Communist Socks and Boots

I've Moved!

2010-02-08T18:55:00.003+03:00

Mood: I-like-to-move-it-move-it
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Kampala

Hey, all. I'm back (weep!) and I'm located at http://detamble.com/blogs/1b.
The new blogs is called My Song in the Trench. Well, the English part of it, anyway.
The intro post there is here. (Was that sentence an oxymoron of sorts?)

Meanwhile, since more people read this than other places where I write, I'll also use this here platform to introduce Fat Boy whose blog is called Freethought Kampala.

Amusez-vous.

Because it Had to be Said

2009-08-21T14:32:00.008+03:00

Mood: Still-gone mood
[Toot!] Index: 9.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Now, I don’t like the fact that Nev’s mug is grinning at me from the bottom-left corner. Emblems that aspire to universalism should be impersonal; did you learn nothing about propaganda from the good Commies of yester-century? :o) Also, it is too American—especially when no irony or puns are intended—to say “I am Ugandan”. I say, in correct grammar, “I am a Ugandan”. But it is a worthy emblem, nonetheless, and I shall put it on me blog. Even on pain of having to break my vow of silence and blog-celibacy. Because it had to be said.

Nev posted it here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take care of those who, like me, have roundly renounced tribe completely. It only takes care of those who realise that, the past being irreversible, tribe should be secondary to national identity. They retain tribe, but relegate its importance. These, too, are kin, and are equally right (though different from one like myself). One could even say that they are merely of a different tribe.

A post to do full justice to the vestigial status of tribe in the Uganda of today would be too long, and would necessarily require a break from my break.
These politicians, who care more for themselves than for you (especially you!) are going to seize tribe and use it to divide and conquer, to stock up fortune for themselves and their undeserving children, who will eat because you bled, and live because you died. Reject, O my countrymen, all who speak of tribe as excluding one group or the other! Remember that you are all sons and daughters of one Adam and one Eve. Do not allow these categorisations to make you segregate against the children of your grandmother’s favourite siblings! We are one country. Reject the lines being drawn amongst us to pit “us” against “them”! We are them, they are us. Heaven forfend that the most-diverse region on Earth, our interlacustrine region, take tribe seriously! Heaven forfend! Technically, you’re not even your father’s tribe, and not even your mother’s tribe—especially in this region, where tribe (by its sheer profusion) is merely something akin to a street address! Forbid it, Almighty God! Choose division over unity, and you shall be expected to stab your nephews. The blood of our brothers and sisters in Rwanda is not yet dry in the ground!

I’m not back. I’m still gone. I’m still studying the things I promised I’d be studying. (Actually, I’m done with most of them, but I ended up picking new interesting topics. Someone now knows what one of these topics is.) I thought I’d be back sooner than this, and yet it appears that I’ll stay away for much, much longer than I had ever anticipated. The three months I talked about may likely become a year or more. I want to be back to make you hate me and hate yourselves in time for the 2011 elections, to spew bile and rage and make you so angry about the fact that you can’t prove me and my absurdities wrong. Remember, O reader, that Zeno of Elea is my favourite from Antiquity.

And fuck you all for abandoning your blogs in favour of Twitter! Shall we be forced to glean any sense from the 140-character updates in necessarily-poor grammar? Is this what we shall quote when we talk about how you spent your 2009? Shall we forever continue our descent to frequent nonsense, away from rare sense? Is it a price we can pay? Forbid it, Almighty God!
Return, then, to the bosom from which you ran. Come back to your blogs, and stp spkn lyk ths cuz its not a gd replcmnt 4 yo blgs! Fck twtr!
Reject Twitter! Gather substance and post it. (Steven Moffat’s Dr. Who episodes are often twice as long as usual episodes—because they are the best episodes. Often, they have to cut big chunks out in the end. I’m trying to say that good explanations—movies, stories, posts, updates, episodes—cannot be short.)

In the meantime, I’ll make it known to the few of you who are my friends and are on Twitter, that when you send ‘tweetme’ to 2299 (only UTL), you can sign up to be sending Tweets off your phone (and receiving them, when you send ‘twitter’). I did it for the money. :o)
Now I shall return to the studying that I’ve been doing, and to working (of course). Consider the previous post to still be in effect, with the mild modification that the absence will last even longer than I had expected.
Since I’m neither on Facebook nor on Twitter, unlike all you cool people, I am essentially without a way to inform you of things. I am abstaining from all “social networking”. That is good for the World, but not for me. So, when I get a new blog elsewhere, I’ll post the link here.

Exeunt

2009-01-27T16:03:00.001+03:00

Mood: Leaving mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.0001
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

I’m going away. I won’t be posting on this blog any more. Yes, clapping and ululating is allowed. Enjoy yourselves. Most of my victims don’t—didn’t—outlive me.

The weblogs will have more air, more signal, less noise. And now, you will be able to discuss amongst yourselves without having to watch for that noisy thing that shows up at the party and urinates in your comment boxes, letting the spirits talk through him. Incoherence has lost, verbosity is vanquished.

You should have picked up a signal from the first paragraph of the previous post. And I’ve come to the realisation that these status thingies, like Twitter, came after the weblog, but many bloggers keep a status thingy (be it at Facebook) and a blog. Of course, went my mind, enligtened, It’s because they serve a different purpose! The people who kept asking me for shorter posts wanted a status thingy!

Blog for essays and such, status thingy for the shorter dispatches. If I’ll blog again, it would have to be with that kind of system, but none satisfies me right now, so I should be pointing to a new URL when I return, running my own contraption. It may not be until three months have elapsed, at least.

Plus I have a hard road ahead. I’m reshaping my company and tuning things here and there. I’m dealing with a huge block, and my hand won’t draw. My focus has been almost only on my rent-paying work. That’s detrimental. (Did You Know: Most of me was built for luxury.) Some music here: Bob Marley on Uprising with Coming in From the Cold.

I’ve had fun doing this. Now I’m going to surrender myself to sanity and calmness—where I’m least at home. To learn to acknowledge the Shekinah within all humanity’s breast. To carefully study the workings of apology and pardon and forgiveness. To learn to write it all but much shorter. Stuff like that.
Studying, reading, loving, writing letters by hand, thinking, drawing, et cetera. I’m going away. :o)

Exeunt.

Pensées

2009-01-18T17:59:00.009+03:00

Mood: Thoughtful mood
[Toot!] Index: 6.66666666666666666666666
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe

This week, for the first time in really long, I put pen to paper and drew a picture. I really, really, really hate how the other concerns of life have taken away from other things that are at least as important as having bread on my table. I no longer draw, I no longer write, I no longer stop to take the luxury of thinking about pointless puzzles. On this blog, when was the last time I posted a picture? Ah, this post. And the last time I posted a story for the sake of telling a story? Ah, this one. Strange, considering that this blog was founded on the high principle of mixing expressive art (drawing, writing, philosophy, et cetera) with the Communist Way. I’ve lost the plot. :o( And, to be honest, ranting wasn’t the point of the blog (originally).

But now, to redeem myself, I’ll spend this post thinking legibly.

I spend my life before a computer, and that is why I use the Dvorak keyboard layout. If you spend your life doing something, put time into making it comfortable. So, next on the list is a great chair that supports my lower back well. And lots of other stuff. I’m currently suffering from the results of bad sitting posture. It’s so, so far from funny. I realised I’d have to fashion myself a course in how to work healthily on the computer.

That brings me to another thing. Our educational system tries to make each of us one thing. You know, “You’re a lawyer, and you over there, you’re an agriculturalist.” That’s where it goes totally wrong. For any single 21^st-Century person, other skills are absolutely necessary. If you get rich, for example (use your imagination!), you’ll hire one who was labelled Wealth Management Expert. But until you have him, you can’t get rich unless you are your own Wealth Management Expert. In short, you have to have studied more than your university allowed you to, if you’ll survive at all. The insidious thing is that the system teaches you to be taught, rather than to teach yourself. I’m going to do a “course” in healthy computer use. You need to do the same. But you won’t. And your university can’t hear your screams. Gwahahahaha.

Before I forget, my wee startup company has put up three utility websites. I don’t have Internet Explorer, but I trust some of you bloggers have it. So, check them out and tell me what isn’t working right. Solomon hosts me. He’s taking all my money, but he’s one heck of a cool dude, that Solomon. He went into the startup waters before I did, and it’s even inspiring. I don’t pay unless I need to; and he has made me pay. That’s the goal of my stuff.

1^st In Line has a cool URL and cool utility. I won’t explain the sites here, because they should be able to do that. Check it out. It’s the one that seems to have the Internet Explorer problems.
My Place almost shares a name with a Coldplay song. Check her out.
Lex.ug was the first, and I made the regrettable technical decision to build it in PHP. I don’t know what posessed me, but I won’t re-write it until it pays me to.

I hope my liking for minimalism in interface design shows up. To make them user-friendly, I got help from un-expected quarters. :o) Most people under-estimate how hard it is for geeks to make user-friendly stuff, but maybe they’ve never seen MS Office. Or nearly any software, for that matter. If, as a programmer, you stray from minimalism, you’re creating a monster. I call that The 27^th Comrade’s Law.

Next, I saw a lunar eclipse on the night of the 13th of January. But it wasn’t even predicted by the NASA people. Anyway, it was at the exact moment of the rising, and I’ll tell you: I’ve never seen a more-elegant sign in the skies. Wow.

I was at the UBHH, on the 15^th. Coolest in a very, very long time. But I was on my best behaviour; ask JF. Except where I noted that the American Declaration of Independence, if translated to Arabic and words like “taxes” turned to things like “oil”, et cetera, it would work well as a dispatch from Al-Qaida, stating the reasons for the fight. Point being that the American founders were called terrorists, just as the Al-Qaida are, because they challenged an empire, just as Al-Qaida does. (For perspective, this Empire kills more innocent people every month than Al-Qaida has killed in its history. Who is your enemy? No, think before you answer.)

We talked and talked and talked. The topics swerved from why Africa’s coup history is a good, beautiful thing (because it shows that these people won’t let you shit on them—they’ll fight you), and that, by extension, fighting and war are beautiful things that cause bad things (it’s really beautiful that animals have enough dignity to exert physical force to prevent you from treating them like trash). From talking about the Aguda (co-incidentally, Rufus Wainright is playing right now) to discussing an interesting loop-hole in the Mosaic Law. And noting that Americans are fucked, because they’ve trusted their presidency with the power to resist any armed rebellion from within. If Bush had treated them like trash, they still wouldn’t be able to revolt. That’s disgusting, you incontinent burger-eating Western cowards! You deserved Bush! (I know, that’s unkind, but I won’t take it back. It’s too cool.)

It seems this Heroines story I wrote is quite popular. It has got me enough face-to-face plaudits. Hmm. Someone even said it’s publishable. But I just read an article that said books are dying. I’d be glad to become a writer, honestly, but better wordsmiths haven’t been published; why should I expect ... Oh, well. The fantasy was actually good while it lasted.

Please read about penicillin allergy. All of you. Turns out I have penicillin allergy, and if I ever receive it, I’ll get a life-threatening condition. In some medical jurisdictions (I made that phrase up, but it works), I’d be required to wear a band on my hand that explicitly states that I’m allergic to penicillin. Here’s an informative video. It mentions swollen lips as a sign. It’s not like I had thin lips, but you should have seen those I had with the allergy!

You know, if I stopped being a programmer, I’d become a writer. I actually dream of that. And also to draw lots of pictures. I’d probably have a blog where the average post looks like this. That’s some fanatasy of mine (second to the seedy one of the army of knife-wielding nuns).
Another thing, related, is that I’m excited about Lulu’s project. I should breathe into a paper bag immediately.

Is this too long already? I hope it is. I’m running out of thoughts.

Do you realise that the honk of a car is actually a language? But the grammar is too context-sensitive, which (I guess) is inevitable since there are only few symbols. All you can do is honk, and maybe vary the length and “tremolo” of the honk. But it is expressive enough to say things as varied as “Get out of the way, you old bastard!” and “Hey, congratulations on the new car!” But I hate honks all the same. In isolation, they don’t carry enough information to communicate politeness.

While we talk about language, I’m fucking tired of fucking saying the fucking F word all the fucking time. Fuck! And yet I can’t seem to fucking stop. But not to worry. I’ll employ my Pauline Philosophy of Dropping Habits Painlessly.

And, believe it or not, there was someone at the UBHH convinced that my hair was ... was fake. Gwahahahaha. That I had extensions in it. How sweet.

Longer! Longer!

You know, George Orwell wrote this column back then. It is interesting, in that you see the ideas of 1984 developing in it. He worried about language and how it loses some meanings, for example. It’s actually a nice chronicle of his ideas’ development. Start here. It has a Wikipedia page. It's rich. On the censorship of “fuck”. (December 6^th.)

Last point. I know, by this time, I’m alone. So I’ll say things I believe. I’ll write for me.
Humans don’t take uniformity to be noteworthy, unless that uniformity is itself a lack of uniformity. A red ball in a heap of blue ones will show up, because it is not uniform. A heap of all-blue will show up in a group of heaps that are otherwise of mixed colours, because it is not uniform. This “showing up” I shall call “spiking”.
Unfortunately, the same humans think that positive spikes (when things break normalcy in the direction of betterment) are expected. It’s how humans are, and that helps them keep improving, et cetera. But negative spikes (when normalcy is broken for the worse) attract attention (because they are spikes) and criticism. “Criticism” can be positive or negative, but the positive end of that word has died, because of what I told you: whenever critics talk, they are complaining, so “criticism” comes to mean “negative criticism”.

This trend can be seen in politics (whenever anybody, for example, talks about Museveni, it is to say “This guy is bad, this is not working out right”). We didn’t talk of the climate until we were saying things are getting bad. The West doesn’t talk of Africa, except to count bodies or to note a battle or war. And that food critic in Ratatouille, Antoine Ego. :o)
It helps keep urging for betterment, but at the cost of truth. Truth is when both sides are told. This negativism, I don’t like. The solution, of course, is to consciously hunt for positive things in everything. Be able to say a good thing for every bad thing you can say, and you can’t go wrong.
I notice that’s the missing element in my raging against the West, for example, but fuck you: you won’t ruin my fun. Objectivity is boring.
I draw the line somewhere, of course. Or I risk becoming a suicidal 70-year-old twelve-time-divorcé who hates his body and hates everything and is incapable of seeing the beauty in anything. Same to you. Think about it. :o)

Outsanity

2009-01-12T09:57:00.001+03:00

Mood: outsane mood
[Toot!] Index: 3.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe

Girls, here’s something for you. There is this disease, called Grave’s Disease. The chances are low-ish that you’ll get it. But the reason I’m warning here is because I’m yet to hear of a more-deforming disease that is almost exclusively for girls. As in, maybe it’s not as bad as an amputation (at the neck, for example), but it is not easy to detect it, yet it damages in style. Okay, it’s easy to detect, but you’ll not know what you are detecting. You’ll think you’re just tired, yet your eyes are about to pop out of your head and dangle on a string of nerve.

See, if you ever get shaky hands and legs, and they just shake on their own ...
And your thyroid (the thing slightly below your Adam’s Apple—Eve’s, in your case) starts to swell ...
And your sight is not so clear anymore ... Just a little bit dimmer ...
And you feel really, really tired even when you have done no strenuous stuff ...
I’d guess a note about libido belongs here, but I couldn’t know. You see, I’m only giving you the symptoms we noticed on someone. It’s funny that the Wikipedia page on the disease lists opposite pairs of signs as symptoms, but I guess it is either because the disease is very tricky or because that’s Wikipedia.
Anyway, one big deal must be when you press a thumb into, say, your foot (on the upper side, behind the toes), it dips in for a short while (they could be slightly swollen), and then it returns to normal. It’s called oedema, and you likely know it (aka. dropsy) . I think it tends to get extremities (legs, breasts, arms). That’s the clincher.
Oh, and also flushes. If, suddenly, you’re feeling too bloody hot, then it passes and you’re drenched in sweat.

And you’re a girl past puberty (especially around late twenties, thirties, forties, although other age groups are in risk, too).
You could have Grave’s disease, so run to the doctor. I said Run.
The treatment is drawn out, and takes like two years, with heavy monitoring. Why did I say you should run? By the way, tell all the girls you know. Tell them, because ... it deforms you in rude style. The doctor who treated the case I mentioned, he didn’t work on Saturdays. But we made the call on a Friday night, and he was in office on Saturday morning, because—and these are his words—every minute you take causes severe incremental damage. Minute! (It uses previous damage, it seems. So the more-damaged you are, the more-damaged you get, like that.)
So the doc ran into office that morning, when he wasn’t even supposed to be working.

If you don’t get treated, you turn into a shivering wreck. Your colour changes (into some dark hue that approaches inky black), and your eyes hang nearly out of the sockets, and you have a goitre the size of a Fresian cow’s udder dancing before your neck. If you don’t die, the disease may go away on its own. But you never forget it, and neither does your body. Or anyone, for that matter.

It’s unknown what exactly causes it, but if you get some wound and it gets septic, that could trigger it. (You can’t know which wound; you may not have taken good notice, anyway. A pimple seems to fill the shoes quite well, I think.) And the wound may refuse to heal, as was the case here. Just run to the doctor. As Madea says, Run like ‘ell.
The person of whom I speak, she’s mostly healed now, with no damages. But that was mostly luck. (Trying to gossip on phone, she told her symptoms to someone who knew another case that was no so lucky, maybe for not being a gossip. The other end of the phone line screamed and told her to run to the doctor right away.) As for you, thank your deities that you read my otherwise-useless blog.
That’s all.

But this was too sane. Too out of character with the usual CS&B stuff. Let’s rock dis joint!

I’ve been talking here, that the way the political system of the World is designed doesn’t follow some good principles. As in, when you design something, there is this thing called The Principle of Recursive Design, which says that the parts of the whole must be of the same qualities as the whole.
So, a strong car, if well designed, must have a strong axle, strong nuts, strong body, strong engine. Well-designed trucks look like Doctor Who’s Cybermen.
A water-proof pen must have a water-proof nib and water-proof casing. If it is poor quality (Made in Switzerland, for example), the ink tube will not be water-proof. If it is good quality, the kind that you pay good money for (Made in Uganda, for example), it will have even the ink tube water-proof. Someday, when it goes open while you’re under the sea, you notice that the ink didn’t spill, and you praise Made in Uganda products on your blog, and they become known all over the World.

But let’s not digress. So, the World political system was obviously made in Switzerland. It encourages popular control of the decision making process on the inside of countries, but encourages dictatorship in the relationships between countries. What happened in the dictatorial times is that someone saw what he felt was right, and he imposed it on the lower mortals. The only lower mortals who didn’t bow and thank the dictator for whatever they received were rebels. Rebels don’t obey the dictator, and those who don’t obey become rebels. This we understand very well. The rebels were attacked by the dictator’s military in a bid to over-power them and make them obey. The obedient ones were told that they were good, and that they would not taste the wrath that is handed out to the rebels. They were made to face the rebels and denounce them and shout at them “rebel!”

We overthrew this order, and the world agreed with us. I’m lying. We didn’t, and it didn’t. What happened was that we all knew that there was better. That we could have a real democracy, one where we influenced the decisions that were made over us. Ultimately, we’d choose what happened to us. So we threw the dictator out. This was inside the countries. The dictators we threw out were in many colours, but mostly White. We said we had had enough of Brits going to London and drafting what we should believe in Nairobi and Kampala. We fought. We rebelled. We wanted to own our land. We wanted to eat what came from the sweat that made our earth soggy beneath our feet. If we got any support from the White dictators such as America, it was because they thought If we aren’t the Master there, nobody will be. Other dictators we threw out were like Idi Amin, who was chosen and installed onto the throne by the ones we had fought earlier. (You see, therefore, that the history of unpopular dictatorship in Africa is a creature of the people who invented it, of course, the ones who say we are steeped in a dictatorial culture, the ones who killed us in our thousands when we wanted our land back.)

We didn’t overthrow dictatorship, because it tarries yet. You know what happens when your government writes a budget according to its decisions, right or wrong, if they differ with what the Westerners think is right? The Westerners say No! Silly Native subservients know nothing! Maybe the Native mind is too weak to grasp European wisdom? Is Plato and Keynes and Washington that difficult for the Native economist? Don’t they know that this way that we point is The Way? What’s with this Native and wanting to make independent Decisions, yet not having the Mind for it? We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Thinking for the European, Obeying for the Native. We don’t teach the Greek Ancients in your Universities for Nothing.
I mean, I don’t care if we fuck up our economy with our decisions. Let’s do it. The worm, when expelled in faeces, will die, because it has no legs, no eyes, no arms. It has been carried around, made to be a parasite, that it has had no use for independent action. When the dependence ends—not if, but when—the worm can’t survive. That’s what the Native is being made. By what?

By dictatorship. We didn’t overthrow dictatorship, because rules are made in Europe and handed down as decrees. (You shall permit homosexual relationships henceforth. Going against this goes against the Human Rights we taught you about. Don’t mind that the very first clause ever written against homosexuality in Africa was written in Europe by Europeans for Africans to obey.)
Spot the dictator. And, as I said before, the only people who don’t obey the dictators are rebels. If you don’t obey, you’re a rebel, and if you’re a rebel, you don’t obey.
So the dictatorship unleashes might against the rebels. All sorts of decrees that haven’t been obeyed have uncovered rebels. From Pyongyang (being besieged, even as we speak, by the Western dictatorship, but ready to strike with Songun Might under the Brilliant Guidance of the Wise Dear Leader to Defend the Juche Revolution) to La Habana. To Caracas. To Harare, as well. I’ll deal with this in another post, just stay calm for now! :-o Sit down.

When your country doesn’t obey (becomes a rebel, in other words), it is attacked. Budgets, trade sanctions, arms embargoes, et cetera. Spot the dictator. Obey Protestant/Catholic-inspired laws! No, now obey Hedonist pseudo-liberal laws! Je suis le monde, et le monde est moi! What I say, you do! Obey! Maybe we wouldn’t rebel if we had a say in making the choice, but no; it’s by decree. You people aren’t fighting, because you don’t know that next they are going to say the law is that you be their unquestioning shamba slaves. You’ll remember my words, when you grow all the food that the West eats, but survive by licking the sweat of your palms. Freedom’s importance is that only free people can defend freedom. You let them be your masters while you watch their movies and turn into over-painted mimicry clowns and think it makes you cool to know who their entertainers are fucking, trading your freedom for the label of “Good Carbon Copy”, learning to do as they do, as they tell you to do, not knowing that, when situations compel them to, they will tell you to die on their front-lines, because their obese children can’t do this hard work for the empire.

A big war is coming, and empires always use the Natives for this dirty business. Have you learnt nothing? How many more Natives shall be shot in the face, and be brought home unlabelled, only to be told apart by the Western-style partings in their Afros? And we couldn’t have refused to fight, because we didn’t have the freedom to not do as “our country” (Britain! We were Brits! How cool!) wanted us to. “Our flag”, the Union Jack, was at war. Only the free can defend their freedom. It’s this fight you now laugh at, as you read this. Your grandfathers sold their freedom for the opportunity to be deemed Brits. Complete with pinstripe suits and partings in the hair and bowler hats. You remember the King’s African Rifles? The (real) Brits don’t. Your grandfathers died in vain, for that dictatorial Master, while thinking that, at least, they were British. Now, you. You have sold your birthright for bean soup. So you can be called “progressive” and “democratic” and such. In the next war, you’ll want so badly to have the label of “League of the Free” against your country, and “Defenders of Democratic Civilization” (note the z in civilisation). Your city will host a base that belongs to the dictator, and the dictator’s enemy (who you’ve been taught to hate and denounce and call “terrorist” or “communist” or just “non-democratic”—the new terms for the old one, “rebel”) will fire retaliatory nuclear bombs at you, and you will have children who are deformed, with noses on their chins. But at least you’ll be “democratic, free, civilised”.

We can’t have democracy inside the countries, if we do, and not amongst the countries, if we do. This handing down of what should be done, that is dictatorship. The Americans do this, sans batting an eyelid. And then they want to lecture us about democracy. This is not sustainable, and, like all dictatorships, will fall. And when it does, Frantz Fanon will be called “an idealistic romantic poet”. What I mean is that the survivors of that war will be chocking on the bullets that slip into their stew from the cooking body parts of enemy soldiers.

Rantdom Thuroggits

2009-01-06T11:35:00.001+03:00

Mood: Yarrow mood
[Toot!] Index: 3.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Terrible, terrible things have been happening in my world. For example, you know your guitar skills are terrifying when you have to chase your audience. Not just that: I was shouting “Only one verse! Just the first one! Okay, okay, only the opening lick. I’ve practiced since last time, I swear!” Now, I know I lost a string, but still.
Anyway, problem is that when you hold the guitar, people want to hear a Jimi Hendrix. At least I know Hendrix didn’t play the adungu. Gon’ practice.

Before I forget, go to Lulu's crib and vote already.

Next random observation: buy land or a house today. If you can afford it, you lucky bastard, buy it. See, Uganda’s population is young. 50% is under fifteen years of age. So, whatever property costs now, it will cost twice as much in about fifteen years (due to increased demand). That’s the conservative estimate. If you factor in increasing wealth (aka. increasing demand), you can increase that estimate. See, with land, supply is fixed; only demand changes, in that historic linear equation. There’s no chance that someone will flood the market with more land. It could, in reality, be anything from five to ten times. So, if you get it now, your investment will lie there making money while you club. 10 million becomes 50 or 100 million. Don’t joke. In any case, buy it now, or you’ll be the one buying at them prices, rather than selling. (A house in the USA goes for about Ushs. 1 billion these days. Be for the future.)

But the value of land will hit the blessed zero, when the Revolution nationalises its use. Vote for me! Vote for the Revolution! Guns and votes! Guns are Votes! Bullets are Ballots! The Popular War, yay!
Man, that poster of Sendero Luminoso still shines brightly in my head, pointing to a path (though maybe not the path).

Next random thing? ’90s pop music was ... God will get whoever sang any of that shit. Leave revenge to God, they say.

I had malaria. This is the next random thing. One Artenam dose fixed me, but Christ Jesus the Promised Nazarene! It was not extremely nice to suffer that shit. :o(

Next: I don’t have my computer right now, and I think I may have lost it for good. The laptop, yes. :o( I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. If you don’t back up your data, go cry in the other room. The rest of us won’t waste sympathy. Back up! Daily! Don’t come crying when—not if, but when—when you lose your disk. Please, please, please: back your data up. (Hint: mail yourself some precious documents, so Gmail or Yahoo! can keep a copy safe for you. Encrypt them, if they are private.)

Next: Life, in her infinite kindness, never lets me forget that I have no reason to believe in myself. You can’t imagine the freedom that gives one.

Mallards, Et Cetera

2008-12-22T19:51:00.003+03:00

Mood: Mersenne-twister mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.5
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

The water-friendly birds of Europe started arriving recently. As always, the clearest signal is with the mallard ducks. I think migratory birds are an inspirational symbol, and if I had to pick one thing that most-embodies hope, I’d choose the migratory bird. It would also be my symbol for luxury: if it gets cold Up There, head Down There.
Unfortunately, the humans Up There also figured out how to fly to Down Here when it gets cold Up There. As a result, there is a band of chain-smoking Greeks who are taking over my spot at the lake. Damn it. I own that place! The Greeks, they won’t leave anything alone, not even the markers I’m using to denote these points. On to βετα, then.
How to deal with the urge to get a pet monkey? Seriously.
The party was off the hook, on Saturday. I’d link to a blog post that says more, but (unfortunately) it has pictures of me. Cameras are a little too honest with me, I think.
Jude says the definition of an idealist is this:
```
idealist, n: One who is yet to try it out.
```
(Note: adjective forms of this word appear in American literature. Correct them with a red marker wherever you find them.)
I thought this was one chance when the World would get to see that violence can be defeated by good ol' trust and forgiveness. But the guns are screaming again. Shit. And this guy, sure that Kony will be grabbed this time, sent the sonny to get the honours prize. Hahaha.
Christmas Carols suck, and those who don’t admit it have either not heard that limited selection of unimaginatively-repetitive chants as frequently as I have or they aren’t being honest. Man, who’s composing new carols? Why no new ones? It may be a watch-worthy sign that, for those to whom this would be an issue, Christmas (and probably Christianity) have become artifacts, remnants, museum items, that can no longer be modified or participated in, just watched from a distance—Please Do NOT Touch the Items on Display. Thank You - Management.
Sticking with the theme, I’ve come to realise that John Calvin is better known, contemporarily, at least, for his sub-par theocracy than for the Calvinist take on Christianity. Shit.
In closing, Boney M. Since I mentioned Christmas carols, you see. I hate the Boney M carols. I hate some Boney M music. But the world is yet to see another song like their Rasputin. Russia’s Greatest Sex Machine ... you should see the video. And El Lute, which is quite inspirational, even tear-jerking. And Sad Movies; at least I liked it as a kid.
Unfortunately, we never let them forget that they made the error of the Christmas carols. Not caring about their other better songs. Stop already. Full stop.

War Songs

2008-12-14T12:24:00.000+03:00

Mood: Military-riddim mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.00001
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe

I’m listening to a song that is painting grim, pale images against my frontal lobes. (I have them, the frontal lobes, even though evidence is lacking.) Prospekts March is quite strong as a song. War poetry—in general, war art—grabs my mind and takes it prisoner. Coldplay, woo-hoo! Guy’s bass guitar is like a child who cries with eyes wide open: loud, offensively-emotional, and not ashamed of it. There is a line there that makes me think the song should be played on a slow-motion version of the last moments of El Ché. Here I lie on my own in a separate sky, here I lie on my own in a separate sky. I don’t wanna die on my own here tonight, but here I lie on my own in a separate sky. The mournful panic in the mind of one who no longer feels his legs, and notices that the silence means his only companions are the newly-dead; the only case where peace after battle is not a good sign. Enemies lie embraced almost sexually—but they are dead.

The Trusty Proof-Reader has a collection of war poetry, including Flanders Fields and Drummer Hodge, which is terse and cold. Even the funny pun (punny fun) it scored in History Boys didn’t numb the decidedly-lonely situation of a soldier burried on the battle-field. But songs, though they are poetry, don’t feel the need to use very elevated language and render themselves too difficult for all but a few. Songs expect the cosmetic effect of the beats to overlay the absence of sonorous language and end up simpler for my mind, yet remaining word-based art. (I'm one of those for whom We few, we happy few, we Band of Brothers remains a bit less-evocative than any of Sgt. Kifulugunyu's songs.)
There is this other war song, James Blunt singing, called No Bravery. He is a soldier, that James, so his lyrics are worth paying attention to. Brothers lie in shallow graves, fathers lost without a trace, a nation blind to their disgrace since He's been here. [...] All men need to accept their fate, wives and daughters cut and raped, a generation drenched in hate says He has been here. While these ones tend to busy themselves with painting the sober, sombre, so-bad picture of the aftermath of battle, they have necessary offsets coming from the other end of the gunfire.

The strongly-optimistic, heart-pounding thumps of war songs. Urging all to battle, singing of the inevitable victory. This is a delicate matter, you know. Every soldier more than seven years old knows about the cold realities of war: we could lose. So it is incumbent on the herb-levitated mind, floating above our own clouds of reality on clouds of cannabinoids, elevated, high enough to compose songs about the victory that can’t help come our way. We need these songs, you see. War songs are pretty much the cannabis of the army. The necessity, therefore, of being high to write the war songs is so that we can have someone to start this highly-necessary, highly-delicate transitive property of war songs.

Bob Marley, being a revolutionary, was pre-occupied by struggle. And his struggle was in his future; his struggle is in our future. Have you heard War, by some chance? And we know we shall win, ‘cause we are confident in the victory of good over evil, yeah.
Military culture generally doesn’t keep credits on the army songs. But here is a story for you, about the guy who composed Sisi Tuko Tayari (We’re Ready); and the lack of a name in the Credits section is only due to the fact that his name was never really known.

In 1978, when General Idi Amin Dada (FM, VC, MC, DSO, Al-hajj, CBE, BDoA, ETC) was toppled, Jeshi la Tanzania generally used the route through Masaka. And wherever they met resistance, they mowed it down like they were fighting for their own country. Masaka was a victim too, and some buildings, forty years after the shots, still have the wounds in them. (It’s surprisingly-difficult to paint bullet holes over.) The unintended effect of the attack vector that the JT took is that they walked where the rebels had walked years before (in the first attempts to over-turn Idi Amin, which were comic failures).

So, here is a JT infantry soldier screaming in KiSwahili for his mates. They come and gather in a thick circle. Human bones and clothes and a gun. The isolation and the gun’s presence indicate that the soldier had died of bleeding from a bullet wound, and some distance away from the centre of fighting. The leader of the JT pack advances and opens a green box that the dead soldier had with him. The rebels had no real doctors on the first attempt to over-throw Amin, and they trained some in simple first aid, and gave them first aid kits that were insufficient, anyway. This skeleton seemed to indicate such a one. His back is against the tree, and his hand holds a plastic biro. He had died writing, it seemed. Examining the first-aid box revealed bandages and syringes and some expired pharmaceuticals. There was the single half-smoked spliff of khaya, which indicated (amid soldier chuckles) that our good departed friend had been into getting high. It’s when the stack of papers (that was given to all such “medical personel”) was opened that the magic happened.

It is in the interminable nights of waiting for the firing to start, of waiting to go back home and “redeem our daughters”, of manning the night look-out, of enduring the vanishing of friends and realising that they had lost hope and deserted the dream, of realising that the odds were squarely and solidly against the rebels, that mind and pen melded in a near-sexual union and birthed a loud, singing child in the form of war lyrics. The columns had been meant for noting casualties and medicine amounts expended and such medical minutiae. Our doctor overthrew that old unimaginative order and cut lyrics into the paper. Taking care to note the beats and tempos, and even what band instruments may or may not be permitted where, the doctor/rebel put together an inspiring demonstration of musical genius with war songs that could even feature as raunchy erotic songs (in the right context, of course). One of the songs, though dishonest to the reality of the rebels at the time, came to be the favourite war song ever in the history of the Ugandan armed forces—Sisi Tuko Tayari.

AIDS Day Posts Round-up to You, Noise to Me Critics

2008-12-06T15:51:00.000+03:00

Mood: Meta-critical mood
[Toot!] Index: 3.3333
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

The 1st of December was World AIDS Day, and I could have passed out with pride, when I went checking the Ugandan blogging scene. I think I don’t normally know how serious/important something is until I read about it in the first person. The presonal character of this year’s blog posts on the World AIDS Day theme was nearly tear-jerking. Okay, not just nearly. I’ll list them, in no particular order.

The earliest post I saw on the issue came a whole week earlier. Hajj Zack, that guy who shows up every now and then and writes some cuneiform stuff where his name should be :o); he wrote Storm’s Eye. Urging like a battlefield colonel, “What are you doing to stop HIV/AIDS? [...] do something about HIV/AIDS today!”

Next came GayUganda, some three days before the day, in a post that is here because it mentioned access to HIV/AIDS facilities by homosexuals, and what one of the Ugandan bloggers’ favourite minister has to say about it. This post, Singing a new song?, examines Dr. Nsaba-Buturo’s change-of-heart towards homosexuals. For those not in the know, the good doctor has come out of the closet and confessed to being a hom ... :o). Anyway, Dr. Nsaba-Buturo once said our constitution should make being a homosexual illegal. For those who didn’t know, again, the Uganda Constitution doesn’t penalise being a homosexual—only homosexual acts. But now Dr. Nsaba-Buturo is changing attitude, and actually wants the oppression of homosexuals to end. And GUG is not sure how to interpret the signals. I empathise, and suggest to Dr. Nsaba-Buturo to lead the campaign to stop the oppression; deal, dear doctor?

Now, it comes to the Day, and the posts come forth inspiringly. I know there are some I don’t have here. I think Lulu and Jasmine had one each, but I may not have bookmarked them (having not yet realised the importance, you see). And, to whom it may concern, Be Silent has new pictures of her baby on her blog: run, all of you, run! :o) Back to the theme.
Pete’s Mama laments Mondays and “monthlies”, and reminds us “not to dip our willies in a pit of death”, which is quite, um, colourful, but not as much as it gets when you add the last part of that closing sentence: “and vice versa”. :o) Don’t dip pits of death into your willie. Cool, I’ll remember that. I chuckled. (Am I the only one who wants to grab a coffee when I read her stuff? What‘s the trick, PMama?)
John Powers also wrote a pertinent post. It’s his usual way of going at it: meanders a bit, smells strongly of humility and tentative optimism. Altogether a nice post from a nice blog. And for a Uganda-centric blog from a non-Ugandan (especially one not on location), it is quite free of the regurgitate-the-news syndrome, something that is not easy to pull off. (Although he did write a “newsy” falsity, that “Public discussion of homosexuality is not tolerated” in Uganda—it is, even though the (probably necessarily) militant attitude of the Ugandan gay community tends to evoke adrenaline rather than tears of compassion; and, for me, the proximity to the West is a little bit un-nerving, and makes them un-intended victims. I think that appealing to the heart rather than to logic is a better way, if a bit Machiavellian. You can’t go wrong saying “Am I Not a Brother?”, but you can see for yourself the success rate of “It’s My Fucking Right—Literally!!!”)

There was another one from a non-Ugandan Uganda-centric blogger who manages to avoid the temptation of “newsy” shit. And also not on location! Jackfruity pointed out the GVO map of HIV+ bloggers in the World. At last check, there were only two from Africa, and none from Uganda.
Now, the more-personal ones. Ariaka, writing Departed in Pain: A World AIDS Day Memoriam, about her sister, Joyce, who died of AIDS. The recount is set in pre-1990s, when we barely knew anything about AIDS, and when there was even less knowledge among us of the little that was known. This theme, of limited knowledge, is very poignant in the post. Go and read; I’ll wait.
Welcome back. Now, Antipop wrote another poignant, personal account. Three people named in her story are victims of AIDS. The rub is in the one-sentence paragraph after the three:

And many more...

There are two cousins and a father. There is mention of an adopted sister, as well. Go and read. I’ll wait.

Actually, you can stop here, because from here on, I’ll be replying to some criticism that’s been slung my way. It may not be neat, and it may make things long. So you have permission to stop right here. :o) Go, go, run along. I’ll even put a split here.

I know there is nothing to be gained by offering facts and logic and figures to 27th, but it worries me that he writes long-ass blogs about American conspiracies to exterminate Africans [...] but no one writes the opposite.

Where did you see that, if you read more than a negligible number of Ugandan blogs? If you read our blogs, you should have seen that, as it featured on a high-traffic one, one of my favourite blogs. Get it all here. It is usually a sign that there is going to a good case built to argue some point, when one shifts an argument to one’s own blog. Keyword is usually, because it isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you see, it becomes a case where a whole post is taken to build up a dismissal, not of the point with which one disagrees, but of the one who argues it. And it’s not the GIFT at work here, since there is no real anonymity involved. Get it all here.

While I said “critics” in introducing this part of the post, I think I mean the singular form of the word. For better or for worse, some of the other critics stick to my mailbox. In any case, usually they are about the points I raise, not me. But I liked this last one to which I link, because it is fashioned as—nay, it is—literary criticism. In short, it is a post that says me writing is trash. I have a perverse liking for negative literary criticism, towards me or to others, and I mete it out, too, with only very little that approaches mercy. I think the finest literature ever written is as negative criticism of literature (“the wide margins are the most-enjoyable part of the book”—or blog, in my case). And Ernest Bazanye didn’t disappoint—that post is written beautifully. Then again, this is Ernest Bazanye. Such lit crit is easier to write when one knows one is elevated above the possibility of enduring it oneself. Have you seen what Salman Rushdie said of John LeCarré? And it is a form of graduation when you get beautiful negative crit coming at you from a good writer. As such, most of that post is agreeable to me (especially now that I’m planning to become a full-tilt writer, rather than programmer). I’d even incite more, if that post had ended well. You see, at the end, it sends us on to some Alexander Pope verse that, in short, says, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” This, if you think about it, is wrong.

How much do you know about your biro? Your computer? Your web browser? Your flash disk? Your mouse? Your shoes? Your shoe’s rubber sole? You epidermis? Your endodermis? Your hair? Your cotton shirt? How is that a bad thing all those times? I’ll, in my turn, quote Thomas Alva Edison (and you can choose who to follow):

We do not know a millionth of one percent of anything.

The dude invented modern electricity, so there you are. But these are merely conjectures, we shall try to prove logically (forgetting, if only for a while, that Baz said logic does nothing for me) that it is impossible to know any more than just little of anything in this universe:

Since everything in the universe depends on something, there is something above the universe on which there is ultimate dependence; we shall call this the First Cause. To know more than little about something, one ought to know about the things on which said something depends. Since the chain of dependence ultimately leads to an infinite entity (the First Cause) that, moreover, is outside the universe (and therefore probably beyond having enough knowledge about), it is necesarry to know about the First Cause to know about anything. It is impossible to know any finite magnitude about infinity (since any value is neglibibly-small in the neighbourhood of infinity); it is impossible to know more than just little, at best, about infinity. By induction, it is impossible to know more than just little, at best, about anything. Q.E.D.

If you’ve noticed that I use inductive proofs, then you’re not as sloppy a student of formal logic as I am, and two points for you. Chances are that Baz won’t say of you what he said of me.
If you’ve noticed that I fondled the bossom of the cosmological argument in a seedy manner, two points for you. :o)
If you noticed the name of some other geek weblog[1] in that prose, two points for you, and tell me why the fuck you’ve been reading it. :o)
If you show my proof to be flawed, then four points to you, and may The First Cause curse your bottom. :o)

Back from that mental auto-eroticism, we have to notice that Alexander Pope was wrong, and that Thomas Alva Edison was right. Yet to lob such a line at an adversary is too good a move that one doesn’t pause to make such boring, kill-joy considerations. When you sit before your keyboard every day, but couldn’t tell how it works, you are like me, and you should realise that a little knowledge is the norm, and not a bad thing. We don’t even know more than just a little about how breathing works, but it doesn’t harm us to use the little knowledge we have to avoid breathing under water.

The second post (chronologically, that is; the first I linked to) uses this weblog as an example of what Baz percieves as a fascist cancer that’s eating our media outlets, while the more-moderate do nothing. Now, I can’t be accused of being moderate, but I hesitate to accuse Ernest of this, either. His post begins by calling those whom he disagrees with “the worst” and “evil men”. It is sheer enough that he notes it in the second paragraph, and the justification becomes “they have implied far worse things about us”. I don’t know if this is how you deal with the name-calling bunch, but I know the moderate lot would be into more of turning the other cheek. A better quote would be the one that sits on the side bar of Hajj Zack’s blog, due to Desmond Tutu:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppresor.

But it lacks pointed words that are supposed to one-up the rest of us, you see. You should see the reply that Ganzi puts in the comments. After you’ve been led to think he’s calls them (whoever the “us” was about) worse things. It’s measured and respectful—far from declaring people who hold different views “the worst [...] evil men”. And it isn’t lost on us, the non-righteous, that Baz calls his group “the best”.
But all who fight for a cause are, unfortunately, convinced of their righteousness. From the exterminationist Nazi to the one who drops a nuclear bomb on the wives and children of those who may have allied with the exterminationist Nazi. We’ll not settle this thing about who is the righteous one, and certainly not in this post. I won’t go into why I think I’m the one who is fighting the oppressor, whoever I may percieve that to be. I leave room to be wrong, knowing the axiom I just stated; it won’t stop me from hunting down my oppressor, though. Baz is on the less-cautious side—he chose the evil ones, and is certain who they are; I happen to be one of them. (What I examine here may be why the poem Baz quotes says “the best lack all conviction”, emphasis mine. Maybe having conviction makes you better or worst, but never best: lacking conviction being what you require for the “best” slot. I hope Baz doesn’t just quote whatever may earn him karma points without really thinking it through, as that is a sad habit of the lower animals, and I don’t know many men I respect half as much as I do him; I don’t want that injured.)

“I think it is time for Uganda to develop a tradition of liberal activism. Because blogs and commentary pages and radio shows are overrun by reactionaries and bigots and people who spew with force and passion, but spew in the wrong direction,” says Baz. It’s supposed to be me who doesn’t consider numbers, as per this post, not Baz. Really, is my viewpoint (verbosely put across in these posts) the mainstream? Uganda has the highest concentration of FM radio stations in the whole World. Baz wants me to believe they are all saying the extreme kind of stuff I say. The truth, of course (if enough of us care for it) is that Baz’ view is actually mainstream. That is why, for example, Baz has, in three posts (that I bothered to count) only my blog and SAGE’s as the machines against which to rage. This persecution complex is not borne out by the fact that SAGE’s last post was nearly a year ago. There is only one post for this year on that weblog; posted in February. The offending post is more than one whole year old. This is only the second (and last, by the way) of the blogs that represent this evil that is eating up the blogs.

SAGE’s sin is suggesting that the country is better-off run by religious people. Theocracy, or a preferrence thereof, if you hadn’t noticed, is an un-acceptable sin in Baz’ books, even though this attitude that he has just displayed has a name: religion. It’s why, in my comment there, I warned him about the more-likely possibility that his “liberal activism” brigade can easily establish a new dictatorship, a dictatorship of “freedom”. Put yourself in SAGE’s position, you believe something, and are labelled “evil man, the worst” for it, by someone who says “Liberal Activism”—you’d notice that you’ve been caught by a dictatorship that enjoys the approval of all who watch, because it says the right thing (though does the other). This rage against the machine of theocracy (clearly not based on any real urging, but merely on something once written on a chronologically-distant blog) certainly has its roots outside of reason. (I feared to say “logic”, to avoid turning into graphite while I try to impale Medussa—thank Vulcan for shiny bronze shields!) It is very likely that Baz hates the hint of theocracy due to a personal experience. Overly-religious parents can be a cause (for the preacherman’s kids that I’ve seen in rebellion, for example), or having done time in a religious school. I did some time in a religious school—they are worse when they mention saints and prophets in their names, or when the religion is old enough to have accumulated lots of ritual that is performed in dead languages (like Roman Catholicism) or new and filled with the fire-brand idealism of youth (like Seventh-Day Adventist). Obviously, there aren’t more people calling for theocracy in Uganda than either the complacent or anti-theocratic. Even if there were, I now see that they would be in a dangerous situation: the dictatorship of freedom doesn’t want them.

A more-tempting conclusion is that this anti-theocratic knee-jerk reaction is merely an example of one doing what he is told is the cool thing to do—by the West. The West, having endured the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the religious bloodshed in Britain, et cetera, is rightly justified in fearing a merger of Church and State. Here, it is different (and may explain our reluctance to go whole-hog into atheism and the like); religions only became a warring point after the Westerners came (you know, that battle in Kampala between Catholics and Protestants, only comprehended by the Western colonialists at the time). But Baz has been told that the cool thing is to scrunch up one’s face at the mention of theocracy, even though his history (history) doesn’t show it to be bad. (By comparison, the “democracy” he sings erotic songs about is a failure in his history, but this time, being cunningly-selective, he chooses to blame the practitioners, not the paradigm.) At this point, you should run to the population post he is complaining about, and read my take on this issue again. There is a whole load of people who have been well-trained in the delicate art of inheriting concern from the West, taking it with the fervour of new cult converts. While our own history points at theocracy, in fact, as beneficial and non-oppressive (I’ll prove this, if called upon), there is a whole group of people who have been schooled to fear it—because the West says it’s bad (likely due to their experience with it, which, by the way, is unique and a minority in all history).

It is in light of what I’ve said above that this stuff that Baz says sounds a lot like just a whole load of blind self-love, a lot of deeming oneself “the best”, as it could have been written by one of our frothing-at-the-beak types: “Meanwhile, those of us who understand that things are not always black and white, those of us with a sense of nuance, those who see the value of asking questions as greater than the act of proclaiming guesses as certain answers just shrug and tut and go away.” You know, the people he screams against seem to be a set that includes him. I guess “the best” are extremists who, as Orwell warned, make sense with things like “Freedom is Slavery!” We are allowed to be whatever we want, as long as it conforms to what the “good men” want us to do. That is freedom, that is what the liberal activism will bring about. (Liberal comes from liber, the Latin for free, just so we are on the same linguistic page.)
Baz would do well to study that all the most-oppressive dictatorships start out with this tired, clichéd chant. And they, like him, were unaware that they were going to create a dictatorial problem. The better of them went into it knowing that they are going to establish a dictatorship. (I hate to admit that these are mostly, but not exclusively, in the West, in contemporary history.) It moves from touching naïveté to worrying fanaticism, as you realise that Baz doesn’t know he is treading a well-troden path, and making the classical mistake of thinking he is starting up something new, inventing something (something good, at that) while at it! If you indulge me a wee bit more narcissism, here’s me talking about this phenomenon in another post (which is so revolting in its refusal to chant the party line, that you can‘t get to the second paragraph of it):

You see, human rights are not in the danger everybody pretends they are in. It is the way of humanity to steer communities towards more respect for human rights. (Our generations are allowed to think they invented the idea, of course. This may be instinctive, and necessary to keep the passion for rights among humans burning brightly millennium after millennium.)

Baz would also benefit from reading the last line in George Orwell’s The Animal Farm.

Usually, it is bad when I have to reply to something. I get verbose, and I reply to sentences with paragraphs. It gets huge. I expect no more than two people to finish this. But I’m jumping to the end, now, skipping the part that doesn’t concern me. I show up next in the sentence that says “Rev wrote a bilious tirade based on a very slight grasp on the issue of overpopulation vs large population.”
I may be wrong, but I thought I knew what over-population meant and what large population meant, as well. And, in the post he refers to, I offer what I think are ways around the inevitable nature of our ecosystem’s preferrence for high fertility at the equator. That is migration, and it has happened since the beginning of movement, and, most importantly, it progresses as a reduction of population in places like this, places where breeding is inevitably easy (we live at the equator, there is a reason our flora and fauna is more-numerous and more-diverse than you find in Iceland).
You would do well to read the comments he put on that blog post, Baz, and see how much of it is merely a lot of “You are just wrong. Entirely wrong.”, with no attempts at providing proof. It’s mostly the same chant, even with the occassional change in words. There is a word for this, by the way: bulverism.
I’ll repeat that Uganda is neither with big population nor over-populated, and leave the burden of proof to Baz. (Even the population people don’t ever say this: they just worry about the rate of growth, not the current numbers.)
Baz and the like-minded say we can’t handle our population growth because the country is, by some metric, very corrupt. I don’t know what you’d do: my car can’t run because there is no fuel, so cut back on the need to travel? They back a reduction in population (growth) because some people are corrupt. Read those comments and tell me what you think. It’s interesting to note that he mentioned only corruption (“corruption and inefficiency and theft”, which is all corruption).

let C be the corruption problem.
let P be the situation where a big population is good.
let F be the set of factors affecting whether or not a population is good.
We know, from Baz and friends’ axiom, that corruption makes a big population a bad thing. With formal notation:
F = {C}
C → ¬P
∴ ¬C → P
Q.E.D.

If, by modus ponens, our population growth is a bad thing, then they are all solving the wrong problem. As Baz said, “spewing with force, but spewing in the wrong direction”. Reason tells us to just negate corruption (C) in order to remove the negating effect on the goodness of a big population.
I realise I’ve been an asshole for providing such gratuitous rigour, and I’ve committed another sucide (it’s possible), but I’ve of late rediscovered my liking for those things; that’s bad enough for my coolness points. To make it worse, I’m not a liberal activist.

It’s interesting to note that there is nothing that Baz’ blog cites as something the liberal activists should rise up against. Indeed, there is nothing on this blog that they can rise up against. It may be a case of having a title looking for a subject, or having an effect looking for a cause. A solution hunting viciously for a problem. I did ask, in the comments, what about my blog the liberal activists should rise up against, and his answer was that “My point [...] was that I wish there were blogs and newspaper articles to counterbalance you and Ganzi.” When you realise there is no stuff for a “liberal activist” even in the Ganzi article (leave alone me blog), you realise that we have a case of an answer looking for a question. It may be that he’s doing what he urges them to do: write about being a liberal activist—gratuitously. It should have benefitted from a better title, like Truth-in-Newspapers Activism and the Occassional Name-Calling, which is something I’d be able to relate to the post (and, heck, even support). Better titles include How to Defend the Consumption of Porn and Rage Against Theocracy in One Post and How to Conflate Standards of Journalism with Ideas You Don’t Agree With And Just Spew With Force And Passion (Hopefully Spewing in the Right Direction). I’d support either, but that doesn’t speak well of them, does it? :o)

It’s not lost on me that the content of my post, hinting as it did on journalists being the agents of brain-wash, may have rubbed the journalist in him the bad way, and he had to strike out. To strike out, with eyes closed, even as the enraged cat does, hoping that the paw will get what the eyes don’t get. If you want my opinion, by the way, Baz is a good journalist, and an even-better columnist. He is accursed he who didn’t show dedication to Baz’ columns in his life. They, ironically, taught me a certain disrespectful writing style that, in a nice dance of the green-eyed goddess of irony, seems to have come back to chew on Ernest’s back-side. :o)
The truth, though, is that the post was against people who rush to condone without having given it harder thought. Journalists are but a subset of this group. This group could pass off a semblance of freedom that is, in fact, a dictatorship. It’s those people that the post rages against. It’s those people who pick on what sounds good (usually because it has been wiped clean and smooth my its repeated application—argumentum ad nauseum) and just pass it on as the good thing, without thinking if it really holds water. They couldn’t even explain why it is good, if they accept it as good. This bunch are the problem, and that post also tries to explain why we are over-run by them, as it were (and not by people who dare to say the non-mainstream, as Baz claims). Indeed, it is dangerous, as Baz has demonstrated while passionately arguing the opposite, to be of the minority viewpoint. I dealt with why our viewpoints are less visible in this short post: Newton’s Third Law of Motion. In short, people like Baz, filled with that righteous fire that enables them to spit “evil, worst” at those of differing mind, have managed to censor all dissenting viewpoints, favouring only their definition of right and wrong, their definition of freedom—Freedom is Slavery.
This regurgitation, sans really thinking, this phenomenon over which that post worries, is given a catchy name in George Orwell’s 1984: duckspeak.

“I know there is nothing to be gained by offering facts and logic and figures to 27th, but it worries me that he writes long-ass blogs about American conspiracies to exterminate Africans [...] but no one writes the opposite.”
Has it occured to our friend that the reason nobody writes retorts is because the opposite views are mainstream, that they don’t need re-inforcement? I hope it has. There was a need for Galileo to write about the Earth not being flat, because the silent consensus was that it was flat. There would be a need for one to scream about the Earth being flat, if one discovers it to be, since the silent consensus is that it is round. This should be simple.
I also doubt that there is much to be gained by offering facts, logic, and figures to me (I’d not say nothing, though—surely enlightenment is possible?), but it worries me that I fail to trim my posts to be small. The thing is, I don’t try much. First of all, I want to stop writing long shit. But I want to write everything I’m thinking, so I (for now) choose to sacrifice being read by the rushing lot in order to gain having all my thoughts put in writing. For the one reader (myself) to whom completeness matters, this is a better deal.
About the Americans trying to exterminate us, I spent the post on arguments for why cutting back on population growth is neither the optimum, easy solution, nor the time-tested one. I spent part of this post pointing out why it is neither the logical solution. I noted that the Americans know this, but they ignore it. This is proof that it is all exterminationist in nature. The burden of proving me wrong and proving my allegations silly lies squarely on Baz’ shoulders. I hope he does—it would help me sleep better. But if I have any indicators thus far, I’m going to get just a lot more bulverism.
And on the necessity of long posts, I’ll quote everybody’s favourite American “left-winger”:

The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts. If you repeat conventional thoughts, you require zero evidence, like saying Osama Bin Laden is a bad guy, no evidence is required. However, if you say something that is true, although not a conventional truth [...] people are going to rightfully want evidence, and a whole lot of it as they should.
~ Noam Chomsky

It may not be entirely lost on Baz that this requiring us to write one-liners to argue our case may be an insidious form of censorship; we’d sound like lunatics. When we say it all, we only leave room for bulverism and dogding our questions. Baz, repeating the commonly-accepted views, doesn’t need more than one sentence. The rest of us have to unwork the damage done by the people who repeat the party line over and over. Baz says that there is this big movement of people like me, yet (in my comments) he manages to remember one particular case that I know too (and so does everybody): look, that doesn’t happen with mainstream views. Which guy was that who said people should take a shower often to be healthy? Which guy was that who said people should never shower at all in their lives to be healthy? Q.E.D. Where Baz gets this idea he tosses around, I know: the news. Puts a new spin to my worry in that population post, no? See, nobody is immune from these things I worried about, so we shouldn’t shut up about them.
Q.E.D.

[1] The weblog is over here, and most of the arcane stuff there leaps right over my head, but it is good to know it is out there, if I ever really, really need to understand it (or die).

The Mathematics and Mechanics of HIV Infection

2008-11-30T08:47:00.005+03:00

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)

Dog

2008-11-22T11:40:00.002+03:00

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.

Touche Pas à Ma Population

2008-11-15T13:49:00.009+03:00

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:

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.

Now, my trusty proof-reader just noted that many other cultures don’t favour girls. That’s true. The problem, though, is not who is favoured (as I seem to imply above). I’d still be complaining for boys, had it been the other way ‘round. The problem is the artificial limit to a population (be it its growth or decline). Keyword: artificial.

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. ~~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)

Jonah and the Fish

2008-11-08T17:17:00.001+03:00

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.

Happy Hour XX

2008-11-01T17:02:00.003+03:00

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.

Forty-Two-Year-Old Gin, With Wrappers

2008-10-19T19:48:00.001+03:00

Mood: Mersenne twister
[Toot!] Index: 6.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Entebbe

I'm wrapped up in things that keep me busy, these days. Good thing, bad thing. And I'm getting WiFi—free—from my former boss' house. Just outside, there is a connection he leaves free for the rest of us. We've only talked rarely, him and I, since I happen here at odd hours.

So I missed the impromptu Happy Hour. Merde, that's what the Frenchman said when he found himself in a similar situation. Scheiβe, said the German, if memory serves. Kisiraani, mumbled the Muganda. But we'll leave it all in the all-encompassing cultural-imperialist series-of-grunts-and-groans of these days: shit.

I'm supposed to be putting a story here, by the way, but no time to type it out. It's been fermenting—like the bottle of Waragi left behind by soldiers fleeing an ambush in the battle of ‘66 and discovered forty-two years later—and should, I hope, taste good when I open it. When I manage to shorten it enough. Good enough, I hope, to make some people think that maybe—maybe—I should be paid to write ...

Has he luck?, Napoleon once asked of a man who otherwise fulfilled all other qualities. But that doesn't demonstrate the importance of pure luck. For that, I turn to the drunko who sits upright over there from 2100h everyday to about 2300h (at which time he falls over to the side, only lightly alive).
Who knows, he says, maybe I'll get unlucky and stop being a homeless drunk. No shit.

Breathing the Song of the Morning

2008-10-13T16:54:00.002+03:00

Mood: Morning mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Some old Jewish legend says God made the world and was happy about it. But there was no music in the world. And the angels told Him, What you have created is good, and to look at it is pleasing. But to hear it, we can't! And God put the sounds of the Earth. The rushing winds bullying the leaves, the guttural languages of the birds, the incurable coughing and expectorating of the brooks, the ambush arrows of sudden rain. The war song of the waves. The religious chanting of the East African ants.
You'll note that, in this legend, there is no looking at the instruments as the origin of music. It's some divine work (this being a Semitic legend, you see) and nature (this being a human legend, also). That's a very strong idea, as far as I'm concerned. When was the music slot on radio ever filled with the synchronised choir music of dogs in the mating season?

But the better form of music is here. The foundational form of music. When the new sun is coming, that is the best music. If you ever wake up before half-past-five in the morning, don't sleep. Don't close your eyes! Wait! In about thirty minutes, the song will start! Be patient! In the meantime, anyway, you could be listening to the breathing.

Breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing. Air rushing through a sleeping lover's nostrils. Sign of life, et cetera. I'm not supposed to be waxing anything-ic (poetic, romantic, —nostalgic, because the cliché rules insist this last one can't miss out), but here's the thing. I feel music was done by humans to perpetuate the pleasing sounds that already existed in nature. And humans are creative, hence raï music, for instance. And jazz and so on. Breathing, breathing, brea ... the kind of lullaby that keeps Sleep awake, rather than the other kind that awakens Sleep. It is a bit hypnotic—a bit—this breathing rhythm. Brhythming, I'll call it. (I have a near-sexual fetish for words that have no vowels in them; like myths that have come alive, to my Bantu-speaking mind.)

Now, your sleeping lover is breathing. But outside, now. It's nearly that half-past-five time of the morning. The muezzin in the masjid over there is singing a call to prayer. Song of the morning is suitingly tinged with a bit of deism—anything else would be pretence. Birds, also. They are rehearsing, it seems, for a day-long gig. The rehearsals are always better, because you get to eat it all before it is peeled and washed; when it is still natural and untamed; when it can still make you sick; when it still weighs fully.
The minutes run, and then the standing tap is opened. The bucket screams in horror, and soon it drowns in the water. I've always known there was something loosely phallic about taps. Now you see? The flow is complete with the noises even.
A boda-boda guy goes past your place on the road. The bike sounds old, but it went pretty fast. And the car going now. Hmm. Engine seems very civilised. Must be a—no, I guess it's an Audi. Definitely an Audi.

Morning man coughing on the road. Kitchen tap is dripping once every minute or so. A steel door groans open. Children protesting against school, because they are wise. Parents loudly insisting on it, because they are not. Baby crying from one of those houses on the other side. But it's not yet warm enough outside, so let's come back inside. It's even going to rain. Breathing, breathing, breat ... Can you believe? Not a movement, even. Just the lungs meditating, just them and their slow chant, breathing, breathing, breathing, bre ... And you're one lucky one. When Sleep awoke, last night, you were against the bosom; so now you hear the steady thud of the heart, the drum-kick of the chest, the primeval Roots of the African drum, the mother of the determined pound of the reggae drum.
One, two, three ... the gods are executing the tin roofs! It's a massacre! Run! Hide! In the hills! Raindrops strike the unfortunate roofs. The shots, of course, are segregative in nature. The richer clay-tile roofs are excused. The cries of agony only come from this tin-roof ghetto.
Breathing, brea—and the breathing stops.

Is it raining? The question can't be understood until you delicately peel off the many thin layers of sleep that cover the voice—a delicate job that requires skill, patience, experience. You pause for a bit, as you work. Now you get the question. Now you give the answer. Yes. Just started raining. Maybe in like two hours it should have stopped, maybe. We'll still be there on time, if the taxis go quick enough. Your own voice is wrapped in blankets, too, even its head is entirely covered. It comes out as a deep growl. My grandfather told me that humans are at high risk whenever they wake up (predators in the caves, lovers caught in their sleep, et cetera), so the deep growl of the morning (and the red mood, for some people) is meant as a way to create a quick citadel while co-ordination returns. The scratchy eroticism in the morning voice, the Rock upon which all reactionary music genres are anchored.
Two groans from two chests. Sleep awakens again. Breathing, breathing. Breathing, breathing. Breathing, breathing. And, with time, it is said, sleeping lovers synchronise their breathing, so that it can't be told apart, in time or depth. Rhythm. Breathing. Brhythming. Breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing.

The Thin Writer From Entebbe

2008-10-03T20:26:00.001+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

If I forget you, O Entebbe,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you.

Now, I know it leans slightly towards the blasphemous for me to steal a psalmist's work and remix it and not give due credit. I don't do it for Bob Marley, I won't do it to David. Psalms 137:5,6. Such intense love for a geograhpical spot, nearly as tough as Bob Marley's Trenchtown.

Where I'm staying these days, a neighbourhood of furry puppies and tense goats. I love it. Quiet, good for me. And if you walk for seven minutes down that road over there, you'll see the fishermen cleaning their nets. And birds that hit the calm water and pull out an uncalm fish. And if you spit at the waves, they say, someone will get a hiccup on the Tanzanian side of the lake.
It's really hard not to get inspired when you live here. Now, if only the rent weren't so high ...
O Entebbe. If I don't detach the head that dishonours my city, may mine be detached.

You people, I'm looking for a writing gig. While I won't stop coding any time soon, I want to stop referring to myself as a programmer. I want to call myself a writer who also programs computers.
So, if you can give me a writing gig, give me. You know, magazine, underground revolutionary pamphlet, newspaper, anthology, et cetera. I'm just a bit tired of sitting on the urge to write more-formally. And if you end up paying me for it, that's even better. ;o) My only condition is that nobody take liberty with my grammar. No unilateral changes to my shit. I know, I use the comma too much, but, why, do, you, segregate, against, me? It's genetic! (I'm serious.) And also allow me a pseudonym.
(The only downside is that my old work can no longer be denied. You see, I always hate my old work.)

If you, like me, want to dance, and you, unlike me, do dance, here is Kat DeLuna's Animal for you. And also Michael Bublé's Sway. And when you get tired, do any OneRepublic. If anybody asks you why you did it, say you did it on my say so.

It's never over on this blog until I've done at least one rant. Five, four, three, two, one—
I saw some depressing pictures of anorexic girls. They had starved themselves away, because, you know, thin is cute. They were really, really dangerously thin. Almost as thin as myself. I've always known that nobody is immune to the effect of propaganda. We are all influenced by messages, and that's fine. I don't blame the girls. Fuck (fashion and chic) mags.
They tell women, “This is what beautiful is, not what you are.” If women know just how much chic mags support the chauvinist argument, they would be illegal by now. We sit in the corner, guys, and watch women rush to mediocrity, to averageness. And they are taunted by photoshopped pictures of the ugly of ten years ago (and, incidentally, also the ugly of ten years hence), and told to converge to it. Lose your identity! Give yourself to the Great Uniform! Look like this!
Well, the words may not be so similar to slogans from the Cultural Revolution, but it's the same concept. And so, many sacrifice this durable believe-in-yourself kind of beauty, to buy a “beauty” that will be an ugliness in ten years (if it lasts that long). I find self-confidence arousing; I don't know about you.

Maybe I'm just angry about the fact that, if the mags have success, there will be way too many very thin people, and I'll no longer stand out. I'll no longer be conspicuous. And there is this girl whose talking turns into a kind of Haiku poetry when I listen to her. She once said:

Your body like a flower
Stalk. Thin and
and long and delicate.

The dreads the petals, the
thorn is where? It
pricks also? Lol, you behave!

But the most-important message today is that nearly no physical features survived to this moment in human history that were not deemed beautiful. I guess, then, even the insecurity the mags exploit is deemed beautiful by some people? It survived, you know ...

One Shot, One Man

2008-09-27T13:21:00.003+03:00

Mood: Snipin' mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

The boy was shot. The girl was terrified. And the soldier was angry that this shot hadn't been perfect. That's what happened on that Sunday night.
A lover crouches among the shrubs that make the hedge. This is back in the September of 1998, by the way, on that road that leads to the Fire Quarters in Entebbe. That road where the army families live. And the lover should have been smart enough to know that you shouldn't pay visits to a soldier's daughter. —At night!
So, the lover squats at the fence, waiting for the torch to come on and draw arcs on the curtains. (This was the signal the girl used to alert him that he could come to the window.) Everybody else is asleep, the signal would say. But this time, when the signal flashed, it was wrong. Because, you see, a man was holding a gun in another room, waiting to bore a hole in the lover's head. One shot, one man was the soldier's way of doing business.

But first, some 1986. You remember the day the Okello men stopped a phalanx of Museveni men at Kigungu, in the January of that year? The stalemate was broken, as you've certainly already heard, by the sniper who hid in the rocks up there. One shot, one man is how that battle ended. A left-handed sniper of the Museveni side sat up among the crags and started switching off one soldier for each shot he fired. He descended the chain of command, one-shot-one-man. (In the beginning, the shooting instructor had told him he was holding the gun the wrong way, because the left hand “just looked wrong”. By the end of his very first day with the gun, he had destroyed the improvised practice target—because, you know, unlike other soldiers, he actually hit the thing.)
It's a bit sad that the best sharp-shooter the NRA ever had ended up in an obscure neighbourhood in Entebbe. The legend in the Bush War was that if he so much as saw you, you were pretty much fucked. “If he sees it, he can shoot it. With one shot.” The story was true of his having darkened an ambushed base by shooting at an electricity wire.
And now, he held a Russian gun, and, with a closed right eye, pointed the muzzle at the hedge where the lover squatted.

At the wedding last Saturday (where this story was resurrected), the soldier explained why he had been too protective of his daughter. The logic was sound: When you have one child, whose mother is dead, you certainly will be extreme in keeping her from wrong choices. All I ever did, I did in the hope that it was the best thing for my only child, my daughter seated among us today, the apple of my eye. When she holds her own child—I hope for a boy in nine months, starting today—she will know what it feels like.
That thing about a countdown-to-the-baby-boy made the crowd roar. The bride smiled a coy smile and raised a slow sidelong kick to the groom.

Anyway, so the torch flashes. A China-made torch spits rays at the curtains. A lover is grateful to end the uncomfortable crouch. He gets up and ignores the shouts in his legs, tries to pull a majestic walk. A window should fly open in a short while, and a story is to be read out in the smoothest voice he can fake.
About the same time, a soldier stirs. A finger leaves its comrades with a quick jerk, like an Afghan mujahid rushing to his position. The index finger kisses a cold trigger. An advancing head slides into the target. The soldier curses his fading clarity of sight, but feels it won't hamper his aim.
And a gentle tug sends a bullet running towards its target, the only bullet in the gun, the only bullet necessary. The bullet cuts a pore in the glass and flies. The soldier clucks his tongue the way them people from Western Uganda do. A lover falls onto the dew. One shot, one man. The lights come on. Still with no shoes on, with the Kalashnikov still in his left hand, a half-naked soldier opens the door to examine his work on the grass outside.

After the Bush War, the soldier's contribution had been recognised. It was hard to ignore, as it were. He became a target instructor, and then, very soon, his sight started a quick descent. By that time, in 1998, he had stopped training soldiers. He could still see and shoot and all, but it was no longer as clear as it had been. You know the thing about perfectionists like him is that if they can't do it perfectly, they'd rather stop. And yet he was still pretty much a perfect shooter. He no longer went to practice, but he was still enviable. And when the army brought proper sniper guns (he had been using an AK-47 all that time), he was the one to break them in, as an honour. Then the lecture he gave the soldiers who were to use them was about how easy things are these days. Telescopic sight? My God, who can't split an enemy's hair these days? In our days, you had to snipe with an AK-47 that didn't have this shoulder nankani! With a Tommy gun, you boys!
Anyway, he had receded to the Fire Quarters by 1998, after his wife died, so that he could raise his only child without encumbrances.
It was then that the lover paid the visits. He had noticed the lover on the third visit, and prepared to take him out on the fourth.

And now he stands over a bleeding lover. The young man has just noticed that his leg isn't going to respond because it is bleeding because it has been shot because the soldier standing over him has fired at him because he wants those grubby wee fingers off his daughter. The soldier squats over the wound in the thigh, and complains, It's two entire metres—my God!—from the head! He blames the deflection that the glass has caused on the bullet, before he returns, like a real perfectionist, to blaming himself. (Two metres really is a large distance to miss by, especially if the range was close enough. I think he under-estimated how bad his eyesight had become. That's what I think.)
Now a shocked daughter creeps out of the house with an open mouth. Now she is kneeling next to her bleeding lover, and the Tiger Head torch is still in her hand (left hand, like her father). Now her nighties are kissed by the dew. Now she whispers to her lover. Now she tells her father: Let's get him to hospital! His thigh is bleeding! The bullet made an exit hole! YOU WANTED TO KILL MY BOYFRIEND!. The boy groans at the first time the girl acknowledges him as “boyfriend”, then the pain wipes his smiles in short order. Now the soldier, not used to upsetting his daughter, asks why he was sneaking in. Now the girl says, He was coming to read me a story! You kill story-tellers? Now she pulls the story out of his shirt pocket, and hands it to her father.
The soldier goes indoors, picks up the shell of the bullet with his toes, and grabs a shirt and picks the car keys. He drove to the hospital with no shoes on.

On the wedding, the soldier had risen from his seat and told his side of the story. His sight is almost totally gone. An unenviable ending for a sharp-shooter, you'll have to agree. He walked to the microphone wagging that cane of the visually-impaired, until he whacked the microphone's stem about three strokes. Then he reached out with splayed hands and grabbed. He spoke into the mic, I'll tell you a story. And he recounted this. Now he said that stuff about why he was such a jerk to the guys who so much as looked at his daughter. That's when he mentioned the countdown-to-the-baby-boy. And then he reached into his coat and said he had something to show the guests. He pulled out a middle-book leaf of an exercise book. He pulled from the pocket another item, the shell of a bullet. The groom rose to pick the two things, a slight limp in his leg. After all, it's your story and your bullet shell. The crowd roared, hahaha.
We are allowed to assume the lover did, after all, read the story to the girl. Exactly ten years to the day after he first tried to (and got shot in his attempt). Ten bloody years, people! To the very day, my God!

Semitic Words, Erotica, Turning Forty, and Geekery

2008-09-19T13:34:00.002+03:00

Mood: Meandering mood
[Toot!] Index: 5.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Insha'llah.
Loaded word. Brits arrest you for uttering it at their democratic, free airports, these terminals to freedom from fatwas and from edicts that call for your apostate head for uttering blasphemous things.
Insha'llah. Guttural Arabic for God willing. But it's more than just blasphemy against the Protestant god.
Insha'llah also exposes you for the divine-boot-licking theo-fatalist with pee-soaked undies that we all are. In one word, you declare yourself a submissive partner in the chain of command that climbs Heav'nward and dangles Earthward. Little wonder, then, that the word comes from The Submission. Ah, the Arabs. Their fierce religiousness is quite a gift to mankind, I tell you. In more ways than one.

And while we are talking about talking Semites, let's all of us turn a little to the left, if you will. From here, we get Shalom. Another one.
A slushy blessing, a wish of peace upon thy head. It's a first-line-of-defence in greeting for those who use it. It means Peace, and that's where the problem is. What peace?
Isn't this the Middle East? What peace? And, funny, the guy on the other side of the fence is also saying Peace in his greeting (this is all some moments before the firing starts). And he says Asalaam alaikum. Divinely-sanctioned Muslim greeting. Yarmulke and kaffiyeh nod at each other with teary eyes. Shalom!, wails one. Asalaam alaikum!, sings the other. The kernel of both Middle Eastern greetings is Peace. And that's where the paradox lies. Because, you see, the firing starts around now.

My career as an eroticist is taking off like the rising spirit of a dead holy rat. And I'm having fun at every turn. Look, first, I wrote stories for a girl. And then, one day, I slipped some erotica in there. She liked it. I started writing erotica. And then, one day, I was stressed, and I drew her something to relax. It was the beginning of my graphical erotica. O My Lord! Illustrated erotica! But I've, thus far, only drawn independent pics. I drew one that is tame enough to put on this blog. Here you go:

It's called Amour-Wrestle, a play on "arm-wrestle", of course. Trust me, away from the blog, things get much, much steamier. Acrobatic, even. But this one is representative of my style: little-to-no frontal nudity, mild cubism, crayon look, mouse-only drawing, no deliberate straight lines, a sense of incompleteness, contrasting skin tones of lovers, et cetera.
And I don't know how this hurts or enhances my prospects of becoming a writer in other forms. (I'll be trying to start writing for a publication here, any, to pad my pockets a bit.)

Despite the luxurious meandering style I've used today, this is still not long enough. —Yet. Not yet long enough to deflect the fleeting flashes of uncommitted attention.
What I do in a case like this is to invoke a rant. Today, it shall be against glam mags.
It's not against the vanity in them. (I'm not feeling terribly-Maoist today, sadly. I've just spent more than Shs. 1,000 this hour.) I'm against the shifting goal posts. As in, one day they say they are celebrating the rich diversity among women, then the next they are declaring a rigid standard to which all women must measure up. It's angering. Example?
At forty years old, something happens to women. I'm not sure what; I just know it must be a bad thing. So women vary, not sharing even the thumbprint, a rich, pulsating population of dancing, smiling diversity ... until said age limit. *wags middle finger*

And yet I know how this shit a-go begin. It sells (you won't believe just how much) when you make people feel urgently-sad about themselves. Do you know who most-adores the New York-descended statistics about Africa, the ones that pretend the positive stuff doesn't contribute to stats, and that "perfect" is short for "like the West" (and also cleverly omitting fields about serial killers and racists and school shootings and so on)? Of course, of course! It's the Africans who a-go count off, finger on upraised fingers, how badly they are told they are doing. *wags middle finger*

So the glam mags tell women that they are well-programmed computers (a rare thing, I tell you, even literally) that will do something bad—crash? burn? reboot? what?—when they reach some stroke of midnight.
The sad thing, of course, being that anybody bought this shit. More than one person. :o(

Let's close, let's close. Sit down, please. You've made it thus far. Let's close. One more thing. Geek shit coming up! *ducks and raps away*
I can't upload my code to any spot on the web right now (laziness, 3^rd World Internet™, and other reasons). So I'll put it in this post. :o) It's under fifty—50—lines of Ruby code. It's a diary program I call journal. It's nice with its quick-'n-dirty style. It can work on any Unix system that has openssl(1) and Ruby. That's roughly any Unix. I'm using Mac OS X. To run it (it is minimalist), in Mac, open the Terminal (Applications→Utilites→Terminal), and then execute the Ruby script. You really should tinker with the code to use it in, say, another editor other than Vim (which I use). Not much work.

It inserts the date line (with time, to the second) when you start a new entry.
It backs up your diary, after every entry, if the backup folder is present. I use the flash disk, so when I have it plugged in, the backups go there.
It's very secure. It uses the Blowfish cipher from OpenSSL. That's top-notch security, there. It'll ask for a password whenever it starts and closes. I didn't use Ruby's OpenSSL lib, because I wanted it short and direct. And quick and dirty. And secure (the password reading, you see). Sweetness. Here you go; enjoy and don't laugh at my variable names.
```
#!  /usr/bin/env ruby

require 'pathname'

HOMEOPATHY = Pathname.new(ENV['HOME'])
JOURNAL    = 'journal'
DIARY_FILE = HOMEOPATHY + JOURNAL
BF_FILE    = Pathname.new "#{DIARY_FILE}.bf"
VIMINFO    = HOMEOPATHY + '.viminfo'
BACKUP_DIR = Pathname.new('/Volumes/EMOTION/VOICE')

def bf_prompt quoi, done
 STDOUT.puts quoi
 flag, inf, outf =
     (done ? ['-e', DIARY_FILE, BF_FILE] : ['-d', BF_FILE, DIARY_FILE])
 system(%{openssl enc -bf #{flag} -in #{inf} -out #{outf}}) and
     begin
         DIARY_FILE.delete if done
         true
     end
end

def bf_prompt_insist quoi, done
 correct = false
 correct = bf_prompt quoi, done until correct
 true
end

def back_up!
 return unless BACKUP_DIR.directory?
 bfbn = BF_FILE.basename
 dest = BACKUP_DIR + "#{bfbn}.tgz"
 Dir.chdir(BF_FILE.dirname.to_s) do
     system "tar cfz #{dest} #{bfbn}"
 end
 STDOUT.puts "Backed up to #{dest}"
end

def jmain args
 toplain   = bf_prompt_insist 'Decrypting journal ...', false
 start_cmd = %{THEDATE=`date` && echo "\n$THEDATE\n" >> #{DIARY_FILE} && vi + #{DIARY_FILE}}
 edit = toplain and system(start_cmd)
 edit and bf_prompt_insist 'Encrypting journal ...', true
 back_up!
 ($? ? $?.exitstatus : 0)
end

exit(jmain(ARGV))
```
Okay. Bye, then. :o)

Keane Music, Puppy Love Expressions, And So On

2008-09-13T15:29:00.000+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Is it my imagination, or do some Keane songs bear more than a passing resemblance to some Coldplay songs? Nothing in My Way sounds like Yellow. At least in the beginning. And because Nothing in My Way starts like Somewhere Only We Know, same thing. We Might As Well Be Strangers is a lot like The Scientist. Everybody's Changing starts a lot like Speed of Sound.
This, of course, takes nothing away from either band. Both bands are fitting heirs to VTO. But I'm thinking, the similarities make me think ... maybe it's my infant dislike for variation making a comeback?

I envy Windows users only for the sheer variety of software they have. Now, can somebody suggest drawing software for the Mac (that won't take more than 10MB on the disk)? I need it. Can't draw on the Mac, so a cheap way to relax has been taken away. I tried the Paintbrush for Mac, and it's not yet goon enough for me.
Also, I have the MacSword Bible installed, but I don't really like it. I want one that can take annotations. I don't have the time to write this software myself. Point me there already.

I just found out that some weeks ago that some people feel insulted when you use the word "retard". I won't be using it again. (Taking it out of my speech may have to be very gradual, even though it's a recent acquisition.)
As it were, I don't really believe that intelligence varies among humans. (It's a constant, but wisdom does vary, as does foolishness.) But that's another post. And when I say "smart", I mean "wise", not "intelligent". And "dumb" stands in for "foolish".

Lastly, I think it is a real tragedy when you grow up and realise that the usual methods of expressing affection that were used during one's puppy love stage are no longer welcome. The thing about kids who fall in love is that they've not been told by glam mags and movies what the "right" way to express what they feel is. They just do what their heart tells them to do. Grown-ups do what society does, clichéd, pretentious, insufficient, and dishonest as it may be.
It's sad that we so easily throw out these "childish" expressions. It's so sad that adults don't really communicate how they feel, because, maybe, it is an uncool way to express their feelings (or the feelings are uncool to express).
And if you're rebelling against this, and you still give your loved ones food, spur-of-the-moment gifts, don't hide what you feel, write letters, cite songs (just don't call them "deds", though; "jams" is allowed), et cetera, you have a place in the Club. And I'm the Dear Leader of the Club of Communication From the Heart. This loss of honest communication may be the biggest loss when people become "grown up", which I (luckily) will never become.

"Iconoclasts of the World, Unite!"?

ABC: Abortion, Barack, Chomsky

2008-09-10T20:45:00.001+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

I realise that the pro-abortion camp uses the same reason to support abortion—the exact same reason, albeit worded differently—as I do to want to abolish abortion. (To abort it, as it were.) This is what I mean.
They want to be able to abort in case:
- they weren't ready for the baby (teenage mother, condom breaker, &c)
- the baby is detected to have a grave congenital condition (Tay-Sachs, sickle cells, &c)
- the baby is "illegitimate" (I don't believe any such thing exists, but hey) or a wife cheated and got pregnant or the result of an unknown father (drunk orgy, rape, &c)
- and many other reasons.
All these are merely inconvenient situations, not insurmountable problems. In other words, the baby is inconvenient.
Now, only Nazis^* kill people who are inconvenient to have around. The reason I'm against abortion is this: we shall never ever have to pay for convenience with life.
None of you would exist. I think you're cool, so I oppose all attempts to kill you. Yes, my reasons are largely selfish. For my convenience—having you around—I oppose your would-be-killers' convenience.

I have another sneaky reason. I was born a bit premature. So pro-abortion people are saying that for some part of my life I was a candidate for this Final Solution to the Unwanted Baby Question for convenience's sake. Pro-abortion people should be aborted, I think. I'll do it, after the Revolution. They are illegitimate inconveniences. It's a horrible constitution that takes the hands that give life and gives to them the choice to take away life! You expect, say, Americans to save the environment and be inconvenienced (not driving their cars), when they won't even save their own children because the children inconvenience them?

But of course it is easy to say this stuff when I don't have a pregnant girlfriend. :o) When someone ever says "I'm pregnant", I'm sure the thought will cross my mind, and maybe even stay there.

I mentioned America. Obama's second country. You know, I've seen some really stupid people saying Obama is a bad choice because he doesn't have experience. Now, don't get me wrong: I hate them both, because they are all ... Americans. But, you see, if he had experience, how would he do this Change thing? Experience means you're of the old guard. Plus, does the President run the country single-handedly in that country? Wow. He's not experienced in flying, but he is airborne right now! Sheesh.
For the record, I hope McCain wins^**. I don't want America to recover. I want them to get another Bush, and respond to the Russians and the Ishmaelites, and get doused in nuclear powder. Obama may prevent this. :o( Vote for McCain, all you patriotic Americans, not for this African Muslim nigger. (And because I've grown fond of him, I don't want him to be the one around when their economy gets worse, as it certainly will.) That said, there'll be only three reasons anybody doesn't vote for Obama there: blind party loyalty, racism, and following my command in this post. Only the last is justifiable before God.

Guided by the first point, I realise that "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" could be replaced with "Good news, I'm pregnant", and Chomsky's thesis would stand.

^* And Americans.
^** He'll win. Someone exported our vote-rigging technology, and the Americans started using it. Some people here don't put Country First! :o( I wonder how much Bush paid him.

My Thinking Shoes! :-o

2008-09-06T14:49:00.002+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

I forgot to pick my thinking shoes from Nakulabye, when I last was there, so I can't write stuff. Don't celebrate yet! You think it means I can't write things here. No! Au contraire, it means I'll write things that even sillier than the usual serving. Actually, I'm not writing; you're forgiven.

This I drew while looking at my uplifted left hand, as the right swung the mouse to and fro. By the way, I'm supposed to be drawing some stuff for some of my women. I was to give this to my mother, but I realised it sucked, so I renamed it Beg, Beggar, Beggest, and put it here for you. :o) What's the magic word? X^( Say "Thank you, Uncle 27^th Comrade", or I'll take it down! X^( Good. :o) You're welcome. Okay.

Along with my thinking shoes, I left my Dvorak layout keyboard in Nakulabye, so I'm having Hell typing here. :o(
I drew this, also, and then realised it didn't have enough warmth. So, again, I donate it to you. Okay. I called it Serenade Guitar in Uganda's National Colours.

The refusal to use computer aid to make straight lines is deliberate, to try and reproduce my scratchy, uncertain, unfocussed drawing style. :o) But wherever I go, I’ll always miss my Staedler crayons.

Heroines

2008-09-04T15:49:00.003+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

My mother walks into the Maternity Ward, skipping over plates and bounding over pregnancies, and looks around. She has been told that the unlucky baby is next to this bed, but she doesn't see any baby. Maybe the baby is lost? So she asks the woman suckling the twins over there, I was told a baby was left here. The twin-mother looks at her and says, Yes this one to the left is the one. Not fed for more than eight hours, madam. She was crying very, very much.
Just as they said, the baby to the left has a big, soft Afro on her small head. It was the easiest way to identify the baby; that's what the nurse had said. Nobody has hair that beautiful in this city, the nurse had said.

Entebbe Hospital, where my mother is the Hospital Administrator, gets jam-packed with people. At all times, it's busy. But the trophy goes to the Maternity Ward, which is so packed that there is only space for pregnant women to coil in foetal position wherever they may find space, and wait for the pangs to deliver them, as it were, from this mal-lit, uncomfortable womb that is the Entebbe Hospital Maternity Ward.
Mama tricks charities into donating pampers, towels, baby clothes, et cetera, for the Ward. But space can't be donated. It's slow in coming. She has strong interest in that Maternity Ward, and it is directly across from her office. She sees everything. One morning ...

I was, for a long time, the Hospital's computer geek-on-call. At random, during the holidays, I'd be trotting the two kilometres to the hospital to go and solve a problem (only to find that the mouse was unplugged, that's all). After healing the machines, I'd stay there to play around and poke about. In my Ma's office, you could see the Maternity Ward. I saw, for example, the heavily-pregnant woman who walked in with a small plastic basket. She told the nurses that her people were on the way. Maybe that was a lie. She had the features of tough beauty that Nilotic women posess; also tall and imposing. And I remember seeing her crack a joke that resulted in the nurses outside exploding in high-pitched laughter for really, really, really long. (I actually felt like going to find out what the joke was, but I also knew that the jokes in Maternity Ward were never the kind your mother should hear you retell.)

So, my mother is in the ward, holding the baby in her arms. She says, We didn't even find out the mother's name, you know. We were going to register her after the birth, which is what happens in these crowded days.
Ma picks up a small plastic basket. It is confirmed as the one that was left there by the tall, dark woman. Ma digs into it. Some small banknotes (it was in the days when we still had notes for denominations under 1,000/=), and a hanky, and a leesu. Not much to indicate that the tall woman had intended to stay for long. When the other baby slept, the mother took back the baby of the Afro, and put her against her bosom. She suckled loudly. That morning ...

From the Administrator's office, I had seen the stretcher with a woman on it being dragged super-fast into the Theatre. The nurses had sweaty foreheads already. The nurses and midwives in the Maternity Ward also don't get much rest. Not any, actually. (Even their lunch is had on their feet, literally. They stand in a quiet group under that tree behind the kitchen and throw their food in fast.) When a birth gets complex, and needs surgery, they do it in their ward's theatre. More-complex stuff requires the Main Theatre. This woman was clearly haemorrhaging. I saw blood. Much blood. And when I saw the long shape, I looked at the face. (They don't cover your head unless you done died.) It was the tall woman of the funny joke. And she was bleeding hard. The stomach, though, seemed to have let go of the baby.

Because it's not that rare for people to be dragged bleeding into the Theatre, Ma has got used to it. She sees accident victims get pulled into the Casualty Section (which is next to her office), so she doesn't mind seeing blood. People come with heads bashed in and necks wrung by drunken driving, and factory workers in shock, with their severed feet in their pockets (I swear, it happened), and guards with accidental bullets stuck in their thighs, and construction workers with lower jaws missing ("It fell in the machine; should we go and get it?"), and men with knife blades broken in their chests, grâce à angered wives, and a child, once, whose hands were still smoking when he was brought in from the fire accident. I won't even tell you about the guy who kept one eye closed, when he arrived with cuts in the face (a window had broken at close range), and when he opened it, a shard of glass sat where his eye should be. You want more? This guy whose suicide rope broke above his (obese) weight, and only his limbs (which he landed on) died after broken bones pierced them visibly. She isn't moved by blood the way we all are. She assumes you'll bleed and heal. Normal stuff.
So, she was shocked when, like six hours later, a nurse walks into her office, says sorry, goes back out, knocks, Ma says, Yes, come in, the nurse walks in and says, Did you know the woman's name? She didn't give us her name. We don't know what to put on the death certificate.

She's in the ward, telling talking to the Afro baby, We don't know your name, because we don't know your late mother's name. Your mother seems to have lied about her relations coming over. She may have assumed too much. We wouldn't even know who they were, if they did show up. We don't know anything about her, except that she has had this hospital's most-beautiful baby in six years.

Anyway, long story short, the baby was never claimed. She did rotations from surrogate mother to surrogate mother in the Maternity Ward for some days, until it was certain she would not be picked. (The mothers who breastfed her, I've heard, were exclusively those with baby boys, as the others felt mbu the competition, of who the more-beautiful girl was, would sour things up.) What happens with abandoned babies or in this case (which was a first and, hopefully, a last) is that some nursing home takes them. Sometimes, Hospital employees take them. (And when the nursing homes win the paperwork war, the employees—who have now got attached to what was supposed to be a temporary duty of keeping the baby—usually physically injure the nursing home people in trying to keep the baby. The Police often has to help. By default, these days, a constable escorts the nursing home people.)

Somewhere, there is an orphaned girl with big, dark hair. The notes the Afro baby's mother left behind, along with the leesu and hanky, will be given to her some time. I don't even know where Ma put them. I'd spend that money if I found it, now. I'm broke as fuck. But then, they are all denominations that no longer work.
I saw this story unfold before me own eyes, and now I tell it. This is me sinking back into that "feminine writing", I guess. And the location, you'll notice, has moved to Entebbe.

Boxing, Tips, The Article, Etc

2008-09-02T18:15:00.000+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

The Vatican is right, on boxing. After the Revolution, I'll abolish boxing. There is something totally wrong with a "sport" that glories in causing damage to the head. I manage to wince through watching a bout, but I hate myself for it. A "sport" where the most-glorious end to a match is causing unconsciousness in your adversary? How did we sink this low?

Sometimes I assume that everybody knows some little nice conveniences, and then I realise that I didn't know them, at some point. So ...
1. On Windows, you can stroll through all the windows you have open by holding Alt and Tab. Every time you hit tab, you advance to the next window. Try it now! 100% FREE!!!
2. When you type "define: thingy" in the Google search bar, you get back the meaning of "thingy". It is a rather nice dictionary, when you're online. define:evil
  It can do your sums, too.
3. In Windows, go to Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Backup.
  Now, buy a cheap CD for 1,000/=, and back your stuff up already. This is one of those things whose value you never learn until you lose your computer to a power surge. Don't say you weren't warned.
4. Open a (second) Gmail account, and mail yourself some precious files you may have. That way, you back up your diaries and stuff in a nice way. Terms and conditions apply.

Turns out CB wrote another article that enraged the bloggers. And I was in there, quoted. I'm glad that CB remembered to note my ubiquitous finish, while describing why we blog the way we blog: it's not a bad way to blog, just a different way.
I've found, in fact, that I don't like these blogs that feel too "serious". You think I should spend the day having people repeat sad statistics at me and reminding me that it's my duty to feel bad about my and our collective state? I know my favourite blogs, and they are usually not "serious". (Besides, "serious" is usually a code word for "pretentious", if you look closely.) Mine isn't, either. Or, is it?
And Baz, I'm not a pretend-Communist. Repent. If the Revolution comes before you've tattooed an apology on your forehead ... :o) Plus, I want to massacre the whole West, not just Americans.
Also, if it has never happened to you, never let thirty minutes of what you say be quoted in only part of a sentence. My personality is not aphoristic—speaks in paragraph-per-point style, not in sentence-per-point. You see the size of my posts?

And then it is funny how strong these reactions are, when they happen. Now I know how to piss you all: you're not serious bloggers!!! Gwahahaha. "Unserious" should become "uns*****s"? Guys, only politicians should lose it when someone calls them unserious. You all owe the world a post that says what you do is not bad, just different. And also ten links each to a "serious" blog, to disprove the article. And twelve "Hail Mary"s.
(Meanwhile, I think sex and boobs are serious business, don't you think?)

In creative fields, you have an amplitude within which you oscillate. It's called a genre. Within it lies the style, another limit. Anything below that is monotony. What Mesach Semakula does, and this other Africa guy, Ronald Mayinja, that's monotony. I hate their music.

Ohohohoho. Baz, I've forgiven you alright. He has written this. Good one.

Half of Me Is My Mother, Why We Cheat, and Five Other Points

2008-08-29T12:42:00.001+03:00

Mood: :o|
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

Argh. I'm having a horrible week. I should close a deal by the end of the month, or I'm going under. :o( And the month has three days left to it, two of which are not working days. Horrible time, right now. But tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow, I may close one.
Alicia Keys' You Don't Know My Name is a bleeding hymn to the red-eyed goddess of unrequitted love. If you agree, say "Aye".
Salman Rushdie got a rejection for Midnight's Children, believe it or not. Stephen King once got rejections for a book that was later let through to sell well. Heck, Stephen King has a collection of rejection slips—yes, the guy who wrote Dolores Claiborne and Shawshank Redemption. Moral: editors generally suck more than the writers over whom they have power. Christ of Nazareth! How did we end up like this? So I'm thinking there may be some semi-literate fuck telling Ernest Bazanye and Iwaya that their books won't be published, or something like that. After the Revolution, all editors will be sent to labour camps. Holy Communist Nazarene! Sometimes you want Plato's republic already.
I'm thinking of a name for my phone. I realise she doesn't have one yet, which is a bad thing. Even my mug has a name (which I'm scared to tell). Heck, even some dreadlock on me head has a name!
Someone once said I write "all feminine and shit, all girly [...] very emotional, sometimes [...] feminine writing [...] gay [...]". She said my writing was "feminine writing". Can you believe that? Maybe women these days write a lot of fuck-the-West and lots of racist and anti-American shit that achieves little beyond frothing at the mouth. Then again, that was back then, when I still wrote stories from the slums. I'm going to start that again, by the way. The "feminine writing", I mean; the stories. (Since half of me is entirely made up of my mother, hints of androgyny every here and there should be permissible. Yes, this is my excuse. Fuck you too. Fu ... what did you call me?)
My left finger-tips are still in the shock of once again meeting the guitar's fretboard. Poor fuckers. And this time I'm pretty serious about wanting to play this thing, so they are only getting started. Pray for my left finger-tips. Also, I'm about to give up on copying James Blunt's chords, until some years from now, when—insha'llah—I've improved much.
I realise this is readably-short, so far. But I want to chase many readers away, so let me lengthen it. (My posts have stage fright, so smaller audiences are all we'll allow for now. Go Away™.

Get The Daily Monitor of August 9^th, if you can. Go to the women's section. I don't remember the name of the pull-out, Women's Special or the like, but there is a story there, a story of pain. A woman recounts how her new husband cheated on her with his secretary, and the hurt drips off the page and falls onto your shoes in big salty drops. Here's the problem: I think all the guys who cheat on their wives (I'll say "us" and "we", to avoid sounding like a Pharisee or, worse, like a pastor) do not intend to. It's just, at some point, the hormones grab us by the horns—yes—and hurl us against the women. Wait. Sit down. Let me explain. Calm down.

The hurt that the woman expressed was so tangible, I heard a scream in my head, which I think corresponds to the scream she gave, when she discovered him with his secretary, clamped tight, chest-ku-chest, between the unrelenting jaws of an impending climax. (Or maybe they were into less-clichéd positions.) Apparently, the door was even open (beware of wanting the thrill of discovery—you may get it). She even got a miscarriage, in the events that followed her seeing her hubby and then fainting. It's a horrible, horrible story of betrayal.
I am always scared of angry women, and this one was more than just angry.
Now, cheating is bad, and not cheating is good. That is the problem: I know myself to not do the right thing except by mistake. As such, I'm totally scared out of my wits when I realise that the wrong thing will cause such severe damage (because I do the wrong thing nearly always). But I love my women so much that I don't want to hurt them, especially not in this fashion. So I'm caught in a hard spot. What to do?

Once upon a time, there were men who would resist the urge to fuck. But they died out, because any hesitation is genetic suicide. All the men, therefore, who have survived to breed today have that strain of losing their mind in the vicinity of sex. It is why humans exist at all. (It's easy to see why it wasn't up to the women, and therefore why women, in general, are more-faithful.) The reason you'll have kids with your husband (his Male Urge™) is the reason someone else may also have kids with him. (Hey, why is it so quiet here? I'll talk to myself, alright.)

The only hope for us, I think, is to not get into a situation where there is a chance of getting into the neighbourhood of the possibility of the chance of cheating. I know, you've heard it many times: don't be alone with your nude secretary. But that's not what I mean. I mean don't have a fucking secretary at all. Too much to ask? Yes. I intend it to be like that. In reality, the murders you'll save the world, if you forgo the secretary, outnumber those you incur by managing your two-appointments-a-week by yourself. It's built into your fucking mail client, after all. Work from home, if your urge, like mine, hits with stochastic regularity. (And, of course, have your wife close by.) If it sounds like you're sacrificing much (money, comfort, &c), it's because you are. Look at it as an investment, maybe.
For prominence, let me put this in a block:
It is important for us to know that we can't resist cheating on our women, and therefore to not get in a situation where we need to resist cheating.
~ Me
If you can't swallow, don't chew. Why? Because swallowing, like fucking, doesn't involve the brain. It's an involuntary action. It's a reflex. You can't think about it and weigh the risks. The point-of-no-return is not marked. All you know is that you've ruined two lives, and now you know—only in retrospect!—that you, at one point in time, did cross the point-of-no-return. I think this is the only survival strategy we have. Do you, like me, fuck anything that walks? Then close your eyes. I sound like an extremist, and I hate that. But, honestly, I think the only alternative is causing such pain and damage that it would be better if we never got involved with our girls at all in the first place. (Funny that they expect us not to cheat on them precisely because it is a bit hard not to cheat on them. The "effort" put in refects the worth, blah-blah-blah. That's another post, I guess.)
Lead us not into temptation.
~ The Nazarene
Ah. If you, like me, are in the "spirit is willing but the Flesh is weak" category, then what you want is not to get into having to make a choice on whether or not to cheat: you'll make the wrong choice. Just don't be led into where you have to make the choice (therefore you can't make the wrong choice). It's not lead us not into the right decision, but rather lead us not into having to make a decision at all. Lead us not into temptation.

I'll close with four things.
1. I love the Haskell programming language because it leads me not into temptation. Other languages require me to be very smart. But I code when I'm supposed to be sleeping—when the right decision won't happen. Hence my love for this beautiful language. (Ignore the criticisms in that article—utter bullshit.)
2. I assume that, because female cheating is not as common, it is also less-forgivable. Chauvinist Pigs of the World, Unite!™ But seriously, the receptive nature of female sex, you see, makes it very much a different thing. But the hurt caused by cheating, incidentally, is bigger for the women (I swear) than it is for the men. If we want something to remind us of the damage we are causing, we should imagine being cheated on, then multiply it by 25,457.493. Hehe. Renders you impotent, no? Me neither.
3. I was watching a play by Tyler Perry where his Madea character was, and there was this exchange (and you see why Tyler is a genius, even when he's generalising too much). The play was called Madea's Class Reunion, if memory serves:
  - How can I tell if my husband is cheatin' on me?
  - Do you think he's cheating on you?
  - Yes ...
  - Well, that's how you know!
  Ah, women. I used to think it was only my Mama I couldn't lie to. Then I discovered it was all girls in general. Then I discovered that all guys couldn't lie to girls, so I stopped feeling inferior. Women's intuition is about my strongest evidence that God is a girl.
4. I think, also, it helps to give these things much thought before we have to think about them. As in, it helps for each of us to have a calculus for dealing with this kind of case before we are faced with a nude army of lesbian rapist nuns with beads on their waists and army bandannas and toe rings and full-colour Communist tattoos and piercings in hush-hush places and guns and handcuffs (ah, my fantasies!). And fire. Don't forget the fire. :o) I love fire.
  That way, we work out where we stand on the issue without being compromised by the Urge™. We kind of do mock drills for survival, as we turn it over in our heads.
  Maybe my fears are unique, but I certainly never love a girl until I love her very, very much, and to think that I'd hurt a girl I love in such a brutal fashion is so, so scary for me, O God, I can do little more besides pray to the Heavens Above to just never, ever let me live into the year when I'd betray my heart's love like this, to lead me not into into temptation.
  OMFG. That's so ... girly. Too gay. But I'll leave it, since I can't spend more time thinking up a replacement. It's fucking late, and I have an early day tomorrow.

"If it eats, bribe it," said The Philosopher

2008-08-22T14:59:00.000+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

Because of the spot I am in, at this point in my life, I'm prone to falling for this stuff of subscribing to "conventional wisdom" from business "thought leaders". You know, I may end up picking up a book from some "business guru" or the like.
But I won't.

If I'm going to read anything for my business edification, I know where to find it. For the curious, it is between Ecclesiastes and Psalms—common sense distilled into Semitic dichotomous verse. Consider Proverbs 17:8

A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of one who gives it;
wherever he turns, he prospers.

No education is complete without that. I know about Proverbs 17:23, too:

The wicked accepts a bribe in secret,
to pervert the ways of justice.

But you notice the evil one, here, is the one who accepts the bribe to pervert justice—not the giver. I'll be a giver, certainly. Not a taker, but a giver. The bad side of bribes is also part of a complete education, isn't it? More on bribes from The Philosopher, in Proverbs 21:14

A gift in secret averts anger,
and a concealed bribe, strong wrath.

Two lines repeating the same thing (for emphasis, I guess), and with poetic élan.

But the other source of wisdom is from music. The official band of my company will be Coldplay. There is a recurring theme in Coldplay lyrics that is at the very centre of this effort: If you never try, you'll never know. These words, exactly these words, occur in two songs. One is Fix You, and the other is Speed of Sound. Another song, the tear-jerking What If?, has It could bend, or it could break; that's the risk that you take. [...] How can you know it if you don't even try?
So, you see, seated at Trenchtown, this silly old iMac G3, I have roughly everything I need to check up, when drawing policies. When a question arises, say like "Should we slip them a bribe, you think?", I know the answer. "If it eats, bribe it." Vive la corruption! Uganda's single greatest convenience.

Blades, Wealth, and Music

2008-08-17T17:55:00.001+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

Of late, I've been walking into no-weapons areas too much. And it always interesting to see the reaction on the guards' faces, when I hand them my switchblade to keep it. Usually, they are just proding my groin with the metal detector in a well-practiced, pointless, homoerotic ritual, expecting to wave me through, after they've asserted who the true Isaza is around here. And then it bleeps when they hit the dagger at my hip. And the veins on their worried faces visibly fill with blood, and you can see the big subcutaneous worms start to crawl all over their arms. Drops of sweat gather like FDC protesters and congregate at the nose, a most-unruly one running down the kalinda-minyira to perch in defiance at the upper lip (must be the Besigye drop). A shaking hand tries, and fails touchingly, to point at the steel bulge stuck to the belt, the tremors forcing the finger to indicate, instead, the general area of where I'm standing. I reach for my knife. At this point, their armpits are darkening rapidly, the footprint of sweat growing like a stain on the ceiling, a bit like a fungus, it even looks like an infection. They glance around. I tug at it and pull it out. They close their eyes, duck a bit, call out Maama nnyabo! (or Ayi Yesu!, when the Nazarene is likely to respond faster than the mother).
I'm harmless, guys. Not a gun; it's a knife. I just love blades. Arabian scimitar, Japanese katana, East African machete, American switchblade, all. I don't stab. I try not to, anyway. Just keep the fucking thing while I check out my concerns here, okay?

If I ever want to get wealthy, it is ... wait. I reiterate that too much wealth is obscene. You cannot accumulate it sans cheating someone out. Okay? Good. But still: if I ever want to get wealthy, it is so that I can totally quit working. Totally. Working takes away my time. I'm a lazy slob; a good-for-nothing lay-about. I want to be so wealthy that I can just chill without having any real worries. I can't stockpile time, so I should just stockpile the other things, and leave time open for me. Wealth would, I hope, afford me time. Time to think. Time to play in my mind. Time to chill with my women. Time to blog. Time to read books. Time to grow delicate flowers and bleed care all over their petals in big, sudden blotches of thick crimson blood. Time to document the growth of kittens from the minute they are born. Time to draw my picture series. Learn languages, take photos, write short stories. Paint a girl's toe nails with fussy, veins-on-temples, shaky-steady-shaky-steady-shaky-steady-hand perfectionism. Time to gather a lot of information that I'd only use if I were to live for a thousand years. And the most-important benefit of wealth: no reason to leave bed. Just grope about, eyes still closed, listen for the breath, locate the warmth, advance and settle within that bosom, like a nestling at home, go back to sleep.

If I'm not making much sense, it is because I'm not trying very, very hard to make sense. At some point, you've hit a wall, really. You can't make sense, try as you may. It's what happens when you are listening to the weirdest bands. Venus Peter is a Japanese rock band I'm enjoying. God bless them for this here song on my repeat, Let It Know. Really sweet.
And Gotan Project, dear Jesus. There is this song, Queremos Paz whose only (very spare) lyrics are sounds of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It's an international band, but they sing much Spanish. Do you know how beautiful jazz is in Spanish? They sing many genres, also. Some song was recorded in a bar. Jazz in a bar—it don't get no better. The lady there croons, and the glasses can be heard tinkling, calls to the waiter, sporadic laughs. At this point, my mind fills in the smoke creeping out of Cuban cigars like defeated demons, bearded revolutionaries bullying a journalist at a table that has more guns on it than bottles, the couple on the dance floor where the tall girl is barefoot, so that the height difference can be tamed, her head buried in his shoulder, her empty glass, its mouth facing the floor behind him, in danger of falling out of her hand gone numb with desire, and Gotan Project is over there bleeding into the microphones, all eyes closed in nearly-sexual concentration on the instruments. Lunatico, the album, is beautiful.

If you don't know by now, I really love long, long sentences. Nadine Gordimer wrote one (page 159, if you have The House Gun), and did the masterful trick of blaming it on the character. How totally ingenious. I have no characters to blame for what happened in the paragraphs above. :o(

The Unhappy Monogamous Polygamous Happy Marriage

2008-08-15T12:12:00.002+03:00

Mood: Uncertain-about-my-mood mood
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Entebbe

First a quick shout before we go on to the post. I've had the occassion to express enough of why I find evolution to be a stupid joke. It wasn't expected, but the comments on the last-post-but-one have provided a platform, and I don't believe I'll ever blog about this again, as I find it uncomfortable material. If you have any strong opinions on evolution, pitch in. And, in the same comments, I mention that I understand the logic behind the agnostic argument—and why it is, itself, the answer to the question it asks (related to the ontological argument for God's existence). Now, the post.

He says polygamy is the normal relational state of humans. That it is "really stupid" to expect that humans interact with multiple people for everything—everything—except who you're laying. Wrong. Even evil.
She, on the other hand, says polygamy is a thing humans do that, while undoubtedly-human, is worse than any alternative (monogamy, in this case). She says humans fight, humans commit genocide (and homicide and suicide and infanticide and other *cides), humans lie, humans betray, humans do stupid things all over. That says absolutely nothing about whether they should be doing these things.
Welcome to our debate. This is Jude, and this is Ange. The argument is about polygamy. Thank you for joining us.

Jude goes like polygamy, okay, is only appealing to girls, not guys. You can ask some honest people. Girls like it. Guys not so much. At which point Ange quips that, The Judeo-Christian marriage vows are strongly-monogamous—and they were crafted by male hands, not girl hands. And isn't it indicative of men's liking for monogamy, Ange says, that they get murderously-angry in the case of unfaithfulness (except their own)? There.

The fact that monogamy has survived vigorously through millenia, where much of the related human urge and behaviour calls for its quick and gruesome death, implies that we are wired for monogamy, in the same way that we are wired for peace, love, kindness, et cetera (which have suffered roughly the same fate: sanity calls for the loss of hope in peace, human goodwill, and even hope).

Just when you're sad (or happy) that Ange has won, Jude raises a finger.
Mothers want their sons to have many girls. How do you explain that?
Ange says, Mothers also want their sons-in-law to be strictly-monogamous. Draw.

Jude is quick to point Westward. The West, he says, is anti-polygamy. And see, he says, how short-lived the marriages there are. There are no chances for Wife n to help Wife n-1 (where n is greater than or equal to 2). The result is that the pressure of this crazy institution—mental institution, I believe—of marriage is applied to only two participants. Only one woman. There is no chance she'll survive it. Just like a pin's point against the skin versus the pinhead against the skin. The solitary wife gets damaged by the pressure, with nobody to share the load with.
Even worse, this monogamy in the West, Jude adds, is only an illusion. In reality, them Westerners are all polygamous. They are very unfaithful to their spouses. Maybe polygamy could help, but we'll never know. They segregate against polygamy over there. The real, safe form of polygamy, that is. Not this surreptitious, unhealthy kind that the entire Westerners do from when they are out of diapers.

Ange counters it, saying that Jude's argument is flawed for assuming that there should even be such undue pressure in a marriage. There should only enough pressure in a marriage, she says, as there is in a close friendship. She has no love for men who have bar friendships that last across decades and regimes, but marriages that are better-measured in hours. These men take caution not to apply undue pressure on their friends, but take no such measures for their wife [sic]. They create this pressure that Jude says justifes the next wife. The men should change, not monogamy.
And on how monogamy doesn't really exist, Ange says Jude is wrong. You see, she says, in polygamous societies, the concept of faithfulness in marriage (by the party that is allowed another spouse) doesn't exist. Because, you know, to get another spouse requires you to have that "wandering eye". By definition, polygamous societies are pro-unfaithfulness. So, the argument is flawed from the very start. If you think unfaithfulness is bad, you are looking for monogamy, not polygamy. Fix the issues with monogamy: that is the only place you have a shot at faithfulness.

At this point, Jude goes and slaps Ange on the shoulder. And I manage to pull him away before Ange cries. He says, Why does she call my argument flawed?
Maybe because it is flawed? How about we stick to supporting our points and leave the tantrums alone?
And Ange goes on about the beauty of the one-and-only concept. That, It is good to lie gathered in arms that you know are yours, and yours alone. Nobody is entitled to this; it is mine, and mine alone. The breath that hits you, the slight snore you hear, the incoherent groans in the dead of the night, when the moonlight has kept pouring into the room through open windows and towelled the two of you off. When the light perspiration on the two lovers and their beddings doesn't know who it came from originally. In a time like that, you want to know this is yours and yours alone. It is beautiful like that, not when you know someone else will take it away tomorrow and treat it like you had never even existed there before. Not ...

Jude cuts Ange short, and says we should keep it in tangible logic here. This bullshit about what is beautiful should not be allowed in a sensible debate, man. And if it were me saying these things, you'd reduce my score points as punishment. But when it is Ange, you allow her to talk ...

I cut Jude short. We should end this. For today, it will end here. This debate is old. Every now and then, we revisit it and it is clear that these two won't agree on anything soon. It entertains me to mediate in their many debates. I hope you liked it. In this marriage stuff, these two nearly never agree on anything. Except, of course, that marriages are never happy. (The say marriages are incapable of being anything like happy or unhappy. Marriages don't care. There are only happy people or unhappy people in marriages. Marriages are, themselves, neutral. The people change; the marriages never do.) Okay. That will be all for tonight. Thank you for joining us.

Dancing, Music, and Other Concerns

2008-08-07T19:05:00.003+03:00

Mood: eclectic
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

Eh, I want to dance. I don't really dance, me. I'm nimble on my feet, but I reserve that for other cases, not dancing. But right now, I crave the sensation of just rocking slowly on my feet, next to a girl. A drink in the hand that presses her against me, dangerous promises dripping off my lips in the heat of the moment, binding suicidal oaths, such as promises of undying love. I want that. I want the other hand to run up her neck as we swap positions and now I see what she was seeing before we twirled. Maybe now it's her turn to look at the fire and see the flames hopping about, and now my turn to face the table and see the perspiring bottle of wine, and feel her glass touch back as she gathers me closer to her in this dance. And I don't know what expression she has on her face. As if that matters. Eh, I want to dance. You hear me? :o(
All this John Mayer, Michael Bublé, George Benson, Ringo Madlingozi, all this Tuku Music, all this teary-eyed jazz and guitarwork, it is for sharing. My headphones are a blasphemy. It is for playing from concealed speakers, at a sweet low volume that is loud when two people in love get in each other's hold and dance. None of that sweaty stuff. I was always the slow-rocking type. Nice and slow. Mostly. ;o) I want to dance; God knows I want to dance.

Hello, readers. I'm the 27^th Comrade. Thank you for joining us for this blog post. And now, the main prolix.
My cat is fine.
... -ish.
The vet took her to a place in Kireka. I'm supposed to trust it to be safe there, but you know how it is. Can't be sure anybody else understands just how to take care of Space. But she's a tough wee tigress; she'll manage. A hug to all who cared. Now you know why I am lovin' all y'all.

I'm tired of hearing "[...] it comes from the Latin for [some word]". Or "[...], which, of course, comes from the Greek for [some word]". I think it is such an elitist line, really. What sounds better than that, for collecting elitist karma? I'm not against that. Do it, if you like. I'm against the Eurocentricism. I am more into negritude and Afrocentricism. So, you know Nimrod? The dude in the Bible, who was the first World emperor? (It was a small world, yes, so he outdid Genghis Khan without ever riding a horse.) I mean this selfsame Nimrod to whom some Nigerian peoples claim to trace their origin. Nimrod was a Cushite. As in, Black. That doesn't matter. (You see, I'm not Black, me, so I don't give a fuck for colours. Nobody seems to mention my colour—chocolate.) This Nimrod; what matters is that he was an African. And he ran the show at the Babel Tower, yeah? Mama of all them languages. So, any time I want elitist points, I'll just go all like "[...], and it comes from the Babel Tower language for [...]". Me, nobody mess with I.

After noticing the comment trend on my invective-laden posts, this comic makes so much sense. And it is the formula to my immortality. Many columnists use that. Like Timothy Kalyegira, for example. Like Onyango-Obbo, whose logic (for the times I can bear his well-written silliness) only manages to prove its absence—if even that. No reason I shouldn't use it, myself. Hmm. "Shit on a biscuit!" :o)
And if I don't comment back to you, dear reader, it is because I'm away from the computer, bound against a pole by a dagger-wielding dominatrix. :o)
But one rule, I've learnt: do not insult people, unless you include yourself in one way or another.

Next: if you ever have to fill in a field—on the internet or on paper—that asks for a postal code, and you put "256", and I catch you. I'll beat you so hard, your entire family tree will be covered in bruises.
I was filling some form, and the lady at the counter told me to fill "256" into the "postal code" field. In a fucking bank. "256", people, is the international phone code, not the postal code. Uganda has no postal codes. Just refuse to fill that field, when asked for it. It's the only way to heal the world of this silly cultural assumption. Not every country is an unwieldily-huge hunk of dirt that requires postal codes. When I meet a field on the Net that requires a zip code of a Ugandan address I fill it with an expletive. Just Say No.

In the video of Usiende Mbali, Juliana is seen, in some shot, reading a Jackie Collins novel. Hahahaha. FAIL.
In a related development: my recent stories (the ones that don't come to this blog) are often very, very steamy erotica, because of the girl I give them to. She likes them. I've just finished one some two hours ago. By the way, see the time I'm writing this: Thu Aug 7 05:25:55 EAT 2008
Explains the incoherence, eh?

Now, more music stuff. At the last Happy Hour, Antipop and Dee said they only done heard Viva La Vida and Violet Hill off the new Coldplay album. Sad. Because, to me, these are the two least-artistic songs on the album. It contains two hidden tracks, Life in Technicolor (comes after Death And All His Friends), and another that comes after Yes. The same brilliant lyricism that made the band give us earlier greats. The best part about this album is that it will put to death this stupid idea that Coldplay is a rock band. Coldplay is not a rock band, if we are willing to invent a new category. There is more of bagpipes and violins in this album than electric guitars.
Strawberry Swing should top charts. Has an Eastern-leaning theme that may be bagpipes or flutes. I hear the album was recorded in Latin America and Iberia, and took the mystical inspirations. It is evident, the loose Catholicism, in the album. Some songs have audible studio sounds (someone counting down from three, at the start of Strawberry Swing, and a chuckle reminiscent of Twisted Logic from back then at the beginning of Reign of Love). Basically, the work of a band that has proven itself, and is now comfortable with experimentation. Lost! is very rich, but not exactly team-work. Chris Martin sits at the piano and makes it bleed. Nice song that deliberately feels underproduced. Cemeteries of London, with lyrics that are as macabre as they are beautiful. Think a gothic artist like Marilyn Manson singing with a jazz band. That's close.
And the last observation is the unashamed nostalgia on the record. Lovers in Japan feels like an '80s song that took a wrong turn—and feels beautiful while at it. The album is great. I love it. Chris, Jonny Boy, Champion, and Guy have given us nice stuff. So, Dee and Antipop, there. :o)

You Might Be An Idiot: The Circular Idiocy Theorem

2008-08-01T14:43:00.004+03:00

Mood: Sad
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Nakulabye

I just got this idea. See, if it were a good idea, maybe I'd have resisted it. But this was just too bad to leave alone. I'm going to make all of you watch my attempt to start this company. You'll watch it sink or watch it float. I'll be noting the stuff worth telling, until it is clear which direction things went. And I'll be honest, the best way I can be. *blinks solemnly*

Whenever I write a post, I subconsciously choose the audience. Some are meant for friends (and non-friends won't understand them or finish them). Some for enemies. Some for those who are reading here for the first time. Some for the three people who read everything I put up. This one is for those, the last group. I know who you are (one of you told me she prints it, if she can't sit through it immediately). This is for you, for I want to trim our numbers. :o) You always read my tripe? Behold I punish you for this sin, visiting mine wrath upon thy seed, even unto the third and fourth generation. Honestly, though, thank you, and here is a verbose one for us. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. And sisters.

Now, on to the post. It should get long, and even angry. I'll call every last one of you names. I'll be a mean, generalising little twerp. I'll call you names of body parts, and one rear one in particular. Some things just never change. You can blame the mood, this time, on the fact that I've come to the end of my savings. :o) My point, if it has eluded you thus far, is that you're not one of the three people I know who will manage to read all this. Go away now. Thank you.

First, the theorem. Jude has recently developed and tested his Circular Idiocy Theorem. It says:

The farther you try to get from being an idiot, the closer you get to being an idiot.

So, here is some news for you: you might be an idiot. I recently saw some comedian funny enough for me to doubt he was an American. He has some lines that end in "you might be a redneck". (If you're not sure if it's your mother or sister that died, you might be a redneck.) My version is "you might be an idiot".

If you've been employed for long and you still run broke, you might be an idiot. (That "long" is subjective.) You know, The Educated Jew noted that it is outside of the intentions of the capitalist lord to make his employees wealthy, since he'll have no employees, then. It is his Intention, rather, to keep them alive (to rear the next generation of wage slaves), and poor (to stay dependent on his wage); for once I'll let you be the one to infer that this is what the West is doing to the Rest, and not even hint at it myself.
Now, if you're clear-headed enough to work through this paragraph—and one that cites Karl Marx, no less!—and you still wake up to report to your fetters in the slave galley, you might be an idiot. Why work hard to make someone wealthy (and assuredly stay broke), rather than work to get wealthy (and probably get rich)? In both cases, the worst that can happen is that you'll be broke. So, why pick the option that has less light? I know why, actually. You're clinging to the sense of consistency and assurance. You're, in short, trying hard not to be an idiot—and therefore being one. Ever heard of retrenchments? New bosses? Have any habits that may upset your boss (and earn you a sack)? You might be an idiot.
I realised it was sinful to waste my most-productive years making other people wealthy, only to get to the other side of maturity and see withered hopes and dreams, as I stand with impotent men in the pension queue, wondering what could have been if I had only tried and tried again and tried one more time. Sinful. My grandpa, the philosopher, would have slapped me for even considering working for anybody else. I'll try to make up for the wasted time.

If you support Besigye, you might be an idiot. Because the alternative to Museveni, in case you didn't know, is not some angry, bulldog-ugly retard. If you really want an alternative to M7, and parties like Bidandi Ssali's PPP don't impress you, you'd rather stand for President than support a stupid, vengeful, lying, angry, bulldog-ugly bag of pus like Besigye. If you're willing to concede that there are problems with Museveni (and there are more than you can ever know about), you should be willing to stand for President. And isn't it stupid to say the guy you're replacing M7 with is the one who once did M7's business? And also, Besigye paints himself as the opposite of M7. That's the problem: you should be smart enough to know that if you don't want your tea too hot, you don't want it frozen either. The worst, though, is that, even if you're not an idiot, many others are. I am, for example. You can't win! The numbers are on our side! Hence why Besigye even has an audience. If someone is too dumb to know that you can't blame fuel prices on the government—any government outside of the American one—that someone is too dumb to lead anything, leave alone a country. Museveni is smarter than Besigye, and that should matter when you're supporting.
In trying hard not to be an idiot (ie., showing "indignation and anger" about M7, since it is what smart, educated, democratic, idealistic people do, these days), you might be an idiot.

If you do as the society expects you to, you might be an idiot. Because that may require you to, for example, wear suits into the equatorial sun. Sure, you're trying to not be an idiot, and I understand that. But that means you might be an idiot. Do only as you want to; where you concur with society, good for society. Otherwise, it can go to jahannamah. (That's how the rules you're following were made, after all.)

The sweetly-paradoxical part about this Circular Idiocy Theorem is that it means that if you concede to being an idiot and stay put, you'll be less of an idiot than the one who runs away from (to!) idiocy. Hehe. Circles are interesting. They have a property that implies that everyone is equally idiotic, as per this theorem. Don't worry. We are all idiots.

If you believe in evolution, you might be an idiot. You're only trying to believe what you've been told is smart to believe, right? Trying to not be an idiot, and therefore being one. We have the monkeys. We have the humans. We don't have the middle "early men". Why? Weren't they fitter for survival than the monkeys from which they evolved precisely because they were fitter for survival? I know, I don't want to go there, but I can't resist. It's Friends Only night, after all. I might as well spill forth. You know, it takes like billions of members of a species before "speciation happens" (new species coming up). That's why, with at least six billion humans around, not one is a mutant that is a different species. Therefore, if we came from, say, six billion "early men", why do we have only one tooth remaining? Are you too spineless and lacking confidence in your brains to take a stand and concede to not knowing? This is one of many questions nobody has answered for me (gimme answers, if you can). Until then, if you believe in evolution, you might be an idiot. (For evolutionists, there is no possibility of an intelligent designer who makes things that are similar. There is no possibility of an intelligent designer who makes things that are similar, for evolutionists. None, whatsoever. None, whatsoever. Similarity, to them, implies evolution. To them, similarity implies evolution. I feel my respect for someone ebb fast, once I discover that he/she is an evolutionist. I feel my respect for someone ebb fast, once I discover that he/she is an evolutionist. Fearing theism so much as to pick idiocy? Fearing theism so much as to pick idiocy?)
You know, one of Isaac Newton's most-famous lines is not even one of the thoeries. It's a confession of ignorance: Hypotheses non fingo; Latin for "I feign no hypotheses." One looks to these scatterbrains in coats for a sentence that approaches that in honesty, and there is none forthcoming. And their intolerance for dissent is the biggest problem here.

I noticed, in the Saturday papers, that Betty Nambooze was coming out of jail to cheering supporters. And she had an Eminem t-shirt on. Now, that's gangsta. Wear the guy who rhymed on Renegade, and the government will flee from thee. And, is it me, or does Eminem just sound better on other people's tracks? Renegade must be the tightest rhyme since Forget About Dre. Man, that kid might be a prophet! Oh, and since Eminem is arguably White, I'll get in a racist mood.

If you're a White person writing about Africa, you might be an idiot. (Don't knock this, you. Racism is everywhere. Everybody be doin' it. Least I ain't lynchin' 'em. At least there ain't no crystals in the night, outside of White establishments. Them racists are even still relaxed enough to be having sex in South Africa! The racists, if you want them, are the Whites over here. I'm glad Baz doesn't read this far, though; I'll admit that. Exit the damn brackets.) After all, no Whites are going to read this far; remember, this is not one of their blogs. So I'm not offending anyone (which is in line with my intention).

I can prove that they are not reading this: you done seen Global Voices? Good. In my time here, I've seen like three Global Voices correspondents in Uganda. Uganda, if you're an American, is an African country. (Yes to both those questions, American.) These GVO correspondents, they are diverse and interesting. ~~A rich mix of backgrounds and cultures that reflects the country they are reporting about.~~ But they have one thing in common; can you guess? Okay, apart from being Americans? (We skipped that consideration, as "one thing in common" sounds better than "two things in common".) Good. Correct. They are White.

That may be because all other Ugandans turned down the offer to help. I know I'd never work for a blog like that; it's against much of what I hold dear. That would be a post for another time, but I'll likely not say such again. In short, GVO is another pseudo-activism portal to burden us with deluded idealistic paranoids who will take over all 365.25 days with "International Blog For [something] Day". More in my "Blog for Human Rights" post. And it loves stereotypes: result of using only one mindset there. Et cetera; all the problems, in short, that show up when White people write about Africa. Point is, it is where White people write about Africa. Little wonder White people read it. My Africa is some book I saw in Aristoc. Interesting cover: blue-eyed girl with lions. Same week, someone asks why we generally don't blog about politics in these blogs. Well, we have White people to do that for us. Politics, lions, child soldiers (politics reloaded, I know, but nude, hapless Blacks look good on American TV, you see), Evil Politicians™ (politics revolution, because evil Blacks are also an American favourite), spiritism, dust, the city chaos, and other similarly-expected things. These, the Whites will write for us. (And "mediocre" is a mediocre word for this.) When we write about the night in the club, leave it be: it's what the Whites don't believe exists, and therefore the only thing they leave for us. Still, if you are White writing about Africa, you might be an idiot.
(Yes, the non-Whites I know who write for GVO about Africa—and I know them because they stand out, as is expected—are based in the West. I'll not mind a list that proves me wrong.)

You're White and writing about Africa. You try hard not to be an idiot by filing Yet Another Thing About Child Soldiers and Evil Politicians™, since that is the safe way to play. You're only trying not to be an idiot. Therefore you might be an idiot.

Before I exit my racist mood, I'll note this. When Dennis wrote his call for recolonisation, many White people said it was an interesting read. You know, things like "uncomfortably-honest [...] daring". He said it was his most-controversial. You see, White people will read when you tell them to be the master. Is this a stunning revelation? But tell them that, with recolonisation, you want the massacres of the times as well. They shut up. What is it, anyway, with people thinking the Jews had it rough with the Nazis? At least there were some survivors. The Reich believed it was possible to exterminate a race after seeing what the Americans had done there, what the British had done here and in Australia, after seeing what the Iberians had done in Latin America, what the Gauls had done in the parts of Africa they had taken. Blame for the Jews' plight is better placed on the Americans than on the Nazis. Next thing, governments will be doing arbitrary arrests, sending people to bays of pigs, doing unilateral anschluss, choosing which leaders run which countries, and we'll blame them, not America. Or should we blame the Nazis, from whom the Americans learnt? When I lynch the Whites in Uganda, I'm only aping Great America, okay? Besides, I'm curious if there would be blog badges for WithoutSanctuary.org, maybe from GVO, if it had White people, instead. (Don't visit that site, if you love me.)

Ange noticed a trend: when White people try to exterminate you, they are about to get fanatically-supportive of you. This is largely in the same way that school bullies are supportive of the kids they've beaten and broken in; a kind of rite of passage. It's why the Aryans, after what they did to the Jews, became the guarantors of their dramatic aliyah. (And because of what these selfsame Whites did, the rest of us are not allowed to crack Schlemiel jokes anymore.) These days, the remnants of the Australian Aboriginals are being spoilt by government cash, after returning from the brink. So, Ange expects that Africa's moment is here any time soon. She points at the Western Aid™, and Jude says "but that is part of the extermination attempt!" You know, until they have convinced themselves that they are the Masters, they'll keep trying to exterminate us, and then turn around, as soon as they are convinced of their Power over Us. Luckily, the World (as we know it) won't stay around long enough for that.
(And it is funny how Americans rush to say it is "this administration" that is evil, not their country. Stupid. Idiotic. American. Retarded. At least "this administration" waits for the Hurricane, before it starts on ethnic cleansing. The "administrations" that founded that country were run by slave-drivers and lynchers. "This administration" is the worst, sure. Save for all the others. And I quote "administration", because that is correctly a regime. They say regime when they talk of any non-White leader, and "administration" for them. Plus, it's one regime since the founding, but different leaders.) Phew.

If you are Microsoft Windows, you might be an idiot. My friend installed Windows Vista, recently, and he loves it. I'm happy for him. I've always had qualms with Windows. Not with the system itself—I nearly never use Windows—but with the icons there. You know, these icons that depict human busts, in cartoony form? A good example is if you go to Control Panel and see User Accounts. All of them are white heads covered in brown and yellow hair. In other words, the icons are White. (Yes, we aren't done—it's been centuries of silence, you see.)
Well, they were White. In Windows XP, before Vista, I once went through these icons looking for a non-Aryan icon. None to be found. It seems it was more than one person who noticed this, because that has been remedied in Windows Vista. If you compare that User Accounts icon, you'll see that there is now a—gasp, choke—Black man in the icon. Here it is:

So, let's recap. Windows XP is oblivious of non-Aryan icons. They notice, and try hard not to be idiots in Windows Vista, and therefore get closer to being idiots. Because, you see, the prevailing attitude towards a black man in your User Accounts in America is Shoot To Kill. As though Windows doesn't know that? They could have portrayed more of the less-than-comfortable truth by putting the Black man icon to take out the Recycle Bin. Or where they need an icon for Potential President.
I just had to note. It was funny. Sorry.

Before the last one: if you are Andrew Mwenda, you might be an idiot. You see, that dude opened his mag. Politics, naturally. The first cracks show when he publishes false shit that could have been verified with a two-minute phone call. Many people forgave him, myself included. You see, while I don't like him, I want his role to be played. His role is vital to good governance, you know. You don't have to be against the government to want it to suffer hard opposition. Indeed, if you like a government, pray for its competition. If you like an athlete, pray that his/her training is obscenely-hard. It is how we keep things in tone. So, I like Mwenda's role, and I think he plays it with genius. My beef is with his publication.
He has sold out to selling out. As in, he wants to sell copies so much, that he has abandoned much of what makes him relevant. Now, he let a stupid story through and (consciously or not) ignored to put it up to rigorous testing, because it would make for good headlines and sell out copies. We forgave him, for many reasons. But what I can't forgive him for is this shit of putting headlines that belong in The Red Pepper. You know, "Museveni assassination fails ...", "Is Kayihura meant to silence the opposition ...", and such-like tripe. Next thing he knows I'll be calling the editorial to ask where the nude girls have gone. Seriously, though, Mwenda should be told that a mag is more than its headline. Tabloids are where the headlines are the story. He should wake up immediately. In trying hard not to be an idiot, he might be an idiot.

You read this far? You might be an idiot.
Did I write all this? Heh. I might be an idiot. Nay, nay. I am an idiot. Takes one to know one. To close with an Eminem line, Ahaha. Cummon, wage slaves, Besigye supporters, social conformists, everybody, evolutionists, White people writing about Africa, Microsoft Windows, and Andrew Mwenda, you know I love you.

Errata, Amputees, and Other Short Stories

2008-07-23T21:01:00.001+03:00

Mood: Caffeinated
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

Let's see what a mildly-caffeinated head can come up with. (Coffee at five o'clock in the afternoon. I'm aging. When it becomes coke at 0600h, I'm Americanised. Americanized. I mean, Diet Cocaine? Eh-meh-RRReek-an-uh-zd.)
First, my previous post. I edited it to put the link to the war song I was referring to. I had got the title wrong, at first. That's what you get for not being Jacob Zuma and still writing about Umshini Wami.

I saw this cartoon in a Babylon paper, recently, where some lawyer is telling a client "Sorry, I added extra zeros to the phone number—habit of a lifetime, you see."

Next: heartbreak! :o) Honestly, this must be for lack of stuff to write about.
A man rushes like a rocket towards the finish line, and is happy to win the hundred-metre dash—another success for his army division in these prestigious Army Games. As he is doing the victory lap, he is awoken by the nurse giving him his lunch soup. (Food sucks, even in the army hospital.) He sits up, pushing himself up with his left leg. His right is just a bandaged stump, a mere extension of his hip, kicking about obsecenely in short, quick arcs.
The amputee who wins the hundred-metre dash in his dreams: that is what heartbreak is like, for me.

Or the guy with a missing right arm seated next to you, to your left, in the taxi. Keeps grunting and groaning, and you start to get pissed. He understands, and turns to explain: You see, I feel some irritating itch on my arm; around the wrist, he says, pointing far beyond where his upper-arm stump sits flapping. I want to scratch it, you see, but ... but it isn't there!
That's what heartbreak is like, for me.

Okay, dwelling on missing limbs can get seriously morbid. Let's see. Like the gentle stream, the brook of water. Nice picture, eh? Well, they've dragged the kicking, wailing mother away, and her son has already been pulled out of the water, his belly punctured to let out the water so the load may lose some weight, wrapped, and taken away, as the priest chants ancient words. And in the water, from between the rocks, a steady thread of crimson blood seeps relentlessly, as though a body is still trapped there. The dead boy has been pulled out, but the blood is still staining the water, freshly.
This is what heartbreak is like, for me.

Enough of that shit. But still. With this love shit, I've been called a "bitch". That I let it matter too much. But what to do, if you are the emotional kind? I wish I wasn't, too. But no choice was given. :o(
Strange, considering my foremothers were a race of warrior women. Mercenaries who prowled these plains and were feared. Not the picture of emotional dolls—silent night-time raiders with body paint and dealdly javelins. And also very beautiful, to add the edge to it all.
Might be a nice thing, as I'm starting a company this month.

Tech companies, on average, are failures. I started one, back then, that no longer exists. But now I'm older and wiser. I can hope for better, expect better.
So, what point did I make? None, really. I'm having a pretty good time. My kittens all got new homes, so I'm just chilling here. Space got the hormone jab, too. No more kids. Now, I'm getting ready to enter geurilla mode and sleep on floors (literally), as this company goes out into the rain.

Warriors and Musicians

2008-07-17T21:24:00.003+03:00

Mood: Bored
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

[This is my 102^nd post. Dedicated to all the girls I've fallen in love with, those I told and those I was too shy to tell, and one of them in particular, who I won't hint at further for fear of making her uncomfortable. Also dedicated to all people who fit in any of the categories of fighters and musicians mentioned below.]

Late eighties, in Uganda. Our hair still smells of gunpowder. You open your windows in the morning, and gun smoke comes rushing in. On occassion there is the salvo of machine gun fire, and mothers rush to herd the young ones under beds, and the men turn the lights down and stroke their clubs and rosaries. This country is covered in bullet wounds, and the hoarding instinct upsets economic advancement. Late eighties, in Uganda. I was there, kids. We had it tough, kids.

We had much of the shit. The Congolese, on the other hand (the hand facing west, for those of you who don't see me), had nearly no shit. Comparatively, I mean. That is a land of tenacious People, the Congo. Did you know that these Western Imperialists halved the population of the Congo by massacre alone? Cut the population in half, literally. Because if your arms are cut off by them Europeans, half you has been cut off.
But in the late eighties, they were riding the orgasmic peak of Mobutu's Authenticité program. Their women, therefore, were round wonders of jiggling beauty, wrapped in their loudly-coloured African clothes. Kuku wa za Banga's corpulent hens. They had it good, the Congolese. They had it good, kids.

So, in the troubled days that were the late eighties, brightness gushed into our country (or just seeped, whatever) from the Congo. As music. It's why I've never understood the relationship between the Congo and Uganda. We love their music and their women. Our generals also love their trees and minerals. But we never hug, ever. Why? "What's wrong with loving one another," Bob Marley asks. "What'swrong with you, my brother?"
Ah, but we played that Congolese music. We played it. Didn't Madilu System serenade our women? Didn't Tshala Mwana arouse our men? Didn't we wail together with M'Bilia Belle? Didn't our Army Band steal Congolese hits and remix them with blood-pumping patriotism? Didn't our guitars go a note higher, too? Didn't we learn Lingala? At least didn't we know that bolingo means "love"?
Kids, love the Congoman. He helped us through them days. The late eighties.

But the early nineties came, as they were meant to. And the school kids had to present something about HIV/AIDS everytime there was a guest to the school. Because the pretense had stopped, you see. We had stood by and watched entire families wave at us and enter the earth, never to return. The Insect was eating up whole towns. Grown men, big and strong, were cut down in midstep. You start a sentence, and before you're done with it you have been eaten by the Insect without eve

It is said that the government was particularly concerned, because the soldiers of its revolution were hit particularly hard. Kids, we started our little attempt to fight The Insect. With nobody to learn from, for we were the first, we marched on. Congoman's music playing behing us, we tried. Philly Lutaya, one of our own musical geniuses, becomes one of the first people in the world to be a HIV/AIDS campaigner. Maybe the very first. He is still the Honorary General of the Fight Against HIV/AIDS, and will always be. So saith I.

Our war had now turned to The Insect. And, down South, our brothers were fighting another war. Against Apartheid. The time had come for all out war, revolution, to restore sanity in South Africa. But the frontline states had become too perilous, too compromised, for the gallant warriors of Umkhonto we Sizwe to base there. So they looked for a brother country farther north, and found us willing and able to host them, fight along with them, and, if it comes to it, die alongside them. And so, they came in. Carrying a gun in one hand and a cassette tape in the other. In the nights, by boat, by car through Tanzania, by plane sometimes, the South Africans came. Their war was won shortly—Amandla!—and some went back. But they left the music and its effect behind. We had heard the songs of South Africa. The songs of those geniuses of harmony. Even the sweaty war songs, like this Umshini Wami (Bring Me My Machine Gun), still refused to let go of the beautiful harmony.
Didn't Lucky Dube spur us on? Didn't Yvonne Chaka Chaka teach us how to dance? Didn't we learn about the more-electronic styles from the South Africans? Didn't Miria Makeba teach us how to find the beauty in the pain?

Shortly, the economy came to life. And music dripped in from the Caribbean islands. And our younger ones learnt how to dance while hopping about like posessed shamans. The beats were solid and a little monotonous. It was called ragga or the like. Our young ones also started singing it. First they played it, then mimed it, then put their own lyrics in, then went ahead to create it entirely from scratch. It is from that music that these boys of today sprung. You kids don't know the history of your country's musical tastes. But that is a good thing. It shows how much distance we've put between us and Those Days. New challenges, new music. I conjecture that from African musical genres alone, one can compose all other musical genres in the World. (For freaks: African music is Turing-complete for music, and maybe for computation itself.)

I hope these big-name artistes jetting in and out of our country are going to have as long-lasting and positive an impact on our music.
(I had to finish this, you see.)

Jazz, Geekery, and Sex

2008-07-13T18:23:00.005+03:00

Mood: Medley
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Ghetto

There is something your mother didn't tell you. I mean, you're likely one of us. One of the people who say "My Mama always told me [...]". One of the people with embarrasingly-intelligent mothers. But even if you are one of us, there is something your mother didn't tell you: watch the patterns in your music, and you can predict your near future.
Say, like, if you always listen to Kenyan Genge music when you're broke, be careful with your money when iTunes starts leaping at Genge when on random—you're going to get broke.
Me, jazz for love and heartbreak. Reggae for a creative burst. Rock for geographical changes.
As it were, I'm playing lots of rock, and I'm shifting soon. The rock came first. I'm playing much reggae—and I'm having rebelliously-creative moments. The reggae was here before.
And now there is this time my player let fly with twelve—I kid you not, twelve—jazz songs, back-to-back, on random. And George Benson is a particularly-bad omen. Love and heartbreak. Behold, I stand ready, armed. Gimme some lov'.

Now, for some geekery. I'm rather insulated from people, of late. It sucks—I lived my childhood a lot like that. (And the result was that I couldn't understand facial expressions and indirect meanings, until Ma taught me. Some fuck pronounced me a "borderline autistic child".) I'm going to let you into the horrible world I'm alone and cold in. Share the load.
Here, below, is seven lines of code. It's written in Common Lisp. It's a complete implementation of an evaluator for the SKI combinator calculus.

(defun ski (se)
 (case (car se)
   ('i (if (null (cdr se)) se (ski `(,(cadr se)))))
   ('k (if (< (length se) 3) se (ski `(,(cadr se)))))
   ('s (if (< (length se) 4) se (ski `(,@(ski `(,(cadr se) ,(cadddr se)))
                    ,(ski `(,(caddr se) ,(cadddr se)))))))
   (otherwise (if (listp (car se))
      (ski `(,(ski (car se)) ,@(cdr se))) se))))

Fuck. Blogger has garbled my code. X^(
It's strict-evaluating, so some things, like the recursion comibinators, will diverge. My favourite diverging expression is (SII(SII)). You can run it by LOADing it into your Lisp system, and then doing something like

(ski '(s i i comrade))

. This, in SKI calculus, would be comrade applied to the self-application expression, and result in (comrade)(comrade). Both the S, K and I work as expected. Kiss that. :o)

I did it while trying to derive my account number in SKI calculus (using double digits for sanity's sake). The expression that results in my account number is(SI 00 58)((S(K(SI))K) 52 70). I didn't think up the second part. Ripped it off Wikipedia. Too fucking difficult. :o) But it results in 5800587052.
Enough geekery! Next, the sex.

Now, I was on the French Wikipedia, sometime. I saw an article that had a beautiful-sounding name. By the way, don't do what I did, if you aren't into having sexually-explicit stuff on your monitor. So, I was saying I saw an article with a beautiful name: tribadisme. Wow. I clicked.
And that may be one of the sweetest clicks I made in recent years. :o) I learnt what tribadism was. I went to the English version for stuff I could understand. It is where, um, lesbians kind of like ... Can't really explain this. You'll have to look for a picture. I've always known lesbians are elevated humans, elevated above us mere mortals. Der übermensch. Some things make me wish to God I was a girl.
So, anyway, I went to Google, and searched for "tribadism". I went to images, and changed my preferences to remove any regulation of content. And I found some sites where tribadism was being discussed. I found a clip—hottest, kinkiest two minutes of nude girls, ever—and some pictures. I opened a directory for my smut. :o) So, my little collection, at the moment, has eight files. One is that clip, and the others are pictures. One of the pictures is an animated GIF. Very interesting and arousing. I'm writing this offline, so I can't link reliably.

I wonder why this never occured to me before. If you know any sites that are as, um, engrossing, put the link in the comments. Oh, I'm talking to prudes. :o) Suckers. You can do an anonymous drop, alright. I'll grow my little collection, and you'll envy me.
But seriously, give me links. Just not any of that painful shit. Keep it lesbian, if you can. Generally, more women, less guys, okay? Although you can let my discernment work, if you're unsure. Clips and pics.

Minus One, Plus One

2008-07-11T11:16:00.001+03:00

Mood: Bored
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Gingko is back. The albino kitten, he is back. Y'all can grab him. I saw, Sybella, your comment. And, because I got Gingko back, that leaves me with two kittens to give away (Khalid being gone with Dusk, that Jazz and Spice girl). Check your mail for my number. My emissary sent it in the mail.

Also, Minty, I'm sorry about misplacing the credits for the word. I'm not as smart as you are, so you'll have to have pity. :o)

So, if you prefer a pure-white cat, you can have this one. Mainly because the one I don't mind having to kill is, you know, Shaka. >:o)
Blame the diabolical mood on something very close to heartbreak that I'm having right now. Very related.

The Moment of the Parting

2008-07-08T20:57:00.004+03:00

Mood: Cold, playing.
[Toot!] Index: 5.7
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Hi, everybody.
I read your comments on my previous posts. Thank you. I'm still not on the Net. Like I said, I'm in the ghettos inventing your future. You have a stake in giving me my peace, quiet and solitude. It's for your own, selfish good. :o)
Sybella, I didn't see your thing about Gingko the albino kitten. Sorry. And, right now, I'm sad because Gingko is about to be picked up in some minutes. I have some small misgivings about where he's going. I wish I had seen your request before I had promised him to somebody else. But I got four kittens ... ;o) Seriously, there are some others that don't have homes yet. More anon.
And Scotchie, ah. "Oxymoron" is the word, I guess. Except I thought oxymorons shouldn't make sense. My thingies (for lack of a name) do make sense (or just try). But I guess "oxymoron" is the word. Scotchie is never wrong. :o)

I'm playing In My Place, by Coldplay. I have a big Coldplay thing going in my life right now. And this may be so last thirty minutes, but Viva La Vida is a great album. I don't use the word "great" lightly. Next thing you know, I'll be calling the band "mighty". Not yet, but nearly. "Mighty" means "a band that could do a collabo with Bob Marley and The Wailers and be heard above the reggae riddim."
I have that song on repeat, because my kittens are going away. This is the part I had put off for so long, and the lyrics are crying into my chest. "If you go, if you go, and leave me down here on my own, then I'll wait for you." :o(
These are the times I wish I had the magic effects of the opportinity to look at a lover asleep some metres away. Looking at sleeping people, particularly women, preferably a lover, has a sedative effect on me. Even sleeping animals try, but right now I need the strongest dose out there.

Comrades, friends, brethren, amigos, kin, blogren. I'm shifting from the slums soon. Since I'm going to be self-employed, I want to return to the City That Gave Me Birth. Kampala even arouses my dust allergies, anyway. I gave Gingko to my neighbour, thinking I'll be here to watch over the delicate thing, but now I'm moving and leaving him behind. On Friday, or thereabouts, I'll get Space sterilised (we agreed, and it will be the gentle two-course needle jab, not some invasive cutting procedure). Since it stops up her hormones, she'll not be able to breastfeed after that. And the hormonal change may even induce, I believe, a bit of apathy/hostility to the kittens. So they should all be gone by Friday.
Sun-Tzu is going to Peggy, Slim's friend. Dee has met her. Gingko to my neigbour. I'm yet to get homes for Khalid and Shaka. (Shaka once loved chilling out in my boots. Inside. Thought Puss in Boots was a hero epic.)

If nobody takes Shaka and Khalid by Monday, I may have to have them put down. Save these kitties. Shaka, Shaka I hate. Almost. Too adult for a kitten. Khalid, the runt, I love the most. Cutest felid on this side of the Nile. We bonded, because he was the smallest of the litter. I was the smallest in lower school. We are brothers, Khalid and I. You want a kitten, get one. You know someone who wants one, get one for him/her. My moving schedule dictates that I have all this sorted out by Monday.
Sybella, you could avenge yourself on me by taking cute Khalid out of me hands. ;o) Shaka and Khalid:

Now, in closing, I know some of you are laughing, saying that The 27th Comrade done got attached to his kitties. No ways. I'm too gangsta for that shit. Between bitches and ho's, I go shoot 'em muhfuckers, ridin' in my sixty-four, smoking Cohibas and sippin' on this Couvoissiere. I drive foreign features, bouncin' on ma 24's, nigga. We live so fly, nigga. These teardrops is for real, nigga. We make money and stack it like books. That's why my leather so soft. I'm on a paper chase, nigga. The money gon' come, or else I'm gon' get it. I love Entebbe like I love women. Lakeside 'til we die, muhfuckers. Kampala kids don't grow. We'll bomb on you muhfuckers. Niggas with a muhfucking attitude.
I'm too muhfucking gangsta for kitten love and shit, nigga.

Update: Gingko's depart box is here. :o( No! Nooo! I'm not gangsta! I love my kitties! :'{ I remember laughing at a woman who couldn't get rid of her many cats on Oprah, and calling it Western stupidity. God, have thee no sense of humour?

Spying On My Mind

2008-06-18T21:46:00.001+03:00

Mood: Frantic
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Nakulabye

Some thoughts from your dear friends in my cranium. See, this one time, Jude and Ange were not screaming at each other. And I noticed the calm silence between me ears, so I tuned in and chanced on their discussion from which the ideas and quotes below originated. Sometimes I wish they were like so all the time, that they got along this peacefully always.
If the quotes seem a bit disjointed, it is because I'm not going to bother giving background. Just dumping what I remember. Mostly, I'm not even crediting who said what.

Yeah, so in making humans the masters of the Earth, God gave them the implicit ability to speak to the Earth. So you can, if it's your kind of thing, talk to animals and hear them talk. And nature loves a chance to talk to the masters. It's snobbery for the animals. Servitude and snobbery. And informational, sometimes. It's how we know for sure that the Earth is crying over our administrative brutality. [...]

Maybe you're just in denial about the fact that Space, with her litter bickering at her bossom, is a clear picture of the Matriarch. The way she has evolved from the purring, pampered, playful kitty, to the defensive small tigress who assumes the War Stance at the slightest, most-distant surprise. In many ways, she's like your Ma with her twins and how she's suicidal in her dedication to her many children's welfare.

Ange: Brooks was here.
Jude: So was Red.
Ange: Hehe. It was true Stephen King, you know. The little, beautiful details.
Jude: Yeah, and I've heard Shawshank Redemption had a Christian undertone. You know, this Jesus guy, innocent, goes into jail and then gets out and also gives Red redemption and makes him a fisherman in the end.
Ange: Huh? 1408 had no such "beautiful details". We didn't go past the middle, even. Whatevs. Why do they call you Red?
Jude: Maybe 'cause I'm Irish?
Ange: Hehe. The Irish are the African Europeans. White Niggers, they call 'em.
Jude: As in, Mobadingwe Murphy, the Irish Ethiope?

I think Coldplay is not a rock band. I mean, you know, there is no real genre they fit in, so we just throw them into "Rock" and "Pop" because they are White and loud. But they, like Staind (for example) are not really rockers. Fix You, was that rock? Viva La Vida, is this rock? Their lead singer was playing on Kanye West's Homecoming, which part was originaly John Legend's. If John Legend were White and 1.5982 decibels louder, he'd be a rocker. I mean ... Ormus Carma was the last true rocker, as this guy says. Or we're just in denial about having liked rock music?

Well, none of those who fear death has ever died. And, by convention, we know that death doesn't hurt. So why does "Your money or your life!" always yield the money? Thing is, death is getting a bad rap. Death is blissful and all. Maybe they just fear the finality of it (but they should, then, also fear the finality in going to the toilet—no "Undo" button). Me, far as I'm concerned, heartbreak is death. Heartbreak is the real death. In fact, all the things we fear about death (and haven't even proven), are true of heartbreak, and tangibly, provably so.

Well, yeah, but did you see the look she had on her face? Like she had mistakenly used dried cat poo from her snuff box.

Yes, so uselessness is part of beauty. Utilitarian things are not beautiful, see. The sensual curves on the soda bottle are useless, but they are why it is pretty. Would you drink out of a cuboid bottle with no colours on it? That's ugly. [...] Yes, kitties too. Like, you know, because their structures—legs eyes, claws, whiskers, stuff—are useless at that age, they are cute. Once they get a use, they cease to be cute. The soft, delicate uselessness is the beauty of baby animals. And some things about girls. Calloused hands are ugly because of their evident utilitarian adaptations. Hehe.

That's it. Jude and Ange, by the way, greet all y'all. Much love from this end.
I want a camera! Too many cat pictures to take. Beautiful cats. See ya. I wrote this away from the Internet, and I don't know how things are over there. How is tout le monde ?

Rantdom

2008-06-12T17:25:00.001+03:00

Mood: Random
[Toot!] Index: 7.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

First, two observations brought to you by your friends in my head.

At about three weeks, kittens start to toddle. And there never was a more-touching sight than how determined they are to have Feline Grace on those unsteady paws.
I'm probably late to this one, but Funk This, Chaka Khan's recent one, is good. Okay, I only done seen a couple of songs off it, but ma! One For All Time is a-playin' right now. Me lordy! La diva est en retour, and we gon' round up all non-believers. Who knows, maybe great music can be kick-started again. Insha'llah, I'll even go to a Chaka Khan concert 'fore me days are thru'. There is this other Castles Made of Sand, the one she got from Jimi Hendrix. It's rich with her voice, and especially since the Hendrix Guitar was preserved pretty well. It's horribly-beautiful.

"Horribly-beautiful". I'll explain. I like those adverbs that are the opposite of the adjective I append them to. "Disgusting" is disgusting. "Sweet" is sweet. So, I say "The gummy bears were disgustingly-sweet." I think it rocks, though not everybody agrees with me. I learnt it (or a form of it, or the possibility of expressing adverbs like that) from Ernest Bazanye, back then, although I bet he wouldn't ever know. He's a depressingly-good writer.
And what is the dash doing there, between the words? Well, I figure if I leave it off, then those are two words. "He is badly dressed" and "He is badly-dressed", which would you prefer? Think it through. I see the former more-often, but I think it is wrong. See, that last sentence "see it more-often" means the "more" is a modifier on "often". "See it more often" would be crying for a comma before it's wrong the right way: "see it more, often". Oh, well. Sorry for becoming Mr. Kabuye without warning. At least I didn't cane you over this? Maybe working with automated grammars has made me a grammar Nazi, but fuck it all. lets all right fucked up gramma [1]

By the way, I'm rare on the interwebs, these days, for reasons too ... technical, I shall say. Too technical to be explained here.
So now ... bye, I guess. :o)
Let me run over and see this picture of a disgustingly-beautiful girl dripping huge, sticky dollops of shimmering beauty all over my monitor.

[1] I catch the irony. In spelling "write" as the wrong "right", I imply we should right fucked-up grammar. And then I leave the dash out, so it means we are righting the fucked (people?). Up gramma hill, maybe.

My Family and other Animals

2008-06-02T15:21:00.006+03:00

Mood: Nominal, heh.
[Toot!] Index: 0.7
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Title of the post stolen from Gerald Durell's hilarious book. :o)

First, you'll learn, from keeping and observing growing animals, that the rule doesn't only apply to humans, but to all species of litter: family is easier to accommodate, even love, when you are not in perpetual contact, because the competitive instinct is directed at the entities we share Space with, family or not.

Now, it's already like totally clear and all that my cat had kids. Introducin' ...
Apprently, names matter a lot in this stuff of christening little ones.
So, I chose to name them after notable military figures. I'm sure Space understands; she wouldn't want her kittens to end up with names as weird as hers, which people would be laughing at whenever I explained the origin. Here is a pic of them on some dirty old towel right under my table! I know, it's not a good place for kittens to be, and they should be cleaner, too, but you know ... Constraints.

Shaka is over there, at the top of the heap. The one with most-contiguous markings of black. He has a white patch about the face, so I know who the father is.
Full name: Shaka Waciuri. The first name comes from Shaka Zulu, and the other is from Dedan Kimathi.

Sun Tzu is the one with that light brown coat. That brown threatens to be a very cute colour when he/she is grown into a big furry tabby. At this point, I don't know their sexes, but what the heck; just deal with the names. Anyway, the owners who end up with them will likely change the names.
The full name is Sun Tzu Miyamoto. :o) The Sun Tzu part is from the ancient Chinese military theorist, mostly to sate my sinophilia, and the other part from Miyamoto Mushashi, the ancient sword-swingin' Japanese ronin fuck who never lost a sword fight in his entire life.

Gingko is the white one. He/she is an albino, it appears. I think I've seen some dark colour in the eyes (after they opened), so that may disqualify the albinism, but I can't be sure. It's nice to have a White kitty.
Gingko biloba Menelik is the full name. The first name is both the first two words, with the second one starting in a small b, not a capital B. I fuss about my kittens' names, yes. Nobody gon' spell them wrong in my lifetime! :o)
Okay, so Gingko biloba Menelik gets the name from the Gingko biloba tree. Menelik is the Ethiopian Emperor who rode out against the Italian army, at the head of a resolute army of barefoot warriors, and routed the colonialists at Adwa. I love Gingko's names, especially the Gingko one. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this book. :o)

Khalid is the lighter one of the two dark ones. Probably the most peaceful of them all, and also the one who sticks against the bosom the longest. Long after the other comrades have fallen off with the sheer exhaustion that suckling brings, he/she is still kneading Space for more milk, and only getting started. Sometimes I worry.
The full name is Khalid Kibuuka. Named after Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Qurayish military general who died undefeated. He was quite principal in the spread of Islam, and Prophet Muhammad (SAW) gave him his nom de guerre, Saifu'llah—The Drawn Sword of Allah. He was nothing short of a military genius. He died of old age, complaining about having missed his chance for martyrdom. (But why do you expect to die, if you fight like you don't want to?) Coolest last words. "I die like an old camel!"
Kibuuka is the god of War in Buganda. For me, he's the most interesting of their gods. His remains are currently in the Uganda Museum, and his people are trying to get them out and take them to his shrine. Back then, the British found the remains somewhere and stole them and took them to Britain, and Uganda reclaimed them. Question: if he is a god, why do we have his dick and balls in the museum? Answer: he wasn't a full god, only a demi-god; I know, I saw him in a previous life.

When they saw what a military genius he was, they said "it's not a man, but a god we fight with/against". I was one of the Luo mercenaries hired by the Bunyoro-Kitara empire to contain this new state of Buganda. When we fell in their ambush, the poisoned darts were raining down on us from everywhere. The myth was that Kibuuka flew into the sky and pelted us from above. In reality, I think he only told his soldiers to shoot skyward so that the arrows would hit us without revealing more than their deadly effect. In running from the divine arrows, we ran towards his hideout, and I saw him before my throat was struck by an arrow. See? Not a real god, but certainly a military genius.

That's all. Now, as we go, here are some pics.
Space bleeding maternal love onto Sun Tzu.

Space, the kits, and a cyborg eye.

And it is all right under my desk. Some things, though, don't change. Like my horrible diet, and the thousand-shilling notes that you could hiss to pieces. And I didn't even have peanut butter, that time, so picture me fighting the buns plain. :o(

All these pics were taken when they were about a week old. They are like two weeks old, at the moment. The eyes done opened.

Drawing Into the Well

2008-05-27T18:24:00.010+03:00

Mood: hung-drawn-quartered-like
[Toot!] Index: 1.1
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

You know, when I was a kid, I used to draw lots. Wrestlers on TV, especially. That was before I had gone to boarding school. The wrestlers were as my young eyes saw them on TV. There was some guy, name of Michael Hayes, if memory serves, and he was a star in my drawing book. They looked a lot like this.
I know, because I drew them over and over and over. My Ma quipped about how my men are always ready for a fight. I was under seven years old.
Today, if I drew a wrestler, he wouldn't be a muscle-bound, hormone-engorged minotaur. Not at all. This is what I drew, a few minutes ago, to be my wrestler.

Notice the shift from whatever that bag of testosterone was, to a lean, mean fighting machine. But it is really a reaction of my mind that I've noticed since late puberty. I draw almost exclusively nude humans (even the pants of my boyhood, they done flown off). Usually, I draw women. When I do men, they face away from me. Coward, yes. (I hate the shameless competition they tend to ... express? I'm my drawings' god, for crying out loud!) Usually, they are thin men, sometimes very, very thin. Nearly as thin as I am. When they are women, they are round and heavy. ;o)

After the wrestlers, when I was about eight years old, I fell in love with my teacher. She was my English teacher, and a wondrous miracle of feminine beauty. Of course, at eight, I didn't know I had fallen in love, you see. I just thought I wanted to be with her all the time, and to make her happy. Full stop. Anyway, I walked up to her, one day, after classes, and told her I wanted to draw her. You know, that was the year the coronation of the Kabaka of Buganda had happened. There used to be lots of pictures of the Kabaka in regalia, in the papers. So I took one and drew it. A teacher discovered it and paid me two hundred—count 'em, two hundred—Uganda shillings for it. It was the first work I sold, and the first money I earned. (It was also the last work I sold.)
So, I learnt that I could draw to good benefit. And I wanted to make my English teacher happy, so I told her I wanted to draw her like I had done the Kabaka.

(That drawing of the Kabaka stayed in the staff room of Budo Junior School for years and years and a day.)

I drew the teacher, and she liked it. I coloured her dress, fussing over the depth of pink here and the amount of blue there.
But wait. Where is this leading? Yes, to why I don't draw anymore. Let's jump, shall we? You people told me my posts are too long for you.

When I draw (or even write) in a book, I start at the back and work to the front. I don't know why. (Even my written cipher code is written from right to left, naturally.[1]) So, once I had these many books covered in pictures of nudes and stuff. Sometimes I draw rocks, sometimes landscapes, all of them in that shoddy me-no-give-no-fuck way. This pile of books was discovered by some guy and he said I was sub-consciously gay because of all the male nudes that shared the space. "The simmering homo-erotic undertones, the taut tension on the page, as though they are about to break loose and [...] the unabashed self-expression of the you bottled up within you", blah, blah, blah, you know. I told him he was wrong, and that collection went to the fire. I don't care if he was wrong or not, anyway. I just stopped drawing on paper that time. I guess I'll start again. But in came digital art. You see, I stopped drawing almost completely, and moved my feeble artistic impulses to code. It doesn't suffice, at the moment, so (on occasion) I will draw on the computer.

Already, this blog has seen some stuff I've drawn. My current Blogger avatar is one, and some other blogger's old WordPress avatar. And a few posts have had some drawings in them. Network Dependency, RT 1.6, and others.

They are almost always with black as the dominant colour. I first drew on the computer with Paintbrush. I was on a black-and-white Epson laptop that ran Windows 3.1, and I was in genuine shock when my Dad told me there was a coloured computer at his workplace. This laptop is where I first drew on the computer. The mouse is harder to command than a pen or pencil, so drawings on the computer, for me, don't obsess over straightness of lines. I don't use line facilities to draw the lines. I basically just draw with the mouse. I've done a self-portrait in the same way. :o) (It came out ridiculously ugly, and the first thing my sister said, on seeing it, was "Wow, you drew a self-portrait on the computer!" We quarreled.)
This picture (not a self-portrait) is from RT 1.4. I don't remember my reason for drawing it.

I drew some more very recently. See this one, which is a drawn copy of the aluminium tumbler I have to my left. I call it Coupe. :o)

But this series started off with Menton, which means "chin". You see, I can't draw thin lips. Either it is subconscious narcissism, or it is just that I can't express thin lips in monochrome. Or I've never tried.

Next in the drawings series, we have Main-en-Main, which is "Hand-in-Hand". I'll spare you the explanation for it. :o)

Next is Handseses, which must be the correct pluralisation for the hand that appears here.

And then Feetseses. Like the hand above, the foot is loosely based on mine. I said loosely. Sheesh.

You know, I've always found the space directly under a table to be mystical, in a weird way. As though, you know, nothing stays there. When I was a kid, growing up in a sufficiently over-crowded house, that looked like a lot of useful real estate going to waste. That, I believe, is where my fixation with the space under tables came from. And that was even before I discovered tables that were fully draped. You know, with the table cloth flowing off on the side, enclosing the space under the table. And then I learnt about footsie, and that space took on a new, fresh, tantalising erotic aura. In Sous La Table, the cleaner checks under the table. What she finds is up to the beholder. :o)

These days, I use the GIMP mostly. (Not always.)
These days, I don't draw many human shapes, at least not without zooming in, because the lack of precision deems that largely a slow, wasteful endeavour. I draw general sketches, and they are more about what is around the character, rather than the character. The character is not very precise in appearance, but his or her state can be picked out.
Here are two from the series, which are rather grim. They fit the profile of thin male nude with frontal nudity obscured.

Piqué, which means "pricked" or "impaled", is one of those grim ones. It's this guy who has a very long spear stuck in his chest. I like the fact that he is on the ground, with both hands on the spear. As in, he must die. The length of the spear and how far it has run into him is in itself a good indicator of how certain his death is. And then the powerless drooping of the head, as life ebbs out of him. The fluid escaping from under him means he is either bleeding to death, or the trauma made him incontinent. They are all sure signs of a near death.
Now, why do I like the picture so grim, especially after spitting at Bukedde for not censoring its gore? Because I witnessed it.

In a previous life, about seven hundred years ago, I was where modern Rwanda is, and I joined a cult (whose members grew their hair into dreadlocks). We were mainly against the colonial droves of the cattle herders who were descending from the north and imposing on us a caste system, where we were the dalits. In one of the wars against them, my friends were killed, one by one. Speared to death. That life, for me, ended in the same battle, but not before I had seen my friend die like that, as depicted in the picture.

And the last one in the series, Strange Fruit. You probably know the Billie Holiday song, but all I got from it is the title. The theme is a little different. Unlike Piqué, this one is drawn from this life. I still find it hard to forget the scream of the neighbour, and how she later showed up at our door—I was like ten years old—pushing her three kids before her like captives. She told my Ma to keep them there, and give them breakfast. It was years later that I learnt about how their father had taken his own life. And with such fashion, such class, such style. Actually, it was far from funny. He had slipped out, feigning to go and ease his bladder, so the rumour says, and the wife, wondering why he had stuck in the toilet for so fucking long, went out to check on him. She found him outside, nude, suspended from a tree, with a short cord, and dead as yesterday. Grim.

Now, to restore your faith in me before you run away. I drew this maybe like two or three years ago. It was supposed to be a self-portrait, but it came out non-right. I drew it in Microsoft Paint. I even obsessed over the colours. Ah, the days when I had time! :o)
When I am retired and rich, I'll be drawing a lot and burning my drawings at an altar above which will hover some Gottfried Helnwein works, among others, worth trillions of scrillions of shillings, that my dealers and salaried thieves will have pulled out of museums and auctions.
[1] It's Salman Rushdie who said "right to left, naturally" in, I believe, Shame.

I've Had a Week

2008-05-24T14:07:00.005+03:00

Mood: Reporting
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I've had a week. Written more in this week, on this blog, than I have in some whole months. I'm close to one hundred posts in my archive! :o)
And not just my blog. I've been spewing lots of verbose comments in places. It's a habit I'm trying to fight (not that it is always bad, but you know ... Summer Glau may find me). Anyway, maybe I'll just comment less. Especially on topics that get me worked up. So if I vanish from your blogs, I'm trying to keep from blogging on them.

Iwaya is an écrivain nonpareil. Some people pronounce the name as eew-eye-ah, but me, I go like eye-why-ah. So, Iwaya writes well. I've collected and lost many links of his things, but there is this one, To My Unborn Daughters that I didn't lose. Go and read already. It's got some things typical of Iwaya's current style. Starts out like a friend seated across you in the pub. Then it gets ghostly about the stomach, grows darker. Red capillaries show up in its eyes later on, and a tear drop is set free about the knees, and by the time you reach the calf of the story, the pub buddy has vanished and has been replaced by the blind veteran telling a deep, dark story. The story gets to the foot, and the pub friend is back. And you wonder how it happened, and he is not revealing the trick. Iwaya. :o)
Will you please go and read that story?

Leads me to ...
I'm discovering the work of a story-teller. Maybe, some day, when I'm retired, I'll become a story-teller. You know, gather people around, maybe kids, and spin 'em a yarn. Maybe on a stage, although I have the most stage fright of any human.
There is this pretty girl I write stories for, these days. She says she likes them. The way we do it, I have no way to edit a line I've sent. It is done in chat, so the story must hold well as you go. No chances to use backspace. Every line I write is sent, and that's that. It's a nice experience.
I wanted to start off with a few lines (hence the telling format), and it grew into a series.
Previously in the story: the boy has killed the Soldier, and the girl is with the doctor. And the Police is looking for the boy. People had been hanged for smaller crimes. Where will the story go? I don't know, either, because most of the stuff comes as I type it.

Also, my cat had four kittens, and I'm so proud of them. Two are black (one more-so than the other), one is like beige with orange-like stripes, and the other pure white (I think it's an albino; I'll see). They are a cute bunch. I have taken pictures, but I don't have the cable with me. I'll upload them, sometime.
The white one gets me worried when it hyperventilates and then sneezes (or something). But we'll all be fine. :o)

Plus, I'm probably quitting my job, now. Soon. Things done happened. I'm excited about it, as well as worried. I just got four kittens, and it's just simply no time to be broke.
Also, I want to hire an adungu and record myself singing to my Ma and send her the record.
I'm supposed to be starting my own company, but I'm really too broke for it. I'll go into it, all the same, because I'll never be ready. I've learnt to burn my bridges behind me to create a reason to march forward.
So, if you find me begging by the roadside, sometime, help a brother out.
But seriously, I'm going to be broke. :o( Broke and busy.

For the disobedient, now that I've finished, here you are: go and read.

Buzibye

2008-05-21T11:19:00.002+03:00

Mood: "Parabolically-angry"
[Toot!] Index: 9.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I won't smudge my blog's otherwise impeccable record with a link to Bukedde.
But still, I'll just note that I'm just sick, sick, sick and totally, totally, totally tired of that paper.

I'm sick of the macabre, grisly pictures. That's what happens when demoniac editors manage to drag their itchy, syphilitic gonads away from their necrophilic orgies.
Those idiots—the entire satan-worshipping coven at Bukedde, from janitorial to `editorial'—may even infect the comparatively-good New Vision people. Soon, even they will be drooling at headless, bloodied nudes with aroused glee.

I usually take matters into my hands and shoot one or two people, when I'm angry enough. But I can't this time, because it is, apparently, press freedom to put stabbed necks on the front pages. Kids don't read the front page, do they? They are asleep when they are walking to school, aren't they?
I'm sickened. Some things, if they even deserve public mention, should be euphemised and hidden. Christ the Holy Nazarene of the Virgin Birth, I'm sick and fucking tired of that paper. I'm worried what I may do next.

2066

2008-05-19T19:00:00.004+03:00

Mood: Bored
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

So, I'm Museveni's biggest fan among all you blogren. If you ask me, I'll say there is nothing stopping him from running for President—and undoubtedly winning fairly and squarely—until he just gets tired of his own popularity.
Okay, I sounded like Ofwono Opondo, there, but still. I think Museveni is very, very under-appreciated. You have all these frothing idealists calling him names, but being a President of a country like Uganda is thankless.

Anyway, my archives have all the pro-Museveni side of me, and the occassional anti-Museveni side. However. I've noticed that his sign, or that of his fans, was three fingers, when he was running for the third term. Pinky, ring, middle. Now, I see pictures, already, of people flashing four fingers, urging Mzee on to his fourth term. Pinky, ring, middle, and index finger. Besigye took the two-finger V salute, index and middle, but he's a queue-jumper. He didn't start with one digit!
I couldn't help noticing that Museveni fans are running out of fingers. On his fifth term, they'll have overflown into the UPC territory. Things got hard to visualise, so I just jumped on to the year 2066.

Bright Rights Writes

2008-05-19T18:28:00.007+03:00

Mood: bright
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

So, I did some trotting among the blogren. And I'm going to round up about a week of that trotting over here. The main theme (even when I've got to shoe-horn unrelated posts into agreeing with me) was and is human rights.

John Powers was the first to mention the human rights blogging, with that writing style of his that exhudes calm determination. Never seen the guy, but I have a picture in my head of what he may look like. It's generic, anyway, and I haven't yet put a nose. He likes gardening, it appears, so the picture is of a kind-of-tall man squinting at a misty morning, with a rake placed on his worn boots. And he is in military wear. Blame my head. :o)
He didn't give us the 15^th May post, or at least not yet.

Jasmine picked up from John Powers, and promised to blog for human rights. She did, writing what became my first info on the passing of Ox. I once played basketball, and Ox was an inspiration. And now he's gone.

Jackfruity linked to both the above, and promised a post. I waited, and I'm still waiting for the post. She said, on her Twitter stream, one day past the Day, that she would still be bringing it forth. Behold, we await yet. She had promised something on gay and lesbian human rights. I think this would have been where GUG jumps in, as well. Except he's in Kenya, at the moment. And, as it appears, far Eastern Uganda doesn't have much internet ...

Tumwijuke linked to the three above, and promised a post. She delivered with stunning mastery, writing up a story that would be worth memorising, down to the last word, had it not been such a heart-rending tear-jerking account. It's right here, Anita's Story.

Henry Owera gave us a post, whose title is hard to pronounce—names of freedom fighters sans spaces, which may be a poetic, artistic touch (some names, though concatenated and truncated, are all complete)—CheMarleyMahatMandelAungSanSuuKyi Rights.
I think, though, that his later post (latest, at this point) is more-pertinent. It opens with the revelation that his mother, in 1998, lost a leg to a landmine. His rage against landmines is untethered in that post.

Carlo gave us one, too. A post with a simple all-digit title. And the powerful point in that post is that the rising food prices may make some of us broker, but they'll make others come closer to death. If we are to ensure the right that encompasses access to food, she says, we are failing on this point. And I agree. I would extend it to say we are failing to ensure the right to life, for many people (which was probably her point, implicitly).

Then, in rolled Baz. He set up a cunning trap, as he referred to it, and got us reading to the end. (He didn't need a trap—who ever quits a Baz tale before the end? You start, you've taken the oath.)
Will you read already? It's an interesting post that looks at the religion and government, and how (somehow) it affects rights.

Did I miss any bright rights writes? Put them in the comments. I didn't bookmark them, I'm afraid. Dumb of me, I know.
The one I refrained from commenting on, because of its sheer clarity on the rights issues it discussed, with the mantra that calls us not to give up our rights, is this one. Go and roll in the enlightenment.

Apologies, Grammar, Gadgets

2008-05-16T14:29:00.004+03:00

Mood: apologetic, grammatical, gadgetted
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

First, the apologies. :o)
Sorry, world. Sorry, everybody. Sorry, DeTamble. Sorry, Carlo. Sorry, Antipop. Sorry, me. :o)
I've been pretty dark on my posts. Negative and all. The mean streak leaking onto my keyboard, and so on. I'm putting ranting aside, if only for a while. I figured I should have another blog for my "opinions" and leave this to have more sanity, but that is impractical at the moment. I'll just put the "opinions" on hold.

Next, the grammar.
You see those sentences up there? "Sorry, DeTamble. Sorry, Carlo. [...]"? If I was slow with my comma, it would turn from "forgive me, DeTamble" to "pitiable DeTamble". That's what "Sorry DeTamble" would mean. Grammar matters, y'all. Oh, wait. No opinions allowed. :o)
Actually, so I'm a grammar freak. Whatchu gon' do? Whaatchoo gooon' doo‽
That brings in the interrobang. A character, informal, that combines the interrogation, okay?, and the exclamation bang, I swear!, and giveth I the combination. Interrobang!? Interrobang‽

Gadgets.
I bought me the Samsung C160. There are a number of shortcomings and successes on this here phone. No Bluetooth or Infrared. Is that sane, for a phone done in 2007? Maybe they figured it was useless, since it can't play MP3. Also, when you type with the T9 dictionary, where the space key and the "guess next word" function are on the Nokia are swapped on this phone. I'm not saying they should ape Nokia, but Nokia got it right, because if the space, which I hit a lot (since I write SMS in good, uncompromised grammar) is closer to my thumb's base, and I use the thumb to type, it becomes impossible to twist the finger to hit the space. Plus it cost me Shs. 120,000/=, and I was told I could have got it cheaper elsewhere. But I've seen it on a billboard in the old taxi park, so at least I got a product Samsung actively cares about. Consolé.
Oh, and it doesn't wake me up. The alarm only works when it's left on, and I switch my phone off to sleep.

But what went right with it outweighs the bad, for a relatively-cheap phone as her. (It's a girl, my phone, and these are the features that gave it away.)
The phone is gorgeous. It'll be on a feminist glam mag cover. Here:
Also, it has FM, though I don't use that. It surfs the web, though (again) I don't use that (no way to turn images off, though, which hogs my money when I surf). It has nice, chimey sounds all over. It's so simple, and lacking many features, which is good because the little you have will become second nature. It doesn't try to do everything, and succeeds at getting that right. It's not anaemic, not bloated—just right.
And the keypad, O God. It's very nearly an erotic experience typing on its keys. And the key tones have a "xylophone" mode that even I, hater of phone sounds, left in. Big, big characters on the screen, too. Nice phone.

Also, my Ma sent me this disturbingly-gorgeous MP3 walkman from Sony. It's such a cute wee thing. The backlight is clear, the text clean. It's sturdy, light, and has a cute velcro holster. I just got it today, and I already adore it.
It has a calorimetre, so helps you when you use it during fitness excercises and the like. It is no iPod, but it need not be. I mean, it came with some really fine music. It has already won. (Norah Jones, some psychedelic guitar-work reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix, Chinese instrumentals, some Iranian drums and flutes, some screeching rock, and too much sensual jazz.) It is coolness in and of itself, even without the über-fast USB charging. It's like having a Danish cookie fall from the sky into your lap. Wait 'til it is engorged with M'bilia Bel and Jean-Paul Samputu. :o)
I nearly added some crude joke about how I may subconsciously be drawn to it as a phallic symbol, but I don't think the time is right for Freudian jokes.

Universal Declaration of Human Lefts

2008-05-15T12:00:00.005+03:00

Mood: Responsive-and-humane
[Toot!] Index: 2.5
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

We were called upon to write about Human Rights on the 15^th of May. Here's my piece. Rambling and laced with poison. I wrote it yesterday. Go with a good bladder. No guns allowed. Thank you.

So, it is the day when bloggers talk about human rights. I don't believe any one of them will say we should abolish the concept of human rights. And that is the problem. The uniformity of opinion, I mean. I've learnt to distrust uniform opinion. Uniformity, in nature, is the exception, not the norm. Chaos rules. Variety, difference, stand-out-ness. Until it comes to things like human rights. Somehow, we've been convinced that this Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, um, universal. Many people think that is rubbish, and I'm one of them.

At this point, I've lost all the world, and I'm left with enough readers—all two of us—to continue without censoring how I feel.
First of all, that Declaration has the wrong name. Which Declaration am I talking about? That's the problem: there is this other declaration that the Americans wrote in 1776, what they called the "Declaration of Independence". And the fact that this Human Rights Declaration borrows a name (and naming format) from the independence one is a major sign of the levels of Americentricism that infected it. I don't care if you think Americentricism is good or bad: that the Declaration was affected by any single culture so obviously is a sign that it is not meant for everyone. If you don't think this is wrong, you're infringing on my human rights not to have to live under forcible foreign influence. (This doesn't change, even if you shift the nominal blame to la Déclaration.)

Are we together? You're gone? :o( Okay, let me write to myself. Dear 27^th Comrade ...

First, let me point out a couple of things I find funny or unrealistic in the Declaration.

I'm a fan of recursion. I like things that refer to themselves. But sometimes it's not funny, because you may never get to the end of the movie (for example) if, in its second minute, it starts showing (as part of the movie) what was happening at the beginning of the movie (probably as a character's memory). When you get to the second minute, the character will remember where she began remembering, and then you go back to the beginning, and keep spinning in that circle until you die.
Here is Article 2 of the Declaration: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration [...]".
And so, Mullah Nasrudin closed the Declaration and started reading again from the beginning, to see what rights Article 2 was talking about. Needless to say he kept doing this whenever he reached Article 2.

The most-interesting one is Article 13. It says I can be within any borders, and it's my human right. "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state." Okay, so let me map out my itinerary and go see the World! :o) It's my human right! No denying me visas on such stupid reasons as "You're carrying bombs, and you've expressed hate for this country many times, so we won't let you in ..." Human rights, oyee!

People celebrate that we have the Declaration. I mourn that we need it at all. Failing to just love one another, we rely on thirty dry clauses—just thirty to sum up something as fundamental as human rights for six billion diverse human souls. The problem with these thirty is that they summarise and generalise. In other words, they leak. There are holes.
Article 16 mentions "Men and women of full age [...] have the right to marry and to found a family." Well, way to make such grandiose statements, not even respecting culture. Incest, for example, is a human right. (I'm not against it; I'm just pointing out that neither is the Declaration—it is for it.) Oh, and it is against gay marriage, too. "Men and women," it says. ("Oh," you may say, "it doesn't say how the pairs are made, only which people can make the pairs, namely grown humans." But if we debate about what the damn paper is trying to say, try debating with the guy who disagrees with the clause on torture, when the Americans next get you.)

That's not to mention that this Declaration is nearly the most-invasive cultural imperialism. Ever. Like, it took Western attitudes and ideas and ideals and (naturally) they sound good to Western ears (or ears that have been influenced by the West), and painted them over the other parts of the World in a forcible "holy rape", the kind of "cleansing rape" it doesn't put any sentences out against (for cowardice/brevity), even though there are people who suffer it a lot. People, I'm facing the fact that the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" says nothing about what has been called the grossest form of dishonour: rape. Not even remotely. It's not like rape is a recent invention, people. (Can someone identify a clause that takes care of this? I'm hoping I'm wrong.)
But take the fact that Article 16(2) is against arranged marriages. I hate them, too, but if you agree that it is good to impress upon other peoples what we deem good (because we were raised that way, not because we would think differently had we been in their place), you also, then, agree that the Declaration is biased. In short, you agree that the Declaration infringes on peoples' rights. Maybe it is a case of upholding the rights of the human above those of the humans (among whom the human is living), which is self-defeating.

A major failing is that the Declaration does not define who a human is. It just states the rights of this human. Now, I know I'll lead the colonial party that will subdue the Martians and bring Mars under servitude of the Crown, and run the Flag up on the red sands of that untamed savage planet. (Rule, Africa! Africa rule the stars!) And I'll enslave all Martians and basically just trample on their Martian rights. They are not humans, are they? No.
Now, did you know that Americans, by being Americans, forsake being humans, and that these rights do not cover them? Well, now you know why I'll throw them all down the lake of sulphuric acid. I hope this had the shocking effect it was meant to have. I hope you realise that human rights couldn't save you, if you fell in the hands of good rights-respecting people who are convinced that humans can't look/act like you.

Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression [...]," so far so good, "and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers," where it breaks down. You see, it is too general not to contradict itself. Before, these people thought everyone would be preaching their gospel. But now, Azzam.com was struck off this information-wants-to-be-free internet, and nobody can invoke Article 19. Because the Declaration picks a side, in the face of slogans like "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues."
If you want to blame the implementors, rather than the specification, tell me if Azzam.com should be allowed back. Sign your name, that we may know you. [1] And then read why it is self-contradictory, in Article 30.

"Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in [things] aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." As in, you shouldn't interpret any Article, like the one that guarantees freedom to push out information of our liking, to mean that you can infringe upon another Article, say like Article 3 ("right to life"), by stopping the global censoring Azzam.com.
Also, I hate the supremacy that Article 30 assumes. It kind of sets itself up like a sort of final god, and seals everything. Sadly, the seal is contradictory, but you are not allowed to call it that, because you'll be violating it and therefore being anti-rights. It's a blasphemous kind of YHWH, really, for its recursive delusions of grandeur. A blasphemous I am the Alpha and Omega, for its finality.

I've never been told that human rights have a dark side, and I bet you have never, either. And that is largely why we defend (even love) the idea of human rights. We are told that everything we like is guaranteed to us by the human rights, and that everything bad is against them. What we believe in is not the Declaration, but rather a certain (I dare say instinctive) idea. It's not some Western ideal, and what we fight for, when we fight for our rights, is not what the Declaration talks about. We fight for that, um, Thing, that can't be summarised in thirty articles, in less than one hundred sentences.

The Declaration was preceded by other documents like it that spoke of rights, and it was not ground-breaking in any way. Indeed, I prefer earlier (less famous) documents, and some that come after, because they don't have these problems above. They are merely expressions of that Thing within all of us that craves its rights. They don't make broad, cultural-imperialist assumptions.
Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, is like my favourite. 1920. Oozing with spirituality. It's beautiful. The thing even packs a whole hymn for those interested and gifted with a voice. While Westerners have lively blog orgies over Burma and Tibet, citing the Declaration, for example, a 1920 document still holds out an empty bowl at their countries. Nearly one hundred years of pointing out the speck in the other's eye, and not noticing the tree caught in your own?

Then the more-recent Draft United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. It's still a draft, but it addresses a more-crucial point than human rights. You see, human rights are not in the danger everybody pretends they are in. It is the way of humanity to steer communities towards more respect for human rights. (Our generations are allowed to think they invented the idea, of course. This may be instinctive, and necessary to keep the passion for rights among humans burning brightly millennium after millennium.) However, indigenous people's rights are, almost by default, threatened. When your land is conquered, part of the conquest is an erosion of your dignity. You know what these British did to us. What the Conquistadors did, too. What the Americans are still doing. Even down here in South Africa. The case of indigenous peoples is definitely more-urgent than any sort of human right. We are talking about existence right, in their case.

I also like the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which is basically the answer to the cultural assumptions in the Declaration.
I mean, consider Article 18, which has "[...] this right includes freedom to change his religion [...]". That is flat against the Sharia Law, you see. One who changes from Submission shall be an Apostate, and shall be treated as an Infidel.
So, how to reconcile the freedom to practice Islam (which bids the previous sentence) and the respect of Article 18? Well, create a Sharia-respecting Declaration! And so they did. Besides that, the robust spirit of sensible dissent that is embodied in the Cairo Declaration, I don't much align myself with it. I'm not a mussulman.

(By the way, the British were still slaughtering the Kenyans in warm sputtering fountains of thick, sticky, bubbling blood, when their people were waving this Declaration around. The blood is still invading a child's lungs, rushing out of opened jugulars into severed wind pipes, blocking off the dying call to a dying mother, the scene playing out in the telescopes of the American shooter in the killing fields of the Middle East, while the Americans are calling us to blog about humans rights.
One reason to hate the Declaration is for how much it affects those who ultimately have no effect, and is effectively ignored easily by the people who command the attacks.)

I like some parts of it. Many parts of it. My favourite, though, is Article 25(2). "Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection."
Apt.

So, this is my entry into the whole blog thingy. I like memes and fads, especially around now. I'm having a dizzying change to my life, and a long, long, half-thought-out post could help with it.
The alternative to a post like this, though, would be a single sentence summarising what I think about blogging about human rights: "It's stupid from the core, and only done by people because they perceive it to be a cool way to identify with something that has near-universal acceptance (and therefore carries no risk of banishment from the cool club) while maintaining the semblance of rebellion and dissent, which are (apparently) cool."
That, frankly, is how I feel about all this human rights stuff, and especially the arm-chair revolutionaries that we are (me included, though I double as a Kalashnikov revolutionary, as well). This idealist outrage is cool, yes, and that's why we do it. It is uncool, to, for example, blog that Jihad websites should be allowed free rein and be linked to in news items, and that America should stop terrorising terrorists and let them go mano-a-mano with their adversary as is the case in a fair fight, and to call for America to stop bullying perceived dictators because (and only because) they don't speak English with a Western accent, and to say the inconvenient truth that the World's environment and continued existence of humans is in more danger from the West than from six thousand bin Ladens, so nobody sets aside a blog day for that.
But try something like press freedom. Everybody gon' jump and express some plastic rage (that they even believe to be authentic).

So, while this fad lingers, I'll check the blogs to see how many people are convinced that African countries have the worst (or even just bad) human rights records. And I'll see how many Americans are looking outside of their country to see the speck. And I'll see how precious few there will be who note that the West is the shocking, unsurpassed worst perpetrator of human rights under the Sun. And I'll see how many have survived the calculated propaganda that is being pumped out of the West about who is, in fact, responsible for all those Bad Things.
Africa is a paragon of human rights, by the way. We uphold them, and not after some crappy piece of paper, but after our own principals that are as African as their names. Ubuntu, for example. Mato put, for another example. Ah, but this kind of thing is not cool, so it would be laughed out of any journal or blog.
You try that, you get a whole load of bulverism thrown your way. Try saying the Burmese are evil, and you get cookies. Say that Africa has the worst human rights record, and you get fifteen minutes on the BBC. Try saying that China should ape the West's models, and you get laid.

And because our human rights codes are not written on some dead tree, they are easier to revise. This Declaration is sixty years old. Not a single revision, and no hope for one. Let's not pretend it was perfect, and on the first attempt. It can get better. But it won't. Bad, bad Declaration. Sit down, Declaration. ("Declaration" is a good name for a dog.)
And I can't get the right not to want to recognise these human rights. I know this paper is not binding, but still. Isn't it my right to flick a digit at this Declaration? Oh, wait, my basic right in the face of this Dictatorship of the Perceived Correct is not guaranteed by the Dictatorship. How can it? It's the nature of dictatorships to quash people like me.
Article 26: "Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages." Provide the bloody money, before you open that trap. And why not beyond the primary? Because the "models" weren't doing it in their countries. Them guys were so out of touch with reality, and this is what happens when you want succumb to the temptation to trust ivory tower idealists to shape the way for a whole fucking planet! Sheesh.
Okay, enough said. I'm feeling better by now.

[1] And when you're done holding up human rights banners for Azzam.com, go get started on campaigning for Maktabah.net (shut down), Waaqiah.com (shut down), Qoqaz.net (changed to route back to your local box IP address), and others. It's unfair for the Mujahideen to be muzzled into total silence, while their enemies get 24/7 access to minds all over the world. Nobody has ever heard their side. If you feel that this conflicts with Article 19, start a blog campaign to end the censoring. What's worse is that these Mujahideen have real grievances that should be addressed before we use the communications upper hand to silence and demonise them, trample on their Article 19 human right, and keep waving the fucking banners for human rights.
You can see the death throes of Azzam.com in its struggle to stay online, at the WayBack Machine.

Rantdom Thurogitts 2.4

2008-05-10T17:10:00.005+03:00

Mood: srand(rand());
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I think I figured out what I want to waste money on, pretending it is a business adventure. I'm being a bit hypocritical ("with the criticism of a hippo"?) in this business, by the way. Even having a business alone means I'm ready to fuck someone up for my own personal (even selfish) benefit. I dunno, being a Communist in a Capitalist society has its problems. I'll move to DPRK and go away from all this temptation, this land of shameless economic khufr.
And here is a post from good ol' Degstar from back then, kind of pertinent to my current state.

Someone once spat a number of aphorisms at me, and he didn't know I'd remember them. He was old, I was younger. He was about to die, and his speeches those days, as though he was aware of the impending end, were one aphorism after another.
I want to write them down as one quote, but remember that they were never this jointed. They were shot off one-by-one, in real life. And then I'll tell you why I note them now.

Don't do anything for society. Society doesn't care for you—people will be laughing heartily before your body is cold—yet you sacrifice a lot for society. The problem with following society norms is that you end up living by rules you didn't make; they are impersonal to you and your loyalty to them.
I know of a woman on that side of the road who won't leave her violent, unfaithful husband, because society expects her to stay in that gaol. I know of a man on that same side of the road who can't marry, because this same society would rise up in fury about his choice. So these two are making mortal sacrifices for you—you are enough to represent this society—and yet you don't even know about them.
You know, if you counted the number of people who make these empty sacrifices everyday, and nail their happiness against the tree of society, you will be sad. But not nearly as sad as they will be, when they realise this for themselves. Realising this is what marks the change from young and stupid to old and wise.

It was my grandpa, the self-same dude who would tell me to drag a smoke off his pipe, when nobody was watching. I remember him now, because I referred to him three posts back. The image of him saying Ecclesiastes 8, 9 right out of memory, smoke rising out of his beard (and he'd verbally underline chapter nine, verse ten), is rather strong. I don't know where it came back from. He said Solomon was his favourite philosopher.
I notice I still make many sacrifices for society (and no other reason). I wonder when the fuck I'll stop ...

Lastly:
I should show you the environment I rig up to be able to write this rubbish in serene peace.

I set up my system so that I have an editor in the middle of the screen, and nothing on the sides. I got this trick from seeing the Writeroom editor. It is good if you are into writing, and you don't want distractions while at it. If you use a Mac, get it and try it. Anyway, so I don't use a Mac at work. I use Debian. There is DarkRoom for Windows, and JDarkRoom for the rest of us. I got JDarkRoom, and I couldn't get it to run. So I rigged up what I have in the screenshot, and it comes close to the effect. It blocks out the rest of the world, and it's only me and my text. Plain text.
There is a ghostly-feint picture, in the background, of Bob Marley pulling a prophetic pose, and nothing else. (Click through for bigger image.)
It saves me from addictive distractions like The Cutest Thing, when I want to rant.

Rantdom Thurogitts 2.3

2008-05-07T11:19:00.005+03:00

Mood: Random
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

Random things. I'd not manage to write them otherwise.

First, Baz wrote this here: Here and Then. If you didn't read it, go now. Read already. It's a beautiful piece. I keep going back to it.

Next, I've never really read any of Florence King's stuff, but she's the kind of intellectual I like. Basically, she's a rebel. American but monarchist. A misanthrope comme moi, and calls herself "conservative lesbian feminist". But I found this quote of hers that is why she shows up here:

As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to 'be' college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.

To add another French-originated word to that, touché. More later.

I hate Wikipedia. It takes more away than it gives. The only excuse I have for using it is how cheap it is to use it. I don't know if I don't hurt myself by using a cheap collection of mistakes and shit. I'll not go into details about why Wikipedia is total bullshit. The editors are the worst kind. The Americentricism is like a cancer there. Anyway, a time will come when we figure out something (nearly) as cheap, but with better quality. Wikipedia is a beginning, and not nearly an achievement at all. It may even be a failure.
But I'll keep using it. :o)

Also, since Dennis mentioned it, I'll take the time to say I think the Japanese cultural element of seppuku (or hara-kiri) is a good example of why I'll abolish the concept of honour after the Revolution. Honour is like slavery, chauvinism, and other concepts that may have been okay back then but have been exposed as evils recently. Honour almost invariably involves death, if you've noticed. Honour murders, honour rapes, honour suicides, honour raids ... Honour is closely related to revenge (against oneself or another). And revenge, when executed by humans, is invariably a failure at whatever it wants to be (bar wanting to be a failure).

Now, John Taylor Gatto. Notorious anti-school person. A teacher for decades. Teacher of the Year Award winner (quit the same year). Here are two things, one being Against School, and the other being The Psychopathic School (must-read). I quote the last one, here:

Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep upon the streets.
[...]
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class.
[...]
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework."

I fear to quote more, lest I lengthen this beyond what even I consider a long post. Just understand that you have to read that piece. It's about America's schooling system, but we are committing the same error here, in Uganda. Then again, if we dared diverge, the aid would be cut. The result is that we'll have many people who are certainly schooled (with papers to prove it) but not educated. (America has many; their President once called Africa a country, for example.) TV features a lot in that essay, as a bad thing. Solitude features as a good thing. .oO Hmm.[1]
We shouldn't let that happen. I think that, if you really want the best for a child, right now, you'd have to face the fact that education is better attained by watching a fist-fight on the street than in class. If you want to teach your children to pick their minds, to think independently, challenge norms, be creative, school is the last place you want them to go. School is the very opposite of what anyone will call a good education. I've been a good school person, then also a self-taught drop-out, and my experience echoes what many smart people have told me, and it's what I assert here. Enough said.
A short Wikipedia article on one of John Taylor Gatto's books.

Happy mid-week.

UPDATE:
Reminds me of a comic I saw yesterday ...

[1] I know a number of people who do little-to-no TV and lots of solitude, some of them my blogren. And, yes, they are of admirable education (even though their schooling is not always exemplary; some are even anti-school). Most of my admired figures are actually not schooled.

Newton's Third Law of Motion

2008-05-02T21:04:00.001+03:00

Mood: Bored
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I've been writing this first line for more than ten minutes. Writing and deleting it. I've changed the wording et cetera, and it has failed to come out the way I want. The alternative—this that I'm doing—is to start by describing that failure. I rarely fail at failure. It's an easy way to start.

I wanted to ask, without seeming like my usual self, whether anybody finds the complete absence of the pro-Mugabe voice on the Net worrying. Don't you people worry about judging based on one side? I know, he's a bad person, the spawn of the very Lucifer himself, and I'd only be marginally worse if I were the President of Zimbabwe. But still, doesn't anybody worry about such uniformity of opinion? I know I do. Every link I click about this thing of Mugabe losing his election takes me to weblogs that nearly look like calculated propaganda (complete with slogans). And here's a link to Time magazine (published before the results were announced). Tell me what's missing there. If you know of any maybe ZANU-PF blogger, please link I.

You know, Jude always starts what he calls The Countdown to Dissatisfaction, whenever people do something like vote in a new leader.
Anyway, if you have a link, put it in the comments. Maybe Mugabe blogs. :o) I'd like to see what the pro-Mugabe 0.001% sound like. That's all.

Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi.
— Isaac Newton

Selah.

Blog, Blogger, Bloggest

2008-04-28T18:17:00.008+03:00

Mood: Pissed, but why?
[Toot!] Index: 2.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I'm not in the mood to work, right now. There's even no sugar, so I can't throw in my second coffee of the day. Among other things amiss. So ... I dip my hand into me head, feel about in the sloshing pool of brains (there are some, even though it's not obvious), blood, goo, stuff, and reach for a nice memory. Here. I have got a nice day out. It's twitching and kicking like a fish drowning in the air. Watch as I cut it open and feed you on it. Given my current state of mind, this post ~~may~~ will get long and rambling. With many links.
I'll talk about the bloggers' happy hour, the etymology of "blogren", Andrew Mwenda, et cetera. If you don't read long posts, don't bother getting started. :o) Go away.

I was at the Uganda Bloggers' Happy Hour. My post is late, so everyone has said it all already. The girls were disturbingly pretty. Many new faces, shining rather brightly. Dee, Carlo, Ivan, Back 2 Basics, Duksey, Antipop, MPhoebe, Kissyfur, Tumwijuke, Lulu, Dante ... basically, girls outnumbered boys.

The title, by the way, is because this post is dedicated to my blogren. You know, when that word was invented, maybe last year or the year before, it was meant to be a portmanteau on "blog" and "brethren": "blogren". Of course, nobody could have known that, indeed, it captured (more or less) the spirit we have. Even when the spirit falters, the pale parts don't show who we are: the good parts that shall remain will show who we really are.

This is not contentious. Until we get to Andrew Mwenda's arrest, and similar things. You see, there are (roughly) one million people at any one time saying wild anti-government things in Uganda. When they are not arrested it's no big deal. When one is arrested, it is a big deal: this one pale point is the definition of what we are. This one time you're late at work is the reason for your pay cut.
Sadly, nobody ever seems to note that the local uproar (in media, especially on radio) is a sign that this is not deemed normal. No, no, no! For them, the face is defined by the lone spot there. Pathetic. Negativist. Pessimistic. Stupid. Idiotic. American.
See here, the BBC article on Mwenda's arrest calls Museveni "authoritarian". Hmm. I dunno about you, but I don't live in an authoritarian country. You know, it's most likely my hate for unimaginative newspaper stereotyping coming into play here. I can't know. My late grandfather worked for Radio Uganda for decades. He was also an actor nonpareil, on top of being a philosopher. One of his Three Laws on Media Truth is: There isn't enough space in any newspaper to fit half of any truth. But this guy is worth a post on his own.

The worse thing is that Mwenda is not the worst that's happened. Ah, but nobody notices when you are not a self-righteous journalist. I like the assumption that Mwenda is right, and the government is wrong. Maybe it's true. But why did you valiant guards of democracy shut up when a Ugandan boy was caught at a UK airport for saying Insha'llah, and labelled "Terrorist"? Where were you? Is a dubious arrest only bad when done by an African country? That boy is doing time in a jail away from home. I'm older than him. (At this point, you'll be forgiven for playing Boney M. In particular, their song El Lute. You have only three minutes.)
Here's the strange thing: Mwenda is driving around Kampala, right now. He could be guilty, for all you know. But Hassan—the boy the Brits gave ten years of jail—is on some island somewhere. Insha'llah, they'll spare him the fate of being a mussulman on The Bay of Pigs.

My old housemother was arrested for nothing, in this Budo inferno thing. You all kept quiet. Mwenda is arrested (let's assume it's also for nothing). You are all talking. Cool. You want justice? Why not try giving it, first? Sheesh!

This leads me to something else. You know, I do read some French blogs from Francophone Africa; The Congo, for example. I landed on that when I was looking for a Tchala Mwana record, and I found a discussion on a Congolese blog about her. In the end, I created a category for these French blogs. I read them, but I refrain from commenting because my command of French is not too good. Anyway, I saw one on Babilown, where he was wondering where the differences are between Robert Mugabe and Paul Biya of Benin. In the end, he says "... for the Whites, a dictatorship doesn't start until their interests are endangered." Yeah, so if arresting a Ugandan on flimsy charges and paranoia doesn't endanger their interests, that's not dictatorship. I wonder what would happen if we caught a Brit or American spy—and most of these are spies—and locked him up. Oh, we are an evil people against freedom.
You'll notice that Idi Amin killed every day of his rule. His rise to power was particularly messy. It's at his messiest peak that he was the beloved of the West. When he faced Mecca and bowed, they wanted a new guy. Then he was a buffoon pretty quickly. The West straddled Africa with dicators we would have thrown away in seconds. In so doing, the real "bad governance" people of Africa are the West. But ask anybody who leads in "bad governance" on any of their pretentious indices.

This is probably why I look at this thing of the West lining up behind Tibet suspiciously. I think it's just knee-jerk. 99% of the people screeching for Tibet are doing it on 99% assumption. Or maybe I'm just more-accepting of "authoritarianism". Like I said here: "If you honestly believe that the only thing that is uniform from society to society, even decade to decade—as shoe, hair and talking styles change—is the way people should be governed, you're the only person I'm sure to be smarter than." I maintain that. And it may be a Freudian way to say I like authoritarianism. Kind of like a governance submissive masochist or something. :o) I face the fact that the parts of the world you call "developed" were running slaves and hung-draw-quartering people when they arose to their perceived prominence. They were exterminating natives and running authoritarian monarchies that were never voted into power. But we, Africa, the rest of the World, are just some toy they can tweak to desired shape. As in, had this been one hundred years ago, we'd be forced to be homophobic absolute monarchies. Gwahahahaha.

The West rushes with stereotypes when it's Africa involved. Let me tell you the other name for that: racism. You'll only pary this if you can explain that double standard. Many people are screeching about Mwenda, now. Let's wait for how many will screech over Hassan Mutegombwa. I'm waiting. Funny, because I came back from my break and blogged about it. And it was the first time it had been on any blog anywhere. A twenty-year-old is going to come out of jail at thirty. For a crime he not only did not commit, but is only flimsily-accused of committing. The Brits grabbed him. Along with his brother. Main point: he greeted in Arabic. Silence.
But if it's some loud journalist who could be guilty? Since he's being grabbed by the Africans, that's definitely wrong. They aren't Brits, you know. Fuck you.

By the way, that French post has some comment of mine. I broke a rule and commented in French! :-o And, before I forget, I'm willing to pay for a Manu Dibango record, whoever has it. And any Tchala Mwana music you may have. Hell, here's the list (I'll pay): Manu Dibango, Tchala Mwana, Oliver Mtukudzi (the old, old one with Under Pressure and the one of Neria), Ringo Madlingozi (the one with Sondela), and Khaled (really, any Raï music, any music from the Maghreb).
At the UBHH, Antipop really showed she was against pop music. I always thought her name was a euphemised "antipope". Oh, well. And Dee was trying to tell me rock music is good.
Look, we all know the last true rocker was Ormus Cama. The rest of them are just footnotes to VTO. I have the Quakershaker album both in vinyl and MP3.

On to other things, then.
In this older post of mine, a militant Capitalist came and made a home. We went on for a while, and you can find some explanations for my words and beliefs in there.
And since this made Global Voices, I can also link it here. A spat I had at GUG's. In particular, my second comment there. There are many things I was replying to that have been deleted. Anyway, if you have the silly patience to sit through my rants, there you are.

Now, my being critical of the critical is in no way new. Here's me, back then, saying stuff about Mugabe and his demonisers. Second-last paragraph. That post also has a comment I'm most-grateful for. It's pertinent at this time in our history. It shows how the Western media—back then—painted freedom fighters as murderous psychos. They are doing the same with whoever is ideologically opposed to them, even today. And y'all just go ahead and believe. The comment summarises this page, which (if you can) you should read. Don't pretend nobody ever said this stuff. It's at this point that I remind you of the even-more-pertinent Where is My Continent post. One more thing, this post says "Democracy is not an American/Western concept. It is a human concept. It existed long before America was formed, long before Europe was populated [...] a concept that is richer on Kampala's streets than in the Pentagon."
I'd go deeper into that, but I've typed enough for a day. For those of you who think you should be more-worried about "democracy" in Africa than about one of those above-the-law rogue states of the West dropping nuclears bombs on your children, sisters, wives and mothers, here's one last narcisistic link: "I won't let me be the tenth person to note that something bad happened in Kampala. I want to be the first to note that something good was born a generation ago." That was in reaction to something similar to Mwenda's thingy.
It's stupid of you to worry about some African government when there's a nuclear bomb in the West with your city's name on it. You've been fooled, foolish one, into having your priorities wrong.

One last thing. So, I'm going for the UBHH, right? And I find this Kampala Road overhead screen bleeding Prison Break over our city. I once said "there are no Ugandan kids who didn't watch the bootlegged Matrix Reloaded two weeks before it was released." I was trying for some hyperbole, but it appears our homeless people actually are fans of that Prison Break guy. Although, of course, Americans still get shocked that we can manage to speak English.

Eh. Enough. :o)

CO, The Fire, Space is Pregnant, and Other Short Stories

2008-04-19T15:05:00.005+03:00

Mood: Many warring moods.
[Toot!] Index: 0.0
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Okay, so WordPress people, I can't comment on your blogs. Thingy says I'm commenting too fast, I should slow down. On my first comment. Bug.
Blogger people, we are still in our love-hate. I post when it works. Dee says the next Happy Hour is on the 24th. No miss.

On the Budo tragedy ... Ever the iconoclast, I'm into rejoicing. Thank God for the (n-19) children who survived the fire! [1] And also, thank God for showing us that there may be a wet-nosed four-foot heroine scampering about between our legs. The girl heroine, I mean, who died in helping her friends. A kiss, a hug, I breathe a prayer, for that little girl and her parents.

Now, some brightness.
I sneaked up on me cat and flipped her over. You see, she's been eating a lot, of late. I grew suspicious. I was buying more food, without knowing why it was going too fast. So, I crept up, and tossed her around.
And the little pink breasts looked back in startled shock and threw scared hands over their little bosoms and stared back, moving arms to shield the rest of their nakedness. But I had seen.
My cat is pregnant. So we got into the obligatory fight. Why didn't you tell me before? Don't you trust me? Don't you know I'm always going to support you? Et cetera. And we cried on each other's shoulders. And then, like most people who really care about you, I asked Tell me, who is the father? Is he a respectable cat with a solid financial standing? Is he honourable? His family? And she gave me that look of I was drunk, I don't know ... There were many cats. We were all drunk.

Okay. The truth is that I saw them. Back then, around a month ago, my cat got laid. So many male cats were around my place. She called for them (angering waul), and they came. By the dozen. They fought and fucked, and fought and fucked. She got pregnant, but I don't know who the father is, either. Actually, cats can conceive one litter with multiple fathers. There is the dark, furry tomcat with a deep growl. I hope he slipped a daughter in. ;o) I want the best kitties. Then there is the long, thin one. I want kitties! My camera batteries quit right when I saw her and her guys outside my window. There is this one tomcat I'm sure landed a son in there. I hate it because it's an uncouth, uncultured, dreadlocked, communist alley cat. It's ugly, too. But I saw it bound over the walls, once, when I chased it. The sheer athletic ease with which it leapt, the fluid, feline grace with which it landed onto the ledge ... Ah, them kitties will be nice. I knew right away, this one should have kitties with Space. Arranged marriages and shit.

So, I'm buying twice as much food, of late. I need to buy a padded basket for the kittens. Cats take nine weeks to give birth, so I have about a month left. Pregnant cats show much affection (mbu, it's good for the kitties), so I get home and submit to the relentless rubbing-against-me that she's taken up of late. But this will be her last, so she might as well have a blast while at it.

[1] Where n is the number of children who were in danger. In my time in Budo, what most people don't know, we had a fire. But nobody died. A few mattresses burnt, and that was it. I know that people who die in fires don't die of fire. They die of CO. When in a fire, stay as low as you can, because CO rises in the heat, and the non-poisonous air is below. You won't die of the fire - don't fear it. Fear the poisoned air.

Pray for The Mothers

2008-04-16T10:25:00.003+03:00

Mood: Sad
[Toot!] Index: 1.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

My old school, my primary school, the only school I was to that I don't mind being associated with, got on fire. It's a boarding school, Budo Junior School. And the fire was in the girls' dormitories. Apparently, eighteen children died in the fire along with two adults (house mothers, in Kabinja language).
They were largely charred beyond recognition, and DNA tests will help tell who is who. :o(

You know, I never imagine my loved ones dying, because my brain refuses to carry through, at some point. It refuses this act of self-destruction. I don't know how I'd stand the reality of it. And not a child. That would slay me. Pray for the parents, pray for the Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers all over the World. Don't stop. Keep praying. Keep praying. Pray for all Mothers that endure the Mother's Hurt. Pray for the Mothers. Pray for these true heroines of Humanity. Pray for the Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Don't stop. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers. Pray for Mothers.

The New Vision
The New Vision, again.
The Daily Monitor.

Fucking Africa Up For Fun and Profit

2008-04-12T17:45:00.008+03:00

Mood: Mad-ish
[Toot!] Index: 4.0
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

[Tag reply is over here, if you aren't in the mood for a frothing beak.]

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep [...] but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis

Last weekend, I went to where I have my light lunches at. Because I eat late, I'm usually the only one in the restaurant at that time. This time, there was some girl. She walked over, said Hi, I hate to eat alone, sorry, haha, and I smiled back, said You've saved this guy a lonesome meal, haha, and then we both fell quiet. Then the radio, because it is a radio, stopped playing Wait For Love and turned to the news. Somewhere in there, Mugabe slipped into my day. Yep, Robert Mugabe. There was talk about something like "He has lost the election" or the like. And all the while I'm thinking Why didn't he rig the votes, intimidate voters, et cetera?
And that's when the girl—worryingly-beautiful, I must note—said my mind out loud for me: He should have won the election; now what's left for the BBC to say? Oh, never mind. They'll start saying the opposition [...] rigged.
That's raw bravery, there. All over the World, it's a fad to declare bad whoever the Great Ingenius Inventors and Tireless Guardians Of the Beautiful Democratic Ideal declare bad. She expected she was setting up a fight, by breathing pro-Mugabe things out at me. No fight, of course, because we were on the same side about this. Then she asked how I can forgive him on the Zim economy. Well, if he took to the radio and declared that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and denounced the West's sabotage as "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance", and maybe got pinker ears, he'd be remembered as a gallant, unrelenting, long-serving American statesman. That's what he should do.
When I said that, she said something that I only reproduce here because I fail to recover from it, one luscious line: You know, I've always wanted to fuck a genius; and the big lips are a big plus.
She was kidding about it all (except the rich lips), but the line was well-delivered, enough to stick in me head.
Before I forget, one of the best lines I've read all week: `God was playing some kind of prank when he developed two sexes.'

In other news. Watch dis. It's Obama Time, so lemme get on this before it floats out of reach. One of us is probably going to run their land. Won't it be sad to blame African hands for all the mass murders that will inevitably continue? Guess it's a good thing I let off America-bashing. The tug of loyalties would kill me.
But we are talking Africans at home and in the U, S, and A.[1]

You see, we are the smallest group on Earth, Blacks. (For some value of group.) We, in total, are barely a billion. The Mongoloid people in China alone out-number us. The Caucasoid people in Bharat alone out-number us. There are more Muslims than Blacks. More anything than Blacks. Even more humans than Blacks! Yet we happen to be seated on wealth that bends the mind. The Congo alone has enough wealth, yet unseen by human eyes, to render Europe quiet with awe. We, Uganda, are squatting over fine, fine oil in a time when men will sail overseas and pillage millenia-old civilisations for juice half the quality. And our environment has survived the blind madness of capitalism, so far. For how few we are, strange that we define the arts. (Because, you see, though you enslave a people, there are some things they can still do in chains: sports, music, story-telling, comedy and acting, looking beautiful, et cetera.) I mean, Eminem is Black, for example. In short, we are a phenomenon. You could say this supernaturalness is why we've been singled out by the bullies for so long. But that's for another day. Now, look at that Wikipedia page.

Africans have the highest educational attainment rates of any immigrant group in the United States with higher levels of completion than the stereotyped Asian American model minority. [2]

So the Africa effect leaks beyond here. Hence Obama.

People will continue being shocked about the likes of Obama, not realising he's the staple over here, if American TV keeps pretending that Africa has only one face: mine. I mean, me, the broke, dumb, incoherent muhfucker.

In closing, I'll make the tail touch the nose. That C. S. Lewis quote 'pon de top? Well, I realised that this democracy thing is the new monarchism. Back then, they cried For King and Country. Now, they say For Democracy and Country. Yeah, they kill us until we have been conquered by their ~~King~~ Democracy. It's a forced conversion, really. This one-size-fits-all shit? It costs more in blood than it gives back. And when people have the power to vote, a Walker walks onto the stage. Encore! If you honestly believe that the only thing that is uniform from society to society, even decade to decade—as shoe, hair and talking styles change—is the way people should be governed, you're the only person I'm sure to be smarter than.
Yet you can believe that there are people who think that. And their conscience agrees with them, as they cause untold deaths of women and children whose lives would be luxurious under worse leaders who are allowed to trade. `For a better, more-democratic World!' Um, yeah. Machiavellian or not, the Lewis quote fits. `Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end'.[3] Some governments (and their nodding citizens) make Hitler a mildly-flawed saint, by comparison of numbers alone.

[1] I do serial commas, and you won't fucking stop me.
[2] It's the fucking brain drain, of course.
[3] This is also why I believe kids should never, ever be spanked, even once; but that's for another day.

Quatre

2008-04-12T17:24:00.003+03:00

Mood: Stagnant
[Toot!] Index: 0.2
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course

I was tagged. Voici, donc. :o)

Four Jobs I've Worked:

Artist (my first job - I drew, I got paid; I was eight)
...
...
Programmer, Computer geek (yes, I can't remember more than two jobs!)

Four Movies I'd Watch Over and Over:
I'd never, ever do this. Many movies I've not watched, it'd be unfair. Rather discover new gold. Besides, I don't watch movies much. But sometimes ...:

Trouble in Store (British, 1953)
Dilwala (Hindi, 1986)
Warriors Of Heaven and Earth (Chinese, 2004)
Shiokari Pass (Japanese, 1977)

They don't make 'em like they used to. Seems the East is making the movies, these days, that move the soul. Not dumbed-down shit for dumb, zapping couch potatoes where you've got to have a nude idiot every five frames to keep them from carrying through with their threat and actually pressing the button on the remote control. Africa rocks, too, if we don't include the sinker called Nigeria.

Four Places I've Lived:

Entebbe, Uganda
Nairobi, Kenya
Accra, Ghana
Mbabane, Swaziland

Four TV Shows I Love:
I won't lie, there's none I love. There were some I once loved, when I still did TV, but they won't fit into the whole 24, Prison Break, et al, group. Still, it's my list. Behold (and I date myself and my preferences a bit):

Mind Your Language
Desmond's
Journey to the West (the old Chinese one with English subtitles and Communist undertones)
Coupling

Four Places I've Been on Vacation:

I'm a wage slave, guys. No vac for me. I hoped to squeeze Moçambique in, last year, and I didn't manage. Now, I'm planning for a distant land at the end of this year. Then, I'll have things to write.

Four of My Favourite Foods:

Wet, Saucy Tandoori
Cornflakes (childhood addiction I can't shake off)
Corned Beef (^ consultez ci-dessus)
Living girl's lips, still attached (better served with warm rubs)

No space for Nestlé Exploder chocolate, Maltesers, Cadbury's Milk Crunch chocolate, or even roasted groundnuts. But I'm under oath never to betray them.

Four Places I'd Rather Be, Now:

Waking up slowly against a lover's breasts.
On a bench in Muzinga Park, Entebbe, looking at the distant lake. With a Girl.
Kicking crabs back into the salty water on a distant shore.
Home, hearing the cat descend upon her meal, while I go through mine.

I keep having the feeling that I'll be asked this question before I'm sent to be executed, the day I die. So I find it hard to answer, and its frequency is also strange.

Perfume

2008-04-06T10:33:00.003+03:00

Mood: Comme-ci, comme-ça.
[Toot!] Index: 0.1
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

Some girl waded by, and the perfume was giggling behind her. Hard to ignore. For me, they are like that, perfumes. They do things.

A scent could just leap at me and grab my face and maybe run a finger across my upper lip, teasing me with more, yet emphasising how inaccessible the bearer is. And then be gone. Other people smell them. Me, I experience them.
They have personalities. They have beliefs, these scents. They have worries, hopes, dreams. Liberal perfumes, militant scents, deceptive ones, spying ones, Communist ones, intelligent ones. Prayerful ones, yellow ones, perfumes that are thirsty, scents that are fighting a habit, perfumes that make you think this is what the sky must smell like. I remember following my nose, to see where the Catholic scent was emanating from, and I found a lady in full Islamic niqab. Weird. Then this lady, voluptous of bosom, with a stern look about her, whose perfume was a rebellious tomboy teenager. Some time, a nurse was supposed to give me a jab (morphine jab, of all things). And she had an assassin's scent. Beautiful, dangerous, invisible, pseudonymous, irresistible, final. And because of the things I thought, I had trouble letting her land the needle in there. It could be poisoned!

Reggae perfumes, digital scents, speedy ones, scared perfumes, careful ones, tall ones (yet I located it to a rather short woman), African scents, rainy ones, mathematical ones, angry ones, hungry ones, sleepy ones, crying ones, brown perfumes, philosophical ones, good luck perfumes, desperate ones, scents that just broke up, perfumes that are time-barred, ambitious ones, imprecise ones, literary ones, unprepared ones. Et cetera, et cetera. :o)
It's a beautiful affliction.

Hedonist Mode

2008-03-28T21:36:00.005+03:00

Mood: Hedonist, Wondering if my cat is pregnant
[Toot!] Index: 3.2
Communism Bit: Off
Location: Job, of course

One of them days I picked up the cigarette and went to smoke it under the stars. And I was thinking about some girl, and seeing some profane nightclub pointing a blasphemous beam at God's window (past midnight!). And I realised that I wouldn't like to be in club at that time (or ever). I realised the stark differences between me and them. Me, a fine night is being at home next to a girl and listening to gentle North African music and we're shaking our cigarette ash into an empty bottle, and I'm sipping at iced tea, and every tick of the clock brings me closer to a Kiss, and (this one is important) I don't know (or, at that moment, care) what the future holds. So, I barked at the fun in the valley: I prefer it this way!

But do I? How can I say I prefer warm, sedate seclusion to the wild, sweaty reveling noise, when I've never tried it? Hence my decision, at that point, to start living a hedonist life, if only for a while. With pleasure as the only goal of living, you know. I've always had some tight little rules to follow, and it seems to me that rules only exist to limit how much pleasure I get to have, so I was implicitly sending them out, as well, and replacing them with a packed schedule of sex, drugs, sex, partying, sex, "trying that stuff", sex, et cetera, and, of course (lest I forget to mention it), sex. The only working in there would be to fund the Schedule.

But the best result of such serious choices is the discourse that starts in my head, between Ange and Jude. It's how I know there are three of us: three viewpoints that cannot even meet. (Mine is ignorant questioning, Jude is for hedonism, Ange against it.)
Ange goes off, Have you ever seen anyone say `I've had enough of pleasure, let me now have some displeasure. Even submissive masochists do it for pleasure. Hedonism tries to fill a bottom-less bucket. You're the programmer; you should know that this Bottom is not good.
Jude starts one under, after Ange has collected extra points for that occupational pun, but he flies in with all guns screaming: If pleasure were not for having, you'd not have the urge to have pleasure. I mean, okay, stop breathing if that bottom-less bucket is not worth filling.

So, there. As always, Jude wins. It went on a little more, but it swerved off-topic in a hurry, leaking into our unfinished debate on whether polygamy is the normal relational state (for both men and women), et cetera.
So, I'm going to get into hedonist mode, tentatively. I know there are some things that constitute pleasure for other people, but not for me. I should define my own idea of pleasure, and then follow through. The worrying part is that my version of pleasure is way too close to what I already do. Maybe I'm just brain-washed by me. So my hedonist mode may not be too different from my current mode, which would defeat the purpose of the experiment. But I should remember something Ange said:
These people see anything that requires considerable restraint not to do, and they just declare it `anti-freedom'. They can't concede to having no self-restraint; they only say they want to live free. And if you think self-restraint is a bad thing, we are not friends anymore.

In other news, I was at a party, last Friday. I was, for most of the time, seated in the back of one of the many obscenely-expensive wagons there. My boss' ride, I mean. I was back there with a girl, and my boss walks in on us. Well, he didn't see anything, as nothing was happening at the time. But he had to look away and back off, expecting the worst. It's not everyday your boss runs away from you, in fear. :o)
Also, I met two bloggers. In both cases, they remembered me before I remembered them, which can be a bit ... bad. Queen B, who I figured out before she told me, walked up to me at the close of the party, and I was shocked there was a blogger there. I had seen her shake that thing to some catchy Nigerian song, Goloco. You may have, by now, heard it; one of the few times Nigerian media doesn't suck that much.
Next came Dennis' brother, Ernest. It's almost scary how these brothers, plus ~~Alfred~~ Dickson, resemble. After he told me he knew me, that he was Dennis' bro, I had to fight the urge to call him `Dennis'. Likeness tends to leap out when you find out family ties. All three, for example, have that bushy chin and insistent eyes. Nice day, that one.

Trenchtown and Sinking Into the Ground

2008-03-21T10:08:00.008+03:00

Mood: Propagandish
[Toot!] Index: 0.3
Communism Bit: On
Location: Job, of course, but written at home

I'm listening to what must be the strongest affirmation of love for the slums ever trapped on a music record, and I felt I should let these pictures out. I took these pictures, of a Kampala slum built upon shaky ground. Literally.

See that there house, the one to the left? I failed to get something against which to scale it. But believe me when I tell you it is so short that the clothes line over there ends at a level above its roof line. It is uninhabited, because it sunk into the ground after a while of habitation, and it was abandoned.
I walked through this slum and noticed that all the houses were short, most shorter than myself.

Or, see this one. The men standing next to it can give a sense of scale. Or the size of its doors. Or if you compare it to the newer one to the right. Or if you look for where the wall should meet the ground. It is sinking into the ground.

See that one. The woman, seated, is higher than the window. Standing her full (even though modest) height, she would be at the roof's level. Nobody builds things that short. That house sunk into the ground. It is still inhabited, because it was cheaper to move the door higher (even higher than the ventilators) than to move out. (It is also quite patched, to the left.) The newer one to the left—yes, people insist on building here, where the Curse is clearly working—gives all the scale we need.

This one, to the right. The woman seated in the door-way of the newer one to the left is at the same height as the door of the one to the right. It has sunk into the ground.

Need I go on? No. But will I go on? Yes.

Can you spot the one that has sunk beyond hope?

Some don't need a scale. The air around the house, the neighbourhood, tells you that this one already succumbed to the Curse and sank into the ground.
The one whose doors were raised and raised and raised until they were about to go through the roof, and migration was not to be avoided: the house has sunk into the ground.

I have more pictures, but that will be all, for now. The houses that sunk into the ground.
Now, if I were one of them idealistic, finger-pointing pharisees, I'd let fly with a line about how `this government' is `not doing enough' to answer `the real questions, the real needs of its people', and how that is a sign of `bad governance', and maybe something like `corruption' and how `appalling' the `state of public housing in this country' is, and how we have an `irresponsible housing ministry' in `this country' and the like. I don't know about you, but there is nearly nothing I hate like those kinds of things. Most of the government criticism I see is just someone trying to sound smart by subscribing to groupthink and `demanding action' from `this government' with carefully-chosen phrases that sound educated and accustomed to expecting better things from the government. It's all shitty pretence, if you ask me. These fake bleeding hearts don't give a fuck about how we be down in our ghettos, and their newspaper columns, papers, books, blogs, radio shows, et cetera are really just an attempt at sounding smart enough for the rest of us. If you want a perfect government, die and get the fuck out of here: there are no problems in Heaven. The rest of us will choose to see these things as our challenges, and act like it, rather than as government failures and sit and whine.
(It's not my theme today, but I may not get another chance to strike out at them, those pretenders who have more failures in their bathrooms than any government can make in a year, yet who still feel the need to become the Jesus who never errs and is therefore fit to judge a whole fucking government. News: no single person, not even you, can be smarter than an entire government, however flawed it may be. So shut up, please, I already know what you want to say, and no government is so homogenously-blind as not to have anyone within it see what you are about to reveal long before you are aware of it.)

:o) I get healed by a nice, long rant. It's like a shower at noon. Now, I can carry on.
From those pictures, you can see that this government is clearly, visibly, not doing nearly enough to answer the real questions, the real needs of its people. Of course this is a sign of bad governance (what with all that disease-level corruption). Nothing else can result in this. It's shocking how appalling the state of public housing is in this country. We are just cursed with an irresponsible housing ministry in this coutry. It's obscene.

These pictures have one thing in common (besides being in the same geographical location): the people who stay in these houses work the hardest in Kampala. The law of life is that ye shall of the sweat of thy brow eat (eeewww). Yet they sweat the most and eat the least. Those who sweat the least eat the most. It's hard to think of this stuff and not feel the blazing red Communist in you rise to the front. This stuff is worse than, say, apartheid, because apartheid, at least, had people protesting everyday. There were armed rebels, even. (I'm proud that my country officially hosted these gallant warriors of Umkhonto we Sizwe, when it became too perilous for the fight to be lower south. Amandla!)
What we have here is a Capitalist system that is just as bad, even worse, than the Sud Afrikaan "Apart-ness". We pretend there is no segregation problem between rich and poor, and yet? And yet we do have our very own "apart-hood". Some people are isolated by the Capitalist structure, they are given only enough to keep them alive to fuck and make kids. Those kids are carefully isolated to be turned into the next suffering class.

The worst nightmare of the Blacks during apartheid must have been waking up and finding that every country in the world had implemented apart-hood, and that it had become the _accepted_ norm. They wouldn't even have a Uganda to run to. But that reality faces the poor among us, the poor us, because the whole world is a Capitalist system, and we have nowhere to run to. (Cuba, North Korea, yes, but the Capitalists hate us, so they starve us and kill our women and children. They say different sexual orientations are okay, but different economic ideologies are bad—we should all be one `correct' thing: Capitalists.)
This accepted inequality has burnt the hope of the majority of us, down there. Not the inequality, but the fact that it is accepted. Many of us down there even accept our poverty fate, much the same way Blacks in some places are still convinced they are inferior. We are being sunk into the fucking ground by you Capitalists. Literally. Maybe they should wait for our Revolution? At least there are those of us who are not resigned to this fate, and we are willing and able to fight. If it's already a fight to just be alive, why not let it be a fight to become alive?

In the Mosaic Law, in the Old Testament, there was something called the Year of Jubilee. Every forty years, all property bought was returned, all slaves freed, all land bought returned to the previous owners. The point was to reverse the detrimental (even devilish) effect of Capitalism in that society. So, if you got poor for some reason, it would only be until the next Year of Jubilee, and then there would be a Revolution—backed by the Torah—to restore Communist sanity. (I find that the Bible is shockingly-Communist, for a book held in high regard by the diabolical Capitalists. Jesus' move with the fish and loaves, for one example, was a concrete Communist act: from boy according to capacity, to crowd according to need. Et cetera, et cetera. Even: from Jesus according to capacity, to humanity according to need.)

But this has already got too long.

The slum is built on a swamp, hence the sinking.
Trenchtown, the slum where Bob grew up, had a big trench from which the name comes. The patterns among sufferers wherever Capitalism won are quite stunningly-similar. From apartheid South Africa to the slums of Kampala. The suffering, the creativity, the eternity of the human spirit. Slums are inspiring, because the are the face of Survival. (Survival also happens to be the name of the album that carries the loudest protests against this self-same unfairness.)
I've run out of space and time, but here is some part of the inspirational song:

Oh, my head.
In desolate places we'll find our bread.
And everyone see what's taking place.
Oh, another page in history.

But I'm from Trenchtown.
Most of them come from Trenchtown.
We free the people with music.

They say it's hard to speak.
They feel so strong to say we're weak.
But through the eyes, the love of our people.
Oh, they've got to repay.

We come from Trenchtown!
They say, `Can anything good come out of Trenchtown?'
That's what they say.
Say, we're the under-priviledged people,
So they keep us in chains.
Pay, pay tribute to Trenchtown!

Just because we come from (Trenchtown).
Just because we come from (Trenchtown).

- Bob Marley (Trenchtown from the post-humous Confrontation album.)