The South African media is supremely useless. This includes TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, agencies, news services, freelancers, and the so-called internet news sites.
The world media is just as bad, possibly worse.
Take for instance the much-reported "human tsunami" supposedly crashing over the South African border from Zimbabwe at the rate of thousands a day.
You would think there would be a photo of lines of people going over the border, or crowds at Beit Bridge (where, we are told, thousands are crossing "legally" every day.) Or at least a photo of crowds at the refugee centre at Marabstad in Pretoria.
Instead: nothing, except a couple of staged shots of a black jumping razor wire fence.
To help all those incompetent affirmative News Editors out there: Beit Bridge is 500 km from Johannesburg. Wouldn't it be worth it to get a reporter with a cameraman to check on Beit Bridge, just to make sure there really is a tsunami?
Especially because there are no such photos to be found out there on Youtube. A Google research returns many hand-beaten Zimbabwean sites, all without photos....
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
SA Media Reports Invisible Tsunami
Call To Shut Down Insitute of Security Studies
What sort of fool works for the Institute for Security Studies, a non-profit trust with shady funding ie. taxpayers' money?
What sort of idiot applies for a job at a body with such a Kafka-esque name anyway?
On both counts, it appears, only incompetents fulfilling a quota.
Consider the ISS conclusion about the 2007 crime statistics for SA published recently.
"Crime levels in South Africa remain one of the key challenges facing the country. [Do they mean low crime levels or high crime levels? One wonders.] The annual release of the crime statistics by the South African Police Service (SAPS) provides detailed information on the levels of reported crime. [As if the SAPS has any idea what crimes are being committed in SA!] Although these statistics are not the only indicators of actual crime levels in the country, they are extremely useful when trying to monitor and understand South Africa’s crime rate. [Actually they are completely useless. The only true indicators are the actual occurrences, which no one in authority has any clue about. We would have hoped the ISS had the data.]
And they pay these dimwits!
* The Institute for Security Studies (ISS) was originally established as the Institute for Defence Policy by the fresh-faced Dr Jakkie Cilliers (see below), and Mr PB Mertz in 1991. Believe it or not, Jakkie is still there, surrounded by dubious characters. The money (our money) must be good.
To see the dusky beauties that are given jobs at the ISS these days, go here
Monday, August 6, 2007
The Battle For Afrikaans Is Over
Afrikaans-speakers with the best brains left South Africa long ago. They live in Toronto, Perth, Dublin, Atlanta, etc., married to English-speaking girls and boys, and speaking English.
The handful that remain in South Africa are protesting against changed street names, showing they are completely unaware that the battle for Afrikaans is over. English won.
* Only a couple of purely Afrikaans-medium schools remain
* Afrikaans universities have been anglicised, Stellenbosch too
* The so-called Afrikaans press (BEE applies there too) is anglicising Afrikaans
* The KKNK Afrikaans arts festival is run by a liberal English-speaker from Wits
* The envisaged Afrikaans Forum is under the auspices of a BEE media group
* Afrikaans- speaking rural whites are being removed from the landscape
* Afrikaans-speaking coloureds are being marginalised politically and economically
* FW de Klerk and his family live safely in London (he has an English-speaking wife)
* Constand Viljoen did not demand the Afrikaans homeland agreed on at Codesa
* All government employees refuse to speak Afrikaans on demand
* The print on product packaging is no longer in Afrikaans and English
* The FAK has lost the political muscle and brainpower that inspired it previously
* The last generation of Afrikaans-speakers with money are government pensioners
Pathetically, a few remaining Afrikaans-speakers are thinking of starting a Taalinstituut. In other words, they are back to square one of the taalstryd.
Afrikaans has been relegated back to where it came from: the kitchen and the farm.
The only radical champion of Afrikaans remaining lives in Dainfern and flushes his toilet with his pool water.
Foeitog!
What A Lotto Fraud and Corruption
The Story So Far
South Africa's National Lottery ceased to operate in March 2007. The Department of Trade and Industry trotted out a number of bizarre excuses for this.
They said it was found that "prominent ANC leaders" including the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, had undiclosed interests in the lottery operator Uthingo, as well as the preferred new one, Gidani.
Of course the media never asked why it had taken the government five years to discover this about Uthingo.
Then the government backtracked when it was supposedly discovered that Gidani had a dubious partner. Word was put out that its international partner, Intralot, had "a perceived questionable international record". Much nonsense was then spoken about a flawed contract and the matter wound up in court.
At the end of July a Saturday newspaper said Trade and Industry minister Mandisi Mpahlwa had been "sitting on a recommendation for eight weeks" by the National Lottery Board to appoint Gidani as the operator. Gidani said it knew nothing.
By 6 August 2007 there was still no lottery. Over 8 000 terminals stood idle across the country. Sales agents were not earning and good causes were not getting their due....
Now Tell Us This Ain't True...
* In-fighting among ANC politicians as to who should get a cut of the lucrative lottery pie has stalled the award of the operating licence
* There was massive fraud at the lottery by means of printing out tickets retrospectively ie. a few seconds after the lottery draw
* A cursory actuarial examination of the lotto results in the two years up to March 2007 would prove that it was statistically impossible for their to be so many first prize winners
* The greed of politicians and covering up the fraud is the reason for the disappearance of the lottery
SA media words – a guide for Martians
Democracy = plunder of private property and the public purse by a small number of known thugs with support of other thugs worldwide
Building capacity = encouraging incompetence systematically in such a way that no one bears responsibility for work undone
Silent diplomacy = doing nothing about something that urgently requires action
Transformation = replacing competent white people with incompetent black people
Black empowerment = legalised protection racket in which known black thugs extract bribes from all businesses in the form of company shares and taxes
Diversity = throwing together species or cultures without regard to suitability or quality
Service delivery = the deliberate stopping of all government services to the public at local, provincial and national level so that local, provincial and national government ministers and officials (all thugs) can steal the money intended for service delivery
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Mahatma Ghandi Spinning In His Grave
Bringing to mind Idi Amin's Uganda, where he killed off all the Indian merchants , a recent national survey shows that Indian South Africans are bearing the brunt of crime in South Africa.
The survey also revealed that close to 90% of whites, Indians and Coloureds believe that very little, or nothing at all, is being done about crime by the government and about 60 percent of their black countrymen agreed with them.
This is according to a study conducted by Markinor for the Institute of Security Studies on the perceptions of crime and violence in South Africa.
The report concludes that Indians were the minority group bearing the brunt of criminal activities with at least 66% of Indian adults questioned knowing someone who had been a victim of crime.
Can Thabo's Wall Be Seen From Outer Space?
Way back in February this year it was reported that PresThabo Mbeki was going to get a new security wall around his official residence in Pretoria.
It was going to cost R90 million and would, of course, be imported. Presumably he wanted none of the local riff raff hanging about his place during construction.
So where is the wall?
When questioned the government quoted an ancient law to restrict information about the wall. They said the 100-year-old Bryntirion government estate in Pretoria was a national key point and therefore could not be photographed.
That dubious body of incompetents, the SA National Editors Forum (SANEF), huffed and puffed a bit about the law, saying the National Key Points Act had no place in what they naively described as "a democratic South Africa" and asked government for its removal from the statute book.
And then - guess what - nothing more was written about the wall and no picture has been forthcoming. Neither has the statute been removed.
Would someone please photograph Thabo's wall and post it here? From outer space even? We need to see.
The act stipulates that no information or photograph of a National Key Point may be published without official permission. We are not asking permission as it is our money (South African taxpayers) whose money has been spent on the wall.
Now we would like to see it.
