A visitor in the garden of our neighbors John and Nora in Durban, on the cliffs above the valley of a thousand hills in South Africa.
These steep cliffs which are still wild, extend for many kilometers and manage to sustain several large species, including leopard, genet, caracal, duiker, steenbok, black and green mamba, vine snake, puff adders, berg adders and many other snakes, including african rock python, like this one in the photo, which can grow to six meters.
How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually but then suddenly’. These two lines, which appear in the Ernest Hemingway-novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’, encapsulate, for me at least, what is slowly but surely unfolding in South Africa. We are in the ‘slowly at first’-phase of going bankrupt as a country, but at a later stage, […]
South Africa: Only a matter of time before the bomb explodes I can predict when South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China […]
A few years ago I read a very interesting book, by a Lebanese writer, one Taleb, titled the Black Swan. By now, I am sure, we’ve all heard the story of the “once enigmatic” Black Swan – but what was the lesson of this story? Simply, that when confronted with incomplete data one often draws incorrect conclusions, and therefore – people often think they know more than they actually do know.