Month: November 2015

Rhino Roundabout

Rhino Roundabout

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

rhinoandguardsThe age-old economic debate whether a government can adequately control demand by regulating its market has moved onto the survival of the rhino.

Last week a regional appeals court (The Pretoria High Court) voided a South African government ban on selling and trading rhino products within South Africa. The decision does not effect South Africa’s compliance with the international treaty that bans the trade of rhino products internationally.

Practically speaking, the value of buying rhino horn products that remain in South Africa is almost nil. The value of a rhino product comes from demand from far away Asian markets.

CITES, the international treaty which regulates the international trade in living things, has prohibited the sale of any rhino product for almost forty years.

(CITES is a fantastic world-peace treaty that I’ve often written about. Use the search bar on my blog to learn more about it.)

CITES was created to save elephants, and it did. Various whales and fishes have also been saved from extinction, but there are hundreds more species that have benefited from being “listed” at various levels of restricted trade.

Rhino were among the first animals to be “listed” as off-limits to international trading by CITES. The rhino horn commands an enormous price in Asian markets where its powder is believed to have medicinal properties capable of curing stomach ailments, reducing fevers and even curing chronic illnesses like diabetes.

The weakness of CITES is proved in the fact that even today powdered rhino horn is legally available throughout Asia, often displayed in the windows of store-front drug stores. Acquiring it – from Africa or India – is patently illegal under CITES. But once acquired, the trade within the country is entirely the purvey of that country alone.

Opponents of CITES thus argue that all it does is perpetuate black markets. Proponents point to several studies conducted when portions of the treaty were lifted temporarily (such as for auctions of stockpiled elephant ivory), when refreshed markets stimulated new demand which in turn broadened the black market.

In an attempt to close this contradiction some countries have passed laws prohibiting internal trade in the same species that CITES prohibits international trade. The Obama administration is currently in the process of an uphill battle that will prohibit the domestic trade in elephant ivory.

Until last week, South Africa had prohibited the domestic trade of rhino horn.

Rhino – unlike elephants – survive because of private game farms, ranches and fenced national parks (like Nakuru in Kenya and Hluhluwe in South Africa). The horn is so valuable and the animal so easy to kill (a single individual with a relatively small gun has an excellent chance of hitting the very large rhino heart from the side of the animal) that only by virtual sequestration from the true wild can it be conserved.

And even so, with great difficulty. Rhino poaching and black marketering is legend. The 20,000 rhino alive predominantly on southern African ranches and farms represent 80% of the remaining population, but the poaching of rhino in South Africa has almost turned into a war.

South African Rhino farmers argue that they have an extremely valuable product that is entirely sustainable on the free market. Without a market, poaching ramps up to supply demand. Farmers claim they require virtual armies to protect their herds.

“This is a momentous judgment,” the plaintiff rhino farmer told the press. “I would just hope that the world understands that if I don’t sell rhino, my whole rhino herd would be dead within the next ten years.”

Rhino can be sedated and portions of the horn scraped off. The powder is more valuable than gold. Like fingernails the horn then regrows with virtually no negative effects to the rhino.

South African rhino farmers have been stockpiling huge amounts of rhino powder for many years, certain that the day will come when CITES will realize that market demand in Asia can be adequately supplied without endangering the animal. In fact, they argue, the pressure for poaching will abate.

In many ways rhino farmers see the prohibition against selling rhino horn similar to the prohibition against selling alcohol. With proper government regulation, the horrors of bootlegging will abate.

Most scientists, CITES and the South African government disagree and that’s why there was – until five days ago – a ban on any sale of a rhino product within South Africa.

The irony in all of this is, of course, that there is not a large enough market just within South Africa to sustain the farming. Clearly farmers believe by opening the valves on the internal market, it will somehow facilitate the international one. That’s illegal.

But that’s not their problem, is it.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

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Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. (Canada celebrates it earlier.) Thanksgiving is one of Canada and the U.S.’ major holiday celebrations, characterized by copious amounts of food featuring seasonal recipes and lots of sweets. The traditional meat served at the feast is turkey.

The two-day holiday originates with the first permanent settlers to the New World, people who called themselves pilgrims fleeing England’s restrictive laws on religion and who arrived the northeast coast of America in between 1620 and 1621.

They faired poorly in the beginning until two local native Americans, Wampanoags of the Algonkian-speaking clans, both of whom spoke English (because one of them had previously traveled to England in 1605) befriended the settlers. The “Indians” taught the pilgrims how to farm and build homesteads, and the summer planting season was so successful that the pilgrims invited the Indians to a “Thanksgiving” harvest dinner in November, 1621.

Click here for much more information about the history and meaning of Thanksgiving by a native American school teacher, who dispels not only the myths about the “primitiveness” of native Americans, but also about the pilgrims’ history and beliefs.

Allegorical Apocalypse

Allegorical Apocalypse

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UofSLanguage is society’s most powerful tool, and it’s under siege in South Africa.

The University of Stellenbosch, the country’s “Afrikaans University,” founded in 1866, the bastion of Boer Culture will no longer employ Afrikaans as a predominant instructional language. Advantage: English.

The issue of instructional language in South Africa’s universities has been under constant debate since the end of apartheid. There are 11 official languages in the country. English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Sotho are the primary ones with English dominating.

But Afrikaans has been a close second. The first European settlers of The Cape more than four hundred years ago were from Holland. Afrikaans is derived from Dutch and became the working language of the South African colony.

Afrikaans was the only language of the first two political entities that declared independence, the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

Colonial languages like higher Spanish, old French, classical Portuguese and the King’s English didn’t last long as their colonies rocketed away from them into independence, and Afrikaans morphed from Dutch remarkably fast to become a sophisticated language of an independent new-world people.

Dutch imperial power collapsed very quickly in the 1800s just as the Afrikaans were on the ascent, but Britain stepped right in to take over from the Dutch. Few places in the world were as important as South Africa to emerging world powers whose ships were trading extensively with Asia.

Afrikaans and English became bitter enemies.

The extraordinary brutality that occurred between the competing British and Afrikaans resulted in several outright wars, concentration camps and massacres the likes of which were not seen again until the atrocities of the World Wars.

Nothing like this happened elsewhere in the world, because of course there were many even earlier native peoples living in South Africa before the Afrikaans who, in fact, the Afrikaans oppressed. Afrikaans culture and politics became apartheid.

So in a 180-degree twist in barely a century, the oppressed Afrikaaners became the oppressors.

Almost 7 million of South Africa’s 53 million people are native Afrikaans speakers, way down from just the last two generations. When I first worked in South Africa in the 1980s more than a third of the population was native Afrikaans speakers.

Luister [which means listen] is a documentary film purporting entrenched racism against non-white, non-Afrikaans speaking students at the University of Stellenbosch (UoS), today.

The powerful student protests that have swept across the country this term have been the catalyst for a wide range of rapid changes in South Africa, and it looks like language policy at UofS is one of them.

The proposed changes are more the nail-in-the-coffin than a revolutionary move. The current policy is for dual-language instruction, Afrikaans with English with translators present in lecture halls. That move a few years ago, which abandoned predominant instruction in Afrikaans, was more significant as it presaged what is now happening.

There seems to be enough maturity in the new South Africa for many to realize that Afrikaans is a mature language that needs help if it isn’t to be swallowed up by English. One of the African leaders of one of the country’s most progressive political parties suggested this week that the UoS policy is not so clearly correct.

Even a United Nations agency suggest some introspection.

In this charged political atmosphere I don’t think the university will reverse itself. And clearly, the deeply rooted Boer culture and its Afrikaans language is not going to disappear because of this.

But as a lover of language and all its nuances and beauties, I admit feeling sad that this very prestigious higher institution is sacrificing such an historic identity to the nondescript functionality of a Twitter World.

Rhino Requiem? Not yet

Rhino Requiem? Not yet

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

rhinossurviveScience is not a Fox News forte, and they shouldn’t have tried to report this weekend’s death of Nola, the rhino in San Diego.

“The subspecies has been decimated by poachers… The horns are in high demand in parts of Asia where some people claim they have medicinal properties for treating everything from hangovers to cancer,” Fox reported.

Like much news telling only some of the story leads to massively misunderstanding it. This is a Fox News forte.

First, vigorous debate continues in the scientific community as to whether this rhino and its three remaining cousins still alive in a reserve in Kenya are, in fact, subspecies of the 20,000 white rhino that survive in South Africa.

The Northern White Rhino (NWR), of which Nola claims descent, has been considered a pretty distinct animal from its much more successful southern cousins (SWR) throughout my lifetime. I remember in the early days seeing them frequently in Meru National Park in Kenya.

Their difference is slightly taxonomic, but in 2010 several scientists delved into the DNA and concluded NWR was a sub-species. But many scientists then and now vigorously disagree.

More to the point, a heavily read science blogger in 2010 explained, “The danger in [suggesting a separate sub-species exists] could eventually backfire: it would not look good if zoologists were thought to be tweaking their conclusions in order to suit their favoured conservation projects.”

Many animal species — indeed including ourselves — develop slight genetic differences and even greater taxonomic differences simply by long periods of geographic separation. The scientists who believe the NWR is a separate sub-species believe that divergence was a million years ago.

Fox also simplified to the point of near falsehood regarding the reasons rhino are poached:

Rhino poachers are motivated far more by a Mideast market than an Asian one, albeit both markets exist. But a poacher’s pay is considerably higher from a buyer in Yemen or Djibouti than Hong Kong.

In the Mideast a rhino horn is polished up to become a dagger handle presented to rich young men by even richer fathers at their rite de passage. The Asian market is a close second, but what is noteworthy is that today’s conflicts in the Mideast have actually enhanced this market, as anything anti-western (like conservation) grows in popularity.

Fox also messed up seriously the suggestions that the subspecies might be saved by in vitro fertilization. I wrote extensively about this in 2009.

Reuters as usual got the Nola death more correctly.

What concerns me is the range of unhelpful conclusions that people of widely different predispositions will have with the notion that an animal has “gone extinct.”

African rhino as a whole are in need of our serious attention, and in fact a lot of good is being done. I think many will agree with me, today, that the white rhino will be saved when only 15 or 20 years ago we doubted this would be possible.

Perhaps it’s the desire for scandal, but the notion that the death of the San Diego rhino presages the death of all rhino is right up the ally of Fox News, or more to the point, its readers.

And once again, they’re wrong.

Ridiculous, Simply

Ridiculous, Simply

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

carsonstoneageTwo notable attacks this morning, one on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali and a powerful Nigerian air force offensive against Boko Haram, clarify what terrorism means to many Americans when overlaid Paris.

Up to a dozen masked gunmen driving cars with diplomatic license plates stormed Bamako’s principal expatriate hotel this morning, forced their way in, briefly interrogated a few people who were allowed to leave after reciting sections of the Koran, then rounded up others in what at this moment remains a hostage situation.

Next door, Nigeria’s powerful air force blasted to smithereens “an outdoor gathering” that it claimed was of Boko Haram terrorists in the east of the country.

When these two events play themselves out, over no more time than it took the Paris events to unfold, many more people will have been killed than in Paris, and many more terrorists as well.

And I’ll wage you dollars to donuts it will receive a fraction of the attention, even in this currently charged atmosphere so sensitive to security and terrorism.

Why?

First, because the vast majority (say 90%?) of media consumers take little interest in Africa.

Second, media consumers presume that bad things happen more in Africa than where they live. It’s not as unusual.

Third and most sinister, media consumers impugn African failures at moral governance – a sort of “they got what they deserve.”

I doubt you will disagree with the first reason.

The second is almost a tautology; I think we’ll agree.

I may get resistance to my third from holier-than-thou effetes, but the more honest among us will be unable to completely shed this characterization. We may resist our weakness to believe punishment is both just and a course of remedy, but we must admit to it.

So while it’s not a satisfying analysis and hardly one that naturally leads to any rectification of the problem, it stands solid.

Let’s own the situation and our frailty at grappling with it, and then let’s roll up our sleeves and figure out what to do about.

Here’s when I get mad: When instead of confronting this terribly complex situation head-on, we look for shortcuts out of dealing with it.

Today on PBS’ Morning Edition, the intellectual weakling Steve Inskeep asked his even worse reporter assigned to the Mali attack, the ever confused Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, ‘Is this attack linked to anything more global?’ (I can’t remember the exact words. That’s my characterization: Listen to the link.)

Then in a terribly disappointing followup, the good journalist Renee Montagne asked Gerard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States, if the Mali attacks were linked to anything globally.

To his eternal credit there was an unnatural radio pause before he answered that he thought the situation was more “local.”

Americans want everything linked to the Joker. They want Syrian refugees to be trained by Him. They want the Syrian Opposition (which yet isn’t organized) to fight Him. They want then “to wipe him out.”

The trouble in the world today is, first it’s not more than it’s probably always been, but second, it’s more deadly because of the geometrically increased number of available weapons, and third: it’s way more complicated than before and if linked to anything singular it’s probably climate change.

I’d love to hear how the Republicans plan on wiping out Climate Change.

There is no Joker. Massive increases in technology allow us to know about so much more of the conflicts in the world than we used to. Huge illogical wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq coupled with the end of the Cold War have thrown unimaginable amounts of weapons out there to be picked up.

So throw all that on your chess board and stop trying to simplify it.

Africans Speak About Paris

Africans Speak About Paris

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

BELGIUM-FRANCE-ATTACKS-POLICEConsider seriously Africans’ reactions to the Paris attacks.

There’s no shortage of empathy in Africa for the victims, nor any support for the barbarism of ISIS. But there’s an understanding of the situation that most Americans lack.

Many more thousands of Africans in Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Kenya and elsewhere have been barbarously slaughtered by radical Islamists than westerners, with little note in the west. Sidelined by this western arrogance understandable anger animates much African analysis.

In an open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg published in one of Nigeria’s main newspapers, writer Jafaar Jafaar politely criticizes the French flags and other gifs that Facebook spread over its platform, worldwide:

“While my heart goes to the French over [the] terrorist attacks… I couldn’t but lash at the folly of Facebook for failure to identify with Nigeria when an estimated 15,000 Nigerians were killed by terrorists in round-the-clock attacks in eight years.

“Sir, I don’t want to believe your bias was informed by the assumed superiority of the races you often identify with.”

Why do westerners pay so much attention to their own suffering at the expense of even the slightest attention to the much greater suffering of Africans?

“Well the simple answer is that to some in the world some lives are more important than others. Western media … has made this abundantly clear,” writes Christopher Charamba for Zimbabwe’s Herald.

I’d say the majority of analysis also lays the blame for the Paris attacks fundamentally on the west itself, for having disrupted Mideast societies for so many years:

The respected author, Charles Onyango-Obbo, recounts almost a thousand years of history in his analysis for Kenya’s Daily Nation this morning.

He reminds readers of the constant exploitation of the world by the powers that be, including the horrible epoch of slavery. Pointing out that the Mideast “is not much bigger than DR Congo and Algeria… mostly desert with relatively few people,” the wars there are all about oil and Israel.

He concludes so appropriately as so many of us have for so many times, that the foolish notion of “wiping out” ISIS or whatever other horrible group might be contesting the region will only ready it for something worse.

This dynamic – fighting to eliminating the bad guys in the Middle East – has been going on for many centuries, but has never ended well for any of the temporary victors. Each time a bad group is eliminated, a worse group arises.

Some in Africa are not as polite as Jafaar, Charamba or Obbo.

A South African Muslim cleric, Farid Esack, told a South African news agency yesterday, “I am sickened … that whenever [western] chickens come home to roost then I must feign horror.

“Stop supporting and funding terror outfits, get out of other people’s lands and continents… abandon your cultural imperialism, destroy your arms industry that provides the weapons that kill hundreds of thousands of others every year.

“The logic is quite simple: When you eat, it’s stupid to expect that no shit will ever come out from your body. Yes, I feel sorry for the victims… But, bloody hell, own it; it’s yours!” he said.

Just as in Nigeria much more attention is paid to Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria than ISIS attacks in Paris, it’s understandable on the one hand that western media – which is predominantly the world media – will focus more on attacks to westerners than Africans.

But the margin of that difference in attention is hard to justify, given the simple numbers of people suffering at the hand of radicals in Africa versus in the west. And Obbo’s astute analysis that this whole mess is a western derivative makes it even less explicable.

We are arrogant. We are forgetful of even recent history. We are small, reactionary thinkers as demonstrated by the lunacy surrounding our fear of accepting Syrian refugees. We should listen to some Africans, rather than just ourselves.

Please Stand Up

Please Stand Up

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religiouswingnutsSane Americans need to speak up. Obama has tried to quell our embarrassment by admitting how shameful many of our leaders are acting, but he needs our support.

Calling we Americans out for “knee-jerk right wing reactions” South Africa’s Daily Maverick pointed out for the upteenth time that virtually all the terrorists we know of with for the last multiple years have been home-grown westerners. Not refugees.

Belgian born and bred. French born and bred. American born and bred. Not born and bred in the Middle East.

If you can’t put two and two together, let’s try one and one. A refugee cannot seek asylum from a country he’s born in. That isn’t the law, it’s just grammar.

“Governor Huckabee,” the co-anchor Mike on Morning Joe this morning said, “there have been 794,000 immigrants allowed into the U.S. from the Middle East since 9/11 and not one of them has been arrested for anything. Why should we worry now?”

Huckabee insisted that there “were at least two Syrians” involved in the Paris attack.

The moderator pointed out that we didn’t know that, and that there was only one possibility and that it was unconfirmed so far. “Everyone else was home-grown.”

“How many is too many?” Huckabee retorted before continuing a rant that included prohibiting Episcopalians and Methodists, if they went around shooting people, “but as far I know they don’t.”

I, too, am on the verge of being nuts: I could get to the point where I believed that Mike Huckabees should be arrested and stashed away for inciting hate and inflicting evil. But I’m not there yet.

Facts comfort me: The Obama strategy in the Middle East is actually working. ISIS controls less territory and has fewer trained leaders. That’s one of the reasons we expect more terrorist attacks in the West…

…as their accomplished social media weavers encourage local western citizens into acts of terror, the same way that individuals in the U.S. have been worked up into shooting church citizens and Army soldiers.

It’s the same, and it’s horrible, and it’s racist and shameful of so many Americans like Huckabee to claim the problem is carried with Syrian refugees.

What are we going to do about it? Today, France announced that it would pay all the tuition for all the 109 students who survived the Garissa University terrorist attack in Kenya in April.

We should go a step further: we should pay all the tuition for any student who wants to attend that university.

South Africa’s Daily Maverick concludes today:

“And so it is that tragedy often causes a suspension of logic, and a somewhat ahistorical response. Global terror has a history, and a face that goes far beyond ISIS, Osama Bin-Laden and Al Qaeda. Its faces are those of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with shrewd hawkish Condoleeza Rice in the background. It is also the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s recent apology for ‘Iraq war mistakes’.”

Stand up if you aren’t too arthritic and still sane. The right wing response in our country to the tragedy in the Middle East and the refugee crisis is shameful and despicable. I can’t believe the media gives it traction, and that so many people really embrace these lies.

Just remember the Weimar Republic. Remember how all those well-off German citizens dismissed the right wing insurgency as insignificant, because it was so laughable and unbelievable.

Yourself & Terror

Yourself & Terror

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

018794-01-02“Aren’t you afraid of going to Africa, now?” a friend asked me during the intermission of a play this weekend.

“No more afraid than you must be staying home,” I replied, angry as usual with the question.

Terrorism has been a part of the troubled world for all of history and “No, Bernie; No, Hillary; no, Donald” we can’t get rid of it. We can contain it, but we are doomed to a worse fate if we think we can end it.

That’s what’s brought us to the current tragedy: a misguided notion that invading Iraq would make the world safer. Misguided heaped upon misguided, for our mistake in Vietnam and Russia’s in Afghanistan seemed to have been ignored.

We as Americans are masterful at fooling ourselves, because we have inflated notions of our might and because we can hide so well in our insular communities.

But I reminded that questioner Saturday of the Cold War, and she remembered then how her own family had built an air raid shelter. She began to remember how it was stocked and maintained.

Was that not done out of fear? That’s terrorism’s success: making you afraid: the presumption that some awful inhumanity which you believe or have actually seen happening somewhere else, might strike you.

We’ve got to get Americans to register facts. It takes memory, a bit of studied research and a huge helping of honesty. Terrorism from Timothy McVay to the Mailbox Bomber to 9/11 to the Twin Towers to a hundred or thousand other incidents of terror have all struck at home. Right here. Not Paris. Not Nairobi. Here.

And so they have for all of our history in virtually every part of the world. The information age allows more of us to know about more of these incidents more quickly than in the past; that’s all that’s different.

Play the odds, folks, and your fears should abate. It doesn’t lessen the horror of a beheading or bomb attack or the phenomenal confusion and angst trying to understand a suicide bomber, but it ought to make you less afraid.

And once you’ve got your senses back, then and only then consider how we should deal with the mess. Take a lesson from Sunday morning’s editorial in Nairobi’s newspaper, the Daily Nation:

“As a country that has known only too well the pain that merciless and misguided fanatics can inflict, Kenya obviously stands united with France in this hour of deepest anguish.

“The world must certainly stand together to battle the scourge of terrorism that has taken an even more menacing face in recent years.

“It would not be wise to rush into ever greater confrontation and war guided by justifiable anger.

“Instead, the voices of the peacemakers must come to the table, too.”

Help Lions

Help Lions

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

lionhuntingfunIt’s time to ban hunting lion in the wild. You can help.

Lion populations are declining drastically. My post several weeks ago provides some explanation, but I was aghast to discover that lion trophy hunting is increasing and especially from America.

Trophy hunting of lion is only one of the causes for the decline, but it is one that ought to be easily ended. “Recreational” hunting, as it’s often referred to, is appropriately named. People do it for fun.

I can’t imagine how someone considers it “fun” to hasten the decline of a species in trouble. Once I was persuaded that lion hunting in Africa contributed to its conservation, much as today duck hunters claim the same.

Whether that was true in the past or not is now irrelevant, because it definitely is not the case, today. Follow my link above to my earlier article for the scientific corroboration.

Then go to www.huntingreport.com and filter to “lion hunts.” In this morning’s report you’ll find 45 accounts of recent lion trophy hunts in Africa. (The list is actually 65 reports long, but 20 of those are mountain lions in Canada, the U.S. and Argentina.)

Of those reported hunts 15 are in South Africa, 12 in Tanzania, 10 in Zimbabwe, 3 in Namibia and 6 in Burkina Faso.

These are reports voluntarily submitted by individual hunters over the last several year period, so like any social media platform, they don’t necessarily represent an average recreational hunter.

Nevertheless, it’s the only reference we have and it’s very disturbing.

Lion is listed as “endangered” in Burkina Faso by CITES, yet recreational hunters still go there to hunt them. Given today’s science, this is unacceptable.

Legislation is pending in both Canada and the United States which would ban recreational hunters from spending any money in America or using any banks in America that facilitates hunting in Burkina Faso.

Legislation is also possible that would ban the importation of any lion trophy. That is often the most effective way to stop recreational hunting.

But I suggest you lobby your representative to go even further.

Both the EU and the United States are proposing that lions be “listed” by the international treaty that protects endangered species as threatened enough that lion hunting would be stopped or massively restricted.

Although the Obama administration can move unilaterally on this, I don’t think it will. Obama’s record on conservation has been less than stellar, and given the current political climate and upcoming elections, I think that Congress must at least be moved to consider.

Tell your Congressman to support “Fish & Wildlife’s Proposed Legislation to Protect the Lion.” Ask for documentation on his/her actions.

Those of you who have been reading my blog over the years know that my personal position on big game hunting as changed. Originally I was neutral, having had positive experiences in my life time with hunters and hunting organizations that definitely contributed to conservation.

In my view that changed a decade or more ago, and with our current science on the state of the wild and rapid decreasing of our planet’s biodiversity, “recreation” should be an easy thing to eliminate to help save the world.

And lions in particular.

Kenya Backs into The Future

Kenya Backs into The Future

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charcoal stockpilesJust as Kenya was doing everything right it arrests a journalist for uncovering corruption, while the Kenyan army that Obama built to route Somali terrorists turns out to be in cahoots with the terrorist leaders!

When will Kenyans stop being on the take?

The government’s interior minister oversaw the arrest Tuesday of a prominent Kenyan journalist who’d uncovered possible corruption in his ministry. The backlash was swift, the journalist was released, the minister comically claimed he hadn’t order the arrest, but the damage was done.

And today another courageous group of Kenyan journalists released a scathing report linking Kenyan occupying forces with the illicit half billion dollar trade in sugar and charcoal that had hugely financed Somali pirates.

Interior Secretary Joseph Nkaissery oversaw the arrest Tuesday of Kenyan journalist John Ngirachu. The journalist had discovered a multi-million dollar hole in Nkaissery’s budget that was unaccounted for.

By the time police brought Ngirachu to the station, the outcry in Kenya was so loud that he was simply kept for a short time and not even interrogated before being released.

Then yesterday, acting as if this was all news to him, Nkaissery ordered the “end to any investigation” by journalists claiming he knew nothing about it.

It’s so lame. Just before the arrest Nkaissery told Reuters that Ngirachu’s reporting was “unacceptable” and “calculated to harm the nation” since it portrayed his ministry as corrupt and that it was a trend by journalists “increasingly taking the shape of a larger plot of economic sabotage.”

So whether the minister then went down a floor and ordered the arrest by his chief of arrests, or whether his chief of arrests knew he would be canned if he didn’t do it on his own, the arrests came swiftly thereafter.

We often scratch our noggin wondering how in the world corrupt politicians think they can get away with it. Well, in Kenya you have to scratch all the way through the scalp to wonder how this guy would think just by denying what he had just said to a worldwide news agency, everything would be fine!

Today Kenyan soldiers are paid well and are well equipped, because of our own dear Obama. I’ve written critically many times about the Obama war effort in Somalia. We Americans built, funded and trained the Kenyans to oust the Somali warlords that had more or less run that evaporating country for nearly 20 years.

And they did a great job.

Now they’re flipping.

According to the Kenyan Journalists’ report, “Eating with the Enemy,” the Kenyan occupying soldiers have struck a deal with what’s left of the al-Shabaab they were supposed to nuke.

They are splitting about $24 million annually through illicit exporting of charcoal to the Arabian peninsula.

Charcoal burning stoves still fire many of the homes in the Arabian peninsula, where there aren’t any forests. Somalia has been deforesting itself for decades to supply them. So this isn’t just an illegal and corrupt act, it’s raping the planet.

But the Kenyan soldier scandal doesn’t stop there. Putting together UN reports with other Kenyan journalist reports, Nancy Agutu of Kenya’s Star wrote today that $400 million is being earned by the Kenyan soldiers and their middlemen back home for the illegal importation of sugar from Somalia.

There are so many angles to this story it’s hard to parse: America once again duped into trying to do good with military means; the ongoing rape of Somalia’s earth even after the war is stopped; the corruption of Kenyan officials high and low; the demand for charcoal in a modern age…

Only one thing is clear. There are some really good, possible heroes among Kenyan journalists.

One of Kenya’s most famous anti-corruption activists, John Githongo, told Reuters recently, “This is the most corrupt Kenya has been since we began measuring corruption in the ’90s.”

Kenya has been working so hard recently to combat crime and corruption, to work through their new constitution, to deal with the Somali crisis at their borders and stem terrorism … that’s it’s simply a crying shame that idiots like this minister and cowboys in the army we built would try to blow their future to smithereens.

Pitiful Profits

Pitiful Profits

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

zanburndi and religioniZanzibar and Burundi, today, are both tinder boxes rooted in ethnicity ready to explode.

It’s time to stop pretending that both Christianity and Islam, Hutu and Tutsi, or Arab and African are mostly “good.” It’s time to denounce religious ideology and ethnicity as mostly “bad.”

Recent studies about religion reenforce this. “Religion doesn’t work,” a South African newspaper has concluded. “Children of non-religious people are nicer than their religiously raised brethren.” (More on this below.)

Zanzibar’s divide is two-fold: Africans who link their heritage to animism and Christianity versus Arabs dedicated to Islam; and a never successful federation between Zanzibar and Tanganyika nearly a half century ago, which poorly formed modern Tanzania.

Burundi’s divide is wholly tribal: Hutu versus Tutsi, the same divide that led to the Rwandan genocide.

Zanzibar has progressed far more than Burundi has in the modern era. From ancient times the island was the seat of Arab power on the Swahili African coast. Its royal families grew trade with parts of the world as far afield as China.

Its gigantic misstep in history was to become dependent upon the slave trade. That gave the British colonizers a moral platform on which to justify their empire building. (It is, of course, illustrative that British industry – ships in particular – were indispensable in the development of the slave trade.)

Burundi is struggling through the ethnic chasm between Hutu and Tutsi that Rwanda solved by becoming an autocratic if communist state. Smaller than already small Rwanda, it’s nearly lockstep historically.

A “civil” (read “ethnic”) war was ended almost a decade ago with a peace agreement that led to free enough elections and a period of relatively stability. But the democratic mechanisms riveting the government were inevitably seen as threats by one side to the other, and the current man power is so unconstitutionally – nondemocratically.

As everywhere in the world, from Syria to Myanmar to Obama/Netanyahu, ethnic divides easily reenforce themselves with religious ideology.

Obviously I don’t want to give up St. Patty’s Day or Christmas, for that matter. But it’s time to grow up. Black Lives Matter. Intelligent Lives Matter.

A study published last week in Current Biology of 1170 children from a variety of religious backgrounds around the world concluded that children from religious families were less generous and more intolerant and sanctioned physical punishment more than children from non-religious families.

Christian and Muslims scored identically with regards to generosity, both groups are 28% less likely to share than nonreligious children.

The children were tested in seven different cities: Chicago, Cape Town, Toronto, Amman, Izmir, Istanbul and Guangzhou.

Researchers asked the parents to identify their child’s religious orientation: 23.9% were Christian, 43% Muslim, 27.6% not religious, 2.5% Jewish, 1.6% Buddhist, 0.4% Hindu, 0.2% agnostic, and 0.5% something else.

The research funded by the religious John Templeton Foundation used animation, physical games and structured social intercourse with other children in the study to reach these conclusions.

“Consistent with previous studies, in general the children were more likely to share as they got older. But …the negative relation between religiosity and altruism grew stronger with age; children with a longer experience of religion in the household were the least likely to share.”

According to Science Daily the studies “challenge the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior, and call into question whether religion is vital for moral development — suggesting the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite.”

In a world of diminishing resources, increasing human demand and aggressive global warming, some very tough decisions are going to have to be made.

The Bible and the Koran, like Mao’s Little Red Book or Gaddafi’s slightly larger Green Book, should not be used as references for a solution.

Not Surprising

Not Surprising

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

metroTourists have been slaughtered in Egypt for a long time. It’s crazy the way the media paints Metrojet as something new.

In fact as tourist numbers increased in Egypt in the last 30 years so did terrorist killings: The period of greatest growth in Egyptian tourism, 2006-2008, also saw the largest number of tourists killed and attacked, nearly 500.

We retrieve memories of terrorism very selectively, often for political reasons. No one should be surprised by the terrorist bombing last week in Sharm el-Sheik.

Below is a quick summary hardly exhaustive. My point is that terrorism is a way of life for all of us, now, and it has been for some time.

Traveling on a vacation to an exotic destination is today similar to taking your kids on an interstate road trip. You do everything in your power to be safe, but you know that the statistics are chilling and that it’s possible that through no fault whatever of your own, tragedy can strike.

But you also know that the statistics are in your favor … as they are in Egypt, or London or Kenya or New York, and that road trip’s value to you and your family outweighs the risk.

The more exotic or unusual the adventure, usually that means the greater the risk. But I believe without this desire to travel to the far corners of the world, we’re doomed to a worse future than terrorism can create, one that secularizes the world and makes it even riper for even more terrorism.

All this doesn’t mean that the Sharm el-Sheik tragedy isn’t worthy of news, or isn’t shocking. But let’s keep it in context. Egypt is in the center of the Muslim/Christian – Democracy/Autocracy conflict, today. It’s horrible what happened, but it’s not surprising.

And if you haven’t visited Egypt yet, you must!

* * *
egyptattacksvstouristsTerrorism in Egypt has been happening for millennia. Many of us believe in the current era the attack that began a continued escalation of terrorism against tourists was on on April 18, 1974, when 100 rebels stormed a military college trying to assassinate President Anwar Sadat.

Sadat’s overtures to Israel and ultimate peace treaty galvanized Muslim militants. They’ve never stopped protesting that in Egypt. Virtually every year since has seen violent attacks on tourists.

The Luxor Massacre took place on November 17, 1997, in front of the famous Hatshepsut temple. Six terrorists disguised as security forces simply gunned down the tourists as they filed from their bus.

The fact that the horrible Luxor Massacre was followed by years of increasing tourist growth to Egypt means either that quite a few tourists understand the risks and consider them worth taking, or that they don’t care.

I think it’s the former.

It was in the period of 2004 – 2006 that the numbers of tourist deaths and injuries really escalated, and it was not because of any any single large events like the Luxor Massacre, but rather numerous tourist killings at places like a tea house in Cairo or a beach on the Sinai. Yet this period in particular was the beginning of the fastest growth in tourism Egypt has ever seen.

Rise of The Ignorant

Rise of The Ignorant

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

FirstGrader1Government politics clashed explosively today with education in Kenya as a court struck down a teachers’ pay raise that had ended a devastating national strike.

Kenya better take a lesson from the U.S.: compromise education and you’ll empower the ignorant. Soon Donald Trump will be running for President of Kenya.

Teachers in Kenya are employees of the federal government rather than state governments as in the U.S. The 5-week long strike which ended in October was therefore nationwide.

The pain of that strike didn’t end with the misery of teachers forfeiting their livelihoods to promote their rights. Kenyan teachers earn 12 times the average national pay, so a huge buying sector of the economy was shut off just as the overall Kenyan economy began to slump.

Ultimately the government agreed to a more than 50% pay increase. The court decision, today, reverses that on the technical grounds that the agency authorizing the increase did so unconstitutionally.

(It’s actually fascinating: the lower Appeals Court effectively reversed a higher Supreme Court ruling. The teachers union is now appealing this lower court ruling back to the higher court. Can’t help but loving this tinkering with government bureaucracy.)

If the pay increase is sustained Kenyan teachers will earn more than 15 times the national average. (In the U.S. a teacher’s salary is almost identical to the national average.)

Why, then, should anyone be worried if Kenyan teachers aren’t awarded this huge increase in pay? …that will stretch even more the disparity between teachers and the common worker in Kenya?

Well, to begin with take a look at the student/teacher ratio. In Kenyan primary schools it’s around 50:1. It’s 25:1 in all of sub-Saharan Africa; the U.N. benchmark is 17:1 and in the U.S. it’s 14:1.

So Kenyan teachers are taking a heavy lift, and this is precisely because overnight a few years ago the country decided to offer free primary education to everybody. (Everyone should watch the amazing movie about this, “First Grader.”)

But statistics like this used cross culturally lose some validity. About the only empirical conclusion evident from this data is that Kenyan teachers are overpaid for working too hard, and U.S. teachers are underpaid for working too little.

I think there’s something important to extract from this.

U.S. institutions of higher learning may be the best in the world. But our primary and secondary schools are a mess, dragged deeper today into our social dustbin by the outrageous licensing of “home” and “community” schooling.

When public education is ignored, as it has been in the U.S. for the last half century, a massive underclass of ignorant people who still benefit from an expanding economy grow more and more powerful.

This underclass pulls down the education system even further: Teachers get paid less, are given fewer resources, perform worse, get paid less still, etc. It’s a spiral into … well, ignorance.

Ignorant people are impressionable and gullible because they aren’t taxed with thinking hard. They’re more likely to jump to conclusions and embrace emotive reactions than question the world. They shoot before looking, because they can’t analyze what they might see.

As the ignorant gain power complex social institutions and infrastructure collapse. You’ve got to be able to think hard to build a bridge or understand welfare or negotiate a nuclear arms deal. Lacking necessary cognitive and intellectual skills the ignorant don’t consider the future as a component of well-being.

The enormous pay difference between an average Kenyan teacher and an average Kenyan worker is definitely cause for concern, but every time Kenyans compromise public education they concede a bit more control of their society and future to the ignorant.

Using the U.S. as the example, that’s not a good idea:

Imagine if when I was a boy I’d heard my parents debating whether they should elect as President Ed Sullivan or Doctor Spock.

Guns & Climate

Guns & Climate

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

samburugunsMore guns make more war and less guns make less war and the truth is shown clearly today in Kenya’s Samburu district.

Since the incredible arming of Kenya by the Obama administration for the Somali Invasion four years ago, the number of weapons in northern Kenya has increased by a ridiculous amount. It’s particularly noticeable now that the war is winding down.

Guns don’t wind down.

So all the tens of thousands of unused machine guns and grenades have reached the black market and they’re available for a song.

The Samburu district of Kenya has always had a sort of wild west flavor, including messy cowboy entanglements. For one thing it’s where two historically antagonistic tribes, the Turkana and Samburu, meet.

Both tribes hold creation myths stating that God created cows only for them, so if the other tribe has cows, they must have stolen them. The young warrior class is charged with recovering as much of these stolen goods as possible.

So cattle rustling has existed at least for as long as anyone has written about the area, well back to the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s different, now.

To begin with, there’s more competition. There are more people, so more food and more cows are needed at the same time that climate change is exacerbating the desertification of these northern areas.

So while it used to be pretty much an ethnic conflict between two or three major tribes, today the issue of enough land for grazing is just as important.

The Kenyan government is moving perhaps too quickly to ameliorate this by generating new local revenue from deep-hole oil wells financed by the Chinese.

But the most important difference is how people fight.

Instead of using spears and clubs, the fights are now almost exclusively with very sophisticated guns.

Guess where they might come from? Amazing, isn’t it, that they cost less than fashioning a good spear?

In the most recent cases it appears the warring factions are better armed than the police.

Kenya has a strict firearm policy: it’s not easy as a private citizen to own a gun. But in the Samburu district of Kenya it’s hard to find a Samburu without a gun.

In an attempt to reduce the weaponry, Samburu authorities announced an amnesty several weeks ago for anyone who turned in an illegal firearm. That program expired Tuesday and “no firearms had been surrendered.”

It is, of course, a common argument promoted by arms manufacturers that peace prospers when more people have guns. This presumes that the vast majority of people are good and only use guns to defend themselves.

That argument is about as cogent as the idea that God created all cows for Samburu.

Here for a Refund

Here for a Refund

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hereforrefundSouth Africa’s student protests just won’t stop. They’re sweeping across the country and are getting serious. Is this the sixties for South Africa?

“Our parents were sold dreams in 1994,” a student leader told the Economist. “We’re here for a refund.”

A third of all South Africans are between 10 and 24 years old, born after the end of apartheid and now attending school at some level subsidized by government.

The protests began about a month ago at the country’s most prestigious science university, Witts, over an announced 10% increase in student tuition. In South Africa all higher universities are funded by the federal government, a similar role to the state governments here.

After two weeks of violent protests, #FeesMustFall resulted in South African President Zuma rescinding all fee increases … for this year.

That barely dampened the moment. Right now protests are continuing at virtually every higher institution in the country, with particularly large and volatile demonstrations in KwaZulu Natal and the Western Cape, but events are changing rapidly.

The country’s most prestigious liberal arts university, UCT (University of Cape Town), was one of the few where classes resumed today following a humiliating apology by its chief executive to students, although small protests continued on campus as well as at Parliament. But in most places in the country, higher education is at a dead stop.

After Zuma announced the rescinding of all fee increases, the protest issues spread like wild fire. “Outsourcing” university workers has now been reversed at the UCT and the Witts CEO has agreed “in principle.”

This is a fundamental issue in South Africa. Several years ago universities discovered huge budget savings if employees previously hired for maintenance, food service, transportation – virtually every industry – were outsourced to large companies.

The universities insisted the large companies hire the existing university employees, which they did, but within a few years benefits, wages and contract negotiations were seriously reduced.

Government subsidies for education based on income are equally under fire, not because students disapprove of the principle, but because it has been so unevenly applied.

The government’s protocol for determining income is rife with corruption and nepotism, often unfairly subsidizing those who are quite affluent while ignoring truly poor students. More interestingly, students are also demanding an end to the notion of minimum performance in secondary schools as a metric for determining subsidies.

What I find so interesting about all of this is that it brings back some deep memories of my own college career which for me was dominated by the anti-War protests.

But as I became more and more involved as a student in those protests, I also became involved in the Civil Rights and Womens movements.

“Trouble had been brewing on campuses for months,” the Economist reports.

The magazine concludes that current protests are congealing into the all-powerful issue of racism, reporting that demonstrators “complain that universities have too few black staff or students. This is true, but largely because, thanks to terrible schools, black South Africans still do much worse in exams than whites, something the ANC has failed to fix.”

Since the end of apartheid the ANC has ruled South Africa, winning election after election, yet it is widely blamed throughout the country for this current and many other predicaments. Zuma’s cavalier flip-flop on fees, which could push the government debt to untenable levels, is typical of the knee-jerking, lack of policy that today characterizes ANC governance.

In the last election the 18-24 year old crowd hardly voted at all.

I don’t think that will be the case the next time around.