Darwin in South Africa

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (This mouthful was changed for the sixth edition of 1872 to the familiar The Origin of Species.) So this anniversary marks one of the most important events in human history: the day faith in the supernatural was no longer required to explain human origins.

Darwin visited South Africa in 1836. The HMS Beagle was on its homeward journey and although the crew were keen to get home, Captain Fitzroy needed to exercise one of his interests and visit the newly opened South African Observatory. Darwin went ashore to “geologise”. The geology of the region interested him greatly. But ever the naturalist, he discovered a bug in the Cape, and it is named after him – Kaapiad darwini.

In all he spent 18 days in the Cape. By all accounts he was sick and miserable, the cold and rainy Cape winter not helping matters. He recorded in his diary that it was a rather desolate country. (In a later book describing his travels, he stated that “there was no country like South Africa” with regard to the large animals that could be found in the interior.)

The world renowned British astronomer Jon Herschel was living at the Cape at this time, studying the Southern sky. Herschel was fascinated by the Cape’s unusual indigenous flora and started speculating on how species evolved. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy were invited by Herschel to dinner and although the details of the conversation are unknown, the 26 year-old Darwin was said to be very impressed by Herschel’s ideas.

The city of Cape Town have erected a series of commemorative plaques to mark the route Darwin took during his stay. Here are images of one of the plaques, taken in Sea Point, Cape Town.

Click to view larger image.

Related articles:

• Darwin’s South Africa legacy
• Wits celebrates Darwin’s birthday

Marietta Theunissen exploits the vulnerable

The last time I heard of clairvoyant Marietta Theunissen she was assisting the infamous Danie Krügel in the predictably futile hunt for the van Rooyen victims. In the Carte Blanche programme that brought them all together, she stated that she had communicated with the girls in the spirit world. Of course she had.

Their very public failure of course had no effect on their renown. She popped up on Radio 702 this morning promoting her latest psychic show. She then took a number of calls from listeners. I usually don’t listen to such garbage but I was interested to follow her technique. She pretty much models herself on Sylvia Brown, so beloved by Larry King and other US television talkshow hosts.

It’s classic cold reading – in a flood of words. A caller would ask a question, such as: “I need advice on whether I should move from Cape Town to Johannesburg”. Now it doesn’t take a seasoned pro to come up with a string of intelligent guesses of what her concerns might be. Why would she want to live in Johannesburg? Why would she want to stay in Cape Town? So she delivers a couple of “readings” that are open to confirmation and in no time at all can fairly confidently dish out advice.

The station was flooded with callers (all women, as it turns out), most of whom were clearly in pain and extremely vulnerable. And this is where the problem arises; her act is no longer just amusing entertainment: it moves into the dangerous area of giving uninformed, completely incorrect and possibly dangerous advice to gullible people.

One caller was concerned about the death of a relative. Theunissen immediately went down the suicide track – which is logical – and assured the caller that it wasn’t suicide. She weaselled out the caller’s fear that dead person had been poisoned – even though an autopsy had shown he had had a heart attack. No, declared Theunissen – she “saw” chemicals in the body and he probably had been poisoned.

How can this possibly help this distressed person? She is going to take this pronouncement from a scam artist – that can’t possibly know anything at all about the case – and carry it around with her for the rest of her life. And who knows how she will use it.

She strongly advised another caller to stop taking anti-depressants because they block the ability for spiritual feeling. She is giving serious medical advice to an anonymous voice on the other end of a phone line! This is a very malicious scheme.

But she not only exploits the vulnerable with the baseless nonsense she sprouts: she’s not shy in depleting their bank accounts either. Here are her rates taken from her website:

Half an hour Telephonic Consultations R 1300
Psychic Marathon (Face to Face consultations) R 1000… Special days only!! [Fully booked for 2009]
Want your own Private Group Session for your Family and Friends….? Marietta and Julia will come to your house…
R 750pp includes a Reading for each person and a BIORES treatment! (min 7 people)
Marietta also does special House Cleansing for people who have unwelcome energies…and want to attract luck, happiness and harmony!
R 1000 per house! [Only available in 2010]
15 Minute Face to face appointments R 750 pp for 15 minute sessions [fully booked for 2009]

Cold reading is not a particularly difficult skill to acquire. Just read Michael Shermer’s account of his highly successful novice cold readings. Just learn the basic technique and you’re good to go.

The cold reader’s bible is Ian Rowland’s The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.

The left-wing coup consolidates

While South Africans manically debate who should be the next soccer coach leading up to the 2010 World Cup, their country is silently falling into the hands of an unelected communist cabal.

It’s all falling into place for the Marxists, Trotskyites, Stalinists and other tendencies within Cosatu and the SACP who now effectively govern South Africa. The sop to realism that was placing the respected Trevor Manuel in a central planning position, is over. Manuel has been removed from a central planning role and is no longer in the “economics cluster”.  His right-hand-man and director general Joel Netshitenzhe has resigned. The ascendency of Ebrahim Patel and Cosatu continues apace.

My suspicion that Manuel had seen the writing on the wall were first raised when he uncharacteristically splurged on a R1.2 million BMW 7-series vehicle. Why not? Everyone else is doing it and he would no longer need to lead by example.

When Manuel resigned as finance minister it caused chaos in the financial markets. Keeping Manuel in a central planning role in the presidency kept the markets quiet. But he knew it was going to be tough going.  When he branded business as cowards for not standing up to labour, it was clearly a cry for help to his party. The left has targeted him unrelentingly with shrill and vicious personal attacks.

I hope I am mistaken, but I think Manuel has given up the fight and has ceded the policy-making and control of the economy to the communists. He knows that the average South African cares far more about soccer than their future under a communist regime.

Tuesday’s Tune: The Knife

I spent a somewhat challenging day on Saturday when I attended the annual Jo’burg Day music festival with my family and a couple of teenaged friends. The sun blazed unforgivingly to a soundtrack of what amounted to pop karaoke.  Then it clouded over and rained. And rained. I was greatly relieved when the kids asked when we were going.

But then, my cold, miserable daughter and her even more miserable friend vetoed any plans of beating a hasty retreat: Zebra & Giraffe had appeared. And I could see why; good sound, good writing, good performance.

Z&G is Greg Carlin. Yes, there was a full band performing, but Carlin is the self-contained creative force behind the band. He made his debut album, Collected Memories, virtually unassisted. It’s electronic rock that’s got a vaguely 80’s feel to it when – Carlin was probably still in nappies.

Every girl in the audience was mouthing the words to every song in their set, but it was The Knife that seemed to get the biggest response.

The Workers Socialist Republic of South Africa?

As pointed out before, the South African government is being taken over by a cabal of far-left communists. I used to say “communists and trade-unionists” but that isn’t necessary since Cosatu, the trade union movement, is a self-declared communist organisation, urging its members to join, and it requires its leaders to be card-carrying members of the SACP.

Of course, the Communist Party is pretty much in the driving seat with its senior leaders all in the government or running the ruling Party. This has all the hallmarks of a silent coup: an unelected body now holds effective control of South Africa. Cosatu is less well represented, but has the “street muscle” to enforce its views on a sympathetic and beholden ANC leadership.

I have heard a number of pundits in the media that Cosatu is just a bunch of uneducated and unsophisticated thugs that will easily be sidestepped by the ANC. The SACP are described as a group of committed, smart activists who get things done. The message is that they might be irritating but these organisations shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Well let’s look at some of the resolutions passed (pdf) at the recent Cosatu 10^th Nation Congress.

Among the short-to-medium term demands:

1. Immediately, nationalize the major means of production.
…
4. Centralise the major means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
5. Create a workers bank to concentrate all pension and provident funds, medical aids funds and
union investments into a single bank.
…
7. Begin restructuring the state – executive, judiciary and parliament – in the interests of the
working class.
8. Abolish labour broking.
9. Abolish retrenchments.
10. Workers takeover of companies threatened with closures because of the collapse of the
neoliberal paradigm of global capitalism.

In short, destroy the economy, loot its assets and deny poor people access to casual jobs. But that’s only for starters. Long-term demands are:

1. Abolish bourgeois private property.
2. Nationalise, socialise and democratise all key strategic means of production in South Africa
such as land, water, minerals, mines, banks, oil companies, shipyards, telecommunications,
transport, food, housing, etc, etc, etc.
3. Concentrate all credit and the power to make money in the hands of the state.
4. Abolish the bourgeoisie executive, parliamentary and justice system, and replace them with
working class state structures.
5. Abolish the distinction between former white suburbs and shacks and townships, and between
rural areas and urban areas.
6. Everyone to enjoy the right to work, housing, education, health and a healthy environment.
7. Everyone to work.

So, reduce the country to a smoking communist ruin, and then force legions of slaves to toil since there will be no incentive remaining to voluntarily do so.

The fact that this stuff has never worked – anywhere, ever – doesn’t seem to bother these megalomaniacs. Ironically, one of the first things such a government will do is to outlaw trades union! This has happened wherever a communist regime has seized power.

Cosatu is a radical organisation with very radical aims. Its champion in government, economic development minister Ebrahim Patel, is well qualified for the position. This wild-eyed ultra-leftist is particularly oblivious to the consequences of his idealogical actions: as general secretary of the trade union SACTWU he virtually single-handedly caused the almost total destruction of the textile industry in the Western Cape. You wouldn’t want this character anywhere near any enterprise, but Cosatu want him to displace one of the only reasonable people left in the government, Trevor Manuel.

Virtually no defence of Manuel has come from the ANC. They might be uneasy but I think they realise that game is up and the party has fallen into the hands of the communists while they had their snouts deep in the trough of public funds.

Can’t write about Mo Shaik

I was sickened by Zuma’s appointment of Mo Shaik. I was going to write about it, but it would just make my blood pressure spike.  So I’ll let Nic Borain not write about it.

However, Mo(e) has inspired me to do a bit of pictorial commentary:

ANCs fascist attack on democracy and the poor

I admit with some embarrassment that the story of the of the vicious attack on shack-dwellers by the ANC in Durban didn’t initially grab my attention. I can perhaps blame this on that apart from a few opinion pieces, it was largely ignored by the mainstream press. But this is a story that should be ringing alarm-bells for all South Africans. ANC thugs – aided and abetted by the police and ruling ANC officials – attacked a peaceful community, destroying homes and killing at least three people.

Their crime? Members of this community belonged to an independent organisation – crucially not ANC-aligned – which actively campaigs for better housing, sanitation, healthcare and education, to be provided on terms favourable to its members. The organisation is called Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the settlement is Kennedy Road in Durban. Abahlali has successfully fought for its member’s rights – all the way to the Constitutional Court. This has clearly irked the notoriously anti-poor ANC ruling elite who would much rather divert development funds to their own bank accounts.

On the night of 26th September, a heavily armed gang launched a surprise, unprovoked attack on the settlement. They destroyed everything they could while calling on Zulu’s to identify and spare themselves. This ethnic rampage resulted in at least three – many reports have it at eight – deaths. This murderous spree went ahead with the connivance of the police who refused to intervene. The only activity the police undertook was to arrest eight Abahlali leaders!

Watch this video: it’s a heartbreaking tale of repression:

The ANC, in a display of unbridled arrogance and cynicism, held a sham reconciliation meeting – attended solely by ANC activists.  They then complained loudly when the Abahlali leaders – in hiding for their lives – did not attend. They spent their time heaping abuse on the movement and blaming them for everything. ANC Councillor Nigel Gumede left no doubt that this was a case of Zulu vs Pondo:

He added a dash of tribal hatred, saying that “in our [presumably Zulu] culture, this [Mfene] dance is associated with muthi” (witchcraft) and needed to be investigated.

Still the community remains under attack. There is nothing covert about it: the ANC is sending a strong message that anyone not actively supporting them is their deadly enemy and will be destroyed. Here are the reasons given for a planned attack on Sunday night:

A decision has been taken to demolish two more shacks after the meeting. These shacks both belong to AbM members – they are both women. The decision has been justified on the grounds that:

1. They are known AbM activists.
2. They failed to attend today’s meeting.
3. They failed to accept pressure to board the ANC buses to protest for denial of bail at the bail hearing for the Kennedy 8.

Zuma, of course has not said a word. This tacit support for pro-Party fascist thugs – in the mould of the Nazi Brownshirts and Zanu-PF youth militia – must be taken very seriously.

Please sign this petition to ask Zuma to intervene.

Related article:

• State turns against shack dwellers

Jacob’s ladder of lies

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, South African President Jacob Zuma attempted to wash away any culpability for his role in his government’s deliberate extermination of at least 300,000 (mainly ANC-supporting) AIDS sufferers. He attacked ex-president Thabo Mbeki maintaining that his insane idea that there is no link between HIV and AIDS was his own private view and not government policy.

Somehow it was Mbeki’s private affair that let his criminal, alcoholic health minister unleash her bizarre cure of onions, beetroot and garlic (with a side helping of African potatoes) for AIDS on the public health system. It was rigorously enforced; doctors were fired trying to treat their patients with anti-retroviral drugs drugs. Activists had to go to the Constitutional Court to force these murderers to allow the distribution of ARVs. They didn’t take Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang to court in their private capacities: they sued the government – which vigorously defended its position.

So Zuma lied that it wasn’t government policy. But worse than that, Zuma vigorously defended this disgusting policy at the time. In an address to parliament in 2000, calling on members to acquaint themselves with the AIDS-denialist literature. Then he dragged out the old straw man canard, They laughed at Galileo:

In Europe in the Seventeenth Century, the main stream scientific view was that the sun moved around the earth. An Italian scientist Galilei Galileo had a different view and believed that the earth moved around the sun. However his views were considered to be so threatening to the scientific establishment that he was forced to publicly recant. As we all know today, he was right and they were wrong.

In the history of science and in particular the history of medical science, there are other examples where solutions were found to difficult challenges as a result of robust scientific debate between conventional and alternative views.

This House, which is based on the fundamental principle of the right to differ and to express a different opinion, ought not to balk at the idea that the President is asking scientists to behave as scientists.

As Carl Sagan said: “They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

In 2000 Padraig O’Malley interviewed then ANC Secretary General and current deputy-President, Kgalema Motlanthe on his views on HIV/AIDS (part 1, part 2). He toed the line that HIV does not cause AIDS, as simply a natural breakdown of the immunity system. As such the “opportunistic” diseases should be treated in their own right. He called AIDS a symbol – perhaps he hadn’t understood Mbeki’s assertion that AIDS was just a syndrome - not a disease. He then went on to blame the drug companies for fabricating the whole thing to make huge profits. And of course he had a swing at whites:

No, they are gullible. You see half of them don’t read but they regard themselves as well informed because they’re white. The reason why when you ask – you ask any of the experts whether they have seen evidence, any piece of document that says scientist so-and-so in such a country has isolated this HIV virus and photographed it and studied it’s modus vivendi under controlled conditions, they will swear at you.

They will tell you that question was answered twenty years ago, they will tell you you are giving audience to dissidents. They will not tell you because it’s not there. That’s why they become vicious because it is simply not there. They take it on authority and then it gets passed on like that but there’s no authority, it’s a lie repeated by those who are supposed to know better. The truth of the matter is that if they were to admit that indeed no such thing has happened, I mean it would cause serious reverberations across the scientific world.

Zuma can lie all he wants but we know the truth: the ANC hates its own people and was willing to let them die in their hundreds of thousands rather than confront the source of this disease and the source of the life-saving drugs. As George Annandale writes on this subject:

Perhaps the president can explain how it is possible to recall and redeploy President Mbeki for creating a nuisance and sowing division in the party, yet, when he was the driving force in the thinly veiled extermination of hundreds of thousands of HIV/Aids sufferers, this moral alliance and its moral upstanding leaders, could not stop him.

Yes Jacob, they laughed at Galileo. And we would laugh at you too if the stench of death didn’t hang around you like a vulture.

The rise of the Weak Man

As the editor of a major South African broadsheet, Peter Bruce writes an amazingly naïve article on his surprise at how the Zuma presidency is panning out:

Jacob Zuma is proving to be almost the opposite of what I expected him to be. I expected a decisive presidency but he isn’t. I expected an authoritative leader, yet no one in or around the ANC seems to pay him the slightest heed. I expected that he would keep party loudmouths quiet but the only person whose attention he seems to have is the mayor of Balfour.

Zuma’s weakness was fully expected. Zuma is not a leader at all. He didn’t take the Party by the scruff of its neck and impose his leadership vision on it. He never had to stump for support or run on his record. He has never debated an opponent in public nor has he made any direct appeal to the South African public.

South Africa is being ruled by a Weak Man.

A Weak Man is someone who is deeply flawed and in deep trouble. He desperately needs support to keep him out of jail or penury but has nothing to offer his benefactors other than his soul. He is without principle and will do anything to get out of his predicament.  He has another very important characteristic: he is a populist and appeals to the ordinary man who empathises with his “oppressed” persona.

The Weak Man is surrounded by power-hungry individuals who prefer, or are only able to rule by proxy. In Zuma’s case this is largely the South African Communist Party and its leftist allies, the trade union movement Cosatu and the ANC Youth League. These organisation would be hard-pressed to win any seats in an election, let alone a general election itself.

Bruce is “rescued” by writer Meshack Mabogoane:

“A hardcore party man, he (Zuma) defers to the ANC for the positions he adopts,” writes Mabogoane. “He reads what is written for him and avoids discussing complex matters. At the same time his comments on crucial matters are usually made after the events and are generally evasive and weak. Zuma has never committed himself to any policies and never offered any personal vision.”

The ANC leaders he defers to are SACP chairman Gwede Mantashe, SACP secretary-general Blade Nzimande and Cosatu head Zwelinzima Vavi.

This same strategy was tried in the campaign to get John Hlophe onto the Constitutional Court. The fact that it stumbled at the last hurdle this time does not mean it won’t be successful in the long run. The problem with Hlophe is that he is just too unpredictable and not nearly as pliant as is Zuma. Perhaps Hlophe will come to realise this and make himself the vassal his supporters so wish him to be. At the moment he is not quite weak enough – but give him time.

Another manifestation of the Weak Man phenomenon is one Siyabonga Gama who is in the running to be the next Transnet CEO. Except that he has been suspended by his board for awarding lavish contracts without authority amongst other misdeeds. There is no doubt he is a loose cannon and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near South Africa’s largest state-owned enterprise.

But what do we see instead? Huge, unprecedented political support – and threats – from the same team that put Zuma in power. In fact, they are claiming he is a victim of political conspiracy just like Zuma was. Another Weak Man is being pushed into an influential position to do his masters’ bidding. Transnet of course has many billions of Rand flowing through it and under its control. Thanks to previous CEO Maria Ramos, it is not yet a smoking, bankrupt ruin and remains a deep trough for alliance parties and the leaders that run them to get their snouts in it.

ANC MPs fail the Kid Test

I think it’s safe to say that parliamentarians of the ruling party, the ANC, are a pretty dismal lot. Since South Africa doesn’t have a constituency system, the Party’s representatives don’t have to display any qualities of character to voters.  Criminals, homophobes, racists, sexists, liars, cheats, xenophobes, drunkards, wife-beaters, perverts, sociopaths, drug-addicts and paedophiles are all welcome and are well represented in the parliamentary benches – well at least those who bother to attend.

The only requirement is a slavish devotion to their political masters. If a boot needs to be licked, they’ll polish both with their tongues. If a bum needs to be kissed, they’ll get that tongue in – deep. That is the only qualification required. They understand that their livelihoods, cars, housing, overseas jaunts, kids schooling, medical care and fancy clothes are granted to them by the Party leaders and in turn blind loyalty is required. Otherwise it’s back to the shack, drinking sorghum beer out of a paint tin.

Certainly, intelligence is not a prerequisite. In fact, I would imagine that intelligence is specifically frowned upon, along with original thought. Nothing better illustrates this than the show put on by ANC MPs at the recent meeting of portfolio committees on the country’s space policy. They were discussing the launch of SA’s satellite, Sumbandila Sat, to be launched in Russia on September 15. These MPs asked a bunch of questions so peurile, so irrational and displaying such a breathtaking degree of ignorance, that one is left thinking that maybe the other prerequisite of becoming an ANC representative is deep stupidity. I guess it’s much easier to control dull brutes than those with functioning mental facilities.

But maybe I’m being a bit severe. Perhaps these cretins people are simply uneducated – victims of “no education before liberation” or something. In that case we could apply the Kid Test to them. Kids don’t have a lot of knowledge, but they display an appetite for it, a curiosity that requires an answer. None of us can know everything and we often reach for our inner kid, asking perhaps naïve, but searching questions.

Let’s examine the questions asked by the MPs to see if they pass the Kid Test:

How, one asked, do we protect our space from being used by other countries’ satellites?

I would give this one a PASS. This is the sort of question a kid would ask and would lead to an answer that could lead to a life-long understanding of what we mean by “space”.

Shown two comparative satellite pictures of Midrand, one dating from the ’60s and the other more recent, another MP asked what could be done to prevent satellites causing so much damage.

This is a FAIL. No kid would ask this question. It can only be asked by an idiot adult who has no idea what he is looking at and desperately wants his voice to heard.

Another MP said her suburb was frequently disturbed by the noise of satellites flying overhead taking these pictures.

This is a FAIL. Have you ever heard a kid making this sort of observation? This idiot needs to be locked up in a lunatic asylum.

Another suggested that indigenous knowledge must be applied to our use of space — and began to illustrate her point by telling a story about two women flying on a loaf of bread.

WTF? If this was a kid telling her story, it was a kid on LSD. FAIL.

At which point, the committee chairman shut down questions.

Well, yes. Perhaps he was just embarrassed but more probably he couldn’t think of a question to ask which would match the brilliance of his colleagues.

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