Sentences

Pithiest sentence I read this week:

"They import nothing into their overseas dominions except damaged officials and they export nothing from them except the same officials, worse damaged"

~ Albert Guerard, describing France's adventures in colonialism as quoted by John Gimlette in his amazing book, "Wild Coast".

To me, the best books both inform and entertain. Wild Coast knocks it out of the park in both dimensions.

Scariest sentence I read this week:


"The world needs more effective global economic governance more than ever."

~ Owen Barder on why the WB presidency matters.

Obviously I disagree. I don't think we need ANY "global economic governance".

Conjuring the Congo

The DRC will have a presidential election this November. After 30 plus years of Mobutu, Laurent Kabila overthrew him and, upon his assassination in 2001, his son Joseph Kabila took over.

Joe is in his 10th year of being president and is the front runner in the current election.

Amazingly, Mobutu's son is also a candidate! His political party has the awesomely oxy-moronic title of "Democratic Union of Mobutuists"! (I am not making this up).

I believe there are 32 total presidential candidates running.

The UN is already decrying pre-election violence in the DRC.

People, this is a country of over 70 million people!

If at first you don't succeed....

People, I'm still unhappy about the colonialist fabulism of Bret Stephens in yesterday's WSJ.

Besides the points I already discussed, Stephens claims that unless "the west" is willing to recolonize, it should be obliged to stop pretending that it cares about problematic countries.

I would make a different case: Unless "the west" is willing to undertake a significant increase in legal immigration and/or reduction in barriers to imported goods, it should be obliged to stop pretending that it cares about the people living in problematic countries.

At least allowing greater immigration and lowering trade barriers are things a western country could actually do, and we know they would provide incredible help.

Suppose that Canada announced it was going to make Ivory Coast a colony. What would happen? How would that work out for our northern neighbor?

Sadly it probably wouldn't be much less controversial (at least inside Canada) than an announcement that Canada was going to materially increase it's allowed immigration from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Culture that is Australia: a story in two parts

Part One:

MELBOURNE, Australia – Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald's spotted them wrestling a 5-foot (1.5 meter) python named Boris in the restaurant parking lot, police said Thursday. Victoria state police said the men stole the 8-year-old black-headed python and a lizard from a pet shop on Wednesday. They then brought the snake to the McDonald's parking lot, where they began wrestling with it in front of puzzled customers, police said.

Part Two:

SYDNEY (Reuters) – The cause of a mystery eye ailment that struck about 50 visitors to a dairy pavilion at an agricultural show in Australia has been traced -- to cow urine.
The Royal Adelaide Show had to close its dairy cattle pavilion after an rising number of people reported sore eyes when visiting the judging marquee.
Officials from the South Australia (SA) Health Department were called in to investigate and found the cause of the outbreak was stagnant cow urine.

The Queen must be so proud!