You really have to know how unusual this is.

A lot of people will have no idea how unusual this is. If I'm in the bush in Africa and I hear a rustle I'm one of those curious people who wants to see what it is. With one exception that is. If' I'm near water and I hear a rustle in the bush I head the other way without looking. If it's a croc or a hippo I don't want to know about it unless a safe distance away. Both are vicious and will attack humans but the hippo is the far deadlier. First, they are huge but they are fast. People assume they can't run. Wrong! They will outrun you any day. And while both crocs and hippos can kill the hippo can do it a lot faster -- literally biting a human in half on the first try. Crocs don't fear anything except hippos. They will never mess with a hippo by choice.

I love to watch hippos, provided I'm far enough on shore or in a good size boat -- no canoes thank you. And that is why I always loved to take a cruise on St. Lucia Estuary. Every visit to the area include a cruise to go hippo watching. So seeing this hippo just follow this couple around like a puppy is quite amazing. I guess they don't have to worry much about crocs.

Now the funniest story related to these facts that I saw was about a large canoe that went down the Zambezi, just up from Victoria Falls. It was one of these double wide canoes that held quite a few people. One very stupid teen aged girl, actually from my part of the country, was riding on the right hand side and trailing her hand in the water. That is a very stupid thing to do. On her left was a very hefty woman. I mean very hefty.

The hand splashing in the water attracts a croc which comes up from underneath the canoe and clamps onto the girls hand pulling her into the river. But in the process of pulling the girl into the water it also managed to tip the canoe over as well. The very hefty lady landed on the croc. Now I can only surmise what the croc was thinking. But it seems likely that that this croc decided anything that large was a hippo. It let go of the girl and high tailed it out of there. Apparently this means Michael Moore can float down the Zambezi on his back with nary a worry except a lot of people wouldn't mention when the falls are coming up.

Bono heckles African speakers who shun his wisdom.

I have little respect for celebrities who become instant experts on some topic when it is clear they know little about the topic. One of the worst around is the absurd Bono. Whether he is sincere in wanting to help Africa I don’t know. I will assume he is. Whether he knows what he is talking about is a different matter. He doesn’t.

This author spent a good part of his adult living in Africa unlike Bono the fly-in, fly-out expert who uses his “fund raising” as an excuse to annoy governments around the world.

The well-known Technology, Entertainment, Design conference recently held its first meeting in Africa and they invited Bono to be there. They also invited numerous people who actually live in Africa. And Bono spent his time heckling them and ridiculing them because they didn’t support his agenda.

Technology Review reports on what the African speakers had a common theme “echoed by every speaker”:

...traditional aid and charity, whether distributed by nation-states or non governmental bodies, have failed. Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and social worker, now a fellow at Stanford, made the case most strongly. He argued convincingly that 30 years of Western aid to Africa has achieved nothing at all. More, he said that the persistence of African poverty could be explained, in part, by aid. He explained that aid had convinced the brightest Africans to work for corrupt governments rather than as entrepreneurs, and it had "distorted the incentive structure."

"What man or nation," Mwenda asked, "has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?"

Far better, he said, is finding Westerners to invest in African entrepreneurs or businesses, which would create wealth. Mwenda, like other speakers, described at length the investment opportunities in Africa. (I half expected the pitch to be directly addressed to Doerr et al.)

In my writing career I have written dozens of articles about life in Africa and two books. And I entirely endorse what these African speakers had to say. Aid has not helped Africans or Africa. It has helped corrupt, authoritarian governments instead.

The aid simply does not get to the people. And many of Africa’s problems are problems of corrupt leadership. Property rights don’t exist for most Africans. They live in fear of the government confiscating their land or business sites with no notice. Hence, they make little investment in these properties.

Money that is poured into Africa is used by governments to enrich themselves. Africa remains the continent with the highest trade barriers of any. There is no justice. Infrastructure, for which aid money is available is not repaired or maintained though the aid money mysteriously gets spent on something.

It is incredible how little aid makes it out to where it is supposed to go. Nothing seems to end up where it is supposed to go. Millions of condoms are donated to Africa for AIDS prevention. Yet over and over at street corners I ran into hawkers trying to sell boxes of the donated condoms. They had hundreds of them which they got in some mysterious manner. I will say the local government did give out a lot of condoms and they thoughtfully stapled instructions right to the condoms, and right through the condoms rendering them useless.

Private charities do better but that is because they build their own projects. But government to government aid is destroying Africa and has been for decades.

Instant expert Bono did not take kindly to Mwenda’s message, one echoed by every African I know. He shouted at the man and yelled: “That’s bullshit.” Nothing like a rock star expert at his rhetorical best.

I got into something of a dispute myself at one point with the local Ambassador from the European Union because an article of mine in a European publication outlined how millions of dollars worth of funding for AIDS education projects were thrown down the toilet by a corrupt government health minister. She wasted almost the entirely AIDS budget on a play that no one saw, which contained erroneous information anyway. She bragged that the press shouldn’t worry as it was EU money she spent. The ambassador insisted it couldn’t be in spite of the local parliamentary record disputing his claim. He insisted I retract my statement. I didn’t. He shut up.

The reality is that there is a strong entrepreneurial attitude among many Africans. The hawkers that fill the streets are willing to work long hours to make a living. But without secure property rights they never go very far. African farmers have the profits from their crops stolen by government marketing boards so they don’t produce more than they can use. And food production plummets.

The educated among the population find the only place to work is government since private industry is so shackled and regulated that it barely exists. What does exist is often illegal and insecure. If you want to make any progress in private industry at all you have to bribe politicians and buy permission to engage in business.

Africa can thrive but not with the governments it now has. And throwing funding at these governments only keeps helps keep them in power. Bono and his type are enablers who allow these dictatorial regimes to thrive and suck out the economic life of their country. Whatever his intentions Bono has been a disaster for Africa and Africa doesn’t need any more disasters.

There are three things the West can do which would help Africa. 1.) End all government to government aid immediately. 2.) Remove all trade barriers that are currently in place (this is especially true for Europe). 3.) End agricultural subsidies to domestic producers (again especially true for Europe).

But the changes that will do the most good are outside the control of the West and entirely internal. Africa itself needs to make serious changes such as: 1.) Establish secure property rights for its people; 2.) remove the substantial trade barriers between African countries; 3.) abolish agricultural marketing boards which rip off farmers; 4.) end their support for dictators like Robert Mugabe, and 5.) remove the burdensome regulations on their local entrepreneurs. Until these problems are resolved throwing money at Africa doesn’t help. It can’t help. Bono's favorite solution is debt relief but debt relief is useless if all it does is wipe the slate clean allowing these corrupt regimes to begin the process all over again. The reality is they won't pay the money back. So the West may as well write the debts off but they have to end all lending to these regimes.

Bush wants the US military to "stabilize" Africa.

The Imperial Presidency and the New World Empire moves forward. All hail Caesar!

The United States military is setting up a new “command headquarters for Africa” though in Germany. I would bet most Americans never realized that the US was now so militarily interested in Africa that it needed a “command headquarters” for this continent. Germany will only be the temporary headquarters for what is called Africom -- the Empires military strategy center for all military conflicts and invasions in Africa.

King George said: “This new command will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa. African Command will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth in Africa.” Nope but it will further the Bushian vision of world empire building!

Bush, who probably isn’t even sure where Africa is, knows zilch about the continent. I lived there for a dozen years. The Middle East is a rose garden compared to the quagmire in Africa.

Bush can’t even figure out a handful of Islamic sects and tell them apart. Consider Africa in comparison. There are 61 countries and territories. But that doesn’t tell you much. They are not countries like many other countries. The typical resident of France sees himself as a Frenchman. The typical African does not see himself as a national citizen but a tribal one. You can’t understand what is happening in these countries without understanding the tribal politics.

Zimbabwe is dominated by the Shona tribe of dictator Robert Mugabe. The other tribe, the Matabele, have often been the victims of Mugabe’s genocidal attacks. Even South Africa, which is downright Westernized compared to the rest of Africa, has eleven official languages reflecting the dominate tribes in that one country alone. The African National Congress was dominated by the Xhosa while the Inkatha Freedom Party is dominated by the Zulu.

Africa is riddled with hundreds and hundreds of languages and dialects. Consider a few countries. There are 18 languages in Algeria and 31 in Angola. Zimbabwe has 19 languages while Zambia has 43. Kenya has 61 while Chad has 132 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has 218. There are so many languages in Africa that no one is really sure how many there are. Estimates range from 1,000 to 2,000.

With these thousands of languages are thousands of tribes who inconveniently don’t just happen to live within the same countries. Nation states in Africa were a colonial invention and the colonial powers didn’t necessarily draw borders that made sense for the tribal/language groups under their control. Often groups that identified with each other were divided into different nations while groups that hated one another were merged into one nation. This formula guaranteed conflict for decades, if not centuries after.

Burundi, for instance, is 85% Hutu and 14% Tutsi. Rwanda has similar numbers. So the Tutsi were a minority everywhere. One result was that over one million Tutsi were slaughtered by the Hutu in the Rwandan Genocide.

Here is a president who has trouble keeping straight as to who is Sunni and who is Shiite and who probably thinks the Kurds have something to do with what Miss Muffet was eating. And we expect him to understand that one reason Zimbabwe is a dictatorship is so the Shona can suppress the Matabele and to realize that the minority status of Tutsi in both Rwanda and Burundi is a reason for the genocide. Is the Congo a center of civil conflict and war because it is a nation with 218 languages and about 200 tribes! Some four million people have died in the conflicts in the D.R.C. alone.

That the neocon Imperialists are now casting lustful eyes toward Africa ought to scare the bejesus out of people. Spiegel reports they are doing this because they are “keen to foster stability on the continent with an eye to Africa’s oil reserves...” Foster stability! Oh, the way the US stabilized Iraq for instance! Or perhaps the way the US has brought stability and peace to the Isreali-Palestinian conflict.

According to Spiegel the new command post for African incursions will only be in Germany for two or three years and then it “is expected to move to an as yet undetermined location in Africa.” US military bases in Africa.

Bush has problems. That is clear. Something is muddling his thinking. Yet he has the faith of a fundamentalists and can’t recognize that he has fucked up the world and is destroying his own country. I use those words intentionally to express the gravity of the situation. As he put it “I’m the decider.” No Mr. Bush you aren’t. You are supposed to be a servant of the American people. And the people want out of Iraq and I bet you’d be hard pressed to find 10% wanting US military bases in Africa.

Bush is not learning because his brain is incapable of learning. His past use of cocaine may have done some serious damage to his ability to think critically -- or to think at all. Empire building is disastrous. It is disastrous to those under the thumb of the empire and it is disastrous to the nation where the empire is founded. All empires collapse! And the bigger the empire the bigger the collapse.

America has become an imperial state run by a man with imperial ambitions. There are certainly threats in the world but I don’t see Empire as the solution. In fact American empire building feeds those threats and makes them more powerful. There will be, for some time, the unorganized, diffused threat of radical Islamists. But because they are diffused and unorganized (and not centralized in any organization) Empire building can’t stop that threat. It needs to be dealt with in other ways.

American expansion into Africa will only push more Muslims toward radical Islamist thinking. There are over 400 million Muslims in Africa and the Islamists are relatively weak there. American intervention will only inspire Africans to adopt a more radical Islamic faith. US intervention in Iraq unleashed the theocratic forces of Islam there. And it will do the same in Africa.

Recent polls showed that Bush now has an approval rating of 28%. He is only 4 points away from the all-time low of Richard Nixon. And still he pushes on. He won’t be happy until empire is established. I am convinced that Bush is fundamentally the most anti-American threat around. He is doing more to destroy the historic principle of American government than anyone. Fiscal sanity has been destroyed for empire. Constitutional rights shredded for empire. Limited government destroyed for empire.

Osama bin Laden and his tiny group of followers killed a couple of thousand Americans in a horrific attack. But he had no power to destroy habeas corpus, no power to eavesdrop on Americans, no power to impose internal passports in the form a national ID, no power to break the budget, no power to engulf America in foreign conflicts around the globe. Bin Laden had a limited power to kill but already the victims of Bush’s response exceed the numbers killed on 9/11. And that is only counting the American war dead not the tens of thousands killed while being “liberated” nor the tens of thousands killed by the civil war ignited by the US invasion.

The worst bin Laden was capable of doing he has done. The enemy without is always a danger. But when Constitutional government is thrown away to fight that enemy then the enemy within becomes the bigger threat. George Bush is public enemy number one. Bin Laden is a poor second compared to him. The biggest threat to American values is not Islamist radicalism but imperialism.