Shell, Chevron, and shenanigans

Boston Mayor Flynn has announced a boycott of Shell Oil products in his city because it has a subsidiary in South Africa. Whether the "charge" is true is irrelevant¾I hope it is, for the sake of South African blacks' jobs if for no other reason. But the boycotted products will be replaced by other companies, includ-ing Chevron, whose refinery in Angola provides most of the funds to maintain 60,000 Cuban troops in the country. Their job is to enforce the status of the country as a Soviet colony, and to wage ever more offensives under Soviet commanders, at times by chemical warfare, against the freedom fighters led by Jonas Savimbi¾the leader who has recently been sold out by Jimmy Reagan and Neville Shultz in an agreement that forces South Africa out of Namibia now, but lets the Cubans stay in Angola for years by treaty, for good in fact.

Mayor Flynn, so fashionably color-conscious, favors the exter-mination of blacks by troops advised and commanded exclusively by whites. He rants against South Africa, which has a judiciary that can, and often does, overrule the government, and which oc-cupies no foreign territory, but he wants friendship with the USSR, whose troops enslave hundreds of millions, and which does not even let its own citizens freely leave the country¾a right that South Africa grants to its lowliest black. Like all con-temporary politicians, he is transported in bliss over the Soviet Mafia now having a more intelligent Godfather.

But back to less obvious matters: It does not follow that Shell is good and Chevron bad. Neither is different from Exxon, IBM, Xerox or other big corporations¾so big that thinking based on property rights has long since given way to a mentality reminis-cent of the government. Beyond their internal world of corporate infighting and their external world of sales and "social responsibility" gimmicks, they have little idea of what is going on:

But a more important point is that ignoble inconsistencies, such as that used by Mr. Flynn to aggrandize himself, can be detected by reasoned knowledge¾the knowledge based not on parroting this or that "trusted" source, but by checking all avail-able facts against tested principles.

I hope that readers recognized the hoax not because I said so, but by the reasoned knowledge that formed the opinion¾yours or mine. It was layman's knowledge that the WSJ's reporters (let alone the tabloid hacks) lacked; yet they were not fired for their journalistic incompetence. They are now feeding you new hoaxes on nuclear-weapons plants, South Africa, and the homeless.