[Guardian] Investigation for the Observer shows how deals done by the UK telecoms giant benefited politically connected elites in eastern Africa. 'Politically connected elites' along with anyone else whom might have been watching the growth of cellular communications and wishing to invest.
The spread of mobile phones across Africa has been one of the continent’s success stories over the past two decades, transforming lives through better communication and simpler banking. It has also resulted in huge profits for powerful international companies ‐ and for some of Africa’s wealthiest and best-connected individuals.
But an investigation for the Observer into the African interests of UK mobile phone giant Vodafone, by the Finance Uncovered network, has raised serious questions about transparency and the processes by which western firms entered Africa’s telecoms markets.
Often western operators that wanted market access in a particular country would have to choose between accepting a government stake in the venture, or giving significant shareholdings to "local investors". But how those governments selected their partners appears contentious, and questions have been raised over how some deals were structured.
#1
The privileged elites must be punished! Free market capitalism is racist. I recommend free Soetoro-Phones manufactured in China for the entire continent of Africa. It would only be fair.
[USA Today] Single-family rentals ‐ either detached homes or townhomes ‐ are developing faster than any other portion of the housing market. These rentals outpace both single-family home purchases and apartment-style living, according to the Urban Institute.
"Almost all the housing demand in recent years has been filled by rental units," says Sara Strochak, a research assistant with the Urban Institute. She also states that single-family rentals have gone up 30% within the last three years.
This change is unique to newer generations. But when did rentals become so popular? And why are people more inclined to rent than to buy? Below, we’ll further discuss the rise in rentals and how it affects the housing market.
The housing bubble collapse and the recession that followed shattered the decades-old tenet of American wisdom that you can’t go wrong buying a home. Most of the housing market fallout from the Great Recession has finally receded ‐ foreclosures and underwater mortgages are back to traditional levels and housing values have recovered in most places. But one thing hasn’t recovered: Americans’ unquestioned desire to own a home.
Today, single-family rental homes and townhomes make up 35% of the country’s 44 million rental units, compared to 31% in 2006.
#3
I rent my house from the local taxing authorities. Should I fail to pay my assessments twice a year, uniformed government representatives will surely arrive at my door to throw me out on the street. We're all potentially homeless.
#5
What were those robo signings from a few years ago? And, funny how nobody from JP Morgan or Citibank or pick-a-bank suffered any consequences from the G-Men on that fraud.
[Slate] Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones was already closer to Roy Moore in the polls than most Alabama Democrats get to Alabama Republicans before the Washington Post reported on the accusations of a woman who says Moore placed her hand on his genitals when she was 14. An overnight poll now finds the race tied. In other words, a lot of national scrutiny is headed Jones' way, some of which will no doubt land on the ad above, called "Honor," which he released Oct. 30.
Here's the narration:
Little Round Top, Gettysburg. Three times Col. William Oates of Alabama led the Confederate forces to take it. Running out of ammunition, Col. Joshua Chamberlain of Maine had his men fix bayonets to desperately repel the attack. What brought those two brave men, one from Alabama and one from Maine, together was war‐two sides believing so strongly in their cause that they were willing to die for it. Those times are past, long ago, and our country is better for it. But now we fight too often over other matters. It seems as if we're coming apart. I want to go to Washington and meet the representatives from Maine and those from every other state not on a battlefield, but to find common ground, because there's honor in compromise and civility. To pull together as a people and get things done for Alabama. I'm Doug Jones and I approve this message, because on December 12, Alabama can lead the way.
(Little Round Top is depicted in the novel The Killer Angels, which was made into the movie Gettysburg, in which Jeff Daniels portrayed Chamberlain. Oates didn't feature as a character in either the book or adaptation.)
In an interview just published in Slate, New York Times polling expert Nate Cohn argues Jones should be "running further to the center or even the right on a few issues" to appeal to his state's enormous population of white conservatives, and this kind of thing would certainly seem to fit the bill. On the other hand, as Alabama columnist John Archibald noted Friday, praising the cause of slavery is probably not the kind of thing that will elevate black voter turnout on your behalf. (The state's population is 27 percent black.) And, well, that's probably why Democrats don't usually win elections in Alabama!
[Townhall] If you’d told me last year that complete Republican control of Congress and the White House would lead to nothing getting done, I would have laughed at you. Of course, last year I would have laughed at the idea of complete Republican control of government, so the idea of no legislative accomplishments would have been a joke not worth telling. Turns out all the jokes, at least so far, have been on us.
That Obamacare repeal fell apart ‐ or, more correctly, never really got off the ground ‐ was a surprise only because Republicans had promised it for years only to have it exposed that many of them didn’t really mean it. They were like the high-rolling poker player who’d just had his bluff called by a rank amateur ‐ they’d painted themselves into a corner. Republicans always have been afraid of health policy as an issue, just as Democrats have little to say on national defense, because only a few actually know the details.
Republicans know how to complain about health policy ‐ it’s not hard when the problems are so obvious. But few truly meant repeal because only a few truly believe the federal government shouldn’t be involved in controlling the health insurance industry. The rest think the government should "do something" to lower costs and don’t understand that this is not what happens when government gets involved.
In other words, they campaign a good game about the free market; they just have no idea what those words mean.
#1
I wonder, have any American ever said "let us try parliamentary system with proportional representation, and separation between the positions of titular head of state and chief executive"?
There is nothing magical about putting an (R) next to your name. It does not give you character or the courage of your convictions. In fact, these days it is largely interchangeable with a (D).
The trick is to find the Right People and give them (R)s, not just slavishly vote for any simpering sitzpinkler just because he has an (R), or because he's less of a sitzpinkler than the other guy. That's just no longer good enough.
#6
My 2-cents: Conservative voters voted Republican as the lesser of two evils. The results of that are that both houses of Congress are infected not by RINO's, but CINO's.
As the GP is now more attuned to the body politic, this disparity is revealing itself. And what of the Conservative base?:
We'll see if it has any life or, akin to The Tea Party, burns out.
#7
The political parties in America have devolved into proto-communists (progressive is their pseudonym) and clueless, spineless leaders of a ragtag band of conservative, squabbling amateurs who will never see the levers of power again after the next wave of democrat legislative victories. Not delivering on anything in the pre-election list of major promises, and fighting the one man, Trump, who despite being a coarse, thin-skinned child at times, is actually delivering what he can in judicial and regulatory relief. IN the history of the late Republic, this will be se as an epic blown opportunity to rescue the American dream from socialism and insolvency. What clowns!
[PJ] Pope Francis would prefer that you let your smart phone be dumb during Mass.
Catholic News Agency reports that the pontiff admonished a general audience on Wednesday, reminding them that the priest tells us to "lift up our hearts," and not to "lift up our phones," to take pictures.
Upon first reading this, I sympathized with picture-takers. After all, many of the people attending Mass when Pope Francis is the celebrant are having a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Then I remembered a simpler, pre-smartphone time when I got to go to a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II in the late 1980s. I was there with several relatives and friends and I don't remember ever having seen a picture from the Mass. I know that some of us had cameras with us. What I don't remember is whether we simply avoided using the cameras during Mass out of respect or if we were instructed not to do so.
Small confession here: a couple of years ago while serving has a hospitality minister (my parish's fancy way of saying "usher") during midnight Mass I was guilty of trying to take pictures of the beautifully decorated church and the crowd from the vestibule, and I wasn't even seeing the pope.
While Pope Francis was making a very specific point, there is a broader concern with being attentive during Mass that I have some personal experience with lately. As many know, I have recently been dealing with a faith struggle that I've chronicled on this site. As I have begun returning to Mass, I deliberately chose to go to a different parish of my own precisely to avoid distractions.
I've been at my parish for twenty years and have been a volunteer there almost that entire time. While it is still my favorite parish, going to Mass there can be fraught with distractions as I know so many people and often end up helping out with various things. I do still love all of that, but during this difficult time I simply wanted to go to Mass and just be present.
#4
I go to mass weekly, the only time I see a phone is when someone uses it to keep a toddler from screeching. And that's in three different churches. Must be a South American or European thing then.
#5
Lots of college students at my church, a fair number gaze at those little screens during Mass. Rarely a raucous ring tone shatters the peace, usually an elder's phone that goes on and on and on while old fingers fumble to find the shut off switch. I visit a lot of churches, almost none have a sign in the vestible saying something like "Please turn off your cell phones" 500 years ago the problem was priests smoking cigars while they said Mass. It's always something.
h/t Instapundit
The crowd responsible for Donald Trump’s election ‐ the pious, self-dealing Swamp Creatures he ran and railed against ‐ have had a bad few weeks.
Their troubles began with reports that Harvey Weinstein has been assaulting women for decades. This was an open secret in Hollywood and yet no one ‐ not George Clooney, Matt Damon, Meryl Streep and other A-listers who love to lecture Americans ‐ said a peep until they were forced to.
Irony doesn’t quite capture the fact that Weinstein and his pals have donated millions to Bill and Hillary and other Democrats so they could rail against the GOP’s war on women. You can’t make this stuff up.
The hiding in plain sight sexual misconduct of other Hollywood figures, including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and James Toback, has also been revealed. So has that of top journalists, including Leon Wieseltier (New Republic), Mark Halperin (ABC News/Morning Joe) and Michael Oreskes (New York Times/NPR). The Oreskes case is especially telling because one of his former Times colleagues who said she wished she’d confronted him about his behavior was Jill Abramson; she made her bones co-authoring a book, "Strange Justice," which included charges that several women had not been allowed to testify against Clarence Thomas during his nomination hearings.
...One might argue this just makes them human. Perhaps. But their attitude becomes blatant hypocrisy when coupled with their daily denunciations of America as a sexist, racist nation filled with deplorables. It becomes truly dangerous when we add in the fact that they also espouse a zero-sum form of identity politics and then insist that it is Donald Trump who has divided us.
#1
The crowd responsible for Donald Trump’s election ‐ the pious, self-dealing Swamp Creatures he ran and railed against ‐ have had a bad few weeks.
If anyone watches SNL, they are still going on with their silly skits. They are whistling in the graveyard and out-of-touch (not sure they ever have been in touch).
h/t Instapundit
In the late 1960s, Yale Law School adopted a quota system for African-American applicants. Putting aside its normal criteria for admission, Yale decided that future law school classes would be 10% black, regardless of qualifications. Other law schools and academic institutions did the same thing at around the same time.
On June 9, 1969, California appellate judge Macklin Fleming, a Yale Law graduate, wrote a letter to Dean Louis Pollak questioning the wisdom of the new quota system. Reading the letter nearly 50 years later, one can only marvel at how prescient Judge Fleming was. I recommend the whole thing. Here are some excerpts:
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Guardian] Investigation for the Observer shows how deals done by the UK telecoms giant benefited politically connected elites in eastern Africa.
[Townhall] If you’d told me last year that complete Republican control of Congress and the White House would lead to nothing getting done, I would have laughed at you. Of course, last year I would have laughed at the idea of complete Republican control of government, so the idea of no legislative accomplishments would have been a joke not worth telling. Turns out all the jokes, at least so far, have been on us.
[PJ] Pope Francis would prefer that you let your smart phone be dumb during Mass.
