophic writer called Huxley* ages earlier. [* We have no information about this person… Contributor.]

An unprecedented battering of storms and bad weather throughout the northern part of the planet had prevented most of the Outlanders from returning to their respective homes, after the conference ended, and so most were still in Zone One in Southern Azania when the island of Keiiretsu was almost entirely destroyed. One of the survivors was the Keiiretsun Prime Minister and what he did next changed the existing world forever.

The Firmians were bankrupted. That was what happened next. The Prime Minister of Keiiretsu called up his markers and the Firmians who had been debt financing their economy for more than half a lifetime were unable to sustain the run on their currency, especially when the CHI-nans panicked and cashed in their massive bankroll. Their economy collapsed and together with the loss of a major part of their modern infrastructure the country ground to a halt for a number of years. Firmia closed itself off to the world and the world effectively closed down.

It ground to a halt, with massive declines in trade and travel, and huge amounts of resources going into recovery. The world that emerged from that chaos was different to any world that had ever existed before.

Meanwhile Corinth Starr the elder found her debt rescinded by the grateful Keiiretsuns and she was able to focus her total attention on dealing with Southern Azania’s own difficulties. She took the credits she had acquired almost by mischance, converted them to one-century bonds and issued them as low interest investment instruments and trebled the amount of cash she needed to implement her plan. The media made a huge fuss of her coup and it provided a bright moment in an otherwise scary world scenario.

And scary was an understatement. The crisis was immense. Joblessness affected half of all potentially employable citizens. Considerable numbers were affected by the plagues that had become more virulent over the intervening time since the era of the dispossession. There were certain places where violent and lawless behaviour had the upper hand and there were places where it didn’t. As mentioned previously the violent assault upon the bodies of peeple, called rape, which had been at pandemic proportions was still barely under control. The decline of rural life had accelerated, great urban presences in the form of so-called ‘informal dwellings’ congregated alongside the major linking toll roads. All other road connections returned to the primitive and at times were impassable. Poverty and drunkenness were endemic. The collapse in trade rendered workless many more swathes of peeple.

The vast estates of earlier times that had produced huge amounts of food had largely disappeared and been replaced with micro holdings which barely supported the holding itself and an aggravating factor was growing soil exhaustion. Further north in the land of the Rumbabweans attempts were made to reconstitute the former large-scale holdings under the more fragmented ownership patterns prevailing following forcible redistribution of the land at the turn of the century.

Experimental production methods with multiple owners attempting to produce genetically modified foods were not successful and thus the entire region had become chronically food dependant on food from external, mainly of Firmian origin. After the catastrophe of 23/11 this food delivery stopped and many peeple were unable to get food and this accelerated the movement towards urban solutions. Millions died of starvation and the violence associated with desperate poverty.

The most successful solutions were the so-called ‘five towers’ in northwest Zone one, the first of which had been built almost in ridicule by Starr’s construction company in the years prior to her accession to power. The Towers solution gave Zone one an edge and was why Southern Azania held then, and later why Zone one held when the world came close to dying after 10/1.

What were the positives? Knowledge, controlled water resources, the solar towers, a stable state, a soundly based and diversified economy and a policing system that at core became highly effective, even if it creaked badly under the strain of dealing with an excessively unruly society.

When you start some series of actions it is often best to open the way you intend to proceed. Those who would force others to adhere to their views, no matter how arcane may choose to open with violence. Those who seek to lead others with a gentler bit toward to a different grazing place may choose to open with negotiation.

Corinth Starr the elder took the view that the coupling of peeple into the lascivious contorted entanglements necessary often to ensure either congenial mutually satisfying penetration was an inherently threatening circumstance, fraught with the potential for violence

As a pragmatist supreme she acknowledged that this coupling was the basic drive that kept peeple motivated to do the tasks that beset them in their daily lives. It was also the source of the plague.

In the days of her young impressionable studenthood she had read the great novels of her time and had been particularly intrigued by some contrivance invented by the writer Aldous Huxley, called the ‘Feelies’. It seemed that the ‘Feelies’ were places that allowed for the more recreational aspects of the coupling process and separated it from the purely reproductive.

In her later pre-political years working as a construction cost analyst she had facilitated the development of virtual reality building models. She would use these to enable her and her workers to quantify the use of materials more effectively in order to maintain a profitable route to the success of her construction mission. As a result she had created one of Azania’s most formidable rising construction companies and had been responsible for many roads and bridges not to mention sky-scraping buildings of enormous height, such as the ‘five towers’ project.. She had also learned how to rattle her competition and stay one step ahead of the ‘rat pack’ as she called them.

Somewhere along the way she had been raped and had had to suffer the rage and horror of taking brutally primitive anti-plague measures to ward off what she had seen as a terroristic assault on her, and her threatening ability. Plus she had to deal with the rage at the assault itself.

Her experience changed her and sent her plunging into a world of confrontational activism only to find herself the subject of polite condescension and not a little fear. She prepared for the future with care and hired persons to develop virtual reality models that would act as ‘paralysing’ agents; nullifying the overwhelming drive to engage in recreational coupling through provision of a solo experience of such apparent reality that it became better than the real thing could ever be. And then she was going to lock bad people into it for life. This was the genesis of the “Virtuality Game©”.

Dealing with this issue involved charging into the most delicately problematic zone of peeple’s behaviour. Satisfying the urge to couple or treble or engage in larger multiples of interconnectedness was the drive that saturated the entire ethos of those places that were more successful at satisfying the wants and needs of peeple generally.

Those regions of the planet that were controlled by ideological philosophies derived from contrarian attitudes, to the coupling process, had huge problems accepting that ‘such things’ relevant to inter-penetrative behaviour occurred naturally and focused their citizen’s attention on the less salubrious elements of the actions. They placed terrible and almost insurmountable barriers into the imaginations of their subjects against enthusiastic coupling and created mental distortions that were ultimately bad for general societal well being.

It was not a subject that could be discussed politely at all, since any discussion always carried sub-textual implications of either: desire to couple, or rejection of coupling desire, and no one ever knew where they were, with consequent misunderstanding and unhappiness. It was frequently observed that “in the absence of truth, people read between the lines and since no one acknowledged the lines the result was always misunderstanding.”

It was such a misunderstanding that had been the cause of her own rape and she formulated the view that it was the absence of clarity regarding the subtext that was the problem, rather than the act itself, which while violent and abusive had nonetheless caused her body to betray her, by triggering off responses she would normally have felt only under conditions of far greater pleasure. This had compounded her rage.

She had felt violated by her own body, and subsequently by the system with which she had had to deal after the event, and which had at every stage carried with it the implications that she had somehow “asked for it”. She resolved that something about the process of so-called ‘courtship behaviour’ had to change if all citizens were to achieve happiness, That No had to mean No unless expressly revoked. A world in which No could be made to mean anything was intolerable and oppressive.

Now that she had achieved power through the combination of Basic Pay and the Gender Agenda she knew that were she to achieve anything positive she had to move with breathtaking speed and structured terror. There was no other way. The preferred process of negotiation and respect for the ‘process’, as the endless rounds of nugatory ineffectual negotiations was called, caused delays that were proving fatal. The planet was increasingly beset by violence and rage, inflicted by sub-sets of citizens with unmet aspirations and agendas, many of which involved destroying the material basis on which society’s well being rested: mindless acts predicated on the belief that “if I can’t have it no one can”.

Starr’s vision involved the idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number and if that meant cutting a few corners, then she would have to do it she decided. She knew that she had a brief window before the nullifying, numbing batterings of democratic negotiation would set in and compromise her vision until all those vested interests most threatened by her success would bring their inexorable pressure to bear and corrupt her ‘missionaries’ positions.

She had a limited tolerance for the weaknesses of her subordinates, and in her construction company had developed ranges of criteria, against which to evaluate the entire costing processes of her activities, in order to weed out corrupt practices and attempts to use influence to enrich the unworthy.

She figured that she had at best six months, maybe four before the ‘honeymoon’ would be over as it were and the dagger’s she had so brutally experienced before would be out and plunged well into her exposed positions.

So her first move was the Rape Genocide declaration and the acceptance of this measure by unanimous consent…in the words of some commentators: with indulgence, from those who thought her a hormonally imbalanced person. She realised that her will could only be achieved by the supplementary facilitation provided by her proposed Contractual Relations Act.

Then she announced almost, casually, after passage of the successful negotiation of the Rape Genocide decision, that investigations of “rape’ cases would be carried out under the provisions of the Terrorism act, which up until then had been rarely evoked. It now became a wholesale mandate and those who were arrested found themselves plunged underground into a reality that was pure horror in its deprivation and virtual reality pleasure, in its use of technology to nullify the will….

To be continued….

From: the testimonies of an enumerator: the rise of Corinth Starr the elder.

[The story so far: Corinth Starr the elder sweeps to an upset electoral victory in Southern Azania, powerhouse of the Azanian Konfederacy. Beyond the borders of the Konfederacy events conspired to give Starr the leverage she needs to enact her proposed concept of The Gender agenda…Basic Pay.]

The rise of Corinth Starr in the Azanian Konfederacy:

After nearly half a century of relative peace in the more developed parts of the world a new and insidious threat had become more and more manifest: a combination of criminal behaviour and terrorism. How to control the rising levels of these scourges while yet maintaining the peeple’s rights ethos developed during the latter part of the 20th century was a task which some described as Herculean and others as Sisyphean. These two ancient terms described respectively an almost insurmountable task and one that seemed never to end no matter what was done to deal with it.

The accession to power of the ‘Rules Ffirst’ parties in the developed world during the crisis period of the early century meant that gradually the human rights ethos became subject to a series of overriding control measures of which the Terrorism acts, passed by many governments, were the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ as they used to say although quite what that meant is still uncertain.

We have mentioned the Twin Towers incident as the first major assault by the forces of unreason: an air assault that brought down the largest building in the greatest city of the planet’s greatest empire of the time: … Firmia.

The ‘Rules Ffirsters’ of Firmia struck back, destroying the bases of the forces of unreason while the ‘Irrationals’ struck again and again randomly hoping to wear down the forces of reason through mindless terror. The sensible rationalists cowered in the face of unreason and turned their rage on the Rules Ffirsters whom they blamed for generating extremist reaction through their absurd preoccupation with orderliness and protecting what existed rather than visualising what could be.

And of course one is inevitably bound today by the outcomes of yesterday’s decisions, or, more appropriately, indecisions.

Rape: the genocidal crime.

Starr the elder’s first action on taking up her majority in Parliament was to pass a measure declaring rape to be a genocidal crime and an act of war to be dealt with as an act of war and not as a simple criminal act for which the peeple’s rights provisions of the Constitution applied.

Subsequently she passed the, now long established, “Contractual Relations Act” in support of the measure. Using the detention provisions of the Terrorism Act (passed by the previous administration using their former two thirds majority in Parliament and notwithstanding considerable public disquiet) she was able to bypass the Peeple’s Rights provisions of the Southern Azanian Constitution.

She did this by having persons, who were accused of making un-businesslike, non-professional, uninvited overtures, either overtly or covertly, to other

from: The Testimonies of an Enumerator:

A digression on a planet

Whatever you do to the web
Of life shall be returned to you twicefold

The book of Shadrach: Navaho section

[Contributors note: In these testimonies recorded by an unknown enumerator we have so far been privy to an unfolding event in a region known as the Azanian Konfederacy. They are reproduced in much the same form as they were found allowing for variances in translation. Where necessary or useful for additional illumination, some ideas are clarified by the Editor or Contributor: i.e.: Ed’: or Contr’:]

The section you are about to read, is a divergence, and contains information relating to an existing range of competing events and entities external to the Azanian Konfederacy.

Some of the statements made would seem based on the unknown enumerator’s familiarity with those things, rather than expertise and so, much of the information is unclarified hearsay.

Unfortunately we have little else to provide validity other than the various monuments to ancient so-called ‘civilizations’, which we now know did exist. Where necessary we have referred to Koz: Legends of Urdos as a form of reference validification.]

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

“…Oppression is a degree- by- degree process. It is however prompted by a pre-emptive action, and thereafter the citizen becomes a reactive entity for a time until pacified.” [Corinth Starr the Elder]

It was Starr’s view that the citizen had been reduced to a passive, almost peripheral entity made all the worse for having no obvious range of choice in the marketplace for political ideas than that presented by the existing governing order and not particular presented by any of those who were, it seemed, unwilling to govern, having carved comfortable niches for themselves within the existing status quo as a smug form of opposition..

“The agenda of all government is the greatest happiness of all the citizens…And the Gender agenda is Basic Pay” said Corinth Starr in her closing speech before the election and by election day itself the statement had become a national saying, peeple were humming it in lifts, singing in dense traffic and even in the outlands or auslande as they were more commonly known, goatherds were shouting the slogan at their goats.

It is possible that the governing party completely underestimated the power of the gender vote have taken it for granted for so long. They may well have simply taken the voter for granted there having been no real opposition for at least five to ten years. Where anyone had presented any credible threat that person or group had been ‘bought’, using the floor crossing route, which was so much more efficient a method of subverting the democratic process than the “murder incorporated” strategy followed by the evil oppressive governments of the ‘dispossession’ era. [Notwithstanding this murder of political persons was not uncommon.]

And it had worked. There had been peace and stability for nearly a full generation. The region had shown modest growth and many of those who had been dispossessed in the past came to acquire great wealth and standing in society. The routine deletions of interesting political persons, was almost ingrained: car accidents being the most common form of assassination [as this variation on presence deletion was called.] and the most probable.]

However there were issues that were not being dealt with or, more commonly, were being dealt with but the rate at which they were being dealt with was outpaced by the accelerating rate at which the issues became worse.

For instance, at the physical level, the disintegration of the national road communication system accelerated and the pattern of macadamised road infrastructures, that along with a plentiful supply of dams had been some of the few useful inheritances of the dispossession era, gradually either wore out, disintegrated or worse. In many cases entire road networks were uplifted and removed to isolated areas where they were re-laid as basketball courts and other facilities (or at least this was what people came to believe). In some places roads were dug up because it was believed they were covering valuables: a deadly belief as it turned out eventually.

So gradually the only way to travel was via toll-roads, paying ever rising fees to travel shorter and shorter distances and gradually this reduced the traffic to essential traffic only. Travel by rail, formerly a major means of inter- regional travel had also gradually become more and more problematic as sections of rail were stolen, together with equipment and on occasions entire pick up stations which were appropriated as dwelling materials. Trains were also increasingly vulnerable to ambush and derailment by armed bandits who gradually, insidiously, came to proliferate, as the rural areas were depopulated and the means of policing those areas became less effective..

There had for instance been a time when peeple had travelled great distances during their popular annual festival holiday seasons. At these times peeple stopped working (when there was work) and went far away to enjoy recreation time in relaxed places. Fewer people did this anymore, and travel off main roadways was both unsafe due to the rise in banditry, and hazardous due to the condition of the roads. Life had come to centre much more about peeple’s home territories.

This was not an issue that peeple voted over but was undoubtedly a problem with all the rest: declining health care availability as the system sagged under the strain of the plagues, robberies at isolated pension payout points, and a low-key, informal ‘civil conflict’ had seen the deletion of more than ten thousand agricultural workers over the period since the formal end of the Dispossession struggle. Incidents of Murder [ a particularly aggressive form of unlawful deletion ]of those designated “witches” with allegedly supernormal powers* [*see: The further testimonies: The Yonka Memorandum] had also surged and there were rumours of slaughter being in the thousands. [Slaughter: another form of Deletion activity, usually unlawful,l and on a large scale. Ed: ref Koz.]

Much of this latter violence was due to the ease of robbing isolated places, rather than by design but the effect, as in other parts of Azania was the marginalisation of rural regions, with a consequent effect on income generating opportunities. The masses out there did listen to the radio though, and they voted for Corinth Starr in their hordes, notwithstanding widespread difficulties with voting points and attempts by the ruling party to force their influence… ultimately the scale of defection was too great.

On the powerful side though, the year of Starr’s accession was also the year the first of the great ‘food towers’, as they came to be called, was built in north west zone one [by the Corinth Starr Construction consortium] This perceptive move (there were ultimately five) enabled Zone one to achieve a high measure of food security notwithstanding the growing problems of water supply.

This water supply issue was the most serious long-term problem facing Zone One, and although sensible measures had been followed for decades in respect of conservation of water resources, the demand was constantly outpacing supply. Zone one was the most attractive destination in the whole of Azania and the people flowed there in their multitudes. The era of advanced Water Wars was looming, as was the renewed era of [water forced ] limitation on peeple’s movements. Water access and provision had been so called “privatised” early in the era; a move which had been controversial amongst the masses who felt, rightly in some opinions, that water should be freely available to all as it was critical to survival on Urdos.

The populist ‘good ole’ opposition oligarchs had chosen the theme of: “limiting the influx of aliens into Zone one”, as a primary election platform issue. They were calling for water permits limiting all citizens’ water access rights and providing overnight permits for travellers. Gratuitous migrants of whom there were many would not qualify for water rights after the first five days of their presence in Zone One. The party pulled a remarkable number of votes. The governing party found itself coming third in Zone one, and did little better in the wider country.

In the event the government conceded defeat, rather gracelessly, at twelve o clock on the day following the announcement although they kept hoping for a last minute miracle that would reprieve them from immanent unemployment.

Corinth Starr took fifty two percent of the popular votes making her the biggest single block in the house. It was an upset unequalled in generations. Various natural allies added another six percent to her muscle and suddenly the country was looking at a whole new political outcome. The presence of a lone, maverick, Progressive Market Libertarian Party representative, as one of her coalition allies kept the financial markets from sliding into chaos and the whole place took a deep breath and prepared for some horse trading.

While the mass murder and rape scandal in an Ausland territory provided the spur of rage that catapulted Starr the elder to power, it is doubtful that Corinth Starr would have been any more effective than any of her predecessors were it not for a series of events in the outer world which combined to give her the space and the leverage she needed, to effect her own revolution and so we must digress for a time to identify what happened, in order that her ‘reforms’ can be seen in their own perspective.

The great ‘clash of civilizations’, that had characterised the conflicts on the planet during Starr’s incubation for power had taken an abrupt and violent turn during the opening year of the 21st century, with an infamous military strike called the ‘Twin Towers’ incident. In this attack the great forces of unreason on the planet were launched into an assault on the world of reason. The world of reason retaliated.

This was followed by a period of revenge taking which saw the great Firmian empire, the target of the Towers assault, reaching out to strike at its enemies in ways that reduced their physical capacity for conflict while, theoretically, nourishing their enemies capacity for functional participation in their “system” of global connectedness.

In reality there were more than two civilization systems, which came into conflict at that time.

The prevailing system in much of what was called the “developed” world, was known as the least-path-of-resistance system, whereby the so called ‘Rule of Law’ prevailed, and when it didn’t ‘common sense’, whatever that means, prevailed. These systems were termed democracies and there were competing forms of democracy. Those that proved most durable were, according to Koz: citing its sources; were those “where the citizen had the unfettered right to change those thieves* that governed them on a routine basis when it was felt their thieving had got out of hand.” Common sense [sic] demonstrated that wherever peeple had the unfettered right to change thieves then the populace remained relatively compliant. Where the right did not exist tensions grew, and common sense became spurious and often fatal. [Editor: The word “Thieves” in this instance seems to be a synonym for the more common word “Politician”. There is evidence that the two names were synonymous, although there are some [smaller] numbers of sources that perceive the relationship between the two words as symbolic or metaphoric.]

There were times when common sense did not conflict with what were regarded as the inalienable rights of peeple: that is, the right to pursue happiness and fulfillment, in peace and peeplehood. When it didn’t concur it was often because the peeple were in the grip of some mass delusion that apparently took various forms. [In many of these delusions the particulars of the delusion itself took priority over the rights of peeple and led to great bout of peeple rights abuses: ref Koz: Contributor’s comment.]

Most peeple favoured this ‘common sense’ democracy system: a favourable, if exasperating idea. I.e. it was common sense to steal as little as possible from the Peeple while governing them, so that you could be re-elected. And then, notwithstanding its many flaws, it was arguably the most successful system on the planet for achieving its objective for the largest number of its proponents. These people who adhered to the ideals of a ‘changing-thieves-routinely- democracy’ were known as the ‘Sensibles’.

In contrast to the “Sensibles” were the “Rules Ffirsters”. Rules Ffirsters, who came in a variety of shades, both physically and consciously, worked on the basis that the most important rule of peeple was self-reliance and that no one should be helped in case it made them weak and unable to take part in the game of life. Obviously “Rules Ffirsters” helped those they regarded as “theirs”: their adherents, and were cloying with those they perceived to be convertible. They were invariably rude and offensive to those Sensibles with whom they came into conflict, rude and offensive to the point of murder* [ Editor contribution: murder: unlawful termination of incarnate entity manifestation otherwise called Deletion.]

“Rules Ffirst” was also the dominant philosophy of those people who were also known as Irrationalists. Irrationalists were for the most part people who believed that the concrete world in which all Peeple lived was imaginary and that there was another external world in some mysterious No place called ‘Heaven’ where those who obeyed the right living rules would be allowed to live when they ended their period of time in the so-called ‘reality’: represented in this case by Urdos. Where these delusions were localised to a few individuals those people were often locked away for their own protection [ and that of others ] However some delusions were truly global in scope, with millions of adherents; and therefore these delusions were often accorded honory reality status. This caused huge confusion amongst all classes of Peeple.

These Rules Ffirsters had certain books of “rules” [naturally] to which adherence was mandatory on pain of deletion. After a long period of decline during which sensible rationalism had helped peeple become more prosperous and comfortable than ever before, in the long story of Peepledom, they had made a great leaping comeback on the brink of the changeover from one era to another. Irrationalists were adept at exploiting peeple’s understandable fear of uncertainty and promoted a ‘death or else’, millenarian, or apocalyptic vision. This was a vision of chaos and destruction to all who would not adhere to their varying brands of Irrationalism.

“Irrationalism was an attractive and simplistic idea and helped those termed “the meek” to cope with the living ‘hell’ represented by reality in Urdos: a place in which otherwise ordinary peeple lived lives of desperate convention”* [ Koz: ref Ibid P 867]

Rules Ffirst Irrationalists were also by no means a united group and the many divisions between them were the basis of the so-called: ”Clash of Civilisations” mentioned earlier. Apparently competing groups of Irrationalists presented their own allegedly unique version of the world allegedly populated by irrationalist citizens. This world was subject to the whims of some external, non-evident, dualistic non-physical entity of immense vindictiveness. This entity was referred to by many names, but was most commonly called “God”.

At the same time all the strugglers amongst the peeple had to obey abstract rules of selfhood that were often founded in myth and ceremony and were frequently abstract and interpretable only by a ‘rules’ specialist expert. It was a though the world was all a stage, as someone called William said, and the scene was beset with disparate groups of performers in a trillion arranged settings all wearing funny hats and diverse ceremonial gear. They were dressed for a multitude of pantomimes, playing to a bored audience of prospects; who were all, themselves, locked into material joy. This led to absurdities at times. For instance a citizen in one place could, name something as trivial as a children’s iconic toy known as a ‘teddy bear’ “Mohammed” without raising an eyebrow; while in another place the same act could result in a crime so heinous that presence deletion was called for. [Contr’ note: we do not fully understand the motivation behind this observation. According to Koz the Teddy” part of the teddy bear was originally Theodore. It is presumed that the observation relates to the freedom peeple had to change their names.]

To break that link with comfort and reveal the pain beneath the surface was the goal of the Irrationalists. It was the source of their power. In many places dominant groups of Irrationalists sought to prohibit any competition from competing Irrationalists and even from systems developed by Sensibles. This meant that Sensibles were forced at times into uncomfortable and compromising alliances.

It was certainly true that life beyond the most basic level was an invented game and one that brought great pleasure to even its most minimalist performers.

Early in the 21st century the ‘Rules Ffirsters’ team became the ascendant team in the world with the Firmians coming to be ruled more powerfully than previously by a brand of that philosophy. Meantime the world body charged with maintaining world peace [an oxymoron of course] was still governed by the least-path party derived from Sensibles philosophy; with paralysing interventions from coalitions of the irrational.. Very little positive happened, as each side had a vested interest in the failure of the other, and like or not, themselves. Not all games are played to be won the best are played for as long as the pleasure remains.

Then there were those who argued that both the Rules Ffirsters and the Sensibles were playing an elaborate game in which only one way of perceiving the world was permitted, and it was a game played successfully by sophisticated adherents while the poor suffered and became poorer, because there was no way that the system, as it was then evolving, could ever accommodate them.

For some of these general opponents of the status quo their alternative form of system was based on the belief that there was no system. They (the proponents of unreason) held that the entire purpose of Peeple’s existence was to prepare for an anticipated joyous existence in an alternative quantum dimension. Any significant participation in the systems created by the various material empires of the day, were guaranteed to destroy Peeple’s ability to prosper in that alternative existence.

This so-called alternate existence allegedly followed upon non-presence in this existing ‘apparent’ reality. This was a confusing concept for peeple, which is as it should be, since it was founded on a nonsensical idea that imaginary things were actually more real the real things. It helped the cause that for many in the world of unreason, the main way to reach peeple with their message was by murdering peeple. Randomly murdering peeple in the interests of a so-called ideological issue was guaranteed to prove advantageous to those committing the deed.

The irrationalist purpose being that if they made everyone scared enough then they would generally agree to be guided by the principles of unreason.

According to the Sensible materialist’s position, the philosophy of unreason was based on an illusion. It was though an immensely powerful and attractive illusion and claimed a growing number of adherents …peeple disillusioned by the horror of their present reality longed for the liberation brought by non-presence. They used their own non-presence assaults as a means to force their enemies to negotiate with unreason. They, and many materialist opponents of the existing systems as well, claimed, [reasonably, as it turned out. Ed] that both the “rules” parties on the planet, and the ‘least resistance” parties, were all pursuing unsustainable policies that would end by destroying everyone’s capacity to survive.

And the system was under threat. Global aging, for instance, was apparently a new disease that threatened to bankrupt the developed regions, to destabilise the global economy and overturn the existing geopolitical order. Most of the most established peeple were elderly (had been present for too long). They had achieved a life that no peeple in previous ages had ever achieved (to the best of anyone’s knowledge) and were fearful of it being threatened: and took active steps to protect their positions.
A generation of peacefulness had softened peeple. There was nothing more desirable than peaceful ness…peeple were prepared to give their presence and happiness for a peacefulness moment.

It was into this ambience that the infamous 9/11 assault took place. Peeple simply making their way in life were summarily executed (deleted) at the workplace…Reduced to non-presence without option. The horror changed the world forever. The lands of the Firmians, and the GrÖlanders (another power bloc on the planet): changed forever….

To be continued…

Legends of Urdos and Corinth Starr

If you’ve been following the Testimonies you can skip the next few paragraphs.

For those who have not yet read the testimonies the following represents a small synopsis of what you are about to read.

To start with everything you are about to read is fiction. The story posed in the fiction is even a fiction within a fiction and is a fictional, even fantastical, history of the world and specifically a place called Southern Azania [SA] during the period 2009-2019.

The “enumerator” of the title is believed to have been a census taker called Marak, living in roughly 2137 AD. [There is controversy over this dating procedure and so it is used interchangeable with other numbers] Some commentators have suggested that the enumerator was some form of Exile.

The Testimonies themselves were part of a parcel of what may loosely be called ‘documents’ discovered by a party of mineral explorers who were visiting the desert planet we call Urdos in search of the fabled Olivine resources which it was always believed existed in huge mother lodes on that sad planet.

The documents enabled us to confirm what scientists had always professed. That is that Urdos had once been a planet, abundant in life. Ultimately our ancestors had used it up and moved on leaving the remnant of the well-used environment to coalesce into dust.

What caused great excitement about the discovery of the document cache was that the period covered by this Enumerator encompasses the period when realisation became sentient: Urdos was in trouble. [You will remember that the documents were referred to in the press as “The scrolls of Monte Christo”, being a reference to the place where they were found as defined on the documents themselves, for as you would have surmised a desert has few place markers.]

Some historians see Corinth Starr and her revolution as the spark that accelerated the catastrophes that befell the planet. Others, more rational perhaps [if one should say that about an Historian] argued that hers was the only revolution that could have ridden out the storm that followed her accession to power.

Gramlich in particular argues that the planet had been experiencing increasing seismic activity for almost two generations before Starr was elected President of Southern Azania. She [Gramlich] continued, that “geographic change and seismic turmoil had taken an accelerating curve, after a series of so-called “Nuclear triple double taps”: explosions that took place in a region that bordered onto the plate structure of the planet.” * [ref: F Gramlich: The origins of chaos. Essay. extract from: The Legends of Urdos. Publ: 9870.]

Those who followed the story in the popular press will remember that Gramlich assembled an impressive battery of data demonstrating how the harmonic symmetry of the planet was jarred by an off-note vibration pattern that prompted a series of seismic events, which while small of themselves, were catastrophic for the humans on the planet, for its balance in the universe had been altered and existing patterns were altering, irrevocably as we now know.

What follows over 19 episodes is the story of how Corinth Starr came to power and what she did afterwards

5 The story of Starr the elder.

The Story so far

In the previous episode Corinth Starr the elder launched her vision of the true post- liberation society in an emerging Azanian Konfederacy, her specific mandate being to promote her principle of Basic Pay.

She presented her manifesto in the now famous Constitution Hill Indaba to acclamation and consternation: acclamation from her supporters and consternation from everybody else

The cynics claimed that Starr’s idea was to make the poor pay for their own development and then set them up so they’d lose everything to the thieving rich.

The cynics were not alone. The Greenists and other groupings, that held [prophetically as it turned out] that the earth was in trouble, and would start hitting back. These radicals saw humanity as virus-like, clawing into the body of Urdos, in ever increasing numbers, causing intolerable itching. They saw Corinth’s vision as crass opportunism.

She was exacerbating the problem; they cried…the poor, schmuck Poor would go into debt to fund an ongoing, ultimately unsustainable, chain of consumer behaviour that would only accelerate the planet’s race to destruction.

“More of the same”, said many. There were powerful voices amongst that part of the leadership, which represented strongly vested interests and honorary holdings, who articulated the argument that it was their very inability to access their wealth that saved the poor from sliding into abject destitution. [As if ordinary destitution was ok, said the cartoons in the weekly print press]. In other words being unable to register their shanties and traditional holdings was ‘good for them’. The ultimo cynics amongst the cynics (and those who felt somehow threatened by the whole idea) said that they found the argument strangely familiar, albeit wrapped up in another package.

There was remarkable unanimity amongst the entire range of oligarchs with which society was normally loaded. The idea of Bee Pee was caricatured and ridiculed. The regular writers in the popular press articulated a storm of debate, a great deal centered around the significance of dropping the idea contained in the word “Grant “, which had been dropped summarily from the BIG argument of the preceding years and had suddenly become a universal right: a move that had caught everyone flatfooted. The articulate class chewed over the change, talking endlessly.

“This market dependency syndrome that we’ve created will blow up the planet.” The spokespeople for the opposition were articulate, and comfortable for the most part.

Starr the elder taunted the arrogance of well-fed opponents denying the destitute a crust of bread because it wasn’t mouldy enough. Here was an position she could scorn. The pivot point to her assault on the power base

Weblog: 11/08/07 Welcome to the 4th episode of the “Testimonies of an enumerator”, a weekly serial in 19 parts that acts as a prelude to part 3 of my collection called the Azanian Quartet. The first two parts of the Azanian Quartet: The Buffalo Hunters and the Ashanti Raider are both available in ebook form at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari. @ USD$1.50 each

In a preemptive, some say petulant move, this week our beloved President, Thabo the Great fired his Deputy Health Minister over an alleged act of insubordination[I gather]. It was such an event that catapulted an energetic Corinth Starr into the independent political arena where she gained a remarkable victory for her Gender in the coming Gender conflict associated with the Starr Revolution. Read on….

4 The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy under Starr the elder.
Period 2009 – 2019

The De Soto conditions

Previously: In episode 3 you read that Corinth Starr (the elder), leader of the Gender* Party made a keynote, life defining declaratory speech at the famous Constitutional Hill Indaba in which she presented the now-famous argument for Basic Pay, a change we all now think of about as often as we do the air we breathe, and which began to turn the tide against the chronic poverty of the previous age.

[* gender: the term used to denote two alternate species of humanity, locked, at that time, into a mutually demanding, reproductive process that aroused considerable competitive conflict. It was also a source of recreation, with the demands of the recreational dimension generally overriding those of reproduction.It was noted that there were humans who rejected the reproduction demands inherent in their design and chose to penetrate their own gender, so therefore not all those who were penetrated were of the penetratee* gender, although the effect in terms of dominance power relationships was similar.][**Penetratee: regular readers will remember that for convenience we have chosen to define the two gender variants that made up humanity on Urdos as penetratee and penetrator, as the terminology used in the documents on which these testimonies are based did not seem too clear on the roles.]

Continuing: The great issue of that time, from Starr’s perspective, was not only gaining acceptance of the idea of Basic Pay but also developing an irrefutable [if perhaps apparently facile] argument to justify her proposed course of action to the hard core economists and bankers of the world. It was her intention to liberate the world ultimately: starting with Southern Azania as the model, from the economic malaise into which a huge marginalised proportion of the planet’s citizenry had slid, early in the new century, and from which it was proving increasingly difficult to emerge, notwithstanding the brief stumbling emergence of the south Asian* economies.[Editors note: we do not know much about these entities. It seems that they may have disappeared during the great climate meltdown of the early part of this post-apocalypse era.]

According to popular legend, Starr the elder spotted opportunity.

Starr had originally sensed the opportunity during a television business chat show on CNBC Africa that she was idly attending to during a late night work session. It had featured a well-known, populist economic analyst from a poverty drenched region in South America.. He had written a widely acclaimed book evaluating why some places in the world, (mainly those from which the Koloniste or kinfolk of the Koloniste came), were able to become prosperous and comfort seeking, while much of the world languished in poverty, adrift in an ocean of corruption, bedevilled with fraud and abusive, unfulfilled promises.

It had been received wisdom for centuries that the reason some were rich (as it was called, i.e. well endowed with valuable assets) and the many were poor [i.e. had no possessions of value or means of obtaining any] was due to the thieving behaviour of those who were rich, stealing wealth (as collective richness was called) from the weak and the timid and the generally self effacing ‘peeple’, to benefit only themselves.

This belief had been the cause of immense conflict between the rich and the poor throughout the century preceding the 21st [51st]. Those places where the poor had won out had steadily become poorer, due to indescribable levels of corruption and mismanagement that had accompanied their attempts to run an incentiveless environment. As frequently collapse was inevitable as those who triggered the Revolutions of the age became themselves the new elites with only token regard for the poor and the dispossessed but without the collective experience and skills from ages past.

Those fewer places where the rich, or as they put it, where opportunity had won out, steadily became richer. Many believed that this was mostly due to luck since there was still plenty of corruption and mismanagement in those places. Nonetheless both sides plunged into an era of reconsideration in the aftermath of the inevitable implosion of all those poor regions. This occurred over the decades known as the ‘Millennium Changeover’ between the so-called 20th and the 21st centuries [Also, for different, but equally obscure reasons, known as the 50th and the 51st centuries: contributor’s note.] The implosions gradually contributed to declining economic activity on the plane, which at times ground to a virtual halt, relatively speaking by the late end of the opening decade of the 21st/51st century.

At that time peeple in the southern part of what was later to be called the Azanian Konfederacy had not yet realised how much their world had changed completely, following a revolution that had taken place in Southern Azania at the end of the 20th/50th century. There were those citizens (as peeple were also often called) who lived in an Azanian world where the Koloniste way still ruled and there were those who lived in a world where the new revolutionary order ruled. Then there were those in between; and those on the outside; and others in the place called nowhere, who had no influence at all on the way their world was ruled. All this notwithstanding all the wonderful masques and fol-de-rol *organised by whatever ruling clique-of-the-moment chose to represent as that moment’s received reality.[* Fol-de-rol: We do not know what this means and assume it to be a form of metaphor associated with misdirected activity: contributor’s note.]

Back at the great Constitution Hill Indaba* Corinth Starr stepped forward and lowered her arms…calmed the crowd soothed them with the rhythm of her arms falling to a beat they could all feel though no one said it out loud: it was a simple chemical reaction.
[* Indaba a word that seems to denote some type of formal assembly: Contributor note..]

“There are peeple out there who say that I am irresponsible for promoting the principle of basic pay and I say it is our due!”

The crowd roared their approval…she was right, who were these hypocrites to tell the world that there was a problem with basic pay for all when they had salaries, they were paid for doing whatever they did, whether they did it well or not. Many of those in the crowd suspected that the country was packed wall to wall with people who had non-jobs for which they were paid and in which they did more or less nothing of any value; so why should they, the peeple not also be paid too.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with an extremist, and Corinth Starr was certainly an extremist. According to legend an extremist of the penetratee gender was more ferocious than any other creature; and this was a person aroused to rage with an antipathy that was overwhelming. So intense was her rage that it had, until that time, created more revulsion than devotion amongst the voting public. The world had been there so many times, it seemed. Then she produced Basic Pay and suddenly when they all looked up they were bestrode by a giant: everything democrats warn against.

At some stage during her time in the sidelines she had a makeover of some major effect. The strident “I wannitdonenowhatthefuckareyoustillstandingaroundfor” scowling, foot tapping demands of the past had been converted to a low key intensity, that sucked in the audience rather than subliminally operating in the shrillness zone of the angry demanding parent: scaring us into submission and repelling, simultaneously. Those that admired her most had previously had distance forced upon them: now she wooed them with an intensity few could match.

“The propensity of all human beings to prevaricate is a core mechanism in us that acts to prevent us from achieving our true potential” She saw a few furrowed brows and smiled, with a perfectly crafted radiance, “This idea that we have an obsession with avoiding the truth is almost trite.” She bit the word off. “In fact it is almost a cliché and like the air we breathe; it washes us, and we never think to alter it.” She seemed for a moment to bow her head and her body slumped, as though as an act of obeisance to her allotted destiny. They waited, not knowing what she was talking about but knowing it had something to do with getting free money; and most definitely feeling the intensity of her presentation.

“How to work within that awareness is a main purpose of the task that awaits us.”

“For years now peeple have promoted the idea that every citizen should be paid a wage by the governing authority…They have called it BIG because it would be a basic income grant,” she twisted the last word as she said it, and the audience could feel the vomit in her bile as she ground at that word…“grant”… “And we say! … Grant us no favours…we our doing our job…our job is too consume!”

What an idea…the crowd loved it. The conservatives of the ruling party and those beyond, in the extended audience shuddered at the thought. The chat show cynics and all the lackey spokespersons of the servile chattering classes tittered at the naivety of it all, and railed against “irresponsible promises”: as if there weren’t already enough, they said.

For it was the received wisdom that for a range of perfectly respectable economic reasons the idea was considered impractical. The core objection was that “the country couldn’t afford it” and on the surface this appeared an insurmountable objection. Starr’s genius was that she saw the opportunity [perceived from that random television programme] to reconstruct the base on which that viewpoint rested and that, added to the desperate times, made all the difference…as they all said at the time.

“And since it is our job to consume we demand our pay by right, for, not to pay us would make us slaves and our constitution does not permit …slavery!” She did something weird there with her voice, dropped the breathe to the lowest point it would go, down below the navel and lifted the word on syllables of fire catching the mood of the crowd and lifting it to enraged indignation…. “Yes, yes, yes!” They roared in adulation.

“How are you proposing to finance this generally inflationary exercise in giving away free money?” her advisers had demanded when she had first shared her vision with them some months earlier. She had introduced them to her chat show hero, a man from a foreign land, a place much poorer than Southern Azania, who had written a famous book, about the true secret of Capitalism’s success, in that part of the world called …Developed.

He had talked to them for a while about the role of property in the accumulation of wealth. He explained how the poor actually, collectively owned great wealth but were unable to access it for use in financing small enterprises because the system failed them. In all places where there was great poverty, there were unclear guidelines to the registration of property rights and therefore huge delays, in some cases insurmountable in the lifetimes of single persons.

This meant that the country was dispossessing its poor by default, and that the failure of the poor to escape poverty was something for which the system itself was therefore accountable; and which must be rectified. He finished by suggesting that the poor should sue.

Starr added. “It is the intention of this party to make that access happen on a massive scale with the biggest recording exercise ever undertaken, what has been done so far is inadequate.” Starr the elder had fixed her advisors with her steely stare, and transfixed them, “Then we shall mortgage the future to finance present expenditure through the widespread use of the basic pay. This new electronic digital era gives us opportunities for wealth disbursement that have never before existed. The Tax authorities will claw the pay back from those who earn above the minimum and our purpose must be to make the entire exercise operate on an entirely electronic basis, with the minimum of costly administrative leakage…” As she spoke those last words she made a wringing motion with both fists held together …like wringing out a towel; like wringing out a bureaucrat with a personal agenda.

She told the assembled crowd all this that day, finishing with:

“Therefore we must redefine the way in which we calculate our national income to include not only all production and service activity, not only in the formal but also in the informal. We must cost in the labour of millions of household activities, all of which have already been financed for millennia by the greater society…indeed…have facilitated that greater society’s very existence.”

The crowd loved Starr’s theme, that in the time of formal slavery the society managed to facilitate the most basic requirements of slaves and the rich still managed to accumulate wealth. So why was it that now, with the world awash with goodies no one wanted, with interest rates at historic lows indefinitely, with deflation eating away at gross domestic product that suddenly the financing of society’s needs had become so impossible.

“It has been said for millennia that the poor have always been with us …well that is true and how have the poor been financed all these years if not through the greater society that has thus over time permitted huge unaccounted capital accumulation.

“It is time for us to realise that investment, for us to make that realisation practical through Basic Pay.”

The crowd loved the feel of Basic Pay and began the great chant: Basic Pay, Basic Pay; feet pounding to the rhythm of their chanting cadence, forearms thrusting forefingers forward in the style of popular rap music… Bee Peee, Bee Pee…..”

She raised her arms and they quietened for a moment. Then she noted, caustically, that delaying the evaluation of wealth existing among the poor occurred because the process was controlled for the most part by the Penetrators, and because the penetrative gender was not the one doing the most suffering; and therefore had no sense of urgency. It is for those of us who feel the pain of nature with its constant hunger, to get things done. Whooping from the crowd revealed a barb well sent

It was a subtle shift, almost a rider to a theorem, and the message got where it was intended.

The cynics in the ruling party, when pressured, said that Corinth Starr (Starr the elder) had merely arranged for the poor to finance their own development and that it was such an unfair idea that no one would buy it. Once a marginal, always a marginal: no one promoting these crackpot ideas had ever scored more than a point or two in an election, and if she looking threatening enough, put her down or buy her out. They were so sleek and comfortable, feeling their omnipotence: their necks wonderfully fattened for the kill. They made a few token gestures; promises of the old kind, that all wrongs would be rectified along with a few token “vivas*”. [editor’s note: we have no record of what is meant connotatively by the use of this word which itself apparently means “long live”]

They put out some election posters suggesting that the idea [of Basic Pay] would cause greater poverty and in their speeches, clever speechwriters argued that such schemers as Starr the elder, like the eternal pyramid scammers, would soon divest the poor of their miserable holdings and then they would truly understand the meaning of poverty and all of society would collapse, just like in the old eastern empires of poor disorder.

They miscalculated: and, again, that made all the difference….

To be continued.

see also: http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

The Manifesto of Corinth Starr: Starr the elder. Continued…

“We have almost as far to go as we have come.
And we have come a great distance.”The book of Shadrack: part the third

Editor’s note: These extracts which follow [and which have prefaced our herstory so far] are taken from the so-called “Testimonies of an enumerator”, which were discovered on an archaeological expedition to the “Abandomentei” zones of the ancient Azanian Konfederacy, about which much was published on Internet news casts when the discoveries were made.

Readers will remember that when the “Testimonies” were discovered the excitement triggered a wave of new investigations that have enabled us to gain a unique perspective, on a time and a place, which, previously, we had not known to exist.

According to the special investigation team assembled to evaluate and translate the documents, the evidence produced indicates that the Transformation period of ourstory started much earlier than we had previously believed, and certainly earlier than the time of the planet wide, “Flooding”. There are even indications that the Floods, with which we are now so familiar, were not the first. There is evidence to indicate that they have apparently occurred more than once during the physical era of proto-human history.

Leofric

The Manifesto: Part two.

“….This means that the way in which we calculate Gross National Product (our region’s income) is as flawed as the statistical data on which we base our conclusions. We may as well be Romans reading the entrails of goats.”

This was the opening full frontal thrust in Starr the elder’s assault on the ruling order.

Her party had come into existence early in the opening decade of that fateful century and she had languished for a time on the sidelines. Equally, during that time she moved fearlessly through the streets and shanty villages that were swarming into existence all over Zone One and beyond. She had travelled too, to the older liberated territories of Azania and encountered people who represented the best of a generation; and who were sliding deeper and deeper into destitution and mutual savagery, while the shining walls of the wealthy parts of the Zones seemed more elusive than ever imagined. Rage was steadily manifesting and that rage, deflected now from power, took the form of more and more violence, between the two species of humans that lived at that time in that place.

These two species, known as genders, (as we now know) existed to mate and produce more offspring, to mate and produce more, frequently identical, offspring in an endless cycle of incremental development, extending over an immense time* (See glossary notes to be published later, regarding abstract terminologies such as ‘time’. For convenience however time is taken as the space between the coming into existence of an average peeple, and their ceasing to exist. This space is then divided up by the number of times the planet turns upon itself, and /or turns about its sun. While it is in fact a mere flicker against the vastness of eternity at a nano level this flicker can seem to be an extensive period… Notes: Koz see ibid.).

This reproductive process involved the interpenetration of one by the other. The original terms for these genders do not make much sense so for convenience we have dubbed them the “Penetrators” and the “Penetratees”. It is also noted that these activities were not exclusively reproductive; in fact ultimately they were exclusively recreational after the reproductive function was modified and simplified. But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. As a further extension to the complexity of this interaction some penetrators could simultaneously be a penetratee, and some penetratees would make use of a prophylactic to consummate the act to mimic a penetrator.

For a variety of reasons, with which it is not our purpose to deal, these relationships had evolved, at the time of this, part one of the testimonies, into a ‘property’ dimension. Humans as we now know had an immense propensity to possess things exclusively. This was known as an Ownership right, and both of these genders believed that they had a ‘right’ to own the other.

For most of the period of advanced proto-human development the bigger, bulkier, penetratively designed gender (the penetrators), dominated the receiving, accepting, possessing gender (penetratees). This had something to do with the length of time needed during the post-gestation period to nurture the reproduced human product. The testimonies cover, in part, the time when that relationship altered.

To return to the words of Starr the elder.
“The true measure of wealth is no longer the production of goods, since we now have the capacity to produce infinitely expanding volumes of commoditising* goods at ever diminishing cost…”

“What we do not have is consumption of goods and services in sufficient volume to sustain all that production and whereas, in the past, excess of demand over supply led to the condition called inflation, with the present excess of supply over demand what we have is a debilitating deflation. Our world is stagnating into despair and violent confrontation between the genders”

… The crowd receives this in bemused silence.

“What happened?” She asked before answering her own question.

“The world has become a global marketplace.

A marketplace can only survive if there are reasonable numbers of buyers.”

The crowd were still puzzled but waited politely, drawn by the magnetic pull of the hyped up pre-publicity.

“The marketplace is awash with oversupply; the system of production is so efficient it’s imploding into stagnation and deflation. And this simply accelerates the plunge of the poor into greater, greater and greater, misery. Indeed,” she added, not quite as an afterthought, her voice rising imperiously through the word itself. “…Everything we have done since we liberated ourselves from the Koloniste and the time of our Dispossession has simply accelerated the vast numbers of poor into a greater condition of misery, made worse by this pestilential mating plague that has come to curse us.

The crowd had responded positively to the negative comments on the Koloniste. Such, ‘them are the peril’ related strategies always provided useful point scoring tactics. But it was the curse of the terrible wasting diseases that had plagued the closing years of the preceding century, turning into pandemics, killing millions by the time of the testimonies that really began to move the crowd. Years of seemingly neglectful measures to combat the scourge had reaped a bitter harvest, and many millions of grieving disaffected citizens; and citizens were also voters. Overwhelmingly the victims of the new age were those who were raped* and beaten by members of the ruling gender. Starr the elder tapped into that well of discontent and began to draw the waters of power to within drinking distance.

[Editor’s note: *This comment on “plagues” appears to be a reference to the so called ‘plague wars’ about which more shall be revealed when those parts of the Testimonies known as the Yonka Memorandum© that are to be published on the Internet Forum some time from now.
*The word ‘raped’ referred to a form of violent penetration assault on a penetratee, without the happy consent of the human being “raped”. As we shall see this rape issue, itself something of a pandemic apparently, played a significant role in precipitating the change that took place during the rule of Starr the elder.]

“There are certain truths that we must now accept,” Starr the elder was a large and formidable specimen of a penetratee gender (referred to as “her” or ‘she”). Her voice had been specially modulated by vocal experts to work on the dream mode of the human brain and was alternately soft and insinuating; rising to crescendo’s of suppressed rage, as she railed against the injustice of violence against her kind. However in this famous Constitution Hill manifesto she chose then to move to a different target.

For many of you however the reason you are all hear is to hear my party’s strategy with respect to Jobs, aren’t you?

And the crowd roared its approval even though they had been lied to for at least forever, it seemed, by ruling party politicians making promises about jobs. Secretly most of those present didn’t believe much would happen in the business iof job provision.

“The most important truth is that there are no more JOBS, and there never will be any ever again!”

She let that statement hang in the air until it gently rained down on her sobering audience. They weren’t too sure that they wanted their suspicions confirmed.

“You all know that for more than two decades now, the popular cry to call in the masses…You out there … at election time, is the ultimate promise of “more jobs”. We remember the “more jobs” party in the last election who gained six seats on the promise and defected to the ruling party on the first ‘window’* opportunity. They were the only ones who got jobs.”

Perhaps there were some in the mob out there who wondered if she wouldn’t just do the same. This right that politicians had to change parties in mid stream notwithstanding that they were not personally elected by the voter had effectively changed the basic compact denoting representative government; and the practice had become a thorn in the prickly hide of the system.

The effect had been to dilute the multiplicity of parties that had peppered the early years of the new Republic and had tended to favour the development of oligarchies; and had in turn ultimately mired down the pace of transformation in an eclectic wash of self-interest.

“It is my belief that those amongst our leaders who have made those promises were sincere in their belief that their actions would lead to more jobs. They have been doing and saying the same things, like some doctrinal mantras over and over again in the bland expectation that suddenly the outcome will alter.

However we keep ‘knowing’ that there are no jobs, that all our conferences have created no jobs other than for a lucky few. We know that jobs have not happened and we keep refusing to believe that they have become extinct. Jobs belong to an age that has gone forever. We have legislated jobs out of existence, haven’t we?”

She could see the first beginnings of movements, the first stirring of heads nodding in affirmation. She held her pause with infinite, studied, care. The crowd hovered in expectation, sensing that she was building to a momentous declaration.

“Most irrationally, we aggressively insist on believing that although we have passed thousands of laws that have made jobs extinct, these ridiculous “jobs” will keep coming back to life because of some curious ‘rules’ of ‘human nature’: whatever they are!”

At this point she paused; let the words sink in upon the now completely silent crowd. She had their total attention, not to mention that of the millions, around the world, who later saw the remarkable speech on television and through Internet podcasting on UTube and elsewhere..

“We must accept another truth, too.” she said eventually, her voice dropping, possibly by as much as an octave.

“It is this…the poor have always been supported by those who had plenty.” The crowd roared its approval. Someone had to pay and ‘they’ were always the favourite target. “They” who haditall: how dare they! Starr the elder raised her hand.

“In the far distant past this support would be in the form of voluntary bondage, later evolving into the hated institution of slavery!” The crowd roared its disapproval of the evil word, they were however concerned at the talk of voluntary bondage and the crowd had looked around at each other wondering about the strangeness of this statement. Fortunately that moment of question was immediately obliterated with the use of the S word. Slave was a word that obliterated reason..

“Therefore the wealth of society has always encompassed the needs of all, no matter how slight these needs are, have they not?”

“Yes, Yes, Yes.” The crowd roared its approval for after all, their needs were slight compared with those of the newly wealthy elites, who had come to dominate Southern Azania since the revolution and who, together with collaborationist remnants of the former Koloniste business class, now quaked at the thought of the new revolution; and would set out to limit it were they free to do so.

Starr the elder’s true genius lay in recognising where the lever was placed, which according to the ancient Archimedes, would “move the world”, and she had assiduously studied how to apply it. Brought up as a scion of a Party main person, she first exerted her influence in the rough and tumble world of construction and construction engineering, before moving into the political mainstream firstly as a hotshot party apparatchik, and then later, becoming disillusioned at the escalating dimensions of patronage, and its dulling effects on the tenacity with which the revolution was being pursued she had spoken out and been expelled from the party. She had taken it personally: others had been caught with their hands in the till and were not expelled!

She could have returned to her own corporation, which had, under her development become the most powerful company of its era, having gobbled up many of her long established competition in the meantime. It was a multi-billion-credit operation and she milked it now for her purpose as so she did what every ambitious person with the aim of ruling the world does. She started her own party and went off in pursuit of glory.

Then, starting softly in one corner of the crowded precinct that extends so spectacularly from the Constitutional Court of the Azanian Konfederasy, the now famous chant began, accompanied by the equally famous Toi Toi. Those who were there that day spoke of the hairs at the backs of their necks curling at the sound.

“Bee Pee, Bee Pee, Bee Pee…. Woza” and then again and again until the entire audience was worked up into a frenzy that even enveloped the gathered dignitaries- who seemed themselves undignified, primly, sitting, observing – until they too broke under peer pressure [to be seen later on television cavorting and toi toi ing with the best of the rest, as they say, and in some cases to their own, considerable, later embarrassment]

“In a world increasingly run by machines… large scale labour has become unnecessary! The exploitation of worker citizens by corporations has ended, but so has the work that humans did.”

The crowd had gone silent again with an aching anxiety. They didn’t really want to hear that jobs had become extinct.

With a nose for the correct instant Starr opened up for her climax.

“Human beings today have now got a new task, having been liberated from the task of toiling at the production lines it is the task of each and every citizen to go forth and consume goods and services, and soak up the excess capacity in our system!!”

She roared it out and the crowd picking up their earlier mood cheered lustily; all the while looking around in confusion, understanding only that there was a plan, embodied in the slogan B…P…, being chanted again and again: cascading around the precinct like a wild Mexican* wave. [Editor’s note: * we do not know what that word means.]
Corinth Starr stood almost bravely to attention throughout the tumult; catching it eventually on its crest. With a wave of her arms she lifted the sound and then gradually brought it down: rooting the energy, until the place was once again silent with expectancy.

“To enable this task of consumption to take place I decree… the payment of “Basic Pay”!
The crowd went delirious, as would any rational riotous mob hearing the most wonderful news ever to have been heard. They leapt up and down, hugged each other with anticipated pleasure and felt the glorious nub of hope burst effervescently through their normal mask of cowed cynicism.

“Yes you heard correctly, this is not some hearing defect you just got…a vote for the Gender Party means “Basic Pay for all”….
When elected, I shall, I decree now, that I shall legislate for the payment of a basic wage to each and every citizen of the land.

Each citizen shall receive one hundred credits each month paid directly into their own electronic account accessible only through their own unique individualised identity logo.

The news headlines that day were …BASIC PAY! WHO’S A GONNA PAY? …

Who indeed…

To be continued

Extracted from the Testimonies of an enumerator.

For those who may not be regular readers what follows is part two of a 19 part series realting to a history of the planet, generally, and RSA [Republic of Southern Azania] specifically, between the period 2009 and 2019. Enjoy.

On the other hand if you are puzzled by this you can back track on NiK’s blog to the items labelled “… Cybersoapie” and “… Prophecies”, respectively, for episode one and the background to the Testimonies.

The Testimonies of an enumerator:
Episode Two.
The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy:
The emergence of Corinth Starr: Starr the elder.


One of the reasons that the Konfederacy became the Konfederacy and not the more commonly determined Federation, as prevailed in some of the great nations of the world, was the growing realisation that the recently liberated citizens of the Home continent were unwilling to submit their hard won freedom to any form of control no matter how apparently benign.

It was an urgent requirement of those who were the liberators that their vision should come to fruition, come hell or high water, as they say. By the later stages of the opening decades of the so-called 21st century (which others on the planet then, already, called the 51st century) it had become tragically apparent that the old child, the newly emancipated Azanian Konfederacy, was growing up too fast. In doing so it was embracing the coiled reflexes laid down over ten thousand generations and hardly impacted at all really, by the kolonialist aberrations of the past preceding seven or eight. There had been a brief embrace, rapidly disengaged on the part of various Koloniste, and Afrika was left to its own, rapidly revealed, all too human inheritance.

“Human being as part of nature is as pitiless as the earthquake, the flood, the wind, hail and fire, it is only human being apart from nature, that makes existence bearable”. These words by an unknown author propelled the amazing Corinth Starr to early prominence. She was a woman of genius, who transcended all understanding in her combinations of extreme wisdom. She seemed almost tapped into the universe, while at the same time she was a ‘take no shit’ hard-arsed ‘diva’ in the mould of a marketing supremo. And she certainly got her message across.

There were certain problems that needed to be overcome if the then country (now Southern Azania),the most dynamic part of the Konfederacy, was to move forward; and overcoming these was proving intractable. The most difficult was the fact that the world had changed completely in the wake of immense technological developments. The developments changed the way humans in advanced countries thought and this alone made them different.

Then secondly, a mantra of the preceding decades proved horrifyingly true: work, in the traditional sense of mass scale employment, was rapidly becoming obsolete. From a period when the citizen class called businessperson was despised for exploiting that class known as “labour”, came a period when, out of sheer guilt at their own cruelty, businesspersons created better and better machines to replace humans (as workers were also known) and ceased the disgusting exploitation of the past thousands of years of slavery and human exploitation of other, less able humans.

Which was pretty cool except that “the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited,” as Corinth Starr was fond of quoting.

So by the end of the first decade of that fateful century almost all countries on the planet Urdos were faced with huge marginalised populations. On the one hand the media driven, so-called “fourth estates” and their acolytes would call for “government action to create jobs” On the other hand new technologies conspired to eliminate entire swathes of “jobs”, as work was also called.

Eventually the word “job” itself, began to sound quaint, and old fashioned, as the realisation grew that there were never going to be any more ‘jobs’: well, not ‘real’ ones anyway. And of course the thought that there were never going to be any more jobs, was such an uncool idea, that most of the early stages of the twenty first century were spent playing around with firelighters of denial next to the explosives stores of reality. All around, changes in the world accelerated human consciousness towards its own serendipitous date with destiny.

In advanced countries people had age-old charities restructured into welfare payments systems that gradually paralysed those places with attention demanding bureaucracies. So that when the great catastrophes happened in the second decade the places themselves imploded, and the speed of that implosion was terrifying.

It was for Corinth Starr to create the justification for the new order with her Nobel winning “Basic Pay not Basic grant.” Process.

Africa had been the exception to welfarism. Nonetheless the absence of social services to compensate for hard times was compensated by large-scale access to land that could feed citizens during hard times. Where this access to the land had been blocked by vested interests that land was expropriated, and issued, in small unusable parcels, to those humans who had slipped so far down the ladder of misery that even a parched parcel of land over which they held no real rights was preferable to starvation. Thereafter the brutalising laws of scarcity could be held at bay through the moralising efforts of free food handouts. After the Great Catastrophe there came a greater catastrophe when the cargoes of “food from heaven” dried up, but that is getting beyond the scope of this history of the Manifesto.

Southern Azania was different. It was a wealthy country in the expanding middle-income range of countries. However it was under-performing and not making as much use of its human resources as it could be. This was Starr the elder’s famous summation, at the Great Constitutional Hill Indaba. The conference had been called to debate the growing crisis involving escalating incidences of violent confrontation, between those perched on the edge of survival, and those floating in the free zone. These latter were constantly darting in and out of the daily flow of events to snatch a bite of prey. They were the new hunter/ gatherers of the 21st century: the Buffalo Hunters and the rest, practicing the art of their origins. [see the Buffalo Hunters@ http://editred.com/nicholasjakari ]

A shock election result in 2009 brought home the danger of that disaffection. It had lurked for carefully ignored years in the resentiment consciousness of idle persons in a state of grievance. Idle persons with no access to succour. It was the time of the first Corinth Starr, known to later generations of Southern Azanians as “Starr the elder”.

Starr’s genius was in the way she rationalised a number of trends into a single package and transformed Southern Azania into a veritable tiger within decades. Gradually the prosperity in one part of the emerging Konfederacy began to spill over into other less prosperous regions until the Great Apocalypse interrupted the entire process, which was when Starr’s wisdom bore its unforeseen fruit. And peeple survived again to repopulate the planet.

The trends?

Yes there were various: the trend to the globalised economy maintained its pace, shattering the monolithic power of regional (then called National) governments and rendering much civic policy making impotent in the process. Politicians increasingly made promises that could only be kept through the violation of some or other party’s rights. This violating process itself became the target of legal harassment as bad governments found outraged, citizen’s activist groups hounding them in the courts.

It was an event, minor, as they always seem at first that sparked the launch of the Gender Party and opened the way to the emergence of Corinth Starr…

Extracted from “The Testimonies of an enumerator”.
To be continued…