Comments

Robert Mugabe dead at 95 — 65 Comments

1. Although it is a truly heretical claim, that the majority of ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe would be in a better condition today had the British never left seems self-evident. Many Zimbabweans have fled, over the years, to South Africa, where they are often treated with suspicion and hostility (if not actual violence), but few in the West are willing to criticize SA for xenophobia or bigotry towards immigrants.

2. Good riddance.

3. Canny travelers to Zimbabwe knew that it was best to order the entire meal, including all drinks and desserts, and pay for it as soon as the food arrived lest the inflation drive the prices higher in midst of the meal.

4. I don’t think it was God who came for him in the end.

   And now South Africa may be taking the same route, taking white property without compensation and not taking care to give it into productive hands.

5. Zimbabwe used to export food.
   After Mugabe got through with it, the people starved.

   And let us not forget the Gukurahundi. But that was dwarfed by what happened in Rwanda to the Tutsis.

   At least he did not pass out ball pean hammers to prisoners with orders to kill each other until the last one standing, as Idi Amin did in Uganda. Amin also died peacefully in bed, as did Mugabe.

6. I have never wished anyone dead. But I have read several obituaries with a certain amount of pleasure. This is one of them.

   Since visiting Kenya and Tanzania in 1997 I have been in love with Africa and have read many accounts of life there. It is such an amazing place. It could be a moderately wealthy continent with much higher living standards.(See Thomas Sowell’s article about why African geography works against its prosperity.) https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2005/07/12/the-tragedy-of-africa-n1132785

   At one time Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) was a relatively prosperous nation.The tragedy is that neither Zimbabwe nor Africa as a whole are going to realize their potential. Because……….tribalism and Marxism – a witch’s brew. It’s the Twenty First Century but Africa is still the Dark Continent.

7. I read an interesting book years ago called “Dinner with Mugabe, “ and was written by a sympathizer. She wrote that Mugabe knew he was unequipped as president and asked Soames, the last British Governor to stay on and help him run the country. The British refused and Soames left. When Soames died some years later, Mugabe by then banned from Britain, attended his funeral. Mugabe’s followers were at least as aggressive and thieving as he was.

8. South Africa is headed down the same path as Zimbabwe for the same reasons. The reasons are not allowed in polite conversation.

9. Since visiting Kenya and Tanzania in 1997

   One of my medical students several years ago is a girl from Kenya. Her parents are both physicians but they had quit their jobs to live on a coffee farm they own. She said the government was so corrupt they had to get out. I assume their jobs were government jobs.

10. “I can’t help but think that all this criticism of Robert Mugabe is just another attempt to demonise people of colour” Titania McGrath

    https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath

11. Per the Maddison project, there are about six countries in tropical Africa whose economic performance between 1960 and today has been worse than Zimbabwe’s. There are three countries whose performance since 1990 has been worse. The country’s standard of living was at its peak in 1973, just as the insurrection against Ian Smith’s government got underway. Take a passable situation, generate ruin, and you’re a hero to some people. There have been shy of 20 African despots over the last 60 years who have been in his class in regard to durability. He was one of the crueler of this set, and trailed only a few as a generator of economic ruin.

12. The reasons are not allowed in polite conversation.

    Someone once said that if you want to know why Haiti is Haiti and Barbados is Barbados, biology doesn’t get you very far. The African experience over the last 60 years has some prevalent features (the growth rate in per capita income has been low nearly everywhere), but there’s also been a lot of variation. What you saw in Rhodesia and what you see in South Africa is that a critical mass of people with the megaphone (and among the rank-and-file) look on the skill and income gap between themselves and the racial minorities as something to be resolved with mass theft. The African countries which lacked an obtrusive white settler population have generally not been addled in this way. In regard to a couple which did (Kenya and Namibia), the political class elected to let it pass.

13. At one time Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) was a relatively prosperous nation.

    Compared to the rest of Africa, not compared to Latin America or even Egypt. However, the white minority did build a fairly comfortable life for themselves. See Theodore Dalrymple on one manifestation of that, but see also memoirs by Doris Lessing for a more qualified view.

14. “I can’t help but think that all this criticism of Robert Mugabe is just another attempt to demonise people of colour” Titania McGrath

    I think that’s supposed to be a parody Twitter account.

15. Mike K: “Her parents are both physicians but they had quit their jobs to live on a coffee farm they own. She said the government was so corrupt they had to get out.”

    It took only a couple of days in Kenya to realize that the government was a kleptocracy. We visited Karen Blixen’s coffee farm near Nairobi. On the way we saw some locals selling furniture by the road side. We stopped to take a look. Beautiful chests and book cases hand made of hardwood. Very low prices. We asked if they had considered exporting their wares to Europe or the U.S. The answer was that they didn’t want to become too successful because President Moi’s cronies would take over the business if they got too successful. The private property laws there are weak or ignored by the powerful. We realized then that our private property laws, which we take for granted, are unusual in many parts of the world. The tribal custom of the “Big Man” is prevalent throughout Africa. How to change it? It would be easier to change Progressives’ mind sets than those in Africa. The future looks grim for them.

16. Yes, Art Deco is right about Titania McGrath.

    She was invented by a comedian, Andrew Doyle, who uses her persona to parody social justice warriors and millennial feminists.

    But Titania’s tweet about Mugabe is more proof that it’s become almost impossible to parody left-wing politics. We’re now all laughing on our way to the graveyard.

17. “His legacy is likely to haunt Zimbabwe for years”

    Were it not for Prez Trump, the legacy of Obama & Hillary would have done the same to America.

    We dodged a big bullet…

18. Not surprisingly, the radical leftists of the world, who know next to nothing about Mugabe or Zimbabwe, are lauding him and planning the statues they want to erect in his honor.

    Meanwhile, from an actual Zimbabwean, I can recommend this Twitter thread:

    https://twitter.com/zimhipster/status/1169851837995831297?s=19

19. Art Deco: I’ve read a number of books about Zimbabwe in the period of 1965 to very recently. All written by white farmers or their off spring. So, there’s that bias, but the obvious thing about the black takeover and eventual theft of the farms by Mugabe’s cronies was that, just like our Progressives, they had no understanding of how the wealth was created by the white farmers. They thought just owning the land was enough. They didn’t understand that it took knowledge and hard work to produce the crops. They don’t understand where wealth comes from. It doesn’t grow on trees. (Except in the tropics, but even there you have to pick it.) You have to have knowledge, risk taking, and hard work . Even then the result isn’t always certain. That seems to be beyond understanding by many Africans and the Communists as well.

20. The future looks grim for them.

    Their economies improve only very slowly. They’ve had some successes over 60 years, however. A majority of African adults are now literate. A great many have a facility in at least one European language (typically English or French). Public health has improved, so measured life expectancy at birth is somewhere around 60 years now. There are some failed states in wretched condition, but most places have managed to establish some sort of regular order in their political life. About 2/3 of the heads of governments today came out of their country’s business and professional class (with a bias toward officials of international agencies). Among the remainder, a background as a partisan is more common than a background as a professional soldier. Pluralistic political machines outnumber despots.

21. Art Deco is correct. You can’t judge the entire continent by the disasters. Statistically speaking, although Africa lags considerably behind the rest of the world, it is making rapid progress on all fronts. Rome was not built in a day.

22. That seems to be beyond understanding by many Africans and the Communists as well.

    It’s beyond understanding of a great many. Ann Coulter many years ago riffled through a set of position papers composed by Americans who no doubt had some sort of tertiary degree. She noted a common feature was that their thinking about economic life was all about budgeting, with no thought given to production. The standard discourse of street-level Democrats (and elected officials) on minimum wage laws incorporates multiple confusions. Now look at the people at the apex and center of the Democratic Party: Charles Schumer (trained as a lawyer, elected official on public payrolls since 1974), Nancy Pelosi (a schoolteacher, once upon a time, on political or public payrolls since 1987 and on-and-off for a dozen years prior), Richard Durbin (lapsed lawyer, and on government payrolls or on contract consistently since 1969), Steny Hoyer (lapsed lawyer, elected official since 1962), James Clyburn (lapsed schoolteacher, l/t patronage holder in a succession of state administrations in South Carolina); Patty Murray (lapsed daycare supervisor). Their educational and occupational background runs the gamut from A to B.

23. Subsidies and aid from the West gave him the incentive to keep the country in a desperate condition.

    Not-RIP.

24. The rule of law, private property rights and the 5 critical cultural virtues embraced, neglected or rejected tell the story. In every continent where those factors are not the norm, so too does the degree of socioeconomic success of those societies reflect that reality.

25. All of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa is a cesspool of corruption and malmanagement. Lagos was recently deemed the 2nd worst city on the planet—Caracas came in at 10th in this ranking by The Economist (London)!
    South Africa was strong, administered by the white educated minority, until the anti-Apartheid movement began. That movement began in the USA!
    I was in SA in the 1960s and it was a marvelous country, still is, but the corruption and inter-tribal combat by the Bantus has been overwhelming. The SA constitution was recently (2018) amended to allow expropriation of white-owned land without compensation. Hmm, sounds like Mugabe. You think the outcome will be different this time?
    My own personal belief is that Africans regardless of location are congenitally resistant to lawful, civilized governance. See Africa–any country, see the American black-majority cities like DC, Baltimore, Southside Chicago. See Obama! See the failed black female candidate for GA governorship who still claims she won but wuz robbed. It is somehow in their DNA. Yes there are mutants, Clarence Thomas and his progenitors among them, but these outliers do not disprove my thesis. Blacks are overwhelmingly pro-Democrat though these same people, the current candidates, are snakes.

26. “Absolute power is when a man is starving and you are the only one able to give him food.”
    – Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean dictator
    (The Times, UK, July 9, 2004)

27. I know it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, but if I had been President I would have sent Delta Force in to assassinate Mugabe as stealthily as possible. It might have made a difference. No guarantees, though.

28. We visited Karen Blixen’s coffee farm near Nairobi.

    J.J.: For my money Blixen’s opening paragraph to “Out of Africa” is one of the greats. One can note the Hemingwayesque details, but it’s the longing sadness of the verb “had” as the second word which kills me every time.

    I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

    –Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), “Out of Africa”

29. Ken on September 6, 2019 at 5:04 pm said:
    “I can’t help but think that all this criticism of Robert Mugabe is just another attempt to demonise people of colour” Titania McGrath

    ME: You can fix ignorance, but you can’t fix stupid.

    Art Deco on September 6, 2019 at 5:25 pm said:
    I think that’s supposed to be a parody Twitter account.

    ME: Psst, Bloomberg & Snopes – my answer was satire.

30. I was in SA in the 1960s and it was a marvelous country, still is, but the corruption and inter-tribal combat by the Bantus has been overwhelming.

    Cicero: I knew a bright, high-powered, gay couple from an Episcopal Church in San Francisco. They were conservative and sponsored me into the church. I liked them a lot. They had friends in South Africa, made several visits and planned to buy property and retire there.

    But by 2008 the bloom was off that rose. SA looked too iffy. They bought a place in New Orleans instead.

31. huxley:

    My impression is that the second half of Blixen’s life was remembrance of things past.

32. “But Titania’s tweet about Mugabe is more proof that it’s become almost impossible to parody left-wing politics. We’re now all laughing on our way to the graveyard.”

    Indeed Cornflower, indeed.

33. Huxley, the film, “Out of Africa” was what inspired us to travel there. After seeing the film, I also read the book.

    I have always been an outdoorsman. The wildness of the bush, as shown in the film, captivated my imagination. I wasn’t disappointed. There is a magic about the bush that is hard to describe. It’s mostly dry plains with Acacia trees scattered about, a few rivers and springs, and it’s teeming with wildlife. The birds alone are worth the trip. To see a 5′ tall Emperor Stork walk a few feet in front of you is an amazing sight. Or the Secretary Bird, or the Weavers, or many other birds which you never see anywhere else.

    I shot a lot of pictures that I go through from time to time to refresh my memory. When I do, I can feel the same sort of yearning for the place that Karen Blixen had, I think. The bush gets under your skin.

    All that said, I wouldn’t want to live there. Rule of law as we know it is missing.The towns and cities are filled with poverty and suffering. The farms are mostly one acre. (Yes, after independence each family that supported Jomo Kenyatta was given one acre to farm.) The farming is done mostly by hand and water is carried long distances to water the crops. Not a very efficient system. And as the children of the farm families have grown up, they have had to leave because the one acre won’t support more adults. Most of the citizens are literate and speak both Swahili and English. They have no coal or petroleum to speak of, so energy is expensive and prized. (As the Progs want to make it here.)

    The way many of the rural people live is similar to the rural U.S. before the REA brought in electricity and tractors became widely available. But the cities and towns are teeming with poor people. They need jobs, but with a kleptocrat government few want to invest.

    It is both a wonderful place and a sad place.

    petroeum

34. My own personal belief is that Africans regardless of location are congenitally resistant to lawful, civilized governance.

    See American cities ruled by blacks. I have had black students who were quite successful but they were NOT American born and raised. My dental hygienist is black, born in Ethiopia and raised in Israel after the Ethiopian Jews were rescued by Israel. She is married to a white Jewish man and they visit Israel every year,

    She tells me about hate stares she gets from black women when she is out in public with her husband, They live in Irvine CA, a very high end suburb.

35. Africa wins again

36. My own personal belief is that Africans regardless of location are congenitally resistant to lawful, civilized governance. See Africa–any country, see the American black-majority cities like DC, Baltimore, Southside Chicago.

    That Curse of Ham thing was pretty potent.

37. Amin also died peacefully in bed, as did Mugabe.

    It’s worse for them now. They should have died a lot sooner, for their own benefit. Same applies to Adolf H.

38. in Kenya to realize that the government was a kleptocracy.
    The white guilt about slavery and colonization has created the cancerous idea that whites “owe” something to blacks. This leads towards supporting kleptocrats.

    All gov’t “aid” is based on, and supports, gov’t oriented kleptocracy. When the gov’t taxes something, and takes away the money of somebody successful, it is not called “theft”. But it mostly is. Tribalism is added so that the leaders of one tribe are willing to tax/ steal from those of other tribes.

    Africa would be much better off with more small ethnic-nation states, and stronger local governments with weaker central gov’ts. Like Switzerland, with its cantons. But no OECD gov’t supports Switzerland local based democracy as a model.

    Mugabe, like most post WW II African leaders, was a Socialist / Marxist. As mentioned above, such folk don’t understand production. It’s not just “owning” the land, it’s making the production oriented decisions of who should do what work, when, using how much of the limited budget. Farm owners are usually the managers, and managerial decision making, if bad, has disastrous long term, often medium term, results.

    One of the huge huge benefits of a market – profit system is that profit, the higher amount of revenue over costs, is also a measure of how much wealth has been “created”. Organizations not creating profit are seldom creating material wealth to feed, clothe, or house real people.

    For the few Africa born folk willing to work hard and learn to work smart, with good morals and unwilling to join in kleptocracy, their best individual decision is to leave their country and go to America, or some G-7 place. This brain drain helps America, but hurts the local countries.

    “Aid” should be redirected at starting more local businesses and helping them run at a local profit.

39. J.J, I totally understand your memories of Africa. I spent over a decade in Africa as a US diplomat, five countries spanning the west, central, and southern parts of the continent. If I started writing out my feelings about the place it wouldn’t stop until book length was reached. I saw civil war between Tutsis and Hutu, and waded through the death and sludge of Ebola. I saw corruption (had to try to do my job through much of it) beyond the imagination of anyone who hasn’t also personally experienced it – everywhere, from the destroyed societies of Burundi and Liberia to the slowly decaying, formerly developed society of post-Apartheid South Africa. I’m now posted in Asia, and I look back at Africa mostly with despair.

    But the vistas and the magic of the land itself stay with me. And the warmth of the people. As for Mugabe, good riddance to bad blood.

40. I was in Rhodesia in the early 1970s and it was a beautiful and prosperous country. It had a national airline and a national railroad. That’s all gone. Now the joke is that you used to visit Rhodesia to see the ruins of Zimbabwe and now you visit Zimbabwe to see the ruins of Rhodesia.

41. Tucker Carlson reported on the praise for the memory of dictator Magabe that our embassy in Zimbabwe posted, and called for the recall of our Ambassador there, who Tucker said, must have OK’d this very unmerited praise.

    Well, its being reported today that the Embassy took down this praise.*

    Here’s hoping that the Ambassador goes too–it looks like he or she has been in their post too long and, somehow, bought into the “glory” of Magabe’s reign.

    P.S.–This certainly does testify to the power of Carlson’s show, and I hope that the President watches it, because while Carlson is not right on all the issues (I happen to think his essential pacifism, and his willingness for us to retreat from some of the conflicts we’re involved in around the world is not the right way to go) he does bring up the important issues, and ones that the MSM deliberately does not report on, hoping that no one becomes aware of them.

    * https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/us-embassy-in-zeimbabwe-deletes-outrageous-tweet-on-murderous-tyrant-mugabe-after-tucker-carlson-calls-for-ambassador-to-be-recalled/

42. Lew:

    If you were there for the Hutu/Tutsi thing, we must have overlapped. I was PAO in Nairobi at the time. Would be interesting to share stories of the continent and our times there.

    And yes, I share your feelings for the vast vistas of East Africa and the warmth of the people. And for the dance of Dahomey and Zaire (Benin and Congo, now).

    Neo: If you can send Lew my email address, he can decide whether or not he wants to get in contact.

43. In the seventies I remember reading about Ian Smith, the last white Prime Minister of Rhodesia, who was vilified in the press as a horrible racist bigot. Given American civil rights struggles, I believed it. Looking back, I no longer think his story is so simple. Likewise today’s black Zimbabweans:

    While acknowledging the privileged position whites had under Smith, several commentators have latterly agreed with his claims that many black Zimbabweans preferred him to Mugabe with hindsight, albeit a very low bar. “Smith’s image improved inversely as Mugabe’s plummeted,” Johnson wrote. “When he walked the streets of Harare, Africans would almost queue up to grasp his hand and wish him well.” “If you were to go to Harare today [in 2007] and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader—Smith or Mugabe—the answer would be almost unanimous”, Boynton asserted; “And it would not be Mugabe.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Smith#Character,_reputation_and_legacy

44. Cicero,

    “congenitally”, “DNA”?

    This is BS and what you wrote above is racist. I lived in Tanzania for a couple of years and have traveled in several other African countries. There is nothing wrong or inferior about Africans as a race. The problems of the sub-Saharan Africans are purely cultural.

    Eurasians got their start on civilization 6,000 years ago when agriculture was invented. Africa had almost no native species of plants or animals appropriate for domestication. It was not until beans and rice were introduced from outside only 600 years ago to the Bantu of West Africa that their journey of civilization began. They have been catching up ever since.

    Your blatant and ignorant racism only serves to reinforce the leftist narrative about Conservatives and Republicans.

45. Tom Grey,

    The most effective “aid” is foriegn investment. This produces both cultural and techical skills transfers. Most of the governmental “aid” serves only to prop up the kleptocracies and to support the bureaucracies of the donor nations.

46. Your blatant and ignorant racism only serves to reinforce the leftist narrative about Conservatives and Republicans.

    This is, ironically, a diversitist (i.e. color judgment) statement in response to a purportedly diversitist sentiment. That said, I agree with the need to be careful when inferring and presenting color judgments based on genetic markers and phenotypic attributes.

47. The most effective “aid” is foriegn investment.

    While smoothing functions (e.g. welfare, charity) serve a legitimate, limited purpose, as progressive processes they are notoriously detrimental (e.g. spoiled child syndrome) to human development and dignity.

48. That Curse of Ham thing was pretty potent.

    .. but not terminal. With the adoption of a productive philosophy, there have been positive developments throughout Africa. Principles matter.

49. Ascribing Africa’s problems to something innate and genetic is, among other things, a copout. We’ve had this argument before here, and I have no desire to go into it again. There are plenty of more obvious reasons Africa has problems, mostly cultural and historical as well as geographic and climatic. There are plenty of highly intelligent people there, as well. In fact, some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met are from Africa.

    I wrote a post about Africa’s problems, here.

50. I like to read the warm feelings that those of you who are former residents of Africa express for the special people and places there. (I was going to write ‘spaces’ instead, but didn’t want to assume that it was only the bush that enthralled you.) Have never read Out of Africa yet, though. Thank you, F, J.J. and Lew, for commenting at length.

51. Ascribing Africa’s problems to something innate and genetic is, among other things, a copout.

    neo: Refusing to consider the possibility that a population whose IQ Bell Curve is centered on 85 versus 100 might have something to do with its problems in running a 21st century society strikes me as a cop-out. (Made worse by its high IQ members tending to emigrate to the first world for understandable reasons.)

    Obviously Africa does not have one single overriding problem, but many. And obviously the Bell Curve argument does not deny there are highly intelligent Africans either.

    However, beyond that I have no desire to go into it either. My conclusion is that it’s just too dangerous to talk about for all sorts of reasons.

52. huxley:

    That IQ evidence has been discussed on this blog many times. I have considered it and found it wanting. But it’s interesting to see that some people seem to feel certain about things that are far from certain. (That last sentence does not refer to you.)

53. J.J.,

    It’s been over twenty years since I read it but I remember enjoying Beryl Markham’s memoir ‘West With The Night’ even more than ‘Out Of Africa’. She was an aviation pioneer and had encouragement (help?) writing her book from Ernest Hemingway. You might want to give it a look.

54. Huxley,

    Your argument assumes that the “nature vs. nurture” debate has been forever settled in favor of “nature”. In fact, it hasn’t, and science is discovering more and more of the mechanisms by which the brain is formed and altered by its environment. We know that poor nutrition and lack of stimuli when children are very young produces dullards.

    I often joked, after living in Africa, that any people who were so clever about inventing new ways to steal from my project couldn’t be THAT stupid!

    No, this is not about genetic inferiority. It is about culture. And culture changes slowly.

55. “And culture changes slowly.” – Roy

    Unless you devote the time, effort, money, and ruthlessness to the change that the Leftists have spent on America.
    Let’s call it “tough love” instead: if what we know about the solutions to the dysfunctions of American and African culture could be applied for a generation or two, I suspect the IQ deficit would disappear.

56. Molly Brown: “It’s been over twenty years since I read it but I remember enjoying Beryl Markham’s memoir ‘West With The Night’ even more than ‘Out Of Africa’.”

    Molly, I did some looking around and found you are not the only one who enjoyed the book. Hemingway was a big fan.

    This passage: “To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.” which I found in a review of the book, is enough to whet my appetite. Thanks for the recommendation.

57. AesopFan,

    It’s not that easy. About 95% of a person’s character and personality are formed by the time they are six. This means that the parents are the overwhelming influence in a child’s development, and parents pass on the cultural values they inherited.

    Unless you want to propose separating babies from their birth mothers, and that is a place I am not going.

58. Roy, a valid point, and why I extended my generation to two, so as to raise up the first generation of mothers & fathers with correct principles, who can pass on the new culture themselves.
    And the Left didn’t have to separate babies from their birth mothers: they convinced the moms to voluntarily relinquish control to daycare (for the poor) and servants (for the rich).

    The problem of culture change is not new.
    The need to begin training at birth is one reason Moses kept the Israelites in the wilderness until their Egyptian-influenced parents passed away.

    Reagan: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

59. Here’s Don Surber on Mugabe
    https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2019/09/mugabe-is-one-left-wanted.html#more

    “Of course Democrat presidential candidate Bill de Blasio attended a dinner honoring Robert Mugabe. The late dictator was the ruler Mayor de Blasio longs to be, and that Democrats long to have.”

    Dems so often admire the strongman socialists willing to murder their opponents in order to bring socialism, and its cultural changes, to a society.

    Aid fails in Africa just as it fails in the big-city ghettos full of poor people. Primarily culture. And, a similar “middle class flight” occurs for those few among the poor — when they have a chance to poor area, they leave. Leave, rather than stay and be a local example, role model, helper for others, so the poor community where they came from is impoverished further.

60. Aid fails in Africa just as it fails in the big-city ghettos full of poor people. Primarily culture.

    There are multiple layers of confusion in this statement.

61. About 95% of a person’s character and personality are formed by the time they are six.

    Thanks for the ex cathedra pronouncement. Been an education.

62. Art Deco,

    What I said is something that every parent already knows and which has been repeatedly confirmed in scientific studies. No invocation of papal infallibility was required.

    Is this sort of sniping from you absolutely necessary?

63. I forget where I read about this example–perhaps it was here–but that example was that laptops were given to children in some poor African? villages, as a way to help the children in these villages to become more educated. (Seems to me I’ve seen a TV commercial about how computers and other technology was “enriching” the lives of people all over the world. )

    The result was that most of the laptops were not used for their intended purposes, some large percentage of them were trashed, and some were being used as things like door props, and nightlights because of the light output from their screens.

    I take it from this example that the lesson is that, unless you are willing to make a large preliminary investment in changing a culture, just throwing things/technology at people who don’t/can’t appreciate what it’s benefits are–if they even recognize them as a “benefit”–will not do very much good.

64. ex President Jimmy Carter helped put Rhodesia on the road to Mugabe.

    Good old American country of the brave, spreading freedom and liberty for all.

65. The need to begin training at birth is one reason Moses kept the Israelites in the wilderness until their Egyptian-influenced parents passed away.

    That’s quite correct Aesop. You are using that spiritual perception, eh.

    Recall also that not even Moses was allowed to go to the new land. Old energies and old genetic constructs must die, the Old Guard must die, if they want to get anything really new done.

    Have you awakened from the Dream?

    It’s also why the scientific community has so many orthodox unchallenged premises and presumptions. They get angsty whenever someone starts questioning the basics.

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