Tag Archives: 7Ways to get your money

Race Free writing

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


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


To wash away silence is a theme of our times.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


At the start I had to ask the crucial question.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Let us jointly break the silence.

Confiscation without compensation: Good idea/bad idea

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

The meaning of money.

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Blog Feb 6th 2018:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


Switzerland’s: 50 year
Negative yielding Bond


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


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


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


!NiK[‘16]


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


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

Regards
Nicholas Jakari

The Jonker Memorandum

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What is the Jonker Memorandum?   The Jonker, as I’ll call it is first and foremost a cell phone story. It didn’t start out intending to be one. It took so long to write that the world changed considerably and … Continue reading →