The London Guardian/Observer, May 11, 2008 (HAT TIP 3 Quarks Daily):

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

This article is the first in the Project 222 series on this blog. Project 222 is a Crab Media initiative to blog about charitable organizations on the 2nd day of the month, to donate 2 days a year to community service and to commit 2 percent of BLOG gross revenue (not blog-GER gross revenue at this time) to charitable work.

The charitable organization is one that, I suspect, will have some appeal both to bleeding hearts like me and the flintier conservatives among Maryland Weekly's readers as well. I refer to KickStart, Inc., Tax ID Number 06-1613235, a charitable organization headquartered legally and financially in San Francisco but with operations primarily in several African countries.

KickStart has an interesting approach for a non-profit organization. While it is a 501(c)(3) organization and cannot engage in activities with the primary end goal of "making money", its primary tool is a series of foot-powered water pumps called the "MoneyMaker," with the Super MoneyMaker Plus serving as their top of the line model.

Who wants a foot-powered water pump? Probably not the average North American farmer, who has tractors and gasoline and municipally pumped water in most cases or at least a reliable electric well. A Kenyan farmer, on the other hand, needs to haul water on a beast of burden, a wheelbarrow or the like from an off-the-grid creek, well or lake in most cases. Neither electricity nor gasoline nor pumped water is generally available. A foot-powered pump can increase the effective irrigation radius dramatically in such circumstances. While the wheelbarrow, etc, may be necessary still, the effective crop irrigation coverage is much broader when one is more or less using gravity, rather than fighting gravity, to deliver water to crops.

Rural Kenyans (and other rural Africans) are not used to forms of commercial mass marketing known all too well to Westerners, and one of the things that KickStart does is to market the devices effectively so that risk-averse, impoverished African farmers will trust in their utility. The website for KickStart promotes some pretty amazing figures for the GDP impacts of KickStart's activities in Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to the water pumps, KickStart markets oil presses for the small-scale production of cooking oil, as well as other technologies.

This organization's site is all about profit, cost-recovery, return on investment. I don't know enough about KickStart to know whether there may be some hidden downside, but distribution of oil presses and water pumps to subsistence or near-subsistence farmers sounds almost per se positive to me, especially if they are being distributed with the emphasis on profitability and cost-recovery to such farmers.

I was enchanted by this hauntingly simple, beautiful site dedicated to the restoration of the mother church of Eastern Christianity, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) cathedral in Istanbul, to active status as an Orthodox house of worship.

I may be going to Eschacon, blogger Atrios' blogger get-together in Philadelphia at the end of March, but have not decided. Philly is close enough that renting a hotel room seems a bit of a waste of money; I would probably go up and back same-day, maybe even by bus to save automobile wear-and-tear (and to kick in some nostalgia from my Princeton days when I was too cheap and broke to pay Amtrak fares up and down the NE Corridor.) Am not committing yet due to cash flow and other more personal issues.

I would consider carpooling it if there are other Maryland/DC bloggers doing likewise.

Soccer Dad has a post up about the praise that George W. Bush is getting from unexpected corners regarding his support for the fight against AIDS in Africa. Also, check out his excerpts regarding the retirement of Fidel Castro from his long-time role as Boss of the Castro Crime Family President of the Republic of Cuba.

HAT TIP Majikthise.

Maryland Conservatarian scored a good one from the Volokh Conspiracy regarding its refusal to run an ad from the American Jewish Congress highlighting the achievements of women in executive, legislative and judicial leadership roles in Israel. The actual ad is here.

Soccer Dad provides media reporting and his own commentary on the libertarian case for Rudolph Giuliani in his bid for the Presidency.

I am not a fan of Giuliani, specifically on libertarian grounds. But check out Soccer Dad for a well-written piece from a much more positive viewpoint regarding the results of Giuliani's tenure as Mayor of New York City.

I have had my fill of this remote, agrarian, down-home tickturd of a state having undue influence over our entire country by means of a political procedure better suited for electing who gets thrown out of the Fifth Grade Cool Girls Club. It is anti-democratic in both spirit and process against most Iowans who, in fact, have real responsibilities other than playing political junkie for hours and hours as if the whole state were composed of politics grad students.

There is nothing that this country actually needs from Iowa other than corn at market prices; Iowa's place in the calendar and its archaic, quasi-feudal primary caucus process makes sure that market prices are exactly what DON'T control the price of corn, through its permanent regime of transfer payments and subsidies from economically successful (i.e. blue, urban, liberal) states like Maryland - fully endorsed by presidential aspirants one after another, in saecula saeculorum.