Yeti 🐭

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

Well they've suspended one of the best informed, best written, and intellectually thorough accounts on X: Charles Pezeshki, actual rocket scientist, student of semiotics, traveled adult thinker etc. As distinctive and enlightening an account as there was.

Free the prisoner.

[Gina @ginnydmm]

More brilliance from the Alt Afrikaner:

“The Most Progressive and Privileged People in the Room Are Calling You "Privileged"

I've just been watching what I can only describe as the Platonic ideal of a South African panel discussion, which is to say four people who agree entirely with one another taking turns to say so in slightly different accents.

First up, Oom Max Somebody-or-Other, veteran journalist and South Africa's longest-serving disappointed Afrikaner. He's built a career explaining why his own people embarrass him, mostly to foreign audiences who nod sympathetically and buy hardcovers. He hasn't queued at Home Affairs since the Botha administration, his last township visit was a guided tour with a Danish film crew, and he considers your concerns about crime "coded language." For what, exactly, he won't say. He just raises an eyebrow. Very effective. He learned it from London editors.
He did a documentary on Orania once. Found it "chilling." The residents offered him coffee. He declined. Can't humanise them. The Guardian wouldn't like it.

Next, a woman calling in from what appears to be a panic room in Sandton, though she assures us it's just a study. Lovely bookshelves. Charming artwork. Electric fencing just out of frame. She'd like us to know that crime is "really not that bad if you're sensible," which is a fascinating position to take whilst sitting behind three metres of concrete, two armed response subscriptions, and a husband who sleeps with a Glock under his pillow like some sort of Highveld Wyatt Earp.
Her domestic worker, I learn, takes three taxis to get home to Diepsloot every evening, but I suppose that's not really germane to the discussion about whether South Africa is safe. Different conversation entirely. Separate issues.

Then there's the chap from London. Left in the early 2000s. Comes back every year or two for a funeral or a wedding, stays in Camps Bay, eats at Kloof Street House, gets a bit misty about the mountain, posts something on LinkedIn about "the Rainbow Nation's ongoing journey." His most recent brush with loadshedding occurred when the hotel generator kicked in during breakfast and briefly interrupted the omelette station. Traumatic, I'm sure. He's been processing it ever since.
He's got opinions, though. Lots of opinions. He thinks people who complain about South Africa are "playing into a narrative." He doesn't specify whose narrative, or what it's narrating, but he says it with tremendous confidence, which I suppose is the main thing when you're speaking from a flat in Hampstead.

And finally, my personal favourite: the NGO director calling in from the V&A Waterfront. Lanyard still on. MacBook glowing. Salary paid in euros by a foundation whose name contains at least three abstract nouns. She's here to explain that my concerns about employment are "valid but perhaps lack nuance." The nuance, it turns out, is that I should have more empathy for the people who got the job I was told I couldn't have because of the colour of my skin. She learned this at a conference in Geneva. There was a panel. Canapés. A communiqué was issued.
She also thinks Orania is "deeply troubling," except she lives in Sea Point, which is essentially the same thing but with better coffee and a Woolworths. The difference, I gather, is intention. Her enclave is aspirational. Theirs is ideological according to her. It's all very complex. You'd need a lanyard to understand.
Combined exposure to consequences: none.
Combined opinions: endless.
Combined time spent in a Home Affairs queue: I'm going to estimate forty-five seconds, and that was only because someone's driver double-parked and they had to fetch their own passport from the counter.

But please. Do go on. Tell us more about my country.
From your privileged progressive position.”

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Harvesting just one kidney from 20% of America’s politicians would give a new kidney to EVERY SINGLE PERSON currently on the transplant waiting list.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

[Amy Gallagher @StandUptoWoke]

“the twisted logic that blames people, entirely unconnected with the crime, solely based on the colour of their skin?”

This is a description of Critical Race Theory.

[Robert Duigan @uMarhobane]

Well they didn't come for the Somalis first, but I appreciate five is an awkward number of panels

[Kenny Carmody @KennyCarmody]

COVID changed something in me that cannot be unchanged.

Not the virus. Not even the mandates. What changed it permanently was watching every government on earth arrive at the same silence, at the same moment, and hold it for six years running.

Nearly six years since the rollout began. Not one head of state has stood before their people and said: some of you were harmed, we know it, and you deserve an honest accounting. Not one parliamentary inquiry with genuine authority. Not one compensation framework built on the actual scale of injury. The vaccine injured remain without diagnostic codes in most countries. Without legal recourse. Without the most basic institutional acknowledgment that what happened to their bodies was real.

This is what accountable institutions do after genuine public health emergencies. They review. They audit. They ask who was harmed and how. They produce findings that are uncomfortable because the discomfort is the point. The discomfort is how trust gets rebuilt.

What we have instead is a wall. And behind the wall, people who lost careers for raising questions that turned out to be legitimate. People who watched their governments promote Long COVID with full institutional weight while refusing to ask a single honest question about overlapping presentations in the vaccine injured. The same symptoms. The same mechanisms proposed in the literature. The convenient frame that points in every direction except at the product.

The coordination is what tells you the most. Individual negligence looks different. It is patchy. It is inconsistent. Individual negligence produces whistleblowers, outliers, one government that breaks from the rest because the political cost of silence finally exceeds the cost of honesty.

What we have is not that. What we have is universal. And universality of this kind does not emerge from independent actors independently deciding to do nothing. It is decided.

There is a particular cruelty in what this does to the injured. It is not just that they are uncompensated. It is that the silence communicates something to them about their value. That they were considered acceptable losses before the fact, and inconvenient liabilities after it. That the calculus was made, and they lost. The psychological cost of that message, delivered not once but every single day through continued institutional indifference, is its own injury layered on top of the physical one.

The children absorb this too. They are watching their parents fight for recognition against institutions that will not move. They are learning what governments actually mean when they say they will protect them. They are developing a relationship with authority that no civics class will be able to undo.

The universal silence of world leaders on vaccine injury is not the behaviour of people managing an honest disagreement about evidence.

It is the behaviour of people who have made a collective calculation that the cost of telling the truth now exceeds the cost of never telling it.

And that calculation, held simultaneously, across every major government on earth, is the most important public health finding of the last six years.

Not what the virus did. Not even what the vaccines did.

What the silence, together, reveals about who was making decisions, and who they were making them for.

[Lerato @_BellaM_]

Stella, your statement exposes exactly why South Africans are angry. When citizens want to run a business, government demands ownership verification, tax compliance, operational requirements, permits, licences and endless bureaucracy before support is released. But elsewhere the system is far more accommodating: asylum seekers get Section 22 permits that legalise their stay, and school rules also accept asylum/refugee documents and even affidavits where official papers are missing. Then people like Mbeki, Mantashe and Dlamini Zuma have the nerve to talk as if South Africans are the ones who are unskilled or unemployable. No! That’s BS! the truth is that this government has made life harder for its own people, then insults them for not thriving inside the mess it created. South Africans are angry because the system does not work for them. And if you still vote ANC after this, then you are voting for the very people who built the dysfunction.

[Sean 🇿🇦 @Seancology]

@Our_DA Since we are on the topic of accountability: when is @Leon_Schreib being summoned to account for the millions of illegal migrants in our country. He must start with Cape Town first

[Jewish Tim Flack 𝕏 @tim_meh87]

Redi Tlhabi just dropped a piece calling @Starlink a “national security threat” to South Africa… and warning us not to sell our democracy to @elonmusk . But she “forgot” to mention her piece is hosted on Phillip van Niekerk’s Substack, the same guy who’s A PAID CONSULTANT FOR MTN.

MTN has every incentive to slow-walk Starlink while pushing its own satellite plays. Transparency matters when lecturing about “democracy” and foreign influence.

[Ryan Coetzee @RyanCoetzee]

I hold no candle for Musk but what I really cannot abide anymore is the sort of rich person, often but not always paid by the public, who always thinks there’s something more important than growth and jobs.

South Africans are so inured to our staggering level of unemployment that we simply cannot see the world historical scale of it. It is more or less unprecedented globally, outside of war zones. Ever.

Public policy-making involves tradeoffs. Given our mind-blowing level of unemployment, there are very, very few things that make risking more growth a good idea. Very few. Starlink is not one of them.

Yes, there are security considerations to take care of, and we should take care of them. But for Pete’s sake, can we just, for once, work backwards from the real problem here?

[Roland Schoeman @Rolandschoeman]

@SAHRCommission How about the open calling for the murder of an entire ethnic group?

[Kallie Kriel @kalliekriel]

Today we mourn those who died during an ANC terror attack that took place in Church Street, Pretoria, exactly 43 years ago on 20 May 1983. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 19 people, both black and white.

[Ernst Roets @ErnstRoets]

They celebrate their "non-racialism" while presiding over the most extensive network of race laws in history.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Maybe you should just read the UN report about it instead of getting randomly mad without knowing what you're talking about.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Dear @sapinker, I am a huge admirer of your cognitive/linguistic work and your influential efforts in popularizing the evolutionary psychological lens. But I'm afraid that you may have missed the key tenets of suicidal empathy. It has nothing to do with "right-wing contempt for empathy." Empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait for a social species to exhibit. But as is the case for countless psychiatric disorders, an adaptive trait can become maladaptive if it misfires. Suicidal empathy is the maladaptive misfiring of empathy in three key ways: 1) it is hyperactive; 2) it is activated in wrong situations; 3) it is directed toward the wrong targets. What I just wrote holds true irrespective of whether you support Trump or not. I hope this clarifies it for you.

[🆆🅸🅻🅻 🆂🅲🅾🆃🆃 ♿ 🇮🇱 @guillum]

If I didn't know better, I would suggest that the South African @GovernmentZA is actively doing everything in its power to foment a civil war in our country.

Diesel going up by 20% is absolutely outrageous. Our fuel is taxed in excess of 30% on every liter. @CyrilRamaphosa could offset those levies if he truly cared about the people of this nation. He doesn't.

How does the @MYANC imagine ANYONE being able to weather a 20% increase in the cost of living? The price of fuel has a bearing on EVERYTHING. Food. Transports. Goods. All of it is affected.

... and don't tell me that this is all due to the Iran conflict. We get most of our oil from places like Angola and Nigeria. Why, then, are we being punished like this at the pump?

To all my American followers: after Wednesday, South Africans will be paying the equivalent of $9/gallon for diesel.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

The DOJ has ONE WEEK left to charge Anthony Fauci for the worst cover-up in modern medical history.

He lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Millions died. Trillions were spent. And Fauci walked away with book deals and fawning media coverage instead of handcuffs. I re-upped my criminal referral to the DOJ because the evidence is overwhelming, and justice has been delayed long enough.

RT if you’re ready to see Fauci behind bars.

[Corné_Mulder @MulderCorn]

#CapeTownTaxesRatesCrisis The 40% of Cape Town’s residents who are expected to subsidise the other 60% in terms of the DA’s plans have started to push back. Well done. It is about time. https://t.co/fTOtlQdtYj

[Werner Human @WernerHuman18]

Exposing the BEE for what it is, is something that should be done in a persistent manner. The ANC political elite will do anything to keep the spotlight from BEE - in order for them and their cadres to enrich themselves.

This article by William Saunderson-Meyer in @Politicsweb is a must-read, detailing some of the extracts of a report on BEE in the mining sector.

Supposedly, this was a confidential report. One can understand why - it is in actual fact an exposé:

It shows that a massive 60% of BEE value were channelled to a mere 46 (!) individuals. The total value being up to R 282 billion.

Basic arithmetic, as @TheJaundicedEye shows, amounts to about R3 billion per individual.

We must continue to shine the light on the darkness of where the cadres operate.

#EndRaceLaws

#ScrapBEE