Category Archives: America

UPDATE III: Into The Cannibal’s Pot: An Update (+Grisly Reminders)

America, Crime, Criminal Injustice, History, Ilana Mercer, Media, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Some of you are waiting for, and have been asking about, the publication of Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. The wait is worse for South Africans who are in the thick of the events my book documents and analyzes—Into The Cannibal’s Pot is a Burkian polemic, steeped in history, reality, fact, and the classical liberal political philosophy.

When I completed the book some months back, the number of Boers murdered was just over 3000. As the courageous Adriana Stuijt now documents, the death toll stands at 3,756. Adriana has been on the case since 1987. She, WND, in the early 2000s, and myself have been (still are) the only sources of serious, ongoing analysis—as opposed to knee-jerk, fleeting cyber-ejaculate—about what is truly underway in the new South Africa. Adriana is Dutch, I believe, and lived in SA. I am South African born, as you know.

In any event, the manuscript is currently under consideration. If all fails, fear not (with your help), someone will see to it that the true story of the New South Africa (“Rambo Nation”), as detailed in Into The Cannibal’s Pot, is told. (And that an important work is published.)

So far, four magnificent men (as writers, thinkers, and human beings) have returned Praise For The Cannibal. Thank you. You know who you are. These gentlemen seemed to sense the urgency of my mission (and, I am told, the thing is an excellent read). As I’ve already said, these towering talents do not inhabit the solipsistic universe in which most American “writers” (and publishers) are mired.

I hope this gives you an idea of where in the publication process I am with Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.

UPDATE I: A GRISLY REMINDER. And people close to my family expect me to rush to the place to visit, possibly forsaking my life. Local predators are on the look for idiot outsiders, such as these. Having documented, contrasted and compared SA crime rates in statistical detail in Into The Cannibal’s Pot, I am more aware than are family and friends of the real risks.

This flashy couple will get western attention, the Boers dying daily in defense of their Zimbabwified farm land, not at all. I tell family and friends that as an outsider, you stand out; become a target in SA. They don’t get it. I, at least, still have the SA accent. But tourists… Why do you think this irresponsible, newly wed man was tossed from the taxi while his lovely wife kept back only to be killed later on? On that, Western media will refrain from postulating or reporting.

Via the Mail Online:

The driver of a British businessman whose new wife was shot dead in South Africa appeared in court today accused of helping to kill her.
Anni Dewani was shot dead after the taxi she and husband Shrien, 30, were travelling in was carjacked.
Their driver Zola Tongo, a local man, was charged with murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery at a court hearing in Cape Town this morning.
Tragic: Anni Dewani was shot dead after the taxi she was travelling in was carjacked. The driver has been accused of her murder
Tragic: Anni Dewani was shot dead after the taxi she was travelling in was carjacked. The driver has been accused of helping to kill her
A prosecutor told the court that Tongo is likely to enter into a ‘plea bargain arrangement’ in return for a possible lenient sentence.
Millionaire Mr Dewani and his 28-year-old wife were hijacked on November 13 as they returned to their five-star hotel from an evening meal.
They had asked Tongo, whom they had met at the airport, to drive them through the poverty-stricken township of Gugulethu so that they could experience a flavour of ‘the real Africa’.
But within three minutes of leaving the motorway, two gunmen hijacked the taxi.
After robbing them both, Mr Dewani was thrown out of the people carrier’s back window.
Nine hours later his wife’s body was found in the back of the abandoned taxi.
While Tongo’s actions were not revealed in court, it has been reported locally that during the drive he phoned a friend.
He allegedly told the friend what the couple were planning and where in the township they were planning to go.
This morning, Tongo appeared in court alongside another man, 25-year-old Mziwamadoda Qwabe. Xolile Mngeni, 23, appeared in court last week.

UPDATE II: I mentioned above the knee-jerk, fleeting cyber-ejaculate type commentary that cyber-celebrities allow themselves when it comes to South Africa.

Contrary to Pamela Geller’s fast and furious factoids, a Boer is NOT a “disparaging term for any white South African,” as she “wrote” in an April 16, “American Thinker” post this year, titled “Genocide In South Africa.” Geller, who is in the habit of spouting off as though she knows everything, should learn to cite sources who do know something about the South African subject.

UPDATED III: Given the South African market, my goal is to ensure my readers in South Africa can purchase the book. We will have to see. But this has to be part of the deal.

UPDATE VI: Miserable, AWOL, Mama Obama (Pimps Puncture Urostomy Bag/Remove Prosthetic Breast )

America, Barack Obama, Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Family, Fascism, Feminism, Gender, Homeland Security, Regulation, Terrorism

MAUL MALIA; SCAN SASHA. NO, DON’T. Having seen the children down whose miniature trousers TSA goons have been reaching; having witnessed heroic little Mandy Smith’s ordeal (and her father’s reprehensible abdication); being in possession of a keen sense of justice and rights—I could never-ever condone such futile, en masse, state sadism and fascism. Not ever. Not against innocent adults. And most certainly not against children, not even the president’s kids, who seem sweet, and whose only flaw is to have been born to a miserable excuse for a human being.

Make that two.

The First Lady has seemingly not experienced a visceral reaction against what is being done by her husband’s administration (begun under his predecessor) to the American people. She has, at least, failed to give voice to a gut reaction to this mass contagion; this moronity, if indeed one was experienced.

This is the same FLOTUS of the “Fat-Based Initiatives”; the woman who so cares for America’s bloated kids. In this post I asked, “Why no white butterballs?” Even Michael Savage hasn’t dared to ponder what would Michelle say if more kids who looked like hers were being mauled by malevolent state workers.

As a mother—as a human being with a heart—I cannot stand to see kids being subjected to the cruelty of strangers. What a miserable excuse for a mother is this woman, Michelle Obama.

SAVAGING THE SAVAGES:

MORE PUTRID, PUSHOVER PARENTS

UPDATE I (Nov. 22): WHERE ARE THE MEN? This is no country for men, any men. You emasculate them, feminize them, make them over in the image of woman, and they’ll offer up their own children as sacrifice. Liberal men have been “liberated” from the natural instinct to protect their own. You can’t blame them. Women most certainly can’t blame men. This is what modern women have worked for; the state as parent and protector.

UPDATE II: RADIATION REALISM. Every doctor I’ve known has tried to persuade me that his particular brand of diagnostic radiation was just dandy for my health. When quizzed about the cumulative effects from the radiation prescribed by his colleagues to keep me in good shape, the medical man would become less cocksure. A cursory perusal of the literature on the additive effects of any radiation confirms that it is anything but safe. The issue here is that no innocent human being should be made to choose between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down,'” even if the first boosts his health (as if). It’s a matter of choice. I have always chosen skepticism when it comes to invasive modalities when used liberally on healthy people.

Now comes a scholarly study, first reported in the The Daily Mail, according to which “full-body airport scanners are just as likely to kill you as a terrorist’s bomb blowing your plane out of the sky”:

Peter Rez, from Arizona State University, said the probability of dying from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack are both about one in 30 million.
He said: ‘The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn’t.
A potential malfunction could increase the radiation dose, he said.
Rez has studied the radiation doses of backscatter scanners using the images produced by the machines. He discovered that the radiation dose was often higher than the manufacturers claimed.
Rez suggested that the statistical coincidence means that there is really no case to be made for deploying any kind of body-scanning machine – the risk is identical.
But he added: ‘They’re both incredibly unlikely events. These are still a factor of 10 lower than the probability of dying in any one year from being struck by lightning in the United States.’
Critics say the low level beam used delivers a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body – that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.
A number of scientists have already written to to the Food and Drug Administration to complain that the safety aspects have not been properly addressed before the nationwide rollout of the scanners.

UPDATE III: TSA THEME SONG, again. I still think that “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” best captures the TSA’s mission, conduct, and the mien of its mindless supporters. Do you disagree?

UPDATE IV: I’ve been remiss, and so have you for not pointing this out to me: even if you choose what to you is a lesser evil, the photons as opposed to the fondle (as Myron puts it), your TSA dominatrix could still pull you over for a once-over. It’s not like your decision between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down'” is honored:

After “electing to go through the airport’s new full-body scanner,” “a bladder cancer survivor from Michigan who wears a urostomy bag that collects his urine,” “was pulled to the side to be patted down by a TSA agent.”

CBS:

The 61-year-old retired special education teacher said he asked to be examined more discreetly.
Sawyer told WLNS correspondent Jessica Maki that after being taken to a private area, he alerted the TSA agents about his urostomy bag and the danger of its lid being undone, but they didn’t listen.
And when the pat-down began, Sawyer says the agent was so rough, the cap on the urostomy bag came off, spilling urine on him.
“No apology, no recognition – Is that urine? – no nothing, no offer to help me,” Sawyer said. “And I had to face the fact that I had to walk through the airport with urine.”

Do the hos who support this—other than the Fox blond squad, and polls point toward a majority in favor—detect a critical mass in the incidence of abuse travelers have experienced?

[Myron, do not expose Anna to this. Traveling for a wedding is not an emergency. Take a stand.]

Writes Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC.COM: “We’re All German Jews Now.”

When you hear the usual suspects on Fox wax about the land of the free we’re so blessed to live in; switch off. America is a fascistic state by any other name.

UPDATE V: REMOVING A PROSTHETIC BREAST. CBS: “A flight attendant and cancer survivor said she was forced to remove and show her prosthetic breast to a TSA agent during a security pat-down.”

However, what I’ve termed “sectional interests” have piped up again. Instead of arguing for the rights of all customers who purchase an airline ticket constrained by a state-monopolized system—cancer survivors are engaged in special pleading. Ditto airline pilots, flight attendants, etc.

UPDATE VI: As to Myron’s suggestion about special permits; I’ve been trying to make the point that special interests-based rights to pass without pain are bad for everyone and wrong. No one other than the suspicious should be searched. Why do you think Israeli security gives out special permits to those with cancer, the elderly, the pilots, the pretty… They don’t. See “TSA: Home Grown Terrorism (& Cretinism).” They do not molest people as we are doing; they question them politely.

Zombie Zakaria Has Some “Ideas” For You

Affirmative Action, America, Education, Europe, Government, Labor, Multiculturalism, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Science, Technology

Fareed Zakaria: is there anyone more inane and wishy-washy than he? Zombie Zakaria’s “Restoring the American Dream” presentation is in the tradition you’ve come to expect from this CNN pundit.

Thus, Fareed vows to “bring you solutions” to “the hollowing out of the middle class” by growing the state’s role in R & D, for, as he concludes, “Almost all of the science and technology research that we take for granted now came out of the Defense Department spending post World War II.”

But surely, and logically, we cannot assert that because the DOD (the Department of Defense) gave rise to certain technologies, without it these inventions would not exist, as ZZ claims? It might be the case that sans state intervention, there would be even more innovation than with it.

This guy’s “ideas” are festooned with similar falsehoods.

Another of ZZ’s lessons comes courtesy of the super-productive German workforce.

“Despite some of the highest wages in the world, strong unions, lots of regulation, Germany has maintained a very powerful manufacturing base, employing millions,” ZZ opined. “It has held in good stead during this economic crisis. Germany’s unemployment rate has actually fallen for the past 15 months straight, an unbelievable record in this economic climate.”

As ZZ narrated the above passage, images of industrious German factory workers flashed on the screen, and were contrasted with the long lines of the unemployed in America. Guess what the American assembly and unemployment lines look like? You are right: By comparison, the German workforce so famous for its industry looked relatively homogeneous.

Still, ZZ hopes to apply efficiencies learned from the German cohort to America’s increasingly third-world, imported, underclass of workers. (“The United States,” we are told, “now ranks 52nd in the world in quality of science and math education.” It used to have “very high levels of performance in math and science.” What happened other than suffocating unionization in education, third-world immigration, and affirmative action?)

As Fareed and his well-to-do, high-achieving (indubitably high IQ) guests conclude, and I paraphrase, opportunities are indeed boundless if somebody has the smarts and the motivation; everybody can be the designer of an iPod or a programmer at Google; this essentially, is not a rarified group. Any one can get to be at “the top end of America.”

ZZ’s smart panel, which can never be called an interest group plumping for government/taxpayer subsidies (no never!), included Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola; Lou Gerstner, who has run R.J. Reynolds, American Express and IBM; and Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO of Alcoa, the aluminum giant.

All were agreed that laborers are interchangeable in as much as potential is concerned, and if given the right conditions by government.

I have advocated in my writings for “a natural shift from a credit-fueled, consumption-based economy, to one founded on savings, investment and production.”

ZZ favors only a shift from consumption to investment; massive federal-government investment.

UPDATED: A Vote For Chile’s President

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Free Markets, Government, Media, Technology, Trade

The following is from “A Vote For Chile’s President,” my latest WND column:

“President Barack Obama took to the podium well before President Sebastian Piñera did. Chile’s president bided his time patiently with the group of rescue workers in hard hats, until all 33 miners had surfaced from deep within the San José copper-gold mine, in northern Chile, where they had been entombed for 69 days.

If not for the translator’s running commentary, I would not have guessed that the man with a beaming smile—so different from Obama’s gleam of dentition and Bush’s demented grin—last in-line to meet and greet the miners who ascended from hell, was no other than Chile’s president. Sebastian Piñera wife, first lady Cecilia Morel, was equally low-key, fading into the background and ceding to the heroes of the unfolding drama.

The images transmitted from Camp Esperanz showed no swat teams, personal body guards, or retinues of handlers and props—the sort of ‘presidential comitatus’ that accompanies the head of the American hyperpower everywhere.

At ‘Camp Hope,’ the pensive group of rescuers and their president looked like a band of brothers. The media scrum did nothing to shatter what was almost a religious atmosphere. All present—mining men, the rescued and the rescuers, and their families—seemed oblivious to the din from the outside world. Nobody appeared star-struck; few were playing to the cameras. All present had eyes for one another alone. Expressions of joy were all the more poignant because so dignified. There was no slobbering, no Geraldo-Rivera hyperbole.” …

The compete column, now on WND.COM, is “A Vote For Chile’s President.”

Next week I hope to introduce you to the work of a dear friend, Professor Dennis O’Keeffe, who has just written a gem of a book about Edmund Burke. My conversation with Dennis will be the first of a two-part interview. You’ll enjoy it.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (Oct. 16): Star Parker in “What Chile can teach America about freedom”:

But back just a little less than 40 years ago, Chile was a typical, poor South American nation, with intrusive government and sluggish growth.
How was it transformed?
Read a short essay called “How the Power of Ideas Can Transform a Country,” by one of the leaders that made it happen – Jose Pinera.
He relates how, in the mid-1950s, the Catholic University of Chile signed a cooperation agreement with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago, then home to the world’s top free-market economists, including the legendary Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman’s classic “Capitalism and Freedom” explains how individual liberty can only thrive when accompanied by economic liberty
Thus began the education of a generation of young Chileans in the wisdom of economic freedom.
Beginning in the late 1970s, these young leaders, with newly minted Ph.D.s, helped implement new economic reforms in Chile protecting private property and promoting free trade.
A graph showing annual economic growth in Chile over the last hundred years looks like a hockey stick. From the early part of the twentieth century until 1980, the line is flat, averaging less than 1 percent growth per year. But beginning 1980, growth takes off in a vertical surge, averaging over 4 percent per year.