Initially, I heard that a klonkie was a black playmate for a white kid in South Africa. Each kid would often have a black playmate growing up who was a child of one of the servants, and they would be somewhat inseparable, but as they grew up, they would grow apart from one another.

The Dictionary of South African English, though, says:

klonkie, noun
/ˈklɔŋki/

Origin:
AfrikaansShow more

derogatory, offensive
Of black or ‘coloured’ people: a patronizing name for a youth; an insulting name for a man; klong.
1953 A. Paton Phalarope (1963) 25The klonkies there, the small black boys, having learned it from the soldiers who camped in Venterspan during the war of 1939, saluted him.
Show more
1989 J. Hobbs Thoughts in Makeshift Mortuary 277‘The klonkie up the ladder?’ He jerked his head at Jake. ‘He’s just a painter who was recommended to us.’

Klong is also interesting:

klong, noun
/klɔŋ/

Origin:
See klonkie.

offensive
klonkie.
1913 C. Pettman Africanderisms 268Klong,..The word is in common use in various parts of South Africa, and is applied to coloured males without reference to age, much as the word ‘boy’ is among the English colonists; indeed so far has the original sense disappeared that the expression ‘ou’ klong’ (lit. ‘old small youngster’) is by no means uncommon.
1963 A.M. Louw 20 Days 71‘He is a big klong now. I can’t work for him any more. He must work for me. What does a mother bring children up for?’ she said.

Very interesting material - check out more here:

Home - Dictionary of South African English

Dictionary of South African English - Over 4000 uniquely South African words across three centuries, browsable by category.

^dsae.co.za

Been perusing Youtube and Minds and Bastyon along with the Fediverse and all I can find is negativity, the world is going to end because we have too many people and are going to bake ourselves in CO2, this despite the fact that where I live over the last 40 years the number of winter days below freezing have more than doubled, sea levels are going to flood, well measurements are averaging about one foot in three hundred years, so I don't see this as a big threat. Or if we don't bake in global warming, we're going to live in severe poverty and poor health because there aren't enough young children to replace functional adults as they retire and make all the goods and services, so this scenario says there won't be enough workers, but then on the flip side people are saying AI and advanced robotics are going to replace us all and there won't be any jobs.

The only existential threat I see are the fear mongers trying to scare us all into obedience so they can control and depopulate us. The ultra rich and greedy, the Klaus Schwabs and their Nazi armies, the Bill Gates and his mass murder agenda, these are the real threats, the Askhanazi bankers like Rockefellers and Rothchilds that want to control the worlds money supply, they all use fear to control us. And it makes sense that they would use fear because it is hard-wired into us as a powerful emotion. Before modern times we were at the mercy of larger predators, lions, and tigers, and bears oh my! Now the really dangerous predators are the ultra rich. But we have them out numbered a million to one, all we need to do is STOP being afraid, unite, and remove them from the planet.

This climate emergency is really so much bullshit, the planet has GREENED as a result of increased CO2 by around 50%, much desert now supports life, and few modern buildings will last three hundred years or will be placed within a foot of sea level. Most people won't notice a 2-3 degree change in temperature. And there has historically been NO increase in violent storms, hurricanes and tornadoes despite the doom sayers prophesies. Forest fires haven't increased, except in limited areas where forest management policies have changed allowing more undergrowth to accumulate, such as in Californicatia. And realistically, the sun is getting warmer and in half a billion years will boil away the oceans and this particular cosmic experiment will be over.

Perhaps mankind is destined to just be a flash in the pan and gone, and certainly if you allow Klaus, Gates, and the rest of the Askhanazi psychopaths to rule the world, it will be, but I would rather prefer to see us continue to evolve and develop and become a truly interstellar species, and I do see a way forward for this to happen but it really require we apply ourselves. First, we need to get rational about what to fear and what not to fear, and instead of looking at ways we can end humanity, look for ways that we can preserve and enhance it, because it is human nature to go where we are looking.

So let me suggest this, there is a way the natural reduction in birth rates that has happened with urbanization AND AI can actually work mutually towards our benefit BECAUSE they are opposite effects on the job market that could cancel themselves out. And to the degree we have this lower than replacement level of birth rate, much of it is due to urbanization much is also due to fear, fear of bringing children into a declining world as sold to us by the fear mongers, when the truth is the world, our living standard as a whole, is actually better than it's ever been. Freedom not so much, but that loss of freedom is largely a function of our unwillingness to accept responsibility and allowing ourselves to be motivated by fear rather than by more positive things like love, and growth, and development, and exploration.

If instead of pulling back on energy production and consumption, we instead focus on increasing our energy supply with newer more sustainable BUT reliable and economic sources, and reliable and economic is where wind and solar fail but even they can be improved, both through improved storage and through a super grid that allows the natural variability of these supplies to be spread across a larger portion of the planet. We can do this by creating a super-grid, a grid where long distance transmission lines that use extremely high voltage DC or DC superconductive lines to transmit energy efficiently over very large distances allowing geographical diversity to help balance demand and supply.

I believe our carbon foot print is a problem that will take care of itself because extractive technologies get more expensive over time and burning hydrocarbons for energy will eventually price themselves out of the market, and if we allow this to happen over time we will adapt and replace it with better sources. There are today good alternatives, there are new drilling technologies such as microwave and laser drilling that can allow us to reach productive geothermal resources almost anywhere in the world. This means of energy production is 24x7 base load energy that we need. There is a type of reactor known as a molten salt reactor, some designs can be efficient breeders. These are not only extremely safe because all of their safety mechanisms are passive relying only on physics and not technology, but also they are inherently self regulating and the breeders can burn the actinides in existing waste reducing the nuclear waste disposal problem from a million year problem to a 300 year problem because the fission products all decay to a level equal or less to that of the original mined ore within 300 years.

One of the reasons we fear is that we are not so good at extrapolating into the future. The assumption is always made that our technology 100 years from now will be no different than today, but to understand the absurdity of that assumption just look at 100 years into the past.

Economics, this is a real problem. A lot of folks looking at the evils of capitalism seem to want to push us into a world communist system, but if you look at historical communist successes you'll find the number is exactly equal to zero. The big advantage of capitalism is the automatic adjustment of demand and supply and that it rewards people in a given sector that are best at promoting that sector. Communism loses in both of these regards, it doesn't get people doing things were they can be the most productive and it does not balance supply and demand. Where capitalism results in an unequal distribution of wealth, communism results in no wealth to distribute so everyone is equally poor.

Part of what has allowed capitalism to run amuck is the Ashkanazi banking system of creating money out of thin air and loaning it at interest. People who promote "real money" such as precious metals or crypto need to understand they are only replacing one fiat currency with another because at the end of the day you can't eat crypto or gold, it only serves as a medium of exchange, the only advantage these have over paper is that they are a limited resource, and that would be not a bad thing if and only if those commodities weren't needed for something else, in the case of gold and silver, for much modern electronic technologies, and in the case of crypto, it is at tremendous waste of energy.

Iceland has proven that capitalism can work well if you simply jail the Ashkanazi bankers. Russia by tying the Ruble to gold and kicking the Askhanazi bankers out has massively improved their economy, but this is the real reason the Ashkanazi are trying to drive NATO up to Russias borders, to punish them for threatening their banking scam. I think we need to do what Iceland has done world wide. Not necessarily what Russia has done though better than doing nothing.

Anyway, hoping here that I can get people to see there is a way through if we're smart, don't let fear drive us over the cliff, and proceed by taking ownership of our future and acting responsibly.

Just wild:

Earlier this month, Free Speech Systems proposed a bankruptcy plan that would pay an annual salary of $520,000 to Jones and leave $7 million to $10 million to annually pay creditors, including the victims’ families.

This is all really wild, IMO.

The guy is being milked. Basically everything he does from now on will largely benefit people he is completely disconnected from, and who were not actually negatively impacted by his work.

It's a travesty.

Alex Jones reportedly concealing funds to avoid $1.5bn payout to Sandy Hook families

The conspiracy theorist was ordered to pay the families of the victims damages for claims that 2012 shooting was a hoax

^{Maya Yang (The Guardian)}

Posted on March 17, 2023

We will be upgrading our server kernels on Saturday the 18th starting at 11pm Pacific Daylight Time. Expected downtime is about ten minutes per service with the exception of Yacy which can take half an hour or longer to rebuild database after a reboot.

This will affect all of our services, free and non-free, virtual private servers, shell services, e-mail, and web hosting. The free services are the fediverse services, friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and yacy.eskimo.com/.

Real numbers are starting to come out.

Russia has spent months pummeling the country with missiles, seeking not only to cause destruction but also deplete Ukraine’s air defense stocks. Ukrainian soldiers have described acute shortages of basic ammunition, including mortar rounds and artillery shells. And upwards of 100,000 Ukrainian forces have died in the year-long war, U.S. officials estimate, including the most experienced soldiers.

They're ready to wind this down, I think.

‘Ukraine doesn’t have any time to waste’: U.S. races to prepare Kyiv for spring offensive

Washington is increasingly concerned about Ukraine’s dwindling supply of ammo and air defenses.

^POLITICO

Absolutely we need to get to the bottom of this and sort the media out.

It's good to see that Cruz is still running with this issue:

Cruz sent four letters to the chief officers of TikTok, Meta, Twitter, and Google asking for information about their platforms’ algorithms.
...
“As you are well aware, social media companies rely on algorithms to not only moderate content, but also to surface personalized recommendations to users,” Cruz said.

He emphasized the ways these algorithms play a tangible role in politics, noting that “Recommendation systems play an increasingly ubiquitous role in selecting content for individual consumption, including by promoting some content, using product design elements to prominently display recommendations, and downranking or filtering disfavored content and accounts.”

Later in the letters, Cruz wrote, “In a world where seven out of ten Americans receive their political news from social media, the manner in which content is filtered through recommendation systems has an undeniable effect on what Americans see, think, and ultimately believe.”

“At their best,” Cruz added, “recommendations help users discover interesting or relevant content that they might not otherwise find on a platform.”
...
But at their worst, Cruz said, these algorithms can be a recipe for addiction and a pipeline to obscene or harmful material, or can be redirected for partisan ends.

“[R]ecommendation systems can also fuel platform addiction by feeding users an essentially infinite stream of content,” Cruz said, adding that these algorithms “can be especially dangerous when recommendations make it easier for vulnerable users, especially teenagers, to find objectively harmful content, such as content that promotes eating disorders and self-harm.”

All of this is true and I sincerely hope that he is invested in bringing big tech to heel.

... But we cannot count the number of times that we have been disappointed by politicians, can we ?

Ted Cruz Launches New Senate Probe, Demands Answer From Big Tech Chiefs

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has launched a new Senate probe into Big Tech through the Senate Committee on ...

^{www.theepochtimes.com}