[WATCH] We are in Kayelitsha, Cape Town for the ANCWL MAYIHLOME IHLASELE RALLY where we will be giving the final marching orders to a decisive victory in the Western Cape. 📍 KwaMfundo High School, Kayelitsha #MbalulaInWesternCape #VoteANC2026 #BuildingCommunitiesTogether

WATCH: Serving as the Mayor of Cape Town these past 5 years has been the greatest honour of my life 🇿🇦 We’ve accomplished so many things, from deploying more Metro Police to delivering the most houses and creating the most new jobs in SA. Now I’m asking for your support on 4 November to take Cape Town forward for all 🗳️💙

This is fun. 1. Hobbs 2. Gavaskar 3. Bradman 4. Richards 5. Tendulkar 6. Kallis 7. Sangakarra (c and wk) 8. Warne 9. Steyn 10. Marshall 11. Akram

Let’s have some fun 🤭 All time test XI’s? (but we’re only allowed to have max 2 players from each test playing nation 🤭)

The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

A remarkable stat for you from the Stormers’ 52-40 victory over the Scarlets in Cape Town yesterday. The Stormers conceded just one penalty in the whole game.

This could evolve into an enormously useful pieces of research on electoral behaviour. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

An update on the impossible model: predicting turnout. I have continued work on the comprehensive model I tweeted about earlier, I think it is quite good and we will see how it holds up. However, I wanted to talk about new registrations only, as an indicator for turnout (this is a component of the bigger model, but it worth talking about alone). Repeatedly - more than changes in the voters roll, and re-registrations or even all registration activity - new registrations demonstrates the most powerful relationship with turnout. So, without being too complicated, I have simply used that as a "predictor". its results differ from the bigger model, fairly substantially - it predicts 47.9% (using only LGEs) - the bigger model predicts 37.2% (using only LGEs) - this is helpful for me, as I have two models that quite nicely cover growth and decline, which will be great when evaluating the final result, with a view to getting this all 100% before 2029. Below are what you get if you only use new registrations to predict turnout (these numbers are only available by province). NPEs are included just for reference, but they aren't used for the prediction. Some key points: 1. The column Corr (correlation) is important. This is the measure of the strength of the relationship between new registrations and turnout, within each province, for all LGEs. These are very strong readings, (1 is a perfect relationship, so around 0.8, 0.9 very strong) 2. Each cell contains three figures: turnout, the new registration rate and the "fit" (Near 1 = strong fit; near 0 = outlier). 3. The final column, the one you will be interested in, is the 2026 prediction. New registration rates were higher this election than 2021 (2.86 vs 1.8) If the historical relationship holds, this data set says turnout should increase marginally from 2021, and in every province bar the NC and WC. This is a massively counter-intuitive finding, and frankly difficult for me to accept. All other evidence (turnout trends in particular) say turnout will drop. But it is hard to argue with the historical strength of the relationship and the fact that the new registration rate was substantially up in 2026 (up a 1pt, which is very big). As a result, I can't disprove these outcomes as they stand, and one must take them seriously. I was hesitant to even publish them to be honest, and maybe the actual result will reveal a fundamental flaw in how this was constructed, but, as it stands, well, there it is.

Even the FT admits Macron achieved virtually nothing in his 10 years as president, except increasing the retirement age - which of course from French people's standpoint is a negative.

Typical liberal comment.

“In war, like literature, everyone has their own style”. Here is a real quote from Napoleon that is quoted in Andrew Roberts’s excellent indeed addictive new book.

ANC veteran Rev Frank Chikane has hardly done any campaigning for the party in Johannesburg — where he is supposed to be one of its three mayoral candidates — because the ANC has not confirmed his candidacy in writing or given him an undertaking his name will be included in its list of prospective proportional representation (PR) councillors tinyurl.com/3am97c45

You mean Musi was the leader?

Well Ryan, I think you need to apologise to Elon. He clearly knows more about politics than you do.

OPINION | "The morality question is very important, because what has happened in this election by the DA particularly, is to tell us that politics doesn’t matter in this election, service delivery does. No, Politics does matter because it directs where service delivery goes, how justice is dispensed, and how equality and fairness is achieved." - says @LukhonaMnguni, @Rise_Mzansi Johannesburg mayoral candidate. For more opinion pieces visit mg.co.za

It gets the funding because it represents the interests of the settler baron class. That should surprise no one.

Jy weer op die wyn?

The GOP trying to gin up a controversy over a Cheesecake Factory joke almost feels like a wholesome throwback to a simpler era in American politics