maanskyn.info

Perhaps the worst sentence I have ever seen.

However, upon closer inspection and application of basic tools of analysis into Jara argument, it becomes quite clear that calling for a “new democratic Left” is in fact nothing but another sadistic ploy by schadenfreude communists hell-bent on implanting confusion in the hearts and minds of the people of this country.

Mushwana is greedy and shameful and should be shunned

Oct 30th, 2009

by Pierre De Vos.

Family legend has it that many years ago when my father, in a letter to my grandfather, complained about the heat in Mussina (where we lived), stating that it was 103 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) “in the shade”, my grandfather wrote back: “If it is so hot in the shade, why the hell do you keep on going into the shade, then”. 

I was reminded of this story when I saw the reaction of former Public Protector, Lawrence (”Fat-Cat”) Mushwana, to newspaper reports that he received a R7 million (no, not Zim dollars, South African Rand!) golden handshake on the completion of his seven year term as Public Protector.

“People just want to see my name rubbished in the newspapers,” he is quoted as saying. To which I am tempted to reply: “If you do not want to see your name rubbished in the newspaper, and you do not want to be hounded and ridiculed wherever you go, then why the hell did you take R7 million of tax payers money and why did you expose yourself as the greedy, overpaid, civil servant that you are?’

As Public Protector, Mushwana was entitled to a judges salary (about R1.5 million a year). He took the job knowing that it was for a non-renewable term of seven years. He was also recently appointed as the chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission so he does have a new job and a good salary to boot. He will not go hungry and will be able to live a very comfortable life. (His life wil be a bit more comfortable, say, than the lives of 40% of South African children who is reported to suffer from malnutrition – even if had not received the obscene pay-out.)

No matter what he might have been legally entitled to (there seems to be a dispute about the legality of the payment), taking R7 million as a “golden hand shake” (after first suspending chief executive of the Public Protector’s office, Themba Mthethwa, for questioning the payout) is deeply and shockingly immoral and unethical. It shows a callous disregard for taxpayers and for the people of this country he is supposed to serve. It confirms that he is a callous human being, not much better than those guys who made the Reitz video, because like them, he also does not care about the suffering of fellow South Africans (a majority of whom are the very poor South Africans he might have pretended to care about).

Fucking hell.

Paul Trewhela on the spat between Kader Asmal and Fikile Mbalula:

It is worth mentioning here that while Professor Asmal earned his own living over decades in the real world of work as a teacher of law, Mr Mbalula is a professional rhetorician, with minimal life experience of independent employment. Almost his whole adult formation has been that of a member of a political elite, which generally earns its living in a manner similar to that of the beneficiaries of Black Economic Empowerment, as described by Moeletsi Mbeki in his book Architects of Poverty (Pan Macmillan, 2009) – that is, at a remove from the creation of real wealth for the society.

For this elite, an ever-enlarged state, with its scope for the feeding of political clients and dependents (as in the former Soviet Union), is its dream. Political cronyism is its lifeblood.

One recalls it was the government in which Professor Asmal was a minister which appointed its own political crony to the post of national commissioner of police, and shielded him for years, only for the commissioner eventually to be charged with corruption. Evidence revealed he had shown a subsequently convicted drugs baron a confidential file on the said drugs baron from the Metropolitan Police in London. There is no surety that public appointees of the Mbalula administration are any less likely to be its political cronies. There is something systemic in operation.

Neither member of the ANC - whether the former Minister of Education and drafter of the Constitution (Asmal) or the serving Deputy Minister of Police (Mbalula) – made reference in this fracas to a recent little fact, reported at some length on Politicsweb: that the leaders of the major Christian churches in South Africa have expressed their horror at an attack on a peaceful settlement of the poorest of the poor which left four people dead and numerous homes wrecked, carried out by local political authorities of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, while the police (for whom Mbalula is responsible) not only stood idly by, but arrested, charged and detained the victims while they let the murderers go hide.

Here, in the assault on the shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was a political action worthy of Il Duce. And not a word from the politicians of the governing party, whether from the worthy professor or from his wordy antagonist, the deputy minister of police.

Another step in the historical metamorphosis of the state, as it issues from the constitutional dreams of 1994….

This is entirely in keeping with what the British public seems to expect and want. It always strikes me when I visit that most Brits seem to fear an “uncontrolled” public. One wants one’s neighbours watched by the authorities to stop them from raping one’s children or shitting on one’s lawn.

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.

“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a statement.

George Monbiot writes:

Unlike some Guardian colleagues I have no problem with shoring up a carbon price to make nuclear – or any other low-carbon technology – become viable

Nuclear waste in an underground depot below Morsleben, Germany, an operation costing €2.2bn (Photograph: AP/Eckehard Schulz)

There’s little doubt that nuclear power could be produced safely and cleanly. There’s also little doubt that it seldom has been. The contrast between the way things are and the way they should be threatens to split the environmental movement from top to bottom.

The movement has many roots, but one is the terror of nuclear weapons in the 1960s, and the recognition that the atomic power industry in its early days was little more than a cover for weapons manufacture. “Nuclear power – no thanks” was the defining slogan of the older generation of greens. It a rational response to the greatest threat to life on Earth. Their continuing repulsion was justified by a shocking series of accidents and leaks, not only at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but also at Dounreay, Sellafield and many other sites.

Today, while the threat of nuclear war hasn’t disappeared, it is less urgent than the prospect of climate breakdown. The two industries – weapons and power – were split up (though in reality long after it came into force) by the Euratom treaty and modern reactor designs are much safer than their predecessors. As nuclear energy produces less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than coal or gas, and as uranium mining, though hideous, causes less damage than opencast coal, the argument has changed. Now the issue comes down to this: whether the nuclear waste will be disposed of safely, and whether it can it be done without the massive use of state funds.

The continued opposition of many in the environmental movement to nuclear as an element in a mix of renewables and other low-carbon technologies baffles me.

Some Background on Homeopathy

First, some obligatory background on homeopathy. If you’ve already heard this one, you can skip to the next section. There is also a more thorough overview of homeopathy at sciencebasedmedicine.org.

Homeopathy is a two hundred year old belief system invented out of whole cloth by Samuel Christian Hahnemann- it never was a legitimate science in its methods or ideas. It is based upon several magical pre-scientific ideas (wrongly called “laws” by proponents). The first is a manifestation of sympathetic magic – the law of similars, or the notion that like cures like. This is a common superstitious belief, but not based upon scientific reality.

So the first law of homeopathy says that you use small doses of a substance to treat symptoms created by that substance. The second law of homeopathy says that you don’t do that. (This is actually one of my favorite quips of James Randi from his lecture on homeopathy.) The second law, the law of infinitesimals, says that as you dilute the substance it becomes more potent – in direct violation of the very real laws of physics and chemistry. Homeopathic remedies are often diluted beyond the point where there is even a single molecule of active ingredient left (or basically, there are the background chemicals that are already present in the water being used).

Homeopathic remedies are therefore nothing but water, and no one has been able to demonstrate the ability to reliably distinguish ordinary water from a heavily diluted homeopathic “remedy.” Modern homeopaths try to rescue their outdated nonsense by saying that water has “memory.” Of course, you can’t rescue nonsense with more nonsense. No one has demonstrated that water can retain complex chemical information for any significant duration – certainly nothing close to what would need to happen for the information to be retained all the way through ingestion and transport through the blood to the site of action.

In short, from an historical and basic science point of view, homeopathy is bunk. From a clinical science point of view, it does not work. But there is a lot of noise in the clinical literature, and this is where Ullman performs his best legerdemain.

by Tom Raftery
22 October 2009

Photo credit clearbrian

I don’t get it. Really, I don’t.

Climate change is destroying the planet. Oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, the glaciers and polar ice caps are shrinking faster then even the most pessimistic projections, South Sea islands like the Maldives are becoming inundated by sea level rise and we are in the middle of a man-made mass extinction event where scientists predict that one-half of all species of life will be extinct by 2100.

This is all pretty horrific to contemplate, right?

And yet, when people try to protest peacefully against the polluters who are damaging the planet beyond all recognition, when people try to highlight and bring a halt to this madness so we can save some shred of our decency, as well as some of the lifeforms on the planet, what happens? They are confronted by lines of police in riot gear, at best, or battered and thrown in jail on trumped up charges, or worse.

Look up civil disobedience in Wikipedia and you see a photo of Gandhi! Other famous proponents of civil disobedience are Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Henry David Thoreau.

Why then, when people are looking to better our planet and by extension our lives, are they attacked and frequently imprisoned by the police, the very force who are supposed to protect and serve us? Obviously it is not us whom the police are protecting and serving. Shame on them.

Then today, I see a report that the provincial government in Alberta, Canada is threatening to unleash its counterterrorism plan if activists continue using civil disobedience to protest the tar sands. No really.

From the report:

Canada’s tar sands will singlehandedly produce more greenhouse gas emissions than Denmark, Ireland, Austria or Portugal by 2020 if the development continues expanding at its current rate, according to a recent report written by award-winning business reporter Andrew Nikiforuk

However,

“We’re going to be working very closely with industry and our solicitor general will be reviewing all of the guidelines we have in place,” said a visibly irritated Premier Stelmach in early October.

Fred Lindsay, the solicitor general, went a step further, suggesting the province might use its counterterrorism plan against future protests.

Now people trying to protect life on this Earth are terrorists? Seriously, it should be the people extracting oil from the tar sands who are subject to counterterrorism plans, if anyone.

When will we see the forces of law and order arresting executives of mining companies for their lack of concern for human rights, or lack of concern for the planet?

Paul Trewhela writes:

I pointed out some of the ambiguities of Hani’s life in a supplementary obituary published in the Independent (London) – the flagship newspaper of the Independent group internationally – on 24 April 1993. It is available on the net.

In the ANC in exile in Africa by the late Seventies, I wrote, there was “explicit control of opinion by a Stasi-type political police, the ANC security department, which built a string of prison camps across the continent. These came to house mainly dissident members of MK, as well as some South African spies. Torture and deaths, as Amnesty has found, were routine.

“MK recruits admired Hani for his courageous role in a 1967 campaign in Zimbabwe, as well as for organising the underground from a base in Lesotho. In 1984, however, a full-scale mutiny took place among MK troops in Angola, directed at repression by the security department and their apparent diversion from combat in South Africa itself. It was the ANC’s most severe crisis in exile.

“Hani played a vigorous part in suppressing the mutiny. By his own account, 18 or 19 ANC members were executed. As the most senior figure on the spot, he did not countermand these acts. Nor did he mitigate Gulag conditions for the mutineers.

“In 1989 he personally abolished representative committees in ANC camps in Tanzania to which former mutineers had been elected.

“A process of mythology came to surround Chris Hani. His heritage in South Africa – by which Soviet methods of command served non-racial ends, and the ‘armed struggle’ came to serve negotiations – is more complex.”

Simmy Lewis is 92 years old. He is Jewish and was a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII. Here is a letter he wrote to the Cape Argus (and gave to Open Shuhada Street) in response to a representative of the Western Province Zionist Council:

Dear Sir

The letter from Rodney Mazinter of WP Zionist Council “Oppression in eye of the beholder” refers. He strongly criticises the youthful group of shministim for their criticism of Israeli action in Gaza. It is very easy to do what your fellows do but very difficult to break away and publicly do what your conscience demands, particularly if that differs from the general viewpoint. They are to be congratulated for their honesty and idealism. True their group are not represented in the Israeli Knesset. This may well be a criticism of the Knesset.

Mazinter claims that the Israeli army’s security measures would not be necessary if the Arabs laid down their weapons, [in which case] there would be peace. Perhaps there also would be peace if Israeli settlers ceased to occupy Palestinian territories and withdrew to Israeli boundaries prior to the 1967 six day war.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel occupied Sinai and established settlements there. However when Israel withdrew the settlers and dismantled the settlements then a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel resulted.

[Regarding] Gaza, true Palestinians illegally fired thousands of rockets against Israeli citizens. Result 13 Israelis killed. In retaliation Israeli reaction led to approximately 1300 Palestinians killed – approximately 1000 citizens, very many women and children.

The United Nations appointed a world respected Judge, Richard Goldstone, to report. He laid blame on both sides. Suddenly his 600 page report is rubbished for criticising Israel. Nobody rubbished him on his anti-apartheid rulings in South Africa or his rulings in Rwanda.

During March 1945, I was a prisoner of war in Germany. I was part of a group of several hundred who underwent a mass punishment on the direct orders of the Gestapo. It lasted two or three days but was not particularly onerous. During the first Initifada, in about 1988, Israeli military inflicted a similar, not very onerous, mass punishment on approximately 400 elderly Palestinians including imams.

All nations are fallible. Humans have similar strengths and weaknesses. Israelis are no different. But they certainly resent criticism.

Yours faithfully

Simmy Lewis

We are unable to find the letter by Mazinter online, but for the kind of rhetoric being written by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) in response to the Goldstone Commission, see the SAZF website.