Obama to ‘celebrate Mandela’s legacy’

Barack Obama on Air Force One
Barack Obama on Air Force One

US President Barack Obama flies to South Africa Friday hoping to pay homage to the legacy of his critically ill hero Nelson Mandela, who is fighting for his life in hospital.

Mandela’s ill health means the two men, who shattered racial boundaries on either side of the Atlantic, are not expected to have a long-anticipated meeting for the cameras.

Still, reflections on Mandela’s extraordinary journey from prisoner to president are likely to permeate Obama’s three-day stay.

Mandela, who turns 95 next month, was rushed to hospital three weeks ago with a recurrent lung disease and has since appeared close to death.

On the eve of the visit, South Africa’s first black president was said to be in a critical condition, but had stabilised since a scare forced his successor Jacob Zuma to cancel a trip to neighbouring Mozambique.

“He is much better today,” said Zuma after seeing Mandela on Thursday for the second time in less than 24 hours.

Yet South Africans, including Mandela’s family, remain braced for the worst.

“I won’t lie. It doesn’t look good,” daughter Makaziwe Mandela said. But “if we speak to him he responds and tries to open his eyes — he’s still there.”

“Anything is imminent, but I want to emphasise again that it is only God who knows when the time to go is,” she told local radio.

Meanwhile Obama, the United States’s first black president, led a chorus of support for the man he dubbed a “hero for the world.”

Mandela’s plight has lent a deeply poignant tone to the visit, around which Obama has built a three-nation Africa tour, and his plans could yet be upended by sudden developments in the ex-president’s condition.

“The president will be speaking to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and that will be a significant part of our time in South Africa,” said deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.

“The president will treasure any opportunity he has to celebrate that legacy.”

The White House says it is in the hands of the Mandela family and the South African authorities on any aspect of the visit.

“We will obviously be very deferential to the developments that take place and the wishes of the family and the South African government,” Rhodes said.

A visit by Obama to Mandela’s former jail cell on Robben Island, off Cape Town on Sunday would now take on extra “profundity”, he added.

Speaking in Senegal on the first leg of his long-awaited African trip, Obama described Mandela as “a personal hero.”

“I think he is a hero for the world, and if and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages.”

The US president recalled how Mandela had inspired him to take up political activity, when he campaigned for the anti-apartheid movement as a student in the late 1970s.

South Africans have also been marking the life of a man who led their country out of centuries of white rule.

Outside Mandela’s hospital a wall of messages and flowers has become the focal point for a nation saying a long goodbye to one of the greatest figures of the 20th century.

“There is no sadness here. There is celebration. He is a giant,” said Nomhlahla Donry, 57, whose husband served time with the revered leader.

Mandela has been hospitalised four times since December, mostly for a stubborn lung infection.

The man once branded a terrorist by the United States and Britain walked free from prison near Cape Town in 1990.

He went on to negotiate an end to white minority rule and won South Africa’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.

He forged a path of racial reconciliation during his single term as president, before taking up a new role as a roving elder statesman and leading AIDS campaigner.

He stepped back from public life in 2004 and has not been seen in public since the football World Cup finals in South Africa in 2010.

But Mandela still draws vast global interest, interest which now appears to be wearing on his family.

Mandela’s oldest daughter Makaziwe on Thursday slammed the “crass” media frenzy around her critically ill father, likening the press to vultures.

“They violate all boundaries,” she said accusing the foreign press of “a racist element” by crossing cultural boundaries.

“It’s like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there you know for the last carcasses.”

With his health now fading, Mandela’s supporters are starting to show signs of resignation — while preparing to celebrate his legacy.

In the rural village of Qunu where he grew up amid cattle and mud-walled huts, 93-year-old Keqane Keledwane said she was not ready to say goodbye to her neighbour.

“I want him to get well. I don’t want to be the only one left behind,” said Keledwane, who lives across the road from Mandela’s house. “I wish him a long life, my old friend.” – AFP

Sales of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ soar on Amazon as America becomes surveillance society

George Orwell
George Orwell

George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is enjoying a spike in sales in the wake of revelations on surveillance in the United States.

Amazon.com says the book, published in 1945, has gone from No. 13,074 to No. 193 on its selling list, and it is moving higher, The Guardian reported. To put it another way, sales are up 7,000 percent.

In the novel, Orwell imagines a world divided into three large states, all of them exercising near-constant surveillance on their subjects. The government manipulates the news, history and the language.

The novel is set in London, the city where Orwell spent much of his adult life. But his primary target appears to be the Soviet Union, although he was also concerned about trends he saw in the United States and Britain.

It was “1984” that made “Orwellian” a common adjective in English. It is one that has been used a lot since news broke of National Security Agency monitoring of Internet and telephone traffic.

“What does our Constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., said in a recent interview.

Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46. But the book remains under copyright in Britain and the United States, so his estate benefits from its new popularity. – UPI

Leave our crime alone!

Kevin_King

by Kevin King

We are a very proud nation. Not when we rape our women, children and infants, murder each other in droves, commit racial, xenophobic and homophobic atrocities, but when we become all patriotic and go on the defensive after our failings are pointed out by outsiders, in this case the Americans.

Preceding Obama’s visit to our country, the US issued a crime warning to tourists stating that “violent and confrontational crime is a major concern [in South Africa]” and goes on to point out Pretoria, Joburg, Durban and Cape Town as “critical crime threat spots”. Many South Africans of course didn’t like this and launched their own counter attack at the US on social media. To sum up the types of responses:

  • Crime happens everywhere
  • US is number 1 in crime
  • SA crime is blown out of proportion

Now coming from a corporate environment I refuse to stick my head in the sand and deny any problems without doing some research. In that way we can identify if we have a problem and if so, take corrective action.

2011/2012 Crime Research & Statistics – SAPS

  • Murder – 15,609
  • Culpable homicide – 11,788
  • Attempted murder – 14,859
  • Assault with the intent to inflict grievous bodily harm – 192,651
  • Robbery with aggravating circumstances – 101,203
  • Total sexual offences – 64,514

Notes

Our murder rate is reported as 42.7 per day. After including culpable homicide there are 75 new bodies in the morgue per day. This might explain why Interpol reports our murder rate as 80+ per day.

A total of 400,624 from the above violent crimes happened in just one year. Over the last 5 years this figure is close to 2,000,000, conservatively speaking. There are about 160,000 people in jail at this moment (highest in Africa and 9th in the world). Where are these criminals if they’re not in jail?

The above crimes are reported crimes and some members of SAPS have been busted for understating crime statistics which means that the actual number of crimes is actually higher. For instance, it is estimated that in SA, only 1 in 20 incidents of rape are reported. 64,514 x 20 = 1,290,280… per year… and thus claimed the title of Rape Capital of the World.

There are about 53 million people living in SA. Based on the reported violent crimes above and the average South African’s life expectancy, a shocking 52.6, each South African has a 40% chance of being a victim of violent crime in their lifetime.

I have left out the other major categories of crime such as common robbery, common assault, common hijacking, fraud, arson, corruption etc. in order to deal with violent crime only. Taking these into account the average South African will almost certainly be a victim of crime in their lifetime.

Now I’m not going to tell you what to think, you can make up your own mind on if we have a problem. Ignoring the rest of the world, I’d expect that any reasonable person would find the above statistics unacceptable. Personally, I think they are appalling.

Moving on, we should maybe compare ourselves to the rest of the world. Now the rest of the world is pretty big so I’m not going to go into details of all other countries, just a select few, starting with the slandering Americans. (Is the truth slander?)

Murder in America

Firstly, it should be known that Americans themselves confess that the USA is a violent country. Secondly, the USA has a population of about 314 million, six times our population, thus we can expect more crime to occur there. Thirdly, the USA has the highest gun ownership in the world, with 88.8 guns per 100 people according to the UN, with SA lying in 50th place with 12.7 guns per 100 people, a further indicator that they might be more violent than we are. So here are the stats:

  • Total murders/homicides – 14,612 (2011), 14,748 (2010)

Yes, a country with six times our population and seven times more guns has fewer murders than we do.

Murder in other places

Now because people who complain about crime are told to leave to Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. we might as well mention these places.

  • Canada – 598 murders in 2011
  • New Zealand – 39 murders in 2011
  • UK – 663 in 2011/2012
  • Australia – 229 in 2010

One thing is very evident when you visit these places. There are no high walls, no palisade fencing or electric fencing. In fact, residential electric fencing is illegal in these parts. There are no armed response units, police are all that’s necessary. It does not appear that these people live in fear behind their white picket fences.

Hopefully the above information will enlighten some as to what the current situation is in our country. The more you know your country the more can be done about its problems.

The fiscal cliff: a lemming’s lunacy

Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. “Alleged lunacy” because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests, to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and “horrifying” collective tumble down the thing called the “fiscal cliff.”

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, December 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in DC, who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, “deep, automatic cuts,” by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011. About.com has counted “over 1,000 government programs – including the defense budget, Medicare,” and unemployment benefits (99 weeks’ worth), as slated for slashing, and concedes that the “deficit, as a percentage of GDP, would be cut.” “The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,” estimates financier Peter Schiff.

I’m inclined to think of this “budget sequestration,” described by Wikipedia as “broad and shallow,” as no more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing? Even the country’s lying money mavens agree, on occasion, that cuts in state spending are good for the private, productive economy. Torture them on The Rack, and they will confess that unless US government spending is slashed, we run the risk of becoming Greece. (The truth is that the tipping point has been reached. We are Greece in denial.)

The country’s “wise” men have thus classified the government-cutting component of the fiscal free-fall as a catastrophe.

Let us continue to unpack this political portmanteau. The next component in the fiscal-cliff equation is private property seizures (tax hikes). Although the US government no longer pays for its obligations, it continues to borrow against the future earnings of its people. What is not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed is confiscated from individual Americans.

Conveniently lost on the Republican quislings who are now weaseling out of their nominal commitment to refrain from additional theft of private property is the distinction between what is mine and what is thine: Taxes are private property plundered. The fiscal-cliff deal includes the expiration of a temporary reprieve previously granted to private property. The Bush tax cuts will sunset, as will the temporary payroll tax cuts and certain tax breaks for businesses. Also to take effect are taxes tied to President Obama’s health-care behemoth.

It is alleged that to fail to confiscate this private property is to add $3.18 trillion to the national debt. The notion, however, that one must “pay for tax cuts” is ridiculous—the government here (and everywhere) is the proverbial burglar promising to return stolen goods just as soon as its financial position has improved. If anything, tax cuts for high-income earners, who also pay for most of the plunder, are nothing short of a return of stolen goods.

Loot plundered from individuals will invariably vanish into the federal maw, where all funds are fungible and none are accounted for.

What should be obvious to the few who understand the natural laws of economics is that slashing government, however symbolically, is to be encouraged; the confiscation of private property to be vehemently opposed.

China surpasses US as trading partner

In just five years, China surpassed the US as leading a trading partner in the world. With 124 countries considering China their largest trading partner and only 76 having that relationship with the US, the Asian country’s influence is on the rise.

In 2006, the US was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, while China dominated among 70. In 2011, the numbers reversed, with China dominating trade among 124 countries and the US being the top trade partner for only 76, the Associated Press reported. Some US allies even consider China their top trading partner, including Australia and South Korea.

The AP findings demonstrate China’s rapid ascent as a trade partner. As a result of its international relationships, the world’s most populous country is becoming more politically influential – and its rise won’t be ending anytime soon. China’s world output is forecasted to grow up to 8 percent a year over the next decade – a rate that surpasses all Western levels.

Trade with China was on average 12.4 percent of GDP for other countries – a rate that is higher than trade with the US has been in the past 30 years. Trade with China was only 3 percent of a country’s GDP in 2002, which demonstrates the surge that occurred in the last decade.

With rising trade influence, China is likely to also generate jobs, raise living standards and gain political power.

“The United States is a tiger with no power. Nobody can deny that China is the one now rising,” said Shin Cheol-soo, a South Korean businessman at the ENA Industry Co.

While the US is still the world’s largest importer and exports more expensive and high-quality products, China is a bigger market for 77 countries, which is an increase of 20 countries since the year 2000. The US exports innovative products in the automobile industry, aerospace, medicine, computers, finance and pharmaceuticals, but China’s low labor costs make it a success in products that can be produced cheaply.

At the current rate of trading, China will surpass the US and become the largest trader by the end of this year.

“The center of gravity of the world economy has moved to the east,” Mauricio Cardenas, the finance minister of Colombia, told AP. “I would say that there is nothing comparable in the last 50 years.”

While the recession hit US businesses hard, some began to thrive in China. Shin, the businessman at ENA Industry Co. who sold auto parts, moved his struggling business from the US to China. And across the world, people have begun to recognize the importance of China in the future world economy. Parents are increasingly encouraging their children to learn Mandarin in school.

“Mothers who send their kids here believe our children’s generation is the China generation. In the future, without learning Chinese, one won’t be able to get a job,” said Nancy Ching, who opened a Chinese-language school in South Korea.

China is also starting to look into markets that were so far dominated by the US. Rather than exporting products, the Chinese hope to soon sell services and investments, including construction and engineering. By building roads, dams, highways, and other structures in developing countries, China is now rivaling the US and Europe in areas it never touched before.

“When we see the people from America, they say ‘We want to assist Kenya’. But I don’t see it. China comes and I see one thing: the road,” said Joseph Makori, a professional driver in Kenya, where Chinese companies are increasingly winning government contracts to do construction.

China’s trade is reaching beyond just economic partnerships with countries in need of cheap products. The world’s most populous country is becoming an influential power in a range of aspects. While China is set to surpass the US and become the largest trader by the end of 2012, it may not be long before the countries will compete politically. – RT

The D-bomb has dropped

by Ilana Mercer

In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.

Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.

The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)

Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.

The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.

As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.

This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.

In a word, neutralize the D-Bomb.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”

Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.

As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)

To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.

Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.

Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.

As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.

The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.

Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.

Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.

The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.

History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.

Perception is everything.

The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.

Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.

And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal (libertarian) writer and a fellow at the “Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.” She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” “The titular tease,” explains Ilana in the book, “is meant as a metaphor and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is IlanaMercer.com.. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.

America’s racial divide grows

In 2008, minority voters turned out in record numbers, propelling Barack Obama to the White House. Similar results fueled his second-term victory on Tuesday. A 2-percentage-point increase in nonwhite votes—to 28 percent—sealed Obama’s reelection, and data seem to indicate minority influence at the polls has grown stronger in the past four years.

Obama managed to win again, despite securing only 39 percent of white voters–who still represent the nation’s largest voting bloc at 72 percent.

Poll after poll indicated the issue atop all voters mind this election season was the still-weak economy, a color-blind issue affecting nearly everyone.

However, analysis of voter data shows that the racial divide that dominated much of the race in 2008 is getting wider. Obama failed to capture the majority of the white vote in many of the nation’s states–even the ones that traditionally bleed blue–and endured a 4-point drop among white votes over 2008.

Based on racial exit-poll data available from select states, Obama would have definitively lost 12 states to Republican nominee Mitt Romney if only white voters mattered. Add another three possible toss-up states and that’s a full 242 possible electoral votes that Obama would not have.

Using the link, toggle between the reality of the 2012 vote and a projected electoral map that uses white-only voter preferences. You can also clearly see what Obama gained and lost using white-only votes from 2008 to 2012. Hint: It’s a lot. – National Journal