Benjamin Disraeli- We are creators of circumstance

We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance. Benjamin Disraeli.

KERS TECHNOLOGY 2009; FORMULA 1 EXPLAINED

Williams KERS Formula One System Explained - Watch more Funny Videos

Africa's next Big Man- Jacob Zuma

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13494552

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13491950

Africa's next Big Man

Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

If Jacob Zuma avoids becoming a caricature of African leadership, he could change the whole continent for the better

National News and Pictures

WITHIN weeks, Jacob Zuma is set to become the most powerful man in Africa, a continent of a billion souls that is still the poorest and, despite recent improvements, the worst governed on the planet. South Africa provides more than a third of the 48 sub-Saharan economies’ total GDP. It is Africa’s sole member of the G20 group of influential countries and packs a punch in global diplomacy. Its emergence from the gruesome era of apartheid is a miracle of reconciliation. Africans across the continent and oppressed peoples elsewhere still look to South Africa’s leader as a beacon of hope.

The country’s president is to be elected by Parliament after a general election on April 22nd which the dominant African National Congress (ANC) is sure to win again. As the party’s candidate, Mr Zuma is unquestionably Africa’s next “Big Man”. But it is a phrase that goes to the heart of the continent’s troubles. Too many African countries have been ruined by political chiefs for whom government is the accumulation of personal power and the dispensation of favours. That the revered Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation is now turning to a man of Mr Zuma’s stamp may sharpen prejudices about Africa. It is for Mr Zuma to prove these doubters wrong.

He is undoubtedly a man of remarkable qualities (see article). In contrast to his dour predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, Mr Zuma can charm the birds out of the trees. Unlike the racially twitchy Mr Mbeki, he feels good in his skin, happy to acknowledge, even celebrate, his modest background. He properly educated himself only during his ten years as a prisoner on Robben Island, alongside Mr Mandela. Mr Zuma is charismatic and canny, as you would expect of a guerrilla who rose to be head of intelligence for the now-ruling ANC. He has been a wily negotiator, who magisterially ended the strife between his fellow Zulus in the early post-apartheid era. He connects easily with black slum-dwellers and white tycoons alike.

Big man, big problems

But his flaws are just as patent. He has been entangled for years in a thicket of embarrassing legal cases from which he has only recently been extricated—on a technicality. His financial adviser was sentenced to 15 years in prison for soliciting bribes for Mr Zuma. He has also been tried, and acquitted, on a rape charge. At the least, he has sailed perilously close to the wind. To put the kindest interpretation on his financial dealings, he has been naive and sloppy, not the best qualities for looking after Africa’s biggest economy. During his trial for the rape of an HIV-infected family friend, at the height of the AIDS plague in a country which has the world’s highest recorded rate of rapes, he showed gross chauvinism and staggering ignorance, notoriously explaining that after having sex he had showered to stave off the disease. He is an illiberal populist, sneering at gays and hinting at bringing back the death penalty.

When it comes to policy, Mr Zuma travels light. In the wake of Mr Mbeki’s shameful and lethal denial of the link between HIV and AIDS, he has overseen the appointment of a sensible new health minister. He seems to want the awful Robert Mugabe ousted in Zimbabwe, though his pronouncements have varied. Once a member of the South African Communist Party, which used to fawn on the Kremlin, he shamelessly switched to capitalism after his predecessors, Mr Mandela and Mr Mbeki, had persuaded the ANC to somersault away from socialism. These days he tells the hungry black majority that he has their interests at heart, while reassuring businessmen that he will not switch to high-tax redistribution. No one is sure in which direction he will push the economy, now wobbling after years of steady, commodity-fuelled growth.

As with all the other Big Men, the principal worries revolve around a fatal conflation of party and state. Given South Africa’s racial and tribal mix, robustly independent bodies are vital, from Parliament and the judiciary to human-rights monitors, medical institutions and free media, but the ANC has stuffed all of them with party loyalists to entrench its hegemony. Candidate Zuma has seemed to rate loyalty to the ANC above all else, even the admirable constitution that the party itself was largely responsible for writing. It is not certain he believes in the need to separate powers, letting his fans hurl abuse at judges when they ruled against him.

Confound us all

President Zuma must grab his early chances to reassure the worriers. He should state unequivocally that he will not propose a law to render the head of state immune from criminal prosecution. He needs to resist the temptation to elevate some of his dodgier friends to high judicial posts. Parliament needs more bite to nip the heels of the executive; the present system of election by party lists shrivels the independence of members and needs reform. To curb cronyism, all MPs, ministers and board members of state-funded institutions should register their and their families’ assets. He should also keep the sound Trevor Manuel as finance minister. Finally, Mr Zuma should ask his government to revise, perhaps even phase out, the policy of “black economic empowerment”. This may have been necessary 15 years ago to put a chunk of the economy into black hands. But its main beneficiaries now are a coterie of ANC-linked people, not the poor masses.

Hardest of all for Mr Zuma to accept is that, in the longer run, South African democracy needs a sturdier opposition. The liberal Democratic Alliance, led by a brave white woman, Helen Zille, has good ideas but has failed to expand its appeal beyond a white core. The new Congress of the People, a black-led breakaway from the ANC, has able leaders, yet several are tainted by association with Mr Mbeki. With luck the opposition parties may stop the ANC from getting the two-thirds of parliamentary seats that would let it override the constitution.

Mr Zuma could yet prove to be the right sort of Big Man: big enough to hold his party back from creating something akin to a one-party state, big enough to accept that no one, himself included, is above the law. If that is how he chooses to spend his five years in power, South Africa would indeed serve as a model for the whole continent. But will he?

A Sobering and controversial take on Somalia's piracy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

Johann Hari
Columnist, London Independent
Posted February 4, 2009 | 05:12 AM (EST)

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through
the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa -collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is
being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer
Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site
WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington
and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the
transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.

ORIGINS of THE TERM EASTER

According to the English monastic historian BEDE, Easter comes from the word "EOSTRE" after the Anglo-Saxon Godess Esostre whose godly focus was on new beginnings, symbolized by the Easter Egg, and fertility, which is symbolized by the hare or Easter Bunny.

The Anglo-Saxon word for the month April was "Eostre-monath" (The month of openings).
Christians celebrated the resurrection long before the word Easter was used, however the word used for the celebrations was "Pascha" which derives from the Jewish festival of Passover.

Religions all mixed up, ain't it? worshipping through a blend of religions, pagan traditions and cultures then?

UK New Tax Year 2009/2010 highlights.

Get the free weekly email from moneysavingexpert.com/tips

New tax year (09/10). The good and the bad

The 2009/10 tax year began on Monday, and it's all change. Bizarrely though, this year’s Budget is after the start of the tax year, so changes then may be backdated (last year's figures in brackets).

The boosts to income ...

1. • Personal allowance UP! Every man, woman and child can now earn £6,475 (£6,035) before paying income tax. For those aged 65-74, it’s £9,490 (£9,030), and for over-75s, £9,640 (£9,180).
2. • Basic rate tax threshold UP. You now pay 20% tax on the first £37,400 (£34,800) over the personal allowance, meaning under 65s hit the higher 40% rate at £43,875 (£40,835).
3. • National insurance start point UP. You now need to earn £110 per week (£105), before paying for NI, usually 11%.
4. • State pension UP. It's £95.25 (£90.70) a week for a single person.
5. • Pension credit UP. The minimum guaranteed income's now £130 for single pensioners (£124.05), and £198.45 for couples (£189.35). See the State Pension guide.
6. • New Health in Pregnancy Grant. All pregnant women will get a non-means-tested £190 in their 25th week. More in the Pregnancy Grant discussion.
7. • Inheritance tax threshold UP. You can leave £325,000 (£312,000) tax-free. See the Inheritance Tax guide.

And the hits ...

1. • Fiscal drag. This isn’t Alistair Darling in women’s clothes, it’s when increased allowances aren’t as generous as they seem. If wages and/or inflation increase by more than the allowances, effectively the government gets more tax revenue anyway, and the real value of the increase is less.
2. • National insurance upper earnings UP. You will pay 11% NI on earnings up to £43,888 a year (£40,040) and 1% above that.
3. • ISA limits. No change. Yet again, the amount savable tax-free hasn’t increased with inflation or earnings. See the Top Cash ISAs guide.
4. • Child Tax Credit family element. No change. Many families get this, and the freeze at £545 is an effective cut. Yet the means-tested element has increased to £2,235. See the Benefits Check-Up guide.

Discuss these changes with other MoneySavers in the Forum: New Tax Year 09/10.

OBAMA- TURKEY SPEECH

Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) - Life is Fine

Life Is Fine

I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.

But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry--
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) - Dream Deferred

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

Mike Wallace and Farrakhan

James Baldwin, (August 2, 1924–November 30, 1987)

Biography

James Arthur Baldwin, an African American, was a writer. When he was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Joynes, moved to Harlem, NY. When he was still young, his mother married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor; and James and his adoptive father had a tumultuous relationship. James Baldwin attended the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in New York. At the age of 14, he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher.

When he was 17 years , Baldwin turned away from religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood, famous for its artists and writers. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955).

In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris, France, where he would live as an expatriate for most of his later life.^[2]

On November 30, 1987 Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.
Love, we say, God, we say,
Rome and Michiko, we write,
and the words get it all wrong.
We say bread and it means according to which nation.
French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure.
A people in northern India is dying out
because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment.

I dream of lost vocabularies
that might express some of what we no longer can.
Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain
why the couples on their tombsare smiling.
And maybe not.
When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records.
But what if they are poems or psalms?
My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats
standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen
loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.
My love is a hundred pitchers of honey.
Shiploads of thuya
are what my body wants to say to your body.
Giraffes are this desire in the dark.
Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not laguage but a map.
What we feel most has no name
but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Price Wars

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Price Wars

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