Archive for March, 2005

Thursday, March 31, 2005

A Growing Crisis

It’s time for me to come out the closet. I admit this with great shame and some degree of embarresment… but well, out with it then:
I used to read super-hero comics from DC Comics. In fact I may start reading them again.
With that rather shameful admission out the way, perhaps it’s worth reflecting on why. [...]

Filed under: General

The Negative White Factor

The Zimbabwe election begins in a few hours and I’ve tended to believe that I sit on the fence too often when it comes to many matters. The being the case, I will take a side this time and state that I believe it will mostly be a sham and the ANC observers will engage [...]

Filed under: General

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The Conceit of the SACP

The Star newspaper had a rather dry look at the South African Communist Party earlier in the week. It had nothing really outstanding in it besides several SACP members arguing that breaking away from the tripartite alliance with Cosatu and the ANC would net it 15% to 17% of the national vote.
Those estimates are based [...]

Filed under: General

You say Potatoe…

Once again it’s the week of Cosatu getting it right in the socio-political but wrong in the political economy – and vica versa when it comes to the ANC. Case in point Cosatu demanded the local currency be devalued or the country will face a general strike called by the union. It’s a pity that [...]

Wayne | 23:00:10 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: General

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Not All Win-Win

The informal alliance between third world campaigners and free marketers is one of the hallmarks of the repeated calls for first world nations to drop both their tariffs and subsidies on agriculture.
The argument for both goes that global food prices would rise to reflect true market conditions and impoverished third world countries would benefit by [...]

Wayne | 20:29:58 | Permalink | Comment?
Filed under: General

Monday, March 28, 2005

Terri Schiavo Case Fallout

‘George W. Bush’s approval rating drops to 45% in wake of Schiavo case intervention’. That was the happy declaration by Reuters as many analysts grappled for an explanation why. The consensus decision seemed to be that Bush and Congress failed to appreciate most Americans personal feelings and experiences from arising from caring for a dying [...]

Wayne | 01:22:26 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under: General

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Damn…

I guess Trevor Manuel’s really not going to become president, now that Tony Leon has endorsed him. That’s a bit like Michael Moore endorsing John McCain for the 2008 Republican Primary – a backhanded compliment at best. I realise that intra-ANC power struggles are far more interesting than actual elections, but that really is no [...]

Laurence | 23:21:20 | Permalink | Comments (6)
Filed under: General

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Fixing the UN

There’s an interesting post on Belmont Club dealing with the issue of reforming the UN. Some of their suggestions are rather fanciful – I certainly don’t foresee the General Assembly being replaced by a “moderated electronic forum” anytime soon, no matter how good the idea sounds on paper – but other ideas are actually quite [...]

Laurence | 11:08:51 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under: General

Extrasolar Planet Observations

It’s not fresh news, but it appears that human science has advanced enough to directly see giant Jupiter like planets
Here’s hoping in a decade or two the technology will have become refined enough to see small rocky worlds similar in size to Earth. Then it’s onto detecting hydrocarbon signatures in their atmospheres.

Wayne | 00:14:31 | Permalink | Comment?
Filed under: General

Friday, March 25, 2005

Financial Peformance In Retrospect

Laurence hasn’t been the only one been having, shall we say, fun with spring cleaning and finding old articles. An old Financial Mail article from around May 1999 on Datatec reveals just how uncritical many financial journalists had become by that time with the dot.com boom. Enough to convince many that the arguments that basic [...]

Wayne | 23:59:20 | Permalink | Comment?
Filed under: General

Thursday, March 24, 2005

What We Could Be Doing

Aziz Pahad has defended “quiet diplomacy” towards Zimbabwe. I suppose we should be glad that he’s making an effort:

“Those who criticise us have never given us any alternatives of what use we could have done, but constructively be critical and raise our concerns wherever we felt it was necessary to raise diplomatically on many occasions [...]

Laurence | 23:19:30 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under: General

Newspapers’ Vanishing Act

Have you heard of the ‘Incredible Vanishing Newspaper’ trick at all? This Day was the first local one to have done it recently but it seems that the Sunday Independent is following suit except in a different fashion.
Take a look at how much ‘meat’ there is on the paper – both with respect to journalistic [...]

Wayne | 21:05:14 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: General

Scenario Planning

Two days ago, while doing a bit of spring-cleaning, I found an old copy of The Star, dated 1975. Reading through old newspapers is often a fascinating exercise, and this one was no exception. There was an article in the business section that expressed concerns about Arab countries modernising too quickly; Iran especially. The author [...]

Laurence | 12:46:33 | Permalink | Comments (9)
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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Shooting the Messenger

Transparency International, an NGO that deals with corruption, has released their annual Global Corruption Report. They figure there’s still plenty of corruption going on in South Africa, and calculate the damage to the local economy thus:

Corruption is costing South Africa’s private sector up to 50 billion (US$8.2 billion, A?6.2 billion) rands a year… It also [...]

Laurence | 23:53:23 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Filed under: General
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