My Beauty Best Teacher

Tesfaye Habisso writes in Friends of Ethiopia:

It must also be understood by all that elections alone will not produce democracy and do not necessarily bring about democratic culture. Authoritarian traditions take a long time to wash away. Creating a democracy in poverty -stricken and illiterate societies such as ours itself takes a long time and exacts huge costs, and is often accompanied by violence, disorder, and a period of uncertainty, even chaos. After all, democracies do not at a stroke make societies more civil and stable; they require strong civil institutions and a long period of time. It is only those who are committed to the values of democracy, rule of law, civil liberties and are prepared for the long-haul, and support less than perfect results as long as the efforts are sincere, who will succeed in realizing democracy and development, peace and stability

.More here

Pop quiz for you. Who said the following statement- US President Barack Obama or Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao?

The complete formulation of our economic policy is to give full play to the basic role of market forces in allocating resources under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government.

Who said this statement- the leader of a a Chinese authoritarian state that operates under principles of unlimited government and no constitutional checks or the President of the US government controlled and run by the Democrats? The idea is that capitalism and market forces are good, but need to be controlled and guided and regulated by government.

Time is up- it was the Chinese Premier! But that was a tough question, right? How about another?

Did this happen in Russia or America recently?

Imagine you're a senior executive at a large business. Hard at work in your office, you're informed that, for reasons unknown, your leader wants to talk to you. He tells you that you are charging too much for your product. You assure him that prices are determined by the market. Unimpressed, the leader demands you lower your prices. Days later, government agencies announce an investigation into the business practices in your industry.

Come on now... it's tough... but did this happen recently in Russia or America? In a former communist nation now run by a dictator who operates in an increasingly tyrannical manner, or did this happen in the good-old-USA? Which country has a leader who thinks it is the proper role of government to set how much businesses can charge for products and is willing to use the power of the state to attack industries that he doesn't like?

Time is up- it was Russia! Nothing like that would ever happen in our nation, would it? State-run capitalism? Nah!

Peter Lewis reviews 'The Fate Of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to The Heart of Despair; A History of fifty Years of Independence' in his article 'Many hands sowed seeds of Africa's failure' "...With precious few exceptions, postcolonial African countries tanked: sometimes politically, sometimes economically, sometimes socially, sometimes - - horribly and spectacularly -- all three at once. Not only did the center fail to hold, but the windows blew out, the walls caved in, and the roof collapsed... Africa was not the healthiest. Its ground had not been nourished but mauled by the colonial powers that staked their claim to the continent at the end of the 19th century. Areas of interest were demarcated without regard to the diverse and independent groups of Africans living there. People with no common history, customs, language or religion were forced into colonial units. Antagonisms and latent hostilities between groups were ignored...he period of decolonization was far from clean. Meredith describes how European powers sought at the very least to keep a foot in the door to maintain vested interests, like Britain, or left only after being pushed out, screaming and kicking, like Portugal. Whichever, the imprint they left behind was of authoritarian regimes that came on the heels of the feudal power exercised by earlier, local chiefs. "Traditions of autocratic governance, paternalism and dirigism were embedded in the institutions the new leaders inherited."The result was the emergence of one-party states, and even more to the point, of Big Men. The Big Man will be the bugbear Meredith finds squatting upon every rotting African country, and he has plenty of material to back his assertion that "Africa has suffered grievously at the hands of its big men and its ruling elites. Their preoccupation, above all, has been to hold power for the purpose of self-enrichment..."

Via FriendsofEthiopia

The FT writes about "The legacy of Suharto":

In the 1990s, World Bank staff used to tell a joke about two friendly government ministers, one from Indonesia, the other from Nigeria. Each enriched himself by taking bribes from a big road contract. The Indonesian took 20 per cent of the contract price, but the Nigerian boasted to his friend that he was even richer because his cut was 100 per cent. But in Nigeria, of course, there was no road.The purported moral of the joke was that Asian corruption was efficient whereas African corruption was not. Former allies and business associates of Suharto, the Indonesian ex-president who died on Sunday, want his legacy to be judged in this light. Suharto may have been corrupt and authoritarian during his 32 years in power, they say, but he oversaw political stability and economic growth that pulled millions of Indonesians out of poverty...It will be easier to end corruption if the crimes of the late Suharto, his relatives and associates are not swept under the carpet in a misguided attempt to burnish his legacy. Suharto was better than some of his African counterparts, but worse than his people deserved.

Issa G. Shivji argues that:

The state itself has to be reformed and restructured. The despotic colonial and the authoritarian post-colonial state cannot play a popular developmental role. Its limits have been reached. The reformed state must have its roots in the people and must seek legitimacy from the people. It must seek a new social consensus and build its legitimacy not only on the economic terrain – development – but also on the political and legal terrain of popular participation, freedoms, rights and stable constitutional orders...Africa has to go beyond liberal to social democracy which would address not only the question of formal equality but that of social justice and equity as well...The experience of the liberalisation of the state over the last couple of decades does not inspire confidence or hope. Popular democracy, grassroots democracy , local democracy, new democracy, etc. are the new concepts being discussed and debated.

via Pambazuka

Benard Wasow writes"...It was not access to foreign aid or special access to Northern markets that gave Asia its advantage over Africa...The external conditions facing these two great regions were similar. The North looked out for its own interests in its dealings with Thailand as much as with Kenya...Asian success was not made in Washington — nor in G8 summits. It was made in Asia. Likewise, we have to recognize that African success ultimately will be made in Africa...the burden of stimulating economic development, the burden of allowing economic development to happen without draining it away through corruption and authoritarian regulation, does not lie in Europe or the United States...The leaders of the G8 cannot bring democracy to the Middle East, nor can they bring prosperity to Africa..."

In Pambazuka Ronald Elly Wanda makes a case for re-instituting the indigenous institution of traditional jurisprudence:

Ronald Elly Wanda

Since flag independence in the 1960s, African governments have been in a rush to normalise authoritarian rule and human rights abuses under the auspices of maendeleo (development) and economic growth. A short stroll in any African village today confirms that the globalised Western culture of justice delivery or innovation that most African leaders seem to trust has not improved the well-being of our local communities or delivered justice for them. On the contrary, it has often blocked viable indigenous innovation of cultures and suffocated African justice. Here in East Africa, cultures of innovation have largely accrued from the jua kali (informal), and not the formal sector. Indigenous cultural innovations have also been at the centre of development in most highly indebted poor countries (HIPC), such as in Uganda or its slightly richer sister Kenya, notably because of wanainchi (citizens) exceptionally limited access to capital.
As such, when it comes to delivering justice in Africa, we ought to revise our priorities by doing away with existing preconceived ideas that might have worked within the European cultural setting. They have clearly not worked in the face of the socio-cultural heritages of African societies, and neither has the opposite, the Africanisation of Western concepts of justice delivery.

More here

Climate change (global warming) is caused by the sun. This may be a shock to you, but strangely enough, the same sun that causes the earth to grow warmer in the summer and colder in the winter also has long-term variations that cause long-term variations in the global temperature. Oh, I know what you are thinking "Humans are causing global warming by driving SUV's and being evil towards Mother Earth and the solution is to adopt Communism." But the truth of the matter is that humans and our actions are probably one of the smallest variables involved in 'climate change'. That doesn't mean that we can pollute as much as we want, but it does mean that most of what environmentalists say and do and believe isn't right either.

It's pretty simple once you become educated. Here is an article from Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, former US Senator from New Mexico, a geologist, and a former Apollo Astronaut (read his book Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space), that was found in the The Science and Environmental Policy Project weekly newsletter:

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE SUN IN CLIMATE CHANGE
Policy makers at the head of government in the United States and elsewhere apparently want to believe, and to have others believe, that human use of fossil fuels accelerates global warming. They pursue this quest in order to impose ever greater and clearly unconstitutional control on the economy and personal liberty in the name of a hypothetically omnipotent government. There exists no true concern by the President or Congressional Leadership about the true effects of climate change - only a poorly concealed, ideologically driven attempt to use conjured up threats of catastrophic consequences as a lever to gain authoritarian control of society.

There has been an absolute natural increase in global surface temperature of half a degree Centigrade per 100 years (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last three and a half centuries. Observational climate data and objective interpretations of those data strongly indicate that nature, not human activity, exerts the primary influence on this current long term warming and on all global climate variations. Human influence through use of fossil fuels has been and remains minor if even detectable. Claims to the contrary only find support in highly questionable climate models that fail repeatedly against the reality of nature. What, then, stimulates historically and geologically observed, sometimes slow and sometimes radical, changes in climate?

The primary alternative hypothesis to human-caused global warming is natural climate change driven by the Sun. Unfortunately, the "human-caused global warming" or “carbon dioxide forcing” hypothesis has become embedded in the minds of otherwise strong teams of observational scientists and their publication outlets. They cannot entertain any other alternative to enhance and amplify variations in the natural heating of the Earth by the Sun - nor can they prove their own hypothesis of human-caused global warming.

As many scientists have documented, the position and orientation of the Earth in its orbit around the sun, and the Sun’s variable influence and activity, determine weather and climate. Seasons vary because of changing solar energy input in annual response to the varying orientation of Earth’s Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Indeed, the Earth’s 23-degree inclination to the rays from the Sun and its annual orbit around that star guarantee large seasonal changes away from the equator. Further, variations in solar radiation received by the Earth correlate with short-term variations in Earth’s weather, based on the slow movement of loops called "Rossby waves" in atmospheric jet streams.

Observations by astronomers over the centuries, as well as studies of tree rings,stalagmite layers, and other pre-historic and geological records, have defined an 11-year sunspot cycle superposed on a number of longer climate cycles. Much modern research documents that the sunspot cycle also correlates with variations in stratospheric winds13 and ozone production, cosmic ray flux, ionospheretroposphere interactions, and the global electrical circuit that exists between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface.

Correlations of records of seasonal changes, solar activity cycles, and local and regional rainfall oscillations all confirm that in some way radiation emanating from the Sun drives changes in weather and climate. Solar interplanetary magnetic fields, whose polarity varies every 22 years or twice the sunspot cycle, may play an additional role as their strength varies directly with increases and decreases in numbers of sunspots.

As a further natural demonstration of the importance of the Sun in determining climate variation, the well-documented solar shielding effects of atmospheric ash and aerosols from volcanic eruptions document the tie between solar irradiance and at least short-term climate swings. Particularly illustrative have been eruptions such as Huaynaputina (1600), Tambora (1815), Krakatoa (1883), and Pinatubo (1991).

More broadly, geological and planetological observations show that major perturbations in climate relate to the position and orientation of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. For example, as Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovic pointed out in 1941, as have many others since, initiation of the major ice ages on Earth correlate with a 23,000-year precession cycle, a 41,000-year obliquity cycle, and a 100,000-year eccentricity cycle in the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Cyclic variations measured in oxygen isotope ratios that correlate with the growth of ice sheets and biogeochemical responses closely reflect the 23,000-year precession cycle. Also, a half-precession cycle appears to be related to the dynamics of the East African Equatorial monsoon. In addition, the 41,000-year obliquity cycle shows strongly in North American marine depositional records.

Climate cycles related to internal solar activity are superposed on long-term orbital cycles. For example, the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300) and the Little Ice Age (1400-1900) correlate, respectively, with very active and very passive periods of recorded sunspot activity. As a fairly recent example of solar influence on climate, the Little Ice Age occurred during a 500-year long sequence of three deep reductions in sunspot frequency. The coldest temperatures came during the last of these minima, a 70- year period of exceptionally few sunspots (the Maunder Minimum). The Medieval Warm Period, (when the Vikings colonized Greenland, glaciers retreated, and farmers could at least survive) also correlates to repeated multi-century long, high sunspot frequency. Since the end of the early 1900s, peak values in sunspot activity rose steadily until 1960, leveling off at higher than normal values until apparently starting to fall about 2000.

The 11-year sunspot cycle repetitions are superposed on a number of long-term cycles of past highs and lows in solar activity. For example, the Gleissberg cycle has imprecisely defined periods of 90±30 years in length. More energetic sunspot activity in the Gleissberg cycle may correlate with temporary decades of warming, such as in the 1930s and 1990s with the reverse being true in the 1810s and 1910s. Analyses of tree rings, lake levels, cave deposits, tree ring variations in cosmic ray-produced isotopes (14C and 10Be), and oxygen isotope ratios record what appear to be other long period solar cycles, specifically, 2400, 1500 years, 200, as well as the Gleissberg cycle.

Many advocates of human-caused global warming agree that solar cycles show correlations with regional climate variations; but, absent a proven amplification mechanism to enhance small solar energy (irradiance) variations, they reject nature in favor of fossil fuel burning. These reviews all document broadly accepted relationships of weather and climate with many different repetition cycles in solar activity, ranging from significant but random solar flares affecting jet stream tracks, to the 11-year sunspot cycle, to the long-term Milankovic orbital repetitions discussed above.

Specifically with respect to the last 120 years, the correlation of measured solar energy input variations with global surface temperature and sea surface temperature is very strong. The statistical correlation of solar irradiance with air temperature has been about 79%. In contrast, during the last 50 years, the correlation of measured carbon dioxide increases with global surface temperature has been only about 22%. This directly contradicts the assumption that carbon dioxide has had a large influence on climate in the last 50 years.

Since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, the increase in total energy from the Sun has been about 0.6 watts per square meter, an increase of less than 0.05% over an average total of about 1367 watts per square meter. On shorter time scales, total variations reach about 3 watts per square meter, or 0.22% from the average. Considering the actual amount of possible atmospheric heating (30% ofincoming solar energy is reflected to space), this variation results in a third to a half a degree Centigrade(0.6 to 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) global temperature change over seven years, that is, a half solar cycle.

Various natural mechanisms for visible, infrared, and UV light reflection, adsorption, emission, and water vapor feedback determine the net solar heating effect on the Earth. Global atmospheric circulation moderates the short-term solar energy inputs, particularly upward convection of oceanic heat and water vapor in the large scale equatorial Hadley Cells that span latitudes from 30ºS to 30ºN . Ocean circulation overall moderates the long-term transfer of solar energy around the globe.

Evidence for the existence, if not the nature, of a means for amplifying solar energy-solar magnetic field interactions with Earth comes from the oceans. Determination of the total contribution of the oceans to heating of the atmosphere, using three independent observational measures of oceanic heat flux, shows that the oceans' heat contribution to be five to seven times larger than variations in total solar energy input.

Additional support that an amplification mechanism exists comes from recent observational data on variations in stratospheric water vapor concentrations over three decades. These data suggest that decreases in water vapor have contributed to amplified sea surface cooling since 2000 while increases between 1980 and 2000 accented surface warming. This relationship may correspond with stratospheric cooling and lower water retention due to lower than average solar energy input since 2000.

Climate change driven by the Sun constitutes a strongly competitive, purely scientific hypothesis to the climate modeling-political hypothesis of human-caused global warming advocated by climate modelers and their acolytes in the science, media, and political establishments. Solar influence ranges from significant but random solar flares affecting jet stream tracks, to the 11-year sunspot cycle, to the 22- year magnetic cycle, up to the long-term Milankovic orbital repetitions discussed above. The current decade or longer period of cold winters in the northern United States and Europe coincide with a relatively prolonged reduction in sunspot activity below even the norm for a minimum in the 11-year cycle.

Actual observations show that climate varies in response to natural forces and that human burning of fossil fuels has had negligible effect over the last 100 years. Lets us hope that State and national policy makers taking office in 2011 and 2013 will understand the facts about natural climate change and the fictions about human influence on change before taking enormous constitutional and economic risks - and before liberty and incomes suffer further erosion.

This is the whole article, although I have edited off the footnotes which document the research. You can believe this sort of logic, or buy into the pseudo-religion backed by computer modeling produced by the Al Gore's of the world.

Mahmood Mamdani writes in LRB:

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact...[continue reading]

via 3QuarksDaily

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G. Pascal Zachary writes in The East African:

“If autocrats do not deliver prosperity any more reliably than democrats, then the romance with benign authoritarianism is probably misguided. Democratisation must be pursued wholeheartedly in Africa — but pursued without illusions. Elections inevitably heighten ethnic tensions, but these tensions can be managed. If democrats are to triumph over authoritarian populists, they must take more seriously the importance of balancing ethnic differences along with promoting economic growth. One without the other is unsustainable.”-[continue reading]

via Africa Works

Bombastic Element on art ecosystems and markets in China and South Africa:

It is apparent South Africa, in terms of the push-pull tensions of its post-Apartheid society and emerging middle class, occupies a unique nexus of culture and politics that's boon for artists and art consumption...while in China It is very simple. You have a society [exemplified by] rapid consumerism and a system that's authoritarian. The 2 co-habit, mingle, co-exist in each other...

More here

This week has been a slow week for posting. I could blame it on the fact that I have been really busy, but that's honestly not it- the real reason is that every day it seems to be getting worse and worse around here, and I'm starting to get annoyed.

For example, I read in the Detroit News two stories- one that says that the Democrats in Congress and the President is going to do everything it can do to help the domestic auto company, and than another that says that the Democrats in Congress and the President are going to slap the auto industry with new fuel efficiency standards that will cost $1.5 billion. What the f&%$ is that?

A lot of my students express similar frustrations- I was trying to teach them today about bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, and one of them raised a hand and asked what the point of it was if you could just ignore or re-interpret those clauses whenever you wanted to? I mean, come on- how am I supposed to do my job and teach these students the core beliefs of our country, how am I supposed to teach them to be proud of our rights and liberties, when the freaking government keeps undercutting me by violating them so openly?

So my brother passed me this site to look at, called I Am Simon Jester. I like it. The reference of course is to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where in the book those who decide to break free of their earthly rulers would often scrawl anti-authoritarian graffiti on walls, signing it "Simon Jester". Some have have suggested that those who find the American government oppressive do the same, and I like it. From I Am Simon Jester:

We are not anarchists. We are not Far-Right or Far-Left. We are the seventy percent in the middle. We are not Capital “L” libertarians, although we do have sympathies with their platform. We are neither bitter clingers nor conspiracy nuts.

What we are is a group of folks that think we see liberty and freedom eroding in our beloved United States. We see the policies and agendas of the hirelings in Washington D.C. heading toward an abbreviation if not outright abrogation of the Bill of Rights.

We think the Federal government, not just this administration, is more interested in self-serving personal, political, and party power than it is in actually doing its best to do the least.

For almost a hundred years, our country has been heading towards becoming a Socialist, centrally planned, Nanny State where the Federal Government tells it citizens how to conduct business, what they could grow in their own gardens or on their own farms, and now even how much a private citizen is allowed to earn before punitive and illegal taxation takes it away.

Now is the time to make it stop.

There are many ways for you to be Simon Jester. Wear a t-shirts that says "Simon Jester," or "I Aim to Misbehave," or "Don't Tread on Me." Go to a Tea Party- there are some coming up on April 15. Write your government officials. And take action, however, whenever you can to show our government officials that we are not going to stand for it anymore, we will not take it anymore, and we will not go into the night quietly.

Issa G. Shivji states that:

the state itself has to be reformed and restructured. The despotic colonial and the authoritarian post-colonial state cannot play a popular developmental role. Its limits have been reached. The reformed state must have its roots in the people and must seek legitimacy from the people. It must seek a new social consensus and build its legitimacy not only on the economic terrain – development – but also on the political and legal terrain of popular participation, freedoms, rights and stable constitutional orders.

In Aidwatch:

Is Ethiopia having a famine? As often is the case, there are two forces pulling in opposite directions that make it hard to answer the question...On the one hand, the authoritarian government wants to cover up any famine to mute criticism of its performance...On the other hand, NGOs have a well known tendency to cry wolf and exaggerate—to see famine where there is no famine—perhaps in order to raise more money for their own organization

More here

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