Truth Coffee

Truth Coffee Cape Town South Africa

Trip Advisor has a zillion other pictures of this place.

Wild Coast. South Africa

Coffee Bay, South Africa

I liked the look of this picture, peaceful, calm, tropical paradise, sunshine, blue skies, the whole kit and caboodle. Google image search* comes back with a long list of places that use this image, for some unknown value of long. I mean, I hardly ever go beyond the first page of Google's search results, and if I do I really have to be in a digging frame of mine. Every once in a blue moon, something on the second page will pay off. 

Google search results all pointed to Hole in the Wall, Coffee Bay, Wild Coast, South Africa.

Hole in the Wall

Looking on Google Maps, I could not find this place. Finally figured out that while all the search results pointed to Hole in the Wall and Coffee Bay, the two places are six miles apart. Looking at the map, I wondered if there were any street view images. I was expecting any, but Google has sent cars down the roads. Pull up a street view image, swing around and boom! There we are.

MTS Oceanos

In 1991 MTS Oceanos sunk five miles off the coast of Coffee Bay. The South African Air Force sent 16 (!) helicopters to rescue passengers. All 571 passengers were rescued, no thanks to the Captain and the crew who were among the first people to abandon ship.

* Google image search - Google's search page looks like this:

Google

Notice that there are two icons at the right end of the data entry line. The first is a microphone and the I believe the second is a camera. Click on the camera icon and you can upload an image, or enter the URL of image, if it's on the net.

Is including explanations like this a good thing? I've been pointing and clicking for 40 odd years and I have probably picked up a few tricks to make my keyboard battles a little easier. I tend to assume that all of these little tricks are common knowledge, but I really have no idea. I am sure there are other methods of doing this, especially if you are using a smart phone, but I am not keen on my smart phone. To me, it's like a wrench. I use it when I need it and then I put it away. I don't spend hours cuddled up it. I have my desktop machine for that. It has a much bigger screen. Looking at pictures on a smartphone is stupid. I don't care how high your resolution is, the image is just too friggin' small. Bring it close enough so that it occupies the same field of view as a desktop display and you are going to be cross-eyed.

Lesotho

Lesotho

Trump imposes 50% tariff on Africa’s Lesotho, the highest among nations - Aljazeera

The move deals a harsh blow to the small, impoverished state, which Trump mocked as a place ‘nobody has heard of’.

Well, I've heard of it, but where is it? I had to look it up. It's in South Africa, that's where.

Lesotho

The Kingdom of Lesotho is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. As an enclave of South Africa. It is the largest sovereign enclave in the world, and the only one outside the Italian Peninsula. It is situated in the Maloti Mountains and contains the highest peak in Southern Africa. It has an area of roughly 12,000 square miles and a population of about two million.

It is the only independent state in the world that lies entirely above 4,600 feet in elevation. Its lowest point is the highest low point of any country in the world.

Okay, kind of an oddball little place, landlocked, high elevation, mountainous terrain. Why do we care about import duties for this tiny country? Because Levis are made there, that's why:

Workers pack completed jeans at Afri-Expo Textiles factory in Maseru, Lesotho [File: Roberta Ciuccio/AFP]

How weird is that?

View From South Africa

Western media outlets have often resorted to dumbing down societies by reducing global events to shallow soundbites or clickbait that reinforces convenient stereotypes, writes Gillian Schutte

Introduction to story from IOL - Independent Online, a South African news website:

Why Compete with a Dying Media? A Call for a Radical New Global Media By Gillian Schutte

The moment has come to question the wisdom of continuing to battle a wounded but still formidable behemoth: Western corporate media. For decades, it has held an almost unassailable grip on the global narrative, buoyed by wealth, political patronage, and an entrenched belief that it alone possesses the authority to define reality. Yet the years of reflexive sensationalism, patent double standards, and top-down editorial dictates have eroded the very legitimacy Western outlets once took for granted. The cracks in their façade are now impossible to ignore, with disillusioned viewers, readers, and even former insiders acknowledging that something profoundly dysfunctional lurks at the heart of so-called “mainstream” news.

She goes on for a bit and it's pretty good.

 Via RT. I am glad I can still see RT. One more reason I am glad I live in Amerika.

I probably look at a hundred headlines a day. I mean it doesn't take long, maybe five minutes. What eats up the time is when something sounds promising, so I take the time to read it. Maybe one or two out the hundred. I course I always look at the memes from Midwest Chick, Busted Nuckles and the Village Hemorrhoid. I enjoy them but the seldom get reposted here. There is a limit to the number of keystrokes I can make in a day and some days it ain't very many. Tonight I think I'm making up the week.

Anyway, every so often, something catches my eye, I take time to read it and decide to repost it or link to it, like here.

African Game of Thrones

Another fine article from Russia. Suck it, White House pansies.

King Misuzulu KwaZwelithini (R) and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (L) attend the coronation ceremony of South Africa's new Zulu king in Durban, South Africa on October 29, 2022. ©  Presidency of South Africa/Getty Images

African Game of Thrones: How will the new Zulu king deal with rebellious relatives? by Kubendran Chetty

The death of South Africa’s Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, three years ago triggered a bitter family feud over succession – one that has found its way to the country’s courts and remains unresolved.

The Zulu nation is the largest ethnic group in the country with an estimated 15 million Zulu-speaking people, predominantly in the KwaZulu-Natal region, whose monarchy stretches back to the 16th century. They are synonymous with resisting British colonialism and oppression in the early 1800s, and the Zulu king is arguably the most influential traditional leader in South Africa.

King Zwelithini’s son, Misuzulu KwaZwelithini, was recognized as his successor and assumed a powerful position that controls vast resources and political power. However, his seat on the throne is being challenged by his uncle, Prince Mbonisi Ka Bhekuzulu, and his half-brother, Prince Simakade Zulu, who is the eldest son of the late king, but was born out of wedlock, and a list of aunts and uncles who have contested the legitimacy of his rule through the country’s courts. At the same time, other family members are firmly behind Misuzulu’s right to the throne.

The lasting conflict between relatives ensures the African ‘Game of Thrones’-like drama has played out in public view, embarrassingly exposing the bitter divisions in the royal family and putting on display the fractious relationships that now exist between those who support the king and those who are firmly against him.

It goes on for a bit about the various pretenders and their legal machinations, but this introduction is just great. Nice change of pace from the horror stories that we usually hear about Africa.

Today's Links

Two stories about the propaganda and one about real world impacts on our paradise.

• Nord Stream sabotage: How Western media outlets do their governments’ dirty work by Tarik Cyril Amar from Istanbul
• You’re All Wrong About Inflation from Handwaving Freakoutery
• Richard Cantillon
• Looks like the Cape of Storms continues to live up to its original name by Bayou Renaissance Man

South Africa

I haven't heard much about South Africa lately and what I have heard makes it sound like a frigging disaster. Oh, there are occasional bright spots, but they are really just specs in a sea of mud. Now Brian Pottinger paints a dismal picture with South Africa’s infinite humiliation. Here is an excerpt:

The white middle classes, confined to their urban or coastal bubble communities, have largely given up — those who can leave often do. The black middle class are hardly different: revolutionaries have become businessmen and sometimes not very honest ones. “I did not join the struggle to die poor,” proclaimed one senior ruling African National Congress (ANC) politician endlessly mired in sleaze allegations. The unions, meanwhile, are corrupted by greed and the “democratic movements” — a few courageous exceptions allowed — are knee-deep in self-enrichment.

It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.

Then we have this comment from Tow Lewis:

I think, what is becoming abundantly clear, is that European ‘civilisation’ is not random chance, and that it didn’t come without sacrifice, hard work, and a fair bit of luck. It didn’t ‘just’ happen, by accidental and, given a bit of lipstick (You can give a pig lipstick, but it’s still a pig), or the facets of Western European institutions doesn’t necessarily, and the odds are probably not good, turn a country into that European success story. European success is not a veneer, it is more than a bunch of institutions, or laws, it is a journey that has been traveled (somewhat erratically) over a couple of thousand years. It can’t just be ‘smeared’ ‘liberally’ hoping that it will hide the ‘sometimes’ savage teeth and claws of the places it imposes itself upon, whatever the intentions.

I’m not saying that European culture and civilisation is perfect, or that it can’t take lessons from elsewhere, far from it, but, possibly, in much the same way we look back on the Roman or Ancient Greek worlds, our descendants might also muse, in centuries to come, at our hubris, and complacency at what we had.

I came across a similar idea in James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise except he tries to tie European civilisation to a couple thousand years of white supremacy. It did take a couple thousand years for Western civilization to develop, but it was the principles and arguments over those principles that caused it to change and grow. The color of their skin was just incidental.

By the way, The Imperial Cruise is a terrible book. I read Flyboys by Bradley and it was pretty great, so I had high hopes for this one. Turns out this one is just dreck. The story is nominally about the Congressional junket that Teddy Roosevelt sent to eastern Asia in 1905.

Unseen - Netflix Series

Unseen | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very meek cleaning lady goes looking for her husband, missing since he got out of prison the other day. She goes looking for help but she keeps running into big bullies. With threats or cruel words they push her over the edge, much to their dismay / demise.

There's a couple of incidents that don't make much sense, like the time she agrees to meet her landlord at an abandoned meat packing plant. Like she doesn't know what he wants? And couldn't this guy find a better place, like her bedroom?

Then there is the secretary at another meat packing plant, this one is still a going concern. She has got to know about all the shady business going on there, but she goes and squeals to the cops about the cleaning lady, even after her boss specifically told her not to do it. She acts like she thinks she is doing the right thing. The question is, is she stupid, or just confused six ways from Sunday?

We have several scenes where she walks right by numerous people and no one even notices her. I don't know about this. Magicians use misdirection all the time to conceal what they are doing, and there have been many examples of people concentrating on one thing and missing something else that is right in front of them. But a woman walking by? I suppose it could happen if the timing was just right. She probably has a lot of experience in being innoccuous, so she may have developed some subconcious sense of when people are watching her and when they aren't.

LUDIK - Netflix Series

LUDIK Trailer (2022) Arnold Vosloo, Vikash Mathura
Movie Coverage

South African furniture dealer gets roped into a gun smuggling operation and he's not happy about it. We watched the first episode tonight and boy oh boy, do we have some characters. I fully expect Ludik to visit revenge on the rich fool who thought he could pressure Ludik. It's going to be great.

Kiswahili

Sarah Baartman Hall (formerly Memorial Hall) at The University of Cape Town
[Mike Hutchings/Reuters]

Tafi Mhaka is calling for the adoption of Kiswahili as an official language of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have already done so. Most Africa countries adopted French, English or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonizers as their official language. At the time, it was probably the expedient thing to do, but times have changed. Note he doesn't say anything about removing the official status of the European languages, only that they add Kiswahili. 

Near as I can tell, Kiswahili is just another one of these respellings of Swahili, Beijing instead of Peking, or Kyiv instead of Kiev. You can call your foreign names anything you want, but why can't they leave the English spellings alone? We aren't going to pronounce it correctly no matter how you spell it, and it just means more time and effort will be wasted on replacing perfectly cromulent words with new and different words that are no better than the originals.

One line stuck out in Tafi's essay:

It didn’t help matters that at the time everyone marvelled at then-Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s impeccable command of English and observers in the West regarded him as “one of the world’s great orators”. 

Robert Mugabe might have been a great speaker (the Wikipedia article uses the word 'speech' twelve times), but I think he was few marbles short of a full deck. In particular I suspect he was missing the economics marble.

---

Sarah Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town
Look at those stairs. There must be a zillion steps.

I was surprised by the picture of Memorial Hall that accompanied Tafi's essay. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I was. It makes sense that there would be a very English building on the campus, I mean the English ran this place for a long time. On the other hand the images that South Africa brings to mind are either a thriving metropolis or miles of shantytowns, not staid enclaves of academia.

Saartjie Baartman, aka Sarah Baartman, 1810

Which brings us to Sarah Baartman. The University of Cape Town renamed Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall back in 2018. Sarah Baartman (c.1789– 29 December 1815) was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. She was exhibited for a few years but was eventually discarded. She died at the age of 26 in Paris.

The Tyranny of Economics

Giant Hydrogen Fueled Dump Truck

Some people with their hands on the purse strings have promised South Africa a zillion dollars to develop a giant hydrogen fueled dump truck. This has got to be one of dumbest ideas ever. Hydrogen is like the absolutely worst fuel in the world. Nothing can contain it, it will leak right through the walls of a steel tank and on the way it will make the steel brittle. And if you want to carry enough to get anything done, you need to liquify it, which means cooling it down to like minus a zillion degrees. So you need fancy, vacuum bottle fuel tanks and you need a fancy rig to cool it and compress it. I'm not even going to talk about how you go about getting hydrogen. Like I said, it's the absolutely worst fuel ever.

But some people think they can make it work, so this dump truck is like an experiment. I doubt it will ever be economically viable, but maybe the guys working on it will learn something. And perhaps the guys holding the purse strings will learn something, but I doubt that. They will continue to spout fantasies, collect admirers and gain funding from whoever has money and believes in their fantasies.

Meanwhile, South Africa is serious mess. Yes, most of Africa is a disaster, but South Africa has, or had, a viable economy. Right now unemployment is running at 35%. The place is a disaster.

I'm thinking what might help is if they could put all those unemployed people to work. How about we forgo the dump truck and we put people to work hauling rocks out of the mine? How would this work out? To the spreadsheet we go.

We need some numbers to describe the situation. I pulled these out of the air. Say we have an open pit mine 100 feet deep and we have a road that leads up the side of the pit that is one mile long. A man should be able to carry 50 pounds up that hill. It will probably take him an hour to make the round trip. Yes, a man can walk a mile in 20 minutes, but going up hill carrying a 50 pound weight is going to slow him down, plus you've got turn around time. I think you'd be hard pressed to get eight loads per man in eight hours, especially if you are going to do this every day. 

If a giant dump truck can carry 100 tons, you are going to need 20,000 men to carry that same amount of rock in one eight-hour shift. If these guys are getting paid $5 an hour, it's going to cost $4 million a week or $200 million for a year. No wonder mining companies prefer big trucks.

There's also the problem of how you are going to put all 20,000 men to work. Walking single file, you could have 500 men climbing the hill and another file of 500 men walking back down, so you would need room for 40 lines of men. Giving each man five feet of space means you would need a road 200 feet wide.

P.S. later the same day.

Well, if you've 20,000 men, I think you have the manpower to build a road 200 feet wide. Of course it doesn't have to be just one road 200 feet wide, you could have 10 roads 20 feet wide. Depends on the situation. In some bizarre circumstance one 200 foot wide road might be just the thing.

But what are we trying to do here? Are we trying to get the ore out of the ground, or are we trying to put 20,000 men to work? Ideally we would do both, but businesses don't run on what we want, businesses run on cold hard cash.

Hope much is it costing to have 20,000 unemployed men? Are they getting handouts from the government? And you know what they say about idle hands - they're the devil's workshop. How much trouble are these idlers causing?

And $5 an hour is the current minimum wage in South Africa. What if we only pay one dollar per hour? Get a fat tax break from the government for keeping all these blokes busy and you might actually make it work.

Or not. Even if these guys were only getting paid one dollar per hour, labor for a year would still be 50 million dollars. You could probably buy a giant dump truck that would carry 100 tons for under two million dollars. Hard to argue with those kind of numbers. Well, I suppose you could start a war, that would certainly keep a large number of people occupied.

P.P.S. I'm am using color codes in my spreadsheets these days. I'm trying to develop some rules. My only rule so far is that cells that contain formulas are colored light blue. I used a couple other colors here just to point out that they are different. I used tan for a constant and the bright blue and yellow cells get used farther along, so the colors indicate they are the same. White squares are for whatever numbers you want to put in there.

Spreadsheets are handy for almost anything involving numbers. And for anything tougher, there's always Desmos.

Sun City & Pilanesberg National Park

Sun City & Pilanesberg National Park

Pilanesberg National Park is a wildlife reserve in South Africa, a couple of hours northwest of Pretoria. It's kind of cool because it's like somebody dropped this circle of hills in the middle of an otherwise featureless plain. You might think it is the site of an old meteor impact, but the rockhounds tell us it's the remains of a billion year old volcano. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania is another old volcano that has become a wildlife preserve. Daring daughter was there a few years ago. I mentioned this at lunch the other day and Jack mentions the Richat Structure, which is neither an old volcano nor an impact crater. Then I recall something about a big crater in the Congo. Did I post something about it? I did.

Africa Craters
Impact Craters in Blue. Other structures in Burnt Ochre.

All this prompted me to plot all these various features on a map of Africa.

Update March 2019 embellished map caption and added link.

Snow? Or Whiteout?

Portion of Letsang Diamond Mine Facilities in Lesotho, Africa

The elevation here is about 10,000 feet, so I suppose the white stuff in the center of the screen could be snow, but it looks more like somebody wrote over the image with a white marker. Or an eraser. Someone could be trying to conceal something, but what? It's a very public enterprise.