The $100 notebook project bothers me, as do all feel-good Lefty efforts at making people's lives better in spite of themselves. 100 million dead Communists last century are a testament to the good intentions that pave the road to Hell, and in my mind the $100 notebook is another example.

Will access to information help a starving, tribally oppressed African child? If so, will this happen before or after he is conscripted into some genocidal warlord's militia and she is sent off to some faraway village as a sex slave? The Internet is a great thing, no doubt about it, but it can't alter the underlying philosophical abyss that is the tribal collectivism of Africa.

From this story, it looks like the project is having difficulty getting traction. Probably, the warlords and dictators haven't yet figured out how to use the notebooks to their favor. They'd rather see charity in the form of money and food, that they can funnel away from the intended targets and toward their bands of thugs.