Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Christopher Hitchens wants to know why Mugabe is still ensconced in Zimbawe.
…the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe predates the “Arab spring” by several years and must now count in its own right as one of the world’s most stubborn and brave movements.
Peter Godwin’s most recent book, The Fear, updates the continuing story of popular resistance. In my opinion it’s not quite as powerful as his earlier book, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, but it does convey the awful immediate reality of a state where official lawlessness and cruelty are the norm. …
…But don’t read them just for outrage at the terrible offense to humanity. They also describe a new sort of Zimbabwean, emancipated from racial and tribal feeling by a long common struggle against a man who doesn’t scruple to employ racial and tribal demagoguery. In those old days of arguing with the white settlers, one became used to their endless jeering refrain: “Majority rule will mean one man, one vote—one time!” They couldn’t have been more wrong. Since gaining independence three decades ago, the Zimbabwean people have braved every kind of intimidation and repression to go on registering their votes. They have made dogged use of the courts and the press, which continue to function in a partial way, to uphold pluralism and dissent. Mugabe has lost important votes in Parliament and—last time—his electoral majority in the country at large. Only the undisguised use of force and the wholesale use of corruption have kept his party in office. One day, the civic resistance to this, which was often looked-down upon by people considering themselves revolutionary, will earn the esteem and recognition it deserves.
Scott Adams writes an informative article about how college, and life, taught him to be an entrepreneur.
I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?
I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.
There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans. …
… If you’re having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.
Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.
Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn’t work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. …
Andrew Malcolm writing in the LA Times explains why the president is speaking on the deficit today.
If President Obama is in political trouble, just wait a minute. He’ll give a speech. He thinks speech-making is his best skill and clearly prefers campaigning over presidenting at a desk.
Oh, look! Obama’s giving another speech this afternoon.
It’s at George Washington University, the administration’s new favorite homefield speech-giving place where Obama had Hillary Clinton talk about foreign policy a few weeks ago.
Obama has looked distracted in recent weeks. He launched a war in Libya while taking his family around South America. For more than a week Obama had Clinton do the public explaining and take the “Say What, a Third War?” heat for the guy who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries by arguing against such irrelevant foreign conflicts.
Nine days after the first Tomahawks blew something up in Tripoli, a besieged Obama finally talked about how it was suddenly in America’s interest to end the 42-year reign of a notorious bad guy. Obama said he was worried that Kadafi would kill innocent civilians, although worse threats to civilians go on every day in countless lands without U.S. military intervention.
This includes Syria, where scores have died to government bullets in recent weeks and Obama only sent out his press secretary Jay Carney to strike fear into the heart of President Bashar al-Assad by issuing two stern warnings.
Last week when the United States government faced an historic shutdown, Capt. Quixote was off in Philadelphia talking of windmills before speaking at an Al Sharpton gala in New York. …
In the Right Wing News, John Hawkins interviews Thomas Sowell on his new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Second Edition.
…Now many people blame the economic issues in Africa, India, Pakistan, the Middle East on colonization by Western nations and stinginess on the same part by those nations. …
…The hard data shows the opposite of what they’re saying. You can look at the case of those countries which finally opened up to the rest of the world and allowed foreign investors in and foreign businesses in, the two biggest examples in recent times, India and China. People by the millions have risen out of poverty in China and in India after they began to open up their markets to Western investments.
None of this is mysterious. When people come in to build phones or other devices in China, the people who set up those business in China make money, but the people in China also make money. The reason is because there is a net increase in the wealth produced by the country. I’m always amazed at how little interest people on the Left have in what does and does not increase the actual production of wealth. They are hypnotized by the notion of redistribution of wealth without any concern about how is the wealth produced in the first place. You can’t redistribute it until it’s produced and if your methods cause less to be produced, people are going to be poorer. …
We have a couple of views on the effects of the Tea Parties. First, from Forbes, a cheerleader.
… It was President Obama’s abuses of power and extravagant spending that launched the modern Tea Party. Like King George, Obama thinks himself above the law. The stimulus spending did more to funnel taxpayer money to those who helped elect him than boost the economy. He mandates we buy insurance then scurrilously dispenses Obamacare waivers according to potential votes or campaign contributions. Without abiding by the Constitution, the law is whatever Obama deems it. Justice becomes whatever he can get away with.
Society instituted governments to defend the God given inalienable rights resident in our persons and property; not to favor certain parties or promote specific outcomes according to political calculation. If everyone was just or we could all defend ourselves, government would be redundant. As James Madison encapsulated, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” We’re not angels so government must protect against crime, fraud and foreign invasion, but those inhabiting government aren’t angels either. Their authority must be well-defined and limited. Domestic functions are best administered locally where politicians are more easily held to account. …
Then W. W. from the Economist Blog – Democracy in America, who says the GOP would have done just fine in 2010 even if the Tea Party had never existed.
… So why did Democrats suffer a whupping in November? As someone once said, it’s the economy, stupid. Again and again political scientists find that macroeconomic variables drive electoral outcomes more than any other factors. The Democrats did about as badly as we should expect the majority party to do during a brutal recession. Nevertheless, humans have story-hungry minds that see agency and intention everywhere. It rains because the gods want it to rain, and Republicans seized the House because Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers funneled a fortune into an astroturf movement that got out the conservative vote. …