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Posts Tagged ‘africa’

African immigrants speak out for Tancredo

Posted by Richard on October 25, 2010

You may have seen my post supporting Tom Tancredo for Governor of Colorado, in which I described him as "sincere, principled, articulate, and funny. Not at all the angry right-wing ogre some people paint him as." And I'm sure you're familiar with the MSM's portrait of him as a racist and xenophobe. So, who to believe? Before deciding, I suggest you consider what African immigrants from the Sudan have to say.

El Marco has an enlightening post, African Immigrant Leaders Support Tancredo, Angry at Obama, that I strongly urge you to read. I can't possibly summarize or excerpt it adequately. It's full of marvelous images and compelling quotes, and you simply have to click the link. But it begins thus:

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo is an extraordinary man with no shortage of friends, and detractors. Tancredo has been branded a racist by the political left for being a leading critic of illegal immigration, and yet he earned a standing ovation from the NAACP. Recently I was in New York to photograph the start of the Sudan Freedom Walk, and learned things about Tom Tancredo (and Obama) that few Americans know anything about. I discovered that while many in the Sudanese refugee community feel betrayed by President Obama, they reserve a special place in their hearts for Tom Tancredo.

Read the whole thing. Please. Seriously. And try not to get teary-eyed.

Yes, I realize that the issues of Darfur, slavery, and genocide don't have any direct relevance to how a candidate might govern Colorado. But indirectly, they do. They tell us something important about the kind of person this candidate is.

In any office you can think of, I'd rather have Tom Tancredo than the current occupant of the White House.

HT: Dan Kopelman (via email)

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Another benefit of global warming

Posted by Richard on August 26, 2009

Turn up your air conditioner. Fire up the barbecue grill. Gas up your SUV and take a road trip. If human CO2 production is in fact warming the planet, you'll be helping to make the desert bloom. And millions of Africans will thank you. This happy news comes from those right-wing shills for industry at National Geographic:

Desertification, drought, and despair-that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.

Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).

Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.

The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.

The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study.

…

In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees-such as acacias-are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.

"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass," said Kröpelin, who has studied the region for two decades.

In 2008 Kröpelin-not involved in the new satellite research-visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.

"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."

"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.

"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.

"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."

Sounds pretty good to me. I think I'll go increase my carbon footprint.

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Obama the African Colonial

Posted by Richard on June 29, 2009

The American Thinker has a fascinating article by L.E. Ikenga that, it seems to me, precisely nails Barack Obama:

Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.

Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign "isms", instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.


The tropes of America's racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.


Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from — also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to — but at the same time it does.
 
My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself — those of us who know our history — have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:


First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country. 

Read the whole thing. 

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From breadbasket to basket case

Posted by Richard on September 25, 2007

Once, Zimbabwe was the "breadbasket" of Africa and one of the world's major exporters of food. Now, there is virtually no agricultural production — virtually no production of anything, other than fiat money (the inflation rate is Weimar-like) and hunger. Soon, all the wildlife will be gone, and then the famine will become really serious (emphasis added):

"Wild animals have become the latest victim of this economic crisis," Johnny Rodrigues, chairman of the Zimbabwe conservation task force, told the London Telegraph.

"We are getting reports from all over the country about an increasing number of baby elephants, buffalo and other animals being killed or injured in snares."

Such is living in Zimbabwe, where food shortages due to President Robert Mugabe's malfeasance have become chronic. His policy of forced land redistribution over the past seven years has left the economy in shambles and has nearly wiped out wildlife on former private game ranches that were seized from their owners.

Hungry Zimbabweans have killed off 90% of the animals on those ranches, National Geographic reports, while 60% of the country's entire wildlife population has been slaughtered for food.

Zimbabwe is in ruins. It's been in a downward spiral for more than a decade. Mugabe's anti-market economic policies, particularly the seizure of private property, have been disastrous.

Most of the property owners who knew how to make economically profitable use of the land have been evicted.

Consequently, Zimbabwe's economy has declined by 35% to 40% since 2000. It will shrink another 5.7% this year and 3.6% next year, according to International Monetary Fund projections. Unemployment has now reached 80% and inflation is at 7,000% (though some independent estimates say it's more like 14,000%). Eight in 10 Zimbabweans live in absolute poverty.

There's no telling how many bodies are buried in the slums Mugabe bulldozed, or how many have been murdered by the looters and thugs Mugabe has encouraged, or how many have died already from lack of food, clean water, and health care. But pretty soon, the bodies will really begin to pile up. How many times does history have to repeat itself before the people of Africa — and those in the West who claim to care about them — acknowledge that authoritarian, kleptocratic socialism is harmful to human beings and other living things?

Maybe if PETA organizes protests against the Mugabe regime … 

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