An old man sits in front of the Louvre which, from residence of wasteful french royalty has become  a splendid museum in Paris, although marred by a ridiculous little glass pyramid at the entrance. He sits there and waits for customers to buy his small replicas of Eiffel towers that he and his son cast from recuperated tin capuchons of wine bottles. You make your living as your ingenuity allows. Not in France, though! The parisian police has picked up papa and son, confiscated their stock and whatever else they could lay their hands on and now papa can explain to his son in the seclusion of a prison cell the workings of french democracy.  I don’t know the rest of the story but what I still find more terrible than this anecdote by itself is the newspaper’s attitude, France-Soir, I think. That miserable rag was in total ‘accord’ with the police actions, imagine, these two might not have paid taxes on their enterprise, we can’t have that in a modern France.

Never has this modern France been more broke in its painful history, even that usurious cheat Louis the 14^th didn’t manage to get his country into such a pile of debt. And it isn’t finished, tomorrow the frenchies are going to vote for another clown and it looks like a socialist will get in. This fellow wants more taxes, more debt, more control. More stifling of private enterprise, more welfare state.

If you want to build a house in France, you have to be: 1 a politician in the reigning party so you can pay with taxpayers’ money, 2 a crook, pally with government officials, 3 do it yourself, using illegal labour but most probably you will be caught because the french have more repressive cops than the rest of Europe.

In our beloved country South Africa the political scene is becoming by the day more contemptibly clownish. Not a service that is not tainted, cops accused of murder, teachers that can’t teach and cannot be taught and now! the bloody Navy is going to do Fisheries Research! First price for that minister! I have experience of the french, dutch, british, spanish, south african and american military navies and I assure you that as ship breakers, the fellows employed by these navies cannot be beaten. You see, their notions are as follows, seamanship is a pain in the arse, promotion is what counts!

My friends, we live in a fascinating country in fascinating times. Three quarters of a population that doesn’t know how to work, with an increasing starvation rate. The remainder lied to and taxed as much as possible by a bunch of communist minded incompetent thugs and yet…human enterprise still saves the day… up to now.