International Affairs: October 2006 Archives
Bravo to Angelina Jolie for standing up to the corruption that runs rampant through third-world non-governmental aid organizations. As I've written in my many posts about foolish foreign aid, the vast majority of money that's given to help poor and oppressed people tends to go straight into the pockets of the tyrants oppressing them.
An associate of Angelina Jolie has said a lawsuit may be filed on behalf of the Hollywood actress against the head of a Cambodian aid group she alleges misappropriated her donations."We are considering filing a lawsuit to recover the hundreds of thousands of dollars that is missing and which he was responsible for," Trevor Neilson, who is the philanthropic and political advisor for Jolie and partner Brad Pitt, told The Associated Press in New York Monday.
Neilson was referring to Mounh Sarath, director of Cambodian Vision in Development, to whom Jolie once gave funds for conservation and community development work in Cambodia.
"We have specific evidence (of) him having taken the money, and we are considering whether to file a lawsuit or press charges against him in Cambodia," he said.
Too bad the American government and the rest of the world's big givers aren't as diligent in administering our gifts as Jolie seems to be protecting hers.
Mark Steyn has a way with words, and I really like his descriptions of how Democrats play at national security like a shell game.
That's always a good question to put to the left: where do you draw the line? In America, the Democrats have turned national security into a shell game: whichever war you're fighting is never the right one. Whenever they're mocked as soft on jihad, they say, oh no, that's not true, we think Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. They demand 200,000 troops in the Hindu Kush to go cave to cave to find Osama's remains. So they're not soft on the war. It's just that the pea isn't under the Iraq cup, it's under the Afghanistan cup. You get the distinct feeling, though, that if you took them at their word and said OK, 200,000 troops go in next Thursday, you'd suddenly discover that the pea was no longer under the Afghanistan cup but under the Sudanese one. That's certainly how it felt in the fall of 2001, when the Democrats were insisting, a week in, that it was an almighty quagmire and the Taliban could never be toppled. As a practical matter, no matter how frantically the left scramble the thimbles, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.
Democrat and Republican politicians are all power-hungry, but at least the Republican route to power involves American victory and defeat for our enemies.
I certainly don't blame Bono and U2 for moving their operations to the Netherlands to avoid taxes. Everyone hates paying taxes, and we all do whatever we can legally to minimize our payments. Duh. What I do resent is when leftists devise all sorts of ways to spend "public" money but then aren't willing to put up their own cash for the effort.
After Ireland said it would scrap a break that lets musicians and artists avoid paying taxes on royalties, Bono and his U2 bandmates earlier this year moved their music publishing company to the Netherlands. The Dublin group, which Forbes estimates earned $110 million in 2005, will pay about 5 percent tax on their royalties, less than half the Irish rate.
So Bono and the rest were already paying far less than the Irish plebes, and now that their special rate is going to be eliminated they jump ship.
For years, Bono and U2 got a better deal than most Irish taxpayers because songwriters paid no tax on earnings from music publishing. That will change next year, when Ireland limits the tax exemption, which also applies to writers and artists. From Jan. 1, artists that make more than 500,000 euros ($625,450) will pay tax on half their ``creative'' income, according to Ireland's Revenue Authority.Remaining in Ireland would have forced Bono to pay a 42 percent tax on such earnings. Alternatively, the band could have channeled profits through a company to pay the 12.5 percent corporation tax.
Who wants to pay 42% of their income to the government? No one! But some rich leftists are quick to pull their money out of the pot while at the same time haranguing the rest of us for wanting to keep what we earn! Reminds me of environmentalist Barbara Streisand's $22,000 water bill and the like.
All this is aside from the fact that most of the foreign aid Bono advocates is foolish, misguided, and actually serves to strengthen the tyrannical powers that cause third-world poverty in the first place.
Is it just me, or can Communists barely speak English? Says the "Democratic" "People's" "Republic" of Korea (i.e., North Korea):
The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.It has been confirmed that there was no such danger as radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test as it was carried out under scientific consideration and careful calculation.
The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.
It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.
What the heck? If they can build a bomb, can't they teach at least one commie to speak English?
Update:
Via my brother, here's a Slate piece about how North Koreans learn English.
As cellphones spread like wildfire over the African continent it should be humbling to leftists that big corporations are helping poor Africans in more practical ways than tree-huggers and socialist NGOs could ever imagine.
Huddled under a spiky tree next to the new cellular mast, Mhlapo interrupts a family meeting to check an SMS and deftly fires off a reply."Now I can contact my children. Before we had to wait months for them to come," she said in a mix of Sotho and Afrikaans, tucking her prized phone away inside a striped dress.
Mhlapo says she spends as much as 200 rand on airtime some months. Margaret Chinhete, a Zimbabwean woman who lives down the gravel road says she spends about 100 rand a month on her new phone, but easily covers that with the extra cash she makes from selling crafts now she can contact customers by phone.
"When I bought this I had never made a phone call. Now I use it to call business contacts. It saves me from walking kilometers every day and I have doubled my monthly earnings," Chinhete told Reuters, as she hauled home her wares.
Rural areas of the third-world are skipping over telephone lines completely and going straight to cell service, which requires less infrastructure per service area and per person. The testimony above shows that the technology immediately enhances quality of life, and as more people get connected the network effect will keep the benefits growing. Combined with ultra-low-cost computing, rural Africa may be able to leapfrog decades of development and have internet connectivity before electricity grids.
