Moody’s are
clearly impressed by the spirit of cleansing and revelation supposedly now
sweeping through the nation’s state-owned enterprises. This is uncovering worms
in places where there were not thought even to be cans. It’s going to be a long
time before anyone will be able to trust a set of financial statements no
matter who produced or audited them. But thank you anyway Moody’s. We need all
the help we can get.
It has just emerged
that the delegates at the ANC conference last year resolved that “Free Wi-Fi (connection to the
internet) must be provided to communities in both metropolitan
and rural areas, and to all public schools, clinics and libraries”. This would
be a very good idea but is not the whole story. Reportedly, due to non-payment
of its subscription to the company that publishes an on-line law library, employees
of the Department of Justice employees can’t look stuff up. Oops.
As the news
comes in that ex-president Zuma has been summoned to court to answer the now
pretty ancient 783 charges of funny money, the rather special South African
responses are being made. All sorts of organisations are calling on their
members to ensure that they too will pitch up at the court to support their
man. Yet again down town Durban will probably become impassable as the hordes,
without anything else to do, will throng the High Court.
A columnist
named Julie Frederikse has suggested that everyone over 70 should be disenfranchised.
Her dubious contention is that these old-folk are no longer concerned about the
future of society and tend to focus more on protecting their own interests than
on issues affecting future generations. Its hard to heap enough scorn on this
idea save for the corollary to not having a vote must be to have one’s tax
number cancelled. And of course, it also means that no one over 70 can stand
for public office. Hey! This is starting to sound attractive.
Once again
the consequences of taking advantage of all the lovely features of keeping in touch and informed
via the internet have been
disclosed. Very simply, nothing that resides on any computer can be considered
private and confidential. All those handy and “free” services that we use, make
their living from selling what they can find out about us when we tap into
their products. So the news that one of the giants in that business, Facebook,
had been the source of information used by many of the big political campaigns
of recent times should not surprise or concern anyone unless they would like to
start paying for every photograph of their hamburger or kitten they send to “friends”.
Tiangong-1 is
the name of a now useless space ship that belongs to China. Very shortly it is
going to fall out of the sky and because it is so large, parts of it will
probably survive the re-entry burn-up and land back on earth. Hopefully not on
anyone. However, this event pretty much defines the word “uncontrolled” and all
we can do is marvel at the fancy statistical calculations showing how small is
the probability of being hit by a piece of very hot Chinese scrap. Various
websites are offering “virtual telescope” observation of the doomed satellite.
But remember if you use one don’t be surprised to receive an advertisement for
hard hats very shortly.
Amongst all
the welter of information, suspicions and abuse the really interesting thing to
emerge from the ball tampering incident is that Cricket Australia has since
2013 had an Integrity Unit. And apparently the ICC has one as well. Come on! Really?
And what have they been doing to earn their money?
James
Greener
Maundy Thursday.
2018
