Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe is planning to celebrate his 85th birthday in style with this impressive menu:
- 2,000 bottles of champagne — Moët & Chandon and ’61 Bollinger
- 500 bottles of whisky — Johnny Walker Blue Label, 22-year-old Chivas
- 8,000 lobsters
- 100kg king prawns
- 3,000 ducks
- 4,000 portions of caviar
- 8,000 boxes of Ferrero Rocher
- 16,000 eggs
- 3,000 cakes — chocolate and vanilla
- 4,000 packs of pork sausages
- 500kg cheese
- 4,000 packets of crackers
And why not? It isn't as though his people are starving, cholera-ridden and on the verge of utter ruin, is it?
4 comments:
If only he would eat all that himself in one go.
I could almost say that countries
with black presidents are run into
the ground, but that's probably an
unfair generalization.
Yeh, I'd say it's unfair, jayessell. Or rather, it's keying off the wrong variable. USSR did a good job turning out African commie thuglets with the Lumumba Institute, and then putting them in charge of countries. In our case, Hussein Husseinovich comes from a family of useful idiots, as Illich himself called the species, and apparently, the ACORN didn't fall far from the tree. (Hussein Senior wasn't good enough for Lumumba, apparently, so he went to the US to study.)
As I see it, if you've got a commie running your country, you're screwed. Works if said commie is black, white or zebra-striped. Now, who's running the US and A? Oh. Crap.
Well, I'd agree with Sergej in thinking that jayessell's generalisation based on skin colour is rather unfair.
But I'd disagree with Sergej, in that he too, is rather too specific. I'd say that it doesn't really matter about your skin colour, creed, religion, political orientation, etc. I'd say that most humans are fairly random mindless beings, with a few outliers smart enough to stop us all turning into a big, writhing mass of anarchy, chaos and blood, like we'd probably end up doing if we actually acted on what we felt; instead, we're lucky enough to have outside sources (some of which are so clever and insidious that they manage to become inside sources) that will give us more important things to worry about than eating each other.
...Hm. That's probably wrong. But I'm just as stupid as the rest of us, so you can probably disregard the last statement. Boo Mugabe, etc.
Ah, but Wunderbear. Civilized living is all about not bopping your neighbor on the head with your caveman-club, even if his music is really loud and really annoying. True. But in this broad criterion, there can be more than one stable way to organize your society. You can live like the modern Chinese, or the Aztecs (twitch wrong and we'll slice your heart out, see if we don't!), or the Brits of the Belle Epoque, or Stalin's USSR, etc.
The socialist way of life I know from my parents' stories is also a way to live. Fun fact about this way of life is, despite Karl Marx's implicit assumption, wealth does not just exist out there for the government to redistribute (or "spread around" as our commie-in-chief puts it); wealth can be created, as it is by engineers, and it can be spoiled without doing anyone any good. I think there is something about socialism specifically that reduces the wealth available for "spreading around". Maybe it's the concentration of so much power in so few hands, so the way to live the best life is to be good at kissing civil servants' rear ends rather than inventing or building things. Maybe it discourages rocking the boat so thoroughly that passivity becomes a survival trait. Could be the marginal tax rate---if making an effort to benefit society doesn't benefit you, are you going to do it? really? I don't know. I see that the USSR collapsed under its own weight, that red China has some rather interesting things that it calls living standards, and that Europe can't always be bothered to take the trouble to reproduce.
As for dark-colored El Presidentes who are commies, I'd say that a lot of those are African, and thus likely Lumumba graduates. "I'm a commie" in this case means, "I run this place and will kill and/or eat (Idi Amin) anyone who disagrees, with the help of my Russian comrades and their AK-47s". Our CIA propped up a few choice thugs as well, but I think Comrade Putin's old outfit was better at it. No qualms from the opium of the masses, perhaps.
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