They Woke Up Early For Uganda

P-D :

OAKVILLE — The street was lined with cars. Someone splashed in the pool. Every now and then a basketball sailed into the street. Noise echoed a block away.

Something was definitely up at the Noblitt home.

Behind a high wooden fence, more than a hundred high schoolers lounged around. Just about everyone held one of those ubiquitous red cups. A teen stood on the deck taking cash from folks as they arrived.

But this was no wild summer keg party. It was actually a charity event. A two-on-two basketball tournament. For children in Africa.

Come again?

Let’s back up. Wednesday’s Second Annual Noblitt Classic was the brainchild of 17-year-old Matt Noblitt and his older sister, Katie. It began when Katie Noblitt, 22, who just finished her senior year at the University of Missouri-Columbia, watched the documentary “Invisible Children,” about child soldiers in Uganda’s decades-old conflict.

(snip)

The proceeds go to the charity Invisible Children, which grew from the documentary’s success. Katie and Matt Noblitt expected this year’s haul to be close to $1,500.

(snip)

Added Jordon Winheim, 17: “It’s summer. I might just be waking up now. Instead, I’m actually doing something.”

The teenagers huddled around a short basketball court, pavement sunk in the yard where grass once was. The hoops were lowered to 8 1/2 feet, so plenty of kids could dunk. Balls flew as shots were blocked.

I wonder if Ugandan child soldiers will feel insulted to know that American teenagers are so patronizing as to lower the basketball hoop by a foot-and-a-half.  I noticed that all the young men were wearing shirts — to empathize with Uganda’s poverty, all the games should have been skins vs skins.  If there were any black players, were they made to pay an entry fee, or did the do-gooder Nobiltts recognize the centures of slavery and discrimination and let them in for free?  When they send their money to Uganda, will they include a letter asking whatever Ugandan warlord will receive the money asking him nicely to use the money for humanitarian purposes and not to hoard it for himself?

“Remove This Thing”

AP:

Male circumcision gains as Kenya anti-AIDS weapon

KISUMU, Kenya - Sitting underneath the bright murals at a clinic, 22-year-old Elijah Ochanda gestures at his shorts and explains: “When they remove this thing, it makes you safer.”

(snip)

Bailey’s study in Kisumu, western Kenya found infection rates were cut by 60 percent among men who were circumcised. The study, funded by the U.S. Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, was one of several that led the World Health Organization to include circumcision in its prevention policies a year ago.

Meaning that 40% of the men who had “this thing removed” still got AIDS. Little comfort for them. Mr. Ochanda, the odds aren’t that much in your favor — your best bet would to keep that “thing” in your shorts more often.

Seriously, I can just see it now — many African men will get circumcized based on the myth that they won’t be able to get AIDS, and they’ll think they’re home free, and they can do whatever (rather, whoever) they want, meaning the infection rate will soar even higher. This is what happened when African AIDS patients were administred the cocktail. They thought they were cured, when all the cocktail does is to mitigate the virus at best.

Pay Day

Financial Times:

World Bank backs anti-Aids experiment

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

Where’s my $45 for avoiding unsafe sex? Better yet, how about a quarter of my annual income?

I’m waiting for the news story that informs us that AIDS is spreading in rural southern Tanzania because of a lot of $45 tricks.

For Once, I Agree with Steve Ballmer

PC World:

Ballmer: African Business Needs to Be More Transparent

Dance across the stage, clap your hands, and yell “transparency transparency transparency…” about two dozen times, and clench your fists in victory afterward.

(snip)

“Technology alone will not turn these goals into achievements,” Ballmer said. “Technology is just a tool to empower people to make progress. It is an enabler.”

So, technology isn’t a cure all? Never thought I would be agreeing with the Microsoft CEO over certain open-source advocates.

Africa needs to increase Internet bandwidth to drive short-term benefits and long-term development, he said.

In order to increase bandwidth, you have to have bandwidth to begin with. And for that, you need reliable electricity, which black Africa has yet to master.

Sugar Daddy

AP:

Bush Says Paternalism Over in U.S. Aid

WASHINGTON (AP) - Declaring the age of paternalism over, President Bush said Thursday the United States demands clear results for the billions of taxpayer dollars it sends to Africa.

Pretend you’re a 10-year old kid once again.  If your parents told you how to spend your allowance, would you think that paternalism is over?  Actually, as long as you’re getting an allowance, paternalism is occurring.

Doubting Dvorak

John Dvorak pours cold water all over OLPC mania.

PC Magazine:

So what to do? Let’s give these kids these little green computers. That will do it! That will solve the poverty problem and everything else, for that matter. Does anyone but me see this as an insulting “let them eat cake” sort of message to the world’s poor?

“Sir, our village has no water!” “Jenkins, get these people some glassware!”

But, wait. Think of how cool it would be! Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising. Do you now feel better about the world’s problems, knowing that some poor tribesman’s child has a laptop? What African kid doesn’t want access to Slashdot?

Of course, it might be a problem if there is no classroom and he can’t read. The literacy rate in Niger is 13 percent, for example. Hey, give them a computer! And even if someone can read, how many Web sites and wikis are written in SiSwati or isiZulu? Feh. These are just details to ignore.

Porn?  That train has already left the station.

There seems to be a notion that the poor in Africa or East Asia are just like the kids in East Palo Alto. Once they get a laptop, there will be no digital divide, will there? People can say, “I did my part!”

Oh, my.  Is John Dvorak considering the notion that absolute total human equality is not true?  Somebody call Potok and Beirich — they have a new “hatemonger” to expose.

How Grammy Limey Got Her Groove Back

The Reuters headline is enough:

Older white women join Kenya’s sex tourists

The body of the article follows suit, but it also states that the Kenyan government frowns on the practice, and coincidentally (or maybe not so), the part of Kenya where this is happening is also a haven for men that are “pedophile tourists.”

By the Time I Get to Ghana

Remember when Lizz Brown made several trips to Ghana a few years back?  She forgot to tell you that it has now become the most important transfer point in the effort to smuggle cocaine from northern South America into Europe.

Redundant

Open Letter to ABC:

You only need to use “Nigerian” or “scam,” not both.  One automatically implies the other.

What? The Toasters Didn’t Work?

The President of the Nigerian Senate is implying that the most powerful motivation of the human species (and just about all animals) doesn’t apply to the marketing of the services of the country’s 25 banks.

Reuters:

Hey, big boy! Any interest?

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian banks must stop using attractive women to persuade customers to open accounts, Senate President David Mark was quoted as saying in Thursday’s newspapers.

Mark said that despite a consolidation of the sector in 2005 that reduced the number of banks to 25 from 89 and was supposed to make them more efficient, many banks still used women to attract new business.

“Banks have made it a policy to employ beautiful ladies and give them targets to meet,” Mark said during the inauguration of the new Senate committee on banking and insurance Wednesday.

“This is unacceptable and must stop. You ordered the consolidation, so I think you must do something to stop it,” he said, addressing officials of the central bank.

“We thought that with the consolidation in the banking sector, the banks will have enough money and capacity to get customers. Why is it that all these girls are now moving around hustling as if they are looking for something other than money?”

Because if it works for carpenters’ levels (yes, I have seen such ads), it will work for anything.

As an aside, take a look at the URL for the Nigerian National Assembly, and read it really carefully.  Perhaps they weren’t thinking when they chose that URL.

Africa Is Only a Disaster Where Democrats Engineered the Downfall

The neo-con blog RedState supplements a recent New York Times story on the impending economic collapse of Zimbabwe with a colorful paragraph of its own.

Question: Neo-cons and “mainstream” conservatives will tend to tell the truth about Zimbabwe, but say nothing about South Africa, which is maybe a decade behind Zimbabwe in its own collapse. What gives?

Answer: Dutcholyatry. The most significant difference between the two African countries is which American president pushed them over the edge, and into the abyss of black rule. It’s fun for neo-cons to pick on Zimbabwe simply because they get to poke fun at Jimmy Carter. Ten years from now, when the krugerrand is at a million percent inflation rate, and the St. Louis CofCC Blog daily monitors the rising exchange rates between it and the U.S. peso, the RedStates, Right Wing Newses, and Power Lines of the world won’t say boo about it, because it was their idol who smashed South Africa to death with the economic boycott he signed in the early 1980s.

Also, Zimbabwe is a slightly less hot potato for the neo-cons to handle than South Africa, because the former never had the hard-and-fast apartheid that the latter did, and apartheid, and its sister systems, segregation and Jim Crow, don’t fit into a “conservative” egalitarian ideology.

The Sexist Monkeys

Methinks some lavender primates need gender sensitivity training.

BBC:

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

Earlier this month, local MP Paul Muite urged the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help contain their aggressive behaviour.

But Mr Muite caused laughter when he told parliament that the monkeys had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village.

(snip)

And because women are primarily responsible for the farms, they have borne the brunt of the problem, as they try to guard their crops.

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

(snip)

In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim.

“The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us,” said Mrs Njeri.

African human beings, especially men, are often given to the same kind of behavior. (”Wunt summa dis?” as the black man ogles a passing woman by saying that and either pointing at his package, cupping his junk in his hand, or actually dropping his pants and showing it off). If this story from Kenya is true (and I wouldn’t discount the possibility that it’s a gag), then the irony is so noted.

Dutcholyatry

What would you call an American President that would use American military and economic might to topple white governments on the African continent, make the Monday nearest Martin Luther King’s birthday a Federal holiday, and sign an amnesty for illegal aliens that forever cost his political party the state in which he made a living and was a two-term Governor?

Right. Now why do most of the Republicans running for President think they want to be his carbon copy, so much so that they’re toppling over each other to convince voters that they’re more the R-word than everyone else?

Because Half the World Wants to Commit Terrorist Acts in Zimbabwe. (Get Real)

International Herald Tribune:

HARARE, Zimbabwe: President Robert Mugabe has approved a law that will give the government sweeping powers to monitor the Internet and mobile and fixed telephones in a country where the independent press has been gagged.

The official Herald newspaper said Saturday that the Interception of Communications Act would allow the government to “sift for information it deems subversive or used for organized crime.”

The law allows “certain communications to be intercepted or monitored in the course of their transmission through telecommunications or the postal service and sets up a monitoring and interception center,” it said.

This means that Zimbabwe’s computer and its telephone will be bugged. But it’s not going to be cheap: It’s estimated that the ZimPATRIOT Act will cost Zim$10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (US$22.62) per year to enforce.

I Got My Wish

Me, on May 22:

Opposing child molestation, kiddie porn, drunk driving, and supporting health care and education, puts you in league with 99.9999% of people. I might faint if Chris Hansen and Dateline NBC ever engages in any sting or entrapment that makes any protected non-white class (or any other protected class) look bad.

I almost fainted tonight. Dateline NBC tonight was a two-hour special titled “To Catch an I.D. Thief,” about identity theft. Hansen’s investigation has exposed the fact that a lot of identity theft originates from that great country that brought you 419 schemes, that being Nigeria. At this rate, Nigeria might as well change its name to Scam.

To think, there are Americans that want to “One Laptop Per Child” Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Thankfully, so far Nigerian Scamian children seem to be more interested in porn than stealing, but just give them time to learn the tricks of the trade.

Also, will NBC now stop its love of racial diversity? This is the same network news division that, day in and day out, pushed “comprehensive immigration reform” while it was a hot issue.

UPDATE 7/23:  Since U.S-Iran talks will begin this week, I know something that our side can talk about.  According to Chris Hansen’s report last night, the servers used to host internet chatrooms where scammers trade stolen credit card numbers and drop points among each other will be hosted in Iran.  In other words, they’ll be untouchable by American interests, and if Ahmadinejad does not crack down on them, his failure to do so could and will be seen as a clue that his regime approves of stealing from American individuals.

One Lapdance Per Child

I had my doubts that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project would result in the blossoming of Africa as a major technological superpower, and it looks like I was right.

Some Nigerian children who have already received them are using them to look at porn.

Unity Will Always Elude Africa

CNS News:

When the African Union website opens, a welcome message declares that “Africa must unite.” But while such sentiment may be growing, an initiative to move the continent towards a formal union has failed.

African leaders meeting for the 9th A.U. Summit in Accra, Ghana, this month considered as a key agenda item a report commissioned by the bloc that recommended steps culminating in a single African government by 2012. But most African leaders rejected the hugely ambitious plan, at least for the time being, saying regional blocs should be strengthened first.

Good luck. East Africans in a little east African country couldn’t even get along to the point where one ethnicity slaughtered a million of the other in an attempt at genocide in 1994. How East Africans, West Africans, South Africans, Arabs and North Africans are supposed to compete for singular control of a unitary continental state without butchering each other is beyond me.

If there can be such a thing as a semi-successful AU, it will have to: (1) Apply only to sub-Saharan (i.e. black) Africa, (2) Allow for three sub-AU semi-sovereign entities encompassing the three major types of black Africans, (3) erase the current political map of sub-Saharan Africa, a legacy of European colonialism, and redraw the boundaries around tribes and ethnicities, (4) restore Zimbabwe and South Africa to white rule.

Today’s Africa News

(1)  The Nigerian MEND Movement, after having kidnapped a 3-year old Nigerian boy, not long after doing the same to a 3-year old British girl, is now facing criticism from the world press that it has crossed a line by committing crimes against children.  Newsflash:  There is no honor among thieves.

(2)  The world press is also complaining that in the failure of African Union peacekeepers to stabilize the Darfur region of the Sudan, that the USA, the EU and the UN should step in and do more.  My response is to reiterate Bismarck’s quote:  “The whole of the Balkans isn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer.”

Peanut Loves Nut

New York Sun reminds us that President Jimmy Carter not only engineered the fall of Rhodesia, but pressured the new universal democracy to install Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF Party over and above the first black democratically elected prime minister.

No food, and the money is worthless? Thanks, Jimma.

Don’t Send a Woman to do a Man’s AIDS-Stopping Job

AFP:

NAIROBI (AFP) - South Africa’s top female politician warned Saturday that men must get fully involved in the war against HIV/AIDS if the disease is to be defeated.

“There aren’t enough men who are taking enough responsibility to go for tests and live responsibly, and that kind of (behaviour) compromises the fight,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, South Africa’s Deputy President, told the closing session of the International Women’s Summit on HIV/AIDS here.

She urged men to live responsibly, to go for tests and participate in projects to help end the pandemic that has infected some affects 39.5 million people worldwide, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Urge them to keep their things in their pants. That would help more than anything.

Straighten Up and Drive Right

Reuters:

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo is banning right-hand drive cars in an effort to improve dire road safety, angering drivers in the vast country’s south and east where most vehicles have the steering wheel on the right.

Congolese drive on the right-hand side of the road. The majority of cars in the west of the former Belgian colony, where the capital Kinshasa is located, are imported from continental Europe and are therefore left-hand drive.

But vehicles in the south and east are mostly brought in from Asia via neighbouring Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, former British colonies where cars are right-hand drive.

“Vehicles with the steering wheel on the right are the cause of a lot of accidents on our country’s roads,” Gilles-Benjamin Saidi Kampene, president of the national road safety commission, told Reuters on Tuesday.

The problem is, African countries that used to be British colonies still drive on the left, while the others, formerly colonies of continental European countries, drive on the right. Interestingly, South Africa is a left-side country, and while it was a British colony, it and its Afrikaans language have heavy influence from the Germans and the Dutch, both right-side countries.

Congolese in the eastern part of the country must not grasp the concept that their country is a right-side one, and that one has to stay on the right even if the car they’re driving has the steering wheel on the right side of the car for a left-side country.

There are a coterie of Americans stationed in central outback Australia, near Alice Springs, N.T., for deep space communications and research, and some for joint American-Australian military purposes. Some Americans bring their left-steering wheel cars, and they don’t seem to have any trouble driving on the left side of the road in spite of it.

Nigerians Still Don’t Get the Concept of Elections

Wrong political party

Day before election day, USA: TV ads are entirely solicitations for votes
Day after election day, USA: TV ads are entirely solicitations for prescription drugs

Day before election day, Nigeria: Machetes are expensive
Day after election day, Nigeria: Machetes are cheap

You can draw your own conclusions about Nigeria.

It’s a Corps, But Not For “Peace”

CSM:

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA - Across the border from South Sudan, in the small Ethiopian village of Asossa, Sun Yingtao, a young agriculture student from Hebei Province in China, is teaching subsistence farmers – many of them refugees from war-torn Sudan – techniques for getting good yields out of their meager lands.

Seconded to the Ethiopian Department of Rural Development, Mr. Sun spends his days trying to identify various vegetable diseases, discussing possible alternative water usage, and debating the pros and cons of sowing onions and peppers in rows or in a scattered fashion.

Sun, who has been here for six months, is a civilian volunteer – one of a group of 50 young men and women who have been sent by the Chinese government as part of a new, experimental “peace corps” project in the country. This is the program’s second year, and there are small volunteer groups in three locations: Ethiopia, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe – three countries of limited economic importance for China.

Tens of thousands of young Chinese went through a rigorous three-month application process last year to compete for a spot on the volunteer team, says Liu Wei, another volunteer in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. And, though small now, the program is expected to expand.

Sinologists who are intellectually honest know that this Chinese “peace corps” does not have entirely “peaceful” motivations for the Chinese government. The real reason, I think, is that the Chinese government is greasing the skids in Africa for colonization.

Testament of All the Racism and Discrimination in America

AP:

WASHINGTON - They range from surgeons and scholars to illiterate refugees from some of the world’s worst hellholes — a dizzyingly varied stream of African immigrants to the United States. More than 1 million strong and growing, they are enlivening America’s cities and altering how the nation confronts its racial identity.

(snip)

The 2000 Census recorded 881,300 U.S. residents who were born in Africa. By 2005, the number had reached 1.25 million, according Brookings Institution researcher Jill Wilson.

Since 1990, the African population has more than tripled in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, where Africans now constitute more than 15 percent of the black population. The biggest magnets are New York City and greater Washington, including its Maryland and Virginia suburbs; Wilson estimates that the African-born population in each area has soared past 130,000.

(snip)

The flip side of the refugee influx is a wave of sophisticated professionals who also are making their way to the United States. Census data from 2000 shows 43 percent of Africans in the U.S. have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Compared to African-Americans, the immigrants’ average household income is higher and their jobless rate lower. [Emphasis added]

Before you get too excited, most of this article deals with the downside of African immigration, including, but not limited to, the lack of experience with modern appliances, illiteracy in their own native and tribal languages, culture shock, and a strained relationships with African-Americans.

So Contrived

Part of the ancient African heritage?

Newark (Ohio) Advocate:

AKRON (AP) — State education officials said they’ll investigate a northeast Ohio charter school that served gin to sixth graders at a graduation ceremony.

Four students were given a teaspoon of gin mixed with water on Tuesday in a ceremony modeled on a Ghanian rite of passage event, said Kwa David Whitaker, an official with the Phoenix Village Academy.

The school’s curriculum emphasizes African history and culture, and the ritual was intended to teach truthfulness, said Whitaker, who oversaw the ceremony.

The students were blindfolded, giving them the uncertain feeling that goes with moving from one stage of life to another, he said. Each student was given a teaspoon of water and a teaspoon of the gin-water mix, and then asked to identify which contained water.

The students recognized that the gin wasn’t water and spit it out before swallowing, Whitaker said. The point is to teach the children to be honest, he said.

Three points:

1. I don’t usually think of “honesty” and “African” in the same sentence.

2. There can be no such thing as a “Ghanian rite of passage” event, because there’s no such thing, historically speaking, as a Ghanian or Ghana. The country, as well as most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, are remnants of contrived partitions among European powers who colonized Africa (”scramble for Africa”) in the 19th Century, the boundaries were negotiated and drawn without regard to the presence of distinct but fluid African tribes.

3. I am not aware that black Africans had any tradition for alcoholic beverages, before Europeans introduced them. Gin and other hard liquors were developed in Europe, especially northern Europe. In fact, when European powers decided to stop chattel slavery, they had to agree collectively not to export hard liquor beverages into black African areas, (Brussels Anti-Slavery Treaty of 1889-90), as hard liquor was the reward for blacks who came across with slaves.

Therefore, this whole affair at this charter school in Ohio, like Kwanzaa, is a modern contrivance.

Where’s the Africa In Those Eight?

CNN:

G8 finale: Africa in the spotlight

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany (CNN) — Leaders of the world’s eight major industrialized nations will end their summit Friday with a pledge to help nations on the world’s poorest continent.

The heads of six African nations will join G8 leaders, and a $60 billion pledge is expected to help fight AIDS and other diseases, according to Reuters.

However, an advocacy organization working to eradicate poverty and AIDS in Africa said that a pledge of an extra $25 billion dollars made at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, two years ago has not been kept. At the end of last year, only $2.3 billion of that promised amount, which is to be paid by 2010, had been delivered, said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA — or Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa.

The G8 includes the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan. I don’t see any African countries on that list. I always thought the purpose of the G8 was to promote policies that helped those countries, and the people therein.

Blacks Steal, White Corporation Gets the Blame

CSM has this long piece about the lack of development in the Niger River Delta, in spite of the fact that this region and its oil drilling provides 10% of American oil consumption.

Obviously, Nigerians in the area, and CSM, blame Shell and other oil companies for not coming through with human development programs, but we get two wee paragraphs of truth from CSM:

Corruption is often to blame, too, he says, pointing out that an interstate highway proposed decades ago – and paid for by the federal government a number of times – has yet to be built.

“Nigeria is very hierarchical, and people enjoy hierarchy and like business as usual,” says Knight. “People inside oil companies, politicians, and government – they were all benefiting from the system.”

This means that important black palms get greased first, foremost and only. The regular people can just lump it, and blame white oil companies.

Mapping the Wrong Course

Reuters:

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya launched a new national atlas on Tuesday that seeks to unearth links between poverty and the environment in a country which, like many in Africa, depends heavily on farming and tourism.

More than three-quarters of Kenya’s 35 million people rely on agriculture for a living, but management of scarce resources is often poorly understood — leading to misuse and conflicts.

For the first time, the atlas, “Nature’s Benefits in Kenya,” binds natural data like water sources, wood supply and wildlife populations to information including human habitation, economic activities and household expenditure, its authors say.

Kenya’s planning and national development minister, Henry Obwocha, said the atlas would help formulate government policy, and Kenya’s Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai also praised it.

IQ-poverty has a much statistically stronger correlation, I predict.

American Government vs Dispossession

President Bush announced today that the American government will enact sanctions against the Sudanese government, in order to punish them for their violent dispossession of black animists, Christians and other black non-Muslims by the Muslim government in the Darfur region of the country.

Some of this charity should begin at home. He should have announced that the American government will do what it can to stop the violent dispossession of American whites by black and Hispanic crime, as well as the double-standard white judicial, social and corporate system, in major cities and other large swaths of the country, and in regards to their economic prosperity and standard of living.

AQ and ZA

I bet that if the world in general, and the United States in particular, would have left their hands off South Africa, it wouldn’t be full of Al Qaeda agents today.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This seems to be the recent history of lousy half-witted half-brained American foreign policy. In the last three decades, we have “democratized” Iran, Iraq and South Africa, and all three of these places are much more the havens for real terrorists that really want to do damage to us for the sake of it.

If there are any honest historians left in this world at the end of this century, they will recognize Fossedal and Sharansky as mad geese, and not wise philosophers.