RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/06/24/land-and-demagogy-in-africa/

An author’s up-close view of how disregarding property rights entrenches misery

In starting to confiscate land from white farmers without compensation, the South African government is acting in one of Africa’s most destructive patterns. But to make that case I need the testimony of a most special inside-outsider, who died a number of years ago.

My friend John Broom, white and British-born, was a partner in the Zimbabwean branch of Deloitte & Touche, and then a long-term exile to South Africa and the finance director of the Quaker Peace Center. In 2000, shortly after the Zimbabwean farm invasions began, he nudged me into visiting his modest apartment in a Cape Town suburb: He had things he needed to say to me. Arriving, I found he had a small album lying ready on a table. It was a folder for business cards, more than a hundred of them from the Eighties, and he invited me to page through while he explained what this and that card represented.

Some of the businesses would have been small and ordinary — a picture-framing service and a gift shop, for example. The cards of individuals whose lines of work I couldn’t have identified on my own proved far more interesting. This guy, said John, was an engineer overseas, an expert in processing gold. He explained that, as a rule, Africa controlled too few stages in the addition of value to the raw commodities it produced. Gold, a big part of this natural wealth, was a painful example. Why couldn’t there be a broad-based jewelry trade in a place like Zimbabwe?

John was one of those people who know everybody’s business. He was talking to me because he knew I was stringing for a South African investigative magazine that I found too politically correct (it even supported President Thabo Mbeki in his AIDS denial) and also publishing in conservative journals back in the States. I was going to listen to him about the essential post-liberation role of capitalism.

About the gold processor, God alone knows how John had connected the dots over thousands of miles, but the 1979 end of the black–white civil conflict in Rhodesia, which turned it into liberated Zimbabwe and saw the lifting of international sanctions, coincided with the retirement of this man, whose wife wanted him out of the kitchen. He had agreed to set up shop in Zimbabwe if John would write him the business plan and obtain a license from the new government.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/06/dirty-predatory-reptilian-vile-wicked.html

Gee! Nobody’s perfect, but that’s a bit thick!

It’s what this devastatingly handsome young fella thinks of “the enemies” of Iran, and he lists those enemies in ascending order of, well, all those things, “the Zionists” (now, ain’t that a surprise?) being the worst of all.To quote the translator and uploader, Memri.org:

‘Ayatollah Alireza Ebadi, Khamenei’s representative in the Iranian city of Birjand, said in a May 31, 2019 Friday sermon that aired on Khorasan Jonoobi TV (Iran) that Iran’s “impure and evil” enemy are a “fusion” of Jews and polytheists, and he described it as a dirty, predatory, reptilian, satanic, vile, and wicked “crossbreed of dogs and wolves” that has “pounced on the convoy of humanity.”
 He said that the U.S. was built by oppressive Europeans on the graves of 80 million indigenous people, but that the Zionists are the worst of Iran’s enemies.
 Ayatollah Ebadi then told a story about a doctor who wanted to cure himself of feeling connected to the village fool, and Ebadi said that, likewise, anyone who is attached to the West and its “dirty, anti-human, liberal-democratic ideology that has destroyed the world” should cure themselves.’

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafFiOonf4Y)

From the distracted, embarrassed looks on some of the listeners’ faces, I’d wager that not everyone takes what he’s saying too seriously …

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/11/rise-fall-oxfam-billion-pound-charity-mired-sex-scandal/

“”Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.”

The mixed bag of academics, Quakers and general do-gooders who had gathered inside the Old Library at the University Church in Oxford on October 5 1942 had wanted to help the people of Greece.

The country, occupied by the Nazis and subjected to an Allied naval blockade, was suffering a catastrophic famine. From humble origins – the meeting was chaired by the local vicar Dick Milford – a £1 billion a year international aid empire would be born; an empire whose tentacles stretch into politics, entertainment and trade and which grew so large it covered up a sex scandal that, when it finally became public, almost brought it down.

The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, first begun almost 77 years ago and later shortened to the nifty moniker Oxfam, is now far more than just a famine relief charity. Oxfam is a brand. And now a damaged one.

Its first shop at 17 Broad Street in Oxford, set up in 1948 also doubled up as its headquarters. Now Oxfam operates almost 750 shops in the UK – by comparison Waitrose runs half that number of outlets – that includes not only regular charity stores but specialist bookshops and furniture stores and even boutiques selling bridal wear.

Oxfam puts on its own music festival – called Oxjam – and even provides stewarding for Glastonbury. In the 1960s, Oxfam rolled out its first international franchise to Canada and there are now 19 Oxfam ‘confederations’ working in 90 countries worldwide.

The charity, under the 24-year stewardship of Leslie Kirkley, grew in the 1950s from a “local charity to a world-renowned aid agency”.  In the late 1970s Oxfam effectively got political, launching its first campaigns’ department and followed that with reports on topics that included “Bitter Pills”, which examined the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and poverty.

Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/10/to-beat-china-recognize-taiwan/

The Sino-American trade war is only just beginning. Initial reports show that the American side is faring better than the Chinese, but these reports are hardly conclusive. As David P. Goldman has assessed, China still has a great deal of maneuvering room with which to bludgeon the United States.

What Washington needs in its ongoing trade war is greater leverage. And, that leverage will not be found in the economic realm.

True leverage would keep China’s leadership off-balance. To that end, the United States should recognize Taiwan’s independence.

Beijing has long insisted that Taiwan is part of China and that the two “will be united” . . . someday. Chinese President Xi Jinping, moreover, won’t rule out the use of force in achieving this long-standing aim. Beijing believes it is a fait accompli that Taiwan will be returned to Chinese rule just as the British ultimately gave up prosperous Hong Kong. And once Taiwan is brought under its dominion, China will have secured its maritime border.

One China, Two Systems?
The United States, for its part, has for 40 years tried to thread the needle between appeasing China and backing Taiwan’s independence in all but name.