Everest, Eid-al-Adha, African politics, and sparkly vampires
I guess it helps to be fit if you’re in the Nepal cabinet. Prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and those politicians physically fit enough will be meeting at the Mount Everest base camp (17,192ft above sea level) “to highlight the threat global warming poses to glaciers.”
While you (if in the US) were busy celebrating Thanksgiving, there’s another holiday you may have missed. This year, Thanksgiving coincided with Eid-al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.
It recalls the obedience of Ibrahim to God, demonstrated by his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael. Those observant Muslims who are financially able usually sacrifice a sheep, goat or other animal according to the religious tradition and local custom. This meat is divided and given to friends and to charity while some is kept by the family for eating as part of a huge feast of holiday delicacies that lasts several days and includes travel to visit extended family.
One source of African news that I often find interesting (and that you can also follow on Twitter) is Pambazuka News (“Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice”). The next several African news items are all from Pambazuka News.
Waving the Ethiopian flag: Its beauty and contradictions, by Etyopian Simbiro moves from a reflection on the Ethiopian flag to discussion of how best to move Ethiopia in the direction of greater democracy.
Some, who oppose the current regime, advocate that Ethiopia must copy Ghana’s centralist system. I am sure there is a lot Ethiopia can learn from Ghana, especially in the fields of building democratic institutions and respecting the rule of law, two of the many qualities that have made Ghana a shining star in the continent. However, it can be dangerous to wholeheartedly imitate Ghana’s centralist policies. Ethiopia has already welcomed a federal system that favours decentralisation in theory, though this has not been yet fully realised practically. In addition, everything that works in Ghana may not work in Ethiopia; the two countries have evident cultural and historical differences. I would argue that Ethiopia, as the second most populous country in Africa, could draw better lessons from other democratic yet federalist countries such as Canada, India, South Africa or the USA, whose diversity/geography-based political systems resemble ours comparatively. Nevertheless, the solution to end Ethiopia’s political crisis is not to simply imitate other countries but to look at our own values and traditions and to combine these native ideas with what we have learned or have borrowed from outsiders. We have been imitating others throughout our history; it is now time to think and act locally, while keeping our eyes open on the global.
(Ghana is indeed one of the sources of happier African news. Maybe I should start doing Ghana news round ups to balance the much more depressing Darfur news round ups.)
Eritrea: Alone against the world, by Nikolaj Nielsen.
Eritrea was the promise that never evolved. Three decades of guerrilla conflict, a struggle for independence hard won, the blood of tens of thousands spilled, for a brief semblance of peace and reconciliation in 1993 that has since been spoiled by a kleptocratic dictatorship and a Horn unable to come to terms with lasting peace. According to Professor Bereket Habte Saleassie, himself a former Eritrean freedom fighter, peace in this part of the world is defined simply as the temporary absence of war. The protracted border dispute with Ethiopia has implicated Eritrea’s leadership in countless human rights abuses upon its own people.
Land grabs: Africa’s new ‘resource curse’? Khadija Sharife.
The global food crisis of 2008, forcing 100 million people below the poverty belt, may have been a catastrophe for the working poor of the world – peoples living in slums and on streets with no name, but for Wall Street, the ‘crisis’ – pushing up the price of grain by 140 per cent, was nothing less than the beginning of a new frontier: Harvesting power through dominion over farmland. Though the US squarely laid the blame for increased food prices on scarcity and the rapidly growing ‘middle class’ segment of both China and India – estimated at 650 million – a leaked document written by senior World Bank analyst Don Mitchell, revealed that 65-75 per cent of the increase was caused by the conversion of ‘crops for fuel’ ie: biofuels.
St. Vincent just voted on a new constitution, and the new constitution lost. Global Voices rounds up the varied views of Vincentian bloggers on the referendum.
15 Toys NOT To Buy Your Kids This Christmas (actually, the one where you filet a fish doesn’t look so bad to me, but some others …).
Twitter Explains the New Retweet Feature.
Nutty Newswire passes on one of those news items that leave me conflicted over whether to just laugh over the nuttiness of it or offer a dash of skepticism: a study shows that buzzing flies are more likely to wake men than crying babies. The reason offered for why this might be so is, of course,
These differing sensitivities may represent evolutionary differences that make women sensitive to sounds associated with a potential threat to their children while men are more finely tuned to disturbances posing a possible threat to the whole family.
Now, it’s entirely possible that this finding is, on average, correct (I do know that, when we’re both awake, I tend to get bothered more quickly by crying babies than Joel, while he gets bothered more quickly by buzzing flies). It’s even possible that the reason it’s on average correct has some biological basis rather than being entirely socially conditioned. But (here’s the dash of skepticism) I feel compelled to point out that the Telegraph, the paper reporting this finding, is a conservative paper, and that there’s no indication that the study (carried out by a private firm on behalf of a company selling an all night cold and flu tablet) was published anywhere peer reviewed. So, there could also be selection bias in the reporting here. (Though, if it’s biology, does that mean it’s men’s job to kill all flies and mosquitos?)
Tiger Beatdown provides a feminist semi-defense of the Twilight franchise and its sexy sparkly vampire in The Edward Cullen Underpants Conundrum. Meanwhile, Racialicious discusses the portrayal of the Indian werewolves.
Since sparkly vampires aren’t my personal sex fantasy (though shirtless werewolves are actually kind of appealing if I only had reason to believe I’d like the story line that goes with them), I’m waiting instead to see whether I can view the new TNT series “Men of a Certain Age” online, when it comes out next week. Not, of course, for sex fantasy material (it doesn’t sound as if that’s what the show is selling), but for good actors. If I can, I mean to give it a try through at least the first couple of shows, if only for Andre Braugher (I think I’ve blogged this a time or three already). So now, having read the various interviews of all three actors about how cool the show is going to be, I finally get to see the first reviews. Here’s one that’s mostly favorable.