Heart Condition

I'm so bored! But I've gotten through some of Pride and Prejudice (the DVD is a better investment of time), and also managed to get through a lot of VCD's I bought in Korea and never managed to watch - like Sleepy Hollow.

I also got a call from Jean Marie Neethling. I can hear by the sound of her voice that she is a very determined young lady. We agreed to meet tomorrow, after her swim. I'd like to interview her when I am healthy (for both our sakes), but she is going to Brazil next week.
If you refer to the very first posts of this blog - images of Amanda Beard - I'd love to do the same with Jean Marie. I think that will only be feasible in summer though, as the diving pool (at the stadium) is probably a green ice block at the moment.

I've also managed to write a very worrying piece called 'Eating Cake' which I am reluctant to post because people might think I'm suffering from depression, or about to slit my wrists.

Tomorrow night Fransa and a few others are getting together to watch the rugby. Should be fun. Hannes is flying to Jo-burg today too, so will be at his place some of the time, catching up on DSTV and picking up the latest on BBC. Continuously exposing oneself to the news is really not healthy.

Have 2 days to fully recover before school on Monday. It doesn't feel like it's enough, but I have really had enough with being stuck indoors. I'm looking forward to being back in the land of the living...and I can't wait to be back in the gym or outside exercising.

[2 of my Grade 10's approached me today and said they miss me. They've been transferred to a new teacher, and they say the noise is now unbearable, and the new teacher has absolutely no control over the class. I couldn't help a quick smirk.]


Eating Cake
Why we’ll soon be eating bread

I’ve posted an article called ‘Spoilt for choice’. It was written to reflect on the extravagant menu – of all things really – we have at our disposal. This decadent lifestyle we feel we are so entitled to will not continue for much longer, simply because it cannot. When a crowd of hungry peasants appeared, complaining, at the palace gates, Marie Antoinette wanted to know what was wrong. Someone explained that they didn’t have any bread, and her famous retort was, ‘Let them eat cake’.

In the same way today, we will be seeing more and more of the middle class wiped out by all manner of catastrophe, and one catastrophe will necessarily unleash another. None of this seems possible now, when we’re just beginning to get settled into luxurious lifestyles, and looking forward to 2010, when our country will be the focus of the world.
I think the party will be well and truly over quite some time before then.

Unfortunately, the habits we have in South Africa are the same the world over. We’re spending more than we are earning. But even if we did save (in South Africa) it wouldn’t matter. This is because the worldwide measure of value, the dollar, is a hallucinated, experimental money system. Oil is calibrated in dollars, and worldwide, we look to the dollar for the evidence of value. The question more and more are asking is: what is the real value of the dollar, since it is backed by nothing but confidence (or a lack of)?

Those voices crying out in the wilderness, when the European Union was being formed, cried out that a system that ties the world together, binds it for good and ill. We’ve seen the good. Being attached to America has helped countries – like China, Korea and Japan – and their economies stand up and grow. A disconnected system may prosper less, and prosper more slowly, but it cannot infect its neighbors, and a crash can be stopped at the borders. Not any more. We’re in this together, and the demise of the American Empire (a nice way of saying The Extinction of the Dollar) necessarily means financial crises to all. Those notes in your pocket are infected. To check, turn on your television or do an internet search. The price of whatever currency you own is calibrated in dollars. If the dollar value becomes meaningless, so does your money.

Let’s explore this alarming epithet a little further. Whether you believe in the economics espoused here or not, believe this: no money system can ever last. None have, and none will. All are flawed, and all have to be reinvented. This is because of tactics like usury/interest and the rest, which finally invalidates money as having value, especially when the value owed exceeds the money one has borrowed to begin with. On Thursday the 7th of August, South Africa and several other countries raised their interest rates. This is the beginning of a global slowdown that is rapidly gaining momentum. At the heart of this is a charging oil price. My confidence in predicting an imminent worldwide recession (and then, stagflation) is based on the absolute certainty that oil prices are never going to be cheap again. In fact, prices will continue to rise faster than most expect. The implications of this are simply devastating.

In the USA debt is at $66 trillion. To pay it back means every man, woman and child has to repay $200 000. It’s not going to happen.

The world is in a collective trance. Some already realize we’re in trouble, but, since no one else is panicking, they continue on as though nothing is wrong. Then the next group has a revelation, and does the same thing. Like H5N1 (which is still boiling out there – and how do you stop hot water from boiling?) the collapse of the US currency is a matter of when, not if.

A worthless dollar will mean a bear market. That’s also due, we’ve only managed to hold it off due to massive amounts of liquidity in the stock market. Lots of that liquidity has come in the form of hallucinated money – second mortgages, money generated from consumption generated from credit (in other words, not savings, not real value). In a bear market, value returns to its source. We’ll be in a bear market before 2010, and for at least 5 years after. I’m not sure whether the world in 2010 is going to be that interested in watching television or playing soccer. They might be trying to find ways to keep the lights on and putting food on the table. That’s right. The world.

I don’t expect even small groups to awaken in the light of this statement, or others made above. People will desperately pursue their delusions (like ethanol and hydrogen, or suburbia and hybrids). We’ll find ‘solutions’ that turn out to be temporary mitigators. We’ll all be surprised that things are much much worse than we could have imagined, and then it’ll get even worse. I expect a lot of disorder and desperate acts as people cling to their suburban investments, and vote new idiots into power. People will do anything to hold onto their investments, and resuscitate them, but it won’t do any good.

What will make this environment even more difficult to contend with will be the background of bad weather and illness associated with one financial and energy crisis after another. People still have a vague concept of what Global Warming or Climate Change portends. It portends the relocation of serious diseases, and it portends extreme weather: droughts, floods, storms, bitterly cold fronts and blistering heat waves. All these will converge (at increasing intensities) to stress human populations, and nature will hit us again and again, in a kind’ve human targeted global culling the likes of which we’ve never seen. The attrition is likely to gain momentum as we move deeper into the 21st century, and as resource wars become more common.

Some writers have suggested that countries will sink into themselves, that the world will become much larger again, and we’ll eventually see pre-Industrial systems redeveloping. Most of these will be local, and based around agriculture. How people will respond to the transition to farm worker is anybody’s guess. Communities will revolt, but where the transition is more peaceful, we may see the emergence of simple cottage industries. If the transition is orderly, we’ll be able to maintain some of our modern technologies, like computers, and cellular networks, but they’re likely to be fragments of what we’re used to today.

People who find themselves working as farm laborers may never figure out what happened, or why. Even if there is an awakening, and I doubt there will be, the great tide that is crashing ashore cannot be stopped. At best, instead of finding someone to blame, all we can do is invest locally, and be creative with our imaginings. We can also stop ourselves now, from continuing to invest in resources that have no future. Suburbia is one. Buy a home in a small, walkable community that is connected to a living, healthy system. You should also get used to not needing a car for everything. Buy a bicycle, and if local (natural/usable) resources don’t exist, develop them.

Specifically, let’s imagine ourselves (if we are the Middle Class) approaching the palace gates of our country (which one imagines is possibly the Parliament buildings). Someone might explain on our behalf that we don’t have any electricity, and we might imagine a statesman striding out into the light and proclaiming, ‘Well, here are free tickets to the 2010 World Cup.’ Do we let him live?