Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Stories below the fold

Mayor Bloomberg is getting together with other business leaders to implement their own version of the Paris accord.

Well, that will be voluntary, and is good news because unlike the UN, they presumably know something about reality,

They can and should spend their excess money on such things, but when businessmen get huge government subsidies for "green" projects that then go bankrupt (and leave them richer) excuse me for being cynical. IF they had to face their stockholders, and took responsibility for paying their workers decent wages, maybe they might actually develop something practical.

The "activists" seem to like to pontificate (and often make money off of) these things.
Instapundit editorial here. about celebrities and their private jets, and suggests they could teleconfernce instead of going there.

And if they really really  have to attend the conferences, maybe they could sail there, using windpower, and take a small boat up to the city (hey, if the Vikings could get to Paris on their boats, so could Algore).

In the meanwhile, corruption is one problem no one wants to talk about.

Here in the Philippines, the "high roller" who burned the casino during a botched robbery, killing a lot of people worked for the government and is suspected of getting rich from corruption.

The Abus and others are getting money from kidnappings in the south: Awhile back they killed a Canadianbecause the gov't put their foot down about no ransom. The city attack in the south is to get publicyt. to get more money.

So one story that Qatar is being cut off by Egypt and Saudi is because they look the other way at locals funding terrorism. including the pro Iran propaganda, printing often fake news about atrocities of the west etc.

Trump is to blame, of course, and now T Rex and others say the boycott is a bit too much, but it is a start.

Dilbert discusses the power of propaganda in recruiting terrorists.

There is more terrorism in the news, this time in London. So how do the British politicians respond? They do a recruitment ad for more terrorists.
They start by giving the terrorists cool labels, such as “Islamic extremists.” Do you know what sounds like an awesome club for an angry young Muslim to join? I’m thinking “Islamic Extremist” sound about right. That branding should be great for recruitment. The media also helps terror recruitment with their wall-to-wall news about the terrorists’ successes.
very time they mention the body count, the bad guys cheer. A better approach for the media, if they want to be helpful, might involve inviting a continuous line of Muslim scholars and critics to talk about how these “gullible losers” were duped by ISIS to kill themselves and spend eternity in Hell. And we need lots of visual and other persuasion about Hell. I want Photoshopped images of the terrorists burning for eternity.

This is one reason that here in the Philippines, they tend to underplay terrorism attacks.

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another story not usually noted: StrategyPage notes that Deaths in Mexico are almost as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan.

ay 10, 2017: Some analysts are claiming that Mexico is now the second most deadly conflict in the world, behind Syria. That is open to debate. The analysts focus on casualty figures in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2016 17,000 people were killed in Afghanistan and 16,000 in Iraq. Mexico’s Cartel War had 23,000 fatalities during 2016. Adjusting for population size the Mexican fatalities are less than half those suffered in Afghanistan or Iraq.

quite a few priests have been killed there, and the bishops have now condemned the gov't cooperation with the drug cartels

 The Archdiocese of Mexico said that people working for the national oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), government officials and some businesspeople are involved in a massive theft operation that costs the government from $780 million to one billion dollars a year. It may be worse. Other analysts estimate PEMEX may lose $1.5 billion a year to fuel theft. Organized theft is a particular problem in Puebla state, but it occurs throughout the country, which is one reason the Catholic Church weighed in on the issue. 

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Sort of related item: SP has a long article on the Congo. The Catholic bishops tried to get an agreement to make the president stand down after two terms, which is required by law, but it didn't work.

Tribal conflict is a major reason for this, and tribal conflict predates colonial times, but corruption is another:

For eleven years the UN peacekeepers managed, at great expense (over a billion dollars a year) to prevent the unrest from turning into a civil war.
Meanwhile more proof emerged that Kabila and his main supporters had stolen billions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid plus making even more from illegal mining and exporting operations. The government also imposed special taxes and fees on legitimate foreign firms and stole most of the money collected. The current government has become so corrupt that foreign aid donors are halting their contributions or insisting on more controls. 
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Chinese corruption is also rarely discussed. Global Voices has a blog post about it.

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