OUT TO LUNCH
My favourite beach in the Cape Town area has to be Strand beach near Somerset West. It lacks the vulgar pretentiousness of Camps Bay and Clifton and an added bonus is that the sea is warm. So, whenever possible as the sun is about to rise I get in the car and head off to Strand beach for an early morning walk before breakfast.
I park in the shadow of one of the blocks of flats and make for the beach. If you walk from the Hibernian Towers to the border of the Denel protected area and back you can easily get your 10000 Discovery Vitality steps.
Last week the beach proved particularly popular with both locals and visitors (I heard several German accents) and the surfers were out early making the most of the waves. I reckon there must have been about 200 people but spread over the length and breadth of the beach that certainly doesn’t constitute overcrowding.
Despite what the main stream media constantly tell us about the fragile state of race relations in the country I have yet to see any incidents of racial hatred on Strand beach.
We are a very mixed bunch, both ethnically and racially, and many will nod a greeting or stop for a chat as we pass on the beach and maybe go up to admire a new puppy being exercised or pass the time of day with one of the many fishermen waiting for a taut line. If Strand beach in the early morning were a microcosm of South Africa we would be a much happier nation.
However, the best thing about my early beach walk is that it is the nearest thing to normality I have experienced in the past two years because we don’t wear masks. I counted one couple of all the many on the beach wearing masks last Wednesday but the rest of us were facial nudists.
They weren’t even dangling from the ears or resting on the chin. They were invisible; very possibly tucked into a pocket or a bag. We didn’t have crazed vaccine zealots screaming at us to either mask up or risk killing our grannies and we all simply assumed that the only way to enjoy a perfect beach is without a mask.
I am a little hazy on what the latest lockdown rules are and I know I have to wear a mask in a shopping centre unless I am in a restaurant and dispersing my toxic COVID aerosols to anyone passing my table.
I suspect that my fellow beachgoers last week were all breaking the law but held the very healthy view that stupid laws are there to be broken. Good on them and may the word spread.
Which is why I am more than delighted that the Ottowa truckers are still there for a third week and that similar freedom demonstrations have spread to Canberra, Wellington, Paris, Brussels and will soon be popping up in other parts of the world.
This is people power at it’s finest and the best thing about it is that it is spooking the woke lefties and scaring the hell out of impotent leaders like Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern who must be having nightmares about rampaging mobs and guillotines.
Apart from standing up to ludicrously tyrannical administrations masquerading as democratically elected governments the Canadian truckers freedom convoy has exposed the main stream media yet again as nothing but propagandists for bullying politicians with fragile egos.
Fortunately we no longer have to rely on the highly selective reporting of the main stream media because there are plenty of budding Joe Rogans out there with Smart phones and professional cameras telling us what is really going on in places like Ottowa.
For example, if you were to rely on the idiotic utterances of Trudeau and his media lackeys you would believe that the truckers were all right wing racists, misogynists, anti-vaxxers and science deniers who drown kittens just for fun.
I mean, these people have even been flying the Nazi flag and urinating on the memorial to the unknown soldier. Really? What if that swastika was arranged by the mainstream media operatives to discredit the truckers?
The disgraced former eNCA journalist Nickolaus Bauer tried this trick in 2017 when he tweeted an outdated photo of people displaying the old SA flag and burning the new flag in support of a story to prove that whites objecting to farm murders were right wing and racist. Moral of the story…believe nothing.
Since the mainstream media are unused to being challenged it probably came as a shock to them when hours of footage of highly articulate lorry drivers and normal, law abiding Canadians on YouTube made it abundantly clear that those occupying the space opposite the parliament buildings were anything but right wing nutters.
In fact, the whole occupation of central Ottowa has been more like a gigantic street party and if you follow either GB News or Fox News coverage all you would see is perfectly decent people (with a few amiable loonies admittedly) demanding that politicians wind their interfering necks in and allow people to enjoy some freedom.
One of the most poignant comments I heard from a Canadian trucker was “this isn’t the beautiful country I grew up in…I want it back”.
This almost certainly applies to Canberra and Wellington too. The people are utterly fed up with phoney crap science, fake information and illogical lockdown rules upsetting their lives.
As the super-smart Candace Owens told her 3 million followers on Twitter last week - “Experts told you if you complied with lockdowns, censorship, masks and vaccinations-life would return to normal. ‘Conspiracy theorists’ told you COVID was never going to end and governments would use it to usher in a totalitarian new world order. Who do you believe now?”
Predictably the elitist lefty wokists are fuming because they never imagined that the working classes would ever take the trouble to rise and challenge their lunatic theories. Someone called Van Badham wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper dismissing the whole protest as a bunch of camel urine drinking nutters and assorted whackos unwilling to be injected with a free ‘vaccine’ used safely on millions. That doesn’t quite address the real issue of bodily autonomy but why let details get in the way of a rant?
Not surprisingly, the IRR’s Ivo Vegter tweeted “I have to agree, These nutcases give freedom a bad name”. Just think about that for a moment. If you don’t agree with Vegter of the IRR think-tank you are automatically a nutcase. Whatever happened to freedom of expression?
The question is, what is to be done to clear the roads of heavy rigs and return life to normal? CNN’s national security analyst Juliette Kayyem came up with a brilliant strategy. She suggested slashing the tyres of all the trucks, emptying the fuel tanks and arresting the drivers. Quite how one removes a 30 tonne rig with no tyres and no fuel and no driver could prove a challenge but I’m sure an ‘interlecshual’ like Ms Kayyem has thought this all thorough very carefully. It’s a bit scary though when a news channel like CNN advocates violent vigilantism.
So, presuming Ms Kayyem’s brilliant plan is ignored there are only three possible solutions for an end game.
First is that the elected politicians of Canada and other countries listen to the voices of those who put them into power and who pay their enormous salaries and get rid of pointless lockdown rules and intrusive vaccine mandates.
Second is that they close down the internet and prevent communication between protesters and ‘unofficial’ news being broadcast and, third, they instruct the military to move in and use live ammunition. I wonder what China would do. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
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According to a report on the BBC website the New Zealand police have decided to adopt the same tactics used by the US to flush out Manuel Noriega many years ago. They are playing Barry Manilow, Celine Dion and other disturbing medleys to get the ‘science deniers’ to leave. Poor Barry…what a finale to a glittering career. Should the same situation ever arise in SA my advice is to pump up the volume on some Bles Bridges. That ought to do the trick.
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Somebody asked me last week what the acronym SONA stood for and I confidently replied ‘Speech Only No Action’. Based on the last five SONA speeches this is a pretty accurate description but, who knows, we may all be surprised and in a year’s time South Africa could be a global force to be reckoned with. Many far more qualified scribes have already commented on SONA 2022 so I am left with the crumbs from the table.
My first observation is that, with the pandemic of colonial buildings being reduced to a pile of smouldering ashes, it was a miracle indeed that the Cape Town City Hall was still standing last Thursday.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time and the cops should keep a wary eye out for homeless people carrying large containers of flammable liquids. The City Hall is, after all, where the land thieving whites have gone to listen to orchestras playing music written by toxic white males who probably supported the slave trade in some way or another.
The thing I really missed this year though was the Presidential flights of fancy about bullet trains criss-crossing the country, smart cities popping up like Namaqualand daisies all over the place and the impending 4th industrial revolution.
I thought at the very least that the Pres could have announced the launch of the SA Space programme aimed at putting the more light fingered members of his cabinet on a distant planet as soon as possible.
