A grin without a cat: Covid-19

‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’ | Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (Carol, 74)

Since Corona-19 struck end 2019, humankind has obeyed. But who or what are we obeying and what might the consequences be?

Page in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ illustrated by Sir John Tenniel where she speaks to the Cheshire Cat

The future foretold

Locked down, curfewed, sanitised, medicated, mandated, and tracked; scary, but Wuhan’s only the grin. Let me try show you the cat.

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Jung, the cult of purity, post-apartheid South Africa and the Antichrist

First published by politcsweb (under the heading: ‘Banished from the Garden of Woke’)


When they said Repent, Repent I wonder what they meant

Leonard Cohen | The future

There’s a whole lot happening here in South Africa and the world that I was finding baffling and personally threatening, until I reread a pocket-sized volume of Carl Gustav Jung’s Answer to Job given to me years back by Jungian analyst, Paul Ashton. In this essay I’ll try to share what multiple readings of this numinous companion have revealed to me, in the hope that it’ll also shed light for you.

But note before we proceed. There are two versions of our story: scientific and numinous. This is the numinous ‘the Word’-version of John 1:1 capturing what is expressed though sacred texts, art and symbols and which, for Jung, is as real and objective as the official, scientific ‘A fireball of radiation at extremely high temperature and density’-version referenced in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary).

Enantiodromia

Jung believed that if:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)

Then God or Yahweh didn’t exist other than as a word or an idea, was timeless, yet ‘everything in its totality; therefore, among other things […] total justice, and also its total opposite’ (Jung 1958:15). So if the totality is void yet everything, timeless yet present, total justice, and also its total opposite, then we’re talking paradox, as in an antinomy (ibid. 10).

In order to exist, Yahweh needed somebody outside void to observe him (ibid. 16) which he set out to organise via the Big Bang in an act of enantiodromia which brought the universe into being.

When one state has a tendency to morph into its opposite, that is enantiodromia. Picture the alternate points or microdots at the heart of the taijitu, the Tao symbol representing yin and yang, coming into being or dissolving and in so doing affecting the whole (Ashton 2007) which, in the case of the Big Bang saw feminine void as yin morphing into masculine yang in the form of the cosmos which found form in the person of Adam ‘fashioned in (God’s) image as the Anthropos, the original man’ (Jung: 1958:17-18) on a tiny Goldilocks planet, on the outer reaches of the Milky Way.

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Covid-19’s not the main problem; it’s our response

Triumph of the germophobes. What more could go wrong?

Mark, my neighbour, and I shared beers the day before all this started. I deliver goat’s milk daily and collect his empty bottles. Must this end? Today I chatted with family for next to an hour on Zoom. Is this ‘the shape of things to come’?

I fear it might be, which is why I believe we must take careful stock and self-correct before it is too late. To this end, these are the facts as I see them, as of now:

  • the chances that Covid-19 will take you out are probably in the same ballpark as that of flu, TB, heart, cancer (related, please see the note right at the end)
  • the lockdown has served its purpose
  • our choices today will determine our future

Coved-19 is going to run its course, like it or not

Because the current version of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, tagged as Covid-19, is novel (i.e. new) experts are struggling to understand how it works.

What is however becoming abundantly clear is that original predictions of millions dying from the virus were way-overinflated. Apropos, watch Dr Ioannidis’s early cautionary (embedded link below), and that of Dr Sucharit Bhakdi.

Instead it seems that young people will mostly shake off the virus while the elderly and those with secondary health issues (obesity, diabetes, heart, etc.) must take particular care.

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When it comes to the property clause in our Constitution, watch the ANC like milk on fire

Section 25 of the South African Constitution sets out your and my rights with respect to property. If South Africans are not ultra-vigilant, the ANC will gut those rights.

The State’s right to expropriation without compensation (EWC) is implicit in Section 25 of the South African Constitution, nothing needs changing.

Not so, argues the ANC and their EFF allies. EWC must be made explicit and to that end the ANC initiated and managed a multi-party parliamentary process culminating in a draft proposal (see below) to amend Section 25, which was Gazetted just before Christmas with a deadline for comments on the 31 January 2020.

Now, mere days before the deadline, we learn that the draft proposal for comment is in fact a dummy or, more exactly, a decoy.

This is the proposed draft amendment (changes to the Constitution indicated in bold)

(1) No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.

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South Africa and the question of truth

Hendrik Mentz says our current debate is riddled with category errors

First published by politcsweb

‘There is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us’ (Vasily Grossman)

For Maxim Gorky, there were two truths, and he advised Vasily Grossman to write the new truth of the (Communist) Revolution into his first novel, Glϋckauf, if he wished it to be published [1]:

We know there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates […] it is a disgusting and tormenting truth. It is truth we must struggle against and mercilessly extirpate. [2]

Grossman wrestled with Gorky’s dualistic epistemology until he concluded – as Plato had centuries before – there can only be one truth:

‘No, Marusya […] You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start playing at two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too – above all. When things are as bad as they are today – there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us. If the Germans enter Stalingrad, you’ll learn that if you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either. It’ll be the end of you.’ [3]

South Africa, and the question of truth

The challenge of what constitutes truth also faces South Africans today.

During the time of the first democratic elections in the country which ended apartheid (1994), our truth was the rainbow nation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela. Now, however, a quarter of a century on, the belief in our oneness has been shattered. Instead, Gorky’s sense of ‘a vile and dirty’ past with its ‘disgusting and tormenting truth’ is what now prevails with accusations of ‘white monopoly capital’, ‘you stole the land’ – and which must now be ‘mercilessly extirpated’ by a new truth that will liberate ‘the people’ from the shackles of a white colonial past.

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No one can tame a fence like Japie Presence

If you live in Suurbraak or its environs and need a fence constructed or repaired, a chicken hok rooikat or otter-proofed, bollards constructed or your lawn mowed, then Japie Presence is your man.

Jakob Present repairing a chicken hok
A rooikat (caracel or African lynx) took out my two ducks one night after the other. Jakob knew what I was up against, fortified the gate using a bent dropper I had on hand and ensured the base around the cage was impregnable and end of problem
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Quid pro quo. I’m voting Cope

This time round I’ll be voting Cope for national, and DA for the Western Province. Here are my reasons.

Why I won’t be voting ANC

What brought my world crashing was our President (no less) Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa announcing to the nation that the Constitution must be changed in order to reflect the prevailing racist trope that white people constitute ‘the original sin’ (see below), and are therefore to blame for a quarter of a century of failed land reform – and not the ANC.

His was my Piet Retief moment; treachery.

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LinkedIn Learning is a life-changer – or was, for me

This unsolicited post will argue that you should take out a trial subscription to LinkedIn Learning to rivet those joints: yours and/or your employees

Photography has featured strongly in much of my working career in education (photographic clubs, school magazines, newspapers, newsletters, websites, press releases and social media), so I reckon I knew something about how to shoot a reasonable image.

However, mine was always just-in-time learning based on a lifetime of hands-on, manuals, physical courses, YouTube and Adobe Support videos.

In short: Heath Robinson.

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Barrydale and books go together

When you conjure Barrydale do you think of literature? If you do then you’ve discovered The House of Books.

Anton de Villiers Fourie in the atrium to his House of Books, Barrydale

Situated in Van Riebeeck Street near to ABSA and the OK, one enters through a garden into an atrium of books. On entry turn to the room on your left: books, the passageway: books, in every nook except the bathroom: books. Additionally you’ll find thousands of CDs and DVDs in the hallway and elsewhere.

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The Buffeljags is running dry

“This is the first time in 30 years the river has been this low,” reports Bertrim Oliver, who lives in Suurbraak, a small village that straddles the Buffelags Rivers on the way to or from Barrydale in the Western Cape.

Where I live, in line with the confluence of the Caledon and Buffelags, neither river seems to flow anymore, and the Buffeljags is fast drying up.

Where the Caledon River meets the Buffeljags in Suurbraak

“Never seen it this bad,” comments Matthew Mentz, “but we have had worse droughts, which makes me think water tables are disappearing.”

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I try to see things as they are