Scotland update

Hoping to have some substantive interviews with some of the more senior folks in the Live 8 movement. The "followers," as it were, are good-hearted people but, as I'd mentioned before, I've heard a few too many times about how poor countries aren't responsible for their situation, and how we are. I think the reality is a bit muddier than that.

Yes, the west helped to make Africa worse off in many ways, including slavery. But corrupt African governments have certainly done their fair share as well, and continue to do so. Mbeki's lunacy in South African is just as much to blame for that country's HIV/AIDS crisis as anyone - Mbeki doesn't believe in the not-so-new AIDS drugs that are saving lives acros the world - and I'm told many of his fellow citizens believe in his conspiratorial "the whites gave us AIDS" crap. And you know, maybe he and his followers have a hard time because of Apartheid, they don't trust white people, now etc. - and you know, maybe I can understand how they'd end up being anti-white racist paranoids. But that doesn't exonerate them from being complicit in their own genocide. I am not the guilty party, and they are most certainly not the innocent.

Anyway, that's not the overarching theme of this place, it's just a tenor I keep hearing, and something that annoys me, and isn't going to win them any brownie points with most Americans.

live8