Tear Gas Will Solve the World's Problems?

Unbelievable! Offered without further comment.

US export industry alive and well: Egypt imports 21 tons of tear gas from the US http://bit.ly/vAOs5s

Hell, No I Won't RICA

Note to non-South Africans: RICA is The Regulation of Interception of Communications Act – a piece of particularly stupid, egregious and unneccesary piece of legislation that requires (among many other idiocies) that all cellphone SIM cards be registered by their owner along with proof-of-residence. This is supposed to make it easier for Police and National Intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one!) to track down criminals.

I won't be registering for RICA.

I don't care if my service provider cuts my cellular service after 30 June. It just means that I'll have some extra money to spend on other goodies each month.

I am an honest, law-abiding citizen. And I am tired to death of being spied-on, nannied, harassed, followed and tracked by my own government. FICA documentation at the banks. Highway banditry against my company from CIPRO. Proof of residence required at the Post Office. Now spy-vs-spy nonsense in the form of RICA. Well, I've had enough!

It's not as though RICA is actually going to achieve anything useful, anyway. If I were of criminal intent I would simply take the following simple steps:

1. Acquire one or more false identify documents (I am told that a bribe of around R100 at Home Affairs does the trick. I am certain that cheaper bulk-rates can be negotiated.)
2. Forge one or more fake electricity/phone/rates bills. Simple job with a laser printer. You need not even own the printer - just go to a local print-shop or internet cafe.
3. Blithely register many, many SIM-cards for RICA under a variety of false identities and addresses.
4. Sell said SIM cards.
5. Profit!

So I won't be going along with yet another useless, ill-conceived, dung-headed piece of invasive, expensive and useless legislative boondoggle written by the control-freaks who are one short step away from demanding, "Papers, citizen!"

Look for #hellnoiwontrica on Twitter.

GMO Maize Weirdness

I went yesterday to buy a bag (50kg) of crushed mielies (corn, maize) for chicken feed, and was a bit peeved to see that the price has risen quite a bit since last month. This is in the face of a bumper maize crop in South Africa.

We're seeing headlines like, "S.Africa harvests biggest maize crop in 30 years" at the same time as reports that the US, European and Australian corn (and other grain) harvests have been smaller than normal. Should be good for SA farmers, no? Explains why the price is a little higher, no?

No! The trouble is that over 50% of maize planted in SA is one or other GMO variety, and Europe and Japan won't touch any South African maize as a result. Legislation in SA does not require separate handling or labelling for GMO varieties, so some of our biggest markets won't touch our glut of maize.

Simultaneously, and much related, we read that as many as 30% of SA's maize farmers face bankruptcy, as they struggle to find ready markets for all that GMO maize. As a result, "price of maize has fallen precipitously in the last 12 months". Really? Not seeing that, here...

The talking heads expect a significant backlash against GMO varieties from farmers. I hope so! Our government is so deep in Monsanto's pocket that mere mortals stand no chance of getting GMO varieties labelled, sorted or outlawed here. We must simply wait and rely on what goes around coming around, and in the present weirdness it seems it has.

But will farmers' memories stretch so far back come planting time?

Drought Finally Official

 Finally our region has been officially declared a Drought Disaster Area, and the Provincial Gov is pumping in emergency funds for "emergency projects such as drilling of boreholes/treatment of effluent water etc."

A couple of weeks ago the local Muni announced that they're going to be constructing a desalinisation works for  Sedgefield. They're even trying to get emergency permission to delay parts of the Environmental Impact Assessment processes that are legally required... despite the fact that brine from a desalinisation works is classed as toxic waste... despite that fact that Eskom has no spare electricity generation capacity to power such energy-intensive boondoggles projects...in the same breath as local pols are mouthing empty bullshit about reducing our Carbon Footprint...

Something is very smelly in the District of Eden! (And it's not just the illegal-but-ignored below-the-water-table septic tanks in Sedgefield.) Apart from totally abdicating responsibility for allowing the development of housing estates in Knysna and Sedgefield far in excess of the actual carrying capacity of our catchment, local officials seem to studiously avoid looking at much simpler, lower tech, more sustainable and cheaper options.

Like requiring rainwater catchment for every house...
Like requiring in-house water to be gravity fed and not pressure-driven (thus reducing by about a factor of 4 the flow rate from taps)...

Despite the drought our rainwater tanks are all full, even while our dams are pretty empty.

Even when the boys were both still living at home we never, ever used as much as 5000litres in a month. And yes, we do wash ourselves and wash our clothes. Pretty regularly. Perhaps when you know and can easilymonitor your stored water levels being conscious about water usage comes more easily.

I shudder to think what the situation will look like in another few weeks when Peak Tourist Season hits...

Update: Forgot to add that the Provincial Gov rates this as the worst drought in 100 to 150 years. Didn't know they were capable of keeping records from that long ago! :-O

How Far Future

I was noodling around the 'net the other day for info on arcane bits of Provincial legislation. You see, some local property developers want to park (yet again!) an industrial "development" in our beautiful, rural neighbourhood. The current proposal -- in stark contrast to the last one -- is pretty softcore. The trouble is that, to get the zoning permissions, they're following an obscure process that eliminates the need for Environmental Impact Assessments, public-participation processes and the like. Or maybe not. It all depends on whether you can convince the Bureaucrat Of The Moment to buy your interpretation of the legislation and regulations.

Long story short, all this led me to a link to the Provincial Government's Draft¹ Climate Change Policy Document. Wow! Who ever would suspect that such a thing exists?

It will take me a good long while to read throught this thing, so all I've done is skim it so far.

Apart from some fairly obvious (to me) missing pieces, the whole thing seems pretty impressive to me. (And this is me -- the anarchist, using a word like "impressive", about government! Will wonders not cease?) In summary, the Western Cape is going to get dryer, mainly in the extreme South-Western areas (i.e. Cape Town, my home town) but not so much where we are (the Southern Cape.) That's assuming the IPCC models have some resemblance to future reality². The Western Cape is hugely dependent on agriculture as an economic driver, so there's much discussion of that. None of this is the impressive bit...

To me what is important in the document is that

1. the Western Cape Provincial Government is actually taking Climate Change seriously, and not in denial like some other governments we might mention,
2. they're actually advocating mitigation strategies, depsite the fact that, as a "developing" nation, South Africa is not "technically" obliged to worry about mitigation⁴, and
3. they're talking about actual, concrete actions, not just a lot of waffle, like the National government's discussion documents. (In fact, the National Government's list of "Key Issues" does not even mention climate change at all!)

My point: We can talk about climate change all we want, but unless we take actual, specific, concrete actions, we might as well be wanking.

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[1] In the (long) time it took me to write this, the policy document has been gazetted, and is therefore no longer merely a "Draft"...


[2] Extremely dubious! I think that consensus amongst climate scientist³ is that the IPCC model is disastrously wrong. Climate change is happening far quicker than anybody expected or predicted, and it is accelerating faster than any "accepted" models. Of course, academic process being what it is, the climate will simply have gone and changed -- maybe radically -- before academic bodies accept the models that explain the change.


[3] Any climate scientist who reads this and wishes to correct my views, please do!


[4] What bollocks! Every human being is going to be "impacted" by climate change. Anybody who think that mitigation is not part of their personal responsibility should be put up against the wall is clearly deluded.

That Good Ol' Inundation Time

That time of year. The Inundation -- not so much the water, though happily the dams and soil are looking much improved from the good rains we've had so far this month -- but the inundation of work in the garden. It's been keeping me pretty busy, I can tell you. I've managed to dig one new bed, bringing the total to 14, and with a little luck I may even get another one dug. Be aware that "digging a bed" for me means heavy composting and double-digging in a heavy clay soil to prepare a deep-bed, so it's a significant investment of energy. And then some people wonder when I am quite... pointed... about visitors to the veggie garden not treading on the beds, but sticking to the paths.  There's also been a lot of rehab work on paths and existing beds, after their 9-month neglect while I worked on a programming contract.

All the plants are terribly slow this year. Spring has been cold, windy and wet, and it's only really in the last week or two that most plants have shown real signs of waking-up. This year's Spring Disaster (isn't there always one?) has been seedling-mix. Usually I use my own compost for seed trays, but it tends to be a bit dense, retaining water a lot, and thus restricting oxygen to the plant roots and slowing plant development. So this year, feeling flush from the effects of the Sojourn In The Desert¹, I splashed out on "professional" seedling mix. What a lot of rubbish. It fails to hold water in any adequate way. It forms a lovely cement-like crust over the top, and just generally is worse than my own compost. Chillis planted into it have still failed to show-up. Chillis planted a month later in my own mix are looking much better. Sadly I risked a number of varieties of Chillis, Tomatoes and Lettuces where my seed-stocks were at their end, and I've now lost those lines. Grrrrrrr... That'll be the last time I buy that rubbish. Rather focus on finding ways to lighten-up my own seed mix.

On the bright side, both the Globe Artichokes and the Jerusalem Artichokes are doing really well, as are a bunch of relocated Tomato volunteers. Squashes and Cukes not so good -- too much cold for them -- but we'll keep trying. Beans (for drying) are doing well, though I still lack a really good Pinto bean, and am struggling to source a decent (large-size) Butter Bean. I like Beans.

I've become a lot more focussed on trying to get real staple crops going, so there's been much more work on the simple stuff -- Beans, Potatoes. Leafy crops are all very tasty, vitaminicious and the like, but what we monkeys really want are Carbohydrates. (Bananas are filling the gap, but there's a limit...) As soon as I get all the right factors in the right place at the right time, I'll be burning the rank grass off the top fields and putting them under grains and oilcrops. Fire is frightening stuff, though, no matter how powerful a tool for clearing land! Between the money-world "disasters"², the increasingly obvious climate changes, and the ever-pressing oil prices my thinking is that anybody who grows food is going to do OK over the next few years!

---

[1] The Programming Contract. It may only have been 9 months, but there were times when it felt like 40 years...

[2] I find it difficult to take that whole catastrophe too seriously. I mean, really, it's all too "We deluded ourselves into believing that Some Crap was a real value and... It all turned out to be Crap!" No sympathy, me. Of course its had the inevitable effect³ on our Developing Nation Crap Currency, which means that the veggie-breeding book I want (Carol Deppe's book) was R260, but is now R330!

[3] Of course we shouldn't neglect the effect of the Idiot Who Would Be KingPresident and his fuckwit minions...⁴

[4] OK, OK! I know I made a promise to myself that this blog wouldn't cross into politics, but really... we're in for a Kakistocracy⁵ worse than the US'ians have suffered these last 8 years.

[5] The word "Kak" is a common South African term for "shit". It actually derives from the Greek word "kakistos", meaning "the worst".

Oil Be Seein' Ya

Hail on the chief!

Power to the peakle!  Piss in the powder and praise the ambulation.  Prop up the prayerful.  Lead us not in too uncertainty, but deliver us our pizza.  Mine us the glory, the power of the vampire...  at least until we've passed the peak, empirical evidence not with standing.  At least until we've picked the bones of the past.  At least until we're pissed.

Pickled in their owned whine, pickled in a peck by their own henpecked pack, their feeding frenzy turns on their own insecret urgents, kundaleaning on their puppets, saintgeorging their dragons.  Landgrabbing at their own psychotrophies, paxing their blags.  Pack to the future: the ünteröberfuerher's articulated cargo culture backed to the gills by their spindizzy illumiknotty cranking the turingspindle, fueling the smouldering krankenfear, winding the springs of smalldering souls.  Fed to the gills on fantasy freelunches, fast boxlunch combustibusiness, massmart instalodges beating the ploughshares the landcares the earthwares into swards of instagratafie.  Burgeoning crapitalism winnowing the crashcrops and salting the earth.  Dah-doo enrunrun, dah-doo enrun.

Their disconnect, their triple-sec, piped pap for crumbfort -- thrice nine I lived there.

Take no heed the surgeon-general's warnings

Robotman's sexpak, empire sturmtrouper, freedom's child backs from the front, back from the udder side, sucks hind tit, sucks on exhaustgas of mannamachina running on empty, running on fumes, fuming and fulminating and running on emptation, "Where is my playcheck? You bastards! You've eaten it!"  Sadly attempts reconstructing the undeconstructible kaputznik intellogies, slides down the slippery slopium in epimenidisney daze.  Glide down the path of disticulated blatherbots' future imperfect, misstilling their weird from the sweat of my own frothers brow.  Small beer in my contigulum.

Nightout in the diskriegulum

Back.  Back from the utter realms of desolated trendfeldenkreit; back from the spam and the spin, the spick and the span, the tucked and tanned desertifed and stratified panglobulous hemi-semi-demi-quavered, the fucked and fanned transmogrified powerpack semisold into wageslavery.  Back from where the normalisms rain.  Back from the bangling headnoise of the neocrims and quaquaquaqua econofascisti; their blathering, their blistering ignoramofarten dismalism ranting and islamowailing "Let rip the warcrimes! Unleash the packs of lunchmeat!"  Crunching bongbots.  Thieving slavetakers.

Bring jah paper, bring jah fire.  Fill up the rightbrothers with righteous fury and fire the eagle's nest;  smoke the whitehouse wasps from their paper castle.  Matchless we march the halls of terregnum, the walls of interment, the malls of terrafie.  Donner und blitzen the gorgon's lair the liars creedpots the krankensteins castle.  Galileo lift thy head raise thy eyes past the neohorizon.  Il papa, il duce, spare us your sanctity.

No cheer for the menschless

So build aye my fortnot my safehouse my madhouse, my powerless mousehole.  With walls inside out and doors of perception flung wide.  And welcome aye the rain and sky, the earth and sun in roofless untermensch obscurity.  Let fall the fools of power where they may, the tools of destiny.  Enchancingly cast spells of remake; cultivate what's left of us an earthward spiral way.  Mine is no disgrace.

Global Climate Change

Earthtimes.org has a story on the EU-funded Antarctic ice core project, "Air bubbles from Antarctica ice core tell a scary environmental story".

"we know for sure that carbon dioxide has increased by about 35 per cent in the last 200 years. Before the last 200 years, which man has been influencing, it was pretty steady."

– Dr Eric Wolff, British Antarctic Survey

the natural level of carbon dioxide over most of the past 800,000 years has been 180-300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of air. But today it is at 380 ppmv.

In one of the universe's divine jests, on the same day we have our Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, speechifying:

[Africa will] see "an increased incidence of extreme weather events; substantial reductions in surface water resources; accelerated desertification in sensitive arid zones; and greater threats to health, biodiversity and agricultural production"

Now, my opinion is that van Schalkwyk is a halfwit. He has absolutely no clear understanding of the urgent need for strong protection of the environment.  He has been handed what is seen as a sinecure post in Cabinet – his reward for screwing the voters of the now-thankfully-extinct New National Party by delivering their votes into the hands of the ANC. 

One of his first actions as Minister of Environmental Affairs was to ease requirements for Environmental Impact Assessment in constructing cellular phone masts.  His department has recently granted carte blanche to golf course developers in the local area to do as they will, in clear conflict with provincial attempts to ride herd on these megabuck millionaire retreats that trash local environments, returning nothing but lies and broken promises to the affected communities.


That aside, I am very happy that he acknowledges the fact of global climate change, unlike some of his counterparts in other countries, who remain steadfastly in denial.


The question remains, though: What is government doing about it?  As a nation we are one of the worst polluters of the environment on a per capita basis.  We produce more pollution per South African than almost any other country on Earth.  The state-owned electricity utility, Eskom, largest electricity supplier in Africa, runs the dirtiest coal-fired power stations in the world.  That is why our electricity is among the cheapest in the world.  At least in the very short term.


Environmental pollution limits, lax as they are, are seldom enforced.  Simply getting chemical suppliers and toxic-waste management companies to comply with regulations commonly takes years, and seldom results in permanent and effective solutions, even after the courts have spoken.


The saddest indictment is that the post of Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism is considered unimportant-enough by the ANC government to award it to an ex-Nat!  (And guess which part of his portfolio gets the significant porion of his limited attention; Environment or Tourism?)


So: The South African government believes that climate change is before us.  That is, at least, reassuring.  We might have to say goodbye to Cape Town, goodbye Knysna Forests.  Are we doing anything about it, yet?  No chance.

Fourth Reich is Rising

So there's this halfwit, right-wing American senator who believes that "People who believe in global warming are like the Third Reich."

Lets look at what he is saying:

1. Hitler claimed that the Jews were guilty of spreading "The Big Lie".
2. Global warming is a Big Lie.

So..... what?  The Jews are guilty of Global Warming?  :-)

No.  From his axioms the only logical conclusion one can draw is:  Sen. Inhofe, by claiming that people who believe in Global Warming are perpetuating a Big Lie, is a modern analogue of Adolf Hitler. Please note that this is the inescapable logical outcome of his own axioms. I did not make this up.

Well, I don't really believe that he's in Hitler's league.  But his logic is equally twisted and faulty.

I'm off to listen to Stratovaius's "Fourth Reich"... (highly recommended band!)

Noise Pollution

Mainly to update you on my letter to the Civil Aviation Authority.  I have not heard a peep out of them yet, but, and I say this with all due pessimism, the volume of air traffic seems to have dropped dramatically!  Perhaps they have taken note and their response is still wending its way back to me.  (Ha!  Vain hope!)

On the other hand, the neighbourhood dog packs still hold forth at full volume, including, once again, BaoBabe's abandoned dogpack yowling and howling at around 4 this morning.  And again at around 6.  And then from about 7 until almost 8:15.  Oh well; the letter went to the council dog-control officer last Thursday, and I don't imagine he's had time to take action yet, so I guess we're in for another noisy Sunday afternoon.

Air Traffic Control

Over recent months we have seen a large increase in light-aircraft traffic overhead, using local farm-fields for take-offs and landing.  So here is a letter I have just sent-off to the Civil Aviation Authority - lets see how they respond...  I'll refrain from ranting about the abysmal design of their website :-)

I am writing to express my deep concern with a recent marked increase in air-traffic (light aircraft) in our area - the Rheenendal area north of Knysna.

Over the past few months I have noticed a very marked increase in air traffic in the area, evidently taking-off and landing using local farm fields, as I am unaware of any licensed airfield in the area.

I particularly strongly object to such traffic due to:
  1.  Noise nuisance
  2.  Invasion of privacy, as these aircraft frequently take-off directly overhead my dwelling, and
  3.  Hazard to a source of my income: I am an organic vegetable grower, and the pollution caused from hydrocarbon emissions from aircraft has, in several cases around the world, resulted in organic growers losing their organic certification.

Please advise me

  1.  Whether any airfield has been licensed to operate in the area,
  2.  Who is responsible for authorising the use of farm-fields for
      light-aircraft traffic, and
  3.  What can be done to stop such overflight.