UPDATED: Agent 10 approves this meme

Agent 10 is a member of the Cuban diaspora. She says this meme isn't funny, but is a hard truth which people should know about. The Cuban people are waiting for President Trump (and Secretary Rubio) to do something -- anything -- to help bring about regime change, so the Cuban people may live! 

UPDATE ADDED at 1715 FMT - This just in from Breitbart News

Canadian Companies Fear Major Losses if Cuban Communist Regime Falls

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio Dominguez on Friday sought to convince Canada to prop up the fading Communist regime in Havana, arguing that Canadian companies could lose billions from nullified contracts if the regime falls.

De Cossio praised Cuba’s “important trade relations” with Canada and the hefty investments Canadian companies have made in Cuba. "Despite the fact that we do not have a coincidence in all the political and international positions, we have always known how to solve our problems, our differences, and work with them based on dialogue and based on mutual respect," he said. 

The Cuban official blamed America’s energy blockade for starving Cuba of the fuel it needs for "everything from energy for hospitals, for homes, for education, for industry, for the production of food, for agriculture, for transportation, for medical care, for the livelihoods of people."

De Cossio claimed Cuba’s infamous nationwide blackouts are "not a result of Cuban inefficiency, not as the result of Cuba mismanagement of the electrical grid, but because the United States is depriving Cuba of fuel." 

De Cossio, formerly Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, was responding to Ottawa warning Canadian firms away from making new investments in Cuba last week, due to the island’s "ongoing liquidity crisis" and the collapse of its power grid.

The back story no-one talks about is that Blackie McBlackface (aka Justin Trudeau), former prime minister of Canuckstan is widely believed to be the love child of Fidel Castro and the hare-brained Margaret Trudeau (wife of Emperor Trudeau I), the same one who, back in the day, was photographed sans panties in front of Studio 54 in NYC. This being a family publication, we refrain from posting the photo but you can find it by Googling "Margaret Trudeau Studio 54.

[Walt, how many times to I have to tell you about run-on sentences?! Ed.]

VIDEOS: "Undercover in Havana" and "An island in turmoil"

Our post "Beginning of the end for Castro Communist Cuba?" (WWW 10/2/26) brought more reaction than usual, not all of it positive. Agent 2, who used to be a regular visitor to Cuba and has friends there, thinks it wrong of Agent 10 to advocate a boycott of Cuba as a tourist destination. 2 writes:

I understand that she wants change in Cuba.... She is telling people not to go and support a dictatorship. But what is happening right now is extremely hurtful to the residents. No tourists mean some resorts are closing, no jobs for the workers, no transportation because of the fuel. 

How are they to shop, go to doctors or hospitals, visit friends or sick relatives? Only some of them have decent bicycles. The tourists give tips, clothes, medicines not only to the workers but they walk off the resorts to the villages to distribute money and meds and clothes.

Lack of fuel for the tourists to take a cab and guess what, the cab driver has a family. Schools are closed and for how long?... I am on WhatsApp constantly with my Cuban friends who are hurting. They are living with this mess. 

The next few months will be very difficult for them. The big solution here is which country will bring their tankers not overthrowing the government. That is for another time.

In this video, Ezra Levant interviews Alexa Lavoie, who he sent to Havana on a mission to document how things are on the ground. Ms Lavoie describes poverty, shortages and surveillance seen in Havana and how its reality clashes with Cuba's tourist image.

She reports many of the same things Agent 2 said, especially the part about jobs at hotels and resorts being the best jobs. As you'll see, things are not so good if you're a teacher or... just about anything else. Watch the video and decide for yourself whether it's right for the US of A to be trying to depose the Castro Communists. 

And here's another one, an ARTE documentary published last October. Like the first video, it shows how, for foreign tourists, Cuba is a corner of paradise in the heart of the Caribbean. But for Cubans life is not easy. A rolling economic crisis means food shortages and poverty as buildings and infrastructure crumble. How can we fail to understand how much the poor people of Cuba -- that includes everyone except the Castro cronies and their military -- want change and wants it now!

The truth about Communism, in one meme

South Africa "Freedom Day" -- not much to celebrate

Yesterday, black South Africans celebrated the 25th anniversary of "Freedom Day", the day in 1994 when they were allowed to cast ballots in the country's first "one person one vote" election. President Cyril Ramaphosa said, "On this day 25 years ago, we founded a new country defined by the principles of equality, unity, non-racialism and non-sexism. Despite the passage of time, we remember vividly...the exhilaration of seeing nearly 20 million South Africans of all races waiting patiently at polling stations around the country to cast their ballots."

Walt was there at the time -- based in Ha-ha-harare, the fun capital of Zimbabwe -- and remembers opening a book (read: started taking bets) on how long it would take for the most prosperous nation in Africa to regress to levels of poverty and inequality like those of Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan and other shithole states of the Dark Continent.

It didn't take that long. Today, widespread poverty and corruption mean that, 25 years after the end of apartheid, many South Africans are still not free. In yesterday's speech, President Ramaphosa praised the work of South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, but said that the country could not be free "when so many live without enough food, without proper shelter, without access to quality health care, without a means to earn a living."

South Africa's black majority were promised that once they were "empowered", they would have white cars, white houses and white women. Pictured above is what they got.

Yesterday, President Ramaphosa (who replaced Jacob Zuma, President No. 3, who was forced out over a string of corruption scandals and a penchant for polygamy) said, "As we celebrate 25 years of democracy, we need to focus all our attention and efforts on ensuring that all South Africans can equally experience the economic and social benefits of freedom."

The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that any progress made to fulfill the promises made to the country's blacks has been undone in just five short years. Today, South Africa is one of the most consistently unequal countries in the world. More than half the population lives in poverty, while a staggering 27% of people are unemployed. And that's according to the government's statistics, which are believed to be wildly over-optimistic.

Since 2011, three million more South Africans have been pushed below the poverty line, according to a study by the national data agency, Statistics South Africa, released this week. More than 30.4 million South Africans (55.5% of the population) live on less than 992 rand (about $75) per person per month.

Those figures, collected in 2015, are actually more optimistic than numbers from 2006, when two-thirds of South Africans were living in poverty. But it captures the painful one-step-forward, two-steps-backwards dance the country has been engaged in over the last decade trying to improve the lives of its population. In 2006, 28.4% of the country was found to be living in extreme poverty. That number had only inched downwards to 25.2% by 2015.

Those numbers aren't likely to improve. In the last year alone, South Africa has entered recession and seen its sovereign debt rating adjusted to junk status, making life harder for everyone, especially the poor. The national power supplier, Eskom, is effectively bankrupt. With massive power outages threatened, those who can afford to are rushing to buy generators and storage batteries. The "povo" (= truly poor) are buying or making candles.

Because of the seizure of productive white farms (and the murder of the white farmers, detailed previously on WWW), millions of South Africans are now facing "food insecurity" -- shortages of food, hunger, even the prospect of starvation -- the crisis which now besets Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and other black-run states to the north. This in a country which was once a net exporter of foodstuffs.

The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that the majority of its citizens live in grinding poverty. The full effect of the 2008 global financial crisis, initially hidden by the euphoria and capital injection of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, is now being felt. The country has also fallen victim to the sluggish growth seen by other commodities-driven economies, unable to improve on 3.3% growth in 2011, the highest GDP has peaked since the financial crisis.

The real problem, though, is South Africa’s inability to implement its own policies. In other words, the black government is incapable of managing the economy or the country. In 2012, the country launched a "National Development Plan" with much pomp and an explanatory animated video showing how much better life would be once they got organized. (18 years after the end of apartheid, they couldn't blame the whities any more.) But a lack of political will and simple competence have left the plan adrift. By almost all measures, South Africa is going to miss the goals -- reduction of poverty from 39% in 2009 to 0%, and the complete eliminate of hunger, by 2030 -- it set for itself in the plan.

Even the commission tasked with seeing the plan through is frustrated by the lack of government support to do so, despite having an office a few doors down from the president. The group's deputy commissioner told the meeja recently, "We have a plan, we like it very much, we take it to parliament, the whole world praises it... And we are the ones that don't implement it." Nothing more need be said. Mother Africa Wins Again.

Dark continent celebrates half-century of corruption and misrule

Africans from Casablanca to Cape Town are looking forward -- or maybe not -- to Sunday, when many of Africa's states will celebrate the 50th anniversary -- more or less -- of the "liberation" of the Dark Continent -- or much of it -- from the white settlers. If this sentence seems a little vague, that's because things in Africa are always vague.

A couple of African writers have noted that in throwing off the shackles of the European colonialists, the Africans (in the lands below the Sahara, at least) seem to have liberated themselves from the bonds of peace, order and good government -- indeed, of civilization itself. Vince Musewe (Zimbabwean) writes that "Africa remains in the economic backwoods and torn apart by civil wars, coups and counter-coups."

In Malawi (formerly known as Nyasaland, and before that British Central Africa) violence erupted during Tuesday's presidential elections. No-one was killed though, so that's considered a peaceful election by African standards.

In northern Africa, Al-Qaeda terrorises the Sahel region and is fomenting jihad against Christians in the Central African Republic and Mali south of the Sahara. That there hasn't (yet) been mass genocide is due mainly to the presence of armed forces from France, which happens to be, errr, the former colonial power.

A bit farther south, civil strife in the diamond-rich Congo (Kinshasa -- not to be confused with Congo Brazzaville) never seems to end. The UN has a token force in the Congo's far east, but local people seem to fear them as much as any of the other gangs of marauders.

In western Africa, Boko Haram continues to wreak havoc in Nigeria. #BringBackOurGirls slacktivism doesn't seem to have had much impact on them. Just yesterday, suicide bombers killed scores of people in marketplaces in two northern towns. The Disunited Nations is threatening to impose sanctions. US assistance in searching for the missing schoolgirls has been delayed by "technical problems".

Want more? In Zimbabwe, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, once touted to by western liberals as a great freedom fighter and another Mandela, clings to power at age 90-odd, crushing opposition and establishing a de facto one-party state, while turning the former Rhodesia into an economic basket case.

Like Zimbabwe, most of the states of central Africa have failed, collapsed or are weak. South Sudan -- the world's newest nation! -- has collapsed into tribal war. Guinea, Niger, Mauritania, and Guinea Bissau are failing as a result of coups and civil uprisings. Walt's agent in Madagascar reports that water and power outages, banditry and looting are daily occurrences.

Corruption is out of control in every African state, with one or two possible exceptions. African society laughs at honest and accountable leaders and cherishes "big men" like Mugabe and South Africa's Zuma.

In Liberia, from whence Ibrahim Al-bakri Nyei writes, about 75 people of Afro-American descent have held power for over 40 years, circulating the leadership amongst them to keep up appearances. The rest of the population still lives in poverty and hopelessness. Corruption is at its peak, casting doubts on the credibility of the regime and eroding public confidence in the state as a whole.

Conclusion: "Uhuru" (freedom/independence) remains an empty event for the majority of Africans. Why so? Could it be that the fact that blacks look like human beings and act like human beings, does not necessarily make them sensible human beings? This the theme of "Are we beast or man?", by Vince Musewe, an economist and author based in Harare.

Musewe quotes (with sorrow) from a speech made by former South African President P.W. Botha, speech made in that country's Parliament in 1987.

“We are not obliged even the least to prove to anybody and to the blacks that we [whites] are superior people. We have demonstrated that to the blacks 1001 ways. The Republic of South Africa that we know of today has not been created by wishful thinking. We have created it at the expense of intelligence, sweat and blood. We do not pretend like other whites that we like blacks.

"The fact that blacks look like human beings and act like human beings does not necessarily make them sensible human beings. If God had wanted us to be equal to blacks, He would have created all of a uniform colour and intellect. By now every one of us has seen it practically that blacks cannot rule themselves. Give them guns and they will kill each other.

"They are good at nothing else, but making noise, dancing, marrying many wives and indulging in sex. Let us all accept that the black man is a symbol of poverty, mental inferiority, laziness and emotional incompetence."

President Botha was a co-winner, with Nelson Mandela, of the Nobel Peace Prize, not because he changed his views on the fitness of blacks to run a modern nation-state, but because he worked with Mandela to ensure that the transition to "majority rule" in 1994 was as smooth and peaceful as possible, in the circumstances. Since then, South Africa has sliding the slippery slope downward, much like Zimbabwe, only not as quickly. It could take another 20 years or so under ANC rule before it hits bottom.

In his article, Musewe asks his fellow Zimbabweans: "What have we to show as a country since our independence in 1980?

"Horrifying corruption and outright theft, a leadership with an inexplicable obsession with luxury cars and sexual encounters, the destruction of prodigious value in all sectors of our economy, the use of arms of war against our Ndebele brothers and sisters, the decimation of agriculture and the dogfight over diamonds, the deliberate extermination of a national indigenous bourgeoisie, the destruction of our environment that is now happening particularly by small-scale tobacco growers and small-scale miners all under the name of indigenisation.

"In addition, just look at the dirt in our cities and townships, the noise that goes on daily, the potholes and sewage all over, the overcrowding and the common face of poverty, hopelessness and serious deterioration of our living standards. Look at our values and morals as a society and what we have become; the greed and selfishness all around us; all this, despite having the highest literacy rate in Africa!"

Can it there be said that Botha was fundamentally wrong or blinded by racism? Corruption, autocratic leadership, mismanagement, incompetence and misrule are the norms in today's Africa. Such is the fruit of the "liberation struggle" of the 60s which will be celebrated on Sunday.

Jeffrey Sachs and the great Ugandan donkey fiasco

Jeffrey Sachs had a Big Idea: to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa -- maybe the entire world -- by 2011, or maybe sooner. And why not? After all, the self-celebrated Dr. Sachs had already single-handedly salvaged the economies of Bolivia, Poland and even Russia. (Well, maybe not Russia, so much.)

In his influential bestseller The End of Poverty, he posits that poverty is simply an economic problem that can be solved. So, with single-minded determination, he set out to put his theories into practice, to prove that the world's most destitute people could be lifted onto "the ladder of development".

The proving ground that he chose was Africa, site of most of the world's truly wretched countries. Wisely, he didn't attempt to develop and enrich the whole of the Dark Continent at once. Rather, he launched the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment in bringing progress and prosperity to a handful of impoverished rural communities.

One of the villages selected was Ruhiira, a flyspeck in southwestern Uganda, very near the Heart of Darkness. To organize and manage the Ruhiira operation, Dr. Sachs chose David Siriri, a man of good intentions and credentials -- a Ph.D. in forestry and agronomics, a local person who knew the language and the people.

The team of geniuses working with Dr. Sachs in New York made a plan for Mr. Siriri to follow. What they must do, he was told, is move from the subsistence farming of matoke (bananas) to the commercial farming of crops which could be sold elsewhere in Uganda, or even exported. Cash crops like ginger, cardamom and pineapples. Seriously.

Mr. Siriri told the folks in New York that the proposed crops needed water...lots of water. Ruhiira does have a water source, down in the valley. Unfortunately, the community's shambas (small farms) are on a ridge...about 1000 feet higher.

But Sachs had an answer. (He had an answer for everything!) The good doctor convinced JM Eagle, the world's largest manufacturer of plastic pipes, to donate $150,000 worth of PVC pipes to Ruhiira. They were ready to be shipped, and would be, once someone figured out who was going to pay the $120,000 needed to get them from the USA to rural Uganda.

Of course the pipes would still need to be installed. Unfortunately the Eagle pipes were manufactured to American standards, with American fittings, whereas Uganda uses British standards.

While the boys in New York were wrestling with this problem, the chief of the MVP funding arm came up with his own brilliant solution. Donkeys! Yes!! "Did you know that just four donkeys can carry eight hundred litres at a time?", the NY pointdexter asked Siriri. "We could create water-filling stations at the top of the cliffs and have people collect their water there for a small fee. We'll prove that people can make money on their crops even if they have to pay for water."

In short order, eight donkeys arrived in Ruhiira. Within a couple of months, four of them died of exhaustion. The Eagle pipes were eventually shipped, but the boat carrying them was hijacked by pirates in the Indian ocean, off the coast of Kenya.

A few pineapples were grown, but proved too difficult to store and ship. No cardamom or ginger was ever sold. The small farms of Ruhiira are still growing...wait for it...bananas.

The great Ugandan donkey fiasco is just one of the many examples of the folly of trying to solve Africa's problem with Eurocentric ideas and techniques. Dr. Sachs was informed and guided by western economic ideas centred on the concept of "the rational man". This theory presumes that, given two choices, the rational man will choose the better option, regardless of religious and cultural influences. In Africa, that's simply wrong.

In another Millennium Village, in Dertu (in northeastern Kenya, near the border with Somalia), the local people -- mostly ethnic Somalis, thus Muslim -- refused to build a clinic because, they said, descendants of Ibrahim (Abraham) do not do manual labour. Instead, MVP funds were used to hire ethnic Bantu (black) labourers to do the work while the Somalis sat around and chewed qat.

These stories, and many more, are to be found in The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk (Signal/M&S 2013). Walt recomments it highly!

With the co-operation of Dr. Sachs -- let's be fair about this -- Ms Munk spent six years reporting on the Millennium Villages Project.
She shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, sat in on conversations with heads of state, and interviewed scores of people involved, from high officials right down to illiterate inhabitants of Ruhiira and Dertu. Here's a quote from the second-last paragraph of the book:

"In the beginning, Jeffrey Sachs had set out on a question to validate his scientific approach to ending poverty. He'd used the Millennium Villages Project as a laboratory to test his theories and to prove that his series of 'interventions' could transform the lives of the world's poorest people. He'd spent more than $120 million on his experiment.

"For all that, however, he had misjudged the complex, shifting reality in the villages. Africa is not a laboratory: Africa is chaotic and messy and unpredictable." [My emphasis.]

Walt can add only that the failure -- for that's what it was -- of the MVP experiment is a classic example of "MAWA" -- the short epitaph beloved of old Africa hands: Mother Africa Wins Again.

Further reading on WWW:
"Have you given yet to help Somalia? Don't! "
"Biggest ratholes named and shamed"
"Coming soon - another 'nation' to help"
And there's much, much more! Use the search tool to check the posts with the "foreign aid" tag. And remember...you can't help those who won't help themselves!

Yesterday's man equates today's middle class with yesterday's poor

Have you read "American then (25 years ago) and now", posted here yesterday? Walt recommended that you read (or reread) The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream, by the late Studs Terkel. The book tells, in their own words, the plight of America's poor.

The Great Divide was published in 1988. It is a compilation of interviews Mr. Terkel did earlier in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president of the US of A in those years. His immediate predecessor, whose Democratic maladministration was responsible for much of America's economic distress, was a former farmer from the Peach State, one James "Jimmy" Carter.

Ronald Reagan is no longer with us. Jimmy Carter, like the poor, still is. And yesterday, just by coincidence, he offered a waiting nation his views on America's "economic challenges".

During an interview with The Associated Press, he said that years of tax breaks for the wealthy, a minimum wage untethered from the inflation rate and electoral districts drawn to maximize political polarization have reduced the quality of life for all but the richest Americans.

Note from Ed.: There's a video clip embedded in the Washington Times report, which I've been trying for half an hour to copy and embed here, but thanks to Blogger's screwed-up GUI, you'll have to go to the newspaper account if you want to hear the words from the horses's mouth. Back to Walt...

In the video, President Carter said there was "a great deal of discouragement since 2008." Well DUH! But how can that be? When the affirmative action version of Jimmy Carter was sworn in, you'd have thought the Choir Invisible was going to descend from Heaven and make everything right -- as right as Carter himself would have made things if only he'd had a second term. What happened to "Yes we can" and all the hopey-changey stuff?

Seems to Walt that people who create messes should have some ideas about how to clean them up. If Mr. Carter has a magic wand which could be waved to end the present impasse in Washington, he would do well to hand it to the incumbent... immediately!

More on (race + poverty = Africa)

A few days ago, in "Race and poverty by the numbers", Walt posted statistics from the United Nations Human Development Index (as listed in The Economist's Pocket World in Figures, 2013 edition) confirming that the poorest, least developed countries on earth are for the most part in sub-Saharan -- i.e. black -- Africa.

There are other ways of measuring poverty and general hopelessness. One Arthur Okum devised The Misery Index, which looks at two basic things -- rates of unemployment and inflation. The idea is simple. If you haven't got a job, and the price of the necessities of life is soaring, you're going to be miserable. So, the higher the sum of these rates, the more miserable the country.

Yahoo!'s Business Insider looked at 197 countries and territories, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, to compile its Misery Index for 2013.

You may be surprised, gentle reader, to learn that the 10 most miserable countries are not all in sub-Saharan Africa. And they're not all black. Here, with Walt's comments, are numbers 10 through 7.

10. Syria - Not really a surprise that a country torn apart by a civil war should be miserable.

9. Kosovo - In the Balkans. Mostly Muslim.

8. Nepal - Small, landlocked, backward. Chief export: prostitutes sent to India.

7. Namibia - Another lately independent southern African country, formerly run by South Africa. Unemployment rate around 85%.

6. Djibouti - Check your atlas. On the horn of Africa. People chew qat all day and all night. That's all you need to know.

5. Turkmenistan - Part of formerly Soviet central Asia. Muslim.

4. Belarus - An unreconstructed Communist dictatorship between Poland and Russia. Chief export: see Nepal, but the chief importer is Turkey.

And now we come to the Most Miserable Three.

3. Burkina Faso, a.k.a. The Land of Upright Men. Formerly part of French West Africa. Large population (mostly Muslim) and very limited natural resources. Still reeling from the after-effects of a severe drought in 2011. Unemployment rampant. Chief export: nothing.

Even so, things are better than they used to be. According to CIA Factbook used by Yahoo! for this project, "The risk of a mass exodus of the 3 to 4 million Burkinabe who live and work in Côte D'Ivoire has dissipated and trade, power, and transport links are being restored."

2. Liberia. In the 19th century well-meaning American liberals tried to solve the "black problem" by sending freed slaves "back home" to a small chunk of west Africa which they called "Liberia". The capital is "Freetown". The flag has red and white stripes, like the US flag, but, like Freetown's best hotel, only one star.

Like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Liberia is heavily reliant on foreign aid. Its economy was destroyed by civil war, government mismanagement and corruption. 85% of the country's labour force cannot find steady employment. Maybe they should have stayed in the USA?

The worst of the worst, the most miserable country of all, is... Wait for it...

1. Zimbabwe

It's the same old African story -- sloth, ignorance, incompetence and corruption -- writ large by the kleptocracy of Comrade Bob Mugable, which denies Zimbabweans basic rights like freedom of assembly and the protection of the law.

Zimbabwe's economy is actually shrinking (source: Pocket World in Figures). So is the population with literally millions having fled to the UK, Canada, the USA, Australia, or any other non-black country. Or even South Africa which sends them back as fast as they can but still can't stem the tide of refugees.

After the Zimbabwe dollar (a.k.a. "Zimkwacha") reached exchange rates of billions for one US dollar in 2009, Comrade Bob was forced to abandon his worthless currency and adopt the US dollar, which reduced inflation to "normal" levels. However, the Zimbabwean unemployment rate is estimated to be 95%, and the CIA Factbook warns that the true rate is "unknowable" under current conditions.

Those who accused Walt of distorting reality and "blaming the victim" in "Blaming the white settlers for the plight of black Africa" don't need to take my word for it. Read the Misery Index! Better yet, go to Zimbabwe. If you can find any old-timers -- the few still alive who can remember what their country was like before "majority rule" -- ask them if they're better off now than they were in the days of "the racist white settler regime".

Race and poverty by the numbers

Pocket World in Figures comes with Walt's subscription to the Economist. It's a great little fact book, very appealing to the kind of people who enjoy reading dictionaries and telephone books. [Do telephone books even exist any more? Ed.]

You might think tables of "the world's biggest", "the world's worst", "the world's and so on" would be boring, but the trick is to read between the lines. At the same time, keep asking yourself questions that begin with "why". Look for correlations.

Here are some stone truths that "progressive thinkers" in the West don't like to talk about, except of course when they're laying that old liberal guilt trip on the rest of us.

Rich and poor in black and white. One of the most common ways to measure a nation's wealth is in GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The 19 countries with the highest GDP are all (ahem) "white", if we count the Arabs in Qatar (#5) as honorary whites. Japan is #20, Canada #14, the USA #12 and Australia #9. Luxembourg is on top of the league table.

The other end of the list -- the countries with the lowest GDP per head -- begins with Somalia. No prizes for guessing that one. You go on through another 13 African countries until you get to Afghanistan and North Korea, tied for #15. Could a liberal intellectual please explain to us the link between race and poverty/prosperity? Or does it all come down to colonialism?

Where's a good place to live? There's more to life than money, right? [Really? Ed.] GDP and the quality of life aren't necessarily the same. To measure the latter, you use the Disunited Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which combines stats on income, life expectancy, education and all the things we include when we say "Have a nice life."

Let's see now... Isn't this amazing... The top 10 countries on the HDI are all, errr, white. Norway is #1, beating out Australia (#2), the USA (tied with the Netherlands for #3) and Canada (tied with Eire and New Zealand for #5). First Asian countries on the list are Japan (#11) and Hong Kong (tied with Iceland for #12).

At the very bottom of the HDI is Congo (the bigger one, formerly known as Zaire, formerly known as the Congo, etc), followed by Niger, Burundi, Mozambique and so on. All black African states right through to Walt's old stomping ground, Zimbabwe, in 15th place. Afghanistan comes in at #16. Then it's all black Africa again through #23 (Djibouti tied with Zambia), which is where the fecal roster ends.

Wow, Walt is only up to page 28 of the 2013 edition of the Economist's Pocket World in Figures. This should be good for another two posts, minimum. More anon.

Redistributing wealth won't save us

The fiscal cliff, the 1% vs the 99%, taxing the middle class out of existance... What it all comes down to is the wisdom of the Almighty State taking from them as has to give to give to them as has not.

There's no doubt the State can do so if it wishes. But is it the smart thing to do? Can the government legislating the "poor" into prosperity? Walt thinks not (lifetime pct .984) and argues from the record of two great empires.

Consider the mighty and long-lived Roman Empire. History tells us an important factor in the slow demise of Rome was excessive welfare. This was mandated by Roman senators to buy voter support. They feathered their own nests while keeping the poor quiet with bread and circuses. Not much has changed in two millenia, has it.

Now think about Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by American atomic bombs in August of 1945. Nothing left. But look at them now! The two cities -- indeed the whole country -- have redeveloped beyond anyone's imagination.

How did the Japanese become so prosperous so quickly? They do not have a welfare system. You work or do without. Which caused more long-term destruction: the A-bomb or government welfare programmes created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?

What we're talking about, dear readers, is the importance of incentives. Walt will explain in five sentences.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

That's not intended to be an argument for no taxes. The Romans had taxes. The Japanese have taxes. There will probably be taxes in hell. It is, however, an argument for a flat tax, an idea whose time has come... and gone... again and again. But keep it in mind as you listen to the wrangling about who's going to pay for all the entitlements and social programmes that the vote-hungry politicians and lamestream media tell us we must have.

Let's clean up our own back yard first

In June the "world's leaders" will gather in Canada to discuss world issues. The main theme, set by "Call me Steve" Harper as host of the meeting, is the maternal health of women in developing countries.

I'm not making this up. We have an economic crisis in Greece, wars in the Middle East and an environmental catastrophe unfolding [bubbling up? ed.] in the Gulf of Mexico, and the leaders of the world's most self-important countries are going to talk about how to help third world women use condoms and kill unwanted babies.

Seems to me it's about time that we Westerners start looking in the mirror at our own problems. We have more than our share. Let's stop making the world's problems our political agenda. The poverty and backwardness of the third world -- Africa and particular -- are saddening, but how can we solve other peoples' problems when we don't even want to deal with our own?

We have troops dying on the other side of the world who shouldn't even be there. We don't have enough jobs for our youth. Crime rates are becoming obscene, not in the Congo, but on our streets.

It's time for the silent majority to stand up and holler STOP! Stop making a political issue of matters that are really none of our business. Before we agonize over the weeds in the neighbour's back yard, let's cut our own.

Back on Uncle Sam's plantation

Bloggers are talking about Uncle Sam's Plantation, a book by Star Parker, who is, let it be said, an Afro-American woman. The subject of the book is the American welfare system and the poverty trap, especially as it affects black people.

Here's a comment from an "opinionated older lady" by the name of Brenda Bowers, who can be reached at brenda.bowers@rocketmail.com.

This is a must read article from one who has been there, done that and dragged herself out of it.

I am of a white lower middle class background whose only experience with welfare is from working with those under its addictive control and watching the lives it has destroyed as the numbers in poverty increase yearly and the number of illegitamate babies being born into poverty and thus trapped in this life style have increased three fold since Johnson’s Great Society of 1965 was supposed to end poverty forever.

I have seen that no such thing happened at all. Poverty increased. It increased because of several reasons, all of which I have at one time or another discussed on this blog. It failed because it took the Black husbands out of the homes making the Black man superfluous. It failed because the Blacks themselves became addicted to the life of having money for food and free housing provided and tho it was a bare subsistence existence it required nothing from it’s recipients.

It failed because we kept trying to fix it by throwing more and more money at the poor which was akin to giving a crack addict an inadequate but steady supply of crack while trying to get him to break the habit. It failed because by making marriage almost impossible for poor Blacks it contributed to an acceptance of immoral behaviors in the Black community to a much greater degree than in any other ethnic community. An on and on and none of them productive!

For my efforts the nicest things said is to call me a racist. Well this article is from the “horse’s mouth” you might say. I hardly think you can call Star Parker a racist. So what can you call her message? You tell me after having read it. BB

Sadly, Ms. Parker's own comments, "Back on Uncle Sam's plantation", are too long for inclusion here. But you can read them on a blog called "In Defense of Truth" by clicking here. Thanks to Agent 6 for the tip!