Mood: Actvist mood
[Toot!] Index: 5.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
It’s HIV/AIDS day this Monday. You’re reading my post on the pertinent topic du jour.
There was this teacher of mine, in Primary School, who used to drive through the school field when he left his home. The point, I still believe, was so everybody would see him and his car go by. He was one of only a few people in that school who actually owned a car. And then, one day, he walked by. Compelled by his broken car to walk, and incapable of inventing a new route from home, lest everybody know he is hiding the fact that his car is broken. We chuckled, when he pased my P2 class for the like-tenth time. O, how the mighty have fallen! Then he hit the fortieth time of walking, and it ceased to be funny.
I had seen a band of mechanics bent into the car for a number of days, before they finally gave up on it and left it there. I called them a band of mechanics, because they were also thieves (you know, band of thieves). You know that thing mechanics do, of pulling out the one expensive spare part they need for the lucrative contract, and then telling you your car is mostly fucked beyond repair, and that, in any case, your that spare part is totally messed, and a new one costs lots, so goodbye, it was a nice car, but all things end some time.
This has a connection to HIV/AIDS, by the way. I’m getting there. The car, first. The car stayed under the tree, and the tyres went to hell. And a squirrel moved in and annexed the boot. A window broke, grâce à some boy trying to shoot mangoes down. And a bird raised a flag over the driver’s seat. Time, meanwhile, sang that lonely song of hers, about her lover who went out to war and never came back, and she was doomed to wait for his return forever. Rain, sun, and fungi, working in tandem like a fishing boat’s crew, ate away the seats. Time sang of the long, interminable wait, a tearful song of loneliness that never ends, because it is infinitely recursive. (“I’m waiting for Time to stop waiting to bring me my long-lost lover,” sang Time, as she waited.) Mangoes weighed down the tree in December, and the branches scraped the car’s top. The dry season went with the mangoes, and the branches rose with colour on their fingers, leaving the car with less paint than before. Next December, they’d descend yet again, to rob paint. Termites moved in with a catchy war song and extended their Glorious Communist Worker’s Termite Empire to most of the area under the bonnet. And time kept on singing and waiting. (Woah! I realise it’s December, people! Mangoes! Woo-hoo! —ED) The worms and snakes and dogs and birds and cats brought the dirt, and the rain washed it out. And time sang on.
And now, I’m in P5. I’m no longer a small kid—I’m all of eleven years old. God, I may even get a beard while I sleep! And I went out to check on the mangoes.
I noticed the car, for the first time in three years. It had changed, you see. That teacher of ours, he was dead now. The early nineties, as I said, were HIV/AIDS galore here. There are Americans who say Uganda has not really made progress in fighting HIV. That it’s just because the infected people died that we have much less prevalence rates today. That’s stupid, because our population is growing, and every infection can, in theory, be assumed to have caused at least one other infection. The infection rate, therefore, doesn’t go down short of deliberate effort to combat the spread of HIV. That’s why Southern Africa, even with many dying of HIV/AIDS every day, has rising rates. My plan for how to deal with it in Southern Africa has a Leninist smell to it, so I won’t put it here (for fear of having the post descend into a rant). In short, intense propaganda and a severe (even painful) restriction of some fundamental freedoms. For the Good of The People and The Revolution™. :o) So, what them Americans say is just a continuation of their very typical belief that Africans just couldn’t possibly have done something good. They are stupid, of course, but I think I already implicitly said that by noting who they were.
Anyway, back to the teacher. He had died. Because we saw him descend into a dead man while he walked by our classes, almost in real time (I swear—he lost weight as he walked by us), we knew he had what we were being told to compose poems about in English class: HIV/AIDS. We could have been wrong, but we weren’t.
In this weird respect for the dead that Uganda generally has, his car was not touched. Until I was in P5, that is.
First, two people who were in P5 with me. Isaac was this poor sod who topped the class. A geek of the first water, he didn’t even know how to insult. Once I walked up to him in class, and he had scratched lots of fractions on the blackboard. We didn’t do mathematics of our own accord, when I was in P5. It had to be an assignment. But not for Isaac. I asked him what was wrong with him. He grinned and said, “Those fractions result in a set of infinite decimal points!” I told you he was a freak. This mathematics stuff made him happy. I asked him what the point of this nonsense was, and he said he could see them rushing to infinity in his head. It was how he had his fun, poor thing. Christ, Isaac, you can’t see numbers! And he looked at me, grinning, slightly entranced by the furious numerical flowers in his head, blooming infinitely, and said “I see them. Colours. Bright colours. Many bright, shiny colours.” And he said Oh!, and he wrote another fraction on the blackboard. I just walked out. Disgusting for an eleven year old to know why prime numbers are interesting—I’ll die before I know.
Isaac once, in a fit of rage, spat his most-loaded insult at someone: your head is like a conical decahedron!!! Poor sod. At that age I could say Tumbaavu! with no problems at all. Not Isaac; it had to be about mathematical shapes for him. Brings a tear to my eye.
The other classmate was a girl (I think she was called Flora, if I remember well). Her reticent manner afforded her only one good friend: Isaac. She was quiet, and it wasn’t clear what she exceled at. But while I was at the old car, it became clear.
So, here’s me at the car and noticing it has moved for the first time in like three years. Lots of rubbish has been pulled out of and around the car, and placed to the side. And some P7 boy crawls out from under it. Glad to have an audience, he explains what he is doing. (Obsessive freaks do that a lot: explain before you want to know.) “I just had to replace the axle, and a few other rusted things. It’s actually in good shape, this car. See? I moved it from over there to here.” It was all of four metres, but it made him happy, so cool, I guess. I’ve known of cars moving to town and back, but whatever. “It proves,” he was continuing, “that the systems are all in order, more-or-less. I steered it all the way. I can’t get it to fire up, though.” And he slips back down. Well, I was standing over another genius, now. Cool. In the time between when I saw the rubbish (including the shed skin of a snake!) and when he went down, a girl had joined us behind our backs: Flora. Now I notice her, because she asks “Have you cut the battery circuit?” The P7 boy comes out, and looks at Flora. Flora explains something about removing the battery and how it can help pinpoint where the power is stopping. A lot of car-mechanic jargon I couldn’t remember for a new computer. After swapping words in that language, Flora slinks down under the car. The minutes pass as she calls for spanners and pliers and so on. They speak in their language, and cut and twist things. And then, some long time later, Flora comes out and sits in the car while the two of us pushed it. Their language is slightly-related to mine, so I can make out times when Flora tells him that her father was a car mechanic before he died, and that she had been working with him since she was five. The P7 boy talks of his mechanic father, too, and that he literally owned the garage after his father died, until his mother also died and he had to move to his uncle’s place. “It’s a nice place, and my uncle is good,” he explains, “but it’s too boring. There are no broken cars to repair.” You people thought I was crazy? We pushed the car harder now, and Flora would have finished explaining that her mother was also worryingly-sick, if the engine had not coughed too suddenly.
Now the school is gathered around us, and the headmaster is getting ready to give an impromptu assembly extolling the virtues of being able to work with your hands. The P7 boy is beside himself. You made it work, Flora! You’re a genius! And the teachers who can drive are taking turns making the car run about backwards and forwards under the tree. You can think it is even new this car, I swear!, one teacher says, his gaping smile letting some excited saliva onto his collar. These two, the P7 boy and Flora, are among the rest of us getting envious looks (because, officially, a school kid wasn’t allowed to drive a car in school). The two were called up, and we were told to clap for them. Clap again! And we clapped ’til our hands hurt, and our envy became almost murderous. Clap again! The damn headmaster! Clapping is not as easy as it looks! And we clapped. CLAP AGAIN! And we clapped. This is why you should all learn to use your hands! These ones are good examples to you all! Blah-di-blah. Headmaster speeches are for forgetting.
Girls got into some otherwise boys-only fields, after that Flora incident. In particular, they took to nursing cars back to life with that faddish zeal of primary school girls. She had quietly led her revolution with simple, good ol’ pure genius. And it never got to her head. She always just gave her advice to other girls as they pulled at the wires in the school compound. Her clique became the first referral when a car repair had to be made in that school. But only until the end of the term, because she never came back the next term. Neither did Isaac. The P7 boy had reached the end of Primary School, but I hope he (unlike the other two) didn’t die during the long holidays.
Me, I think the real damage HIV/AIDS has done and is doing will only be felt in the number of young people who died before their capacity could be realised. And not just the kids who are born HIV+, but also the fact that HIV affects young people the most. 50% of Swaziland’s youth are HIV+. If this was fifteen years ago, that would be like saying 50% of the young Swazis will be dead in two years.
This other guy who wanted me to make him a website to warn people going to Makerere University against the serious danger of HIV infection they are in, he got HIV while at Makerere. He said some grim shit, “Almost like they come with HIV infection as a primary goal. You won’t believe how many there are who share my story. It’s almost like HIV laid a trap here, to get the young people getting an education, to decimate those and leave the rest alone.” He is on top of his class, but quite depressed at the moment. (I didn’t make his website, but let’s not digress. See, I need money. Charity is for Westerners, the atheist missionaries—now they preach “democracy” not “Christianity”, we being the poor fuckers who have to swallow whatever the West is pissing this time—so he should get money from an NGO and pay me; then, I’ll do it. Fuck you too. You’re the ones keeping Capitalism here, not me. Fuc ... what did you call me? Fuck you, your head is like a conical decahedron. Fuck you, tumbaavu.)
Anyway, I’ll go away now. You’ve pissed me. I dedicate this to Isaac and Flora: too young, way too young. I never even got anyone to act out Sherlock Holmes books with, once Isaac went on to Where There Is No Disease. :o(
As for you, just decide to let the defeat of HIV/AIDS start with you. See, if you don’t contract it, that is one trail closed. Forever, ’tis closed. That stuff the Westerners are saying about how our infection rates came down, ignore it. Let’s do the one thing we know works. ABC, contrary to what I may have said, doesn’t mean Abortion, Barack, Chomsky. Ignore, also, the people, who, eager to sound like they are the very embodiment of Free, tell you that abstinence is pushed only by ultra-religious extremists and therefore has no room among the free people. Stupid cultism, because religion seems to be for the free as well (and they conveniently ignore that this near-hedonist cultic freedom fanaticism is a religion more insidious than Dark Ages Catholic theocracy and even more oppresive of those who may not agree, but with full Orwellian covers—Freedom is Slavery). Only fools reject something because of who supports it. You’ll be amazed who can turn into a fool on such things. But I guess the temptation of intellectual acceptance and the peer pressure thereof must be too hard to resist, in a world where being called “free” or “smart” is better praise than being called, say, “forgiving”. If you’re going to avoid a sexually-transmitted disease, logic tells you that abstinence works. Irrespective of whether Martin Ssempa and Mrs. Janet Museveni and Pat Robertson support it or not. Fuck you—abstain! (Paradox—oxymoron!) Tell your kids to abstain, tell everybody. It’s only until we’ve cut off the supply of infection, then we can collapse upon each other in an orgy of celebration for having vanquished our second-biggest enemy (Western Imperialists and American spies being the biggest.) See, I have to shock you into realising I’m not saying this stuff for reasons of religion. Abstain already! And then, if you want to fuck, use a condom. And, if you don’t use a condom, be faithful to your partner. It bears repeating, this Abstinence, Being faithful, Condoms. ABC. I think I’m staying, even though this has become too long. (I’ll be training for brevity. I know this length to be a bad thing, but I seem hopeless at brevity.)
You see, when infection happens, it’s not necessarily the third party to worry about, leave alone the second party with whom you’ve locked face. It’s an exponential, recursive relationship. As in, you are exposed, through one partner, to all the partners your partner had. But because this applies to your partner too (in relation to his/her other partners), you are exposed to their partners too, which exposes you to the partners of the partners of the partners’ partners. Which exposes you to the partners of the partners of the partners of the partners’ partners. Recursively, like that, rising exponentially. That’s why this bullshit of “low chance of infection” doesn’t work. It’s not your partner we are deeming “high risk”; hell no! Instead, we mean the fact that there is a connection between you two and the teeming, exponentially-rising number of partners that you only get exposed to secondarily. If there is any high-risk person in the explained web—and there is, you can be sure—the risk level is 100% transitive, which comes fully to the two people we are currently perving on in our collective mind, who are otherwise “low-risk” in isolation. What’s the chance that you’re not making contact with HIV? Basically zero. If you make it a pessimistic assumption, then it is certainly a zero chance. That’s why ABC is an important discovery for the human race (and, like all such things, it was discovered in Africa—Uganda, in this case) and those who knock it down should be tortured then shot in public. Sorry, got carried away.
Now, the next thing you do, after ABC, is to teach people and fight stigma against those who have HIV. There is a reason it has been on my activism side bar since 2006. See, stigma feeds HIV. Currently, only knowledge can defeat HIV, you see, and stigmatised people don’t access knowledge (because it may cause them suspicion and then discovery and then stigmatisation when they, for example, pay attention to HIV/AIDS literature). They may be barred from accessing it by a society that deems this stigmatised subject too taboo to teach people about, too worried about its exposing effect. The result is that they live in 2008 as though it is 1992. No ARVs or knowledge to use them well, no good feeding, no good health care. Subsequently, no life. So go and teach! Go ye into all the world and teach about HIV/AIDS to every creature! And fight stigma, or nobody will come to hear you teach, and you’ll be a voice in the desert, and, in spite of accumulated knowledge, we’ll be as though it is still 1992 for those who need the information the most (both to take good care of themselves and to avoid infection). You see, therefore, that if we fight stigma, we fight HIV/AIDS directly. Stigma is at the root of the problem and of the solution. Fight stigma!
With that, I shall close and get some food. Such fine food, it reminds me of the Easter of ‘96. :o)
Sunday, 30 November 2008
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Dog
Mood: Do(d)gy mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
As penance for the length of the last post, I'll make this short. But I'm still up to my jaws in bile, so I'll spit yet. At dogs, this time.
They lie to you when they tell you dogs don't forget. I went to that gate yesterday, and it just barked at me. Vicious barking, with intention to rip me jugular out.
Wasn't it I who recognised its mother dead by the roadside? Wasn't it I who, while its mother's blood still flowed and cars still stopped to look at the mangled dog body, initiated a plan to save the stray family's puppies?
Wasn't it my brother and I who carried the little puppies and distributed them to families? Wasn't it I who kept it (with Scooby as the working name) for the few days when it had nobody to take it in? Didn't I give it off my own plate until we threw it into that same gate? Who waited until the people behind the gate weren't going to be the thirty-fourth set to throw the puppy back out before he left? Didn't I check some days later and see it there, fed and at rest? Didn't I silently celebrate with it? Didn't it remember me, when I sneaked in and stroked it a few times?
And now, guess who has forgotten. :o( Way to say Thank you. Cool. I'll get me a new favourite-dog-that-isn't-mine.
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
As penance for the length of the last post, I'll make this short. But I'm still up to my jaws in bile, so I'll spit yet. At dogs, this time.
They lie to you when they tell you dogs don't forget. I went to that gate yesterday, and it just barked at me. Vicious barking, with intention to rip me jugular out.
Wasn't it I who recognised its mother dead by the roadside? Wasn't it I who, while its mother's blood still flowed and cars still stopped to look at the mangled dog body, initiated a plan to save the stray family's puppies?
Wasn't it my brother and I who carried the little puppies and distributed them to families? Wasn't it I who kept it (with Scooby as the working name) for the few days when it had nobody to take it in? Didn't I give it off my own plate until we threw it into that same gate? Who waited until the people behind the gate weren't going to be the thirty-fourth set to throw the puppy back out before he left? Didn't I check some days later and see it there, fed and at rest? Didn't I silently celebrate with it? Didn't it remember me, when I sneaked in and stroked it a few times?
And now, guess who has forgotten. :o( Way to say Thank you. Cool. I'll get me a new favourite-dog-that-isn't-mine.
Saturday, 15 November 2008
Touche Pas à Ma Population
Mood: Touch-me-not mood
[Toot!] Index: 5
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe
This is one of those times I start with a title. Some times, I figure it out after the last sentence is written. You’ll likely know it is a spin-off of the SOS-Racisme slogan, Touche Pas à Mon Pote. So I’m trying to say: Don’t [You Dare] Touch My Population.
You know what happens in India, because of the artificial limits to how many children can be born to a couple? Baby girls get killed (because, in Bharat, they pay the dowry, not the guys). Baby girls get aborted (more abortion ranting later on). Baby girls are never registered. Parents favour boys, and so the girls suffer. They can’t just pull our move of “let’s try again; a woman’s sixteenth kid is usually a boy”. No, they don’t, because the government limits the numbers.
You know what happens in China, because of the artificial limits to how many children can be born to a couple? The single kids are pampered and lacking in sibling experience, so some become obese and anti-social—Chairman Mao, come back and save China! (I envisage a horde of round Peking kids up to their necks in dung, under banners of It Is a Workers’ Revolution!) In China, baby girls get killed (because, in the Red Sunrise, boys are favoured over girls for prestige in older culture—pre-Cultural Revolution). Baby girls get aborted. Baby girls are not registered. Parents sometimes go to other countries to have their babies. A lady was recently found to have tens of pins in her flesh, and doctors said they were inserted in her as a baby. (Turns out her grandma wanted to kill her so a baby boy may take her place.) This, comrades, is what happens when a population is artificially-limited.
Why am I saying all this stuff? Because of three things:
I don’t watch television much. This one time I was at my friend’s place, and I saw the minister in charge of our population (I forget the exact name of the portfolio). She was unveiling a book, Report on The State of Uganda’s Population. The usual statistics: highest population growth in the world—high fertility, by 2050 we’d have 150 million people, 50% under fifteen years old, and what this latter one implies (though it seems to have caught them by surprise, for a reason I can’t quite tell), viz. rising teenage pregnancies. There was also the usual reaction: limit births! Control births! Quick! We’ll be over-run by them wailing babies! This is what has prompted this post.
I hate it when people make it look like a fast-growing population (even one that we don’t seem to know how to provide for) is a bad thing. See, Japan’s population is falling, as is that of Western Europe (even if you count immigrants). Those populations (and China’s) have fallen below replacement levels (where more people die than are born). This is where we would be headed. The difference is that nobody forced it upon Western Europe. It isn’t by law. Logic, therefore, says that populations can fall of their own accord: why should we compel people to not have Little One, even when they want to or can? Especially considering that populations have proven that they can go down of their own accord?
By stopping everyone from having many kids because someone can’t provide for his/her kids, we are imputing the silliness of some random guy on others. (We’d sooner jail everyone, because I stole a banana from the lady at that shop over there. I’ll pay her, by the way. But she should not leave her stall unattended; should teach her a lesson.) It is not bad to have a falling population, just as it is not bad to have a rising one. The IMF is not telling Europe to pop more kids, as though the negative effects of a falling, aging population don’t exist. Why do they insist on us cutting back on the fertile sex, when, in fact, we need a bigger population to develop (faster)? Because logic isn’t their goal: extermination is. I’ll come back to this.
These countries that have falling, aging populations pay big pensions, and nobody knows where the pensions will come from when everybody is old and imobile. Of course they would come from an immigrant working force if they’d ever come, and this underlines why we should have more kids: there is need for more (but not necessarily in their countries of birth; it’s myopic of the IMF—International Monetary Fund!—to forget that immigration is the way of humans, and it helps transfer populations and spread them evenly).
Do you want Uganda to be like them ageing countries? Now, what if Japan got an epidemic that kills in huge numbers? Or an atomic bomb (we are still in Nippon, yes)? Populations are not a now-issue. They are also a padding against any major deaths that may not be foreseen. But because the IMF knows this, and it is just an American imperialist body, they are encouraging our suicide. And the standard Ugandan’s reaction? I’ll help you guess: what do Uganda’s educated people choose, when given a potentially-dangerous idea from the West, and any other idea that’s not from the West? All you blind worshippers of your killers, fuck you. (And I say that with love, because many of you are friends.)
What we are doing is fleeing from a problem that is largely just imagined and only probably going to happen. The benefits of a big population are real and tangible. Guess the choice we made. Actually, we didn’t make that choice. In fact, Museveni’s refusal to control the population is frequently on record, and one of the only things he has refused to take on. It may be because it is unpopular here. But also maybe because he is a wise dude. (Don’t wrestle me on this one; there will be a time and place for that.)
The choice was made in America, when them neo-Nazi wasps were giving us the conditions on which they’d pay us what they owe us. Debt and poverty are bad if only for the way they enslave you without any chains you can fight tangibly. (So that entire swathes of our populations think they are free—you bloggers, especially—when they will be affected by decisions made by neo-Nazi exterminationists who can’t pronounce your country right. And since the chains are invisible, you can’t start fighting them. If you do, you’re mad. I’m mad.)
(At this point, I took a break and had some hot, spicy, home-made Japanese curry, with goat meat and carrot dices. Ate it with the chopsticks we got from the Chinese lady next to Four Turkeys Bar. All this I disclose to provide an explanation for my change in tone, if it goes softer.)
Don’t tell people to cut back on kids. They will see that, for example, those with many kids stay broke. After about one generation of that, the average new family will be small. This is simple to see, but (as I said) it doesn’t help with extermination, and that’s why it’s not on the table. The graph that number-of-kids-per-family follows is an undulating sinusoidal one. Up one generation, down the next, up the next, down the next. This is because, when less kids are had, there is wealth to encourage more kids, and then the wealth dwindles, and then the kids reduce, then the wealth returns ... It’s been like that for thousands of years. The West should snap out of this (largely racist) superiority complex that makes them try to take our countries and try to model them after some fucking ideal they have between their pink ears. (I see my red tone survived the meal.) This has always been the goal of any empire: fashion a series of submissive states according to your best interests (a phrase Americans bandy about often). It is in their best interests that there be as few of us as possible. Spot the imperialist.
My point in this frothing-at-the-beak paragraph (I realise I failed to make it) is that populations regulate themselves safely. Humans regulate populations unsafely. They tell you that Europe is prosperous because it can provide for its (comparatively-few) people. Stupid myopic bullshit. Europe wasn’t killing babies to get wealthy. (They did kill babies; but those were African babies, not European ones. Selah.) Indeed, Europe became wealthy because of a big population. I’ll elaborate: a big population was necessary to power the industrial revolution. When Africa threatens to have an industrial revolution, it is necessary for them to attack the one spot that makes it happen (not the technology—the steam engine was invented by Heron 2,000 years ago, in Africa—but the people). When the plague killed off many people in Western Europe, there were people left because there had been some before. So a big population saved them. Imagine a bird flu outbreak in Europe. If it doesn’t kill all of them, it’s because there are many of them. And if there are too many people, such things are natural controls (versus artificial controls). Next paragraph, please.
Thank you. We live at the Equator. Life is vigorous at the equator. The ’Mericans come here to see gorillas and chimps and monkeys (and are shocked when they see people as well, especially the ones who aren’t wielding seven-foot spears). Why here? This is the equator. Life lives, around here. (The comma!) That life liveth, here, means that a booming population is not a strange thing. It’s the way of equatorial populations. Not just human populations: viral populations, too. Malaria parasites and vectors, and all manner of insect, worm, and germ will be common here. The best way for a population to survive in this region is to have many offspring (calfs, puppies, kittens, chicks (the animal), chicks (the people), kids (the animal), and, of course, kids (the people)). It’s not just humans with many kids. It’s only here that you found cultures that ideally required every man to have thousands of cattle, for example. It’s not an accident. It’s the ancient wisdom that the West assumes Africans don’t have. (As do the “educated” Africans; what the West says and does is, to them, the right thing.) The ancients knew their land very well, and knew that those thousands of cattle will just drop dead with anthrax in, at most, ten years. Of the thousands, ten will survive and quickly generate a new set of thousands. That’s the nature of where we live. The IMF isn’t interested in your survival. The less of you there are, the easier it will be to rape your country and bully you and take your gold and your oil, and you won’t be able to fight, neither with stick nor with gun, because there will only be two old, toothless relics of you.
Rwanda is an equatorial country, and also has the highest population density in the World. This is after that Western-caused and Western-sponsored genocide that Rwanda endured. Had they a small population, they’d have been decimated. Yet the killing may have been a (macabre, unsettling) way to naturally control the numbers. If I’m still failing to make my point, here it is: equatorial regions are supposed to be bursting with high populations of everything imaginable, both prey and predator (and you know the graph of the relation between prey populations and predator poulations). And the Great Lakes region is an interlacustrine one. The availability of the perfect environment for unbounded breeding of everything shouldn’t elicit anything short of admiration, except if you throw some unashamed imperialists in the mix. How the fuck can they, the killers of our mothers, get the nerve to tell us what is best for us? (I shouldn’t forget to note that the perfect region, the interlacustrine Great Lakes region of equatorial Africa has the perfect city, Entebbe, the city of the gods, where I am as I type this. O, Entebbe.)
(The irony is that our Enemy plans way ahead, with inspiring patience. We, on the other hand, in our stupid chase for what we deem cool for today, are so short-termist. Consider, for example, our current obsession with political instability. Yes, we want this stupid, unproductive thing called political instability. Not because anybody can point to any definitive good thing that will certainly come of it—I dare you to—but because America tells us to want that. Don’t wonder why it is the “educated” Africans, eager to demonstrate their progressive attitudes and their intelligence, who call for our governments to have a few short terms each. The danger is not in the short-staying presidents/governments, but in their inability to work with who comes next in a continuational fashion. In other countries, the state has a plan that, for the most part, every next government will carry out. In that case, it’s safe for presidents to last under twenty years. But here it’s different—not bad, just different. Whoever goes will leave with his/her dreams and plans. In this case, you need them to last over twenty years, so that they can try out everything, fail, modify, repeat, until their pictures in the papers start to look ugly, then they leave—even if in disruptive (even violent) fashion.
Americans know this, and they tell you to change presidents frequently, because that will keep you from seeing any patterns or planning long enough. (Besides, Ugandans should know better: we’ve had one-month presidents many times before, and there is nothing good that came of it.) And because you are educated, you do as you are told. This, by the way, is nearly the only thing school achieves that couldn’t be done elsewhere: it teaches you to follow stupid orders without thinking. You live by a bell’s ringing for all your formative years and expect to ever think for yourself when the time for it comes? And the imperialists who set up our school systems were looking out for the British Empire to have many clerks saying “Yes, super-human British People; anything you’ll ask of me, milord.”, but they ended up providing clerks who say “Yeah, über-cool American dudes; whatever floats your boat, man.” Either way, it provided an empire’s yes-people who are convinced they are free (and are therefore incapable of fighting their chains—on pain of the psycho-ward).
Jean-Paul Sartre, you were wrong. :o( Parthenon! ...thenon. ...thenon. Brotherhood! ... therhood. ... therhood.
The danger here, of course, is that the “educated” Africans rush after what’s cool, and the imperialists reserve the right to specify what is cool.)
So, you see that I’m not against controlling the population. I’m against doing it in an artificial pattern. If the Earth overflows, some people should leak into Solaria, into Venus or Mars, maybe, and so on. That won’t be a bad thing. Necessity is the mother of ... We could just use Time Lord technology and stack them all into one fucking box. Doctor! Doctor! DOCTOR!
Either way, the unfortunate things that happen to babies in a case where the extant idiots (some of whom are no longer capable of optimally working for their own bread) are preferred to new blood can’t be justified by fear alone. Populations control themselves, or we invent ways to stomach them well. The IMF knows these things, but population control isn’t even their worry. Our existence is their worry.
I already expressed how I feel about abortion. A life is really too high a price to pay for convenience. Especially when it is the convenience of some ruling class’ budget plans, rather than the convenience of the people in the bedroom (which, too, I tend to be against). Some people deserve to be killed, for a variety of reasons. Population growth is not one of those reasons.
I’ll take this chance to reply to one Anonymous, a diligent reader of my blog (thank you, bambi).
Anyway, to come back on course, we have just seen that the Enemy wants us to kill our babies in such unmotherly brutality, for none of the reasons that may even be considered, but simply because we fear to go against this law that, in pure imperialist fashion, was passed down from the empire’s headquarters. People won’t stop having kids. They’ll just kill more, as children become as dispensible as shirt buttons, because they fill the same niche: conform or die. Ryde or die. Be a boy or die. Be a girl or die. What the fuck?
My trusty proof-reader ... I’ll start capitalising it. So, my Trusty Proof-Reader just said that China made it okay to have another child if you have a girl first. Hmm. So, they saw the problem and solved it? No. People are now killing boys if they come first, so that they can mix things up a bit and have a widdle booyi and a widdle gaayo. Can sanity return, please? Also, Trusty Proof-Reader compels me, with no little amount of physical violence, to note that China allows two kids in the rural areas. Can I go on? Yes. Good.
I would be done, at this point, if I didn’t want to lengthen it enough such that I throw enough of you off. I have the short posts for those who want them. The long ones have a certain audience that I try to sift through by padding these rants with empty paragraphs such as this one. It’s all a trick. And this isn’t long enough yet. I’ll say my main point again here: they want to kill us by our own hands. Since they control what we like, they can make us like to exterminate ourselves, and we will do it. They can make it cool to emasculate oneself, and Africa will be burning testicles to generate fuel. This slavery is non-obvious—it is mostly in the mind. So fighting against it makes you look like a hallucinating psychopath. Africa’s biggest enemy is the African who is well-schooled. They speak and write good English, and they paste their newspaper colums and weblogs in English, and in subliminal adoration of their Western slave drivers, and continually say that the way it is done over there is the right way, they say we should govern our people in the way that the Westerners do (or, failing that, the way the Westerners say), not knowing that they are among the governed, and that they would have to try and exterminate people from the colonies to make room for more-luxurious living in the imperial base (kill the Africans and Arabs, get more oil, drive more cars, bigger cars, live the American Dream, all at the low cost of 99.95 Africans) if they were to govern in this fashion that normally is called “democracy”. The West is in the jaws of a credit crunch: a swathe of the world living beyond its means. Whole economies built with money that doesn’t exist. But if we have more educated Africans, they will sell off everything they have in exchange for the right to be called “democratic” and “progressive” and even “first-world”.
Allow me to proceed on this thread. (It started out as a lengthening ruse, but it has got a head and legs.) They know that their statistics and news stories are going to be accessed by these educated Africans. Actually, I should be quoting that “educated” because these Africans are just schooled, not educated. That’s why their jobs ask for experience. If they were educated in school, they’d not need the experience to educate them. Indeed, experience (and anybody will tell you this) is mainly to undo the rigid stupidity of school (only in that job, though—they remain well-schooled for other things, as we sshall soon see). School also shows that they respond to the bell and switch from their history book to their literature book, then to their geography with no trouble at all. Capable of being told to do ten disparate things in a short space, not managing (or needing) long periods of concerted, concentrated thinking. Cramming dates and formulae, then spewing them just in time to pass this test, then forgetting them just as soon, and even having to repeat the process with the same stuff a few more times. (They lie to kids that finals test all the previous years in school, when the evidence is, in fact, that they test only the last year or two: finals are not designed to ingrain anything, and that is why cramming-and-spewing works well for passing our finals.)
School breaks people in to the life of a clerk, an unthinking yes-person, a cog in a giant empire-wide wheel. No room for developing a style or a reason for one. So, school teaches them that, then it is used at their jobs. They are paid shit, but they never realise it, because that requires concerted thinking on questions like, Why does it seem like I’m always broke just before every other pay-cheque, even after a raise? In this way, they are slapped in-between the palms of the capitalist wage slavery system, and are incapable of breaking out, because they are well-schooled. Or, for that matter, “educated”. They don’t even stop to ask why nobody ever gets wealthy because he/she is schooled, but (if ever) by simple effort. (And, to be fair, the British man never said you should be schooled to get wealthy; only so that you get a job. Clerks are highly-needed, so you’ll get a job. Clerks are not highly-paid.) Ever wondered why what you can do doesn’t matter, only that you have a degree (proof that you can be treated like an automaton and still be subservient, happy, and intimidated when the need arises)?
This is a very insidious thing, because these “schooled” Africans now write in our papers and put stuff on TV. They become headless propaganda machines, declaring what the empire wants as what we should be doing having been told what to want, which was easy because they are schooled, remember). It’s why, honestly, a suppression of our media wouldn’t constitute a major loss. It may even be a gain, as long as we can surf the government issues in the cafés. They are our intellectuals. Headless intellectuals, that’s the picture. (Hehehe. iTunes just jumped to Bittersweet Symphony. Woah.) Now, because our intellectuals are well-schooled, you’ll note that they are far from the dictionary definition of “intellectual”. Me, I’m proudly un-schooled, and maybe I retain some semblance of independence. They punish us for not being schooled by only letting schooled people into some circles, while we shine the shoes outside. Bread or Freedom? :o) My last qualifications are S4, so I guess, while something in me was killed, something must have survived. (Americans, I think our S4 corresponds to your eleventh grade.)
Last paragraph; stay seated. Think of all the people, therefore, who think of our growing population with panic. Those are our intellectuals. (The unschooled ones, we just pop our kids and listen to nobody. Sex is fun, in any case; we can barely hear anything above the fun.) I remember seeing, ‘twas in the New Vision, I believe, a map that showed food security in Uganda. Our intellectuals believed it, and that is the problem. It painted the whole country in green (the peak of food security, a flower to admired by all), except the North East of Uganda, which was in the red (dangerous situation).
There would be no problem if New York had been painted red, too. (I’d get a massive kick out of seeing the colours of the Revolution cover that side so beautifully, for the first time.) New York is deemed to have better food security that the North (and that's why the books and maps are about us, not them). There lies the problem. Our intellectuals don’t do no concerted thinking. New York, and most parts of the West, for that matter, are farther from their food supplies than the North is. The North is self-sufficient*, but would get from the rest of Uganda (and the Sudan and Kenya, et cetera) in the event of poor rains and the like. There is more food waiting to go to the North than there is waiting to go to the combined West. That’s what food security is defined as. (A single well-placed nuke bomb could have Americans starving to normal sizes in all the cities.) But they painted the North red. I’d not mind if they meant we are Communist up there. They just played on stereotypes that schooled Ugandans believe (because they are schooled and incapable of ...) and managed to elicit belief. Believe it or not. An American attaché must have looked the map over and thought, How, now that the Kony guy done gone away, shall we maintain a need to be in the North?. His fat chin creased for a while, as he thought. Then he grinned, and pulled a red marker and painted the North. That way, the bags that scream USAID! USAID! Help From the American People! USAID!, carrying genetically-modifed “corn” would be plentiful yet. (Just to clarify, the American people of whom the bags speak are not the Natives. It’s hard to give help from a reservation concentration camp, you see. The bags mean the benevolent land-owners who caged the Natives. I guess we have something the Natives don’t have; Doohnibor is a neologism that means: to steal from those who do not have to give those who have.)
Ever noticed that, though there may be other bags in an area, only the USAID bags get the CNN shot? Ever noticed that these pictures are prominent, of semi-nude Africans chasing after American benevolence, as it tumbles out of the American jets? This picture, of the empire that spreads peace, love, kindness, progress, is the one Americans want the schooled people to believe. They believe too. Believing the map was step one; step two is believing the pictures on CNN. Step three is believing stuff like “Uganda can’t possibly get rid of the food insecurity that currently plagues her, unless the population and birth rates are controlled [...]” The worst belief, though, is that we even need any aid. That we would be doomed if we didn’t do what the imperialists want us to do (especially when the believed reason for the doom is “cutting aid”).
Our intellectuals, again, can only tell political bunches apart by whether or not they are for the term limits or not. No such shit as left-wing, right-wing, whatever. Nobody bothers, because the imperialists don’t want us to worry about such stuff. You see, it would expose the ideologies, and people would start to think. That’s bad for them. If they keep us glued to stupid things like term limits and so on, we won’t have any time to consider who wants a Communist government. We’ll only be thinking the stupid thoughts of children. I saw some intellectuals debating what Obama’s victory means for Africa. Headless intellectuals, they are. They don’t stop to wonder why it should matter who is running WA (because we are a conquered state, which is bad). They just accept that we should consider it as something that affects us. They’ve been told by the empire that it determines their fate, so they debate that. Not whether or not we should even be caring who runs that heap in the West (and not, for example, how Lucy Kibaki is feeling this morning). They are headless intellectuals, automata, unthinking, well-schooled.I already know what they’ll say about the population thingy. I already know what the West says about the population thingy.
* It feels good to write North and self-sufficient in the same clause. Woo-hoo, Juche! :o)
[Toot!] Index: 5
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe
This is one of those times I start with a title. Some times, I figure it out after the last sentence is written. You’ll likely know it is a spin-off of the SOS-Racisme slogan, Touche Pas à Mon Pote. So I’m trying to say: Don’t [You Dare] Touch My Population.
You know what happens in India, because of the artificial limits to how many children can be born to a couple? Baby girls get killed (because, in Bharat, they pay the dowry, not the guys). Baby girls get aborted (more abortion ranting later on). Baby girls are never registered. Parents favour boys, and so the girls suffer. They can’t just pull our move of “let’s try again; a woman’s sixteenth kid is usually a boy”. No, they don’t, because the government limits the numbers.
You know what happens in China, because of the artificial limits to how many children can be born to a couple? The single kids are pampered and lacking in sibling experience, so some become obese and anti-social—Chairman Mao, come back and save China! (I envisage a horde of round Peking kids up to their necks in dung, under banners of It Is a Workers’ Revolution!) In China, baby girls get killed (because, in the Red Sunrise, boys are favoured over girls for prestige in older culture—pre-Cultural Revolution). Baby girls get aborted. Baby girls are not registered. Parents sometimes go to other countries to have their babies. A lady was recently found to have tens of pins in her flesh, and doctors said they were inserted in her as a baby. (Turns out her grandma wanted to kill her so a baby boy may take her place.) This, comrades, is what happens when a population is artificially-limited.
Why am I saying all this stuff? Because of three things:
- There are people who are worried about our population,
- and yet there is never a reason to worry about populations.
- America is telling them that limiting our population is a good thing; this is an exterminationist ploy.
I don’t watch television much. This one time I was at my friend’s place, and I saw the minister in charge of our population (I forget the exact name of the portfolio). She was unveiling a book, Report on The State of Uganda’s Population. The usual statistics: highest population growth in the world—high fertility, by 2050 we’d have 150 million people, 50% under fifteen years old, and what this latter one implies (though it seems to have caught them by surprise, for a reason I can’t quite tell), viz. rising teenage pregnancies. There was also the usual reaction: limit births! Control births! Quick! We’ll be over-run by them wailing babies! This is what has prompted this post.
I hate it when people make it look like a fast-growing population (even one that we don’t seem to know how to provide for) is a bad thing. See, Japan’s population is falling, as is that of Western Europe (even if you count immigrants). Those populations (and China’s) have fallen below replacement levels (where more people die than are born). This is where we would be headed. The difference is that nobody forced it upon Western Europe. It isn’t by law. Logic, therefore, says that populations can fall of their own accord: why should we compel people to not have Little One, even when they want to or can? Especially considering that populations have proven that they can go down of their own accord?
By stopping everyone from having many kids because someone can’t provide for his/her kids, we are imputing the silliness of some random guy on others. (We’d sooner jail everyone, because I stole a banana from the lady at that shop over there. I’ll pay her, by the way. But she should not leave her stall unattended; should teach her a lesson.) It is not bad to have a falling population, just as it is not bad to have a rising one. The IMF is not telling Europe to pop more kids, as though the negative effects of a falling, aging population don’t exist. Why do they insist on us cutting back on the fertile sex, when, in fact, we need a bigger population to develop (faster)? Because logic isn’t their goal: extermination is. I’ll come back to this.
These countries that have falling, aging populations pay big pensions, and nobody knows where the pensions will come from when everybody is old and imobile. Of course they would come from an immigrant working force if they’d ever come, and this underlines why we should have more kids: there is need for more (but not necessarily in their countries of birth; it’s myopic of the IMF—International Monetary Fund!—to forget that immigration is the way of humans, and it helps transfer populations and spread them evenly).
Do you want Uganda to be like them ageing countries? Now, what if Japan got an epidemic that kills in huge numbers? Or an atomic bomb (we are still in Nippon, yes)? Populations are not a now-issue. They are also a padding against any major deaths that may not be foreseen. But because the IMF knows this, and it is just an American imperialist body, they are encouraging our suicide. And the standard Ugandan’s reaction? I’ll help you guess: what do Uganda’s educated people choose, when given a potentially-dangerous idea from the West, and any other idea that’s not from the West? All you blind worshippers of your killers, fuck you. (And I say that with love, because many of you are friends.)
What we are doing is fleeing from a problem that is largely just imagined and only probably going to happen. The benefits of a big population are real and tangible. Guess the choice we made. Actually, we didn’t make that choice. In fact, Museveni’s refusal to control the population is frequently on record, and one of the only things he has refused to take on. It may be because it is unpopular here. But also maybe because he is a wise dude. (Don’t wrestle me on this one; there will be a time and place for that.)
The choice was made in America, when them neo-Nazi wasps were giving us the conditions on which they’d pay us what they owe us. Debt and poverty are bad if only for the way they enslave you without any chains you can fight tangibly. (So that entire swathes of our populations think they are free—you bloggers, especially—when they will be affected by decisions made by neo-Nazi exterminationists who can’t pronounce your country right. And since the chains are invisible, you can’t start fighting them. If you do, you’re mad. I’m mad.)
(At this point, I took a break and had some hot, spicy, home-made Japanese curry, with goat meat and carrot dices. Ate it with the chopsticks we got from the Chinese lady next to Four Turkeys Bar. All this I disclose to provide an explanation for my change in tone, if it goes softer.)
Don’t tell people to cut back on kids. They will see that, for example, those with many kids stay broke. After about one generation of that, the average new family will be small. This is simple to see, but (as I said) it doesn’t help with extermination, and that’s why it’s not on the table. The graph that number-of-kids-per-family follows is an undulating sinusoidal one. Up one generation, down the next, up the next, down the next. This is because, when less kids are had, there is wealth to encourage more kids, and then the wealth dwindles, and then the kids reduce, then the wealth returns ... It’s been like that for thousands of years. The West should snap out of this (largely racist) superiority complex that makes them try to take our countries and try to model them after some fucking ideal they have between their pink ears. (I see my red tone survived the meal.) This has always been the goal of any empire: fashion a series of submissive states according to your best interests (a phrase Americans bandy about often). It is in their best interests that there be as few of us as possible. Spot the imperialist.
My point in this frothing-at-the-beak paragraph (I realise I failed to make it) is that populations regulate themselves safely. Humans regulate populations unsafely. They tell you that Europe is prosperous because it can provide for its (comparatively-few) people. Stupid myopic bullshit. Europe wasn’t killing babies to get wealthy. (They did kill babies; but those were African babies, not European ones. Selah.) Indeed, Europe became wealthy because of a big population. I’ll elaborate: a big population was necessary to power the industrial revolution. When Africa threatens to have an industrial revolution, it is necessary for them to attack the one spot that makes it happen (not the technology—the steam engine was invented by Heron 2,000 years ago, in Africa—but the people). When the plague killed off many people in Western Europe, there were people left because there had been some before. So a big population saved them. Imagine a bird flu outbreak in Europe. If it doesn’t kill all of them, it’s because there are many of them. And if there are too many people, such things are natural controls (versus artificial controls). Next paragraph, please.
Thank you. We live at the Equator. Life is vigorous at the equator. The ’Mericans come here to see gorillas and chimps and monkeys (and are shocked when they see people as well, especially the ones who aren’t wielding seven-foot spears). Why here? This is the equator. Life lives, around here. (The comma!) That life liveth, here, means that a booming population is not a strange thing. It’s the way of equatorial populations. Not just human populations: viral populations, too. Malaria parasites and vectors, and all manner of insect, worm, and germ will be common here. The best way for a population to survive in this region is to have many offspring (calfs, puppies, kittens, chicks (the animal), chicks (the people), kids (the animal), and, of course, kids (the people)). It’s not just humans with many kids. It’s only here that you found cultures that ideally required every man to have thousands of cattle, for example. It’s not an accident. It’s the ancient wisdom that the West assumes Africans don’t have. (As do the “educated” Africans; what the West says and does is, to them, the right thing.) The ancients knew their land very well, and knew that those thousands of cattle will just drop dead with anthrax in, at most, ten years. Of the thousands, ten will survive and quickly generate a new set of thousands. That’s the nature of where we live. The IMF isn’t interested in your survival. The less of you there are, the easier it will be to rape your country and bully you and take your gold and your oil, and you won’t be able to fight, neither with stick nor with gun, because there will only be two old, toothless relics of you.
Rwanda is an equatorial country, and also has the highest population density in the World. This is after that Western-caused and Western-sponsored genocide that Rwanda endured. Had they a small population, they’d have been decimated. Yet the killing may have been a (macabre, unsettling) way to naturally control the numbers. If I’m still failing to make my point, here it is: equatorial regions are supposed to be bursting with high populations of everything imaginable, both prey and predator (and you know the graph of the relation between prey populations and predator poulations). And the Great Lakes region is an interlacustrine one. The availability of the perfect environment for unbounded breeding of everything shouldn’t elicit anything short of admiration, except if you throw some unashamed imperialists in the mix. How the fuck can they, the killers of our mothers, get the nerve to tell us what is best for us? (I shouldn’t forget to note that the perfect region, the interlacustrine Great Lakes region of equatorial Africa has the perfect city, Entebbe, the city of the gods, where I am as I type this. O, Entebbe.)
(The irony is that our Enemy plans way ahead, with inspiring patience. We, on the other hand, in our stupid chase for what we deem cool for today, are so short-termist. Consider, for example, our current obsession with political instability. Yes, we want this stupid, unproductive thing called political instability. Not because anybody can point to any definitive good thing that will certainly come of it—I dare you to—but because America tells us to want that. Don’t wonder why it is the “educated” Africans, eager to demonstrate their progressive attitudes and their intelligence, who call for our governments to have a few short terms each. The danger is not in the short-staying presidents/governments, but in their inability to work with who comes next in a continuational fashion. In other countries, the state has a plan that, for the most part, every next government will carry out. In that case, it’s safe for presidents to last under twenty years. But here it’s different—not bad, just different. Whoever goes will leave with his/her dreams and plans. In this case, you need them to last over twenty years, so that they can try out everything, fail, modify, repeat, until their pictures in the papers start to look ugly, then they leave—even if in disruptive (even violent) fashion.
Americans know this, and they tell you to change presidents frequently, because that will keep you from seeing any patterns or planning long enough. (Besides, Ugandans should know better: we’ve had one-month presidents many times before, and there is nothing good that came of it.) And because you are educated, you do as you are told. This, by the way, is nearly the only thing school achieves that couldn’t be done elsewhere: it teaches you to follow stupid orders without thinking. You live by a bell’s ringing for all your formative years and expect to ever think for yourself when the time for it comes? And the imperialists who set up our school systems were looking out for the British Empire to have many clerks saying “Yes, super-human British People; anything you’ll ask of me, milord.”, but they ended up providing clerks who say “Yeah, über-cool American dudes; whatever floats your boat, man.” Either way, it provided an empire’s yes-people who are convinced they are free (and are therefore incapable of fighting their chains—on pain of the psycho-ward).
Jean-Paul Sartre, you were wrong. :o( Parthenon! ...thenon. ...thenon. Brotherhood! ... therhood. ... therhood.
The danger here, of course, is that the “educated” Africans rush after what’s cool, and the imperialists reserve the right to specify what is cool.)
So, you see that I’m not against controlling the population. I’m against doing it in an artificial pattern. If the Earth overflows, some people should leak into Solaria, into Venus or Mars, maybe, and so on. That won’t be a bad thing. Necessity is the mother of ... We could just use Time Lord technology and stack them all into one fucking box. Doctor! Doctor! DOCTOR!
Either way, the unfortunate things that happen to babies in a case where the extant idiots (some of whom are no longer capable of optimally working for their own bread) are preferred to new blood can’t be justified by fear alone. Populations control themselves, or we invent ways to stomach them well. The IMF knows these things, but population control isn’t even their worry. Our existence is their worry.
I already expressed how I feel about abortion. A life is really too high a price to pay for convenience. Especially when it is the convenience of some ruling class’ budget plans, rather than the convenience of the people in the bedroom (which, too, I tend to be against). Some people deserve to be killed, for a variety of reasons. Population growth is not one of those reasons.
I’ll take this chance to reply to one Anonymous, a diligent reader of my blog (thank you, bambi).
77% of anti-abortion people are men. 100% of men will never get pregnant.Of course. But if that was meant to prove that my anti-abortion stand was typical, dismissible, and/or insensitive, it failed. I mean: 77% of pro-abortion people are women. 100% of them are of child-bearing age, and a good percentage are having unprotected sex. What did I prove? Rien. Or maybe I proved that those in danger of bearing kids are readier to abort them, which isn’t a stunning discovery. Let’s argue this on other points, not cyclic non-proofs.
Anyway, to come back on course, we have just seen that the Enemy wants us to kill our babies in such unmotherly brutality, for none of the reasons that may even be considered, but simply because we fear to go against this law that, in pure imperialist fashion, was passed down from the empire’s headquarters. People won’t stop having kids. They’ll just kill more, as children become as dispensible as shirt buttons, because they fill the same niche: conform or die. Ryde or die. Be a boy or die. Be a girl or die. What the fuck?
My trusty proof-reader ... I’ll start capitalising it. So, my Trusty Proof-Reader just said that China made it okay to have another child if you have a girl first. Hmm. So, they saw the problem and solved it? No. People are now killing boys if they come first, so that they can mix things up a bit and have a widdle booyi and a widdle gaayo. Can sanity return, please? Also, Trusty Proof-Reader compels me, with no little amount of physical violence, to note that China allows two kids in the rural areas. Can I go on? Yes. Good.
I would be done, at this point, if I didn’t want to lengthen it enough such that I throw enough of you off. I have the short posts for those who want them. The long ones have a certain audience that I try to sift through by padding these rants with empty paragraphs such as this one. It’s all a trick. And this isn’t long enough yet. I’ll say my main point again here: they want to kill us by our own hands. Since they control what we like, they can make us like to exterminate ourselves, and we will do it. They can make it cool to emasculate oneself, and Africa will be burning testicles to generate fuel. This slavery is non-obvious—it is mostly in the mind. So fighting against it makes you look like a hallucinating psychopath. Africa’s biggest enemy is the African who is well-schooled. They speak and write good English, and they paste their newspaper colums and weblogs in English, and in subliminal adoration of their Western slave drivers, and continually say that the way it is done over there is the right way, they say we should govern our people in the way that the Westerners do (or, failing that, the way the Westerners say), not knowing that they are among the governed, and that they would have to try and exterminate people from the colonies to make room for more-luxurious living in the imperial base (kill the Africans and Arabs, get more oil, drive more cars, bigger cars, live the American Dream, all at the low cost of 99.95 Africans) if they were to govern in this fashion that normally is called “democracy”. The West is in the jaws of a credit crunch: a swathe of the world living beyond its means. Whole economies built with money that doesn’t exist. But if we have more educated Africans, they will sell off everything they have in exchange for the right to be called “democratic” and “progressive” and even “first-world”.
Allow me to proceed on this thread. (It started out as a lengthening ruse, but it has got a head and legs.) They know that their statistics and news stories are going to be accessed by these educated Africans. Actually, I should be quoting that “educated” because these Africans are just schooled, not educated. That’s why their jobs ask for experience. If they were educated in school, they’d not need the experience to educate them. Indeed, experience (and anybody will tell you this) is mainly to undo the rigid stupidity of school (only in that job, though—they remain well-schooled for other things, as we sshall soon see). School also shows that they respond to the bell and switch from their history book to their literature book, then to their geography with no trouble at all. Capable of being told to do ten disparate things in a short space, not managing (or needing) long periods of concerted, concentrated thinking. Cramming dates and formulae, then spewing them just in time to pass this test, then forgetting them just as soon, and even having to repeat the process with the same stuff a few more times. (They lie to kids that finals test all the previous years in school, when the evidence is, in fact, that they test only the last year or two: finals are not designed to ingrain anything, and that is why cramming-and-spewing works well for passing our finals.)
School breaks people in to the life of a clerk, an unthinking yes-person, a cog in a giant empire-wide wheel. No room for developing a style or a reason for one. So, school teaches them that, then it is used at their jobs. They are paid shit, but they never realise it, because that requires concerted thinking on questions like, Why does it seem like I’m always broke just before every other pay-cheque, even after a raise? In this way, they are slapped in-between the palms of the capitalist wage slavery system, and are incapable of breaking out, because they are well-schooled. Or, for that matter, “educated”. They don’t even stop to ask why nobody ever gets wealthy because he/she is schooled, but (if ever) by simple effort. (And, to be fair, the British man never said you should be schooled to get wealthy; only so that you get a job. Clerks are highly-needed, so you’ll get a job. Clerks are not highly-paid.) Ever wondered why what you can do doesn’t matter, only that you have a degree (proof that you can be treated like an automaton and still be subservient, happy, and intimidated when the need arises)?
This is a very insidious thing, because these “schooled” Africans now write in our papers and put stuff on TV. They become headless propaganda machines, declaring what the empire wants as what we should be doing having been told what to want, which was easy because they are schooled, remember). It’s why, honestly, a suppression of our media wouldn’t constitute a major loss. It may even be a gain, as long as we can surf the government issues in the cafés. They are our intellectuals. Headless intellectuals, that’s the picture. (Hehehe. iTunes just jumped to Bittersweet Symphony. Woah.) Now, because our intellectuals are well-schooled, you’ll note that they are far from the dictionary definition of “intellectual”. Me, I’m proudly un-schooled, and maybe I retain some semblance of independence. They punish us for not being schooled by only letting schooled people into some circles, while we shine the shoes outside. Bread or Freedom? :o) My last qualifications are S4, so I guess, while something in me was killed, something must have survived. (Americans, I think our S4 corresponds to your eleventh grade.)
Last paragraph; stay seated. Think of all the people, therefore, who think of our growing population with panic. Those are our intellectuals. (The unschooled ones, we just pop our kids and listen to nobody. Sex is fun, in any case; we can barely hear anything above the fun.) I remember seeing, ‘twas in the New Vision, I believe, a map that showed food security in Uganda. Our intellectuals believed it, and that is the problem. It painted the whole country in green (the peak of food security, a flower to admired by all), except the North East of Uganda, which was in the red (dangerous situation).
There would be no problem if New York had been painted red, too. (I’d get a massive kick out of seeing the colours of the Revolution cover that side so beautifully, for the first time.) New York is deemed to have better food security that the North (and that's why the books and maps are about us, not them). There lies the problem. Our intellectuals don’t do no concerted thinking. New York, and most parts of the West, for that matter, are farther from their food supplies than the North is. The North is self-sufficient*, but would get from the rest of Uganda (and the Sudan and Kenya, et cetera) in the event of poor rains and the like. There is more food waiting to go to the North than there is waiting to go to the combined West. That’s what food security is defined as. (A single well-placed nuke bomb could have Americans starving to normal sizes in all the cities.) But they painted the North red. I’d not mind if they meant we are Communist up there. They just played on stereotypes that schooled Ugandans believe (because they are schooled and incapable of ...) and managed to elicit belief. Believe it or not. An American attaché must have looked the map over and thought, How, now that the Kony guy done gone away, shall we maintain a need to be in the North?. His fat chin creased for a while, as he thought. Then he grinned, and pulled a red marker and painted the North. That way, the bags that scream USAID! USAID! Help From the American People! USAID!, carrying genetically-modifed “corn” would be plentiful yet. (Just to clarify, the American people of whom the bags speak are not the Natives. It’s hard to give help from a reservation concentration camp, you see. The bags mean the benevolent land-owners who caged the Natives. I guess we have something the Natives don’t have; Doohnibor is a neologism that means: to steal from those who do not have to give those who have.)
Ever noticed that, though there may be other bags in an area, only the USAID bags get the CNN shot? Ever noticed that these pictures are prominent, of semi-nude Africans chasing after American benevolence, as it tumbles out of the American jets? This picture, of the empire that spreads peace, love, kindness, progress, is the one Americans want the schooled people to believe. They believe too. Believing the map was step one; step two is believing the pictures on CNN. Step three is believing stuff like “Uganda can’t possibly get rid of the food insecurity that currently plagues her, unless the population and birth rates are controlled [...]” The worst belief, though, is that we even need any aid. That we would be doomed if we didn’t do what the imperialists want us to do (especially when the believed reason for the doom is “cutting aid”).
Our intellectuals, again, can only tell political bunches apart by whether or not they are for the term limits or not. No such shit as left-wing, right-wing, whatever. Nobody bothers, because the imperialists don’t want us to worry about such stuff. You see, it would expose the ideologies, and people would start to think. That’s bad for them. If they keep us glued to stupid things like term limits and so on, we won’t have any time to consider who wants a Communist government. We’ll only be thinking the stupid thoughts of children. I saw some intellectuals debating what Obama’s victory means for Africa. Headless intellectuals, they are. They don’t stop to wonder why it should matter who is running WA (because we are a conquered state, which is bad). They just accept that we should consider it as something that affects us. They’ve been told by the empire that it determines their fate, so they debate that. Not whether or not we should even be caring who runs that heap in the West (and not, for example, how Lucy Kibaki is feeling this morning). They are headless intellectuals, automata, unthinking, well-schooled.
* It feels good to write North and self-sufficient in the same clause. Woo-hoo, Juche! :o)
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Jonah and the Fish
Mood: Recursive-piscine mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
I’m thinking, What if Jonah, when he was swallowed by the fish, what if he ate the fish? Maybe he wasn’t into sushi. Maybe the fish didn’t have scales, and the prophet was into goodly ol’ kosher stuff. Or, maybe, if he had eaten the fish, that would have led to infinite recursion; because, you see, the fish had eaten him, also! So, in eating it, he’d have eaten himself (inside the fish, at which point he would eat himself just as he had eaten the fish, and then had to eat himself again (inside himself, at which point he would eat himself just as he had eaten himself earlier and the fish yet earlier, and then had to eat himself again (inside himself, at which point he ...))).
You see, where I stay, you can smell the lake. It’s a bit interesting to think you’re stepping in a pond that has three countries on its edges. Most of the people I meet on this road are holding oars and nets—the huge majority of them are fishermen. And women balancing baskets of fish on their heads, also. And some boda-boda guys ferrying the fish by the hundreds. (I feel sorry for them fish: first to die by drowning in air, then to die by boda-boda.) Sometimes, like twice a day, I see fish of scary proportions. I mean, I’m an Entebbe boy; we know fish pretty well. But to see a fish that could positively conceal this laptop in its body, that’s worrying. What if I get eaten by a fish? My very thin (even serpentine) proportions could make me appear worm-like to them, so I’m not just theorising. Anyway, back to the fishermen.
On this same road, there are big, big bushes. I saw some fisherman, with oars in one hand, calling into one big bush for one “Yona”. For the Other Peoples (I’d say for the Nations, if I were in punning mood) “Yona” is “Jonah” in our dialects here. So, after thinking about beig eaten by fish, I chuckled when I saw an angry fisherman calling into the bush for Jonah. I was thinking, He’s been eaten already, dude, don’t you know?
After a while, the man started talking to Yona, who I couldn’t see. Saying some stuff like I won’t be calling you for so long next time. You know what time I come, and yet you still expect me to beg you to come get your fish ... At this point, I’m passing the fisherman, and I’m slightly worried he could be a frothing-at-the-mouth psycho who is even armed with a spear-shaped piece of wood!
But there was a Yona exiting the bush, actually. A cat with a beige coat was purring towards him. It hops over the gulley that drains water (and tadpoles) towards the lake, and the fisherman squats towards Yona. A small fish is produced, and placed at Yona’s feet. The man mumbles some stuff I didn’t hear (although I had stopped to watch, waving my curiousity licence), and then he gets up to leave. Yona purrs a bit, then paws the fish. It jerks. It’s alive! Yona gon’ get eaten, Allah! Run, Jonah, run! Tell Nineveh that in forty ... But Yona slapped the fish strongly on the trunk once, twice, thrice, fouice, fivice ... Tamed by cat style kung-fu, the fish calmed down a bit and conceded a bite. And then Jonah took the still-jerking fish into the bush.
That’s another thing about Entebbe. If it takes your fancy, you can have your fish kick its way into the pan. But now I’m dying to know the back story of this fisherman who feeds a cat that seems to even be a stray. And likely everyday.
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
I’m thinking, What if Jonah, when he was swallowed by the fish, what if he ate the fish? Maybe he wasn’t into sushi. Maybe the fish didn’t have scales, and the prophet was into goodly ol’ kosher stuff. Or, maybe, if he had eaten the fish, that would have led to infinite recursion; because, you see, the fish had eaten him, also! So, in eating it, he’d have eaten himself (inside the fish, at which point he would eat himself just as he had eaten the fish, and then had to eat himself again (inside himself, at which point he would eat himself just as he had eaten himself earlier and the fish yet earlier, and then had to eat himself again (inside himself, at which point he ...))).
You see, where I stay, you can smell the lake. It’s a bit interesting to think you’re stepping in a pond that has three countries on its edges. Most of the people I meet on this road are holding oars and nets—the huge majority of them are fishermen. And women balancing baskets of fish on their heads, also. And some boda-boda guys ferrying the fish by the hundreds. (I feel sorry for them fish: first to die by drowning in air, then to die by boda-boda.) Sometimes, like twice a day, I see fish of scary proportions. I mean, I’m an Entebbe boy; we know fish pretty well. But to see a fish that could positively conceal this laptop in its body, that’s worrying. What if I get eaten by a fish? My very thin (even serpentine) proportions could make me appear worm-like to them, so I’m not just theorising. Anyway, back to the fishermen.
On this same road, there are big, big bushes. I saw some fisherman, with oars in one hand, calling into one big bush for one “Yona”. For the Other Peoples (I’d say for the Nations, if I were in punning mood) “Yona” is “Jonah” in our dialects here. So, after thinking about beig eaten by fish, I chuckled when I saw an angry fisherman calling into the bush for Jonah. I was thinking, He’s been eaten already, dude, don’t you know?
After a while, the man started talking to Yona, who I couldn’t see. Saying some stuff like I won’t be calling you for so long next time. You know what time I come, and yet you still expect me to beg you to come get your fish ... At this point, I’m passing the fisherman, and I’m slightly worried he could be a frothing-at-the-mouth psycho who is even armed with a spear-shaped piece of wood!
But there was a Yona exiting the bush, actually. A cat with a beige coat was purring towards him. It hops over the gulley that drains water (and tadpoles) towards the lake, and the fisherman squats towards Yona. A small fish is produced, and placed at Yona’s feet. The man mumbles some stuff I didn’t hear (although I had stopped to watch, waving my curiousity licence), and then he gets up to leave. Yona purrs a bit, then paws the fish. It jerks. It’s alive! Yona gon’ get eaten, Allah! Run, Jonah, run! Tell Nineveh that in forty ... But Yona slapped the fish strongly on the trunk once, twice, thrice, fouice, fivice ... Tamed by cat style kung-fu, the fish calmed down a bit and conceded a bite. And then Jonah took the still-jerking fish into the bush.
That’s another thing about Entebbe. If it takes your fancy, you can have your fish kick its way into the pan. But now I’m dying to know the back story of this fisherman who feeds a cat that seems to even be a stray. And likely everyday.
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Happy Hour XX
Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
If memory serves, there has only been one month, since the January of 2007, when there was no Happy Hour. That means we would have had nineteen of them thus far, but this month had two of them. So ... We are at twenty. If my mathematics sucked, cool: I don't change much.
Girls discussed hair and hairpins. And we all got pink October-Is-Cancer-Month ribbons for our shirts. (Shirt mostly, but you can put it anywhere you wish. Just remember the pin on it.) I wore mine. I'm going to have the pin surgically removed from my chest, though. :o| I hope I don't be one of the 1% of breast cancer victims who are men (or boys, if you want to take a potshot at me).
Apart from hair, cancer, and lemons, we discussed ... um, hexadecimal numbering. Strange things happen when the djinn* and tonic has been plenty.
I'm about to hit some place for pizza. I'm failing to cut the story I promised into a smaller thing fit for the blog format. I'll likely not keep my promise. Sorry, everybody.
Anyway, now I need to go away from this computer.
PS: I hit the place for pizza, people. God!
* This rendition of “gin and tonic” is stolen from the book I returned to Dee at the Happy Hour.
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe
If memory serves, there has only been one month, since the January of 2007, when there was no Happy Hour. That means we would have had nineteen of them thus far, but this month had two of them. So ... We are at twenty. If my mathematics sucked, cool: I don't change much.
Girls discussed hair and hairpins. And we all got pink October-Is-Cancer-Month ribbons for our shirts. (Shirt mostly, but you can put it anywhere you wish. Just remember the pin on it.) I wore mine. I'm going to have the pin surgically removed from my chest, though. :o| I hope I don't be one of the 1% of breast cancer victims who are men (or boys, if you want to take a potshot at me).
Apart from hair, cancer, and lemons, we discussed ... um, hexadecimal numbering. Strange things happen when the djinn* and tonic has been plenty.
I'm about to hit some place for pizza. I'm failing to cut the story I promised into a smaller thing fit for the blog format. I'll likely not keep my promise. Sorry, everybody.
Anyway, now I need to go away from this computer.
PS: I hit the place for pizza, people. God!
* This rendition of “gin and tonic” is stolen from the book I returned to Dee at the Happy Hour.
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