johnbyronkuhner.com

This kind of stuff gets my inner Robespierre rolling.  $70 billion?  This is an estimate, of course, but apparently it’s a good enough estimate to make the news.  With all due respect to Christopher Hitchens’ intellect, the universe is not rationally coherent unless it finds some way to avenge itself in some horrible way on men like this.  The stories of Egyptian poverty are as notorious as any in the world: one of the stories seared into my head is Christians there sorting through mounds of garbage, living off the country’s leavings.  And this:

In Cairo, there is an area called the City of the Dead. It is a large ancient graveyard filled with tombs. One million families with nowhere else to go have had to break them open and live in the graves. It’s a symbol of the living death the dictators we arm and fund have inflicted on the Middle East. While the people live in coffins, Mubarak’s family buy palaces here in London: I just went to see the five-storey Georgian mansion they own round the corner from Harrods here in London.

Allowing for exaggeration – one million families in quite a lot where family size is not small – there shouldn’t be anyone living in graves.  Not while their leader is shopping in Soho.  And certainly not while we’re paying their leader to do so.