News stories about civil liberties in Africa seems to come along like buses: grouped together in waves, and very bad when they hit you. From only a little perusing of the Internet, here’s the Top Five Bad News Stories from Africa.

5) Mozambican archbishop alleges condoms are a tool of genocide - The head of the Roman Catholic Church in Mozambique has attacked the use of condoms, asserting that they, and the anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS, are deliberately infected with HIV “in order to finish quickly the African people”. He alleges that this condoms have replaced colonialism as whitey’s way of keeping the African man down.

At the moment, over 16% of Mozambicans are infected with HIV, making it one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. That 16%, over 3m people, are only kept alive by the production of anti-retrovirals, and the pandemic is only kept in check by the use of appropriate contraception.

The anti-retroviral drugs and condoms are distributed for free, or at heavily discounted rates, by Westerners that feel it is the White Man’s Burden to cure Africa of its maladies. If the African leaders think we’re trying to kill them, they can stop helping themselves fight the pandemic, and they can see how long it is before they all drop dead.

4) Nigerian corruption plumbs new depths - Nigeria’s parliament has reported that $5m has been acquired by the new Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives illegally. Patricia Etteh, the first female Speaker, is accused of taking that money in bribes from companies tendering offers for government contracts. And it’s understandable that she’s suspected. In the six months since taking up the position, Etteh has bought twelve cars and rebuilt her house. She hasn’t tried to explain where she got the money for all that.

More than anything, the one factor that cripples Africa’s development is corruption, and no country in Africa is worse-affected than Nigeria. Since 1960, $220bn of Nigeria’s fabulous oil wealth has been stolen by politicians, leaving tens of millions of Nigerians destitute as victims of state thievery. Nigeria was right to renew its anti-corruption drive, but, if the old habits displayed by Patricia Etteh die hard, there can be no progress towards a better future.

3) Kenyan Church gets homophobic and belligerent - Kenya’s branch of the Anglican church has rejected moves by the US Episcopal Church to compromise over the ordination of gay priests. “That word ‘halt’ is not enough,” said Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi. Kenya has led the African churches in the belligerent line taken over the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain, amongst others, Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003.

This indicates the moral mess that most African authority figures, particularly churches, are in. Their American brothers and sisters offered to cease ordaining gay priests - permanently and totally - and it was rejected out of hand by the Kenyans. The Americans were conciliatory in pandering to the Kenyan church’s bigotry and hatred. The Episcopal Church’s reward is not only a slap in the face from the Kenyan archbishop, but a loss of its own liberal common sense of which it was once proud. Now, no member of the Anglican Communion can truly claim to represent compassion.

2) Zimbabwean government steals white farmers’ land. Again - The Zimbabwean ‘parliament’ has rubber-stamped Robert Mugabe’s plans to expropriate businesses owned by Zimbabwean civilians (colloquially known as ‘whites’) and give them to his cronies (colloquially known as ‘freedom fighters’).

Just as Zimbabwe is suffering from one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world today, Zimbabwe has now decided to take farms from farmers, who know how to grow crops, and give it to militiamen, who know only how to kill white farmers.

1) Four African countries teeter on the edge of war - Two old wounds have reopened across Africa. Soldiers from DR Congo and Uganda have exchanged fire across the border, the dispute over led to the last Congolese war (known as “Africa’s Great War”) and left 3m dead. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea and Ethiopia are continuing to exchange accusations that they breached the terms of the peace treaty that ended a decade of intermittent war in the 1990s.

The two crises, the likes of which tend to be regular occurrences in the respective regions at the best of times, have come about because the countries’ governments have been pig-headed to the point of not caring about their own people.

The fight in central Africa is over oil rights: an issue that shouldn’t matter to the state, as the oil rightfully belongs to the company that discovers it, not the government that oppresses the local inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Eritrea-Ethiopia ding-dong is over good old-fashioned national pride: Ethiopia’s government thinks Eritreans should sing a different national anthem, whilst Eritreans are quite happy singing their own and think it’s so good they want a few Ethiopians to sing it, too. These four governments clearly think that shooting foreigners makes their people happier than letting them get on with their lives.

The problems that affect Africa are simple and recurring ones: intolerance and bigotry, oppression and belligerence, corruption and theft. They are underpinned by an ignorance and anti-intellectualism that belittles opponents and makes political debate curt and moot. Lots of problems blight Africa, but these are the most important. They are of their own making, and they are easily remediable.

PS This ain’t gonna become a recurring feature. Piss off.

I find it bizarre that there’s been even so much as muffled or murmured comment, even by the BBC itself, on the findings of the most recent BBC World Service poll. Apparently, after questioning 22,000 people across 21 countries, they’ve found that most people accept the anthropogenic climate change theory, and that most people believe that the government should take drastic interventionist action to prevent climate change.

As bizarre as it is, I find it entirely believable that they did so. This is the BBC, after all, and they’ll make a big deal of anything that supports their political beliefs and objectives: that evil humanity is responsible for past and potential climate change, and that only the white knight of government can save us all from drowning under water levels raised by our own materialistic greed.

And they sell it so well, too. The press release of the poll is titled “All Countries Need to Take Major Steps on Climate Change: Global Poll“. By doing this, not only do they attribute expert status to off-the-cuff public opinion - which is a fallacy regularly committed of worshippers of the twin Gods That Failed - but they only attribute this as an after-thought: as if it doesn’t matter that it’s only a poll, so long as it agrees with the BBC editorial line.

Furthermore, their website describes the ‘news’ as “Humans ‘causing climate change’“. As above, this is a pathetic journalistic trick committed to pass op-ed as fact. As an ex-reporter for the Sun, I know enough about dressing sewage up as something more appetising. I could just as easily title this post “BBC makes big deal out of ‘insignificant snivelling little’ poll that is statistically and political ‘irrelevant’“. Bad example, I know.  After all, what’s more truthful than that?

Whatever one’s opinion on climate change, it can hardly be seen to be just for the government to use its propaganda-broadcasting arm to lower journalistic standards by presenting its own editorial stance, on its own poll, as a newsworthy item of factual content. That is does so indicates how unfree discussion of this issue has been, and how most Western governments have decided to close this debate before it even opened.

Unlike Northern Ireland, Burma doesn’t have a marching season, but, if it did, this would be it. A month of sporadic protests has escalated recently, after the military attacked some monks at a protest march on 5th September, and the past week has witnessed daily marches of monks and other civilians around the capital, Rangoon.

On Monday, tens of thousands of Burmese people turned out onto the streets to protest against the oppressive and primitivist military junta. Lower-end estimates for the number in Rangoon alone were 50,000, with potentially as many as 100,000 in the capital and unknown thousands in 24 other cities around the country.

That’s impressive, but it’s not unprecedented. Last time ended with the military ruthlessly cutting down the peaceful protestors, killing over 3,000 innocent people. Now, the junta has made ominous sounds, including threatening to ‘take action’ against ‘destructive elements‘ that were supposedly behind the protests.

Burma is one of the world’s most secretive and oppressive states. According to Freedom House:

The junta rules by decree, controls the judiciary, suppresses nearly all basic rights, and commits human rights abuses with impunity

Whilst Human Rights Watch adds:

Burma is the textbook example of a police state. Government informants and spies are omnipresent. … There is no freedom of speech, assembly or association.

Which is all very unsurprising, because it’s a military dictatorship.  They clearly have no qualms about opening fire upon civilians: including monks of the country’s supposedly state religion.

So we can’t be surprised when the ongoing series of protests gets ugly. We can only hope that, when that happens, the Burmese people don’t lack the will-power and dedication required, and that they refuse to bow down to those that deny them their most basic of rights.

Inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to appear at speak at a top American university was never going to go down well. Inviting him to speak at Columbia University, in New York City, was the height of stupidity.

That’s the same New York City that counts amongst its inhabitants almost two million Jews that Ahmadinejad wants to wipe off the map, and was the target for the 9/11 terror attacks that Ahmadinejad has asserted was perpetrated by the US government.

But, just to make sure he goes home even more unpopular than he arrived, he pushed the boat out that extra bit further. Other than decadent Americans and conspiratorial Jews, I wonder who else the Iranian President hates. Oh, yeah…

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who told you that we have it.

The evil tyrannical dictator doth protest too much. Or, if you’re more Simpsons than Shakespeare: “Nice man. I wonder if he’s gay.”

It came as a response to a question regarding the execution of Iranians - in total, 200 this year alone - amongst whom were homosexuals, who may or may not (or, put another way, were) executed for being gay.

Now, I don’t know who the heck taught young Mahmoud to debate in school, but he (or she, but it’s Iran, so he, otherwise she’d be stoned to death) should have told him never to accept the premise of an opposing argument. So, Mahmoud, strapped to argue that homosexuals aren’t stoned to death for the way they’re born, decided to attack the premise: by arguing that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Iran.

Yeah, I’m sure the decadent Western gay epidemic hasn’t spread to Iran. After so fully failing to understand history and geography, Ahmadinejad has decided that he would be even cooler if he flunked science, too. Oh, wait, that already happened. Boy, little Mahmoud must have been the coolest kid in the playground.

Having a world leaders conference at Columbia was a good idea. The best and most important universities in the world - a group to which UCL belongs - deserve to host the best and most important speakers. Sadly, Ahmadinejad was clearly not the best speaker, nor would he be particularly important were it not for the fact he’s making nuclear bombs behind the bike shed.

Rewarding him for his crimes, and those of his predecessors and compatriots, by giving his ideas the oxygen of publicity, is not acceptable. Except, of course, when his ideas are so f***ing stupid, that we can laugh at them, and hope the oxygen just allows that kid to burn up before he grows up to do something really stupid. Oh…

Check out this first part of a dramatisation of the famous speech by John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The speech itself is infamously long, and, despite Rand’s assertion that it’s the best thing she ever wrote, it’s breathtakingly inaccessible in its original form. Anything that gets its message across - including this project - must be a good thing.

I almost want Fred Thompson to win just to see this happen. More instalments are to follow.

Belgium’s political and constitutional crisis shows no sign of abating, over a hundred days since the election, with no government having been formed. A lot of bloggers out there have written posts in recent times along the lines of, “Hey, if Belgium can do without a government for a hundred days, why can’t we?” Sadly, it’s not that simple.

If you don’t visit any of the blogs that have done a Belgium bit, congratulations on making ours your blog of choice. Oh, and you probably don’t have a clue what happened. Cutting a long story short, thanks to Belgium’s federal system, under which parties each pander to only one of Belgium’s three linguistic groups, the election held in June returned a combination that has made it almost impossible to form a coalition government.

Fast forward to now. In the past hundred days… nothing has happened. No government has been formed, and very little progress has even been made towards that end. Formal steps have been taken, but few people think a government will be formed soon. Many, instead, are predicting the break-up of Belgium into independent Flemish (productive, liberal, Dutch-speakers in the north) and Walloon (lazy, socialist, French-speakers in the south) states.

Why is this a good thing? Well, so say most classically liberally-inclined bloggers, its proves we don’t need a government. I don’t think I’ve ever read the words ‘the trains are still running’ as many times in my life as I have recently. Others harbour hopes that Belgium will break up: because they want to give the EU a bloody nose, because they sympathise with the Flemings being heavily taxed to subsidise backwards Wallonia, because they believe smaller countries are better for spontaneous order, or a variant on the above.

These are, for the most part, fallacies. Strictly, Belgium does not have a government - but it undeniably does have a state. The absence of Gordon Brown from Downing Street doesn’t mean the government’s schools shut down or its policemen decide to take a day (or, in Belgium’s case, a hundred days) off. Other people, civil servants, will continue to do their jobs. Either we’re ruled by politicians, or we’re ruled by bureaucrats: it’s lose-lose.

Furthermore, the legislative drivel has not be ended. Belgium, at the heart of the European Union, would be able to rely on the EU to further advance the intrusion by the state. Royal decrees may still be issued without a government technically being in place: if the technocrats want a law passed, they just ask the King, rather than the politicians. Just check out the latest edition of the Belgian Official Journal (I know, as if you’re not a subscriber…).

And Belgium’s federal constitution, the cause of the absence of a government, is exactly what keeps the show on the road during this period. Even if a national government can’t be formed, Belgians still have six other governments: one representing each of the linguistic communities, and one representing each of the region. That’s enough government for anyone.

Belgium is a heavily socialised country, anyway, with the state involving itself in every facet of the civilians’ lives. Belgians are still forced to carry identity cards, pay their employees a ridiculously high minimum wage, and pay amongst the highest taxes in the world. So what if it doesn’t get any worse? It certainly isn’t getting any less burdensome.

Despite the claims by other bloggers that Belgium is some sort of Paradise Found, in which the absence of a few ministers is a panacea to the ills of any country, this is clearly not the case. What Belgium needs instead is a government in place, but a government that is actively committed to the withdrawal of the state from individuals’ lives. That way, not only would Belgians be able to boast that they don’t have a government, but they’ll be able to boast that they barely even have a state.

Robert Mugabe is a vile man, without respect for the rights of his citizens, or the effect that his misrule is having on his country’s well-being. A racist and a communist by conviction, and a murderer and thief by action, his vilification is total, covering all wings of political thought in this country, and rightly so.

So it must come as a surprise to most that we still lavish honours on Mugabe. He remains a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, despite a House of Commons select committee urging the government to strip him of that title, no less than four years ago. Despite the tough talk from Blair and Brown over Zimbabwe, they’ve refused to do the most simple thing and remove the endorsement that his knighthood represents.

In June, the University of Edinburgh stripped him of his honorary degree, having finally woken up to the well-documented genocide committed by Mugabe’s North Korean-trained militia in Matabeleland in the 1980s: which killed at least 20,000 and left hundreds of thousands starving.

This is a fine precedent for the government to take, and remove the vestige of honour that lies on his chest. So long as it remains, it stands not as an honour to Mugabe, who has long since abandoned that ideal, but as a dishonour to our country.

If you believe Mugabe should be stripped of knighthood, please sign this e-petition or join this Facebook group.

The existence of the state can only be justified in defending the rights of its people: using its monopoly on the initiation of force to protect civilians’ indisputable rights from the threats posed against them. Most people incorrectly insist that a degree of enforcing a uniform and disputable morality is the responsibility of the state. The form of government best-suited to enforcing its own morality upon the individual is that guided by the immaterial, and ill-designed for tolerating dissent.

On 20 September 1870, the forces of the Kingdom of Italy, led by General Raffaele Cadorna, breached the Aurelian Walls that encircle the ancient city of Rome: home of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. The capture of the city on that day completed the Risorgimento, and put an end to the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope was given a rump state, the Vatican City in 1929 (by that nice fellow Mussolini), but one that is pathetically small: at under half a square kilometre, it’s smaller than Fitzrovia, and a quarter of the size of Regent’s Park.

Seeing the tiny scale of the Vatican, it’s easy to forget that, for over a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church held dominion of vast swathes of Italy, and, in league with the allied Holy Roman Empire and the French and Spanish rulers, held all of Europe under fear. Their two main weapons were fear, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope. (Damn, their three main weapons were…)

When we hear of news of theocracies on the news, it’s almost always of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and always in unfavourable terms (except when it’s on Channel 4 or BBC, when it’s obviously laudatory: which proves that it’s a bad thing). But that belies for how long we, or, rather, our European neighbours, were in thrall to the same phenomenon: oppression at the hands of unthinking and unyielding dictators, enforcing their morality on others without earthly justification. Of all forms of government, the theocracy is the greatest of threats to liberty. On this day in 1870, the world was rid of one of the gravest of all time.

Sorry for the misleading title, but I’m not going to comment on Alan Greenspan.  He’s plugging his new book so thoroughly, that you’ve probably had enough of him, so I’ll focus on the interviewer.

Jon Stewart’s interviewing technique has been criticised unsuccessfully before. So, in attacking his ridiculous questioning of one of the world’s foremost living economists, I won’t be the first or the last.

They’ve made a choice: “We would like to favour those that invest in the stock market, and not those that invest in the bank. That helps us.” … It seems to me that we favour investment, but we don’t favour work. The vast majority of people work, and they pay payroll taxes and they use banks.

And there’s this whole other world of hedge funds and short-betting. It seems like craps. And they keep saying, “No, no, don’t worry about it, it’s free market. That’s why we live in much bigger houses.” But it isn’t, it’s the Fed.

So, apparently, the Fed deliberately keeps the interest rate low to help rich people? Basic economics - nay, common sense - dictates that the opposite is true. High interest rates increase the return on capital, hence the value of money. By definition, the rich have more money.

As a result, wealthy people ‘benefit’ from high interest rates relative to the poor. That’s why the Guardian always bleats on about the Black Wednesday rate hikes; it hit their readership of poor students and failed artists hard.

Sadly, this sort of misrepresentation of economics is a hallmark of the left.  Whatever one thinks about state control of monetary policy, the accusation that the victims of the state don’t cut across wealth lines, and include only the poor, is absurd.

You’re a great comedian, Stewart. You’re just not the best economist. Stick to the funny stuff.  No matter how risible your politics, that doesn’t count.

As has been made very clear, the government doesn’t want to hold a referendum on the EU treaty that will usher in the EU Constitution by the back door. But, whatever the government says, the inhabitants of East Stoke, in Dorset, aren’t going to take it lying down. They’ve used a provision in the Local Government Act 1972 to hold a local, parish-wide mini-referendum on whether the UK should have a vote on the matter.

Libertarians must have very grave concerns about the use of referenda. The fact that 51% of the population supports a law doesn’t make it a good law if it hinders the 49% that oppose. Even if 99.9% of this country voted a certain way, it wouldn’t make the other 0.1% wrong, or the actions of the majority any more moral. The smallest minority is the individual, but we’re all individuals, so we all suffer if the minority is ignored.

However, in this case, the government is insistent on not having a referendum for other reasons. They’ve heavily exploited their electoral ’success’ (is winning 35% of a 61% turnout really a success?) to pass fundamentally immoral laws. Now the boot’s on the other foot.

Whatever you think of the European Union itself, the European Constitution must be considered a vile document: enforcing uniformity and destroying the individuality of both countries and persons themselves. A referendum is the only way it can be thrown out, but a sure-fire way of guaranteeing it.

Sadly, we’re not going to get a referendum any time soon, are we? Not on Gordon Brown’s watch. The result is we’re denied a proper chance to throw out this travesty of a constitution, and left supporting mini-referenda in parishes like East Stoke. In Dorset? I certainly do.