Debt? Yes, Please.

This is a cursory lesson in human frailties. It is very easy to say, “Oh, this happened in a Third World Country so, obviously, these people are more liable to such acts of profligacy.”

Yet it happens, frequently, on a large scale Worldwide. Everywhere.

This is an article dated 21^st April, 2014, from the ‘New Straits Times’, a highly respected newspaper published in Malaysia:

“NILAI: Mention Felda LBJ and sad tales of a crumbling community brought down by greed from instant wealth would come to mind for the locals here.

The area was just an ordinary settlement until it was selected to be part of the Negri Sembilan technology corridor, a joint-venture project between the State Development Corporation and Tabung Haji, 16 years ago.

The 504 settlers grabbed the limelight back when the transformation saw their lands being acquired, making them "instant" millionaires. It was a dream come true that after years of hardship, these families suddenly had loads of cash to spend and their lives began to change.

Apart from indulging in luxury cars, many of the settlers opted for enormous houses with extravagant furnishings, including swimming pools. Many men also took new wives.

With these changes came new challenges and problems, especially after the money ran out. Many abandoned their huge houses, which are now rotting reminders of the once "instant" millionaires. Some settlers passed away while others chose to migrate with their children to cities.

Mohamad Said Sulaiman, 57, said the settlement, which was left vacant for many years, was picking up now due to surrounding development.

Many people, especially staff of the new academic institutions nearby, had begun to rent or purchase the houses left by Felda's first generation.

Checks by New Straits Times showed that the settlement seemed poised for recovery with interest buzzing from outsiders working in the surrounding area, including near the Kuala Lumpur International airport, located 30 minutes away.

Said said many were unaware of the history of Felda LBJ and how the settlement got its name.

He said it was visited by the then US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was said to have brought cheer to the residents.

"I remember my father telling us how ecstatic the settlers were when Johnson arrived and some people did not sleep throughout the night.

"Imagine a US president, with his entourage, coming to a small settlement. It was definitely a highlight of their lives," he said, adding that the settlement was subsequently named after him in honour of his visit.

"We were also told by our uncles that Johnson tried his hand at tapping a rubber tree during his visit."

“Most of the settlers were really touched as he was willing to get his hands dirty,” he said, adding that things changed after the residents were blessed with good fortune three decades later.

 Husin Alias, 52, a security guard and a second generation settler, who witnessed the disintegration of his community and blamed it on their inability to handle the instant wealth, said the settlers received between RM1.2 million and RM1.4 million in cash, depending on the size of the land.

“It was a lot of money, especially in the 1990s, and many did not spend it wisely. Big houses mushroomed, men began ignoring their families and responsibilities and started drinking alcohol, gambling and chasing women. It was sad that they allowed money to change them.”

 Husin said he was lucky that his family was wise enough to lead a moderate life. His parents built a modest house and divided the money among the children while keeping some aside for the future.”

  Some settlers fell victims to investment scams and became embroiled in longstanding legal battles that they had no money left to complete the construction of their homes. With no land to return to many were forced to find jobs as security guards or venture into trading, but their income was barely sufficient.

The Felda LBJ is now known as Kampung LBJ as it is no longer a Felda settlement. The settlement’s entrance overlooks the route to the new Nilai Polytechnic in Labu, Negri Sembilan.”

The Federal Land Development Authority (more commonly referred to as FELDA).

Quite clearly there will be names here with which you will be unfamiliar but this does not detract from the overall message that we need to explore.

This is something that happens, as I said in the introduction, Worldwide. It is a feature of life in the so-called ‘Developed’ countries.

That feature is called ‘insecurity’.

We, as a race, have been inundated over the years—thousands of them, with the idea that there are the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. H.G.Wells made a story about them called ‘The Time Machine’. Other authors, including the magnificent Isaac Asimov, have also made reference to this societal idea.

The fact is, that for most people, they are uncomfortable with the concept of having money.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But it is true.

We have this little maggot in our heads that says, “We should be rich. We should, deservedly, have lots of money,” and yet, having got it we get rid of it as soon as we can.

Why? Because we are uncomfortable with it, it makes us uneasy.

Our comfort level is debt. We are so accustomed to being in debt that not having that debt makes us uncomfortable.

The idea for this is rooted in the class system that has been around since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans certainly had the belief that there are people who were supposed to have money and then there was the peasantry and that they were required to root around in the mud doing the work that would keep the rich (and famous, perhaps) living in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

Note that these people had ‘become accustomed’ to being wealthy. It was, and is, part of their lifestyle, their persona.

It doesn’t take very much to find stories of ‘riches to rags’. There are those who have won great fortunes on lotteries and football pools that have subsequently “spent, spent, spent” until they returned to destitution.

A famous such person in the United Kingdom was Viv Nicholson whose story can be read, in part on ‘Wikipaedia’.

She is not alone. There are countless people who have received fortunes—large and small, only to fritter them away to nothing in a relatively short time.

We dream of gold but we comfort in having nothing. Paradoxical?

Just a part of human nature, part of that complex mix of our psyche that makes us all, individually, interesting.

Flight MH370 – Discontinued?

It seems that the public interest or, at least, the media interest, in MAS Flight MH370 has waned.

It is, often, no longer on the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen and, in newspapers, it has been despatched to the inner pages if it is mentioned at all.

Of course there are still wild theories surfacing on the pages of ‘Facebook’ and other social media centres but the craze has, for the most part, died down.

We are now refocusing on the ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine and other, more sensational, issues.

The fact is that we have developed a mental numbness to the deaths of the people on board because it is taking too long to find the aeroplane; the whole issue is dragging out past our attention span that needs to be filled with something ‘amazing’ every so often.

So we turn our attention back to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and the latest episode of ‘Blacklist’—or whatever the new kid on the televisual block happens to be. At least therein lies some entertainment, a sop for our unimaginative minds to soak up while we await death in some form or other.

This is what we are doing. We are waiting for death. We are filling in the time between now and whatever awaits us in the hereafter by attending to vacuous entertainments.

Our brains are inured to pain and suffering to the extent that yesterday’s news and shock-horror stories are just humdrum tales today.

We need constantly topping-up on excitement to keep our nerve endings raw.

Might I just put it past you that between one and a half million and two million people have been killed in Afghanistan? Just Afghanistan. We shall ignore the millions of deaths that are, even now, occurring in the Niger Delta, South Thailand, Burma, Sudan, et al, through anthropogenic causes. We haven’t begun to mention that the Americas also have their problems in this regard.

So that didn’t ‘float your boat’, as it were?

Try this:

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties. There are 16 million people undernourished in developed countries (FAO 2012).”

Take very careful note of that last sentence and then, having read it and absorbed what it means, you may now hang your head in shame.

Why is this happening? Because we voted in the wrong people into Governments. Because we allow Corporate insensitivity to ride rough-shod over us.

Who cares if people are dying through hunger as long as the shareholders get their extra cent on the dollar!

Are you aware that the nation of Uganda is so rich in its potential agronomy that it is capable of growing enough food to feed all of Africa?

Why doesn’t it? Because tribalism and greed will not allow it. Because the political will to transport the food is not there. Because the people in Uganda are dying of AIDs through a failure to resist their vile traditions and filthy customs so there is nobody remaining to pick the crops.

Ancient traditions and cultures are preventing development Worldwide. Not just in the remote areas of backward countries but in the so-called ‘developed’ countries because people come from these backward places and they drag their revolting practices with them and claim the right to practice them. We do not stop them because that would be ‘Politically Incorrect’!

And so we turn our backs.

Thus the media, who know what our bell curves are for ‘news’ input is like, will shelve the subjects that they realise are ‘going off the boil’.

Am I some sort of rabid socialist? No. I am a human being with a fine regard for the suffering of others.

I am a person with a fine sense of justice.

That sense of justice is sometimes seen by others as a form of cruelty but I stand by my beliefs as I will stand by you for your right to your beliefs.

We fretted about the possible deaths of 239 souls on Flight MH370 for a month.

We are ignoring the millions who face death every day and those who pass on every day.

Because we are at the whim of the media, the governments and the corporations.

One day the ‘Black Box’ and ‘Cockpit Voice recorder’ (CVR) will be found and interest will be revived for a few days; there will be a news report on Somalia and we will sit up and take notice; there will be another outbreak of Ebola somewhere and our eyes will widen with vicarious fear for those in danger—but we will only react for a few minutes while the report is being relayed to us.

Then we will settle back and chuckle at another episode of ‘The Following’.

It is a comedy, right?

English as She is Massacred

There have been, in recent times, a number of occasions in which I have suffered a severe wince at the pronouncements of newsreaders both in British newscasts and American.

This is quite apart from the appalling standard of English employed by the people who post things on ‘Facebook’ and other social media sites.

Some of those people can be, in part, forgiven because they are, for the large part, uneducated or that they have foresworn to use any education they may have received for reasons best known to themselves.

I was also going to include people who are dyslexic but, on reflection, a friend of mine is dyslexic and, although his spelling is sometimes worthy of a raised eyebrow, his choice of words is never in question.

Let us start with a few examples in order to make my case reasonably (I hope) clear.

During the extensive reporting of non-facts regarding the disappearance of MAS Flight MH370 one of the newsreaders explained to the imagined assembled throng who were, as one, agog to hear her every word that the “...NTSB, an acronym for the National Transportation Safety Board...” We shall dispense with the rest of the story.

Firstly, the NTSB is not an acronym no matter how much she, and the rest of the assembled non-English speaking media people would like it to be. NASA is an acronym. This is because it is a word formed from the first letter of a series of words; hence National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. While I agree that NTSB does, indeed, stand for the National Transportation Safety Board the initials do not form a word; it is, thus, an abbreviation and not an acronym.

There are several ‘nyms’ about. We have ‘homonyms’ from the Greek ‘homus’ that means ‘same’ and is used in ‘homosexual’, for example. So ‘homonym’ is ‘same name’; this means words that are pronounced and spelt the same but have different meanings. A fine example is ‘spring’ that can mean a season of the year, a coil of metal that will return to its previous shape after compression or tension, a leap into the air or, even, water flowing from some point in the ground.

There are ‘synonyms’ and ‘antonyms’. A ‘synonym’ is a word having the same sense as another while an ‘antonym’ is a word opposite in meaning to another. ‘Fast’ is an antonym of ‘slow’.

While we are pondering abbreviations we might consider the increasing usage of the abbreviation ‘lbs’ for pounds. This does not exist. The written expression ‘lb’ is short for ‘libra’, which is the Latin for ‘pound’—and ‘book’, incidentally.

The plural for ‘libra’ is ‘librae’; you will observe, on close scrutiny, that there is no ‘s’ at the end of ‘librae’ thereby giving the lie to the abbreviation ‘lbs’. Thus the announcer on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ telling us that ‘so-and-so is “packing on the ell-beez” is nonsense. Of course, without the ‘zed’* at the end it is less of a catchy sound-bite, as they say.

There have been wars and natural disasters that have, we are reliably informed, decimated the population of a specific area.

Perhaps I could persuade you to examine the idea that we have a decimal coinage system and that the SI units of measurement are also decimal.

‘Deci’ is ‘ten’. Thus ‘decimate’ means to ‘reduce by one tenth’. It is a very precise measurement that is rooted in the myth that it was a punishment meted out to soldiers in the Roman Legions. In fact it comes from ‘decimatus’ meaning ‘tythe’. This is a tenth of your possessions or produce that is given to authority as tax; it continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where the authority was the Church that built tithe, or tything, barns to store it—usually on a Glebe, which is an area of land belonging to the Church.

Nowadays it has become common usage to refer to ‘decimate’ as the destruction of a large proportion of’ land or population, for example.

All languages change. There is little in the English language that existed even three hundred years ago that we should recognise as useful to us now.

We develop, words are introduced from other languages and words are made up from the development of science and engineering.

Three hundred years ago they would not recognise ‘cache memory’ for what it is now even if they knew the word ‘cache’.

Words, old words, take on new meanings. Some of them are at complete variance to their old meanings. Go to a ‘symposium’ and you would be going to meet a drinking partner; while a ‘sinister’ person is, disappointingly, merely left-handed. That is if we accept the purely etymological meaning!

And that, dear fellows, is what we call a ‘contronym’.

*’Zee’: transAtlantically.