Category: this is south africa

Day 317 – Cape Cormorants Crisis on the BBC

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Indeed.

Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, the sudden abandonment of more than 1,700 Cape cormorant chicks has sparked the largest seabird rescue mission the country has seen in 20 years.

That larger seabird rescue mission being the response to the MV Treasure disaster back in 2000.

Look, there’s a lot going on in South Africa right now: politrix, lockdowns, a virus etc etc. but, being someone who generally has his finger on some sort of pulse, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more about this locally. So I’m glad that at least the BBC has stepped in with a attention-raising photo essay.

On 11 January, ranger Andile Mdluli was conducting a regular patrol on Robben Island, most famous as the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, when he noticed that almost all of the island’s thousands of adult Cape cormorants had disappeared. Unprotected, their chicks were being picked off by predators in their nests.

“It was just carnage, with kelp gulls and ibises coming for these chicks,” says Lauren Waller, a seabird scientist at Sanccob.

I was on Robben Island just over 100 days ago and I can vouch for the ferocity – and numbers – of gulls and ibises. Especially the ibises. Literally thousands of nasty, ugly, scary African Sacred Ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus). I’m pretty sure that Robben Island is the Sacred Ibis reservoir for the whole of South Africa. And it’s been spilling over for a while now.

But I digress. Often.

It’s important that these chicks make it to adulthood, because the Cape Cormorant is not doing well on the numbers front:

Cormorants are “as endangered as African penguins”, says Ms Ludynia, but “because they’re always in large flocks people don’t realise”.

…and they’re not cute and waddley either, both of which always help with gaining funding and awareness when you’re dying out.

Anyway, on that note (and given that the chicks will get through 20 tonnes of sardines in the next couple of months), wherever you are in the world, if you want to help out with SANCCOB’s costs, here’s the page you need to go to.

You can even select for your funding to go directly to the chicks in question. Do it.

 

Thanks for the link, Switzerland and Sheffield

Day 316 – Things I’m not doing tomorrow

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[Update: What happened next? See this post for details.]

 

Number 1 – Going to this:

Where. To. Begin.

Yes: THE ENGLISH IS TERRIBLE: a split infinitive, a missing hyphen, a couple of AWOL commas and an embarrassing speling eror.

But that’s not the reason that I’m writing this post.
“Dr” Chabad (de Jaeger) de la Fontaine is the reason I’m writing this post.

“Dr” Chabad (de Jaeger) de la Fontaine was the lady who became briefly and locally famous after the Muizenberg beach protests last week. Here she is:

…making claims that she is:

“…a very highly skilled medical doctor, as well as a virologist, immunologist and quantum physicist, working with parasites that they call viruses.”

Look, we’ve all been there, but this is really is no way to publicly describe your colleagues.

Still, it’s an impressive array of qualifications and specialisations, and one that – if you do a bit of background reading on “Dr” Chabad (de Jaeger) de la Fontaine – seems to vary depending on the day of the week and the direction of the breeze.

The flyer above (as you can read) suggests her qualifications and specialties as:

MbCHb, Naturopath, Homeopath, Quantum Physicist, DNA Nutrition, and Permaculture.

Gotta keep that DNA nutrified.

…while LinkedIn says she is a:

Naturopath, Homeopath and Quantum Nano Technology Researcher with “expertise in water, blood, salt, origin of humanity, genetics and DNA”, whose “deep intuition is extra-ordinary.

and she is also the owner of “Aqua Resonance Technology Ltd”, which according to the CIPC, doesn’t exist.

But elsewhere, we learn that she is also “Founding Member (and Human Intelligence Self- Mastery Consultant/Coach/Trainer) @ Changing Lifestyles (Pty) Ltd”, which according to the CIPC, er… also  doesn’t exist.

And she’s also been “Executive Assistant to CEO @ AFRO SYNERGY TOURS (Pty) Ltd”, which according to the CIPC… ag… look, you can probably guess.

Still, maybe it’s a quantum physics thing and these enterprises simply exist in a parallel universe, reality or timeline. Or maybe the CIPC has got it nailed and they don’t exist full stop.

We just don’t know.

What we do know is that (according to “Dr” Chabad (de Jaeger) de la Fontaine), “Dr” Chabad (de Jaeger) de la Fontaine can do

GENETIC NUTRITION & DNA ACTIVATION

and is a networker in advertising and promotional products:

I mean, I find it a bit strange that after her weirdly capitalised MbCHb, which must have taken an absolute minimum of six years to achieve, she has never chosen to mention it before anywhere that I can find, but I’m sure that’s just an oversight.

In fact, the highest qualification that I can find on any of her myriad profiles suggests that she has a Masters degree, listed thus:

Master’s Degree, Quantum Physics, Haemotology and Nutrition for Blood Types @ Private Tutor From 1980 to 1988

Three of my four PhDs in apparently randomly contrived subjects also came from Private Tutor, so that all seems legit and completely above board.

Elsewhere on that page, she claims to have spent 16 months as a:

Senior Researcher @ Scientific research on water oscillation, frequency and resonance technology

which seems an awful long time to be doing senior research at scientific research on something that doesn’t exist. Especially when you’re a qualified medical doctor.

In fact, that particular profile (written at the end of 2015) doesn’t actually mention that she is a qualified medical doctor at all, but I’m sure that’s just an oversight. It does tell us that she worked to try and get a new modular furniture system business up and running, and has a diploma in Event Management from Damelin College in 1994 though, which pretty much adds up to about the same thing, I guess.

A minor point: The HPCSA doesn’t list her as a medical doctor either. Odd.
But I’m sure that’s just an oversight.

Anyway, tomorrow, as you will see, she’d like us to spend 3½ hours with her beyond the lentil curtain as she demands “TRUTH OVER LIES”, and transparency around the qualifications of those “advising the president of the replublic [sic] of South Africa”.

Yes. I’m all for clarity around the qualifications of these so-called ‘experts’ telling us how we should be living our lives.

Still, I won’t be going.

Day 313, part 2 – Vaccine delivery

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The first vaccines for The Virus arrived in South Africa yesterday, and wow, was the pomp and ceremony was dragged out onto the cold, wet apron at the airport in Johannesbeagle?

(Yes. Yes, it was.)

Dignitaries, politicians, umbrella holders and a really sycophantic media were all present to witness a whole 1 million doses of Covishield™ arriving on an Emirates 777.

That’s just enough to fully vaccinate 0.8% of the population, by my rudimentary calculations.

And yet:

I don’t watch news programmes specifically for this reason. But last night, I flicked on eNCA because I wanted felt I had to watch Ramaphosa’s address on reducing the lockdown. This was long, long, overdue, but clearly held back so that he could wave his little “we’ve got some vaccine” flag.

And wow. The blatant fawning during the pisspoor pre-speech small talk was absolutely sickening.

I looked up several times from the ironing (it’s all about the glamour here, ok?) and was eventually told off by Mrs 6000 for using the phrase

What the actual fuck?

four times – ever more incredulously – in about a 90 second period.

I’m well aware that the art of politics is all about spin, but this was so robustly applied that we were all almost flung outwards at mass times angular velocity squared times radius*.

They’re clearly not even bothering to hide it anymore. Gone are the clever intricacies of subliminal messaging. This was in your face GovernmentLove©. I’m not one for hyperbole, but I was actually quite shocked. I would not have been surprised if they’d cut across the studio to some sort of shrine to the ANC**.
It was actually like I was watching a party political broadcast***.

Stay away from news channels, guys. Or at least watch them with the knowledge that they’re all pushing some sort of agenda. This one wasn’t pretty. But at least it was pretty obvious.

Right. While I’m sounding like some sort of Trump fan with a Masters in Media Conspiracy from the Dunning-Kruger Online College, might I just ask why we’re bothering with this whole injection thing anyway?

It’s a tiresome, clumsy, process and people can avoid getting the jab if they so choose.

Ugh. No. That’s not what our reptilian overlords want.

Why not just use chemtrails?

After all, Darth Putin has got one of his planes in Cape Town right now, ready to go:

The Russian-built, Russian-registered, catchily named Illyushin II-76 TD-90VD arrived last night from the so-called Novolazarevskaya Airbase (which also sounds Russian), and features a huge cargo hold, capable of being adapted to hold fluids to bomb fires (definitely) or spread weather-modification and mind-altering chemtrails (possibly).
Surely it shouldn’t be such a big thing to fill it with vaccine and get us all done in one go?

I mean, that’s almost certainly why it’s here, right?

Right.

I’m glad you are all in the know as well.

 

Stay safe.

 

 

* engineers and physicists will know
** ok, that was a bit of hyperbole
*** back to no hyperbole

Day 309 – Vaccines: it’s complicated

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Who’d be a politician? Not me.

There are very few decisions that you will ever make that will make the people happy. Some of the people, sure. But not all of them.
When you do the wrong thing, they’ll jump all over you and when you do the right thing, they won’t acknowledge it because it should have been done sooner, or later, or in a different way.

And when you add Covid to the situation, then it becomes an even messier boiling pot of piss. Lockdown, don’t lockdown, lockdown but sooner, lockdown but more lightly, lockdown but let the pubs serve scotch eggs; close the borders but leave them open; protect the teachers but don’t close the schools.

And once you’ve messed all that up, you can get onto the vaccine issue.

Now, without saying that they are perfect in any way, I think that the UK government seems to have done rather well on the vaccine stuff. They ordered early and have thankfully avoided the complete mess that the EU has made of the whole thing:

The latest figures from Our World in Data reveal that just 2.1% of the EU population has received a vaccine, compared with 10.8% for the UK. The goal to vaccinate at least 70% of the EU’s population by this summer is wildly off – at the current pace, the bloc as a whole would reach only 15% by the end of September.

But guess who’s fault that EU mess is?

Well, apparently it’s the UK’s, because they ordered the vaccine that the EU wanted, but they had their ducks in a row and they ordered it earlier. It’s like the lazy guy who only woke up at 10:58 blaming you for grabbing the last Sausage and Egg McMuffin.

But no, let’s ignore our own ugly shortfalls and find another scapegoat. Deflecting the blame is such a politician thing.

Happily, Boris is having none of it:

While the finger pointing on the continent continued, Prime Minister Boris Johnson avoided being drawn on any potential impact of the dispute on UK vaccine supplies.

The UK has made money available for other countries to get vaccines, too. But read the papers and the pixels and all you see is criticism. And I think that’s a little unfair in this situation.

Because apparently, the UK is one of those “hoarding” vaccine:

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday urged wealthy countries not to hoard surplus COVID-19 vaccine supplies, adding his voice to calls for global production to be shared more equally.

But we in SA could also have had a successful programme in place, were it not for the fact that we only started negotiating with vaccine suppliers on January 6th. And were it not for the fact that at least some of the R500 billion war chest to deal with Covid hadn’t made its way into the pockets of corrupt government officials and towards failed SOEs.

But no, let’s ignore our own ugly shortfalls and find another scapegoat. Deflecting the blame is such a politician thing.

Meanwhile:

Britain said on Sunday (Jan 10) it has helped raise US$1 billion from global donors towards the drive to help “vulnerable countries” access coronavirus vaccines, by match-funding contributions.

The UK said, in addition, it has committed 548 million pounds to the Covax Advance Market Commitment (AMC), after matching with 1 pound every US$4 pledged by other donors.

I mean, it’s not bad, is it? You can’t really say that they’re not helping out. And sure, one could argue that they are a rich country and so on, but one could also find plenty of space for that sort of money within the UK, especially given the pandemic.

And yes, many countries (including the UK and those in the EU) have ordered more vaccines than they need, simply because they didn’t know which vaccines would work and which wouldn’t. And sure, they’re lucky to be able to hedge their bets in that way, but you can rest assured that any spares (and hopefully those orders all come through and there will be spares) will be redistributed through Covax. Just like Cyril wanted.

That’s… er… the same Covax that the SA government missed the deadline to pay and join, by the way.

There’s good news too, though. Maybe SA can take up Tanzania’s share of vaccines, because Tanzania’s president is still relying on the dual therapy of [checks notes] steam inhalation and God:

“We will also continue to take health precautions including the use of steam inhalation,” he said.

“You inhale while you pray to God, you pray while farming maize, potatoes, so that you can eat well and corona fails to enter your body. They will scare you a lot, my fellow Tanzanians, but you should stand firm.”

And, to be fair, that approach does seem to working, given that they haven’t had any cases of Covid since last July.

Mainly because they stopped testing for it then. And as U2 told us, you can’t find what you’re not still looking for*.

Without giving any evidence, Magufuli said vaccines may be part of a foreign plot to steal Africa’s wealth.

“Vaccines are not good. If they were, then the white man would have brought vaccines for HIV/AIDS,” Magufuli said during the opening of a new farm in his western home region.

Sure. And quite possibly a cure for stupid, as well.

 

 

* or some such, anyway

Day 308 – Are we nearly there yet?

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2½ weeks.

2½ weeks to pack up a whole house.

It doesn’t seem such a big job, and indeed it probably wouldn’t be if there weren’t other things which also needed doing during that 2½ weeks. But there’s parenting, schooling (back full-time next week, nogal), riding, Dodgeball, piano and singing.
There’s dog walking, exercise, work, football (on the TV, at least), there’s blogging and there are the daily mundanities of life which still need to be happening alongside the packing up of the whole house.

I’m now at the point where I’m fairly sure that there’s stuff which I won’t need in the intervening 2½ weeks and which I can therefore chuck into in boxes, ready to go. There will be things which I have packed which I will need, but when I realise this, I will just have to curse quietly under my breath and pretend that I can manage without them.

Positives:
Almost sorted the internet connection for the new place.
Almost sorted the inspection certificates for this place.
Managed my fastest run for a while this morning (still very slow).
Wine shop and bottle store down the road seem to be prepping to reopen.