If there’s one thing a small infantry team can never have enough of, it’s firepower. For such an inherently vulnerable unit, the ability to effectively take on much larger and stronger targets is a great battlefield leveller and a useful force multiplier.
Except there’s one problem: Weight. While every soldier likes bigger and more powerful guns, [...]

After days of rumours and half-hearted denials, it’s now official: Richard Dyantyi, the ANC’s Western Cape local government and housing minister, has sent Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille a letter informing her that the ANC-run province intends changing the city’s management structure. The proposed change will abolish the executive mayor system and replace it with [...]

I expect that most of the people currently working themselves into an apoplectic frenzy over Pope Benedict’s speech haven’t even bothered to read it. But I have, and I have some thoughts:
First, the speech is a helpful reminder that one doesn’t become Pope by being an intellectual lightweight. The text is long, sophisticated, and clearly [...]

I just wanted to apologise for the relative lack of updates over the past couple of weeks. I’m now moving into the final stage of the final year of my politics degree, and I’m simply not finding the time to update every day like I used to. I’ve got end-of-year projects piling up on top [...]

One of the most frustrating things is watching people you tried to advise otherwise continue to destroy themselves financially. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but perhaps this generation is too heavily driven towards peer pressure desired status symbols and pointless consumption. Nevertheless, I do find myself wondering whether it is merely those social [...]

It would appear that the rampancy of the HIV/AIDS virus amongst South Africa’s populace may be fuelling the birth of a new, more virulent strain of Tuberculosis.

In general, I suck at both describing and summarising speeches, so I’m not going to attempt it with Jack Bloom’s address at the South African Institute of International Affairs. Needless to say, it was very interesting, and all I can say is that it’s a sad indictment of the paucity of our national debate that [...]

Can somebody please explain why Douglas Gibson’s “visit” to Thabo Mbeki’s home is so bad that it should warrant this sort of hysterical overreaction? I put “visit” in scare-quotes because the reality is that Gibson’s inspection amounted to him standing outside and looking at the home from the street, just as any member of the [...]

Apparently South Africa will be a taking a seat on the UN Security Council as of next year. I must confess to having mixed feelings about this. Superficially, it’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, the government has chosen to position South Africa on the wrong side of virtually every important international issue it deals with, ranging from [...]

I apologise for the late notice on this, but tonight Jack Bloom will be giving a talk at Wits University on the topic: The case for George W Bush: Why the neoconservatives are right and everyone else is wrong.
This is a rare opportunity to hear one of SA’s most interesting politicians speaking from a perspective [...]

As some readers might know, we cracked a mention in Elle Magazine this month. Yay! Sure, they only wrote one sentence about us, and 50% of that was incorrect (we’ve never written about whether or not South Africa will lose the 2010 World Cup, and we’d certainly never be stupid enough to claim that we [...]