Posted inEnvironmentEqualityGeneralHealthLifestyleNews/PoliticsTech

Education policy and the future of water

On Tuesday, I watched a video on the deteriorating water situation in the Arabic state of Jordan, which foregrounded to me the imperative, that countries give a central place to essential concerns such as the continued availability of water in their education programmes, from primary school through high school to universities. Unless they pay urgent […]

Posted inBusinessEnvironmentEqualityGender violenceGeneralHealthLifestyleMediaNews/PoliticsSportTech

It is time

The time, in the brief recent history of our country, has come for our country to wade into a foreign conflict, choose a side and fight, using our military, for that side. The time has come for our foreign policy to match our constitutional values, rather than the conflicted and corrupt, reflexive “Friends With All” […]

Posted inEnvironmentGeneralNews/Politics

The follies of humankind, through the eyes of a young girl

In this time of economic and ecological uncertainty, which has, tellingly, given rise to the philosophical genre of “extinction studies” (see http://thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2014/06/30/human-extinction-its-not-just-science-fiction/), it may be wise to remind ourselves that the human folly which has given rise to the fraught state of the present, globally, is nothing new. Human history is littered with such follies, […]

Posted inGeneralNews/Politics

What ‘war’ means today

When picking up Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude – War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2006), again, in the light of recent developments across the globe involving Syria, Isis, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda (to mention only some of the names associated with war), I was struck, anew, by their astute identification […]

Posted inNews/Politics

We will ask questions about CAR

By Ntsako Shivambu I am one of those so-called clever blacks who believe you are a tribalist, a traditionalist and a clueless politician that doesn’t have any leadership skills. But the reason I’m writing this letter is not to talk about that but what you said during the memorial service for the soldiers who died […]

Posted inNews/Politics

The dogs of war

I’m shocked and saddened by the loss of 14 of our soldiers in the Central African Republic. It sounds like the Wild West. And it doesn’t matter how many of “them” our forces killed, it’s all just bullshit. How do 200 of our troops get attacked by a rebel army of some 3 000? And nowhere […]

Posted inNews/Politics

African Union, useful or useless?

By Lindelwe Dube The continent has recently seen an increase in the number of attempted coups. The list includes Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast and now the Central African Republic (CAR). While Africans themselves and the international community may look to the African Union (AU) to facilitate peace and stability, the AU has struggled to fulfil […]

Posted inGeneral

Lennon and Laing – kindred spirits

John Lennon and RD Laing – two individuals who worked in entirely different cultural fields; the one a singer, songwriter and pop star, the other a psychiatrist (perhaps experimental psychiatrist), writer and radical thinker of the left. What they had in common, was arguably the fact that they were both utopian visionaries, and both were […]