How can you own the most of something extremely precious to the world and yet grow sick and poor because of it? That’s the story of South African gold.
Seven of 13 miners who were trapped in yet another gold mine catastrophe in South Africa died over the weekend. Gold is the reason South Africa is what it is economically, and right now what it is isn’t too good.
Infidelity, sexual deviance and pornography are now all OK, and this is as monumental a cultural change as gender rights. American-led it is spreading across the world. Example which follows is Kenya.
The acceptance of what only a few years ago was considered immoral and unethical is aggressively rationalized by churches, especially evangelical ones as political necessity. Religion has unmasked its piety. If Jesus or Muhammad only knew.
The recent, great deaths of two public ladies tells us something very important about our time. In these terrible moments of human history, death attracts more civility than life.
America’s Barbara Bush and South Africa’s Winnie Mandela are being treated like saints, and that’s wonderful and refreshing. The fact is that practically every person is worth celebrating for the good things they’ve done in their life, and literally every human being has done something worthy of our praise and admiration.
But as in death, they were not in life.
I was in Nairobi yesterday watching a brilliant protest backfire miserably.
“Rowdy Kenyan youths” (as described by the police) deflated the tires of more than 200 vehicles on Kenya’s main highway at the peak of rush hour causing a nightmare traffic jam that backed up the city for nearly a whole day.
The #NeverAgainMSD may be the first public movement to actually tackle our paralyzed government while confronting and beating such behemoths as the NRA. We should have known. Remember South Africa.
Hector Pietersen is one of the most revered persons in South African history. He moved the struggle against apartheid further along in one day than it had in the previous 100 years. He died doing so, at 12 years old.
There’s only one of 52 countries in Africa where individual citizen gun violence reaches the level of America’s : South Africa.
Citizens – huge percentages – in both America and South Africa believe banning at least some guns will reduce this horror. Guess what? South Africa has already passed some of the toughest gun laws in the world but gun violence is still increasing. Does this mean laws against gun ownership don’t work? There’s a pretty terrifying answer.
Watch South Africa, Americans!
The election of Jacob Zuma, a year or so of excessive celebration by his base then an accelerating deterioration of the economy, the scandals which mounted until his ouster yesterday with one year left in his second term, instantly followed today by a police roundup of all the scoundrels involved … this, my friends, could be Donald Trump in America.
Imagine Ryan voting to impeach Trump and Pelosi voting not to: American political strategists better closely follow what’s happening right now in South Africa.
The South African president – despised in every corner of his land while retaining the steadfast loyalty of an enraged minority – was thrown out yesterday afternoon, or more correctly, the process began to oust him. At last! you exclaim, a unified South African sigh of relief and joy? Not quite. The opposition is remarkably subdued. It seems they believe that might have lost all chance of coming to power now that their one-and-only issue is moot.
What do the leaders of Zimbabwe, South Africa and the U.S. have in common?
In South Africa, today, the first real action to oust President Jacob Zuma is expected after at least 5-6 years of planning to do so. In Zimbabwe the destructive dictator Robert Mugabe who was ousted by a coup last November may be on the way back!
And in the U.S.? Neither Zimbabwe or South Africa provide as much surprise and contrast to the past as Donald Trump in the White House. Impeachment by the book is simple; by historical standards a slam dunk. But the chances of impeaching Donald Trump are about as great as winning the super lottery. So why is it so hard to get rid of these monsters?
After all their hard, creative and persistent efforts it’s heartbreaking watching Kenyans now destroy their beautiful society. Then again the heartbreak feels the same when I think of what Trumpism is doing to America.
The Kenyan government defies court orders to turn the country’s TV stations back on. The Trump government defies laws passed by an overwhelming vote in Congress to impose Russian sanctions. Yes, there is protest and outrage but not enough so both governments prevail in their anti-democratic slaughter of freedom and liberty.
This weekend the world’s largest big game hunting convention opens in Las Vegas very much as it has for each of the last 30 years. Except this year there’s one radically new component: It will be attended by the United States Secretary of the Interior with a delegation from the department in full hunting regalia.
That’s not surprising, but the agenda has shifted for this august group of officials. Unexpected meetings have been arranged to decide what to do about President Trump’s flipflopping about elephant tusks.
Hopefully the remarkably stupid Kenyan government has learned its lesson, but it remains to be seen.
Today Kenyan courts ungagged the country’s three major TV networks. Tuesday the government pulled the plug on the networks for covering the mock swearing-in ceremony of the loser in the recent national election.
As you’d expect the first moments’ back-on-air was a press conference of the mock government and faux president who would never have drawn this amount of attention had the government not gagged the TVs in the first place.
Raila Odinga’s unexpectedly short mock swearing-in ceremony as Kenya’s “Peoples President” in central Nairobi today marked the end to his long struggle for power. Not even his designated vice president showed up.
Many thousands of supporters filled Nairobi’s central park clearly hoping for the start of a prolonged if violent struggle but dispersed quietly after Odinga hopped into his car and sped away hardly a half hour after he had arrived. By late afternoon it was business as usual in downtown Nairobi, and the real government was suddenly more stable and powerful than ever.
You might not have noticed the cheering but there are some serious praises coming out of Africa for Trumpism.
Africa’s despots, dictators and iron-fisted rulers rather seem to like our new president. Trump and they struck quite a few bar buddy poses at DAVOS.
Each constantly starved for attention, an American and an African leader in DAVOS today separately made news with their patently disingenuous pitches: the American Trump that he wants free trade, and Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa that he wants free elections.
Nobody believed either. So what’s the point?