The Half Baked Lunatic

You normally don’t think of Kenya as being at the forefront of technical and financial innovation – but I was struck by this story I saw recently on CNN:

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/04/15/mckenzie.kenya.mobile.money.cnn

What started out as a way to transfer pre-paid cell phone credits to family and friends has turned into an entire micro-transaction commerce platform that is replacing banks in Kenya. And there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work elsewhere!

Think of it as PayPal for cell phones.  For example – you want to buy a magazine from a vendor on the street, but you don’t have change.  The vendor doesn’t take credit or debit cards. So you just enter their cell phone number, specify how much you want to transfer, tap in your security code, and hit send.  Just like sending a text message, but you’re sending cash.  The vendor’s phone beeps, notifying them More...

How’s that for a title to a blog post?  So what do you think ... does the pope believe in god?

Seriously.  The one thing we can be sure of is that the pope believes in power, influence, control, politics – and huge amounts of wealth.  And he gets all of those things by making sure that OTHERS believe that there is a god.

It’s a great system – the church has countless laborers all across the globe who have embraced a life of poverty, yet they spend their time recruiting new members and collecting donations for the church.  Sure, half of it gets used for local charity, and some (certainly not all) of these projects actually do some good, but a large percentage of the money goes all the way to the top. It’s the greatest scam ever invented! Way better than any other pyramid scheme – they’ve even managed to make it tax deductable!

I’m not saying the pope isn’t a smart guy.  It does take a certain degree of intelligence to More...