President Ramaphosa and the Covid-19 Crisis

Not all that long ago, Cyril Ramaphosa was viewed as a reasonably competent manager, even if somewhat pedestrian in his decision-making and childish in his aspirations, as evidenced by his Wakanda new city plans, and his aspiration to teach every school pupil to code, where it is known that a high proportion of schoolchildren are not able to read with understanding and most children, not to mention teachers, are at a very low standard in mathematics.

Unfortunately, the continued experience gained by the public of Ramaphosa over the time he has been President have exposed many of his weaknesses. That has come into stark clarity during his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. As an experienced businessman, we would have expected Ramaphosa to understand that important decisions need to be made after careful consideration of expert advice. That has not happened. Just as Mbeki did during the early phases of the AIDS crisis, he seems to have locked in the advice of a group, perhaps only a few, ‘experts’, ignoring the views of others, particularly those of the public. This is clear in regard to the ban on cigarettes and liquor, where he has chosen not to permit the public access to the information or the reasoning process on which the decision was made.

The very name of the ‘Command Council’ gives a clue to the mindset: it is dictatorial, the action of a group of people who have no need to submit their deliberations to the scrutiny of an elected Parliament, no matter how feeble and emasculated that body may have become under ANC rule. This is certainly not the way one would expect an enlightened, confident and capable manager to act. The example of Angela Merkel provides an example of how he should have acted.

As an experienced manager and director of large companies, Ramaphosa should have the ability to understand when he can trust what he is being told, and what he should view as a sycophantic giving of information to please him. That is an important quality of any manager, and it is critically important in managing the response of a country to a pandemic, which has the potential to cost the lives of thousands of citizens, all of whom are entitled to rely on the capability of the elected President to make decisions that are well-considered and effective, in the light of facts.

Ramaphosa claimed at the outset of the lockdown that the purpose of it was to give the Health Service the opportunity to prepare for the crisis. That alone is a little naïve, given that the government knew, or should have known, early in January that the pandemic would be life-threatening. It should have started making the preparations at that time. It did not. The result of that failing has been that the hospital services, already at breaking point after 26 years of incompetent and corrupt cadre misrule, is now likely not to be able to handle the rush of patients. That level of incompetence seems to have prevailed until now. Two months ago, Ramaphosa visited the Eastern Cape ‘to check on the state of preparedness of the Province’. During that visit, he expressed his pleased satisfaction that the ‘Province was well-prepared’ for the encroaching crisis. That was patently incorrect, either as a result of his inability to investigate the matter correctly, or simply a political assurance, to avoid any political fallout. In either event, it amounts to criminal negligence on the part of a man whom that the public has a right to trust. The Province is not now prepared for the crisis, and was plainly never prepared. Ramphosa’s well-publicised endorsement of the performance of his Party in the Eastern Cape was wrong and misleading, and it came after 25 years of Press reports regarding the incompetence and corruption in that Province. Surely, that alone would have prompted any reasonable manager to interrogate the situation thoroughly. Ramaphosa failed to do so.

The prime requirement of a manager is that he manages. The antics of the members of the Cabinet, and more recently of the members of the ‘Command Council’, each going his or her own way, prove conclusively that Ramaphosa does not manage: he passes on the decisions made by the ANC NEC (a body that has no standing in the legislative or regulatory framework of the government under any law, but which is certainly the de facto government of the country). Ramaphosa’ s conduct in this regard is clearly in breach of his duties under the Constitution and his Oath of Office. His dereliction of his duties is clearly visible in the actions of Dlamini Zuma, in contradicting his statements on tobacco, and in the excesses of Cele and Mbalula. The fact that he would simply ignore the breaches of the law by the taxi industry in loading to 100% of capacity and crossing Provincial boundaries is clear evidence of that, as is his caving into the demands of the taxi bosses in forking out a subsidy of R!,2 billion, at a time when practically every industry is under existential threat as a result of his bungling of the Covid-19 crisis, without any form of support by the government.

Another vital capability of any manager is the ability to plan. Clearly Ramaphosa does not plan. The ‘Command Council’ has lurched from one self-made crisis to another, making ad hoc decisions and reversing them, and never bringing the public into its confidence. The rationale behind many of the incomprehensible decisions, if, in fact, there is a rationale, is conceived in dark rooms and edicts are issued.

Virtually every aspect of Ramphosa’s performance, or lack of it, since the coronavirus struck, casts doubt on his ability to be the President. The only comparison that is positive is that he has probably been better than Zuma would have been.

Surely South Africa deserves better.

Advice to the President of South Africa

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for two decades, with most of the indicators of a healthy economy falling, with the country losing its status as the most advanced and the largest economy on the continent, with a flight of experienced and effective management heading off to more congenial pastures, with the State Owned Entities heading ever more deeply into financial and operational collapse. The government has ignored this, as well it might. The ANC-led government has been responsible for the mismanagement of the economy since it has been in power, using its position to derive corrupt profits and simple corrupt diversion of funds from the State. It has constantly asserted that it plans to stop corruption, a statement in every State of the Nation Address by the President since 2010, but no action has been taken to put meaning to those fine words. The people, the businesspeople and the international investment community have taken note of the empty promises, and are no longer willing to give any credence to such empty words. They want action, and they want it NOW. The same disbelief applies to all of the multitudinous plans announced by the Presidents – all of them- and the government they represent. And the same demand for action NOW is present in the thinking of those businesspeople and investors when they consider what they can do to pull the country out of its multi-faceted crises, and, indeed, whether they wish to.

A small piece of advice has been offered in a book published early this year – “Multiverse” – which analyses the cause of the many problems discernible in the worked through the medium of quasi-science fiction. The book has been read by many leaders of business and politics around the world, and the advice might well be taken to heart by the President of South Africa.

“It is well known that your country has many plans, but that no-one ever does anything to implement them. Part of the reason for that is that the people who should be responsible for implementing them did not really commit themselves to drawing them up, and so have no real reason to do the hard work of implementing them, and the other part of the reason is that those plans were pie in the sky. They represent a wish list, but no fairy godmother has arrived with a magic wand to make them real. You need to call in the best experts in the country, no matter their political affiliation, to make a realistic evaluation of the state of the country, and then to formulate plans that will bring it to where it should be. There must be no reliance on the past as an excuse not to achieve the future. That past has happened, and you can’t manage it now. You have to accept what is and go on from there. There must equally be no reliance on reasons that you certainly know to be little more than political posturing, and equally no commitment to a set of policies and ideologies that no longer have a place in a real-world country. Nothing can be written in stone, and nothing can be off the table. You need to evaluate each element of your plan and take it to a logical conclusion, using only assumptions that can be shown to be valid now.”

I have told you this because I believe that there should be absolute clarity on our stance. Your government in the past has imposed laws and regulations on your people and the companies on the basis that they have the power to do so, without most people having the ability to avoid becoming subject to such unfair laws. I know that the Ministers have blamed the dire economic situation in the country on numerous factors, such as global warming, the China-American trade war, White Monopoly Capital, and other similar reasons. The real truth is simple. Investors avoid the country because they choose not to donate a half of their shareholding to people nominated by the ruling Party. They would rather go to another country where they can rely on the electrical utility not doubling the cost of energy every three years while they allow the lights to go out, simply because the political appointees are robbing the State-Owned Entities blind while they employ twice as many people as are needed. simply to keep the unions sweet. The businesspeople go to other countries and planets because they can, and because they have not received a fair deal here. If you want to create the millions of jobs that you need, you must offer the investors the sort of deal that they will get elsewhere, from any honest government. You, as voters, must insist that the people you elect, comply with the norms and standards that you would want for yourselves. You must punish the Members of Parliament who fail to hold the Executive to account, when it is clear to any thinking, fair person that what they are doing is not right. You must make them believe that they represent you [the voters] in every decision that they make. You have suffered long enough at the hands of evil, greedy men and women. You will have one opportunity, at the next election, to set the path for your country. If you make the right decisions, you will enjoy the full support of the Integra Corporation and many other similar companies throughout seventeen universes. Your country will boom as it never has before. If you make the wrong decisions. you will condemn South Africa to the group of failed States, the countries that are willing to accept the excuses that their politicians offer them, rather than demanding that they perform their duties to the high standard required by their salaries.”

In a discussion of the reasons for the state of the nation, an analysis of the President was made:

“We don’t think that he [the President] is an inherently bad man but sometimes the job is more than he can cope with. His response to such a situation is first to spend a lot of time hesitating and then, when we push him for action, to turn to the people he knows, the people in his Party, who are more than willing to give him the advice that best suits their desires, or simply to defer the matter, to delay making a decision or to pass the responsibility for it to a group of so-called ‘experts’, who are, more often than not, people who have sold him on their supposed capabilities and who are, almost by definition, people he has come to know as a result of their Party connections. Of course, they earn big fees for doing the work, and their interests are best served by inflating the problem far more than is really required. They produce a report at the end of weeks or months, with seven hundred pages of waffle and recommendations that are in line with Party thinking, when what he really needed was a one-page summary of the facts, and another page setting out three or four possible ways to go, each with a ‘why’ and a ‘why not’.”

The book contains many items of wisdom and insight, and should be made required reading by every politician and businessperson, possibly every High School student.

Where are They?

Fermi asked the question, referring to the lack of contact from other, inter-galactic civilizations. He asked “If there are intelligent people out there, where are they? Why have they not made contact with us?”

Of course, the question ignores numerous factors, such as the time it would require to travel to us, if that is what he expected them to do. A spacecraft, traveling at 20% of the speed of light, a speed well in excess of what we, as a supposedly advanced civilization, could hope to achieve with our present state of knowledge, would require more than six hundred years from a star system only 120 light years away, given the time required to accelerate to that speed and then to slow down on arrival. And that would imply that such a civilization would have a valid reason to visit us, a civilization that only managed to start using radio more than 450 years after they would have had to leave home!

Perhaps the answer lies in some simple calculations.

Assume that humans on Earth have been able to send and receive radio messages for about 120 years. That’s not long, considering our 2 000 000 year development as sentient beings, the Earth’s 3 600 000 000 year existence, and the 13 600 000 000 year life of the Universe. Assume that other civilizations have followed more or less the same path. That seems to be not unreasonable.

Now consider that radio waves travel at about the speed of light. That means that a radio message, a flashing light signal or other similar form of communication that was sent by a civilization somewhere in the Universe, let’s say 120 light years from Earth, on the day they first developed radio communication 120 years ago, would reach Earth today. To receive that message, we would have to aim a large radio antenna (large, in order to collect the faint signal sent by an early-stage technology) at exactly that point in the heavens that the transmitter would have occupied, adjusted for their movement and ours (because all celestial objects are in relative motion, at high speeds, so an antenna aimed at a star system we see in the sky today would miss the actual point it now is by many millions of miles if we were to reply immediately) in order to receive the signal. If our aim were even one degree off, there is a high probability that we would not receive the message. And, to top it all, we would have to be ready to receive the message at exactly the time it passed us. One minute too early or too late, and we would miss the signal, because it comes, not as a long beam, but as a single block.

If our radio antenna is able to scan an area of one degree by one degree at a distance of 120 light years, it would have to scan 42 253 such areas! If such a scan requires one day each, to be meaningful at the lowest level, about 365 blocks per year, the scan would require about 190 years! Alternatively, we would need about two hundred antennae continuously working for a full year to receive the signal from our celestial neighbors, to allow us to have a reasonable chance to receive the signal.

Of course, that neighbor might be further than 120 light years away, say 200 light years, in which case we would have to wait another eighty years to receive that message. They might have developed earlier, or more quickly, than we did. If so, two hundred years ago, they might have tried to make contact with us by radio, perhaps for fifty years, and then given up hope that there were other sentient beings out there, and reverted to other methods of communication, such as using the opportunities offered by quantum entanglement. The radio signals would have zipped on by us, leaving us ignorant of our neighbors. On the other hand, their development might have lagged ours, leaving us to wait another hundred years, or a thousand, to hear from them. A thousand years is an insignificant fraction of the period of existence of sentient life on Earth.

It is an enormous arrogance on our part to base our belief that there are no other sentient beings in the Universe entirely on our own example. We are, in effect, demanding that life on another planet developed in the same timescale as it did on ours! The factors that might influence when we receive a radio signal from another civilization are legion – their distance, the date of origin of the other civilizations, their rate of development to create radio signals, our ability and preparedness to receive a radio signal as it zips past our location at the speed of light, even the question of whether they use radio as a means of communication. While looking for such signals is a whole lot better than doing nothing, it is very far short of a valid test for the non-existence of sentient beings out in the Universe. Asking that another civilization should have developed both long-distance spaceflight capability, and then decided to look for intelligent life in our isolated nook of the Universe, at all and long enough ago to have reached us within the tiny portion of our existence when we would have the scientific development and religious permission to receive and understand such a visit is even more preposterous.

On any basis of science and logic, the answer to Fermi’s question, “Where are they?” is “Wait and see.”

Let us Make America Stupid Again

Donald Trump has a wonderful platform to spread a message, no matter how uninformed, how incredible, how amazingly stupid it may be.

During his normally rambling and disconnected monologue to the Party faithful in Tulsa on June 20, he managed to pull off one of his most staggeringly stupid statements, apparently without any response from the audience. He stated, in unequivocal terms, without any possibility of a future claim that ‘he was joking’, that the coronavirus numbers continued to rise, a fact that he attributed to the increased testing of people. His recommendation, which he said he had given the people responsible for this unacceptable state of affairs, was to reduce the amount of testing!

This seems to be a statement of GOP policy, insane as that seems to be. This is borne out by the GOP Senators, who, during the impeachment proceedings, refused to hear evidence, positive or negative, on the conduct of their leader. By remaining ignorant in the face of well-publicized and well-proven facts, they can deny the truth.

Just as the continuation of the abjectly aberrant behavior of the current President places footprints in the history of the country, and of the Republican Party, in the way it has destroyed America’s status in the world and the cohesion of American society, his faulty and absent decisions have resulted in the needless deaths of over a hundred thousand innocent citizens. No amount of mindless ranting at the media for their ‘fake news’ or at the scientists and medical experts who have given advice tat has purposefully and maliciously been ignored by the President and, at his behest, by his administration, can take away the many graves of those who have died as a result of his stupidity, his incompetence and, as many around the world say, his insanity. Those graves will remain, written large in the history of a country that once enjoyed the respect and admiration of most of the world. They will remain as mute testimony to the ability of one man to corrupt the moral values of a venerable political Party, in much the same way as the graves of six million innocent people mark the history of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party. Neither of those men, nor their political supporters and mindless hangers-on will ever be able to deny their complicity in the deaths of many of their citizens or the destruction of their countries.

If one statement will go down in history as the defining description of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, it will be that they managed to MAKE ANERICA STUPID AGAIN.

It is Time to Go Back to Fundamentals

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for several years, with successive administrations chasing their unproven or disproven ideologies, conducting experiments designed to prove that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and structuring the State to facilitate fraud on a large scale. Even before the Coronavid-19 crisis struck, the country was in a parlous state, with unemployment at record levels and increasing steadily, school performance among the worst in the advanced world, the country’s ranking for economic performance among its peers in the developing world at record lows and declining, the finances of the country in the worst state for decades, and no reprieve in sight. The pandemic struck a country that was in the worst possible condition.

In a way, the pandemic, although hugely destructive in many ways, may present South Africa an opportunity to hit the Reset button, and grab at an opportunity to retake the place it held in the civilized world before lunatic policies and governing Party-institutionalised corruption dealt it such devastating blows. Tito Mboweni has recognised the need, stating that the Treasury should develop a Budget based on a zero-base process. He is fully aware that tweaking the existing Budget will not correct the many problems he, and the country, face. This would be an exercise in futility, a repositioning of the deck chairs on the ship of State as it sails at full power into the iceberg.

The first step in correcting any problem situation is to recognise what the real problems are, and where the country would like to be. A roadmap is useless until you know where you are on it, and where you want to go. This should be done in a dispassionate, non-accusatory way, so that the participants in the exercise are not compelled to defend their territory. The process of coming to a statement of where we are now must include theoretical and practical economists, businesspersons from large, medium and small businesses and people who are affected by the conditions, such as housewives, teachers, students and taxpayers, both active and retired. It is vitally important to have a balance of views. Nothing could be more destructive to the process than to have a preponderance of radical views, as is almost always the case when a committee of politicians and political advisors is convened. If you need to be convinced of the truth of this, look at the state of the South African economy! One cannot imagine that the ANC would be so delusional as to believe that it could benefit from the imposition of policies that would be certain to destroy the economy.

Once we know, realistically, where we are, we need to define where we want to go. At this point it will be almost impossible to avoid the political rhetoric and electioneering slogans, but a factual statement of the basics may help to define our desires. We could, for example, say that we desire to reach a state of 3% unemployment within ten years. The question then arises: employment in what? Let us say that we want the economy, in terms of GDP representation, to be 5% mining, 20% agriculture, 30% services and 45% industry. We can then break these desires down in terms of categories, and from these derive the growth needs to reach the targets. These, in turn, will generate the requirements, the absolute necessities, in terms of investment, education and training, infrastructure, labour conditions and so on. It will be a complex exercise, made more so by the need to avoid expressing the desires in terms of political aspirations and existing policies, but the exercise will be a valuable one, highlighting the actual needs, as opposed to what preconceived and often wish-list policies dictate.

When this work is complete, and not before, we can start formulating the wish-list, the configurations of the economy that we would like to have in the desired state, in accordance with the Constitution, and disregarding any other existing policy and legal imperatives and structures. We could, for example, desire an open economy, attractive to foreign investment, with equal opportunity to all its citizens and as much of the work as possible being done by private enterprise. It will be essential at this stage to ignore the past policies, because many people will see these as the only possible way, while others will view them as anathema. This wish-list will then be applied to the desired state and an assessment be made of how feasible it will be to achieve both the desired outcome and the desired form. Revisions and re-evaluations will ensue, until the majority accept that the statement is both comprehensive and realistic in terms of the South African scene and the world economy.

We will now be in a position to formulate plans to achieve the desired state. A combination of the desired shape of the GDP with the gap in number of qualified potential employees will result in an education outcome, and from that we can formulate the plans for a change in the education and training system. Similar changes will result in practically every area of economic activity. This must be done ruthlessly. Changes will bring pain to the participants in the existing structures, but this must be viewed as inevitable if we are to achieve the desired state. Some pain results from every change, but changes are essential if we are to move forward. The pain that we identify can be mitigated by plans to retrain and redeploy those affected. For example, it is clear that the civil service is overstaffed, underqualified and inefficient. When we know the necessary minimum configuration of the civil service, a performance evaluation can be performed to determine who is both capable of doing a meaningful job in their position and is actually doing it at an acceptable level. Those identified as being good in their present jobs will be retained or transferred to a similar job elsewhere, where a need is shown. Those who do not perform adequately can be put on a ‘B List’, while those who perform acceptably but whose jobs are no longer required, will be put on an ‘A List’. The A List can be offered a total retrenchment package, for example, of a value equal to their retrenchment packages plus, say, 12% plus benefits for a year, which can be drawn down as the interest on a loan to be advanced by the government plus a monthly salary, and they can be given leave of absence for three months to put together a business before the arrangement comes into effect. They will be supported in their efforts by a team of qualified experts in their chosen field and provided with retraining they may need. In this way, they will be given an opportunity to establish a business that, for example, is able to tender for the activities that they previously undertook as employees, or any other business. Of course, any attempt at illegally influencing the granting of tenders would disqualify them from the scheme. In this way, a large number of small businesses will be able to be established. Those on the B List will simply be retrenched on the normal terms, although they could be introduced to the business establishment support teams, or to retraining programs.

The restructure of the economy will require considerable changes to existing laws, probably including the BEE laws, the labour laws restricting the employment of workers, the generalization of Union settlements to non-participating employers and the setting of minimum wages, the laws entrenching tribal kings and chiefs in a position of almost unfettered power over their ‘subjects’ at high cost to the fiscus and the economy, the laws establishing numerous inefficient and economically non-productive bodies, and many others, as well as the passing of new laws to ensure that the civil service does its designated work honestly, efficiently and at lowest cost. Included in the latter could be laws that increase the penalties for dishonesty by 50% in the case of a person in a position of trust, such as a Mayor taking a bribe to allocate a contract illegally, or a bank director defrauding the depositors. This would underline the need for adherence to the doctrine of trust, particularly in elected officials. Other similar laws would penalise attorneys who persist in defending unfairly any person known to them to have committed the criminal act, on the basis that attorneys are officers of the Court, and should be expected to uphold the law, to the extent that they may act only to ensure that the client is given a fair trial. In this context, ‘fair’ should be applied to the client as well as to the prosecutor and the Court.

It is fair to say that a majority of thinking people are dissatisfied with the status quo. This is reflected in condemnation of an unfair, ineffective and unduly slow legal system, by citizens advising foreigners and foreign-based fellow citizens not to return to the country and not to invest in it, in racial bias between groups which previously strived to achieve the miracle that Nelson Mandela stood up for. It is shown by the near-insane call by the EFF to allow White businesses to die, echoed by the ANC Mayor of Ekhureleni, at a time when the country needs every job it can manage, and every cent of tax revenue. It is proven by a de facto real unemployment rate of 50%, when 5% would be considered by any thinking politician as a disaster, by the fact that South Africa has dropped in the ranks of economically-successful nations every year for the past decade, and has not achieved anything near its potential in the past 25 years. The need for a major overhaul of the economy is highlighted by the flight of major mining and industrial companies, such as Anglo American and Gencor, to foreign fields, by the continuing withdrawal of foreign investment capital from what should be the major developing economy in the world, as well as by the dismal financial reports regarding the performance of the economy. South Africa cannot afford to wait the months or years that seem to be normal in ‘urgent’ actions by the government, such as can be seen in the lengthy inactivity in combatting gender-based violence and the prosecution of those whose criminal actions have been extensively documented in reports by investigative journalists and the Zondo Commission.

The time for action is now, before the situation as deteriorated so much further that no rescue plan will achieve a result within less than twenty years. A naïve expectation that the ANC government will take the necessary steps in time to prevent the disaster becoming a catastrophe, an expectation that Cyril Ramaphosa would do that shortly after his accession to power, and then again shortly after his election more than a year ago, has been shown to be an illusion born of hope, not a realistic extrapolation of past conduct, and will inevitably lead to the collapse that seems, in any realistic view, to be imminent.

Is Donald Trump Mentally-Disordered?

 

To accuse a sitting American President of being mentally disordered is a serious matter, to the nation and to the world. To have a man who does not meet the normal description of ‘sane’ in control of the most powerful nation on Earth is frightening indeed.

Donald Trump is in control of a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, as well as military might that has the potential to upend world stability and destroy the fragile peace that has reigned since the end of the Second World War. Yet Donald Trump has taunted two countries, widely suspected to be on the verge of having intercontinental nuclear weapons, also in control of men whose sanity is not above suspicion, threatening annihilation of them, not once in a fit of anger, but several times. On the evidence before the world, there is no good reason to believe that Donald Trump, a man seemingly obsessed with military power and a believer in striking first and hard, will not succumb to his wilder impulses and, rather than simply tweeting his inane thoughts, convert those impulses into destruction, releasing a nuclear holocaust that the world will most likely not recover from for centuries.

Donald Trump has been shown to be a habitual liar, from his statement that he is a ‘self-made man, building a fortune of billions’ (the amount of that fortune has still to be conclusively shown, as is the means by which he built it, with oppression of small suppliers and allegations of money-laundering being rife) from a ‘small’ loan of only one million dollars now being alleged to be a start-up boost of at least twelve million, and probably more, to allegations that the crowd at his inauguration was ‘the biggest in history’ (correctly stated to be amongst the smallest of any President in the last four decades), to his continuing boast that his relations with the Chinese Premier are ‘the best enjoyed by any American President with a Chinese leader ever’ (when it is obvious to see that the Chinese leader holds the American in disdain), to his boast that he had resolved the North Korean problem (when ninety-five per cent of the rapprochement has been achieved by the South Korean leaders, working to defuse the continuing crises that Trump precipitates), to his arrogant demand that the NATO partners ‘pay their cost of the Military build-up’ (when Germany spends considerably more on preventing the development of threats by peaceful, economic means, so avoiding the huge waste of economic resources caused by the purchase of munitions, which would have been far better applied to developing the world economy), to his most recent claim that ‘we have made a lot of money, a lot’ from the imposition of tariffs on imports from China (totally ignoring the fact that the American consumers paid those tariffs, not the Chinese, and that they pay those costs several times over in the form of increased cost of those products when bought from American suppliers, who increase their prices to match the imported price). It is tempting to believe that some of the claims made by Trump result from his ignorance of economics, accounting and common sense, a belief that is possibly as frightening as that the President has lost his marbles, but the overwhelming number of Trump’s outright lies argues against such a charitable view. His tendency to exaggerate, and over-exaggerate, to the extent of total untruth, is shown by the fact that Trump is always prone to the use of superlatives. He cannot see something as ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’: it is always ‘the worst ever’. Nothing is ‘good’ or ‘better’: it is always ‘the greatest on record’ or ‘fantastic’.

The stand-off between Trump and Congress in passing Bills to enable the operation of government is another example of Trump’s failure to understand the workings of democracy. The simple argument goes that the majority of Members of Congress are elected to represent the majority of voters. That is what democracy, at the lowest level, means. However, Donald Trump is willing to engineer and permit and sustain a standoff between the majority vote in Congress in order to win his argument that a huge Chinese-Wall style barrier be built on the Mexican border, a wall that, in his election speeches, he assured his gullible voters would be paid for by Mexico, a factor now conveniently ignored, in the form of another lie of significant size. Trump also conveniently ignores the fact that the greatest number of illegal immigration offences by far are caught at the formal border crossings or by apprehension of people who have overstayed their visas. Neither of those causes is capable of being prevented by a $5.6 billion wall. However, Trump is willing to put the lives of eight hundred of American citizens at risk, in order to win a battle with Congress that should never have arisen, and would never have arisen had Trump not viewed his own desires as more important than those of the American voters.

There seems to be little doubt that, if Donald Trump had been the Chairman of a listed company, the shareholders would have been justified in unseating him for the simple reason that he is mentally and morally unsuited to managing the affairs of the corporation. More happened to Elon Musk for less cause. They would not permit the impulsive, often irrational, decisions to be made, often carrying huge risks for the corporation (country) and its environs, without consultation with a range of knowledgeable and qualified persons, nor would they permit the bullying tactics that have alienated so many allies to the extent that the corporation (country) has been abandoned as a reliable partner. How long will it take for the Republican Party to come to the same conclusion, and take action to protect themselves and their country from the continuing depredations of this man?

There can be little doubt that the actions and statements of Donald Trump are not those one would expect from a reasonable man, a test required by the Courts, but are they sufficiently divergent fron those reasonable man actions and statements to constitute a form of mental disorder? The test should certainly be more strict in the case of a man with the inordinate and uncontrolled power of the President of the United States. His incoherent tweets and statements, quite apart from his actions, his wild exaggerations and distortions of the truth, his seeming inability to command the support even of men and women whose beliefs are close to his own and his subsequent vicious turnarounds in his views of those people, would seem to argue at least for a form of mental instability.

To answer the question whether Donald Trump is mentally disordered, the American public, the Republican Party and the representatives of the people and the guardians of their government need to take a serious look at the claims and statements of the President, evaluate them in the light of the facts and the actions of a reasonable man, and ask themselves “Would we put this man in charge of the upbringing of our children”.

Why is a new Referendum on Brexit a Betrayal of Democracy?

Theresa May has repeatedly stated that there will be no referral of the Brexit question to the people. She has stated that a mandate was given two years ago, and it is her duty to perform exactly in accordance with that mandate, even though the ‘facts’ that were known then, or, more realistically, that were stated to the people at that time in the interests of achieving a relaxation of the controls imposed on the British government by the EU, a much larger and, presumably, more democratic democracy, were wildly wrong. The decision was made and we must jump off the cliff into a dark unknown that becomes more frightening with every step we take closer to the edge of the cliff.

Why is May so determined to lead her people to a mass suicide attempt, when it is abundantly clear, or it should be, even to her, that the agreement she has negotiated does not carry the support of her own Party, far less the support of the majority of MPs? Is the Prime Minister so pig-headed that she cannot see that there are alternatives to her agreement or a no-deal Brexit? Is she simply stupid, as the Labour Party leader has said? Is she so committed to remaining in power in the Conservative Party that she is willing to lead her Party to destruction, rather than face the real facts?

One is tempted to compare Mrs. May’s stance with that of Adolph Hitler in the dying days of the Third Reich, when he refused to accept that he had led his country to catastrophe, insisting on fighting to the last man to support an ideology that was abhorrent to the vast mass of Germans. One can only hope that she, or, more likely, some of the more democratically-inclined members of her Party will come to understand that the decision made two years ago to leave the European Union was a decision made on the basis of incomplete information and a world situation that was vastly different to the one that prevails today, and that the decision now needs to be reevaluated by those citizens in the light of the facts and projections by experts available today.

Even the best case scenario of a Brexit with an agreement shows no significant advantages to Britain, and it discloses risks that would make any thinking voter uneasy. It is unlikely that such a best case scenario will be realized, and much more likely that the worst case scenario will be closer to the truth. In this case, the economy of the United Kingdom will fall by around ten per cent, the jobs market for those who voted for Brexit in the first case will collapse, the cost of food, health care, travel and many other elements of the life of the average Briton will be adversely affected, possibly to a greater extent than was caused by the 2008 financial meltdown, and Britain will revert to the status of a struggling island nation, trying to find its place in the world. It is sure that Britain will be isolated in a hostile world, with Russia and China ascendant and the USA in decline under an equally pig-headed and economically illiterate President, with a damaged European Union standing by as it watches the illness develop in its near neighbor. The EU will then be disinclined to assist Britain to any greater extent than it sees necessary to protect its own interests, and it may, probably will, be more inclined to exacerbate Britain’s suffering, even at its own cost, in order to demonstrate the evil effects of such an EU exit attempt by its remaining members. Certain Brexiteers have claimed that the EU cannot afford to have Brexit fail. Of course, what they do not say is that Britain represents only one sixth of the European population, and that the suffering of the average Brit will be at least four times that of the average German or French citizen. That would be a small price to pay to make a point that will reach the minds of even the most obtuse EU citizens.

On the question of whether to ask the people to reconsider the question of whether they wish to leave the EU, one must ask what is the function of the government. Surely, at is basis is the imperative to give reasoned effect to the will of the people. In the case where the politicians, always willing to pursue their own agenda unless the threat of a withdrawal of the support of the voters is dominant in their minds, can come to no clear consensus on what to do, the democratic imperative, the only democratic imperative, is to refer the question to the people, this time with clear facts and reasoned arguments. No longer will it be possible to argue that a Brexit will save £28 billion – that amount and more has already been wasted in the period of futile negotiations with the EU. No longer will it be possible to argue that it will be possible to reserve British jobs for Britons – for every EU citizen who comes to Britain for work, there is a British employer who needs that employee and is unable to find a Briton who is willing to do that work. Those jobs will be filled by immigrants from other nations, not by the non-existent Brits who don’t really want those jobs. British industry is already complaining that it will be starved of workers when the EU supply dries up. And, most of all, those EU workers pay tax in Britain, add to the economic activity, and push the economy forward. No longer will it be possible to claim that the EU needs British industry. It does need those industries, but it can attract them just as easily by offering concessions to the industries to relocate to the EU. It will not need those industries in Britain.

One of the factors that seems to be ignored is the Russian interest in breaking up an economic and military power that has the capability to stand in the way of Russia’s dreams of regaining its empire. The extensive involvement of Russia in influencing the 2016 American elections has been well documented, as has its continuing interventions in American politics since then. Is there any reason to doubt that Russia was at least partly involved in spreading fake news and ‘false facts’ during the Brexit campaign? Listening to the views of some leading Brexiteers in recent months, one can hardly suppress a suspicion that the whole Brexit issue was instigated and directed from Moscow. Think of it. Russia does not need a single unified economic and military power on its borders. It would much rather have a disputatious and disparate group of countries to oppose its ambitions. It has already, to a large extent, achieved that by buying the American President and spreading extensive misinformation throughout the only remaining power capable of opposing it. Brexit and the rise of the extremist political Parties in several European countries are logical next steps in the plan.

The European Union was a glorious plan, a plan designed to uplift the frequently-warring countries of Europe together. It has gone wrong, as most democracies do, because the citizens left too much power in the hands of anonymous bureaucrats, whose interests lie strongly in the extension of that power. However, a democratic institution is subject to the will of its people, even though those standing between the people and the implementation of that will often use obstructive and divisive tactics to maintain and extend their power. Surely Britain’s efforts would be better applied to reforming those aspects of the EU that it does not like, than to walk away from it all at a possibly ruinous cost? Any responsible leader of the people should put in the effort to convince the people who voted for Brexit that their decision, based on incomplete and improperly presented propaganda needs to be reevaluated in the light of new and updated facts and responsible projections. It is surely time for the British Government to come to the understanding that a re-referral of a possibly wrong decision to the people is not a denial of democracy, but a reaffirmation of it.