Monday, August 29, 2011

Is Africa overpopulated with Pushmi-pullyu?


As we have all gathered from harrowing scenes on our T.V. screens, famine has yet again hit the horn of Africa. I haven’t seen Bono and Bob Geldorf rushing around with their cheque books, nor do I see much coming from the rest of Africa. There is an interesting article in the Independent. It shows the utter apathy of the African Union to the situation. To put it frankly – they don’t give a shit. Let ‘whitey’ pay. Reading the comments is well worth it. It appears ‘whitey’ is utterly sick of coughing up dosh because, as we all know, most of it ‘disappears’ in ‘transaction and administration’ costs and most of what is left gets looted. BUT, and here is a big BUT, it appears to me as if the ‘donors’ (I.E. unwilling tax payers), are catching on to the fact that they actually make the entire situation worse!

Kevin Meyers wrote a piece for the Irish Independent in 2008. If you Google the title, it appears that the article provoked quite a backlash. It is however a rather alarming observation and certainly raises some big issues. My conclusion is a ‘damned if we do and damned if we don’t’, that is still riding on the endless excuse of colonial wrong doing. Shame no one tells this to the Chinese as they plunder Africa of natural resources so that we in the West can have cheap ‘Made in China’ products. (Why does a Dr Doolittle pushmi-pullyu [pronounced "push-me—pull-you] spring to mind? Amazingly, it appears the creature comes from Africa.)

 
Below is the article with a comment at the beginning from sources unknown.  

Somalia is not a humanitarian disaster; it is an evolutionary disaster. The
current drought is not the worst in 50 years, as the BBC, and all the aid
organisations claim. It is nothing compared to the droughts in 1960/61 or
73/74. And there are continuing droughts every 5 years or so. It's just that
there are now four times the population; having been kept alive by famine
relief,  supplied by aid organisations, over the past 50 years. So, of
course, the effects of any drought now, is a famine. They cannot even feed
themselves in a normal rainfall year.

Worst yet, the effects of these droughts, and poor nutrition in the first 3
years of the a child's life, have a lasting effect on the development of the
infant brain, so that if they survive, they will never achieve a normal IQ .
Consequently, they are selectively breeding a population, who cannot be
educated , let alone one that is not being educated; a recipe for disaster,
in evolutionary Darwinian terms.

We are seeing this impact now, and it can only exacerbate, to the detriment
of  their neighbours,  and their environment as well. This scenario can only
end in an even worse disaster; with even worse suffering, for those
benighted people, and their descendants. Darwinian theory shows that
biological principles will apply to the human condition, in spite of all our
goodwill , and eventually, some mechanism will intervene, be it war, disease
or starvation . Talk about kicking the can down the road, as the Americans
say, about their budget deficit  !

So what to we do ?
Let them starve ?
What a dilemma for our Judeo/ Christian/Islamic Ethos; as well as  Hindu
/Buddhist morality.
And this is beginning to happen in Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries in
Asia, like Pakistan.
Is this the beginning of the end of civilisation ?
We better not be around, when it happens !


This report by K. Myers appeared in The Irish Independent.

AFRICA is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS

No.  It will not do.  Even as we see African states refusing to take
action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the
Begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again.

It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed
The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown
from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So, why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic
demographic growth in that country?  Where is the logic?  There is none.
To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of
another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the
camera,which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry.  My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially.
Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia;  like most of you, I have
stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there.
The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic,
Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory
and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system;  but I do not know
what it is.  There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a
column like this.

It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of,
well, the self-righteous, hand wringing, letter writing wrathful
individuals, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every
debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority.   It
will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like
John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire
enormously.  So be it.

But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of
our own Irish Famine, with this or that lazy analogy.  There is no
comparison.  Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was
down by 30%.   Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the
Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's population
has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness.  Somewhere,
over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent,
Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently
tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive,
illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive
because of help from the outside world.

This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense.

Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the president
of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap
water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against AIDS
infection.

Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not
prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia,
Eritrea etcetera.

Broad brush-strokes, to be sure.  But broad brush-strokes are often the
way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan,
China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the
20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part
of Africa.

They are now -- one way or another -- virtually all giving aid to or
investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its
lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and
causing catastrophic ecological degradation.  By 2050, the population of
Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent of France, Germany and
Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly Protein-free
wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult
population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally
devastated and economically dependent country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation
today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty,
hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such
wide-eyed children, with comparably
jolly little lives ahead of them?  Of course, it might make you feel
better, which is a prime reason for so much charity.!  But that is not
good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa.  It
has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade.  It is
inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when,
in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease
is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now
operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would
otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts.

Oh good:  then what?  I know, let them all come here (to Ireland) or
America.  (not forgetting Australia!)      Yes, that's an idea.

_____

So…if you have read up to here, how about I lighten up the situation just a little. Here is a little play I wrote a few years ago and posted on this blog. Scanning briefly over it I concluded that I am seriously disturbed in the head! If you haven’t read it yet, here it is – The Flight ofthe Feeniks

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Last of the Rhodesians - Progress so far…


Well quite a lot has been happening behind the scenes. Firstly, I have now obtained the services of a top class editor and even better…for free! Now this person has a mountain of editorial and producing experience but I am not allowed to divulge his name. Secrets indeed! I am only allowed to say this much, and I quote from his Email –
I'd prefer to be known as a "Former BSAP plain-clothes-type whose ZANLA-given Chimurenga (nom-de-guerre) name was Netsai Mabhunu".

Which brings me to the subject of Chimurenga names. I don’t seem to have one, well, not that I know off, but I am working on it. It will have to be based around the word Penga.

I have had the honour of having a chit-chat with this individual who has had a glance over the first six reworked chapters. He also said to stop sending in bits and bobs and every ten minutes excitedly send another slightly changed chapter. Basically, what he meant was to wrap it all up and then send the lot. Okay, fair enough. I reckon that will take another four weeks. He needs about the same amount of time to go over it and then send it back to me for any changes and after that – it is ready to roll hot of the presses, AND believe me, this is HOT.

So hot that Netsai Mabhunu said I haven’t a chance in hell of newzimbabwe.com publishing it, nor getting an endorsement from the likes of Peter Godwin. Now why would that be? He tried to explain that what I have written is too controversial. ‘So what?’ say I. I never intended to write some PC correct nonsense but the hardcore truth as I witnessed it. But, I am not telling it, I am showing it. So far, as I reach well into a third of the rewrite, I have satirically and creatively mentioned racism, segregation, homophobia, religious slandering, white class structure, the difference between town and country, bullying, alcoholism, bravery, cowardice, lunacy and sanity. We have the good, the bad, the beautiful and the downright ugly side portrayed as Rhodesia struggles to hang on to…what? I think I have achieved the right balance between the ludicrous laugh out louds and then with a thump, the reader is brought back down to earth with rather a shock at the almost cryptic way I put over a serious point.
 
Cartoon by Vic Mackenzie.

 

What is difficult is to bring over the picture of Rhodesia trapped in an almost Victorian time bubble. The isolation and the total lack of the influence of the counter-culture revolution that ended in 1972 and even the shock culture of punk in 1976 onwards, never entered our little ‘paradise’. As far as Rhodesia was concerned, to hell with ‘the winds of change’…

What Netsai Mabhunu hasn’t realised yet that whilst this is a memoir, it is in fact written as a true adventure story, with all the characters being real and many have contributed. I hope that in this way the book will crossover into mainstream rather than just be picked up by the Rhodesian Diaspora.

I have also been doing a bit of promotion via Facebook etc and deliberately let slip some chapters aimed at former police officers that were with me at Morris Depot police academy. These were in turn leaked further. As a result I have been receiving some interesting and vital information. Some of this has now been included.

Finally, the website is up there but I haven’t done more to it yet. I will wait till the book goes off to editing, then I have more time. Oh, someone wrote that I have rather a high opinion of myself considering the short amount of time I spent in the British South Africa Police. Actually, I have a very highly inflated opinion of myself, but that has nothing to do with the time I was in the BSAP but the fact I was, and always will be - penga.

Catch ya all later.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Anarchy in the UK – the Rhodesian solution.


Well well, what an exciting week! Looting in Luton, shooting in Tooting and London burning. Rhodesians worldwide were quick to offer support on how to solve the problem with these naughty youngsters known as ‘Yobs’ for a better PC correct terminology. Some of the ideas floated around were rather sound, but ‘String the fuckers up!’ may have been legally allowed back in the good old days of Rhodesia, after all we were gentlemen and not the Ku Klux Klan, but to be honest, hanging is sadly banned in the UK.

Another idea was put them in the army. Great idea, they can go looting marijuana fields in Afghanistan. ‘Bring back the birch!’ was another good suggestion. I am not sure about birch as I was beaten with a bamboo cane. My headmaster had quite a selection of weight and sizes in an umbrella stand in his office. But, here in the UK they banned this practice also.

Some said if they love burning cars so much, let them have a South African tyre necklace to light up their dark lives and make it a new event for the London Olympics. The 100 meter flash dash or the singeing sprint. The winner gets a fire hydrant.

Below are three very short clips of some of the looters and rioters in action. Watch these and then decide what should be done with them…





AND, this just has to go to number one. It is from 1976, the year I arrived back in Rhodesia to start my own ANARCHY…hah hah hah

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Rhodesia- Ration Packs; the ultimate truth!

Ratpacks or Ratz for short, were a fundamental part of nearly every combatant’s bowl movements on the White side. What the bad Black side ate is not of interest in this story. I gathered that the evil bastards simply shoved a rifle up a peasant’s nose and got served and serviced. (I never bothered with that stunt because I wasn’t that hot on boiled hukoo and sadza.)

Now, my Proof-reader told me he couldn’t be arsed going through this chapter, and recommended I delete it. So I did. Gone…puff - just like that (not), because you now may have this chapter to read. It is excruciatendely boring. Actually, that word doesn’t exist, but don’t pass a stone over it. Please add any of your own observations.

The description below is very thorough, but it contents might have passed through me with very little spice and so; read it and whilst you do…why not microwave a nice Indian Madras – there is nothing better than a good curry muncher…

Disclaimer and rightful claiming –

Please note that I retain the right to add your name, anecdotes, edited Emails or Facebook comments, for my own personal exploitation, either in my book or on my blog and website. (Here is the time to get famous hey! Albeit, less than 15 minutes…lol)

 Kind regards, Karl… Last of the Rhodesians


Eat, drink and be merry - for tomorrow you will be dead from food poisoning.

I had seen these boxes before. When I was 15 and had been visiting best-friend Stephanie Brooks, her brother Mike (who was doing his call-up with the army), would bring a couple of half empty ratpacks home with him during his R and R. (Rest and Recreation.) We had experimented with them in the kitchen and usually fed the dog with the results.
I just love children sized shoe boxes with little neatly packed mysteries in them. Sure enough there were lots of surprises. A quick look at the rest of my sticks ratpacks revealed that we had three different types of  ‘One Box, One Man, One Day’. Stamped on the side of each light brown cardboard box was a letter. C, G or H. The idea of this was to give everyone a change of diet everyday. Digging through the contents, it soon became clear that the initials actually stood for: Crap, Gore and Hideous.

Basically, all ratpack types would have the same stuff in them. The different types were due to the contents of the supplied tinned food and the kind of starch. A quick visual examination could be described so:
Common to all ratpacks -
1. A (my) palm sized, very sticky transparent plastic bag, filled with orange or green sugar. This was supposed to be ‘cool drink’. For some strange reason this bag always seemed to have burst and made the rest of the contents adhere to each other like super-glue. Once you had the stuff in a cup and applied water, you were treated with a vile taste resembling nothing like oranges or lime, and a mass of wet, semi-dissolved sugar swirling around at the bottom.
2. Another transparent bag, about half the size of the sticky one, which looked alarmingly like it contained four teaspoons of dried semen. In fact, it was supposed to be milk powder that you combined with the next two bags.
3. A small bag of cigarette tar, the same size as the semen bag, which appeared as having been scraped out of the lungs of a chain smoker. This was the coffee! When boiling water is added you spent some time twirling a defoliated twig in it (no teaspoons), and then you shook in some sugar and milk powder. The milk powder flatly refused to dissolve, and immediately gathered in small lumps on the surface and no amount of twirling could get them to do their proper job of integrating with its dark brother. (See! – Black and Whites don’t mix well!) When it came to drinking the stuff, the lumps would stick to your teeth and when you bit into them, you were rewarded with the sensation of chewing on a sweaty sock.
4. A bag of off-white sugar the same size as the ‘cool drink’.
5. A packet of four bullet-proof, light brown oblongs that fitted neatly into your top breast pocket around the heart area. These were biscuits or hardtack as they are correctly known, and are made from wheat flour, salt and water and then baked extremely hard. The things could last for years and were almost indestructible. It was claimed they could stop a bullet, that’s why we kept them in our shirt pocket. They were close to inedible and attempting to eat them without being softened in the ‘coffee’, you had a good chance of breaking all your teeth.
6. A bag, same size as the sticky stuff, resembling salted small white pebbles. Well, they were as hard as pebbles, but not quite as hard as the biscuits. These were peanuts. Not the nice Willards roasted type that you bought in the supermarket, these were the rejects. These were the nuts that fell on the floor whilst they were being pulled out of their shells. They were left to lie there for weeks till they became rock hard. Now they were so devoid of moisture, that whilst attempting to chew them, they set like concrete as soon as it had collected every drop of saliva in your mouth. You then used the twiddle stick from the coffee to pry the soapy tasting muck from the roof of your mouth where it had decided to take up permanent residence.
7. An aluminium, unmarked toothpaste tube, but filled with some stinking green/yellow pus. Inside was an incredibly greasy load of semi-rancid margarine. This tube obeyed Murphy’s Law every time it was squeezed. Instead of coming out the narrow hole exposed after removing the screw top, it instantly unravelled its rear end and fired its rotten guts all over your combat trousers. Since you couldn’t eat the biscuits, you now used them to scrape the greasy gunk from your crotch, leaving a lovely large stain. Since the stuff ponged so bad, you wouldn’t dream of cooking with it, so it got promptly chucked. Even the ants gave the stinking glob a wide berth.
8. Some huge yellow salty pills. These were to be taken every day to combat salt loss due to excessive sweating. They tasted vile.
9. A box of Lion matches. Besides for making foja (fire) they could be used as tooth picks and ear cleaners. My mate Addie used them as weapons. He had this very annoying habit that after he lit up a fag, he would place the used stick in the crook of his folded first finger and then use his thumb to flick it into your face.
One interesting thing about this box of matches was the logo. As little boys do, it had become common knowledge that if a thumb was placed over the lion’s head, keeping its mane visible, the body now resembled a semi-erect penis that had just ejaculated. 


Starch Options
1. A bagged handful of off-white, rock hard, wedding confetti. This was rice. Not the kind Uncle Ben would eat. The stuff took ages to cook, drank water like a fish and because there was no sieve available - it tended to turn into mush. If you added the sugar and the milk-powder it became the world’s worst rice pudding.
                                                or
2. A bagged handful of yellowish hard tubes resembling a gutted cheap ballpoint pen, now chopped into finger tip sized bits. Officially it was called macaroni, but any resemblance to its Italian origins was lost in translation. When mixed with milk-powder and sugar, it just beat the rice pudding in the competition of the worst things you can put into your mouth without gagging.

The Tin Options
Each tin was approximately 200grams (7 ounces) and had no paper labels. Upon opening them, the strange contents could be one of the following –
1. A blue boiled egg, some badly cloned Heinz type beans, and a dwarf’s circumcised penis, otherwise known as a cocktail sausage. This was the ultimate in bad eggs, so to speak, because the egg, which took up 80% of the tin, stank like a stink bomb and looked the same colour of a freshly hung corpse’s bloated face. It sat ponging away in some orangey coloured sauce that had a few brave beans wallowing in it whilst the baby sized dick hid under it.
We were actually warned about these tins. We were not to open them if the tin ends looked suspiciously like they were being pushed out from the inside. This unique feature in tinned food was due to the fact that the egg had finally come of age, and the frenzied bacteria that were happily eating it had farted so much, that the bulging ends would erupt imminently. There were rumours that the Selous Scouts, a unique fighting unit, would use them as grenades against the Gooks.
or
2. Frankenfarters.  These deathly pale objects were called this because they resembled Frankenstein’s fingers - after the nails had been neatly guillotined off and the bones pulled out. They smelt like they had been breeding in a swamp and once ingested they tended to produce abdominal gas that a Gook could smell from a click away.
or
3. More tiny penises, drowning in a thick orange swamp full of dodgy beans. This was really the same as the tin with the egg, but without it. This moved the food from inedible to barely edible.
4. An occasional and rare imported tin of Pilchards in tomato sauce and on the most wanted list. They tasted so lekker they would be traded for promised blind-dates with fellow recruits’ virgin sisters. Judging by some of the ugly buggers we had with us, you would have to be blind to date any of their sisters… or mothers for that matter.

Now certain members of our trainee buddies in arms were wise to the fact that ratpacks are used only in desperation. Jan, our leader was way ahead on that scale. His sausage bag really was full of swag. Out came real tins of just about any produce available in the shops and he soon had himself a regular feast prepared. Why hadn’t I thought of going shopping before we went on COIN? That was because I flatly refused to use my pay to feed my-self. I would rather starve… and so I did.
Another clever device Jan had brought with him was called a tin opener. An amazing device that could open tins! I hadn’t thought of bringing one of these either.  His was a SAP issue, a tiny folding hook type metal thingy, that hung around his neck on a shoestring. A little larger than a thumb, it was a flat piece of hardened steel with a folding flat blade. With leverage, the punctured tins contents would slowly be exposed. We now had to queue to open our food. Meanwhile, ‘Poor old Guy’, in frenzied desperation, had thrown his tin numerous times at one of the huge granite rocks that dotted around our ‘camp site’ until it burst its guts all over the show and then scraped the stuff into his aluminium ‘cooking’ pot…
So, after an excellent evening meal under the magnificence of the southern hemispheres’ stars, we went happily (not) to bed…