Gareth Cliff

In 1968, teenage Red Guards were beating their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards. Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre swooned at this, calling it the people governing themselves. Why did a man this intelligent get it this wrong? Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy gets you. Mises had already explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral, only a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

JUST IN: Jensen Huang reportedly has no prenup, meaning a divorce could cost him $81 billion, the most expensive divorce ever.

Celebrating excellence in geospatial science! The American Geographical Society (AGS), on its 175th anniversary, has awarded #TeamCSIR’s Sives Govender the 2026 Paul P. Vouras Medal in recognition of his exemplary research and outstanding work in the field of regional geography. The medal will be presented on 20 November 2026 in New York City during Geography 2050: Africa Shaping Tomorrow, a symposium held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Congratulations to Sives Govender on this outstanding achievement and well-deserved international recognition! #GeospatialScience #Geography2050 #AfricaGIS #AfricanInnovation #ResearchExcellence

MADLANGA COMMISSION | Adv Annelene van der Heever argues the NPA breached its agreement by providing the Section 204 statement to the commission.

Exclusive: A covert Russian network sought to exploit last month's riots in France by using social media to blame the unrest on uncontrolled immigration and portray the government as having lost control, according to an internal EU assessment seen by Reuters reut.rs/3UMHXCW

Looks like ASA wants the status quo in Gauteng - an alliance with those that destroyed Gauteng. To my fellow Gautengers, keep going off-grid. The hubris won't last.

The grey areas. Everywhere that is going to require a coalition.

One island, two countries, and a gap in per capita GDP so wide you could lose a civilization in it. The Dominican Republic sits at roughly $10,000 USD per capita. Haiti hovers around $1,700. Same geography. Same hurricanes. Radically different institutions. Property rights explain most of this story. The Dominican Republic, for all its imperfections, built a functional legal system around private land ownership. Haitian governments, by contrast, spent two centuries treating property as something the state grants and revokes at pleasure. When you cannot secure title to your land, you cannot borrow against it, improve it, or sell it credibly. Hernando de Soto estimated in the early 2000s that Haitians held roughly $5.2 billion in informal, legally unrecognized assets. That capital sits frozen, unable to do what capital does. The state is always a coercive institution. The question is whether its coercion remains constrained enough to let people produce and trade. Haiti never solved that question. Since independence in 1804, it cycled through dictators, foreign occupations, and kleptocratic governments that treated the treasury as personal income. François Duvalier murdered his opposition and taxed the productive class into emigration. His son Jean-Claude burned through foreign aid while infrastructure collapsed. The pattern repeated because the incentives for rulers never changed. The Dominican Republic had brutal governments too, Rafael Trujillo chief among them. Trujillo, monstrous as he was, kept basic commercial infrastructure functioning because he wanted an economy to loot. Sometimes predators preserve their prey. Haiti's governments skipped even that minimal calculation. Geography handed both nations identical starting conditions, and institutions determined everything after that.