These people have the best intentions of doing what they can to help Africa and I commend them for their efforts. It is just unfortunate that the corruption in most (not all) governments will most likely abuse any aid given and very little will reach the people. Of all the money raised and given, I wonder how much will be spent on weopons. I would like to see the money raised actually purchase food, water, wells, water purifying plants, etc instead of writing them a blank check.
The poster is correct in saying that this aid is just a band-aid and can only help in the short turn. Long term solutions as stability, infrastructure, education, and freedom will have to play a role in the longer term solutions.
RJacksonB - 08:07am on 07/03/2005
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. [...]
Say Anything » Please Stop The Aid - 06:07am on 07/06/2005
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. Free Speechless in WashingtonStephan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has a post on the actions of a judge in Thurston County Washington, just down the sound from me in Tacoma:"A dangerous, unconstitutional ruling” [...]
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. [...]
Former Naval Person - 01:01am on 01/13/2006
[...] Free Speechless in Washington How Long Can We Keep Them At Guantanamo? Eugene Volohk at The Volohk Consipiracy has a nice answer to the tripe from the left about how we need to either charge the prisoners at Guantanamo and give them a trial, or release them. This is a typical presentation of that argument from Final Call.com by Jim Lobe: The latest broadside was issued June 13 by Republican Senator John McCain who said Washington should either try the 520 detainees currently held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba or let them go home. ÂI think the key to this is to move the judicial process forward, so that these individuals will be brought to trial for any crime that they are accused of, rather than residing in the Guantanamo facility in perpetuity, Sen. McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, told reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference called by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. He recalled that he and two Democratic senators had sent a letter to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld after visiting Guantanamo two years ago, recommending that he Âtry Âem or release them. See also The Atlanta Journal Constitution here: McCain is emerging as a voice of conscience and nuance on what to do about the 3-year-old prison complex, which has been condemned by human rights groups as mistreating prisoners. A veteran Navy pilot who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton,” McCain agreed with former presidential candidate Ross Perot  who worked to improve the treatment of American POWs in Vietnam  that reports of abuses at Guantanamo could become an incentive to treat future U.S. captives brutally. Eugene at Volohk Conspiracy answers this argument on his blog: U.S. detentions of enemy combatants, some people say, are troublesome because they are potentially of indefinite duration. America held enemy prisoners during World War II and earlier wars, but at least there the wars were over in several years; the war on terror could go on indefinitely. Isn’t that unfair to the detainees? Try them or let them go, people say. Note that this argument is independent of the conditions of confinement, or of the argument that some of the detainees may have been seized by mistake; people say this even about prisoners who are definitely al-Qaeda, Taliban, or Iraqi insurgents. This argument, I think, is a mistake. Let me briefly explain why. The purpose of detaining enemy combatants is prevention. An enemy soldier wants to kill our or our allies’ soldiers (and often civilians). We normally stop that by killing him. But when he surrenders, we prefer not to kill him: Killing the enemy generally isn’t our goal, but just the means to the end of protecting ourselves and our allies  and if we can serve that end by locking a captured enemy soldier up instead of killing him, we do that (and are required to do that by the laws of war). The thing that makes this logic work, however, is our ability to keep the man locked up. When we release him, he can go right back to killing our soldiers. What’s more, it seems quite likely that he will: If he tried to fight us once, why wouldn’t he do that again? We release ordinary criminals after some time chiefly because we hope that the term in prison has deterred them from repeating their crimes. But someone who obviously isn’t deterred by the risk of being killed (the high risk, when you’re a small force fighting the U.S. military) isn’t going to be deterred by the risk of repeat incarceration. Thus, we have three options: (1) Kill them on the battlefield, and protect our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. (2) Lock them up until we feel confident that the war is pretty much over (which indeed could be decades), and protect our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. (3) Or in a fit of misguided mercy  misguided because it is mercy to the bad that ends up hurting the good  let them out and allow them to again kill our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. Option 3 strikes me as deeply unsound, and not required either by justice or by international law. But why not try them, then, some people ask? Well, as to enemy soldiers who were fighting in uniform as part of a disciplined force, there’s nothing to try them for: Fighting as a soldier who complies with the laws of war is not a crime. (If one weren’t fighting in a war, one would surely be committing the crime of attempted murder, but being a soldier who fights according to the laws of war is actually a good defense against that charge, subject to various caveats.) They aren’t being locked up to punish them for a crime; they are being locked up to prevent their engaging in lawful but deadly attacks on us. ... But as a matter of law and of morality, it’s perfectly proper to keep an enemy soldier detained (again, I set aside the separate questions related to conditions of detention, and related to confirming that the person is indeed an enemy soldier) until he is no longer dangerous to us, even if that means he’ll be locked up for the rest of his life. It’s that; killing them on the battlefield; or letting them go so they can kill us. What’s your choice? From the Los Angeles Times we learn that the prisoners will not be told of the London bombing, and something else of interest:“Obviously this appears to be a terrorist-related incident and for some of the enemy combatants we are holding, they would view this as encouraging,” Hood said. “They would view this as part of another jihadist attack on the West … So this is not the sort of current world event we would share with the detainees.” A single group, al-Qaida in Europe, claimed both the London bombings and those in March 2003 in Madrid. Hood declined to say whether there would be any attempts to collect intelligence from detainees about the attack. Many of the detainees have been at the U.S. Naval base for more than three years with little contact with the outside world. They can send and receive mail, which the military reads and sometimes redacts for security purposes. The military posts some news headlines at some of the five prisons holding the suspects. The prisoners, who come from more than 40 countries, are all suspected of ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime that sheltered it. Most have not been charged. Nine British citizens were held at Guantanamo but all have been released. I wonder what they are up to now? Back in December, it was felt they could not be held in Britain. From the Washington Post we read: British Court Deals Blow to Terror Law Foreigners Can’t Be Held Indefinitely, It Says LONDON , Dec. 16—Britain’s highest court of appeal struck a blow against the government’s anti-terrorism policy Thursday by ruling it cannot detain suspected foreign terrorists indefinitely without trial. In a stinging rebuke to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, the panel ruled 8 to 1 that the provision authorizing the detentions violated European human rights laws and was discriminatory because it applied only to foreigners. Eleven suspects are being held under the policy, five of whom have been in custody for nearly three years. Suppose they had any interest in making trouble for the government after they were released from London’s custody? Listen to this clip recorded off the BBC by C-SPAN of Tony Blair right after the London Bombing. This is just after he was told of the bombing and shows what his top priority is. How Best to Help Africa WizbangBlog has a nice post on an interview in a German newspaper on aid for Africa. From Rob Port, guest blogger we read: Excerpt from a Spiegel interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati: SPIEGEL : Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa… Shikwati: ... for God’s sake, please just stop. SPIEGEL : Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty. Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. SPIEGEL : Do you have an explanation for this paradox? Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid. Read the whole thing. Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. Free Speechless in Washington Stephan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has a post on the actions of a judge in Thurston County Washington, just down the sound from me in Tacoma: “A dangerous, unconstitutional ruling” Today’s Seattle Times editorial defends KVI and excoriates Thurston County Superior Court Judge Christopher Wickham for his ruling that John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur had to report their airtime advocating for I-912 as an in-kind contribution: Two years ago, when the federal campaign-finance law reached the U.S. Supreme Court, dissenting justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas warned that something like this would happen. We doubted it; it seemed clear to us that the law applied to ads, not editorial content. We thought Thomas was over the top when he said campaign-finance law was leading toward “outright regulation of the press.” Judge Wickham has made a step toward just that. It is a dangerous, unconstitutional ruling. The losers need to appeal it and the appellate courts need to reverse it. I’d go one step farther. The voters of Thurston County also need to deny Judge Wickham another term on the bench.There’s more at Michelle Malkin’s site. The sources of the problem—as political bloggers who’ve been fighting similar regulatory encroachment battles on the online front know—go higher up than that, of course. Their names rhyme with McGain and Feincold. Looks like talk radio needs a Mike Krempasky and an industry free speech coalition. Quick. Once again the actions of Senator McCain go against the most logical of ideas: Free Speech. Combine that with his recommendation to let the terrorists go and you have the makings of a truly idiotic presidential candidate. Can you imagine a worse president than McCain? That’s it for today, Podcatchers! What other podcasters are talking about: Podcast Podcasting Vote for the Rip & Read Blogger Podcast at Podcast Alley. Click here: My Odeo Channel [...]
These people have the best intentions of doing what they can to help Africa and I commend them for their efforts. It is just unfortunate that the corruption in most (not all) governments will most likely abuse any aid given and very little will reach the people. Of all the money raised and given, I wonder how much will be spent on weopons. I would like to see the money raised actually purchase food, water, wells, water purifying plants, etc instead of writing them a blank check.
The poster is correct in saying that this aid is just a band-aid and can only help in the short turn. Long term solutions as stability, infrastructure, education, and freedom will have to play a role in the longer term solutions.
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. [...]
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. Free Speechless in WashingtonStephan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has a post on the actions of a judge in Thurston County Washington, just down the sound from me in Tacoma:"A dangerous, unconstitutional ruling” [...]
[...] Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. [...]
[...] Free Speechless in Washington How Long Can We Keep Them At Guantanamo? Eugene Volohk at The Volohk Consipiracy has a nice answer to the tripe from the left about how we need to either charge the prisoners at Guantanamo and give them a trial, or release them. This is a typical presentation of that argument from Final Call.com by Jim Lobe: The latest broadside was issued June 13 by Republican Senator John McCain who said Washington should either try the 520 detainees currently held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba or let them go home. ÂI think the key to this is to move the judicial process forward, so that these individuals will be brought to trial for any crime that they are accused of, rather than residing in the Guantanamo facility in perpetuity, Sen. McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, told reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference called by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. He recalled that he and two Democratic senators had sent a letter to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld after visiting Guantanamo two years ago, recommending that he Âtry Âem or release them. See also The Atlanta Journal Constitution here: McCain is emerging as a voice of conscience and nuance on what to do about the 3-year-old prison complex, which has been condemned by human rights groups as mistreating prisoners. A veteran Navy pilot who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton,” McCain agreed with former presidential candidate Ross Perot  who worked to improve the treatment of American POWs in Vietnam  that reports of abuses at Guantanamo could become an incentive to treat future U.S. captives brutally. Eugene at Volohk Conspiracy answers this argument on his blog: U.S. detentions of enemy combatants, some people say, are troublesome because they are potentially of indefinite duration. America held enemy prisoners during World War II and earlier wars, but at least there the wars were over in several years; the war on terror could go on indefinitely. Isn’t that unfair to the detainees? Try them or let them go, people say. Note that this argument is independent of the conditions of confinement, or of the argument that some of the detainees may have been seized by mistake; people say this even about prisoners who are definitely al-Qaeda, Taliban, or Iraqi insurgents. This argument, I think, is a mistake. Let me briefly explain why. The purpose of detaining enemy combatants is prevention. An enemy soldier wants to kill our or our allies’ soldiers (and often civilians). We normally stop that by killing him. But when he surrenders, we prefer not to kill him: Killing the enemy generally isn’t our goal, but just the means to the end of protecting ourselves and our allies  and if we can serve that end by locking a captured enemy soldier up instead of killing him, we do that (and are required to do that by the laws of war). The thing that makes this logic work, however, is our ability to keep the man locked up. When we release him, he can go right back to killing our soldiers. What’s more, it seems quite likely that he will: If he tried to fight us once, why wouldn’t he do that again? We release ordinary criminals after some time chiefly because we hope that the term in prison has deterred them from repeating their crimes. But someone who obviously isn’t deterred by the risk of being killed (the high risk, when you’re a small force fighting the U.S. military) isn’t going to be deterred by the risk of repeat incarceration. Thus, we have three options: (1) Kill them on the battlefield, and protect our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. (2) Lock them up until we feel confident that the war is pretty much over (which indeed could be decades), and protect our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. (3) Or in a fit of misguided mercy  misguided because it is mercy to the bad that ends up hurting the good  let them out and allow them to again kill our and our allies’ soldiers and civilians. Option 3 strikes me as deeply unsound, and not required either by justice or by international law. But why not try them, then, some people ask? Well, as to enemy soldiers who were fighting in uniform as part of a disciplined force, there’s nothing to try them for: Fighting as a soldier who complies with the laws of war is not a crime. (If one weren’t fighting in a war, one would surely be committing the crime of attempted murder, but being a soldier who fights according to the laws of war is actually a good defense against that charge, subject to various caveats.) They aren’t being locked up to punish them for a crime; they are being locked up to prevent their engaging in lawful but deadly attacks on us. ... But as a matter of law and of morality, it’s perfectly proper to keep an enemy soldier detained (again, I set aside the separate questions related to conditions of detention, and related to confirming that the person is indeed an enemy soldier) until he is no longer dangerous to us, even if that means he’ll be locked up for the rest of his life. It’s that; killing them on the battlefield; or letting them go so they can kill us. What’s your choice? From the Los Angeles Times we learn that the prisoners will not be told of the London bombing, and something else of interest:“Obviously this appears to be a terrorist-related incident and for some of the enemy combatants we are holding, they would view this as encouraging,” Hood said. “They would view this as part of another jihadist attack on the West … So this is not the sort of current world event we would share with the detainees.” A single group, al-Qaida in Europe, claimed both the London bombings and those in March 2003 in Madrid. Hood declined to say whether there would be any attempts to collect intelligence from detainees about the attack. Many of the detainees have been at the U.S. Naval base for more than three years with little contact with the outside world. They can send and receive mail, which the military reads and sometimes redacts for security purposes. The military posts some news headlines at some of the five prisons holding the suspects. The prisoners, who come from more than 40 countries, are all suspected of ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime that sheltered it. Most have not been charged. Nine British citizens were held at Guantanamo but all have been released. I wonder what they are up to now? Back in December, it was felt they could not be held in Britain. From the Washington Post we read: British Court Deals Blow to Terror Law Foreigners Can’t Be Held Indefinitely, It Says LONDON , Dec. 16—Britain’s highest court of appeal struck a blow against the government’s anti-terrorism policy Thursday by ruling it cannot detain suspected foreign terrorists indefinitely without trial. In a stinging rebuke to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, the panel ruled 8 to 1 that the provision authorizing the detentions violated European human rights laws and was discriminatory because it applied only to foreigners. Eleven suspects are being held under the policy, five of whom have been in custody for nearly three years. Suppose they had any interest in making trouble for the government after they were released from London’s custody? Listen to this clip recorded off the BBC by C-SPAN of Tony Blair right after the London Bombing. This is just after he was told of the bombing and shows what his top priority is. How Best to Help Africa WizbangBlog has a nice post on an interview in a German newspaper on aid for Africa. From Rob Port, guest blogger we read: Excerpt from a Spiegel interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati: SPIEGEL : Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa… Shikwati: ... for God’s sake, please just stop. SPIEGEL : Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty. Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. SPIEGEL : Do you have an explanation for this paradox? Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid. Read the whole thing. Like I said before, if we want to solve the problems facing Africa we need to stop simply throwing money at the continent and start pushing for political changes that will bring to power truly free and democratic governments. Free Speechless in Washington Stephan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has a post on the actions of a judge in Thurston County Washington, just down the sound from me in Tacoma: “A dangerous, unconstitutional ruling” Today’s Seattle Times editorial defends KVI and excoriates Thurston County Superior Court Judge Christopher Wickham for his ruling that John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur had to report their airtime advocating for I-912 as an in-kind contribution: Two years ago, when the federal campaign-finance law reached the U.S. Supreme Court, dissenting justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas warned that something like this would happen. We doubted it; it seemed clear to us that the law applied to ads, not editorial content. We thought Thomas was over the top when he said campaign-finance law was leading toward “outright regulation of the press.” Judge Wickham has made a step toward just that. It is a dangerous, unconstitutional ruling. The losers need to appeal it and the appellate courts need to reverse it. I’d go one step farther. The voters of Thurston County also need to deny Judge Wickham another term on the bench.There’s more at Michelle Malkin’s site. The sources of the problem—as political bloggers who’ve been fighting similar regulatory encroachment battles on the online front know—go higher up than that, of course. Their names rhyme with McGain and Feincold. Looks like talk radio needs a Mike Krempasky and an industry free speech coalition. Quick. Once again the actions of Senator McCain go against the most logical of ideas: Free Speech. Combine that with his recommendation to let the terrorists go and you have the makings of a truly idiotic presidential candidate. Can you imagine a worse president than McCain? That’s it for today, Podcatchers! What other podcasters are talking about: Podcast Podcasting Vote for the Rip & Read Blogger Podcast at Podcast Alley. Click here: My Odeo Channel [...]