Correct me if I a wrong

With the election date announced (May 29th, thanks for asking), everything here has become even more politically charged than usual. Voting will be for provincial and national government, but the players are all the same, and so even anything to do with the municipalities becomes antagonistic and polarised very quickly.

Here’s a reply to a Facebook post regarding funding for homeless shelters in Cape Town.

It looks like a keyboard has fallen down a steep slope, bouncing on several rocks and deflecting through the branches of a particularly thorny tree before coming to rest in the midst of a honey badger family, where the junior members have flung it from one to another for an hour or more.

And then one of them hit the POST COMMENT button.

This comment is absolutely unintelligible, but it’s still easier to read and is more sensible and pleasant than most of the stuff you’ll read on social media for the next few months.

Although “spiritual warfare attackers” will almost certainly feature less in that other stuff.
Which is no bad thing.

Correct me if I a wrong.

Great timing

Thursday was the day that Climate Scientists announced that the world had made it a whole year with an average global temperature >1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. And if you click through on that link, you’ll be able to read about many of the other records that have recently been broken as mankind does its best to trash what’s left of the planet.

It probably wasn’t the best day that the UK Labour party could have chosen to announce that they were dropping their £28bn a year “Green Prosperity” plan, halving the funding due to “the economic climate”. The actual climate isn’t the only climate that is struggling, then.

When you are an opposition party, it’s easy to make grand statements about how much you are going to spend, and all the plans you are going to carry out once you’re in government. No-one can hold you to them, because you can’t do them anyway, because you’re not in power. But suddenly, with Labour surely almost certain to win the upcoming election in the UK, they’re having to backtrack on their promises.

But with the world experts crying out for more funding for environmental and ecological issues, more buy-in and more commitment from governments, the perfect timing of this climbdown was a disaster.

Talking of disasters…

During his 2024 State Of The Nation address on Thursday evening, President Ramaphosa talked up the progress that the government had made in tackling loadshedding, which was running at Stage 2 throughout his speech:

“Since SA’s renewable energy programme was revived five years ago, more than 2,500MW of solar and wind power had been added to the grid, with much more in the pipeline. More than 120 new private energy projects were in development after regulatory reforms enabled private investment.
These are phenomenal developments that are driving the restructuring of our electricity sector in line with what many other economies have done to increase competitiveness and bring down prices. 

Through all of these actions, we are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach.”

About an hour after he made that statement, loadshedding was raised to Stage 3.
And three hours after that, it was raised to Stage 4.

And now we’re on Stage 6. No electricity for 12 hours each day.

Again, absolutely wonderful timing.

“…we are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach”

Utter nonsense. Any light at the end of the tunnel has clearly got nothing to power it.

There goes the election…

Many people had thought that the ANC might sink to below 50% of the vote in the upcoming national elections. And to be honest, given their performance over the last n years, that seemed like a very reasonable suggestion.

But that was before the ANC asked… er… the ANC to pray for… er… the ANC “to renew itself”.

I can’t comment on all of the other political parties in South Africa (because there really are an awful lot of them), but I certainly haven’t heard of any of the others asking themselves to pray for themselves.

Oops. Missed opportunity right there.

God isn’t going to be looking favourably at any party – no matter how honest they are or how good their policies might be – if their members haven’t been in touch with Him and prayed for self-renewal, now is He?

That’s just not how He works.

So I guess we might as well just hand the election – and what’s left of the country – to the ANC for another 5 years. After all, we’re not just fighting the last of the pre-1994 generation, but also the Lord Almighty too now.

Oh, and the “renewed” ANC, apparently.

Yeah right.

Damn those Imperialist forces!

Just in from serial government clown Fuckile Mballoona [sp.], the Secretary General of the ruling ANC party here in South Africa, this:

He’s been spouting this sort of nonsense for many years now.

And I mean, you never rule anything out in the politics of this country, because it’s like one constant Bob Mortimer story on Would I Lie To You?. It regularly seems completely fanciful and utterly unbelievable, and then it turns out to be absolutely true.

But this one? No.

Come now. The only imperialist and neocolonialist forces with any influence in the upcoming elections are the Russians and the Chinese, and they’re both right behind the ANC. But they’re got their work cut out, given that the actual voting public are fed up with the lack of service delivery, the loadshedding, the rising crime, the cadre deployment, the constant corruption, the dysfunctional state owned enterprises, the poorly-controlled inflation, the plummeting Rand, and the tossers in charge.

Could any (or all) of those be the reasons that the ANC has been singled out as a party that must lose power?

Well, it’s either that or it’s the CIA.

And I know where my money lies on this one.

Hopeless

It’s been a weekend filled with local violence, the occasional threat against Cape Town schoolchildren, more of the usual disinformation and misinformation and more of the usual hyperbole and histrionics.

Unsurprisingly, social media has been a particularly unpleasant place to be, with a complete lack of tolerance throughout, and no willingness or effort to listen to anything that anyone on “the other side” has to say.
Ebola has nothing on the replies and threads that follow just about any article of comment on the situation in Israel and Gaza.

If there were such a thing as Biohazard Level 5, this would be it.

Reasonably, I wanted away from real life for a few minutes. I thought that I would find solace in the Daily Challenge on Geoguessr. And indeed, I seemed to have found it when I was unceremoniously – but happily – dumped in some semi-rural backwater in Pennsylvania. Peace. Tranquility. Half a world away from all those problems.

And then I turned myself around and found a glorious metaphor for the world at the moment:

Could it have been put any better? Sadly not.

Anyway, once we were done with that, I was popped into a forest in South East Latvia, which was much less telling about the general worldwide state of things.

And thus, much nicer.