Here’s a fairly comprehensive summary of why we should support our country and our team, but have nothing to do with the exploitation of FIFA: The Fifa conquistadors are coming!

My other columns on FIFA have been collected in a previous post: Boycott FIFA

I will have more to write concerning FIFA and Match, some of it in their own damning words.

PS. Here’s a #boycottFIFA ribbon for your Twitter avatar or Facebook profile picture.

The world didn’t end while I was on holiday, and neither did my columns. First, I grabbed a review unit — the sweet little Nokia Booklet 3G I had lying around — to take along. Security reasons, you understand. I had cleaned it up thoroughly in preparation for its return to Nokia, so imagine my surprise when I fired it up and it alerted me of a new email. That prompted this column on ITWeb. I always said Google could very easily be evil.

While I was away, I first wrote a column in response to the UK parliamentary whitewash of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit email leak. However, the noise around Eugene Terre’blanche and Julius Malema prompted its delay, in favour of this: While FIFA takes over, we fight. A week later, upon my return, Anatomy of a whitewash found its way online.

I have some more very juicy bits lined up about FIFA. It doesn’t get any prettier as we count down to the World Cup. I’ll keep you posted.

Ever since the first “2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act”, no. 11 of 2006 was passed, and FIFA began calling for volunteers for the Confederations Cup rather than employing people like civilised companies do, the whole World Cup thing has left a sour taste in my mouth. It’s annoying to watch your government hijacked, and your country and its people exploited, by people who think they’re too good for the rules by which the rest of us play.

So here’s an idea: Boycott FIFA.

It’s almost time for the 2008 Olympics, and the Chinese authorities are making sure their coming out party is as green as possible. And what does environmentalism entail? Draconian restrictions, of course. The Communist Party of China no doubt can relate to the greens’ penchant for fascist measures to save the rest of us from ourselves.

In a bid to pacify the environmental tyrants of the occident, the communist tyrants of the orient have instituted a ban on cars. Beijing residents will be limited to driving only every other day, with the aim of halving the usual 3.3 million cars on the road. Additional restrictions will shut down (and even move out of the city) many major factories.

BEIJING (Reuters) — Beijing will introduce “odd-even” traffic restrictions for two months from July 20 to help ease congestion and reduce pollution during the Olympics and Paralympics, officials said on Friday.

Authorities hope the regulations will take 45 percent of the city’s 3.29 million cars off the road and reduce emissions from vehicles by 63 percent, officials told a news conference.

[…] Those affected by the ban will be compensated by not having to pay road or vehicle taxes for three month, costing the city about 1.3 billion yuan ($189 million).

Violators would be punished “according to relevant national and local regulations” and lose the compensation.

Only 70 percent of government-owned cars will be included in the scheme.

And if you’re sufficiently poor to have an older, high-emissions car (of the kind Britain’s PM, Gordon Brown, unapologetically wants to use as an excuse to super-tax the working class), you don’t get to drive it at all.

Over at the Huffington Post, this measure is considered a mere band-aid. One dreads to think what a real cure would look like.

And while you park your car, and close your factories, and stop smoking, and renounce your right to protest or get drunk, here’s what you shall cheer, the “spiritual civilisation bureau” decrees: “Aoyun! Jia You! Zhongguo! Jia You!”

The offically-approved cheer, complete with “civilised” gestures, is being taugh through official media and school training programmes. Note the faceless face of “civilisation”. Reports the BBC: “Li Ning, president of the Beijing Etiquette Institute, told the Beijing News that the cheer was in line with general international principles for cheering, while at the same time possessing characteristics of Chinese culture.”

Good to know we have international principles for cheering. I’ll confess I’ve been very disturbed by the uncivilised cheering I’ve come across. Granted, this involved anti-social people who even had the temerity to wear individual faces in public. Shameful. Glad they’re cracking down on that sort of thing.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any funnier, you discover that with beautiful irony, the cheer means, “Olympics! Add oil! China! Add oil!”

Not if you have the misfortune of being a Chinese citizen in Beijing, you don’t.

Our own politicians and 2010 World Cup organisers undoubtedly have luxury box seats at the Beijing Olympics, where they’ll be learning from the masters how to please the world’s eco-fascists.

I have advocated turfing out the government whose national socialism got us into this power crisis. It is a grave crisis, after all, which will probably cost this country most or all of its economic growth, all its capacity for job creation, most of its capacity for heavy industry and manufacturing, all the central bank’s admirable work to keep price inflation low, all the treasury’s admirable work to pay down fiscal deficits, all the investment credentials painstakingly built up in the face of skepticism and fear, and all the growth in small- and medium-sized businesses that would have formed the bedrock of our economic and employment growth. I used to be optimistic about our ability to host the 2010 World Cup, but no longer.

In any sensible democracy, such a disaster would precipitate not only a swath of resignations and firings, all the way to the top, but the collapse of the government and its banishment to the electoral wilderness for years to come. That is what should happen here. The ANC used to have a moral right to rule. It has forfeited that right, by failing both its own constituency and the electorate in general, in the most serious fashion.

I haven’t however, advocated an alternative, and will continue to leave such a decision open for now. I think there is space in South Africa for a new party, one that is committed to free people and free markets, rather than paternalistic and unrealistic “government service delivery”. One that is economically conservative but socially liberal, and represents the true non-racial ideals that define the hopes and dreams of ordinary South Africans.

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For those not familiar with the South African power utility Eskom, here’s a taste.