Martin Erasmus

Libertarian Entrepreneur Realist Ferroequinologist Farmer

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@Micylaaa Always a good investment

[Charlie O'Malley @charliebadger99]

@ClarksonsFarm1 Would either pass an MOT? :)

[Rob Heine 💔.... @RobPadoa]

@HrothN We moesten dit gedicht op school leren..😀

[Tim Noakes @ProfTimNoakes]

Please tell me why @elonmusk is not the most able person/intellectual/business man/engineer who has ever inhabited planet Earth. @ProfTimNoakes

[Jade Warwick @TheJadeWarwick]

I love this woman

@jk_rowling is a true role model

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@SPQRSA English Heavy Metal Rocks it

[Skye @SkyeZedA]

The real reason you’re seeing the tantrums about the White Cross Project is this.

And this applies to almost any criticism of the South African government. It’s why people call for critics to be arrested for treason and in some cases even “necklaced”. Google that term if you don’t know what it means in the South African context.

The truth is that some South Africans simply refuse to confront what so-called post-apartheid South Africa has become.

We have one of the highest murder and rape rates in the world. Our per capita murder rate is roughly 8 times that of the United States. Extreme violence on farms. Incitement of violence by politicians against farmers and minorities. More race laws on the statute books than at the height of apartheid.

Just about every major state-owned enterprise has been hollowed out by corruption, mismanagement and looting. People live behind 8-foot walls with electric fencing, burglar bars and security gates. Some South Africans literally install “rape gates” in their hallways to protect their bedrooms from intruders.

Our police and military are a running joke. Police stations don’t answer their phones and struggle with broken-down vehicles and basic resources.

Once world-class cities have been allowed to decay. There is rubbish everywhere, crumbling infrastructure, sewage running through communities and potholes you could practically swim in.

Our education system produces millions of functionally illiterate children. 8 out of ten Grade 4 children cannot even read for meaning.

We have an expanded unemployment rate of 43.8%. Only 16.7 million people are employed. 26.5 million people receive social grants. Read that again: we have more people on social grants than we have people employed.

For years, they sneered at the people who warned where this country was heading. They called them racists and traitors. They insisted the warnings were hysteria and that the ANC would never destroy the country.

Now they have to look at the results.

And when those results are exposed internationally, they don’t rage at the failures. They rage at the people exposing them.

Because admitting what has happened means admitting that the people they mocked and vilified were warning about things that ultimately came to pass.

That crying you hear over the White Cross Project?

It’s humiliation and embarrassment.

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@LStranackNutt Belated Happy Birthday. May you be blessed

[Farai Mazhindu @FaraiMazhindu]

Under its own race-based empowerment laws, the ANC treats restrictions on a minority as legitimate domestic policy, not something wrong.

Yet when Zimbabwean officials face sanctions for unleashing violence on citizens, journalists, gutting free speech, and looting state coffers, the same government calls that punishment unjust and demands it be lifted.

Ronald Lamola's UN appeal to remove sanctions on Zimbabwe's ruling elite sits awkwardly beside Pretoria's own race-based employment and ownership laws, restrictions imposed on white South Africans on the very basis, race, that his government insists is unacceptable when others apply it.

Penalizing your own productive citizens and businesses by race, while shielding a neighboring regime accused of repression and graft, isn't principled foreign policy.

It's a double standard dressed up as solidarity.

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@RoryDuncan1966 Don’t forget about the 1064 locomotive disaster and Prasa Tall Train saga. Billions wasted so the comrades can eat

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@DIRCO_ZA Maybe if you stop stealing and award contracts to people who don’t have the skills you would not have to borrow that much

[Caught At Silly Point @atsillypoint]

There is no cricketer on earth as valuable as Marco Jansen across all formats, because what he can do, nobody else can. Cricket has tried it twice and failed both times.

Tall bowlers are not rare. Garner, Ambrose, Cuffy, Jamieson, Finn, Muzarabani. Cricket has always had them, and they have almost all been right-arm.

Tall left-armers are rare. There have been two who mattered. Bruce Reid, six foot eight, Australia, 113 Test wickets at 24.63 and feared by everybody who faced him. And Mohammad Irfan, seven foot, who played four Tests in his life.

Fine, so it has happened before. Except Reid averaged 4.65 with the bat, with a top score of 13 in 27 Test matches, and his back gave out at 29. Irfan barely played.

Jansen is six foot eight, left-arm, hammering the pitch at genuine pace, with a Test best of 84 not out and four international fifties across formats. He is also the tallest active international cricketer in the world, and South Africa have produced only a handful of left-arm seamers in thirty years, so most batters have never seen this shape at this pace from anybody.

Then add the rest. Those angles, and the subtle, crafty little alterations that detonate without warning. A knuckleball that failed because his fingers were too big, so he built one hidden in the palm instead. He does not do it every day. When he does, it erupts. The powerplay and the death overs in the same T20 World Cup.

And then the bat. The long levers and that swing mean an innings can be ripped away from you in twenty minutes, from a man you had already filed as a bowler.

He is gifted, obviously. But it is the hunger for improvement, the relentless curiosity about adapting, and that he is not afraid to graft.

Cricket has seen the height. It has seen the angle. It has even seen the two together, twice.

It has never seen them in a man who could also take the game away with a bat.

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@BarneySimon 🙈😂

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

I fully agree with John

[💕Elle J 💕#JustSaying 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 @ejames500]

I'm with John

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@JacquesMaree73 Jy het kant verkeerd gespel

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

Absolutely

[Rob Louw @roblouw6]

Absolutely 💯

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@RoryDuncan1966 The anti hunting lobby are trying their best to interfere

[Martin Erasmus @martinerasmus23]

@Micylaaa Jy Lyk heel handig 😜