A COUPLE of weeks ago (April 5) Oom Krisjan directed readers to a website that purports to prove that no Boeing hit the Pentagon on September 11 last year. It raises some very interesting questions, which have now been ”answered” by a French professor by the name of Thierry Meyssan in his book, The Frightening Fraud.
The nutty professor takes the view that not only did American Airlines flight 77 not hit the United States’s defence headquarters, but the flight did not exist at all. He goes on to suggest that the disaster was a plot dreamed up by the US government. Lemmer respectfully suggests M Meyssan take a little more Coke with his brandewyn.
The book has become a bestseller in France but, there again, the French might soon allow the equally nutty Jean-Marie le Pen to run their country.
Pentagon spokesman, Glen Flood, said the book was ”a slap in the face and real offence to the American people, particularly to the memory of victims of the attacks”. He undermined these noble sentiments by going on to say that he has not read the book and has no intention of doing so.
Ripples from a pebble
Ja, conspiracy theories can certainly take hold of the senses. One little suggestion that big business might have caused the rand’s plunge and big brother brought out the big guns. The Myburgh commission aimed its BB gun at free enterprise and found … well, that no one could really say why the rand became ‘n gat.
But the manne have their own ideas. Like the French professor, they blame the government. And the defence force. In fact, almost anyone not sitting in the Dorsbult when this old chestnut comes up for discussion. The reasoning goes that if the government needed to pay off the first tranche on that arms deal, it might just look the other way for a bit while the rand went into a tailspin.
Where the sun has never shone
Lemmer has been warming his hands on the heat coming from this newspaper’s sports department this week after a printer’s blaps resulted in the wrong page being printed – and a Peter Robinson article appearing twice. That’s not to say that Robinson (a regular patron of the Dorsbult) does not deserve to be read more than once a week.
Our colleagues at The Star might have wished for a similar gremlin to rescue them from this rather extraordinary statement in their back-page lead on Tuesday: ”Like the sun always sets in the east and Tom never does catch Jerry, no Premiership season seems complete without a farcical boardroom squabble and this one’s no different.”
Perhaps the Earth spins in a different direction in Tony O’Reilly’s universe.
A door that keeps revolving
Also spinning was the Democratic Alliance spokesperson on health, Sandy Kalyan, who, while gracious in welcoming the government’s turnaround on providing antiretrovirals to pregnant mothers and rape victims, felt she had to be ”critical”. Now Oom Krisjan thought that was the role of the official opposition.
Nevertheless, Kalyan rambled on: ”But without the provision of milk powder any child of an HIV-positive mother will be doomed. Government should be proactive in engaging the companies that produce milk formulae. It is estimated that it would cost R100 a month to provide a baby with milk powder up to the age of six months. If the health department cannot make this possible the social development department must be approached to increase welfare grants.”
This started to sound awfully familiar. Wasn’t the high costs of providing milk powder recently being offered by African National Congress spin doctors as one of the excuses for not providing nevirapine?
Ever-spinning reel
The ANC-led government’s radical shift on HIV/ Aids policy had heads reeling, including that of President Thabo Mbeki, it seems. This week he was urging South Africans not to go around having ”hugely promiscuous sex”. It wasn’t so long ago, Oom Krisjan seems to remember, that onse leier was blaming ”racists” for the myth that Aids was spread through heterosexual sex in an attempt to show that Africans were a promiscuous lot.
A carnival balloon
On a kinder note, Oom Krisjan has ordered a special vintage of his favourite tipple to raise a glass in honour of the 70th birthday of Madam Speaker Frene Ginwala, who has, since 1994, formidably presided over many heated debates (and the odd punch-up) in the National Assembly – and occasional parliamentary hiccups like the toilet paper crisis of a few years ago.
Jingle in your pocket
After mentioning Darren Fichardt’s woes in this column recently (March 28), Lemmer is pleased to announce that all the professional golfers who won prize money in last year’s Zimbabwe Open have now been paid. ”The R1-million prize money was cleared through our bank account this morning,” reported Louis Martin, chief executive of the Sunshine Tour. No information on the interest gathered in the past five months, though. Perhaps it went to Uncle Bob’s re-election campaign.
The images unwind
Tilting at windmills in the name of national security (or trade and industry, for that matter) can be damaging to your health – just ask Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete and Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Lindiwe Hendricks. Both have been out of action recently with back problems. Lemmer refuses to believe those who say this shows the Cabinet lacks backbone.
Readers wishing to alert Oom Krisjan to matters of national or lesser importance can do so at [email protected]