The Dalai Lama
Weblog 25th March 2009-03-25
Dateline Jozi
It is hard to imagine a governing party in a working democracy taking the kind of liberties with public credibility in the run up to a national election that the ruling party is taking in South Africa’s immanent election, and getting away with it. Perhaps though South Africa is no longer a working democracy?
Some would say in retrospect that 2009 was when politics really got dirty, with fingers in the eyes to opponents, following a spray of dust to block the nostrils. Others argue that a country is only truly a democracy once the voter has changed the ruling party on a few occasions. Until then it is simply an emerging democracy.
This campaign of the ruling party is a defensive fighter’s response to some very real problems that no main persons want to deal with, yet. This is throwing dust in the face of your enemy as it advances. Distraction and misdirection: Keep all opposition in reaction mode so you never have to defend your record and no one else gets around to presenting their plan. In the meantime advance your troops.
It is a mean dust trail and one that rightly cannot be ignored. The ruling party must be most certain that they will walk this election again and again time without plunder to show such disregard for the State constructed out of the Struggle.
For us oldies the past month or so reeks of the old days when the Apartheid Regime would make some outrageous contribution to our daily fair … and then bluster their way through a series of denials backed up with fists and whatever for those too persistent in pursuit of transparent clarity.
The Minister of Foreign affairs [Mrs Dlamini-Zuma] this morning made a defence of the idea that sport and politics don’t mix that would have done her predecessor [Mr Botha] proud, and would undoubtedly confuse the hell out of Mr Peter Hain who organised umpteen campaigns against Apartheid sport, presumably with Mrs Zuma’s blessing, back in the bad old days. I imagine that Ms Zola Budd, wherever she is, feels a sense of chagrin that the people who destroyed her more than promising career would now be protecting her participation.
Or was there a difference between the apartheid regime’s violation of human rights in South Africa and the Chinese Government’s violation of the rights of Tibetans following their occupation of the Tibetan State for the past half century. The head of the SA Communist Party believes so.
Presumably the taxi drivers who this week vowed on the national news to disrupt the world cup because [apparently] their rights to terrorise motorists are being violated by the bus rapid transport system coming into being are ok, because they are not mixing politics with sport: their grievances are purely commercial.
The ruling party’s silence on the threats of taxi drivers contrasts curiously with their rudeness to one of the planet’s most revered figures. Nonetheless this strange disinterest in the affairs of the world pales compared to the way the Party has behaved recently over a range of issues that should affect voter responses but quite obviously are not going to, perhaps because the voter base of the party approves of their positions.
To mention a few: The shock release on medical parole, from a fifteen-year prison sentence of the Presidential candidate’s benefactor, Mr Shabir Shaik. The circumstances become murkier under cross-examination and the apparent fairness gap between his treatment and the plight of thousands of other alleged terminally ill prisoners is largely ignored, both by the government and its supporters..
Then there is a red herring, soften- them- up- for- bad –news report that the national prosecuting authority intends to drop its always-pending-[alleged corruption and racketeering ] case against Mr Zuma the prime Presidential candidate in the election…
Then there was is the brief ‘uproar’ over the listing of struggle icon, and convicted fraudster, Mrs Madikazela –Mandela for the national assembly. At number 5 there is no question that this formidable woman will take her rightful place in the national assembly, and the volume of antipathy over this is at a lower level of confusion. As was the bizarre endgame played out by another [lesser] struggle icon Karl Niehouse the ruling party’s answer to Karl Rove the Bush fixit man, who confessed tearfully to a stunned nation that he was a lying crook who deceived people over money. The list of circumstances in which the ruling party demonstrates it disinterest in the things that bother ordinary people is almost endless, and so ingrained has dismissive behaviour become that few people even bother to take note of it anymore aside from uptight opponents and reject larneys.
Nonetheless all this was light dust indeed in retrospect, when played out against their latest attempt to test how far they can fool all of the people and still win an absolute majority from the suckers.
To enlarge on my opening observation: This week the government of South Africa defended its commercial interests in the 2010 World Cup by playing the most bizarre card played by this capricious government in its fifteen year history in office. They banned the Dalai Lama from attending a world Peace conference organised to promote the World Cup competition.
Their reasoning: The Dalai Lama’s attendance was not in the country’s national interest. This phrase that has popped up a few times lately is again reminiscent of the Auld days and usually meant not in the ruling party’s interests.
It is hard to imagine how the Dalai Lama, more than likely the world’s most elegiac figure now that Mother Theresa has died could cause a rift in South Africa’s national interests.
I also have no recollection of a time when the public response to a ruling party decision was so overwhelmingly negative.
Fortunately for the ruling party the psychographics of soccer supporters is so diametrically different to the psychographics of Dalai Lama supporters with only marginal areas of overlap that most of those who intend to party at the world cup have only one world piece in mind, and it’s not the Dalai Lama, bless his withered buttocks.
What remains to be tested is whether the ruling party supporters numbered in any quantity amongst the unaccustomed outpouring of unhappiness at the bizarre behaviour of the government of the huge response to Tim Modisa’s after eight debate yesterday..
Top honours for the day go to the fellow [who may have been called] Thabo, who had the unenviable task of multi-tasking his defence for the Government while seemingly taking his daughters to school: to judge by the happy squealing backgrounds [one was reminded of Perlman’s great interview with a cabinet minister in some remote part of the continent discoursing on his country’s chances while feeding the chickens.].
The Party Spokesperson, remained firmly stoic in the face of a tirade of rage and confusion that had even the redoubtable Mr Tim Modisa amazed. If ever one had evidence that the national broadcaster’s prime radio station has some credibility it was the after eight debate on the Dalai Lama’s rejection. Even a cabinet minister was appalled [Mrs Hogan Min of Health]
… Will she be fired is the next question. She should be is my answer.
Thabo handled her betrayal with stunning fortitude. Even the loquacious Mr Leon, a well known, fellow guest with Thabo X , was silenced by the fellow’s dogged fortitude.
Of course the Party spokesperson was never able to give a direct NO to the repeated question. Did the Chinese government exert pressure on the Government to silence the meddlesome monk? Did the master prevaricator of the week draw the line at outright lying?
Perhaps he worked on a need to know basis and he didn’t need to know that. Perhaps these are the troops?
A day later the head of the Communist Party came on line to defend the decision, and the public was subjected to a delightful exercise in prevarication whereby the forcible takeover [in 1950]of the independent [Theistic] Kingdom of Tibet by China was represented as reclaiming an intransigent part of “one China”, and the efforts of the Tibetans to reclaim their independence was in effect likened to the behaviour of the late Ian Smith in unilaterally declaring Rhodesian independence.
The takeover of Tibet by China was a colonial act equivalent to South Africa deciding to annex Lesotho on the ground that it is surrounded by that country and subject to a “One South Africa” policy, and far from the Dalai Lama being a dissident priest he, like Nelson Mandela with whom he was to share the podium at the aborted Peace Conference, is a liberation leader. Obviously the communist party of South Africa can’t get it head around the fact that people want to be rid of communist rule where it still applies.
Anyway none of this had any effect on the voters who, in a series of extreme low poll by-elections on the 25th March sent the ruling party back into office by huge margins… If anything the ruling party seems more popular than ever, and so I stick by my prediction that the ruling party will win the by a landslide in a low poll election with the possible loss of the Western Cape.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Is COPE a Trojan Horse
The beloved country is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries. I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades.
We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”? Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair [former Pom PM aka Phoney Haire]admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”….
I refer here to those proponents of the completely utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism; the perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America, and providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by the socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing of beneficiaries of AA, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and far more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful... Being incompetent in Governmnent has trained them to be incompetent as campaigners for a new party.
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing form their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence. One reads about “purging” and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… and may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.]COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
% Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They [the authors]present an intriguing essay [they [the a of IT Party]do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much will the general public swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades.
We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”? Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair [former Pom PM aka Phoney Haire]admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”….
I refer here to those proponents of the completely utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism; the perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America, and providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by the socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing of beneficiaries of AA, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and far more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful... Being incompetent in Governmnent has trained them to be incompetent as campaigners for a new party.
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing form their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence. One reads about “purging” and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… and may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.]COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
% Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They [the authors]present an intriguing essay [they [the a of IT Party]do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much will the general public swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
Is COPE a Trojan Horse
Can Cope cope?
The beloved country [SA] is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries.
I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They [the ruling party] have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades. We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”?
Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”…. I refer here to those proponents of the completely, utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism. The perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America./ The same philosophy now providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people, that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing off beneficiaries, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and for more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful..
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing from their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC [ruling party] is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence like for instanc e in the civil service. One reads about “purging”; and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… said person may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.
COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
%age Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They present an intriguing essay [they do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.
I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much the general public will swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.
You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
The beloved country [SA] is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries.
I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They [the ruling party] have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades. We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”?
Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”…. I refer here to those proponents of the completely, utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism. The perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America./ The same philosophy now providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people, that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing off beneficiaries, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and for more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful..
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing from their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC [ruling party] is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence like for instanc e in the civil service. One reads about “purging”; and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… said person may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.
COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
%age Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They present an intriguing essay [they do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.
I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much the general public will swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.
You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
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