"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

A Conservative In Indian Country - Running The Gantlet In La-La Land

John Hancock - no relation to the signer of the Declaration of Independence but no less of a patriot - lived in a tony, progressive neighborhood of Washington, a stone's throw from the White House now occupied by Donald Trump. 

 

The neighborhood, University Park by name, was the home to lawyers, non-profit managers, educators, and doctors, all of whom displayed Hate Has No Home Here, Black Lives Matter, and Biden-Harris lawn signs, who voted in lockstep for the Democratic Party and the most liberal members of the City Council.  

PTA meetings were all about diversity and inclusivity, and residents often hosted black-white get-togethers where black teachers from the inner city on special assignment to all-white Jarvis Elementary were entertained and feted for bringing the reality of urban life to racially homogeneous Ward 3. 

Casual conversations on Alling Street were more often than not about the devil downtown, the new resident of 1700 Pennsylvania, the despot-in-waiting, the usurper, the tyrant.  No introductions were needed on Alling Street, for all engaged were of the same stripe.  It was simply assumed that one was a member of the tribe, the clan, the group.  Who of friends and neighbors could possibly be a Trump supporter, a Republican, and a conservative? And so without hesitation, the chat turned to Trump's latest lies, fraud, and misinformation.

Hancock nodded to the assertions made - convictions long past any reasonable reflection and in autopilot mode - but he increasingly had difficulty in holding his tongue since to his neighbors the re-election of the President, tantamount to electing Beelzebub himself, was an unconscionable, unthinkable turn of events; and therefore prompted the most cockamamie, out-of-left-field impressions of deformed governance and irreparably immoral residence. 

The gym, the library, the coffee shop were no different - places of settled opinion, communal grief, and redoubts of resistance.  In fact there was nowhere he could go to feel himself, let loose some of the enthusiasm for Trump and the imminent social remake; so as a gesture of personal pique, he wore a red Rappahannock Oyster hat, a MAGA hat for all intents and purposes, to all venues. 

The looks, the raised eyebrows, the insolent stares were worth wearing the ill-fitting, now fish-stained cap, bought years ago on the dock of the Bay one summer afternoon overlooking Carter's Creek.

'Could it be?' was the irrepressible look on the face of his coffee mates, gym buddies, and library fellows.  Some mistake surely, not in this neighborhood; but there it was as plain as day, an apostate, a denier, a...words failed the crowd at this unexpected vision.  In Mississippi certainly. In Iowa perhaps, and in the redwoods of Humboldt County very likely, but here in Northwest Washington?

Mary Beth Barnum, a retired school teacher and volunteer for the Harris campaign and her husband Nick, a midlevel manager somewhere in Maryland, had been friends of the Hancocks for years; but the diapers and PTA meetings which had long held their interest, were long gone.  The Barnums could simply not countenance the harshly conservative views of their neighbor.  

Perhaps it was all for show - John was simply being John - but finally over limp chicken and stiff broccolini (Mary Beth had never been able to cook her way out of pot roast and mashed potatoes) he let fly with a virtual torrent of invective, twists of irony, and an outright vaudevillian ad hominem slaughtering of leftist cant.  

The Barnums were stunned. They spluttered and splat, but could not regain their footing after such a dinner table assault. 'Get over it', John advised as Mary Beth and Nick fought for traction. 

‘Why did you do that?', asked John's wife Prudence hours later.  'They are lifelong friends'.  Yes indeed, but now after the trash pickups and playground stories, supernumerary at best, and the very epitome of political hothouse insularity, it was time for a change. 

 

Fighting for purchase, the hopelessly outgunned Mary Beth sputtered some inane response about 'propriety' and 'the rule of law'; but neither she nor her deer-in-the-headlights husband could possibly get their heads around the Trump revival, the absolute negation and dismissal of progressive fantasy.

'But....how...when...' and other gurgling attempts at coherence were lost in the treacly soft jazz piped in on Sonos. 

John immediately regretted the episode.  Although there was as much chance of reasonable response from the Barnums as a June Bug in December, he should have kept his own counsel, retreated, and kept still; but the time felt right.  Coming out of the closet felt good and imperative.  It was only a shame that it was the poor, clueless Barnums that had to feel the full brunt of his Trump fidelity. 

There was no point whatsoever in flogging a dead horse.  His compatriots, neighbors, co-workers, and friends had become so instinctively upset by every little thing, so incensed at America's plunge into systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia, that there was no pulling them out of the well.  There they were consigned to howl and moan while the nation moved on. 

'Nice hat', said a gym buddy still nursing his wounds after the Trump election and yet to come to grips with the Anschluss over at USAID and the mobilization at Education, HHS, and Energy.  What more could he say, confronted by the unthinkable.  He had been locker mates with Hancock for years and engaged him in small talk and pleasantries for years; but now, there he was with a MAGA hat, and insulting in-your-face slap, a rejection of all hopefulness and honesty.  

'Thanks', said Hancock, who troddled off off to the ellipticals without much of a second thought to the stares and wonder of his gym rat buddies. 

They would never get it because they did not want to - it was not that they were stupid as such, just so mired in a caressing, embracing happy intellectual provincialism that they could not even consider something other than a wonderful life in a progressive commune. 

So the faux MAGA Rappahannock Oyster Company hat stayed. Hancock, energized by the Trump Anschluss into USAID territory, lorded it over friends and neighbors.  An extra American flag flew from the Hancock balcony.  The time for quiet rectitude was over.  These jerks had a comeuppance coming, and why not from him?

There was no point whatsoever in flogging a dead horse.  His compatriots, neighbors, co-workers, and friends had become so instinctively upset by every little thing, so incensed at America's plunge into systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia, that there was no pulling them out of the well.  There they were consigned to howl and moan while the nation moved on. 

'Nice hat', said a gym buddy still nursing his wounds after the Trump election and yet to come to grips with the Anschluss over at USAID and the mobilization at Education, HHS, and Energy.  What more could he say, confronted by the unthinkable.  He had been locker mates with Hancock for years and engaged him in small talk and pleasantries for years; but now, there he was with a MAGA hat, and insulting in-your-face slap, a rejection of all hopefulness and honesty.  

'Thanks', said Hancock, who troddled off off to the ellipticals without much of a second thought to the stares and wonder of his gym rat buddies. 

They would never get it because they did not want to - it was not that they were stupid as such, just so mired in a caressing, embracing happy intellectual provincialism that they could not even consider something other than a wonderful life in a Soviet commune. 

So the faux MAGA Rappahannock Oyster Company hat stayed. Hancock, energized by the Trump Anschluss into USAID territory, lorded it over friends and neighbors.  An extra American flag flew from the Hancock balcony.  The time for quiet rectitude was over.  These jerks had a comeuppance coming, and why not from him?

Get Over It! The Real Trump Revolution - The Arms And Tanks Of Structural Reform

Not only are liberals gone from Washington, soundly and roundly defeated by Donald Trump in November's election, but their way of thinking.  Their faux idealism, diversity window dressing, and hand-wringing righteousness are on the curb, detritus, leavings of an elite banquet. 

Everything about the last four years of the Biden Administration and the campaign of Kamala Harris was, despite their secularism and utopianism, surprisingly Christian.  Progressives were evangelists, prophets, and missionaries of a new truth, true believers in a universal, all-encompassing messianic future of harmony, peace, and verdancy.  They hectored like the prophets of the Old Testament, and shamed and cajoled new Christian waverers like Paul and his disciples.  There is only one way, said Paul and progressives, and that is ours. 

 

It was that seeping, weepy, cloying message that somehow went most against the grain.  Religious to the core, Americans had a muscular faith, one of charisma, power, and glory not one of pedestrian sanctimony; and no matter how much the Left insisted on an inclusive communitarianism, its goodness, philosophical purity, and heaven-sent beauty, most Americans outside the coastal corridors wanted none of it.

As importantly they were tired of being patronized and assumed to be ignoramuses - social troglodytes incapable of getting the picture without harping lectures and the insistent images of black people in every ad, paraded and feted at Grammy and Oscar time, on every school dais.  They were sick and tired of the hammering, the bludgeoning, and the preaching. 

Over the years Middle America saw the institutions of government infected with this brand of Utopianism - schools, public health, the military, foreign affairs, and the interior.  Every agency, every department was being transformed into a kindergarten of reformist ideals.  Citizens were told how to behave, what to believe, and what to do to assure the promised land.

Donald Trump since his first appearance on the political stage rejected all of this.  Not only did he oppose liberal policies of taxation, spending, governmental universalism, intemperate environmentalism, and an ideals-based foreign policy, but the way in which they were promoted and presented to the public - God's commandments on Mt. Arafat.  It was this self-righteous, patronizing attitude that stuck most in Trump's craw. 

The years of vilification, lawfare, tarring and feathering, the bastinado, and attempts to humiliate, denigrate, and destroy the former President were simply adding fuel to the fire, cementing his resolve, and confirming his intention to once and for all rid the country of insidious progressivism.  His would be a complete revolution, not just window dressing of a few acceptable economic and financial reforms but an uprooting of the system and very insidious philosophy which had persecuted him and eroded the originalist principles of the nation. 

 

Liberals were shocked and hysterical when within the first two weeks of his Presidency, he began the process of upheaval and structural reform.  His shuttering the offices of USAID, an agency which for decades had bled taxpayer money on idealistic schemes of social betterment and looked the other way while it was siphoned off to Aruban bank accounts, Swiss chalets, and the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo, was a long time in coming.

His associate, Elon Musk, in an uncompromising entree routed the bureaucracy, closed all doors, and took control of the purse.  No more would this agency and its army of overpaid bureaucrats, do-gooders, and teat-sucking consultants be allowed to operate. 

Foul! shouted liberals.  You can't do that.  It's illegal; but Trump knew exactly what he was doing.  A bar-fighter from the streets of New York, a take-no-prisoners, chokehold real estate mogul made of intimidation, threat, and suggestion - the currency of the business - he shouted loud and clear to progressive whiners, 'So sue me'.  

By the time the lawsuits make their way through the courts, USAID and a bevy of similar political, unproductive bureaucracies and their employees will be history. 

Democrat lawfare and the attempt to put a former President in prison on phony, trumped up charges were nothing compared to this; and he was undaunted and unbowed.  He would make good on his promises and would tear down progressive shibboleths, remake Independence and Constitution Avenues, and dig up pretentious institutions built over solid, Jeffersonian roots. 

Oh, said progressives barely over the shock of electoral defeat at the hands of a madman and gobsmacked by his executive orders, what about the poor people, the displaced bureaucrats now jobless, homeless, and destitute? but the President was unmoved.  There will always be casualties of war, and this was indeed was one. A price must be paid for years of waste, progressive idolatry, and looking-the-other-way morality. 

The hypocrisy of the Left which distorted and abused the law, the Constitution, and due process in its illegal pursuit of Donald Trump was never more clear after his takeover of USAID.  How could you? they shouted when they had been far more destructive of American principles and rules of law.

Trump's takeovers and remakes may eventually be challenged, but so what?  The man's agenda, his promises to the American people, and his profound beliefs in the very idea of structural reformation are worth the risk; and after all, the courtroom is his friend. 

Liberals are in a frenzy - their worst fears have been realized.  A tyrant, a Hitler, a Stalinist, pogrom-hunting, stalag-minded dictator is now President of the United States and rolling out his tanks and halftracks in force.

What is happening is not this hysterical nightmare but needed institutional reform and a resetting of the moral compass. This president is not given to chicanery or a limp-wristed puleeze.  He will not change the institutional architecture by dribs and drabs, rearranging the furniture but leaving rooms intact.  He will destroy and replace. 

'Get over it', Trump shouted to no one in particular from the balcony of 1700 Pennsylvania, but to all those naysayers, smarmy operatives, and faux idealists within hearing.  

Back to our roots, the President said in a calmer moment referring to Wild West prairie justice,  laissez-faire enterprise, and unbounded expansionist, territorial ambition.  Nothing stood in the way of gunslingers, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and the Union Army.  The nanny era was over, the age of commiseration, daisy chain idealism, and petticoat policy done and gone. 

'I'm back', said Trump. 'Get over it'.

Monday, February 3, 2025

DOGE And The Saturday Night Massacre - USAID And The Political Chicanery Of 'Doing Good'

'It's about time', said Carter Lane, veteran of four decades in the bush 'doing good', overseer of US government grants to African dictatorships, faulty programs whose beneficiaries, the poor, never saw a dime of American monies, and whose big men got as rich as Croesus by siphoning off most of the foreign aid to offshore bank accounts and gifting relatives and friends with the rest. 

Washington bureaucrats, enamored with Africa, Africans, and the black American diaspora, poured millions into corrupt, venal, exploitive regimes on the vain hope of improving the lot of the dispossessed and marginalized while only filling the coffers of tribal elites getting theirs. State Department planners, hungry for the continent's store of valuable energy resources and essential minerals, colluded with this idealism, lobbied Congress on national security and humanitarian grounds and assured that billions of dollars were poured down the sluice with rare conditionalities. 

The leader of a USAID mission to one African country challenged a top government official who was the liaison on all development projects, questioning his seriousness if not integrity after millions of dollars of aid were spent with little to show for it. 

The Secretary stood up, straightened his elegant linen caftan, and said, 'Mr. ____, I am here thanks to the support of my family, the loyalty of my tribe, the political support of my region, and lastly the generosity of the federal government, and I intend to repay them in that order.

 

A hard lesson for the team leader, an old progressive who had committed his life and career to bringing Africa out of the mire of misgovernance, corruption, brutality, and indifference; but an important one nevertheless.  The US government granted aid to those countries with certain geopolitical or economic interest.  In this case, the President was sitting on untold billions worth of rare earth materials necessary for cell phones and computers, and a new offshore drilling operation had discovered a deep sea oil field that beggared the imagination. 

Who in Washington cared what the country did with it paltry $10 million for health, education, and welfare as long as it voted with the US in international fora, allowed it access to its natural resources, and protected it from internal and external assault? In other words, keeping the big man in power no matter what. 

Critics have long known about the cycle of American venality and African corruption, and over a decade ago William Easterly wrote an article for the New York Review of Books entitled Foreign Aid for Scoundrels in which he criticized the international foreign assistance establishment and that of the United States in particular, for continuing to support corrupt dictators and to ignore their abuses of human and civil rights.  He referred to a seminal book by Dambisa Moyo:

Faced with this indifference to tyranny of even the most lethal kind, African intellectuals are increasingly beginning to protest. In her book Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo struck a nerve because she protested so eloquently against the paternalism, presumption, and double standards of the donor countries’ aid agencies. In many cases, foreign aid, as a review of her book put it, “fostered dependency, encouraged corruption and ultimately perpetuated poor governance and poverty.”
Paul Collier, writing in The Independent focuses on Moyo’s observation that foreign aid disenfranchises the very citizens it is designed to help:
One of her (Moyo’s) central points is that aid can, in effect, disenfranchise Africans, since the population cannot “hold its government accountable. The first stage in her argument is that aid is easy money. If governments had to rely upon private financial markets they would become accountable to lenders, and if they had to rely upon taxation they would become accountable to voters. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues.
Easterly collected data on the amount and proportion of US foreign assistance to dictators:
The proportion of aid received by democracies has remained stuck at about one fifth (the rest are in a purgatory called “Partly Free” by Freedom House). As for US foreign aid, despite all the brave pronouncements such as the ones I’ve quoted, more than half the aid budget still went to dictators during the most recent five years for which figures are available (2004–2008).
Paul Biya, the dictator of Cameroon had been in power for 28 years and was known for his brutal rule.  Yet, he received over $35 billion during his reign:
In February 2008, Biya’s security forces killed one hundred people during a demonstration against food price increases and also against a constitutional amendment that will extend his rule to 2018. Many of the victims were “apparently shot in the head at point-blank range.” The IMF justification for the newest loan in June 2009 noted laconically that these “social tensions” have not recurred and “the political situation is stable”.

 

Biya is not the only dictator to have so benefitted:

Helen Epstein described the support that aid donors give to Ethiopia’s tyrant Meles Zenawi, who has roughly matched Biya in aid receipts in a shorter period of time. Peter Gill in his excellent recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (2010) documents Meles’s misdeeds further, which rise to the level of war crimes in his counterinsurgency in Ethiopia’s Somali region (I reviewed the book for The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010).
Other long-serving aid-receiving dictators include Idriss Déby in Chad ($6 billion in aid between 1990 and the present), Lansana Conté in Guinea ($11 billion between 1984 and his death in 2008), Paul Kagame in Rwanda ($10 billion between 1994 and the present), and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda ($31 billion between 1986 and the present).

 

Easterly concluded with this ringing indictment: 

Aid agencies exist to give aid, so they must keep the money flowing. The department of an aid agency assigned to help a country may not get a budget next year if its officials don’t disburse to the country’s ruler this year; so they hand out funds no matter how autocratic he is. (The autocratic recipients know this and know they can ignore any “raised concerns” about democracy, including human rights.) Only the most well-publicized and egregious violators of democratic principles—like Robert Mugabe—get cut off.

Mali was the favored child of the US State Department.  Here democracy could grow and be an example of a country which did things right, followed American principles, and had a chance to be the bulwark against the anti-democratic forces of al-Qaeda increasingly present in the vast northern desert.  Mali would vindicate State Department/USAID programs in Africa, many if not most of which had little or no impact and served to prop up tin pot dictators.  The Secretary of State could report back to a restive Congress that things were going well, the Department’s missions were succeeding, and there were many success stories that could be reported back to African-American lobbyists. 

In 2012, however, events in Mali exposed the total illusion of these assumptions. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cited Mali as a gem, a bright star of nascent democracy; but the wool had been pulled over her eyes, and in a bloody coup, her favored, knighted president was overthrown by the military exposing his endemic corruption. 

 

For decades the American government has propped up dictators and looked the other way as taxpayer dollars went down the rathole as long as African governments remained loyal.  As a result of this political indifference and feigned interest in human welfare, the continent sank farther and farther into a miasma of poverty and bullying governance. 

Of course American complicity is not the only reason why Africa is still Paleolithic.  Its tribalism and some undiscovered cultural trait which has kept it from the rapid, remarkable development of Asian countries which were at the same economic levels as Africa scarcely thirty years ago and are now international political and economic giants, are involved. 

Yet such complicity at the very least prolonged the worst of Africa's endemic underdevelopment.  US aid did little economic or social good and simply perpetuated government ineptitude and corruption. 

So, it is about time that finally and hopefully once and for all US foreign assistance is at an end.  African countries will finally be held responsible for their corruption and will be forced to borrow from European capital markets for any development loan.  The nonsense, chicanery, faux idealism, and geopolitical ignorance will end.  Elon Musk and DOGE are the avant garde. 

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Joe Biden Retires White - After Years Of Diversity, Now Among His Own Kind He Says, 'I'm Home'

Joe Biden had always wanted to be black.  “I want to be black”, the President had said to his wife one night before retiring.  “I wish there could be a race change operation just like there is for sex”.

For years, but especially since he was elected President, Joe Biden wished he could channel Bill Clinton, get down with the black community and be one of them. In fact he had always wanted to be blacker than Clinton, a tall order, for the former President had done everything except blacken his skin and curl his hair to become the first black president.   He loved fried chicken, collard greens, and the blues.  He loved hanging out with black men on the stoop, sharing stories about poontang and moonshine.  

Clinton liked the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the aging coterie of Martin Luther King.  He said that he felt for the plight of black people – it was a personal, emotional thing with him, not just a political one.  Even more than LBJ who did more for the black community than any president since Lincoln, Bill Clinton’s empathy was heartfelt.  He was moved to tears over a poor black child, fist-clenching angry over reports of lingering Jim Crow and continuing denial of black rights. 

Black people loved him.  They loved his warmth and good-natured camaraderie, and felt that his friendship was above and beyond ‘the black vote’.  He was a friend to the black man, and they would never forget it at the polls. The fact that he drew the line at black women – his preferences were uniquely white – gave some blacks pause.  If he were really one of them, he would be courting their women.  

 

Ordinarily black men were angered at white sexual trolling – for that was what it was, sexual adventurism which never amounted to anything; and worse, white men never settled for anything less than the high-toned, sassy, and best black women, emptying the gene pool of the best.  Yet, they forgave Clinton for his white women.  He meant well, but how could an Arkansas cracker ever get above high-gloss nail polish, tight skirts, and cheap beauty parlor hair?  He was as black as a white man could get, but still as white as an Easter lily.

And so Joe Biden lamented as he left office, giving Kamala Harris a kiss, the closest thing he had ever gotten to intimacy with a black woman, and this one sent shivers up and down his spine.  A buss on the cheek and a 'see you later' smile was all he could manage, and a fare-thee-well grimace was all he got in return.  

Why hadn't he used the perks of office to bed some hot chocolate pussy?  Why had he been forced, thanks to DEI into a life of black servility and not the black, wiry, scented Garden of Eden?

'Bill Clinton had himself some chocolate pie', Joe mused, and that black Lothario, Dr. King had it every which way'; but he, now at the end of a long life and career promoting The Black Man, he ended up dry as a bone, alone with his faded, wrinkled, cunt of a white wife. 

Many were the nights that he dreamt of Lourdes McMichael, New Orleans octoroon, cream-colored, magnificent Mardi Gras queen who served as his cultural liaison to the marginalized poor.  Her scent, her soft, smooth, delicately colored skin, her....

Here the former President stopped himself in his tracks.  Not only was he a political has-been but a horny old man, regretting sexual encounters never had and dreaming of impossibilities.  If he were bluntly honest, Lourdes and Lenora and Bette were chosen not because of their partisanship and progressive loyalty but because of their dreamy allure, and fitting nicely into a diverse White House, configured like a pasha's harem. 

And if he were even more bluntly honest, that was all he expected of black folk - a hot time in bed with a darky.  He was, again if he came clean, little more than a Southern grandee, a plantation owner with seigneurial rights, a Thomas Jefferson, an Andrew Jackson and a slew of white men from King Carter to Jefferson. 

 

'Wake up, Joe', said his wife Jill on the morning Donald Trump and Melania were to take over the Presidential chambers.  'It's time to go'.

The President mumbled his assent, searched for his slippers and shuffled one last time to the presidential toilet.  He wanted this dream to go on.  There he was in a tropical idyll with a tawny, bare-breasted tribal maiden ready to take him as her lover, the hot, cloying air wrapping them both in a moist, sensuous cloud.  They moved together....

There the dream evaporated as he looked at the scary figure of Jill muscling her way to the sink, all sagging, lined, and stupid.  For a moment he grasped at straws and reached out at his delicious brown phantom. 

Where would he go now, he wondered as he took his last sip of presidential tea, took a last piss in the Presidential toilet, and fitted himself for the last time with the presidential pin. 

'Delaware, my dear', said his wife anticipating his every thought as she had for the last few years as his dementia took him farther and farther away. 'Rehoboth, the beach, lounge chairs, and sundowners'. 

But the President simply couldn't shake his dream and the luscious thoughts of Lourdes McMichael.  Why couldn't she be part of his security detail, an agent ready to service him? After all LBJ's bodyguards pimped for him during and after office. 

The good news and the bad news was this - on the one hand retirement in Rehoboth would be lily white, a haven, a racial redoubt, an asylum from all the hectoring bitchiness of BLM, uppity ghetto women and shiny bald dudes come for their due.  On the other it would be white bread, white sand, and white dreams without even a scintilla of black pussy. Where had the time and opportunity gone?

He had been trousered, contained, and propered for his entire political life when all he wanted was to eat black chone, to be one of them, to be finally and once and for all black 

It was not in the cards and Jill had attended to that.  His retirement would be lily white, as white as snow, as untainted, unsullied, and uncolored by racial desire as could be.  He and she would be the older couple everyone admired, the latter day Jimmy and Roslyn Carters, resting on well-deserved laurels. 

Of course there was the black upstairs maid and the downstairs butler, a bit of color in the retirement spectrum, but they were irritating reminders of what had escaped him.  After four decades of touting the black man, working for his rights and his dignity, he was left on the beach with a scraggly old woman.  What divine justice was there in that?

Worse of course was the cavalcade of white, blonde, blue-eyed Iowa beauties filling the offices of Trump's West Wing.  His for the asking, a jamboree of white, silken, flowing-haired young things at his beck and call.  

Joe had neither - neither scented, earthy black bush nor white Minnesotan crystalline white delight.  JFK, LBJ, MLK, Jefferson and just about every President since Washington had a little bit on the side while he, a latter day potentate had none. 

'I should go to confession', Joe said to his wife who looked quizzically at him, wondering in what corners of a very bourgeois childhood he was wandering; but at her insistence he demurred to a life of reverie instead of forgiveness.

 

From Boardroom To Ghetto - Ho's And Bro's, The Tale Of LaShonda Evans And The Demise Of DEI

LaShonda Evans was former President Joe Biden's poster girl for DEI - not just a black woman, but an uppity, nasty one from the inner city, an affirmative action hire to show America that he meant business, no white wannabees in his White House. 

LaShonda was the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a sinecure and no-show job that paid well and required no effort.  She was hired to show that the White House was not white but rainbow colored, and that anyone no matter of background, parentage, or particular promise would be welcome. 

LaShonda was given a corner office looking out on Pennsylvania and Lafayette Park, a team of eager young people who had begged and pleaded for appointment, and a generous expense account.  All she had to do was to show up on occasion, cut a few ribbons, and with the help of the President's speech writers, give an occasional update on DEI affairs. 

LaShonda was all that Biden had hoped for - a big, high-shelved black woman from the ghetto with an attitude.  After growing up in the projects with a drug-addled mother and absent father, watching two brothers die in gunfire on MLK Avenue in broad daylight, and in and out of the law for sexual favors, she was intimidated by no one.  Even the President, the man whose finger was on the nuclear button and who was the leader of the free world, took a few steps back when she walked into the Oval Office. 

'I ain't got me no flowers', LaShonda said to the President. 'Y'all done forgot me'; and with that the President buzzed his aide de camp who hustled into the room and bowed his head in contrition as Biden lambasted him for gross incompetence and racial ineptitude.  'We are here to make a difference', the President said, 'so get to it'. 

Expecting at least a thank you from the woman, Biden paused, and gave his trademark ear-to-ear smile; but LaShonda only touched up her hair, adjusted her brooch, and said, 'Whatchoo call me in here fo'?'

The President nonplussed, paused for a moment, trying to regain his presidential demeanor and confidence, then mumbled something about welcome, duty, and America, some incoherent patter at which LaShonda frowned and said, 'You ain't makin' no sense'. 

This was at a time when Biden's staff had circled the wagons and insisted that he was in fine mental fettle, sharp as a tack, on top of world affairs, a man to be respected if not honored; so LaShonda's response was the shot heard 'round the world after it had been repeated by the Chief of Protocol who had been invited to the meeting and shortly thereafter had become the surreptitious meme of the White House. 

 

LaShonda was the crack in the dike, the first to call out the Emperor's new clothes, to see him as naked as a jaybird and with even less sense.  

Of course the staff closed ranks and muffled their whispers and innuendoes - after all, their livelihoods depended on Old Joe - but over a shot and a beer at the Old Ebbitt Grille they became conspiratorial and unhealthily honest. 

Meanwhile LaShonda, after redecorating her office and tossing the funeral home-smelling bouquets and posies in the trash, she settled in, tried out all the phones and intercoms, turned on the wall-sized television to a BET sitcom, nipped at her Courvoisier and felt as happy as anyone on God's green earth. 

Now, she was supposed to feel at home what with all these people of color, gays, transgenders, and women around, but she wanted no part of these fey fairies and white wannabees who flitted about, a pretentious, buggering lot that belonged back at Harvard or wherever they came from, not a one of them who had ever set foot across the Anacostia into the real America

 .   

As soon as she realized that she was untouchable - as a black woman there was no way she could be demoted or cashiered - she showed up less and less, called out her white colleagues for racism and demanded an increase in pay and benefits because of the hostile environment in which she was forced to work, changed offices to larger and larger spaces until she was finally Queen Bee, Cleopatra on the Potomac. 

She was the first to go when the Trump storm troopers came to town and claimed prime offices for themselves.  DEI was not only to go but go in a ceremonial bonfire, a gleeful barn burning of the icon of the old guard, so LaShonda was ushered out onto Pennsylvania Avenue and told to take a bus back to the ghetto while all the bling and cheap tchotchkes that lined her walls were tossed in the trash. 

She took the L56 to Arnold Avenue and was welcomed back with open arms.  Half her expense account monies had been sent to her homies.  She never forgot where she came from and was happy to be back, an inevitability she had planned for and awaited.  Four years was plenty of time to pad her bank account, ship thousands offshore, and still take care of her friends, so an early retirement in Bimini was definitely in the cards. 

 

'The sham, the fraud, the idiotic Ponzi scheme of DEI is history', said the new President, 'and an American culture of equality of opportunity will once again be the law of the land. Bye-bye to the racial hangers-on, the do-nothing, make-nothing seat-fillers who simply took up space.  A new age of enterprise, intelligence, and ambition is here'.  

LaShonda chuckled and high-fived her sisters when she heard this and saw this bevy of white, blonde girls on the dais with him.  'Talk about seat-fillers', she laughed, those ofay bitches gonna do some lap dancin' on the old man'; and so it went, LaShonda without rancor or regret back in her old neighborhood, tapped for no good reason to go uptown, served her time and was where she belonged. 

DEI had made not a whit of difference to the ghetto, an invention of white wannabees for Uncle Toms, and so it came and went without notice except for the stuffed envelopes of cash that came down from the White House thanks to LaShonda Evans.  The homeboys in fact loved Donald Trump, a man cut from the same cloth - imperious, with attitude, a dude with arm candy and yachts. 

LaShonda did what she said - took her gains, bought a beachfront property in Bimini, drank rum Cokes, screwed the locals and lived happily ever after.  

Saturday, February 1, 2025

The Emperor's New Clothes - 'Naked!' Shouted Donald Trump

Myra Blanken grew up in a modest home in Far Rockaway, Long Island, a solidly conservative Jewish community where shabbat and seder were always observed, children went to yeshiva, and where socializing was without goyim. 

 

It was a happy childhood of pot roasts, brisket, and latkes, stories from Isaiah and Kings, dancing school and pinafores.  Adolescence was no more troubled than any other, less rebellious but no less promising.  Thanks to her parents, Myra was encouraged to excel in school, and to take advantage of her quick mind, patience, and intellectual discipline.  'You'll go a long way', said her father.

Myra was never in a Christian community until college, and it was not a happy experience.  While the school was top tier and the scholarship generous, the student body was less so.  She was a 'kike', 'hebe' and 'yid' and not the valedictorian of her class, a ranked chess player, and master of advanced calculus and number theory.  

This was the price of doing business, she knew - another lesson from her father who never made a bad business decision in his life and was able to barter and borrow his way from Seventh Avenue tailor to owner of a chain of Long Island dry cleaners. 

'Put up with it', Shmuel said to his daughter. 'What do they know?' A holocaust survivor, grandson of the the Russian shtetl, and rabbinical scholar, he knew; so Myra kept her own counsel, graduated with honors, went to Harvard Law School and found herself a wealthy trial lawyer before she was thirty. 

A good Jewish liberal - her family had been Socialists, labor organizers, and community activists ever since she could remember - she naturally turned to defending progressive causes and took on corporate interests with the acumen of a Law Review editor and scholar and the principles of a committed Jew.  Once she got her dander up, she was a virtual Genghis Khan in the courtroom, and tore into the greed and subterfuge of the best and the brightest like a harpy.  She won every case she tried and exacted generous corporate penalties for those who settled out of court. 

Despite her rock-solid, Harvard and rabbinical logic, Myra was a convinced liberal, and endorsed every social justice issue that made the news.  Whereas in the early days she took on Southern racists in federal court, challenging state law and enforcing federal civil rights statues, she moved on with the times from Negro to black, changed sides and defended latter day offshoots of the Black Panthers, and from her San Francisco office took on the causes of Castro and Folsom Street gay men. 

California was an epiphanic wake-up call.  Far from the corporate world of Wall Street, it was the nexus of social reform.  Corporations would continue to exist as is, nibbled away at by the SEC and other government regulatory agencies, but the underserved, the underprivileged, and the socially put-upon needed her talents more than the DC Court of Appeals; and so it was that in addition to her courtroom appearances, she spent more and more time in the streets.  Only loud, defiant protest and demonstration would resonate with America's systemic racists. 

 

She became the poster girl for principled progressivism, an attractive, eloquent, and persuasive woman of rectitude and purpose.  Along the way, however, she began to lose her bearings.  The hard, flinty logic which had characterized her early days wobbled and finally sank into presumptive waters.  The black man became not just the victim of discrimination, but a noble savage, denizen of the African forest endowed with a supernal nature and preternatural environmental wisdom who must regain his rightful place atop the human pyramid. 

The gay man and his transgender cousins represented a new world of utopian sexuality, one uninhibited by the fetters, harnesses, and bits of heterosexuality; and women, over the millennia both saints and sinners were finally recognized for the superior sex that they were. 

How Myra Blanken changed from a woman of unchallenged logic and pure reason into a garden variety progressive is a mystery.  How could a child of such parentage, such inestimable intelligence, and such professional brilliance go so far off the rails and wallow in the most pedestrian and obvious social fantasies?

It wasn't love - Myra didn't fall in love with a Berkeley radical or young Noam Chomsky - nor was it indoctrination (she was too inoculated against that by her Hitler era parents), and it certainly was not some dreamy, unexpected shining light.  It had to be circumstance and the heady camaraderie of progressivism - the big tent jamboree of causes, the happy pursuit of ideals together, a perfect storm of Jewish orthodoxy, historical liberalism, and the satisfaction of a very personal, emotional longing for intimacy and camaraderie that had been ignored along the trajectory of her success. 

Whatever it was, she was a woman possessed, ruled by passionate emotion, spiritual ambition, and given to the comforting, embracing arms of her fellows-in-arms.  Liberalism has always been an affair of the heart and not the mind, attracting the credulous and the wishers of good, and Myra's commitment was proof of its evangelical power.  If this steely, bear-trap intellect's hold could be loosened thanks to the blandishments of the Left, then anything was possible. 

Ah, but there's the rub, the elemental truth of genetic pairing and the ineluctability of innate, hardwired being.  Nature always trumps Nurture, and slowly but surely, there was no way she could square The Movement's inchoate, even puerile responses to social issues with their obvious objective solutions.  The ghetto was not the new Garden of Eden, a place of native, God-inspired humanity, but a shithole of dysfunction, dependence, and entitlement.  

 

Transgenders were not the harbinger of final reconfiguration of human sexuality, but freaks, oddball misfits, and emotional infants.  Environmental Armageddon was not on the horizon, for the historical adaptive nature of human society was already taking measures to conform to the new climate reality. 

The Emperor's new clothes were on display.  For years he walked from palace to courtyard as naked as a jaybird, until an interloper called him out.  Donald Trump got elected, shouted 'Bullshit', and within hours the sham, the political con game, the Ponzi scheme extraordinaire began to disappear.  No sooner did the President legislate DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) out of federal existence, than corporations, businesses, families, and individuals give it up, take down their rainbow, Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs, and once again began to use old, familiar ways of speaking.  In one fell swoop, the whole house of race-gender-ethnicity cards came tumbling down.  The nation was simply waiting for permission. 

And so it was that Donald J Trump became Myra Blanken's personal savior.  She knew deep down that there was something wrong with the fol-de-rol, the fantastical visions, the impossible presumptions, and the outright intellectual fraud of the censoring, cancelling, idolatrous Left; and with that one shout, 'Naked!', all her closeted good sense came out. 

The nature of group-think and mind-fuck has never been more on display than in the last few weeks since Donald Trump's inauguration.  All it took was a few strokes of his pen to shake loose the tethers of faux liberalism and to put every identity-obsessed liberal on notice.  

Myra joined the ranks and transferred her legal skills to the rout of lawfare, a return to legal equilibrium, and the promotion of historic conservatism. 

Her father still was pushing the progressive cart down Orchard Street, and so it took some time for him to absorb and reconcile his beliefs with newspaper photos of his daughter with the President, but the love affair between father and daughter is untouchable. 

Friday, January 31, 2025

Friends Of The Zoo - DEI In The Monkey House And The Sad End Of A Social Justice Warrior

Bob Muzelle watched the apes, orangutans, and howler monkeys do their acrobatics in the Monkey House of the National Zoo and thought, 'Here I am among them'.

Bob was lamenting the Trump victory and the executive orders which in one fell swoop did away with a decade worth of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.  Gone were efforts in government, schools, and corporate America to favor the black man and help restore him to his proper place atop the human pyramid; to champion the new age of gender fluidity, and to honor and promote gay men and women.  Trump, the social troglodyte, the bullying retrograde, the...

Here Bob shook his head in disbelief and moral angst.  How could this have happened?  How could a carefully crafted, just, and righteous enterprise be so summarily dismissed, tossed aside as if it were half-eaten muffins, detritus, trash?  The black man deserved more, much more; and the work to restore him to his native forest sublimity was not yet done. 

A great ape came ambling over to edge of the cage and smooched his lips against the bars, eyeing Bob - or so it seemed to him - with ironic envy.  An intelligent, sentient, marvelous animal trapped in a plastic environment - plastic trees, plastic rocks, a rope swing and a semi tire.  This is where Bob's treasured DEI had gone - dismissed, forgotten, and only an item of curiosity and indifference.

It hadn't always been this way, for he and his colleagues had watched the DEI movement grow and prosper.  Black faces were everywhere you looked - in every television ad, in every boardroom and government office, in hospitals and universities.  Yes, the great majority of African Americans were still selling dope; and ho's, pimps, grills, and bling were still at the heart of ghetto ethos; but progress had been made.

A vigorous affirmative action program had brought scores of disadvantaged black students from the dankest, darkest slums of Washington to his son's tony Upper Northwest private school. Yes, an unfortunate number of these young people were sent back to Anacostia for theft, assault, and sexual intimidation; but that was to be expected - a necessary part of progressive integration.  Now the school had cashiered its DEI director and was returning to its historical legacy of educating Washington's best and brightest. 

The gay man, spat on, dishonored, and dismissed, had been promoted as the harbinger of a new sexual age. The end of restrictive and punitive heterosexual orthodoxy was in sight when Bob first turned his attention to the needs of the sexually under-respected. Gay men and lesbian women were seen everywhere, proud and elevated; and the emergence of transgenders was the icing on the cake.  The revolution was well underway; but now, thanks to Donald Trump, they were once again tossed aside in favor of outmoded and irrelevant straight men and blonde, blue-eyed, sexy women.

The Inauguration could have been called Straight White Day for all the bouncy, toothy bimbos headed for the West Wing behind Emperor Trump. A disgrace, a slap in the face to those who had overcome prejudice and scorn to finally see the light of day and bask in it. 

An orangutang swung his long arms and looped himself up a branch on a plastic tree, peeled a banana and, and threw the peel at Bob - or at least so he thought given the down and desperate mood he felt that day; for forget all the black and gay people suddenly dismissed and forgotten, what about him? His position as CEO of Americans for Social Justice, a small but not uninfluential advocacy group, would soon be dissolved in the lye of Trumpism.  Donations would dry up, political support on the Hill would vanish into thin air, and he would be on the street. 

A Rhesus money screeched at him, pissed out the bars of the cage, did a J Fred Hicks impression, and swung back up into the faux treetops.  Everything was metaphor that day, as clear as the bright blue sky of May. 

LaShonda Evans, his deputy - a high-shelved, bullying black woman recruited from the ranks of Black Lives Matter - saw what Bob saw, the demise of a carefully constructed, promoted, and ideologically pure movement, but was unmoved.  It was time to head back to the inner city where she came from, rejoin her sisters on the street and get down with things instead of wasting her time up here with an ofay, whitey Jew boy.  She had ridden the DEI horse long enough, pasture time for him and Panama Red on MLK Avenue for her. 

What surprised Bob the most was the dispatch with which DEI was sent packing.  One would have expected at least some residuality, some lingering vestiges of good; but no sooner was Donald Trump in office than DEI doors were shuttered and locked, and thousands of social justice advocates left on the curb.  Why not a RIF, a reduction in force, rather than wholesale dismissal?

Because the whole country was sick and tired of the charade, the noxious pretentions of gender spectrum, black-only sanctimony, that's why.  Sick to death of in-your-face swishy gay men, Bernal Heights tough girls, and bald black men on television hawking everything from peanut butter to equities.  Tired of being called racists and misogynists, backward swamp fools, Bible-thumping irrelevancies, nothing but a scouring would do, and at the first ragged lines of unemployed racial touts leaving Washington, cheers went up from coast to coast. 

Asians repopulated Harvard and Berkeley.  White-only soap operas returned to prime time television.  News anchors and reporters were white girls from Omaha and chiseled-jawed cowboys from Montana.  Attitude disappeared from CVS, Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs came down, rainbow flags went unsold, and calling-a-spade-a-spade nomenclature returned.  America, like it or not, was returning to its integrationist roots and losing the failed notions of identity along the way.  It was a new time, a heady time. 

 

Bob left the zoo where he had wandered long enough, and nursed a Bud at the Blarney Stone across the street.  As he mused and looked idly out the window, all he could see were white people, lily white people, blonde people, straight people, and the anxiety returned, hopelessness in the place of hope. 

'Another Bud, please, Wild Turkey back', he said to Mac, the bartender, a man who after seeing legions of discouraged progressives down his drinks, knew what was what, and gave Bob a double on the house.  

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Why Is Africa Still Paleolithic? - Culture, Said The Wise Man, Culture

Most African nations achieved independence int the early Sixties, and they have been in a downward spiral ever since.  They are sinkholes of poverty, misrule, corruption, and venality with no signs of development despite billions of dollars of Western foreign assistance.  

While China, South Korea, and India were all underdeveloped, poorly governed, and desperately poor countries only thirty years ago, they are now economic powerhouses, have raised millions out of poverty, and have become major players on the world stage. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are not far behind. 

What are the reasons for such persistent African underdevelopment? Many liberal critics have blamed colonialism, a system they say which subjected millions, exploited the continent's wealth and resources, and created a culture of dependence and serfdom.  Yet the colonial powers left Africa over sixty years ago, more than enough time given the Asian example for significant development.  

 

China under Mao had been turned into a subsistence economy, beleaguered by pestilence and famine, and ruled by a brutal, uncompromising dictatorship.  It was little more than a Paleolithic society, cowed, penned, and beaten into forced labor camps, miserably inadequate communes, and deformed, socially engineered communities.  

Yet after the death of Mao and the rise of reformist, Western-oriented leaders, in a remarkably short time China has become arguable the most influential world power.  Its cities are models of engineering and architectural genius.  Its software and hardware industries dominate world trade.  Recently using a brilliant, unconventional model, has jumped to the forefront of Artificial Intelligence computing. 

India before the leadership of the reformists Rao and Vajpayee in the early 90s was a Soviet client state which adopted Communist economic ideologies which did nothing to improve the lot of a rapidly increasing population, kept individual private enterprise in irons, and guaranteed economic stagnation and popular dissatisfaction.  When Rao turned his back on Sovietism and embraced the liberal economic policies of the West, the pent up demand and classic entrepreneurial energies of the country were released, and in but a few decades joined the commonwealth of developed nations. 

So Africa, like China and India, threw off or was relieved of an archaic system of governance; but in the ensuing years did nothing with its newfound freedom.  The 'colonial excuse' is no more a legitimate excuse for decades of Africa poverty than is 'racism' for the perennial underperformance of black Americans.   India, China, Korea, and Vietnam have shown that countries can evolve quickly and well from a penitential past. 

'The forest', say other observers, the dense equatorial jungle which covers much of Africa is the principal factor of underdevelopment.  Africans because of circumstances of nature and evolution happen to live in a harsh, often impenetrable environment.  Development is virtually impossible under the conditions of an oppressive jungle. Europe and the Middle East, thanks to climate and geographic situation, have been far more able to develop the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, and Rome, and if Africans had been more favored, they would have progressed equally. 

However, much of Africa is veldt, savannah, and Sahel - dry, open regions watered by major rivers.  Societies which could have prospered on the banks of the Niger never did.  Timbuktu was once the center of Arab learning and its libraries the envy of Alexandria, but Niger, Mali, and Burkina went nowhere.  The few African empires - Gao and Ghana - flourished for a time in these potentially productive regions, but left nothing behind.  No architecture, infrastructure, or public works. 

India has overcome environmental impediments to development - extreme heat, drought, and irregular rains - and grown to control them.  China has developed every one of its climatic zones, mining the best for wealth and productivity, and leaving the deserts - at least for the time being - alone. 

Finally and after all liberal justifications have been exhausted, and racial sensitivities finally dismissed as thin-skinned idealism, culture has come to the fore.  There is something powerful and ineluctable about Confucianism and its pervasive incorporation and influence in Chinese life which gives China the moral center that other societies lack.  The image of the driven, ambitious, proud, and disciplined Chinese is not folly.  In both China and the diaspora, Chinese are among the most productive members of society.  India's combination of deep Hindu faith and boundless entrepreneurial energy - both cultural expressions - are at the heart of its renewal. 

 

Tribalism, however, the heart and soul of Africa, has no such developmental implications. It was and still is endemical parochial, insular, and narrowly focused.  Its worldview, encompassing the secular and the divine like other societies, never extended beyond its forest enclaves.  There are no Notre Dames in Africa and no Hinduism, perhaps the most complex, nuanced, intellectually philosophical of the world's religions

Chinese development was principally due to the reforms started by Deng Xiaoping and enthusiastically endorsed and expanded by his successors; but there is no doubt that the cultural infrastructure of the country was the foundation on which these more practical changes was built.  A culture built around Confucian principles of respect for elders and tradition, wisdom, loyalty, discipline, and trustworthiness more easily coalesced around newly-enunciated programs of national reform.  A culture which had millennia of ‘authoritarian’ Mandarin rule would not find the centralized programs of the Politburo intolerable, especially since the economic changes implemented promoted economic development.

Image result for images confucius

The experience of Japan is no different.  The same rapid economic progress occurred when the Meiji leaders decided in 1868 to catch up with the modern world.

Lawrence Harrison, one of the first outspoken advocates for considering culture as an important factor in economic development recently wrote the lead essay for a conference on Culture and Economic Development sponsored by the Cato Institute. In it he said:

The "Confucian" countries (more accurately the countries strongly influenced by Chinese culture, which also embraces, in addition to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship) all share substantially in the universal culture of progress: education, achievement, work ethic, merit, and frugality are all highly valued in the East Asian societies. Their economic success contradicts Weber's analysis in The Religion of China in which he asserts that rapid capitalist development is unlikely in China in large measure because of the absence of anything like the Calvinist "tension" caused by uncertainty about being of the "elect."
Many observers attributed the stagnation of the East Asian economies (Japan excepted) at mid-twentieth century to Confucianism, particularly to the influential role played by the Mandarin literati (Mao a prototype) and the low prestige that attached to economic activity in the Confucian scheme of things. But all that was necessary to release the powerful education/achievement/merit/frugality undercurrent to perform its economic magic was encouragement from the political leadership, in the cases of South Korea and Taiwan stimulated by security concerns. The trigger for the magic in China was Deng Xiaoping's 1978 pronouncement, "To get rich is glorious," effectively marking the end of Mao's Marxist revolution.

Harrison goes on to disaggregate ‘culture’ and suggests, based on his and others’ research that there are a number of characteristics which characterize successful cultures, whether as nations or communities living abroad:

Some economists have confronted culture and found it helpful in understanding economic development. Perhaps the broadest statement comes from the pen of [Harvard economist] David Landes: "Max Weber was right. If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference." Elaborating on Landes's theme, Japanese economist Yoshihara Kunio writes, "One reason Japan developed is that it had a culture suitable for it. The Japanese attached importance to (1) material pursuits; (2) hard work; (3) saving for the future; (4) investment in education; and (5) community values."
 Image result for images max weber

Perhaps the more interesting research was carried out by Harrison and his colleagues at the Fletcher School at Tufts University (Culture Matters Research Project) to see how these general categories correlated or were associated with certain cultural factors, such as religion:
The data roundly validated Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Protestant countries do better than Catholic countries in creating prosperity. To be sure, the averages for the Catholic countries are depressed by Latin America’s slow development, but even when one looks only at First World democratic-capitalist societies, Protestant countries do substantially better than Catholic countries with respect to prosperity, trust, and corruption.
More broadly, the analysis of religions suggests that Protestant, Jewish, and Confucian societies do better than Catholic, Islamic, and Orthodox Christian societies because they substantially share the progress-prone Economic Behavior values of the typology whereas the lagging religions tend toward the progress-resistant values.
Harrison cites the Nordic experience as an example of the importance of religion and culture to economic development:
All five Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—have a Lutheran background, even though few today are churchgoers. Lutheranism is the source of much of the Nordic value system that has produced high educational levels, extensive welfare programs, and high quality entrepreneurship symbolized by Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Volvo, Saab, and Ikea. The compatibility of economic efficiency and social spending in the Nordic context is apparent form the 2006 World Economic Forum ratings.
The Economist recently observed, "High taxes and generous welfare safety nets need not undermine competitiveness…Scandinavian economies are ranked high in the league…" (Sweden was number two in the world.)
Timur Kuran and Anantdeep Singh of Duke and University of Southern California, respectively, studied the question of Islam and economic development in India  where Muslims are a significant minority, but lag far behind Hindus in per capita income. (Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences 2004).  Kuran and Singh cite two principle factors behind this lag –  the waqf inheritance system and Shari ’a Law.  


The traditional inheritance system which channeled money through inefficient family structures, inhibited the flow of financial resources to modern institutions; and while Hindus were investing in banks and other financial institutions and using their profits for further growth, Muslims did not, and their growth was stagnant.

Kuran and Singh also cite Muslim adherence to Shari ’a law which kept them out of the mainstream of British civil, contract, and criminal justice. 
Kuran identifies the absence in Islamic law of the concept of a corporation and two institutional bottlenecks that once seriously hampered economic growth in the Muslim world: the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibits capital accumulation, and the waqf system, which locks vast resources into unproductive organizations designed to deliver social services. 

Thirdly Kuran and Singh cite Islamic education as an obstacle to development – i.e. a religion-based educational system cannot possibly expose students to the more general learning of the modern world.

For years, the discussion of culture as a determining factor was verboten, largely because of relativist, Marxist-influenced academicians who insisted that all society was a question of economics, institutions, demographics, and control of the means of production.  These theories were co-opted by Political Correctness advocates who said that to criticize a particular culture was to deny its inherent value.  Since all cultures are equal, there must be more secular answers to questions of economic and social progress than religion.

Wrong.  Perhaps now, in the death throes of woke and with the ascendency of political and social conservatism, phenomena will be looked at objectively and dispassionately.  Such observers can well start in Africa.