My plan over the holidays was to take a bus to Rwanda. Then I met an American with an SUV. We hit the road on 22 December, headed southwest from Kampala. After two hours we crossed the equator, marked by a 7 ft tall wooden circle and a series of "science experiments" to demonstrate that water does indeed spiral down in the opposite direction once you cross the line.
Shortly thereafter I took my first turn behind the wheel. Potholes, pedestrians, pedalers, peddlers and fucking gigantic buses triggered a flashback to my glory days with Mario Kart and Rock 'n Roll Racing.
Some Ankole cows heard that the iPhone was on sale at the community well:
If the Vikings had been able to make helmets out of horns like that then Leif Ericsson would be on the $1 bill.
By the grace of Krishna we made it to our first stop, Lake Mburo National Park, without harming man nor beast. The warthogs and impala showed more consideration for our vehicle than the cows. We set up camp by the lake.
I cooked pasta in the campfire and prayed to Mohammad that the hippos would keep their fat asses off our tent when they came onshore for nocturnal grazing.
At dawn the next morning we went for a stroll with a machine-gun toting park ranger, Jeffrey. The gun was for African Buffalo (also called Cape Buffalo) - all of the lions were killed by the cattle owners. The buffalo also have horns that would make a Viking moist.
Jeffrey explained that the best thing to do if you encounter a buffalo and you aren't carrying a machine-gun is to lie down and play dead. The buffalo will lick the living shit out of you with her rough tongue, but she won't be able to get her horns into you and fling you to the side like dirty underwear.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Lake Mburo: where hippo nightmares come true
Friday, December 7, 2007
Entering Bureaucrats Outweigh Lowly Africans?
Was Ebola kept under wraps to ensure that CHOGM proceeded as planned?
Where you eat jackfruit and it tastes just like cherry-cola
C-o-l-a
Cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Ebola
E-b-o-l-a
Ebola
bo-bo-bo-bo-bola
Well I’m not the worlds most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly caused serious symptoms, such as diarrhea, dark or bloody feces, vomiting blood, red eyes due to distention and hemorrhage of sclerotic arterioles, petechia, maculopapular rash, and purpura and other secondary symptoms such as hypotension, hypovolemia, tachycardia, organ damage as a result of disseminated systemic necrosis, and proteinuria. The interior bleeding is caused by a chemical reaction between the virus and the platelets which creates a chemical that will cut cell sized holes into the capillary walls. After several days the person will die literally of "a million cuts."
Hot on the heels of CHOGM, Ebola has arrived in Uganda for the first time since 2001. So far 93 cases have been confirmed, resulting in 22 deaths. The timing of the outbreak’s official announcement has provoked accusations that the government withheld information from Bundibugyo district (on the border with DRC in western Uganda) in order to avoid alarming foreign delegates that came to Uganda for CHOGM last month. Cases of unexplained febrile illness have been documented in Bundibugyo since September, and Marburg virus, which belongs to the same family, Filoviridae, was documented back in July. In the government’s defense, there are approximately one gazillion potential causes of febrile illness in this part of the world, and this strain of Ebola has not shown all of the typical symptoms, nor has it produced 90% mortality rates as occurred in DRC in 2003. Furthermore, diagnosis is delayed by the fact that samples must be shipped out of Uganda for diagnosis. So, it may be reasonable to need two months to confirm that a virus is indeed Ebola. Then again, it may not. The question remains: Were Ugandan lives sacrificed to ensure that the conference would proceed without a hitch?
Starting tomorrow, UVRI may be able to prevent such desperate and delayed decision-making. The institute will become the second institution in Africa capable of diagnosing Ebola (the other is in Gabon). A team from CDC Atlanta is here modifying one of the labs in order to meet – just barely – the recommended safety standards. It will be an important step for Uganda to reduce its reliance on other nations and for UVRI to move towards the operational excellence it was known for prior to the wars in the mid-1980s.
Lost of course in all the Ebola hub-bub is the everyday epidemic of malaria. Assuming that the 100,000 annual deaths in Uganda attributable to malaria are spread evenly throughout the year, then roughly 1,900 Ugandans have died from malaria since the Ebola outbreak was announced on 30 November. Malaria didn't scare the CHOGM delegates because it is primarily a disease of the poor. If you live in a shoddy house, you don't have a bednet and you don't buy newer medication to which Plasmodium isn't resistant, then you are likely to fall victim. That was the case in the southern U.S., Italy and many other places before the widespread DDT campaign in the 1950s and 1960s concurrent with the construction of better-sealed homes.
Friday, November 16, 2007
CHOGM!
CHO! – GUM!
CHO! – GUM!
"Why is there a wrinkly white broad in trite head wear sitting over there? Oh yeah, it's time for CHOGM."The monster has finally arrived. It has been the topic of conversation for months, the explanation for all construction, renovation and remodeling as well as for the many shortfalls in government services. Rumors have swirled around the questions of whether or not roads will be closed and vacation days granted. Even when people aren't talking about CHOGM directly, it inevitably surfaces in descriptions of grandioseness. “I’m sleepy. I ate a CHOGM-sized lunch.”
What does CHOGM actually mean? To most people it means that Her Royal Highness Elizabeth II is coming. "We have to fix the roads for the Queen." "Security needs to be increased for the Queen." "We need to paint those empty buildings so the Queen thinks they are being used."
If he can turn a can of soup into art, maybe the Queen has a chance.The Queen, of course, is nothing more than the most expensive table furnishing on the planet. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) brings 5,000 delegates from 53 nations (representing 2 billion individuals) to meet in Kampala for a week. The U.S.A. may be the only former British colony not in attendance.
The most urgent topic of discussion seems to be what in the hell to do about Pakistan, followed by what the hell to do about Zimbabwe. Mugabe was not invited, but reps of the opposition party were. That led the Daily Monitor (Kampala) to point out that Uganda's own opposition parties are notoriously absent from most conference proceedings.
[update: 400 Zimbabwean soldiers and officers were detained when an apparent military coup attempt was discovered. Supposedly the plan was to bomb Mugabe's residence.]
The scandalously unjust system of global trade agreements will also be negotiated, with the developing countries trying once again to join together long and strong enough to push back the U.K. and the other paleo- and neo-colonial fat cats.
The CHOGM Badass Award goes to Solomon Iguru, the Omukama (honkified = king) of Bunyoro, who turned down his invitation to the banquet honoring Queen Liz. His Prime Minister explains: "Eating, drinking and shaking hands do not develop Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom. He will not attend the event." Iguru instead requested (and was subsequently denied) a private audience with Liz and Gordon Brown in order to address grievances relating to the British occupation of Uganda, most notably the transfer of two Bunyoro counties to Buganda, a neighboring kingdom, as punishment for a Bunyoro uprising. Both the Bunyoro and Buganda, along with several other Great Lakes kingdoms, can trace their roots back to the Empire of Kitara, which peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. If global conquest and submission had been part of Kitara's collective mindset, it might have capitalized on the devastating diseases and ethnic in-fighting that characterized the British Isles at that time...and I'd be typing in Bantu.
Will Uganda benefit from CHOGM? Optimists forecast a boost in Uganda's reputation as a 'civilized nation' (the way Ugandans throw around the words 'civilized' and 'uncivilized' makes me squirm) that will bring increases in investment and tourism. Pessimists (realists?) point out that most of the colossal sums of money spent to prepare for CHOGM have been spent on things that will only change Kampala temporarily, with no assistance whatsoever to the rest of the country. The BBC reports that in the last two financial years the government has spent close to $200 million on CHOGM preparations, including $11,000 for umbrellas, $18,000 for new rubber stamps, and around $200,000 on Blackberrys.
[The median income in Uganda is about $300.]
Government officials aren't the only folks getting ready for the invasion of foreign bureaucrats. The BBC also reports that sex workers have been taking English lessons and have upped their prices for a full night from $60 to $100.
ps. Happy ThanksgivingFinally, big ups to any genes descended from Squanto a.k.a Tisquantum, who escaped slavery and traveled all the way back across the Atlantic only to find that his tribe had been wiped out by an imported illness. For unknown reasons (loneliness? to be a good Christian?) he proceeded to save some Purtians' asses. If those Brits had in turn taught the Patuxet how to use the Empire's legal system to establish property rights, perhaps Native Americans today would not be relegated to the back alleys of the United States.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
30 MINUTES OF OBAMA
What's on your mind?“The Phenomenon”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19651
I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain.
… Obama confesses his "curious relationship" to the 1960s, and acknowledges that "as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980...I understood his appeal."
It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes.
He admits that "there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward [a] zealotry" similar to that of the Republicans, and he observes of both sides: "It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off politics." It's easy, he writes,
to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.
In his "Politics" chapter, Obama writes with a considerable amount of candor (for a sitting senator) about his Senate campaign and the things one has to endure to become, and be, a senator. He can poke fun at himself and see his own shortcomings. But these passages, too, are chiefly about his deep frustration with how politics works today. He didn't like raising money,[3] and he seems to dislike powerful interest groups—particularly the single-issue advocacy organizations that vet candidates, dangling their endorsements in front of them—even more. "I've never been entirely comfortable with the term 'special interest' which lumps together the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids," he writes. "I must have filled out at least fifty questionnaires" in 2004, he continues. "None of them were subtle."
Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that might actually endorse me...so I could usually answer "yes" to most questions without any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that gave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should be repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation's top priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achieve that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.
Already in his young Senate career, Obama has disappointed some who thought they saw in him, in July 2004 in Boston, a political warrior. His voting record is generally quite liberal, almost conventionally so: his composite liberal score, according to the National Journal, is 83, meaning that his votes were more liberal on economic, social, and foreign policy issues than those of 83 percent of his colleagues.[4] But for the most part, he has not been a bold advocate. Aware that his celebrity is a likely source of resentment for more senior colleagues, he has moved slowly, seeking the spotlight rarely. He stepped into it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when he made his first appearance on a Sunday morning talk show—after turning down such invitations for months. His remarks to ABC's George Stephanopoulos were mostly quite measured ("there seemed to be a sense that this other America was somehow not on people's radar screen"). Around the same time, he offered his first major bill, which would give federal assistance to auto companies with retiree health care costs in exchange for greater fuel efficiency.
More recently, he has sought to call attention to the Darfur genocide. He visited a camp for the region's refugees in Chad in late August of this year; his interest surely owed something to Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the Rwandan genocide A Problem from Hell, who took a year's leave from her post at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to work for Obama. He assembled a staff with strong Washington and Capitol Hill connections.[5] He visited nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union with the moderate and agreeable Indiana Republican Richard Lugar; and, with the ultraconservative Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, he coauthored legislation—which in late September became the first law he's passed—requiring the publication on the Internet of the cost of all federal contracts, grants, and congressional "earmarks," the pork barrel appropriations that have drawn much criticism in the past year.
… the biggest surprise of Obama's first year was his vote for the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, the Republican bill, endorsed by the White House and signed enthusiastically by President Bush, to limit class action lawsuits. Obama's was one of eighteen Democratic votes in favor of the legislation, but the votes of the other seventeen were mostly expected (they were Democrats from red states or members of the party's "moderate" contingent like Connecticut's Joe Lieberman and California's Dianne Feinstein). A fair amount of speculation arose about Obama's vote. And it continues: in the November 2006 Harper's Magazine, Ken Silverstein, in a lengthy piece of reporting that inquires into the less uplifting aspects of Obama's Senate service, reports that the bill "was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama's second biggest single bloc of donors."[7] The financial companies hate class action suits, which can, at one stroke, impose huge burdens on industries in which they have invested.
One can't dismiss the possibility that such lobbying may have affected Obama's vote. But I think—from the evidence of his books and other writings—that a more likely explanation is this: he wanted, even if only to prove to himself that he could do it, to show at least one Democratic interest group that he could say no, and he chose the trial lawyers. They are less threatening than the advocates of organized labor and abortion rights. I feel certain that he just wanted to see how it felt.
“ The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.”
“Where is Barack Obama coming from?”
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1
…Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back.
When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound.
The victory of freedom over history is not just, of course, an American story about individuals but also a story that America tells about itself. Obama rejects this story even in one of its most persuasive incarnations, the civil-rights movement. He calls the “spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness” a “useful fiction, one that haunts me . . . evoking as it does some lost Eden.” When it seems that history has been defeated, that is only an illusion produced by charisma and rhetoric.
It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake. This was American innocence at its most destructive, freedom at its most deceptive, universalism at its most naïve. “There was a dangerous innocence to thinking that we would be greeted as liberators, or that with a little bit of economic assistance and democratic training you’d have a Jeffersonian democracy blooming in the desert,” he says now. “There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”
“By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”
Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275
Obama said that the “blogger community,” which by now is shorthand for liberal Democrats, gets frustrated with him because they think he’s too willing to compromise with Republicans. “My argument,” he says, “is that a polarized electorate plays to the advantage of those who want to dismantle government. Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They’re not trying to reform health care. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals.”
I recall a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: “People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant.” In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota’s George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses.
Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate. Campaigns have grown increasingly costly; in 2004 it took an average of more than $7 million to run for a Senate seat. As Carl Wagner, a Democratic political strategist who first came to Washington in 1970, remarked to me, the Senate today is a fundamentally different institution than it was then. “Senators were creatures of their states and reflected the cultures of their states,” he said. “Today they are creatures of the people who pay for their multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Representative democracy has largely been taken off the table. It’s reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s, when senators were chosen by state legislatures who were owned by the railroads and the banks.” Accordingly, as corporate money has grown increasingly important to candidates, we have seen the rise of the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it—not just lobbyists themselves but an entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public-relations agencies, pollsters, and media strategists.
All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”
“How the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman.” The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1
…Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”
He was a black child, by American lights, but his mother and his grandparents—the only family he knew—were “white folks,” and his confusion was acute. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes how, as a teen-ager, he tried marijuana and cocaine. (“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” he told me. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”) He went to Columbia University, and liked New York, but he found the city’s racial tension inescapable. It “flowed freely,” he wrote in his memoir—“not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed.”
Fired with political idealism, he decided to become a community organizer. He wrote to organizations all over the United States, and finally got one reply, from Chicago. He moved there, going to work for a tiny, church-based group that was trying to help residents of poor South Side neighborhoods cope with a wave of plant closings. It was a humbling, exhausting, and only rarely edifying job; Obama stuck with it for three years. “Chicago” is the longest section of his memoir, and in many ways the bleakest, for it tunnels deep into the bedrock of inner-city despair and inadequate politics and black selfdestruction. It is also an unsentimental celebration of the city, which has a rich lode of brash, bluesy charm, of course, but also was a place for a serious, talented, too cosmopolitan young African-American to sink some roots.
“Teaching [at U of Chicago Law School] keeps you sharp,” Obama said. “The great thing about teaching constitutional law”—his subject—“is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.”
Americans aren’t simply too tired to think about politics, he said; they’re being deliberately turned off. “If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.”
…few who heard a speech that he gave at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago in the fall of 2002—months before he announced for the Senate—forgot it. “It was the best antiwar speech I have ever heard, bar none,” a lifelong Democratic activist, now in her late sixties, told me.
I asked Obama about that speech.
“I noticed that a lot of people at that rally were wearing buttons saying, ‘War Is Not an Option,’ ” he said. “And I thought, I don’t agree with that. Sometimes war is an option. The Civil War was worth fighting. World War Two. So I got up and said that, among other things.” What he said, among other things, was “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Invading and occupying Iraq, he said, would be “a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”
In Springfield, Obama led a campaign for death-penalty reforms that resulted in unprecedented legislation, requiring the police to videotape all interrogations in cases involving capital crimes. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democratic congresswoman who represents Evanston and parts of north Chicago, told me that she thought the reforms were terrific but that, statewide, such things would never be popular, and that Obama was doing himself no favors politically by championing them. Similarly, Obama recently co-sponsored landmark legislation to curb racial profiling—not a popular issue outside minority communities, and not, therefore, a smart move for a man running for the U.S. Senate.
Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’
Sunday, November 4, 2007
SMEAR THE QUEER
MSNBC orchestrates a gang-bang in Philadelphia
Tim Russert: "Senator Obama, my cousin's neighbor's vet claims that Senator Clinton is, quote, 'a cold bitch from Hell', whereas my sister-in-law's hairdresser refers to Senator Clinton as a 'dynastic money-whore serving the interests of the corporate elite'. Who would you agree with?"
Peter Jennings: "Senator Edwards, a reporter once overheard Senator Clinton saying that the taco she ate for lunch was 'so-so'. Does this mean that she hates Mexicans or that she is unable to make tough decisions regarding immigration reform?"
Now, I'm no fan of Hillary (although I will vote for her over any of the Republican candidates), but MSNBC's full-frontal attack struck me as unnecessary and counter-productive. The candidates don't need help pointing out each other's faults. Along the same lines, the question to Kucinich about his UFO sighting was preposterous. Don't we have better things to discuss? For example:
1) Education. The candidates were limited to one "lightning round" of 30-second responses to outline their plans for education. That's like asking them to fit their foreign policy strategy into a fortune cookie. (Summary of recent McKinsey report on why schools in Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea kick ass: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9989914)
2) Decriminalization of marijuana. As pleasantly surprising as it was to hear this issue raised in a question to Chris Dodd, it was equally disappointing to see the debate restricted to a form even more demeaning to the public's intelligence than the lightning round - the "raise your hand if you disagree" method. It would have been nice to hear someone mention the report that Milton Friedman and 529 other economists have endorsed which estimates that ending marijuana prohibition would save the government $10-14 billion annually (we could fund three weeks' colonization of Iraq with that cash!) (http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/). Or to listen to a discussion of how and why minorities are disproportionately likely to be busted for pot.
Those are long-term issues that will require focused grassroots movements to enact change. More immediately, we have a once in a 4-8 year chance to nominate the least-sucky candidate with a realistic chance of being elected.
It would be a start...Wednesday, October 24, 2007
HAPPY UNITED NATIONS DAY!
Time to celebrate. Break out your blue helmet, translate everything you say into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, and politely ask the USA to pay its bills.
United Nations Day, proclaimed in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, is held annually on 24 October, the anniversary of the coming into force of the UN Charter on 24 October 1945.
A few days ago I had dinner at Entebbe's Chinese restaurant with an American PhD student from the London School of Tropical Medicine and a Brit working for the tuberculosis dept at WHO (a UN org). He informed us (although we should have guessed) that the U.S. routinely neglects to pay its membership dues to be a part of the UN. One could make a strong argument that the UN is the most powerful war-prevention organization in the world. And we don't support it. Not only do we not support it, we actively campaign against it. Why should we have to listen to what the rest of the world has to say?
Next I propose that we take on the International Red Cross. They hurt our military efficiency by working to cure terrorists that we have partially blown away. Furthermore, the organization's full name is International Red Cross and Red Crescent. The crescent, of course, is a symbol for "terrorist vacation spot."
The UVRI neighborhood
Yankee soldier
He wanna shoot some skag
He met it in cambodia
But now he cant afford a bag
Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact its giving orders
An they cant afford to miss a word
Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?
Yankee detectives
Are always on the tv
cos killers in america
Work seven days a week
Never mind the stars and stripes
Lets print the watergate tapes
Ill salute the new wave
And I hope nobody escapes
Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?
Move up starsky
For the c.i.a.
Suck on kojak
For the usa
Lake Victoria from the lab
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
THE MOSQUITO HUNT
Mud bricks for building homes drying in the sun. Where Entebbe meets Lake Victoria dozens of men labor in the swamp, digging up clay to mold into these bricks. The resultant holes fill with water and become perfect breeding places for Culicine and Anopheles mosquitoes, including Anopheles gambiae, the most efficient malaria vector on Earth.
Fred finds A. gambiae larvae.
Larvae are scooped out of breeding habitat with plates. One reason that malaria is so difficult to control is that A. gambie breeds in small, temporary puddles that can from in tire tracks or animal footprints.Monday, October 8, 2007
VIOLENCE!
Ferocious Goats!"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." (Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51)
Today is Columbus Day in America:
http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/columbus_western.html
It isn’t uncommon to hear an Italian say that Mussolini deserves credit for building roads, bridges and other infrastructure. Yesterday a young Ugandan said something similar to me about Idi Amin. “Amin tried to put more power in the peasants’ hands…so long as they made no attempt to take any from him.” Can Amin’s eviction of the nation’s Indian-Ugandan population - an effort to put control of the economy into black Ugandans’ hands – be seen as an effort to reduce structural violence?
Structural violence , a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential. In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or…the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible”. Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience” [59]. Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression. – Farmer et al “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine” 2006
Watch your back!!! J. Sachs has beef with Farmer’s depiction of the global economy as a zero-sum game:
…[Farmer] goes on to suggest, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that structural violence is the key barrier to the escape from poverty. In essence, he occasionally comes close to espousing a neo-Marxist theory, according to which extreme poverty persists mainly because of exploitation by the rich and powerful. For example, he favorably quotes two liberation theologians who argue that poverty today "is mainly the result of a contradictory development, in which the rich become steadily richer, and the poor become steadily poorer."
That is not correct for two reasons. First, Haiti aside, the rich are not, in general, getting richer and the poor, poorer. The Haitian experience does not shed much light on the massive reduction of poverty in Asia in the past quarter century, particularly in China and India. Nor does it properly apply even to Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which underwent notable declines in child mortality and illiteracy in the past generation, and a similar decline in the proportion of households with incomes too low to meet basic needs.
Second, and just as important, there are many structural causes of extreme poverty that are not related to "contradictory development" or to "structural violence." A number of other factors can present steep barriers to economic development: an ecology that readily spreads disease (for example, the presence of particular mosquito vectors and climate conditions conducive to high rates of malaria transmission); physical isolation (communities living in mountains or rainforests); adverse biophysical conditions for food production (such as vulnerability to drought and poor soils). But Farmer's overriding message--that the poor are not to blame for their poverty--is emphatically correct, even though his specific diagnosis of "structural violence" appears too limited to offer a truly global perspective on poverty.
Friday, October 5, 2007
ROCK & ROLL!
The Uganda Virus Research Institute
There is no rock & roll in Uganda.
Imagine it: an entire nation that is neither ready nor willing to rock.
28 million heads that do not bang.
A country that prefers country. (Kenny Rogers was the first voice I heard on the radio here).
What are the social implications and metaphysical consequences of this absence? How does one know when it is time to ramble on? What color haze is all in one's brain? Why don't we d-do it in the what?
MEET THE SQUAD - the UVRI Dept of Entomology
1. Louis Mukwaya – Dept Chair
Age: 60-70
Approx Height/Weight: 5’8’’, 200 lbs
Exp with UVRI: at least 20 years
Notes: Eccentric and jolly. Shows front few top teeth when he laughs. Not concerned with administration – interested only in what mosquitoes do. Did pioneering work on several mosquitoes that spread Yellow Fever.
Age: 40-50
Exp with UVRI: 25 yrs
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 130 lbs
Notes: Knows his mosquitoes. Favorite music: Michael Jackson.
Age: early 30s
Exp with UVRI: 2 yrs prior to doctoral work at Notre Dame, 1 yr since completion
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 160 lbs
Notes: The Next Generation. Primary research interest: population genetics of malaria vectors. He has been my primary contact here, a gracious host, showing me the ropes not only at UVRI but Entebbe as well.
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: 5 yrs
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 140 lbs
Notes: proud Catholic
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: ?
Approx height/weight: 5’6’’, 120 lbs
Notes: shy
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: two weeks
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 140 lbs
Notes: Recent graduate of Makerere University (major: biotech). Dreamed of playing chess internationally. Converted to 7th Day Adventism while attending 7th Day Adventist high school.
Age: 25
Exp with UVRI: two weeks
Approx height/weight: 6’1’’, 185 lbs (increasing daily)
Notes: Spends too much time on computer. Doesn’t know one mosquito from another. Spreads papers all over desk. Eats snacks in office. Good listener (skill honed while watching TV). Nervously side-steps inquires about his religious beliefs.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
DRUGS!
My first meal in Uganda. From left: pineapple, coleslaw, green beans, white rice, beef & vegtable stew. Note the quantity.
Entebbe is a little bit Canberra and a little bit Miami. It resembles the former city in that it has a higher concentration of government ministries, research institutes and NGOs than one would expect for a city its size (90,000 residents). Amin used to reside here, and for that very reason the current President, Museveni, lives in Kampala.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
SEX!
My bed. De-toothing
poor girls coming to campus for the first time from the village see the campus girls walking around with good hair, nice clothes, mobile phones and even cars. They want to get those things too and the easiest way is to get a rich older man and de-tooth him.
There is a very strong element of peer group pressure, which exacerbates the concern with materialism and more importantly maintaining the visibility of success through being seen to own luxury items.
‘Keeping Up Appearances’: Sex and Religion amongst University Students in Uganda.
J. Sadgrove / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 116-144 123
“Only you can stop inter-generational sex!”
Take-home message from a public service ad currently playing on local television. The ad features four people on screen in separate squares, Brady Bunch style. The first is a dirty old man looking to get his rocks off. The second is a university aged girl fondling her cell phone, complaining about keeping up with the Joneses. And the last two are a concerned man and woman who want to know what they can do to stop sugar daddies from transmitting HIV to the next generation.
The Ludacris version:
Gold digger signs from her head to her toes
You hear me sayin no don't mess with the stress
She's out to get ya dough nuttin more nuttin less
Shes lookin' for a prize, man you killin me
Actin like you don't see the dollar signs in her eyes
She wants her nails done, and her hair, too
Plus a diamond necklace, thats all on you
You still can't see it, yeah you a sucka
If you do it homeboy man i couldn't be it
Hypnotised by her good looks?
Yup maybe, but a victim for a good crook? Nope not me!
Consider yourself warned so you can stay.
Or you can stick to my rhyme and get the heck away!
Either way, go.. figure, shes a gold.. digger.
Gettin' close as your bank roll grows bigger
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
THE WEST IS THE BEST
Not too long ago Paul Wolfowitz, mastermind of the Colonization of Mesopotamia, President of The Earth’s Bank, Shining Knight of the Neo-Conservative Code of Honor (“America as Lord and Savior”), traveled to Africa. He gave many speeches, smiled many smiles, shook many hands and even climbed down occasionally from his white SUV to walk on the dry dirt. It was tiring work. The thousands of new African faces each day seemed to sap the energy out of Paul. On the final day of the trip he found himself in the middle of a drought-ridden region in East Africa. He was suffering, fatigued and dehydrated under the merciless tropical sun. He was far enough from Darfur to be safe, of course, but close enough to have disturbed his black and white dreams the night before. He had been tormented by a statement that he’d made not too long ago:
It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities. It doesn't mean you can prevent every such incident in the world, but it's also a mistake to dismiss that sort of concern as merely humanitarian and not related to real interest.
Even in his weakened state, Paul saw the real interest as clear as desert day. His aides had informed him at the morning briefing that it stood at 4.3%. Mere humanitarianism, on the other hand, seemed freshly and deeply complicated, as if he had discovered after all these years that he’d been adopted, that he was not in biological fact the son of Polish Jews but rather just another American Mutt with no special story to tell, only as human as anyone else. Paul began to lose faith in everything he’d been taught about Africa. He scoured the stainless steel corridors in his mind for something, anything, to help him understand. As a freshman at Cornell he’d read Jean Pictet’s “The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross”:
The wellspring of the principle of humanity is in the essence of social morality which can be summed up in a single sentence, Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. This fundamental precept can be found, in almost identical form, in all the great religions, Brahminism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, Judaism and Taoism. It is also the golden rule of the positivists, who do not commit themselves to any religion but only to the data of experience, in the name of reason alone. It is indeed not at all necessary to resort to affective or transcendental concepts to recognize the advantage for men to work together to improve their lot.
Suddenly, out in the sand, Paul saw a young woman carrying water in a large plastic container balanced on the blue cloth coiled like a snake around her head. He imagined her seven miles down the king’s highway where she’d dipped into an ancient lake. He imagined her husband working in the gold mines and he imagined her children slowly going insane as they waited and waited for the rains. Then he imagined the janjaweed on the edge of town swooping down to take the young woman away like the Nazis took his grandmother. Paul began to sway under the weight of his visions. By this time a local man had approached, recognizing Paul from the Internet. As Paul fell to the earth the man asked:
“Why are you persecuting me?”
Paul smiled faintly, his eyes mere slits into his slippery soul. He stared at the bare black feet in front of his face, and then he looked up at the man and responded, in sing-songy scratchiness:
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land
Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest