So this man is denied due process?

Any of the bush lawyers here know whether there will be a jury, or “judge only?”

QUESTION: I don’t get it, Poland won’t pay for gas in rubles, when I buy something from the US I have to pay in US dollars not Canadian, so what am I missing?

Um…the contract would have specified the currency payments were to be made in, which wasn’t rubles.

The right immigrants are great. I received this through WhatsApp

WHAT AMERICA GAINED AND SOUTH AFRICA LOST

After a quarter century, this small generation of South African immigrants has risen to break through, en masse, into such key leadership roles that they’re changing the US. UTUBE…, PAYPAL, , TESLA… one of them has led the transition from PCs to cloud computing; another leads the US’s top business school; and another is replacing the space shuttle.

But they’ve done it as individuals, and – with the notable exception of commercial spaceflight pioneer Elon Musk – almost invisibly.

In December, the Silicon Valley Business Journal made a remarkable statement regarding four of their first five winners of the US’s high-tech chief executive officer awards, which feature competition from the likes of Google’s Larry Page.

It said: “Here’s something interesting about our executive of the year awards, something that hadn’t occurred to us at the time that these four executives were selected – they are all originally from South Africa.”

In Silicon Valley alone, South African-born high-tech chief executives include Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola and Gyft; Willem van Biljon, co-founder of Nimbula; and Pieter de Villiers, founder and chief executive of Clickatell, the world’s largest online text messaging service.
And these weren’t even among the award winners.

Those include Gauteng brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, who have built the US’s largest provider of residential clean energy, and Paul Maritz, the outgoing chief executive of cloud computing giant VMware, who was schooled in KwaZulu-Natal.

Impact South African immigrants in the US number only 83 000 – a “small number even for a big city”, says Professor Nancy Foner, an expert on immigration achievement at the City University of New York.
So small, she says, that there are almost no figures or studies on their impact.
Yet new South African networking organisations, such as the Sable Accelerator in California, are springing up as South Africans are suddenly appearing in front of microphones as chief executives and university deans and scientific research team leaders.

Apart from well-established South African communities in places such as San Diego, or the tight group of professional golfers in Florida, South Africans don’t network the way they do in the United Kingdom.

Instead, mutual recognition often happens like this:
“Hey, that guy running the University of Notre Dame seems to have a Saffer accent.
Come to think of it, so does the dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business. Ja, and what about the guy who was in charge of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority? And with a name like Mahlangu-Ngcobo, that elections judge in Maryland has gotta be from home.”

Pat Soon-Shiong, philanthropist inventor businessman, Cape Town-born of Chinese descent, the son of a shopkeeper, Pat was University of Witwatersrand educated and is also the owner of The L.A. and part-owner of LA LAKERS

Some are fairly well known. Pik Botha’s grandson, Roelof, has been ranked as high as 22nd on the Forbes Midas List of venture capitalists, ­having funded the launch of…… YouTube in 2005.

Among the celebrity conscription-dodgers, singer Dave Matthews probably heads the pack. Matthews was recently declared the US’s most successful touring act of the decade. Remarkable anonymity
But most have risen to the cutting edge of American business with remarkable anonymity.

Former Illovo schoolboy Steven Collis, almost unnoticed, has taken the reins of healthcare wholesaling company AmerisourceBergen, listed 29th on the Fortune 500, with 13000 employees, and annual revenues of an almost ridiculous R600-billion. It’s the same story in science.

The single greatest breakthrough in cancer treatment in recent years – epigenetic therapy – has been credited to Stellenbosch’s Peter Jones, who now runs a major research center in California.

And another South African, Dr Liam Pedersen, has grabbed what could be the most exotic job in the US.

He leads a Nasa research team to develop the brains of “intelligent” space robots that will explore the solar system in search of extraterrestrial life.
And to test his “autonomous navigation” systems, Pedersen (42) gets to test the robots in places like Antarctica and alpine lakes in the Andes.

In terms of sheer impact for Africa among transplants, it’s a draw between ex-pats Dr Trevor Mundel and Nomvimbi Meriwether.

A former Soweto businesswoman, Meriwether – now the owner of Meticulous Tours travel agency in Washington DC – is the co-founder of multimillion-dollar health and basic education charity in Southern Africa, the Meriwether Foundation.
Astonishing over-achievement She told the Mail & Guardian that her fundraising clout in the US enjoyed a major boost in December when her daughter – South African-born Nana Meriwether (27) – won the Miss USA crown.
”We are meeting governors, presidents, billionaires, so the plight of [South Africa’s] most vulnerable ­children is being heard where it counts,” she said.

Mundel, from Johannesburg, has been appointed as president of global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a grant budget of about R130-billion, and a brief of nothing less than to eradicate polio and malaria from the Earth.

But it’s when you consider a professional field as specific as immigration law that the astonishing over-achievement of this group becomes clear.

Bernie Wolfsdorf – another conscription dodger – has been named “the most highly rated immigration lawyer in the world” for the past three years by the peer-reviewed International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers, and South Africa’s Daryl Buffenstein is a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

In the same field, Chris Wright, a transplant from Johannesburg, is described as “Hollywood’s go-to lawyer” – somehow securing “genius” work visas for everyone from Piers Morgan to Playboy playmate Shera Bechard.

The “O-1? work visa is normally reserved for foreigners of “extraordinary ability”, including Nobel prize, winners, but Wright has controversially expanded its use to include celebrities. South African lawyers have not yet broken through, as a group, as judges in the US’s highest courts, the way they have in, say, Western Australia.

But Margaret Marshall (68), a former student leader at Wits, recently retired as chief justice of Massachusetts, where, in a landmark case in 2003, she was the first justice in the US to grant gay couples the right to marry.

Compared to the US’s business world, expatriates have under­achieved in Hollywood itself, but its modest breakthrough artists include Charlize Theron, District 9?s Sharlto Copley and Stelio Savante, who both co-produced and cracked a role opposite Matthew Perry in the comedy The Whole Banana last year.

Building and innovating The poster-child for the 1980s immigration generation is Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX – the rocket company charged with leading the replacement of the space shuttle. In an earlier interview, he told me he left the country in 1988 because the South African Defence Force promised to be “an amazing waste of time”.

John Affleck-Graves, executive vice-president of Notre Dame, Collis and Wright were among those who told me they credit their education for much of their success, but offered few other clues as to why South Africans had risen so sharply.

Professor Foner says white South Africans, in particular, had “invisibly” risen to the top.”South Africans [in the US] have gone unnoticed, especially the majority who are white, for whom there were few cultural barriers, if any,” she said. “But I have noticed that South Africans move right into elite circles in the US, immediately, and look where they’ve gone.”

Donovan Neale-May, founder of the Sable Accelerator, says the 1980s South African immigrant generation was unique in that they did not take advantage of contacts and mobility through “ethnic communities” in the US, “as, say, Indian entrepreneurs have done so effectively”.

Instead, Neale-May says the conscription-avoidance generation had simply outcompeted American professionals with a multitasking combination of management talent, drive and pioneering vision.

Overwhelmingly white phenomenon South African emigration to the US has been an overwhelmingly white phenomenon.

According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, only 14% of South African immigrants – about 11 000 – are black. And they’ve had to travel a far more difficult road, says Foner.

Yet a number of black South Africans have made New World leaps that are, if anything, closer to the purest form of the “American Dream” than their rich white countrymen. Among the exiles who remained in the US, Mahlangu-Ngcobo is one who has emerged as a national force in both government health policy and theology.

She has testified on healthcare for the government’s Congressional Black Caucus and, during the violent tumult in Liberia in 1997, she led a workshop there on violence against women.

The author of nine books – including research works on Aids and gender equality – Mahlangu-Ngcobo lectures on public health, and has founded both a US church and an international ministry.
Gift Ngoepe, the first black South African to be offered a professional baseball contract, is one of a more recent immigrant generation to the New World.

The unlikely sporting story He discovered baseball when his mother took a job as a domestic worker at the Randburg Mets clubhouse.

A tiny room inside it later became his home, and he simply practiced against a wall until he was noticed by coaches and, later, a US mentor. Now, he plays professionally as a shortstop within the Pittsburg Pirates organization. Richman Mahlangu (49) has a similarly unlikely sporting story, but, in pursuing it, has carved out a classic, John Steinbeck-style American tale.

He fled apartheid itself at the same time that Musk and others were ­fleeing conscription. Mahlangu’s “hook” into the US was a sports scholarship after he literally discovered the sport of tennis when he found a broken tennis racket on a dusty street in Durban’s Lamontville township in the 1970s.
He says that, as with Ngoepe, a local professional coach was so taken by his diligent practice with that racket that he offered free lessons, and, eventually, an introduction to a US mentor. Living in Las Vegas, Mahlangu has since achieved neither riches nor professional-level excellence in his sport.

Instead, he has coached his two sons to the point where, last year, they were both recruited for scholarships by Ivy League universities.

His youngest son, Yannik (17), has held a national rank of ninth for his age group and his eldest, Nicholas – now on his way to Harvard – has starred with Andre Agassi in a TV ad.

The rubles thing is fun.

Not for Vlad.

No wonder he was fidgetty at the Easter service.

No kidding, the biggest fakenews bullshit I’ve seen in a while is the current price of the Rubble. The Kremlin actually thinks they are putting out this fake bullshit and people will believe it? FMD.

Historically, they’re actually going back to the old Soviet ways. The Rubble then was fixed at a massively overvalued exchange rate.

Unbelievable. This will end up in the High Court.

The interlocutory application had almost no chance of succeeding. Judges are very reluctant to stop matters proceeding to full trial. WA Cats will be aware of the Lloyd Rayney trial which proceeded to a Supreme Court trial in front of a NT judge alone after he was charged with the murder of his wife, a WA Supreme Court Registrar and reported on the front page of Teh Worst.

Wow, just wow. Another Indian female hates whitey.

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/john-kennedy-catches-biden-nominee-in-massive-lie-about-police/

Peak stupidity, anyone?

Meet ‘Cam’ (on the right) a fictional ‘Black Caribbean non-binary transmasculine person going through their second pregnancy’ that the LGBT Foundation have used as an example of they way maternity services in Britain could be improved for pregnant trans people

Mole

Wasnt the old pegging of the rubble in the USSR days

Pegging is actually the wrong term. The right term is fixed or at least when I was growing up 🙂

Pegging means there is ex-changeability by the pegging conversion rate. The Honki dollar was pegged to the US. Dunno about now. It meant that you could exchange Honki for US Dollars at any time at the pegged rate and no questions asked as there were no exchange controls preventing convertibility. There were a few complexities but that was about it.

It does however serve to illustrate the amount of pretrial publicity a court will allow and still permit a matter to proceed to trial.

The photo of the accused has been published – that used to be a no-no.

How much of Biden’s $43 Billion

I very much doubt that is real cash moving across borders as in the US government filling up the coffers of the Uke government’s bank account.

I bet nearly all that “money” isn’t money at all and in fact very likely US propaganda by valuing material being sent to Uke at sky high prices. I suspect it’s also being doing to frighten the Russians about the resources being offered to Uke.

The old Sov hardly imported anything.

So they made everyfink?
How did that work out?

Sancho Panzer says:
April 29, 2022 at 7:19 pm

The old Sov hardly imported anything.

So they made everyfink?
How did that work out?

Stop it. 🙂

Ranga

That breed should be outlawed. Pitbulls are absolute freaking maniacs and simply cannot be trusted.

Maybe I’m wrong as I’m just relying on memory, but recalling back when I was a kid, dogs were far more aggressive than they are now. You walked past someone’s home with the gate open. If there was a dog, invariably it would be trying to attack you. I suspect, the popular breeds being bred these days are much docile. Our lunatic, wants to just attack other dogs and leaves humans alone.

JC.
Back in those days most dogs would have been “intact”.
Having your nuts chopped off tends to modulate behaviour.
Or so I’ve heard.

JC.
Back in those days most dogs would have been “intact”.
Having your nuts chopped off tends to modulate behaviour.
Or so I’ve heard.

Oh Yea. But you know, ours had his nuts cut off and he’s aggressive as anything, while on a leash, toward other dogs.

Growing up we’d avoid certain streets because of rabid dogs.

Sky news musta had somebody call in sick at the last minute.
They put Jenna Clarke to air, presumably without notice, coz she was clad in a dressing gown & had her hair pinned back. She only just had time to get the curlers out of her hair.

You know, Mercedes Benz has said that by 2030, their entire range will be electric. What if it doesn’t work out well?

Get a load of this.

https://tinyurl.com/4t66abb9

Brittany Higgins rope trial to go ahead in June
Remy Varga
Reporter
@RemyVarga
17 minutes ago April 29, 2022

The man charged with the rope of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House will face trial after the ACT Supreme Court denied his application for a permanent or temporary stay of proceedings due to the widespread publicity surrounding the case.

ACT Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucy McCallum also dismissed an application that would have required media outlets to ­remove news stories and content mentioning the allegations.

Justice McCallum said it would be a “pious hope” to try to regulate the media through suppression and non-publication ­orders and said the issue was one of regulation rather than “condoning a media ‘free for all’.”

“This country has robust contempt laws of which the media may be taken to be aware,” she said. “To seek instead to regulate media discussion of criminal proceedings by the inexact tool of suppression and non-publication orders is a pious hope, particularly since the advent of the internet and social media.”

Accused man Bruce Lehrmann, who has pleaded not guilty and denied sexual intercourse took place, sought the applications on the grounds he would be unable to receive a fair trial due to media coverage surrounding the allegations against him.

Mr Lehrmann, a former Liberal staffer like Ms Higgins, also sought an order preventing “any media outlet from publishing any material of and concerning the accused and/or the complainant that relates to or refers to directly or indirectly the present criminal proceedings or any part of the subject matter to which those proceedings relate”.

Judge McCallum described this application as “problematic” and said she wasn’t persuaded that a trial judge wouldn’t be able to appropriately guide a jury.

“Further, for the reasons already stated, I am not persuaded that the material which the evidence establishes remains on the internet is of a kind that cannot be addressed by appropriate direction to the jury,” she said.

Justice McCallum said there existed no statutory power from which to issue a take-down order and said there was no evidence of a “threat to publish” that needed to be properly restrained.

“The refusal of the media entities represented in court to give an undertaking as sought does not of itself establish the existence of a threat,” she said.

A six-week trial of the case has been set to start on June 6.

Wuhu sounds like WA’s sister city.

Lower-ranking officials have gotten the memo. Wuhu, a city in Anhui province, locked down and initiated mass testing Sunday after identifying a single positive case. Xi’an, a city in Shaanxi province, locked down for more than a month in December and January and is back in de facto lockdown. Industrial cities Zhengzhou and Suzhou have initiated mass testing, banned social gatherings, closed movie theaters, gyms, and bars, and advised residents to work from home. Unless all these cities succeed in shutting down their outbreaks simultaneously, China seems headed for rolling lockdowns and strict limits on intercity travel for the foreseeable future.

I generally don’t like posting entire pieces, but this one is really worth a read. China could entering a new phase. Closed up and the CCP going back to its roots.

WSJ

Xi Jinping Is Betting It All on Zero Covid
To fight the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party leader mobilizes forces he will likely find difficult to control.
By Eyck Freymann

China’s Leninist political system is very good at mass mobilization but very bad at stopping mass mobilization once it has begun.

Mao Zedong proved this most destructively with the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Today Xi Jinping’s bold embrace of the zero-Covid policy, in the face of an increasingly transmissible Omicron variant, is evoking Mao’s legacy and running the risk of repeating Mao’s mistakes. Like Mao, Mr. Xi’s position within the Chinese Communist Party is rock-solid. Yet the grass-roots effort he has mobilized against Covid is gathering internal momentum and is increasingly likely to last past the National Party Congress in October.

This will have severe and long-lasting consequences for China’s economy and society—and for investors and firms with exposure to the Chinese market. Mr. Xi has unambiguously hitched his personal legacy to the successful preservation of the zero-Covid policy. His speech at the Two Sessions conference on March 17 “swept down from the commanding heights” and “set the tone for all,” National Health Commissioner Ma Xiaowei wrote in a leading party journal this week. “He has personally commanded and made arrangements for the epidemic, taken overall control, and made resolute decisions.” Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who has taken over supervision of the pandemic response in Shanghai, said this week that she had come to implement “General Secretary Xi Jinping’s requirements.”

Given the rising cost of containing the Omicron variant, this is a risky macroeconomic bet. As of Monday, 45 cities with 373 million people, representing 40% of China’s gross domestic product, were under partial or full lockdown, according to Nomura estimates. More cities and counties are under “static management,” a euphemism for quasi-lockdown.

Yet Mr. Xi’s logic is primarily political, not economic. To abandon the policy would require the Communist Party to countermand an order that it has repeatedly and unequivocally given for more than two years. This not only would be an admission of failure, it would badly delegitimize Mr. Xi’s carefully constructed hero-cult. The Chinese people have become accustomed to life with zero Covid. If Mr. Xi lifts the policy now, he could be seen as personally responsible for every death that follows. To revise the policy would therefore be an unacceptable risk for Mr. Xi ahead of the Party Congress.

Lower-ranking officials have gotten the memo. Wuhu, a city in Anhui province, locked down and initiated mass testing Sunday after identifying a single positive case. Xi’an, a city in Shaanxi province, locked down for more than a month in December and January and is back in de facto lockdown. Industrial cities Zhengzhou and Suzhou have initiated mass testing, banned social gatherings, closed movie theaters, gyms, and bars, and advised residents to work from home. Unless all these cities succeed in shutting down their outbreaks simultaneously, China seems headed for rolling lockdowns and strict limits on intercity travel for the foreseeable future.

Even after the Party Congress, Mr. Xi may consider it unacceptably risky to unwind the zero-Covid policy. It is time for markets to start taking this possibility seriously.

The history of the Great Leap Forward illustrates the worst-case scenario of what can happen when a Chinese leader insists that a pest be eliminated at any price. In 1958, Mao launched the “eliminate sparrows campaign,” arguing that birds were stealing grain from farmers’ fields. For every million sparrows killed, Mao promised, there would be food for an additional 60,000 people. More than three million people were mobilized in Peking alone. Schoolchildren banged pots and pans day and night to keep the birds from sleeping. Middle-school girls were organized in rifle regiments and given shooting lessons. Ordinary people climbed trees and strangled chicks in their nests.

Within a year, China’s sparrow population had collapsed. The result was a swarm of locusts that attacked crops. The annual harvest had already been badly damaged by collectivization. Massive statistical errors from the overreporting of harvest data convinced central planners that China actually enjoyed a “super-abundance” of grain, when in fact production was contracting. Tens of millions of Chinese died in the resulting famine.

China’s food system today is sufficiently marketized that the government bungling of food allocation won’t lead to widespread hunger. Government efforts to improve food provision to populations in lockdown have also made enormous strides in the past few weeks.

Yet as in the Great Leap Forward, the aggregate macroeconomic damage from pandemic lockdowns has likely been deeper than the official data suggest. As Daniel Rosen argued in Foreign Affairs, China’s reported 4.8% GDP growth for the first quarter of 2022 strains credulity, and the true data for the second quarter will surely be much worse, despite the coming fiscal and monetary stimulus. Since Mr. Xi has committed himself to an ambitious 5.5% annual growth target, the pressure on local officials to manipulate economic data will only increase as the Party Congress approaches.

If the zero-Covid policy becomes permanent, China’s external border may never reopen in any meaningful way, particularly for foreigners. But the implications for China’s social contract could be even more profound. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s more-pragmatic colleagues Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping tried to return to market economic reforms. To resist them, Mao turned to an increasingly paranoid style of repressive and ideological politics, leading eventually to the Cultural Revolution.

Since Mao’s death, the Communist Party has derived legitimacy primarily from its ability to deliver economic growth. Yet in recent years, as inequality has increased and growth has slowed for secular reasons, the idea of pinning legitimacy to ultra-fast growth has lost some of its appeal. As Mr. Xi enters a third term, perhaps he envisions a radically different future for China. Going forward, the party may derive legitimacy less from GDP growth than from its ability to protect the lives and health of the people, ensure “common prosperity” through redistribution of wealth, and preserve domestic social order with the help of its repressive surveillance tool kit.

In China, more than in other countries, the shadow of history looms large over politics. When Xi Jinping doubles down on a pandemic policy that makes no macroeconomic sense, rallying the people and the Communist Party to eradicate the virus, he knows that he is ordering a Mao-style mass mobilization. History suggests that such movements gain momentum over time and are not easily reversed. It’s possible Mr. Xi has no intention of returning China to the relatively open-facing, gradually marketizing country that it was before the pandemic. If so, China will become a less dynamic, more statist and more ideological society in which the party rules and the masses follow.

Fester is pretending not to read my comments.

Can someone ask Uncle Fester a question derived from this silly sentence.

So basically they put dollars into their account at Gazprombank, then must convert those dollars to rubles in their other Gazprombank account then pay the bill. So they still have to pay in rubles, with Gasprombank cutely ticket clipping on the forex exchange.

There are very harsh exchange controls and the Russian central bank controls the the exchange rate. This would mean that any Russian bank would need to clear the exchange transaction with the central banks. How is it possible for the Russian bank to make a cute spread on the exchange transaction?

Winston Smithsays:
April 29, 2022 at 7:21 pm

Thanks, Winnie. I’ve book-marked your post.

the security guards, Lerhman and the Higgins should all have been summarily jobsacked as of 8:00am the following Monday morning, never to be seen

Why the security guards? “Do you know who I am – who my boss is? I’ll have your license by tomorrow morning – good luck finding another job!”

Rabz: HBOT = ??

If I turned up and blundered into my work’s office, completely planeted with a handy equally pissed HBOT at 1:30am on a Saturday,

I’ve worked in the security business. You’d be surprised……

Anyone else from Perth noticed all the new Tesla’s on the road?…

Yep, my wife commented own that very thing while we were driving this morning.

… commented on … FFS

They use bands to restrict blood flow.

Sounds isometric.

DC woman who ‘accidentally suffocated her baby in 2021 while high on angel dust’ then threw his body in the trash is stabbed to death ‘by infant’s father’ while awaiting trial

Another classic case of white supremacy.

Stay drunk and you’ll never get sick.

Bombed again. Like these xunts:
https://funker530.com/video/nsfw-mavic-3-drops-mortar-round-into-group-of-russian-troops/

Three cheers for death. That’s the spirit.

They leave their wounded mate behind.

..
And rifle.
Something weird about the editing though.

Leadership, you really are a Xunt of a human being. Just a low down dirty Xunt.