South Africa descends further into darkness 43
A South African sent us a description of how depressing life for even the well-off has become in that beautiful country:
Every day, we have to endure four hours — in separate two- hour sessions — of no electricity. South Africa has now endured fifteen years of load-shedding, and there is no end in sight. Massive corruption and incompetence have destroyed Eskom [South Africa’s state-owned and only power utility]. The consequences for business are dire. Who will invest in a country that is plunged into darkness for four hours every day?
Really, life in this land of ours is pretty depressing. The infrastructure of Johannesburg is collapsing— potholed roads, litter-laden streets— and it is all ghastly.
Everywhere, physical decay is visible.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery is leaking, poorly guarded, and penniless. I have not visited it for decades.
For vacancies in departments of schools once held in high esteem for their academic excellence, new appointments are brazenly advertised as “transformative posts” — by which is meant, white candidates, however well qualified and however experienced, need not bother to apply. “Decolonizing” of content, ranging from geography to English literature, is officially under way. Even private school English departments that remain dedicated to teaching the classics of the Western canon are condemned by “transformation committees” as reactionary, regardless of the excellence of their pupils’ examination results.
Recently there were floods in the east-coast province KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).
The floods in KZN were horrendous – over 400 fatalities. The lack of maintenance of any kind under the ANC, let alone any development, is appalling. And still the “woke” idiots in charge screech on about pronoun use and critical race theory.
An article by Gerbrandt van Heerden in the Daily Friend confirms the accelerating decline with this information:
Skills are in short supply in South Africa.
According to immigration specialists Sable International, load-shedding and a failing electricity grid are among the reasons why skilled people are leaving the country.
And there are other causes of the shortage and the exodus:
An obvious cause is the country’s abysmal education system. Poor educational outcomes have increasingly led to a skills mismatch in the South African economy. While the country’s industries require high skills, the education system is producing a low- to semi-skilled workforce. Despite the poor performance of mostly government run schools, no clear plan has been articulated on how to fix the education crisis.
Corruption and nepotism have resulted in poor services and decaying infrastructure.
Harmful government policies, such as BBBEE [Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment – quotas based on the old apartheid racial classifications!], make it increasingly difficult for the small pool of talented workers we still have to remain in the country. Parliament recently began public hearings on the controversial Employment Equity Amendment Bill. Proposed changes will enable the labour minister, in consultation with the stakeholders of a particular sector, to set numerical sector-specific employment equity targets. [“Sector-specific” = compulsory quotas of “underprivileged” groups.] Companies that fail to comply with the targets can be fined between 1% and 10% of turnover and will be disqualified from doing business with the government. Businesses are reluctant to expand at all if they are forced to hire staff on a basis that does not allow consideration of skills and experience. So this will further accelerate the skills flight from the country.
Despite the warnings from many experts, civil society groups, and healthcare professionals themselves, about the disastrous effects of nationalizing the healthcare sector, government has once again recommitted to the policy. The South African Medical Association (SAMA), which represents 12,000 medical doctors in South Africa, stated that thousands of its members will emigrate if the NHI is implemented. A survey conducted by SAMA showed that as many as 38% of its members plan to emigrate from South Africa due to the planned introduction of the NHI.
Some of the occupations in demand include architects, chemists, civil, industrial and mechanical engineers, economists, software developers, tax professionals, and maths and science teachers. Expatweb’s latest Critical Skills Survey, based on a sample of 220 businesses, indicates that businesses find it difficult to recruit engineers and ICT [Information and Communications Technology] specialists. Banks, retailers and businesses are fighting over the limited talent pool.
The shortage will have serious implications for South Africa’s political stability and economic sustainability. It will discourage business confidence and the ability of businesses to expand. This must increase unemployment, already at a record high level, and diminish further the dwindling taxable population. Yet the government shows no will to effect the reforms necessary for the growth of skills.
The corruption, the incompetence, the decline is gathering pace.
South Africa is hurtling to its fall.
How goes the revolution? 99
The radical Ethnic Studies addition to Minnesota’s proposed social studies standards encourages students to disrupt and dismantle America’s fundamental institutions.
Katherine Kersten writes at American Experiment about public education in Minnesota becoming nothing more than Marxist indoctrination, and how it is a model for the whole of America. (We quote a large part of her article, but recommend that it be read in full.)
Minnesota’s proposed new social studies standards have sparked controversy since the first draft was released in December 2020. What’s grabbed public attention in the final draft, now in the rule-making process, is Ethnic Studies. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has added this highly politicized “fifth strand” — unauthorized by statute — to the four content areas named in law: history, government and citizenship, geography and economics.
The inclusion of Ethnic Studies marks a victory for forces seeking to radically remake Minnesota’s public schools. Ethnic Studies goes beyond the standard “anti-racist” Critical Race Theory (CRT) focus, especially in its stress on student political activism: “disrupting”, “dismantling” and “transforming” our nation’s fundamental institutions. It imports the whole ideological thought world from which CRT sprang, and serves as a vector for the activist network that is driving it nationally.
In short, Ethnic Studies is the spider at the center of the web that MDE is spinning.
How did this extremist ideology — born of the “Third World Liberation Front” that grew out of the 1968 student strikes and riots in California — make its way from San Francisco and Berkeley to elementary classrooms in Litchfield and Faribault, Minnesota?
It’s a scandalous story. When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.
These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system … as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is”.
Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in … a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.
When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools”. By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable”, and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.
But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance”, for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power against marginalized”oppressed groups”.
How will this play out in Minnesota’s classrooms? Here’s an example: Students will study our police departments and justice system in connection with an Ethnic Studies standard that requires them to “understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression” and “eliminate injustices”.
To this end, fifth graders will first “examine contemporary policing” and its alleged “historical roots in early America”. The claim is that our police departments sprang directly from slave patrols of the Old South.
Sixth graders will describe the “impact of Minnesota’s juvenile justice system” on “historically disenfranchised groups”. High school standards suggest the notion of criminality itself is racist: “explore how criminality is constructed and what makes a person a criminal.”
Biased, misleading instruction of this kind will likely convince many young people that policing and the very idea of criminality are oppressive, racially “constructed” and among the many things schools are instructing them to “resist”. …
The campaign to highjack the revision of Minnesota’s social studies standards may look homegrown, but it is nothing of the kind. EdLib MN [Education for Liberation Minnesota] is a state chapter — indeed the only state chapter — of a national extremist organization called the Education for Liberation Network.
The EdLib Network makes no secret of its revolutionary agenda: to dismantle and replace America’s fundamental institutions. Or in its own words, it “promotes the transformation of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that reflect the values of Education for Liberation”. The network’s strategy to achieve this objective is “wholesale K-16 implementation” of Ethnic Studies in schools across the nation.
Two 20th-century Marxist thinkers, Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci, are central to the Ed Lib Network’s worldview. …
The name and concept of “Education for Liberation” are drawn from the ideology of Brazilian Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968. Freire maintained that education’s purpose is not to pass on knowledge, but to build revolutionary consciousness among the “oppressed” to achieve “liberation” by overthrowing the system. For decades, his book has been one of the most widely assigned texts in many colleges of education.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist [a founder of the Italian Communist Party – ed) has been called the godfather of cultural Marxism. … He proposed that activists infiltrate and gain control of key institutions of civil society, like schools and political parties, to shape a new ideological consensus and organize opposition to the existing social order. This strategy has become known as “the long march through the institutions“.
According to its website, the EdLib Network has worked since 2012 to promote Ethnic Studies in California, the epicenter of the movement. In March 2021, California’s board of education approved the state’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.
The model curriculum’s “guiding principles” call for “transformative resistance” and repudiate “forms of power and oppression” that include “cisheteropatriarchy” and “anthropocentrism” (the belief that human beings are superior to animals). The curriculum originally incorporated student chants to bloodthirsty Aztec gods, but recently dropped these following a legal settlement.
Now the EdLib Network is going state-by-state, “building power from the ground up” and creating “regional assemblies” to help “educators and grassroots organizers to implement Ethnic Studies in their own communities”. …
The curriculum begins by declaring its support for political revolution: “System changes occur when people unite, mobilize and organize in coordinated resistance to disrupt and dismantle inequitable systems.”
Lessons are saturated with the concepts and lingo of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist ideology. Starting in pre-K, for example, students are taught to reject “normalization”. Older students are repeatedly instructed to question “common sense” and refuse to “consent” to “hegemony”— i.e. the power “white men use to dominate others”. In grades 7-12 lessons, Gramsci is invoked by name. “We need to understand common sense the way that Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher, understood it,” students are told. They are asked, “What hegemonic beliefs do you plan to disrupt?” and assigned to “create counter-hegemonic stories.”
Throughout, instruction is cult-like and highly manipulative, and the pressure to conform is overwhelming. Elementary pupils are assigned to rewrite popular songs to reflect Ethnic Studies ideology, and to recite Gramsci’s ideological tenets in “choral readings”. Overall, these mind-numbing lessons conjure images of youthful Red Guards being groomed for China’s Cultural Revolution. …
The new field of “Ethnomathematics” teaches that math began in ancient “empires of color”, was appropriated by the West to oppress BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), and should be taught, in part, through racial and ethnic storytelling. In science class … students may study Ojibwe architecture.
[In Minnesota] legislative proposals [include] one bill that would require MDE to establish an Ethnic Studies Task Force, with “input” from the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition. This task force would be charged with developing K-12 Ethnic Studies standards in a range of subject areas, which MDE (the Minnesota Department of Education] would be required by law to adopt and to do so using an expedited process allowing minimal public input. …
Meanwhile, many young people — especially minority children — lack the basics in history, reading, science and math, as class time spent on fundamental knowledge shifts to indoctrination in extremist ideology.
Brave parents are stepping up to demand that our schools be returned to the people of Minnesota. But so far others — including the business community, civic organizations, and school boards and administrators — have been silent. Unless we all raise our voices, our state’s and our children’s futures will soon be in the hands of forces determined to transform our nation beyond recognition.
Will America allow Communism to win the Cold War after all?
Has it already won?
World conquest by needle 4
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the agency of the abominable UN that is being used to bring us under one world government.
Dr. Tess Lawrie writes:
The WHO is proposing a global pandemic agreement that would give it undemocratic rights over every participating nation and its citizens. Put simply, in the event of a ‘pandemic’, the WHO’s constitution would replace every country’s constitution. Whether your country’s elected government would agree or not, the WHO could impose lockdowns, testing regimes, enforce medical interventions, dictate all public health practice, and much more.
Over the course of this pandemic, the WHO has withheld safe and established older medicines, ignored the experiences of frontline doctors, disregarded evidence from low, middle and high-income countries, and taken no heed of the values and preferences of people affected by their recommendations. It has apparently ignored the huge numbers of adverse reactions on its own database and has failed to issue warnings about the gene-based vaccines. It has also advertised that the mRNA vaccines are as safe as normal vaccines – and this is simply not the case.
Many of us are extremely concerned that the WHO now intends to take full control over every member nation via this pandemic treaty.
And over every individual.
Is it possible, do you think?
And if it is possible, is it likely to happen?
Voting for tyranny 73
In 2020, tyrants came to power in the United States by fraud. They were not elected by a majority. The majority voted for Donald Trump to be president, which means most Americans want freedom. But far too many did actually vote for the tyrannical party. All Americans got the government the large minority wanted and that they, but not most Americans, deserved.
In other Western countries, Germany for instance, the tyrants now in power were elected by majorities.
The proven fact that hundreds of millions of Westerners want to be governed by authoritarians welding power arbitrarily, cruelly, and destructively is strangely omitted from conservative commentary.
But Paul Gottfried has observed the horrifying fact, and writes about it at American Greatness:
A bad habit on the establishment Right, here and in other Western countries, is to treat those who have made disastrous electoral decisions as victims. If the choices made by these “victims” turn out badly, as they have in the cases of numerous municipal governments and blue states and with the election of Joe Biden, conservatives carefully avoid accusing the voters. Apparently high crime rates, unnecessary lockdowns, goofy LGBTQ+, antiwhite measures, and galloping inflation should not be pinned on those who cast electoral ballots.
If eligible voters in heavily black urban areas endorse corrupt politicians who thrive by playing the race card and ignore rising crime rates, the fault, we are led to believe, is entirely with those who have been elected. The stigma belongs to politicians who have betrayed the “people,” although a majority of the “people” dutifully voted for them. Are we to think that those who have voted more than once for Maxine Waters, Kweisi Mfume, and Bill de Blasio or who ran in droves to rescue Gavin Newsom in the California recall election last year are simply the hapless victims of evil politicians?
The same tendency to shift blame misleadingly is characteristic of the German democratic Right, as I gather from reading their leading weekly Junge Freiheit. Although Germany has moved even further to the left than the United States on social and cultural issues and is governed by a Green-Social Democratic coalition that is even more radical than our Democrats, the fault, according to German conservatives, does not lie with the German “volk“, which is no longer even recognizable as such.
Significantly, German voters stand behind a state that has little respect for civil liberties, one that has gone after its only non-leftist party—Alternative for Germany—because its leaders have suggested in speech that Germans are an historic nation, not just a collection of individuals. Unfortunately, most Germans don’t seem to care if a leftist woke government shuts them up and strips them of their national identity.
The lockdowns established by the German government were also far more comprehensive than ours, and the state attacked those who protested them as Nazi sympathizers and in many cases subjected them to arrest and prosecution. The new German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who has published in the far-left Antifa, has designated as her first priority, “combating the far-right threat,” a war that should start in kindergarten. Last week, the culturally radical Social Democrats swept to an unanticipatedly large victory in Saarland. Their chief competitor, the Christian Democrats, lost to the Social Democrats, who managed to outdo them in LGBT advocacy, and in calls for massive immigration and blatant antinationalism. The last time I checked, it was overwhelmingly ethnic Germans who voted for this woke hell.
Are we to pretend that those who vote for race-baiters and unhinged antifascists are not really voting? They are simply the victims of malign forces that bring to power leftist demagogues and crazed social engineers despite the “people”? Although it may be convenient to nurture that fantasy, real majorities often elect utterly loathsome governments …
I’m also not willing to give these voters the benefit of the doubt because they have been under the influence of lying media. Although the leftist media lie through their teeth, one might expect that adults at some point would notice. But even if they don’t, I see no reason to treat voters as the helpless victims of their own choices. Truth is, they are getting the leadership they deserve. And they are suffering the consequences they brought on themselves.
We should assume that when citizens are authorized to vote, they are responsible for what they mark on a ballot. We are, however, free to doubt that all voting citizens take civic obligations seriously, and in the 19th century, the educated bourgeoisie … wished to limit the franchise to literate property holders like themselves. They believed that only the “capable classes (les classes capacitaires)” were able to exercise political power prudently, and some doubted that women, with certain exceptions, were emotionally stable enough to attend to political affairs.
Although these early bourgeois liberals may have had a point, Western countries since have moved in a different direction. We are therefore obliged to operate with another assumption. That assumption is that all authorized citizens should be able to choose their leaders. This means that they will be getting the government they democratically elected, and the responsibility for that choice is theirs.
Why have millions of citizens of the formerly free countries of the West turned against freedom?
Invitation 88
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