Mbeki fiddles while South Africa burns
Posted on May 21st, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,687 views
According to a news report on News24, Mbeki has not bothered to order the SANDF to deploy its forces in support of SAPS in the areas affected by xenophobic violence.
He’s leaving for Tanzania tomorrow. In the meantime, the police are battling to contain the situation. Despite their pleas for assistance from the SANDF, the army is not allowed by article 201 of our Constitution to intervene unless they have a presidential order.
Mbeki, you are such a loser. I hope you die soon.
You should have declared a local state of emergency in the affected areas and deployed the army on Monday already.
Tags: Mbeki, xenophobic violence
Filed under South Africa news | 3 Comments »
Feeling horny?
Posted on May 12th, 2008 by Richard Catto 4,002 views
Feeling horny? Want to get the girl?
Well, why wait when you can get straight to the point right away?
Buy our new African Rape kit (genuine Kudu horn included), plus full instructions for a mere …
SATISFACTION IS GUARANTEED!
[ This post parodies the absurdity of criminal behaviour ]
Tags: African rape kit
Filed under Rape | 2 Comments »
Emily Williams’ family is going back to England
Posted on May 11th, 2008 by Richard Catto 3,011 views
On February 12 2008, 12 year old Emily Williams was shot and killed by armed robbers while she sat in her mom’s car outside the house that was being robbed. I wrote about this a week after the event and pondered why her mother had remained smack in the centre of the hot zone, when she had been concerned enough about the situation to call for help.
Now her family has recently announced that they’re emigrating to England because they no longer feel safe in South Africa. Well, as it turns out, when you read the IOL article you discover that they’re not emigrating at all. Roger Williams is British and so he’s going home. The only ones who are emigrating are his South African wife, Toni, and their daughter, Sophie.
Poor 10 year old Sophie, being dragged off to dreary dismal and unsafe England just because her mother failed to do the sensible thing and get clear of a dangerous situation.
The Williams protest that they feel everyone has a right to go about their business without having to worry about crime.
What a load of shit.
Thoughout history men and women and children have had to contend with the threat of crime and violence, threat of abduction into slavery, threat of rape, threat of being robbed at sword point, and threat of being killed. Crime will never ever ever disappear. We will always have crime in every single country on the face of this planet for as long as people are alive.
Even in Britain, there is crime for you to worry about. You will never find a place to run to which will offer you a crime free zone. It simply does not exist.
America is even safer than Britain and the reason is because America is flooded with guns. In America, if you feel threatened by crime, you go buy a gun, and many households have one. In some US cities, local laws compel each household to own a gun.
In Britain, if you feel threatened by crime, you can’t buy a gun. I actually don’t know what the hell you do in Britain if you feel threatened by crime. Maybe you emigrate to America?
Tags: Britain, Crime, Emily Williams, guns, United States
Filed under Crime | 65 Comments »
Catch Stephen Hawking this Sunday (May 11) at the Muizenberg Pavilion
Posted on May 9th, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,754 views
Yes, The Stephen Hawking who wrote A Brief History in Time will be here in Cape Town at the Muizenberg Pavilion on Sunday May 11 2008 to deliver a lecture at AIMS titled Universe.
To find out how to attend, booking information is available here.
Tags: Stephen Hawking
Filed under Science | 1 Comment »
OpenID could leave you stranded
Posted on May 9th, 2008 by Richard Catto 2,250 views
Like many people presented with a new innovative online service, I just accepted OpenID as a useful service that I should probably have and use.
And I did. I discovered that when I created a WordPress.com account, I got a free OpenID url thrown in. So I used it to sign into Plaxo and create an address book for myself there.
Listening to all the hype and the urgings to use OpenID from many fellow South African bloggers, I simply went ahead without considering the possible pitfalls of doing so.
But now it seems like I should have looked before I lept, because as Kyle Neath points out in a blog post he wrote in April, he has 5 reasons to give us pause before we jump onto the OpenID train.
The most compelling reason he lists, in my opinion, is the fact that should your OpenID provider decide to cancel its service, you will very likely lose all access to all the accounts you created using that OpenID url.
That means that if WordPress.com decides to cease being an OpenID operator or simply goes out of business, I won’t be able to log into the plaxo account I created with the OpenID url they provide me.
At some point, some OpenID providers will cease operating. That is a sure thing, and unless some vital changes are made by the third party services which currently accept login via an OpenID url, some people are going to lose access to all their accounts and all the data they store there.
"With a distributed model, it should be assumed that at any given time any given node could be disconnected or go out of service. Most implementations today do not afford this luxury. You can’t enter your email address to recover your account. You can’t change which OpenID you registered with. And you simply can’t access your account should your provider be having some technical difficulties.
When I look at the currently implemented OpenID ecosystem, I just see a tightly coupled system that is going to fail at some point for a large amount of users." – Kyle Neath
Kyle, I don’t think you could have put it more plainly why people should not use OpenID for anything but trivial throwaway accounts which contain no data that one wishes to retain.
I am now going to see if Plaxo will allow me to convert my OpenID account to a conventional username, password system with account recovery through an email address and secondary email address.
Thanks for the warning. You may have helped a lot of people to save themselves a lot of unnecessary trouble in future.
Tags: Kyle Neath, OpenID, Warpspire
Filed under Online Services, OpenID | 1 Comment »
