Executive Director @Sakeliga | Economist | Christ or chaos
Nov 7, 2023 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Perhaps this can save a life🧵
Cape Town is a splendid place to tour - when done right.
Concerningly, misinformed tourists are placed in grave danger when guided by Google Maps and perhaps other apps through highly dangerous areas. The quoted story is far too common.
Here is the Cape Peninsula. The main tourist zone is marked in red. The airport is at the blue X.
Upon arrival, the tourist must get from the blue X to the red zone safely. This is not difficult, but main highways must be used and certain danger zones are to be strictly avoided.
Jul 6, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
SA yet another example of how wrong liberal universalists were that you could superimpose a Western-style liberal democratic framework on any country and out the other side would come rainbows and unicorns. Failure must now be blamed on anything but Pretorian mass democracy.
The bet was that SA's immense social complexity could be mediated by a centralised democratic order with theoretical 'democratic institutions' and 'checks and balances' without those things properly existing in real life. Something like a Cargo Cult order - form without function.
Feb 1, 2021 • 20 tweets • 7 min read
In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, They Rejected Lockdowns
By @jeffreyatucker
aier.org/article/in-the…
The '57-58 flu is estimated to have killed in one year around 100k Americans, or about 200k in today's population terms. The age profile of death was notably younger than Covid, and pregnant women appear to have been one of the high risk categories.
Jan 15, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Best news of 2020 was Covid isn't dangerous to children, after panic that the young could be vulnerable. None of the miserable Covid fearmongers actually celebrated this fact. They just pivoted to new fear campaigns and pretended that children were still risk vectors. Nuts.
Children are the bright light of Covid. Closing schools or masking children all day at school and pumping them full of Covid fear is a macabre type of abuse by a generation of cowardly adults.
Last night, a peaceful couple was executed in cold blood on their farm near Newcastle KZN, with no apparent motive other than some form of sick terrorism. Criminologically, this can't be likened to (also horrendous) township violence. Different problem.
southafricatoday.net/south-africa-n…
My work on this problem so far leads me to the tentative conclusion that on avg male farmers are murdered at a similar rate to the avg SAfrican male. This is often taken to mean that farm murders are not a uniquely bad problem, but I think it supports the opposite conclusion.
Jul 29, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Putting highly sensitive, unproven assumptions into models with hundreds/thousands of lines of opaque code spitting out numbers that get handed to bureaucrats to tell tens of millions of people how to live is not how any of this is supposed to work
The epistemological and political philosophy failure that this entire chain of policy formation entails represents what's wrong in most other areas of public policy. This technocratic authoritarianism remains THE barrier to progress in C21st, thrusting us toward impoverishment.
Apr 14, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
As the chattering classes fawn over the president's "stunning and brave" lockdown leadership, the truth, as always, alludes them. Lockdown reveals a weak, unimaginative, detached, reckless, weather vane leader. 1/n
1. The state doesn't have the capacity to enforce lockdown or deal with its resultant chaos. The president made one of the most fundamental strategy errors - committing his govt beyond its logistical capabilities. 2. Expecting the poorest SAns to endure lockdown itself and the
Dec 19, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
All JSE Alsi real total returns (real $) since 1994 occurred in just 5 years: 2002-2007. Outside of that period (1994-2002 & 2007-2019), real $ Alsi delivered - 0.9%/year.
2002-2007 Alsi real $ gains came on the back of a commodity boom, global debt binge, and rapid domestic capital consumption to fund rampant household consumption. The company carnage on the JSE is testament to a very widespread destruction of wealth.
Dec 12, 2019 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
The ANC took reins in '94
Those cadres were commies to the core
Marx was exhumed
Wealth was consumed
And now the whole place is done for
SAA turned off the flights
Eskom turned off the lights
Cadre deployment
For crony enjoyment
This is when reality bites
Nov 28, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Sad seeing the Steers burger shrivel up into almost nothing. Latest trick is the oversized bun with the afterthought patty hidden somewhere inside. It has to pretend inflation averaged 6% for the past 20yrs and it will butcher that patty until it confesses.
If you compare the price of a Steers burger 20 years ago to its less impressive descendent now, it more or less fits the official CPI inflation story (~6%). If you compare it to a decent quality burger today, more like 9% annual.
So Germany can "boost" it's economy by the govt borrowing more scarce real savings & using them to fund MOAR govt programmes with unknown P&L/return, racking up MOAR debt & future taxes for taxpayers. 1) If you actually believe this, then you are lost in a very dense fog. 2)...
Jul 12, 2019 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
The Rationalist conception of man is that he is unfairly put upon by circumstances of birth (culture, religion, place, language). The Rationalist aims to free him of these, giving rise to a 'blank slate' conception of man common to Rationalist Humanism (Marxism, liberalism).
In this blank slate Rationalism, culture & tradition become things to be freed from, rather than things that *helpfully* constrain, teach and can be gradually improved. This Rationalist conception extends to inherited language, mores, religion, economics, and today even genetics.
Jun 13, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Half of all transactions are comprised of nationalised, state-monopolised, oligarch-friendly, debt-based, fractionally-backed fiat money. We don't have capitalism. We have capitalism gasping for air at any opportunity. That it catches the odd breath keeps this whole game going.
All this political angst directed at CAPITALISM™. But let's ask ourselves, does the West look more or less like the Soviet Union than it did in 1989?
Larger state size/scope? ✅
More creepy surveillance?✅
More regulations?✅
More state debt?✅
More monetary central planning?✅
Mar 1, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Emigration is ripping South African communities apart, but silence about it in the mainstream. Economically and socially brutal what's happening.
Presentation by a bank this week revealed 1/3 of kids leaving pvt schools are doing so because of emigration. 1/3 of that 1/3 are black. Emigration is multiracial and extensive.
Aug 31, 2018 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Earlier this year AgriSA announced that farm murders had declined to their "lowest in nearly 20 years." But they made no mention of the declining number of farms, farmers, & seeming trend of farmers moving to towns. Has @AgriSAOfficial adjusted the data for these trends?
@AgriSAOfficial Based on my research of StatsSA data, the number of farming units has fallen from 60k in late 80s to around 30k today. What's less clear is how many farmers live on these commercial farms given increasing corporatisation & mechanisation of farms, & farmers moving to towns.
Aug 27, 2018 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
The highest ANC policy objective is the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). One needs to understand all ANC policy through this lens. The NDR concept germinated when the ANC abandoned its 1912 liberal roots and embraced communism in the 1950s under heavy Soviet influence.
The understand the NDR, one needs to understand Leninism and the systematic increase of tyranny in Russia under his guidance. Here we find the idea of the "democratic revolution", which is Lenin's terminology, doublespeak really, for expanding state control over the economy.
