Their secret services - disguised as intrusive NGOs or workers at the embassy - often get them involved in shady acts and unscrupulous practices. Real NGOs ask for their assiduous assistance and protection. Their hosts - and centuries old protocol - expect them to surreptitiously provide support while openly refrain from intervening, maintaining equipoise. Other countries protest, compete, or leak damaging reports to an often hostile media. The torpid common folk resent them for their colonial ways and hypocritical demarches. Lacking compunction, they are nobody's favourites and everybody's scapegoats at one time or another. And they are ill-equipped to deal with these subtleties. Not of intelligence, they end where they now are and wish they weren't. Ignorant of business and entrepreneurship, they occupy the dead end, otiose and pension-orientated jobs they do. Devoid of the charm, negotiating skills and human relations required by the intricacies of their profession - they are relegated to the Augean outskirts of civilization. Dishonest and mountebank, they persist in their mortifying positions, inured to the conniving they require. This blatantly discernible ineptitude provokes the "natives" into a wholesale rejection of the West, its values and its culture. The envoys are perceived as the cormorant reification of their remote controllers. Their voluptuary decadence is a distant echo of the West's decay, their nonage greed - a shadow of its avarice, their effrontery and hidebound peremptory nature - its mien. They are in no position to preach or teach. The diplomats of the West are not evil. Some of them mean well. To the best of their oft limited abilities, they cadge and beg and press and convince their governments to show goodwill and to contribute to their hosts. But soon their mettle is desiccated by the vexatious realities of their new habitation. Reduced to susurrus cynicism and sardonic contempt, they perfunctorily perform their functions, a distant look in their now empty eyes. They have been assimilated, rendered useless to their dispatchers and to their hosts alike. XLIV. Microsoft's Third Front The Intellectual Property Wars Elated investors greeted chairman Bill Gates and chief executive officer Steve Ballmer for Microsoft's victory in the titanic antitrust lawsuit brought against it by the Department of Justice and assorted state attorneys general. They also demanded that Microsoft distribute its pile of cash - $40 billion in monopoly profits - as dividends.