South African videos showing street violence banned

Subject: South African videos showing street violence banned.

I have many South African friends who write to me of their concern about the politics and the violence in their country. Some of the video clips they send are truly terrifying especially if you are living there and whilst any video has to be understood against a wider background of past institutionalised violence, the current spasm of overt violence especially against the farmers, from men out of work and without hope but never the less citizens of a country which has had 25 years of governance by people of their own choosing and who's current plight cannot be levelled at the farmers or in fact, against any white citizen still living there.
The videos are graphic and I don't particularly like to receive them but they do describe an aspect of life there.
This morning I turned to send a message to the wife of a friend who died a while ago and who is concerned about the turmoil in her country, only to find that all her video posts showing the violence have been removed from her Facebook messaging page.
Is this the result of the pressure put on Mr Zuckerberg to clean up Facebook. If so it seems to be selective. The damage done to South Africa is only proportional to the damage it does to itself and people living outside the country shouldn't be denied an insight as to what is happening there.
Our own press are largely silent about the country, now that Apartheid and white rule has been brought to an end, they seem strangely reticent to castigate the black rulers and politicians from letting the misery of the population at large drag on with paralysis on housing, health, and the economy which so needed the governments attention.
After the kleptomaniac rule of President Zumba so much needs to be done and law and order must get preference in such a violent country.
The banning of the free press, of which the internet and its thousands  of contributors through the medium of street videos is one aspect and has publicised to the general public, across the world, much of what the governments in various countries wish to keep quiet.
The removal of these videos of violence on the streets of South Africa is wrong and despite how unpalatable this part of the picture is, it should be shown.

Grammatical jiggery pokery

Subject: Grammatical jiggery pokery.

 

I have a good friend who reads my blogs (he has to be a good friend to do that) and in a spirit of informed betterment, he points out my grammatical mistakes, of which there are many. Misspelling seems to be my most egregious fault, along with composing sentences which are too long and disjointed. 

And there I was thinking content was enough.

It's interesting how the importance of having a view and the willingness to spend time promoting it is questioned because of the technicalities of language which seem get in the way. I know that it's jarring to see misspelling littering the page of an essay, it takes away much of the impact of what is being said by stopping the mind in its flow and the need to consider if it's, "i before e except after c". 

I was blogging the other week about how a strong accent can get in the way of our concept of intelligence and how hoodwinked we become listening to a posh bloke talking twaddle. 

My schooling was minimal, especially when it came to formal grammar. There were kids in my class who at 15, on leaving school couldn't read or write. School was a warehousing project, a legal entity which kept children from the poorer estates in limbo until it was time to find some menial work and earn their living. 

Literature and the formal structure of language was taught at a bare minimum and any knowledge we picked up regarding graver came from the type of books we read. I was lucky to have a home where books and reading were valued and whilst the learning was piecemeal it was there, filtering in not as a set of rules but as a matter of fact absorbed on the page. Suffering, undetected, a form of dyslexia meant that spelling was a nightmare with letters jumbled up, back to front. To this day I could not possibly do a crossword puzzle or play Scrabble. It's just too much of a unintelligible visual mess trying to guess which letter follows the next, although I might know the word and it's meaning. 

Reading was a slow way out of the jungle. It gave me an insight into the minds of people who, more articulate and more visionary than myself could prod me along the way to form opinions about things outside my world of the common experience. 

Books are the passport to everything, they tell you neatly everything you need to know prior to experiencing things yourself. If you are disadvantaged and have been trapped in some existence which is mind numbingly repetitive and boring, then a book at bedtime is what you need to fly away and become a prince, and the world of grammatical jiggery pokery plays no part in your enjoyment.

News

Subject: News

When I was growing up newspapers were the main method of gaining news. It was before the time of rolling 24 hours news which now flows, unimpeded into our homes each day through the television. Back then the news was predominately a presentation of what had happen or what had been said and we the reader were left to make up our own minds as to its importance.
Today the scene is very different. The actual news incident is placed in the background and we are instead prone to a tirade of commentary from the titans on our screens, personalities who have become bigger personalities than the ones reported on in the news.
So what we have is a potted variety of information, information regurgitated by the commentator, information scanned and assimilated according to editorial diktat. "Brain washing" would not be too strong a word for the news which is presented these days. Scepticism is never far away from the reporting on the pronouncements of certain leaders or the politics of certain countries. The slanted reporting and the guest speakers who's opinions are sort out to enhance the editorial view. The news has become a football kicked from one half to the other as a treat or an opportunity, depending on which side you fall. The phenomenon of 'false news'  adds to the mix, where powerful organisations creat their own version of the news and feed it to us via the internet and the many media players who use it to peddle their ideas.
The days of a report being written of a battleship holed up in a harbour in South America  and sent to a news room to be typeset and rushed still wet, printed and packaged under the papers banner which under some editorial/owner control once stood for the ethics of the paper and its veracity.
Today it's a scramble for lurid headlines. The truth comes way down the list of priorities and the attention span of most people has gone down with it. News flies thick and fast and the choice of which story to tell becomes another tool in the ability to manufacture opinion.
I believe you must choose your sources of information and by that I don't mean listen and read only what you wanted to hear. Choose from a range of different sources, the BBC as well as Sky, RT as well as Al Jezeera, the Turkish station TRT and NAK the strange Japanese. English language TV Station. They all have their own slant, their own proclivity, their own way of presenting the world through often ideologically tinted glasses.
Of course there are those of you who would utter, why bother, it's news, stories about other people and their success or failure. It has no relevance to my life and what's more because I can't effect what's going on i don't care.
My own view is that knowledge is a gift, a gift which repays and keeps repaying. You might not have all the answers but for your own mental wellbeing, to have an opinion which  is founded on as close to fact as you can get, is remarkably satisfying.

When Daddy was King

Subject: When daddy was King.

The assumptions we made when we were young, under the protection of our parents was a rare time of assumed safety. Each journey we made with them was unwittingly made in the absolute faith they knew what they were doing and knew where they were going. Our faith in them was total as we trailed along in their wake barely understanding the transactions they were committing to to make the journey safe.
They of course were not filled with the same assurance, they were calculating the odds of probability, that given what we knew, then the best outcome should bring us somewhere nearly to where we wanted to be.

These twin worlds are particularly true in early parenting where the child assumes the subordinate role and the parent the authoritative. The assumptions were enough since the propositions had not been tested and it's only in adolescence that the trust we had is called into question and more often denounced as wrong. A  tug of war begins and  hard words spoken before the young person goes off into the world by themselves to test out for themselves the sense, or nonsense of all that parental teaching.
The clock ticks on and the years roll by. Our lives take many turns as we make a success or failure of our attempt to live according to our beliefs. Sometimes those beliefs are rooted in what we learnt on our parents proverbial knee and sometimes we learn the hard way, through trial  and error.
As we grow older our surety weakens not because we fail to see those markings we  followed throughout our lives but because those marking have become irrelevant in the modern world. It's a unique world we live in today, experience counts for little and most of the things we would count valuable are often challenged or simply found on a 'Do It Yourself Manuel on You Tube'.
The experience of knowing the way is now better handled by a 'route finder' on your smartphone. The knowledge you had which was shared and handed down by your parents is now found as a tutorial on the internet. So the regime which placed a parent first in the pecking order is shrinking fast.
The real shock comes when you realise how feeble and out of touch you have become in navigating your way around the most simplistic problem. The hurdles old age builds for itself is the way we find it difficult to take on and assume as a first point of call the problem solving technique of looking it up on our hand held encyclopaedic source of everything from A to Z, the smartphone.
As we stutter and grope around for answers our siblings have the answers at their finger tips, quick accurate solutions, aided and abetted by a plethora of electronic solutions which we never knew existed.
Everyone is an expert except you. The patriarch, no longer the head,  exists only with the patronage of those who in years gone by so longingly looked up to a Daddy, during in that brief period when he was King.

Colonial rule

Subject: Colonial rule.

It's interesting that white colonial rule is nearly always castigated and made the reason for the demise of the people of Africa. Even that statement is bound to cause a flurry of disquiet in certain quarters as we struggle to come to terms with the venal nature of mankind in general.
 Is a person who has lived in a family who's domicile covers more than a few generations on the African continent not also an African. We have no hesitation with claiming Britishness for people from Africa who settle on our shores and yet we seem strangely disquieted by the thought that white people are anything other than usurpers when they live in other lands where the bulk of the people are non white.

The colonial rulers, the British, the Belgians, the French and Germans not to mention the the Portuguese who were the first to settle roots on the continent,  are all seen in a poor light by modern day ideologues who wish for a better more equitable world encouraging multiculturalism in Europe but denying  it in terms of colonialism.
The phrase used most often in the description of colonialist rule is "brutal". They were brutal towards the native inhabitant, robbing them of their birthright, stripping the land of the riches which natural assets such as diamonds, gold, copper and rubber had a greatly magnified value in Europe, whilst in Africa they were virtually worthless.  The exploitation was if anywhere in the value system, between and within the societies. Without the potential asset being transformed into a commodity which had value in the one and not the other it seems to me a flawed argument to equate the one with the other. Does the fact that the Chinese now exploit their economic position over ourselves make them criminal, of course not, it's rather that the course of history which flows an uneven course exposes  some whilst protecting others.
Europe is currently being exploited for its social awareness, its protective human rights culture as it becomes a cherished destination for people of Africa. It's a reverse colonisation which, much as the colonial settlements caused dislocation in the tribal affairs of Africa so the cultural divide of the peoples of Africa causes disruption in the urban landscape of Europe.
The oft discussed propensity of African nations to wither away ( some would argue they are historically rejuvenated) back to a tribal  acknowledgment of power, power held in the hands of a tribal or political chief, with all the potentially despotic consequences which patriarchal dictatorship brings, is a better outcome than the colonial rule, now thrown on the scrap heap of history.
The trauma of the Congo or Zimbabwe are only the latest in a long line of post independence failures. The blame has always been placed on the colonisers and the decay in those countries of what we in Europe would call the assets of modern living, the roads, rail, fresh water, and sewerage disposal have been left to rot, somehow it was up to the colonisers to implant their importance on the local population.
Perhaps as the reverse colonisation takes hold the word will get back from the sons of the sons that colonial rule was not all bad.

Left holding the baby

Subject: Left holding the baby.

The scientific concept  that I am nothing more than a set of chemical and electrical nerve endings, a series of neutrons fired off by the reception of stimulus received by the brain from the world around around me. Nothing more than an totally individualistic entity who's social norms are little more than a primitive reaction learnt for the sake of collective security.  Or the cathedral  like imposition of "Gods Divine  Purpose" in our lives which seems based on nothing more than the primitive fear which lurks in all of us.
A sense of being possessed by something larger, of sharing a common ancestry which comes as a pre-planned exercise in social awareness with all its psychological assumptions regarding morality and ethics, even its assumption of love and responsibility.
When a women becomes pregnant and feel the baby growing inside her it's a unique bond, that sense of creativity which makes the baby hers. In most of us the sight of a new born child leads us to feelings which can only be described as fundamental, that primitive wonder at such an entity, totally dependent for survival and elemental in its lack of identity, other than being one of us. It's personality and it's tantrums are ahead and often defined by its parents but at this special moment, assuming it is healthy the baby belongs to that common stock of human kind and we love it as if it were ours.

I know there are aberrations to this fulfilment, mothers who want nothing to do with their baby. And men who are merely onlookers in this whole process, other than what their upbringing and social grooming has taught them, an awareness of tenderness unrelated to the requirement of actually giving birth or the initial responsibility which giving birth places on a women.
Is this instinctual ?  This acceptance of a role to be played, or is this a part of the social structure which faith, in its wider relevance to humanity suggests. Could we, would we have developed in the way we have, as social animals, without faith.
Watching chimpanzees or elephants perform inside a tight knit social structure, with care and love for their siblings, one has to ask do they have a faith. Is their mimicry of our socialisation, also with their apparent sense of responsibility not just an animalistic thing.  Have we in our mental probing, our constant search for answers not fallen into the trap of assuming that evolution has a goal. That the intricacies of the 'survival of the fittest' leads to a better outcome. What if the fittest were also the least competent in other fields of human endeavour and that strength was also a weakness in that it destroyed the life opportunities for all but a few Alfa males who's dynasty eventually leads us to a dead end.
Does it remind you of the present phenomena market led capitalism, where growth and market movements are cheered on regardless of where the growth is coming from or why and the movement in share prices do not reflect the quality of the stock held but rather the artificiality of computer driven algorithms which track movement for movements sake.
Will our faith in faith die out when AI (artificial intelligence) takes over and the mechanisms of a mechanistic world, freed from social awareness, unaware of that ethical consideration, finally transcends man's need for the reassurance of a father figure and the only moment left of our flirtation with love for loves sake, is that moment when we see and hold a new born baby.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf.

ubject: Who's afraid of the big bad wolf.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf. The wolf in question is AI, (artificial intelligence). 
Much of what I write in my blogs questions the changes in society. the way society has become much less defined, where the mix of norms and cultures lead to confusion in all but the diehard advocate of that, (as yet unachieved), multicultural state. Who's apostles speak of a seamless interaction with each other, but who are blind to the variances which environmental pressures bring. That utopian world were compassion irradicates prejudice. 
Perhaps looming over a not too distant horizon, the ultimate utility, Artificial Intelligence will circumvent all our fears and doubts by making "us" irrelevant.
What started as gadgets to assist us is rapidly progressing into gadgets to replace us. Given the speed with which a computer can learn to replicate a function and store the experience and therefore gaining an  ability to judge when that knowledge is appropriate. Not through trial and error, but by assembling, in nano seconds an appraisal or analysis based on previously assimilated experiences (much like we humans do) of what the next best action should be. But unlike humans, 'Artificial Intelligence'  is undeterred by any moral or ethical misgivings which so hinder our human response time. 
We already have the AI conditioning it in our use of the smartphone to "help" us navigate our way around. Many of us have surrendered ourselves to the 'sat nav' as being better than we are at knowing where we are and where we need to go. The emotion of trying to understand our environment, its tricks and complexity is substituted by the bland switch off of all our human emotional or predictive self analysis. We are 'wet nursed' by a machine algorithm and find the psychological impact of this "help" enough to comply eagerly to the next range of gadgets which will take over our cognisance. Surrendering our human awareness, our perceptive ability, and our conscious apprehension will inevitably lead us into becoming zombies. Like children reliant on their parent, we will give up more and more of that human spirit, the spirit of endeavour which has been our defining characteristic.
The time will arrive when we humans become so in thrall to living a computer aided life that the computer itself will rationalises 'our value' to it !!
This is not science fiction but science fact. 
The AI decision will not be a moral one, simply an appraisal of the cost benefit of having us around.
. 

Ode to Libby

Subject: Ode to Libby.

Like a mangy dog in its kennel I toss and turn seeking a soft spot to survey the world through the kennel door. The bone is in reach and the water bowl is full, what more can I want when so much outside the kennel is foreign.
There was a time when I could range around the neighbourhood sniffing here and there, doing the necessary without giving a thought to those pesky humans and their municipal rules. The cats sprinted up the trees as I strolled along, and only that large bull-mastiff  caused any grief as you passed his gate. 
Today there seem to be regulations against much of what we did back then. Humans have cast their myopic gaze over  our lives and now we have to be tethered to a human as they stagger along behind us calling out commands which only reflect their failure to understand our instinctive impulses.
Take cats. They are a scourge for a dog, getting a place on the couch whilst we have to make do with a smelly blanket in the kitchen. They come and go at their leisure the humans even provide a small hatch in the door for them to come and go whilst we have to wait for walkies. They don't have the same sense of commitment to humans as we do there's little tail wagging or genuine affection which we exhibit freely and without charge. Food seems to be the only reason for a cat to hang around and I have seen cats openly cadging a meals from around the neighbourhood.
Out in any weather we still provide that signal of companionship and affection, even on blustery wind swept days when we would be much happier tucked up in our box. We never complain to be hooked up to the leash and respond to words like walkies without ill feeling.
The ignominy of watching us poo and then rushing forward to scoop it up in a bag is very condescending. My nose can pick out any number of poo's left unattended. From the cat to the squirrel they lie all around unscrutinised but 'wow' if I have a No 2 the  whole world descends on my shoulders and plethora of sanctions fall into place.
No leave me alone here in my kennel to dream of catching that over indulged cat when it walks in after midnight. Then we will see who's boss.

Being self sufficient

Subject: Being self sufficient.

Sometimes when you make a decision you wake up the following day and say to yourself "my God what did I do that for". It's often the case that your actions have consequences and these consequences which are not on your horizon prior to the decision suddenly loom up like battleships on the horizon. The potential to do you harm is enormous but until the shells start to cross the water it's the threat which frightens us.
Our lives are full of moments when we turned this way and that and if you have a mind to you could spend hours contemplating, 'what if'. The fact is, we do things often on a whim, often because we believed what we hear, often because we are emotionally or ideologically driven by events.
Listening to the Noble Lords in Parliament hang their collective heads (with a few exceptions) and wish that "the people's vote" had never happened and that the plebs have been ignorant in not understanding the consequences, it was always so. 
As the Titanic went down and the first class passengers took to the boats their concern was for 'their families' not the third class or stowage class who's route to the lifeboats was blocked since the ship didn't carry lifeboats for them. 
The Lords are concerned, neigh terrified that their estate is going to be turned over and their lives disrupted. Who could wish to rock their boat and how can they prevent it.
52% of those who took the trouble to vote wanted to leave the EU. They very possibly misconstrued the dire state they were in, economically to those damn foreigners. The lack of jobs, lack of accommodation,  overloaded healthcare and the near non existent social contract they had been promised in old age. 
With the Daily Express and the Daily Mail bombarding them with false news, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out, even decade in and decade out, was it any wonder that the brainwashed washed public, who had suffered, (particularly since the financial collapse in 2008) not from our relationship with Europe (Europe have pumped money into the hardest hit areas of Britain), but rather they suffered from that strange brand of Etonian leadership which, looking around to save money and balance the books, books which the bankers had pillaged when being payed out after the crash, settled on the poor and the already destitute and it was these very people who had hit back with the only weapon they have, their vote in the Referendum. Theirs is not, as they see it, given the wilful brainwashing by the establishment, a difficult choice, it was "Johnny Foreigner what did it".
Their Lordships much removed from the travails of Hull or Rotherham were never much exposed to what goes on outside the bubble of London and specifically Westminster, the nearest they get to a tenement is reading a paper produced by a think tank written by academics as part of the course requirement to get a First.
If we go off the high board in a couple of months time and providing they haven't drained out all the water, we will hit the water and instinctively learn to swim again. Perhaps it won't be in an Olympic pool with flashy facilities but rather like the municipal pool in Peel Park where I grew up, a bit smelly and run down but adequate. 
Adequate has to be our new adjective. We need to adequately adjust to being a second flight nation. We need to rid ourselves of grandiose ideas, of punching above our weight. We need to consider our own people before we worry about everyone else. We need to spend the money we flash around in 'overseas aid' and expensive expeditions to solve the wars that unruly nations across the world get themselves into and concentrate on educating our own children to be productive human beings. For too long we have ignored our own stock of home grown talent (other than the fee paying schools) and rather filled the work space with imports from outside. 
Sell off trident and reduce the fleet to patrolling our own waters. Keep the army, airforce and navy to a minimum like the Scandinavians, they too had a glorious past but grew up to realise the advantage of being small is also to be self-sufficient.

2019

 

Subject: 2019

The fireworks have gone and the starry sky given way to the black, never ending outer space. After the party we nurse our headache and wonder what it was all about, this celebrating a new year. As day follows night so we pick up where we left off struggling to piece together our place in the scheme of things. 

This will of course be a year to be reckoned with. It's the year when we came out again, like chicks emerging from their mothers protection surreally exposed after weeks of seclusion and forced feeding we now have to forage for ourselves. Full of dangers which we were protected from by the discipline of someone else who said they knew better, we now have to forge our own links with reality. That Bald Eagle in the sky or the Chinese dragon patiently waiting for our representative to call and are but two of a plethora of connections we have to forge to seek recognition in the world at large.
The chick, in its naivety noisily demands attention from its protector. The mother seeks to instil some sort of rudimentary knowledge before the young chick flies off the nest to make its own way but as every mother knows it's never enough and just around the corner lies some event which will be the make or break from there on.
We have reached that point as we attempt to leave the European nest. As in nature, it has to be done to fulfill our full potential, a potential we assume is there to assume. Soon we will know. Sufficient numbers of the population felt there was room for change. 
The cloister atmosphere of the EU Commissioners remit, like the monks in a monastery could only see what was inside the walls of their monastic desire but we, the Anglophile who remembers their colonial ambitions and the fame and fortune they brought wants to reopen the book, page 47 to try to rekindle those old fires who's embers never truly went out.

Happy New Year

Subject: Happy New year.

So it's New Years Eve again, another year gone of the allotted time span, a year in which Brexit looms ever larger, with ever increasingly hysterical reporting about the doom ladened events which will occurs if and when we leave the safe harbour of the EU.
For me it's been a year of 'steady as she goes', negotiating the inevitable medical mishaps associated with old age, the trials of an unappreciated body which was left to motor on without any oil change or plug replacement, slowly starting to show its age. 
I resolutely refuse to acknowledge the benefits of exercise, assuming that inactivity has as many advantages as rigorous activity, and leaving aside all those doom Sayers who would have us out in all weathers, it seems to me that it's a little ingenious to throw away all those carefully cultivated years of sloth for a final tilt at exercise to stave of a premature end.
With the family, like so many these days atomised across the globe the internet allows us perhaps even more interaction as we throw into the discursive mix perl's of opinion dressed up as fact since we know we will not be interrogated as in a face to face conversation where philosophical opinion is given short shrift in preference for the practicality of independent bias. One of course does miss the pleasure of standing back and watching the product of your loins grow into throughly likeable people, clearly without much recent help, other than the 'genetic plasticine' you initiated all those years ago which has since been prodded and squeezed into the attractive shape you see today.
Where will next years New Years Eve find us, if at all. Will we be merely a photo on the mantelpiece an object gathering dust, a memory of what might have been, or will we still be on the list for a Christmas card. Will we once again be identified by the number of medical, appointments in our diary, and a constant worry for the kids who see their role as providing a backstop to a rapidly disintegrating NHS. The purple rinse set and a bungalow by the sea at Clacton, the daily stroll along the prom, a macabre routine as purposeful as ones inevitable demise. Is this the picture postcard we have become, a picture we would never have thought of as us, caught in that pause between life and death.

A more chilling thought is how many blogs lie ahead before the pen runs out of ink. That trail of verbiage, some would say garbage stretching back to 2012, an almost daily commentary on life as seen by one individual. Trying to delve behind the edifice we all present, questioning and cheering from the sidelines has been a throughly pleasurable exercise although perhaps for many, one in which the energy could have been used elsewhere. Every year I get them bound into a book with an appropriate photograph to enhance the storyline. It's interesting to recapture the sense of the 'moment' which stimulated writing my my thoughts down in the first place.

The blog address from which the book is drawn is :- twocents2012.blogspot.com

It has the title Random Thoughts.

New Adventures

New Adventures

When i switch on the news in the morning it's quite surreal to contrast what is going on in Egypt, Yemen, Bangladesh, Palestine, even the streets of Paris when compared to our own sleepy idyll where apart from the occasional peaceful demonstration with a handful of unarmed police to keep a watching brief.
The turbulence in the Middle East and the vehemence shown by the young men throwing stones or equally the intolerance of the authorities towards those demonstrating.shows that within and between some countries there is an impossible gulf to breach.
Our own news is benign in comparison. We  highlight some local tragedy on the roads or perhaps  a domestic incident which has flared up and tempers led to injury. There is no wholesale upsurge of discontent although our news papers do their best to work us  up to some incident in a hospital or old peoples home. There are thousands who will wake up this morning to merger rations, to the worry of bills unpaid but it's not disaster mode and the society infrastructure is there to help. There are of course people waking this morning and every morning, in pain or  feeling the pain of a loved one who is dying. There are untold circumstances where a personal crisis pushes the person into a realm of unhappiness from which they feel they will never emerge but a national calamity, we have non. Even Brexit, as complicated as it is will not, in my opinion drag us down. There will be winners and losers and adjustments to make but non as cataclysmic as opening your door to the sound of rifle shots and bombs falling. We will try to make out that the end of the world is nigh but really it’s just an adjustment to new circumstances non of them life threatening and who knows it may be the reawakening of us with the new adventures which lie ahead.