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The Internet Classics Archive: 441 searchable works of classical literature
MIT Has 441 works of classical literature available online that allow you to create powerful text queries.Also included are "reader's choice" websites related to the texts.
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If you wanted to examine the dead sea scrolls in the past, it would have been a challenge. These scrolls are being shared online now and allow scholars around the world to have access only afforded to exclusive scholars on a limited basis in the past.
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A wonderful list of educational Twitter hashtags by Jerry Blumengarten (@cybraryman1) - such a helpful person!
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Google Advanced Scholar Search
Perhaps the most powerful page in Google Scholar, you can limit your searches to certain fields of study, certain courts of law, certain years. This is a very powerful tool.
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Google Scholar Citations Open To All - Google Scholar Blog
Researchers should use Google Scholar Citations. This is like Google Analytics for your paper or article. You can create links to your work, update your profile, add links to coauthors, and then track how often your article is cited. The modern researcher should definitely set this up.
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Google scholar lets you search articles, patents, legal opinions and journals. It is time to take students into this took, especially now that you can use google scholar citations.
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Twitter Template - Resources - TES
This is a twitter template. Another tool for offline use for those schools who don't get a lot of access but would like to bring some fun social media style activities into the classroom. You do need to join the free TES site to access these, but it is a great site and I'm finding lots of things to use.
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Facebook template page - Resources - TES
Some of use the fakebook tool at classtools.net but if you need to be offline, this is a template to make a Facebook page for a famous character. It is a .doc (Microsoft Word) file and you can download it and use it for your activity. These are great for looking at famous characters and students enjoy them.
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TES collection World War II - Resources - TES
This is an excellent set of world war 2 resources from the UK including videos and lesson plans. For elementary school.
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Shelfster - The Best Research Tool for Writers
Shelfster is in beta and is a tool for writers to collect resources. It is interesting because of how it moves between desktop, mobile, and web. Research is evolving and students should be empowered with social bookmarking and research aggregation tools like this one.
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College Prep: Famous Authors Take The SAT!
Two well known authors subject themselves to the SAT essay and are graded.This would be an interesting case study for students from many perspectives: 1) for understanding the assessment and 2) for keeping perspective. ;-)
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Best individual tweeter2011 | The Edublog Awards
I love how this year's nominations for best individual tweeter include follow buttons. How cool! Thank you for those who nominated me, I appreciate it!
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Best individual blog 2011 | The Edublog Awards
Thanks for the nominations. My blog made one of the very many on the list for the best individual blog of 2011. Of course, I hope you'll vote. I'll share the other ones as well. Lots of great people on these polls. Yes, if you like me, I'd love to have your vote. ;-)
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ipl2: Information You Can Trust
The Internet public library has a great index of resources to help you find information, particularly deep web resources to use in research. This is a place you should refer student researchers.
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Here is the page showing how steve works. I've been digging through their website trying to see how active steve really is and it look as if perhaps this research project is not as active as it once was. However, I do think that letting students tag books and other works could be a powerful way of seeing meaning emerge and to create networks of learning
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Steve.Museum | Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project
"Steve is a collaboration of museum professionals and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access cultural heritage collections and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects. Our activities include researching social tagging and museum collections; developing open source software tools for tagging collections and managing tags; and engaging in discussion and outreach with members of the community who are interested in implementing social tagging for their own collections."
This fascinating website is museum professionals looking into how social tagging can help museum communities and professionals. It uses a suite of open source tagging tools that can be downloaded. -
Here's my diigo tag cloud of resources I've bookmarked on Diigo.
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Social Bookmarking | Common Craft
If you don't understand social bookmarking, here is a common craft video called "Social Bookmarking in Plain English." It explains how social bookmarking works.
Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 12/05/2011
Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 01/05/2012
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The 2012 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings
The Rankings of university based academics who are contributing "most substantially to public debates about school and schooling." My friend Curt Bonk is on the list.From Edweek. "The rubric reflects both a scholar's body of academic work--encompassing books, articles, and the degree to which these are cited--and their 2011 footprint on the public discourse."
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If your family has a heritage from Ireland, they've posted their entire military history online in a fascinating project.
Now is your chance to solve that old mystery – was your grandfather a hero of the 1916 Rising? Did your grandmother stand up to the Black and Tans? Did your family suffer a Civil War split? -
Duncan Quirk: A Brave New Fahrenheit 2012
Scroll down in this article to get a great overview of SOPA along with the convoluted ways that this could cause problems in education.
The fundamental flaw of SOPA is making the website solely responsible for its users' actions. Instead of allowing sites to act in good faith with the copyright holder, it will punish the site rather than the user. This is akin to issuing speeding tickets to GM for drivers going too fast. -
David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts » A Conversation Starter
So, you want to start conversations. Watch this 3 minute video by David Truss including such thinkers as Alan November, Diana Laufenberg, Adora Svitak, Chris Lehmann, Chris Kennedy, Tom Grant, Stephen Heppell, Mitchel Resnick. Nice work.
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Mobile Learning in the classroom. 80 page free ebook from Jackie Gerstein. (This is a compilation of blog posts written about mobile learning.)
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San Diego Prosecutors Charge 5 School Officials For Corruption, Bribery
Bribes in San Diegofor construction contracts. I think if some looked deeper, they may find technology has some things happening as well. Be honest and you don't have to lose sleep.
African Scholar
...provides information on scholarships available to African Students, colleges and universities, test preparation, entry level job and internship opportunities, as well as opportunities to interact with admissions specialists, scholarships administrators and other African students around the world. The goal is to help parents and students navigate through the sometimes complicated admissions process and give Africans an opportunity to capitalize on opportunities available to them around the world.
Vote Ruth Johnson for Michigan Secretary of State
According to a recent Detroit News poll, the Michigan Secretary of State race is a statistical dead heat moving into the last three weeks of campaigning, with the Republican candidate Ruth Johnson leading the Democratic candidate Joslyn Benson 52.9 to 46.7. This is too close to the margin of error for my liking, so I want to remind all of you why it is important for you to pay attention this election and vote for Ruth Johnson for Secretary of State of Michigan.
In Recommendation on the GOP Candidate for Secretary of State I wrote:
Unlike in years past when the Secretary of State race really didn't matter that much, this year it does. The main reason for this is because of billionaire George Sorus and his attempt to corrupt our democracy by corrupting the very nature of elections in our county. As I wrote earlier in Soros Creates Project to Install Secretaries of State Across the Nation in Attempt to Control Vote Counting Forever:Although Johnson was not my first pick in the primary, you would have to be a crazy liberal to want anyone else to win that seat in the upcoming general election. If Benson were to win, you could expect the rule of law to crumble in our state and for her to use that office to corrupt the voting process. Make sure you vote for Ruth Johnson for Michigan Secretary of State this election.
George Soros has created a "527" group called the Secretary of State Project, which can accept unlimited undisclosed money, and will use that money to run attack ads and hit pieces on Republican and moderate Democrats in an attempt to install left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state across the nation. Once Soros has put in place left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state all across the nation, they will be the ones counting the votes, deciding who is a registered voter and who isn't, and supervising the election process.
Joseph Stalin once remarked, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." George Soros is setting it up so that across the nation, left-wing Democrats will decide everything for our nation.
SoS Project is also endorsing Jocelyn Benson, candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, whom it lauds as an "[e]lection law scholar and community organizer." Benson is a candidate ACORN would love.
Now that you understand why important it is to win the Secretary of State position this year, let's immediately narrow down our list of possible candidates. Of course I hope that no one in their right mind considers voting for Democrat Jocelyn Benson- she is a left-wing liberal professor and lawyer who wants to let illegal aliens and Democrats from out of state vote, doesn't really like the 'one-person, one-vote' rule, wants to put an electronic chip in your license card so that she can track you at all times, wants to have Democrats count the votes and certify the votes in any election, and thinks that ACORN should run the entire Secretary of State office.
Also we probably can eliminate Green Party nominee John Anthony La Pietra, who is an attorney and likely a watermelon, Libertarian Scotty Boman, who is a community college instructor and will only suck votes away from real conservative candidates, and Tea Party candidate Kyle Franklin, who likely lives in California and is a registered Democrat who got on the ballot through forged signatures (see my post Fake Tea Party Group Exposed as Democrat Plot!).
Ruth Johnson has a Master's Degree, was on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners from 1989-1998, was a State Representatives from 1999-2002, and since 2003 has served as the Oakland County Clerk. She's an able and nice clerk, but I remain bothered by her inability to run away with her last elections. Also, she seems to be approaching the SoS position more as a legislator and less as an administrator. She's a good clerk and her experience running elections and ballots is a good plus.
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Overview Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
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The Colonialism-Imperialism Paradigm Is Kaput (1 of 2)
The Colonialism-Imperialism Paradigm Is Kaput
George B. N. Ayittey, Ph.D.
June 26, 2005.
Africas paradox is galling: immense mineral wealth yet inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. A few countries have sprinted ahead but Africas overall economic performance remains abysmal, lagging behind those of other regions in the Third World. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has warned that at the prevailing rates black Africa would take another 150 years to reach some of the development targets agreed by UN members for 2015. (Financial Times, July 9, 2003; p.1). Who ruined Africa?
The causes of Africas lack of development have always evoked heated emotional debates. On one hand are those who portray Africa as a victim of powerful external forces and conspiracies a group that may be described as externalists.On the other are those who believe that the causes of Africa's crisis lie mostly within African in the nature of government (governance) or how Africa runs its own affairs. This group may be described as the internalists.
The Externalists
The externalists believe that Africa's woes are due to external factors such as the lingering effects of Western colonialism and imperialism, the pernicious effects of the slave trade, racist conspiracy plots, exploitation by avaricious multinational corporations, an unjust international economic system, inadequate flows of foreign aid, the neo-liberal policies of the World Bank, IMF, and deteriorating terms of trade. Disciples of the externalist creed include most African leaders, scholars, and intellectual radicals. For decades, the externalist position held sway, attributing the causes of almost every African problem to such external factors.
In his book, The Africans, African scholar and historian Professor Ali Mazrui, examining Africas crises, attributed most of Africas woes to Western colonialism and imperialism. "The West harmed Africa's indigenous technological development in a number of ways" (164). Africa's collapsing infrastructure (roads, railways, and utilities) is due to the "shallowness of Western institutions," "the lopsided nature of colonial acculturation" and "the moral contradictions of Western political tutelage" (202). In fact, "the political decay is partly a consequence of colonial institutions without cultural roots in Africa" (199). Therefore, self congratulatory western assertions of contributing to Africa's modernization are shallow: "The West has contributed far
less to Africa than Africa has contributed to the industrial civilization of the West" (164). Decay in law enforcement and mismanagement of funds can be traced to Western colonialism too. "The
pervasive atmosphere in much of the land is one of rust and dust, stagnation and decay, especially within those institutions which were originally bequeathed by the West signal the slow death of an alien civilization" (204) and Africa's rebellion "against westernization
masquerading as modernity" (211). Western institutions are doomed "to grind to a standstill in Africa" or decay. "Where Islam is already established, the decay of western civilization is good for Islam since it helps to neutralize a major threat" (19).
Many African leaders also subscribed to and espoused similar views ascribing the causes of Africa's crises to external factors. In fact, since independence in the sixties, almost every African malaise was alleged to have been caused by the operation or conspiracy of extrinsic agents. This externalist doctrine totally absolved the leadership of any responsibility for the mess in Africa. The leadership was above reproach and could never be faulted. President Mobutu even blamed
corruption on European colonialism. Asked who introduced corruption into Zaire, he retorted: "European businessmen were the ones who said, 'I sell you this thing for $1,000, but $200 will be for your (Swiss bank) account'" (New African, July, 1988, 25).
In his address to the third Congress of the Democratic Union of Malian People recently, President Moussa Traore observed that, The world economy is passing through a period characterized by monetary disorder and slow trade exchanges. The worsening crisis is affecting all countries, particularly developing countries. Due to the difficult situation, which is compounded by the serious drought, socio economic life has been affected by serious imbalances
that have jeopardized our country's development growth. Debt servicing, characterized mainly by state to state debts are a heavy burden on the state budget. The drop in the price of cotton which accounts for much of the country's foreign earnings, has led to a great reduction in export
earnings" (West Africa, 16 May 1988, 876).
President Danial arap Moi accused the IMF and other development partners of denying Kenya development funds, thus triggering mass poverty (The Washington Times, June 3, 1999; p.A12). According to the Chairman of Ghanas ruling NDC, Issifu Ali, whatever economic crisis the nation was going through had been caused by external factors. He said the NDC has since 1982 adopted pragmatic policies for the progress of Ghana, adding that the macro-economic environment of 1999 has been undermined by global economic developments" (The Independent, Nov 18, 1999; p.3). Said the Zimbabwe Independent (April 27, 1999), Mugabe
rejects the criticism of those who blame the government for the economic crisis. It is, he says, the fault of greedy Western powers, the IMF, the Asian financial crisis and the drought (p. 25).
Naturally, African leaders would deny any responsibility and blame everybody else except themselves for the mess in Africa. The New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) echoes this orthodoxy when it claims that Africas impoverishment has been accentuated by the legacy of colonialism and other historical legacies, such as the Cold War and the unjust international economic system. Colonialism subverted the "traditional structures, institutions and values," creating an economy "subservient to the economic and political
needs of the imperial powers" (para 21). Colonialism, according to NEPAD, retarded the development of an entrepreneurial and middle class with managerial capability. At independence, Africa inherited a "weak capitalist class," which explains the "weak accumulation process, weak states and dysfunctional economies." (para 22). More recent reasons for Africa's dire condition include "its continued marginalization from globalization process." (para 2). NEPAD seeks $64 billion in investments from the West.
Frankly, this colonialism-imperialism card has been so overplayed that it has lost its relevance and credence. Even Africas children dont buy it. Chernoh Bah, president of the Children's Forum asserted that Africa's socio economic problems are a direct repercussion of incompetent and corrupt political leaders who usurped political office via the gun. "Some blame colonialism for Africa' plight while others blame the continent's harsh climatic conditions. I think the reason is the kind of political systems we have had over the past decades, he said. (Standard Times [Freetown], April 2, 2003; web posted). At the United Nations Children's Summit held in May 2002 in New York, youngsters from Africa ripped into their leaders for failing to improve
their education and health. "You get loans that will be paid in 20 to 30 years and we have nothing to pay them with, because when you get the money, you embezzle it, you eat it, said 12-year-old Joseph Tamale from Uganda (BBC News, May 10, 2002).
The Internalists
Internalists are the new and angry generation of Africans, who are fed up with African leaders who refuse to take responsibility for their own failures and, instead use colonialism and other external factors as convenient alibis to conceal their own incompetence and mismanagement.
Internalists believe that, while external factors have played a role, internal factors have been far more significant in causing Africas crisis. This school of thought maintains that while it is true Western colonialism and imperialism did harm Africa and continues to do so, Africa's condition has been made immeasurably worse by such internal factors as misguided leadership, misgovernance, systemic corruption, capital flight, economic mismanagement, declining investment, collapsed infrastructure, decayed institutions, senseless civil wars, political
tyranny, flagrant violations of human rights, and military vandalism. In fact, one can identify a whole lot of them but these will suffice. U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, himself an African, lashed out at African leaders at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit in Lome in July 2000. He pointedly told them that they are to blame for most of the continent's problems. Instead of being exploited for the benefit of the people, Africas mineral resources have been so
mismanaged and plundered that they are now the source of our misery (Daily Graphic, July 12, 2000; p.5). Earlier in the year at a press conference in London in April, 2000, Kofi Annan, lambasted African leaders who he says have subverted democracy and lined their pockets
with public funds, although he stopped short of naming names (The African-American Observer, April 25 May 1, 2000; p.10). During a brief stop-over in Accra, he disclosed in a Joy FM radio station interview that "Africa is the region giving him the biggest headache as the
Security Council spends 60 to 70% of its time on Africa. He admitted sadly that the conflicts on the continent embarrasses and pains him as an African" (The Guide, July 18-24, 2000; p.8).
Ordinary people are speaking out too. Said Akobeng Eric, a Ghanaian, in a letter to the Free Press (29 March - 11 April 1996): "A big obstacle to economic growth in Africa is the tendency to put all blame, failures and shortcomings on outside forces. Progress might have been achieved if we had always tried first to remove the mote in our own eyes" (2). Angry
at deteriorating economic conditions in Ghana, thousands of Ghanaians marched through the streets of the capital city, Accra, the economic crisis is due to external forces and therefore, beyond his control, then he should step aside and allow a competent person who can
manage the crisis to take over," Atta Frimpong demanded (The Ghanaian Chronicle, Nov 29, 1999; p.1). Appiah Dankwah, another protestor blamed the NDC government for mismanaging the resources of the nation.
By the 1990s, African governments had completely lost touch with their people; in fact, they were at war with their people. Citing "the credibility gap between the people and the leadership built up through years of mismanagement," Mr. Mohammed Boudiaf, the head of Algeria's
High Executive Council (HEC), lamented: "A large segment of the population has, I am afraid, lost confidence in the capacity of the leadership to provide jobs, housing, health care and its ability to combat corruption" (Financial Times, June 17, 1992; p. 4). Indeed, said Simon Agbo, a farmer in Ogbadibo, south of Makurdi, Benue state capital in Nigeria: "I heard we have a new government. It makes no difference to me. Here we have no light ( electricity), we have no water. There is no road. We have no school. The government does nothing for us (The
Washington Times, Oct 21, 1999; p.A19).
Rafael Marques, a journalist, jailed and convicted of defamation for a 1999 article in which he characterized President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola as a dictator, wrote: "The government has created a stateless state here in Angola. Each citizen is responsible for his own health and welfare while the government is accountable to no one. The MPLA and
UNITA are like two gangs and the people of Angola are innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a drive-by shooting" (The Washington Post, Sept 18, 2000; p.A1).
As a result of the failure to provide the basic necessities of life, the state and those in power have increasingly alienated themselves from those they rule and from whom they claim to derive their legitimacy. The growing gap between the leaders and the people has made the leaders increasingly insecure, sensitive, repressive and less responsive to the wishes of society. The mass of the people in turn regard the state and its organs with fear, suspicion and cynicism because as far as they are concerned, they are no longer legitimate or relevant in their lives. The government does nothing for them. Insecure African despots spend inordinate amounts on the military and security forces, subverting other state institutions squelch dissent, prop them up in power, and serve their parochial interests. The masses on the other hand, sensing their
inability to meaningfully influence the policies of the state and the behaviors of those in positions of power, develop apathy and withdraw from participation in the political process for safety reasons.
Government, as an institution that cares about its people and attends to their needs, has ceased to exist in many African countries. What exists is a vampire state, where the government has been hijacked by a phalanx of unrepentant bandits and crooks, who use the machinery of the
state to enrich themselves, their cronies and tribesmen, while excluding everyone else (the politics of exclusion). The richest persons in Africa are heads of state and ministers. Quite often, the chief bandit is the head of state himself.
At an African civic groups meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Nigeria's President, Olusegun Obasanjo, claimed that corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (95 billion) from their people in the decades since independence (The London Independent, June 14, 2002. Web
posted at www.independent.co.uk). In August 2004, an African Union report claimed that Africa loses an estimated $148 billion annually to corrupt practices, a figure which represents 25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But these are gross underestimates. According to one UN estimate, $200 billion or 90 percent of the sub-Saharan part of the continent's gross domestic product was shipped to foreign banks in 1991 alone (The New York Times, Feb 4, 1996; p.4). Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused 220 billion ($396 billion) -- that is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa's most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the
continent (The London Telegraph, June 25, 2005; web posted). If this sum had been divided equally among Nigerias 120 million people, its income per capita would be at least $3,000, instead of the miserable $265, which is about the same as it was when it gained its independence in 1960. Between 1970 and 2004, more than $400 billion in oil money
flowed into Nigerian governments coffers. What happened to the oil money?
Eventually the vampire state metastasizes into what Africans call a coconut republic and implodes when politically-excluded groups rise up in rebellion: Somalia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Burundi (1995), Zaire (1996), Sierra Leone (1998), Liberia (1999), Ivory Coast (2000), and
Togo (2005). Only reform intellectual, economic, political and institutional will save Africa but the leadership is not interested. Period.
Ask these leaders to develop their countries and they will develop their pockets. Ask them to seek foreign investment and they will seek a foreign country to invest their booty. Ask them to cut bloated state bureaucracies or government spending and they will set up a Ministry of
Less Government Spending. Ask them to establish better systems of governance and they will set up a Ministry of Good Governance (Tanzania). Ask them to curb corruption and they will set up an Anti-Corruption Commission with no teeth and then sack the Commissioner if he gets too close to the fat cats (Kenya). Ask them to establish democracy and they will empanel a coterie of fawning sycophants to write the electoral rules, hold fraudulent elections with opposition leaders either disqualified or in jail, and return themselves to power (Ivory Coast, Rwanda). Ask them to reduce state hegemony in the economy and place more reliance on the private sector and they will create a Ministry of Private Enterprise (Ghana). Ask them to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises and they will sell them off at fire-sale prices to their cronies. In 1992, in accordance with World Bank loan conditionalities, the Government of Uganda began a
privatization effort to sell-off 142 of its state-owned enterprises. However, in 1998, the process was halted twice by Ugandas own parliament because, according to the chair of a parliamentary select committee, Tom Omongole, it had been derailed by corruption, implicating three senior ministers who had "political responsibility" (The East African, June 14, 1999). The sale of these 142 enterprises was initially projected to generate 900 billion Ugandan shillings or $500
million. However, by the autumn of 1999 the revenue balance was only 3.7 billion Ushs.
Now, their recalcitrance has transmogrified into extortion. Ask them to move a foot and they will demand foreign aid in order to do so. In 2003, some 30,000 ghost names were discovered on the payroll of the Ministry of Education, costing the government $1.2 million a month in salaries heisted by living workers. When Ghana demanded foreign aid to purge these ghost names, Japan ponied up $5 million.
The reform process has stalled through vexatious chicanery, strong-arm tactics, deception, and vaunted acrobatics. Only 16 out of the 54 African countries are democratic and fewer than 8 African countries can be described as economic success stories. Intellectual freedom remains
in the Stalinist era: only 8 African countries have a free and independent media. But without genuine reform, more African countries will implode -- Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Togo and Zimbabwe are already teetering on the brink
The slave trade, Western colonialism, imperialism and external factors have nothing to do with the naked plunder and wrong choices made by bad African leaders. The World Bank has nothing to do with monumental leadership failure in Africa. The IMF, which most African leaders relish
vilifying, has nothing to do with petrol (gasoline) shortages in Nigeria. Nor do Western agricultural subsidies have anything to do with why African governments cant supply reliable electricity and safe drinking water to their people. The slave trade has nothing to do with
Nigeria turning itself into the scam capital of the world.
The Flaws in the Externalist Position
The issue of Western culpability or complicity in causing Africas woes evokes such intense emotionalism that it often clouds rational analysis of our problems in Africa. Let us strip the issue of its emotionalism and examine it rationally.
Historical Wrongs Committed by the West
The Slave Trade/Colonialism
Everyone agrees that the slave trade was at once a brutally inhumane treatment that can ever be meted out to a people. The horrors of capture, the trans-shipment, the loss of millions of able-bodied men, the atrocities that were committed by European slave traders, etc. are all documented. We all agree to the humiliating experience of colonial subjugation. The discrimination against African natives, the exploitation of Africa's mineral wealth and artifacts, etc. -- we also agree on that.
Remedies
We may seek compensation (reparations) for the harm that slavery did to us. We may seek the return of the stolen booty. Ethiopia has just received its ancient obelisk, stolen by the Italian colonialists. But even here, African leaders have debauched the issue.
Back in August 1999, representatives of African governments met in Accra and issued a declaration: "Africa is demanding $777 trillion from Western Europe and the Americas in reparation for enslaving Africans while colonizing the continent" (Pan African News Agency, August 18, 1999). It added that the money would be demanded from ''all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism''. Dr. Hamet Maulana and Debra Kofie, co-chairpersons of the commission, urged that worldwide monitoring and networking systems be instituted to ensure
that reparation and repatriation will be achieved by 2004. Problem is, U.S. GNP is only $12 trillion and amount asked- $777 trillion- exceeds the combined sum of the GNPs of the entire Western world! According to the British governments Office of National Statistics, The United
Kingdom -- that is England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland -- is officially valued at $8.8 trillion, a sum that includes all of its property and buildings, machinery, roads, bridges, planes, trains and automobiles. It also includes all the money deposited in its banks and other financial institutions. Plus everything on the shelves at Harrods (The New York Times, Jan 1, 2004; p.A4). So how do African leaders hope to collect $777 trillion?
We may argue all we want about the size of reparations but these historical wrongs cannot repeat, cannot -- be used to justify the cruel atrocities and grotesque misdeeds African leaders commit against their own people. Winning independence for their respective countries gives no African leader -- none of them -- the license to do what they want with their people and countries.
European slave traders or colonialists did not tell President Mugabe to raze down shanty-towns, destroying the propertied of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans and rendering more than 1.5 million HOMELESS. American imperialists did not tell President Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia
to order his security forces to open fire on student demonstrators, killing more than 40 of them on June 15, 2005. British racists did not tell President Isaiah Afwerki of Eritrea to shut down all the private newspapers in Eritrea and jail all their editors and journalists.
These leaders must be held ACCOUNTABLE for their actions. Historical wrongs by the West do not factor in here because they are a separate issue and CANNOT be used to excuse wrongful actions taken by African leaders TODAY.
Colonial Legacies
It is also agreed that the colonial legacies bequeathed to Africa were pitiful. What the Portuguese left behind in Guinea-Bissau, after 200 years of colonial rule, was a small brewery for their local servicemen. There was no social development; industry was not encouraged. African colonies were to serve as sources of raw material and cheap labor for the industrial machines of Metropolitan Europe. The colonial economies were based on export mono-culture: the export of one or two cash crops.
Colonial education was geared toward training male clerks for the colonial administration. The Belgians and Portuguese never encouraged university education as that would teach African natives of their political rights. When Tanzania gained its independence in 1964, it had only 4 university graduates.
Infrastructure was Spartan. Few roads and railways were built. Even where built in West Africa, they exhibited a dendritic pattern: Straight from the coast to the hinterland to evacuate some mineral or cash crop.
All this is true but heres the problem: After independence, we, African elites, did not maintain, let alone keep the little infrastructure we inherited from the colonialists. In fact, we destroyed them! Infrastructure crumbled in the post colonial period. The few universities we got in Ghana and Nigeria decayed. In Uganda, Makerere University used to be called the Harvard of Africa in the 1950s. By 1980, it was a shambles. In Zaire, the Belgian colonialists put down only 2,000 miles of paved road appalling for that huge country the size of Texas. By 1990, only 200 miles were usable. So who do you blame: the Belgian colonialists for not laying down enough roads OR Mobutu for failing to maintain the little that Zaire got? Later, we learned that Mobutu allowed the roads and infrastructure to crumble in Zaire because it made it difficult for the opposition to organize against him!
(contd)
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Feature Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
- ISBN13: 9781590171998
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Overview Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
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Soros Creates Project to Install Secretaries of State Across the Nation in Attempt to Control Vote Counting Forever
A PATRIOTIC ROTTWEILER sinks his teeth into a real juicy story that makes me shiver in my bones- George Soros has created a "527" group called the Secretary of State Project, which can accept unlimited undisclosed money, and will use that money to run attack ads and hit pieces on Republican and moderate Democrats in an attempt to install left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state across the nation.
Once Soros has put in place left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state all across the nation, they will be the ones counting the votes, deciding who is a registered voter and who isn't, and supervising the election process.
Joseph Stalin once remarked, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." George Soros is setting it up so that across the nation, left-wing Democrats will decide everything for our nation.
Via The American Spectator:
At the top of the SoS Project's slate of candidates for state-level secretary of state positions in 2010 is Minnesota's radically left-wing Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer whose cavalier attitude toward electoral fraud and whose shamelessly partisan conduct during the recount process cleared the way for Al Franken to steal last year's U.S. Senate election from then-Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). Ritchie was first elected Minnesota secretary of state in 2006. Franken and Obama, by the way, were endorsed last year by ACORN votes, ACORN's federal political action committee.According to the SoS Project website, The Secretary of State Project helped elect 9 out of 11 candidates for chief elections officer in key states in 2006 and 2008, and raised nearly 1 million dollars for SoS candidates in both election cycles. Now it is gearing up for 2010 to support left-wing Democrats for Secretaries of State around the nation.
The 2010 slate also includes California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, whom the group describes as "one of the most progressive Secretaries of State in the nation." Bowen was endorsed in her previous run by California ACORN PAC.
SoS Project is also endorsing Jocelyn Benson, candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, whom it lauds as an "[e]lection law scholar and community organizer." Benson is a candidate ACORN would love. The bio SoS Project provides credits Benson with running a 2004 "voter protection campaign in 21 states, deploying 17,000 trained election law lawyers." Last year in Michigan, she helped to lead the fight to stop the Republican secretary of state "from disenfranchising voters who were victims of home foreclosures." Assuming the desperately mismanaged Michigan continues to exist through Election Day next year, count on the desperately evil ACORN endorsing Benson.
This is a group to fear and has a steady track record of success. I'm worried that Soros is out-smarting the Republican Party, and while Tea Partiers and Conservatives argue about being true to their beliefs, left-wing Democrats across the nation will become Secretaries of State, and they'll be the ones counting the votes next election.
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Feature Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
- ISBN13: 9781590171998
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Overview Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Available : In Stock. |
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FREE with Super Saver Shipping Usually ships in 1-2 business days |
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Feature Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
- ISBN13: 9781590171998
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Overview Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Available : In Stock. |
|
FREE with Super Saver Shipping Usually ships in 1-2 business days |
Where are Africa's intellectuals today?
In 1998 the then Deputy South African President,Thabo Mbeki articulated his hopes for an African Renaissance. "...The time has come that we call a halt to the seemingly socially approved deification of the acquisition of material wealth and the abuse of state power to impoverish the people and deny our Continent the possibility to achieve sustainable economic development.Africa cannot renew herself where its upper echelons are a mere parasite on the rest of society, enjoying a self-endowed mandate to use their political power and define the uses of such power such that its exercise ensures that our Continent reproduces itself as the periphery of the world economy, poor, underdeveloped and incapable of development.The African Renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of the parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of the entrenchment in African society of this rapacious stratum with its social morality according to which everything in society must be organised materially to benefit the few As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question - where are Africa's intellectuals today?..."A question as pertinent now as it was then.
An Elite Education is Not Enough Nor is an MBA
William Deresiewicz wrote in American Scholar:
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there...[continue reading]An observation even more ominous for the future of Africa's productive capacity where the elite adopt a redistributive rather than productive approach to wealth. This is further accentuated by a preference for non-manufacturing MBA's
Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 01/03/2012
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Columbia University to Offer ‘Occupy 101′ Course
"Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. "
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Gov. Cuomo to announce state education commission to reform schools: A.M. News Links | SILive.com
On Wednesdain in New York state, education reform turns up a notch...". Gov. Cuomo, in his second state-of-state address Wednesday, will accuse New York's schools of being unaccountable and announce a commission to come up with reforms, the Daily News has learned."
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If you like open and free resources, you won't want to miss this humdinger of a post.
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A Difference: The Difference Between Curriculum and Pedagogy
Darren Kuropatwa writes about some of the current controversies in Manitoba Canada as they grapple with being ranked 10 out of 11 in a recent government benchmark. Again, it is troubling when governments get more into ranking than in to comparing how you did this year versus last year.
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The annual social network lynching mob arrives
Ewan McIntosh bemoans another round of social media critics in Scotland and the guidelines they are drawing up for educators. Some things are ubiquitous and this misunderstanding of social media and the role in education is just one of them.
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My 2012 Goal: To Embrace Ipukarea
Ss the Free Range Librarian heads to New Zealand, I am completely fascinated with the theme of this conference. ".Ipukarea (from the Māori language – Te Reo Māori) refers to the ancestral homeland, a significant water or land feature which relates to identity and source of livelihood. It is a place that represents New Zealand history and emotional attachment, a place to go to be rejuvenated, a place that represents the hopes and aspirations of the people and the life-giving waters from which they drink."
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A New Year: A New Learning Journey Begins
Beth Kanter is one of the leaders in managng a nonprofit and using social media. her upcoming booknaounds exciting. if you are a nonprofit or fundraiser you need to rewd her blog. here is her announcement anout what 2012 holds for her. ". As Visiting Scholar to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation this past year (my 3rd), one project I worked on was facilitating peer learning groups to test and develop case studies and frameworks for my next book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit” that I co-authored with KD Paine and editor, Bill Paarlberg. The book will publish in the second half of 2012. The book is a how-to guide for using measurement and learning to improve networked nonprofit practices."
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The Best Space Stories of the Year
The top space stories of the year including amazing phooe you will want to use. (Except for the pic of the Russian cosmonaut Bresnev sent into space knowing he would die.)