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Originally uploaded by lowfatbrains.

Today’s quote is from the Christian Science Monitor, which gives a revealing look into the reasons why Africa refuses to reign in Mugabe. This is a matter close to my heart, since I have family in Zimbabwe, and am well aware of the crisis that faces the people in the country.

At any rate, most South Africans look at Mbeki’s so called “Quiet Diplomacy” (or “softly, slowly” approach) in relation to Zimbabwe, and scratch their heads in disbelief: matters have progressively gotten worse with censorship of the press, human-rights abuses and land evictions, intimidation, beatings, a crumbling economy with ever increasing inflation, poverty and unemployment.

And yet, Mbeki has constantly argued for many years, “Together with [Zimbabweans], our government will work persistently and without making the noise of empty drums, to help the sister people of Zimbabwe to find a just and lasting solution to the real and pressing land question in their country.” SA’s Foreign Minister Dlamini Zuma’s elaborated that SA would “never” condemn Zimbabwe “as long as this government is in power” because they didn’t want to “throw [the Zimbabwean] people over the precipice”, despite the evidence that they already are being pushed over it by their own government.

Yet this is not the real reason behind Mbeki’s softly, slowly approach. No, Mbeki was in fact much clearer about it at a March 28 South African Development Community conference in Tanzania, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article:

“The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe; tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. And any government that is perceived to be strong and to be resistant to imperialists would be made a target and would be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of SADC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa.”

Therefore, the real meaning of quiet diplomacy is essentially to support Zimbabwe, which “is perceived to be strong”, through thick and thin because it has been “made a target” by “imperialists”, and the SADC must not show “weakness”.

This is similar to the slogan, “My Country, Right Or Wrong”, and it is likely to have the same disastrous consequences of allowing a thug and a tyrant to stay in power.

Ever wonder what you’re really drinking when you pick up that bottled water? And I don’t just mean what’s in the water: where’s it come from? What’s its impact? What’s its future? These questions have been bugging me, so I set out to discover the answers. Turns out, there’s a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t buy bottled water any more. So, here’s the seven deadly sins of bottled water.

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You’ll have noticed no new posts for quite a while. This is because I’m busy moving into my new house. So, expect a very quiet few days, at least until I get everything moved, unpacked, and my internet reconnected.

Today’s quote is via the German newspaper, Spiegel Online, and concerns the recent alarming reports of the destruction of German (and American) bee populations. In it, they refer to Albert Einstein as saying:

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

It seems that the exact cause of the decline of bee populations in Germany and America may have a large number of causes. In Germany, it has been attributed to an alien invader from Asia called the varroa mite, the use of pesticides on wild flowers, and monoculture. More worryingly, it is also suspected that it may be as a result of genetically modified crops. In America, similar reasons have been given to account for their loss, also citing a “vampire” mite that destroys bee hives.

The phenomenon of entire hives being destroyed is called “colony collapse disorder“, and it appears to have spread to regions in Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Poland, and also Britain. An astonishing 24 states in America have reported a 50 to 90 percent loss in bee colonies.

Most interestingly of all is a recent German study that claims that radiation from mobile phones is the cause because it “interferes with bees’ navigation systems” and prevents them from finding their way back to their hives.

All the reasons do seem to have one thing in common, however: us. Not really a newsflash, but still, it’s sad.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

Kurt Vonnegut,  born November 11, 1922 and died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007. If you don’t know who he is, read his book Slaughterhouse Five.

Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons. There are several fantastic quotes scattered throughout the document, but one of the more interesting ones is this:

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoplesâ?? attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the worldâ??s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

I find that particularly fascinating (and promising, in fact). I’ve always found Marx’s works to be interesting and still relevant in today’s society, especially in the fields of sociology and political economy, despite some of my friends still having a chuckle and saying that he has absolutely no relevance in today’s world. In fact, one of the first lines of an economics text I read a while ago said that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marx was proved “wrong”, never mind that since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 it was recognised amongst the Left and others that Lenin’s revolution bore no resemblance to Marx’s ideas. At any rate, it seems he may have relevance in tomorrow’s world.

On a related note, this document ties in nicely with another paper I’ve started reading from the Oxford Research Group entitled Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, which argues “that international terrorism is actually a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends”, such as climate change and resource competition.

(And if you want a summarised version of the Global Strategic Trends report, the Guardian have done an article on it).

Here’s an interesting hypothesis that I came across recently, reading through an article in the latest edition of the IEEE Spectrum about digitally animated faces. It’s called the “Uncanny Valley” effect, formulated by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and it basically says that, as a robot becomes more human-like in appearance, the more humans are likely to empathise with it. However, this effect reaches a point where empathy is reversed, and humans are likely to be repulsed instead. This, too, is then reversed and replaced with positive empathy once more as the appearance of the robot becomes even closer to that of a human being.

I’d be extremely interested if this hypothesis could work in reverse. For example, could individuals who believe in cyborgization i.e. integrating themselves with machines actually decrease the amount of empathy fellow humans feel for them?

Sometimes I read something that I just can’t believe, where it seems to be just too insane for anyone to have possibly said or done it. Today was such a day. So here we have Recruiting Sergeant Marcia Ramode educating African American Corey Andrew in an exchange of emails as to why being Gay doesn’t let you into the United States Military. Please excuse the capital letters, it would seem that Sgt. Ramode doesn’t know how to use the Caps Lock key:

YOU GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE AND PRACTICE YOUR GAY MORALS OVER THERE THAT’S WHERE YOU BELONG

Well. Yes. Indeed. My calendar tells me that this is the 21st Century, but I think the half-naked gay Africans dancing voodoo the world over have sent me back to the Middle Ages, just replace witches with gays and you’d be spot on. Get out the faggots and burn them!*

However, the whole email exchange contains so many great little nuggets that I can’t resist adding this little quote on, too:

YOU SHOULD SAY THANK YOU MILITARY PEOPLE FOR WHAT YOU DO SO THAT YOU CAN LIVE A FREE LIFE IN THIS COUNTRY. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.

I can see how “freedom” having the word “free” in it can confuse the issue. Thanks for putting things straight, Marcia.

* In case you don’t know, a faggot is in fact a bundle of wood. What were you thinking?

For anyone interested in privacy, security and surveillance issues, Roger Clarke’s website is a must. Well-researched and insightful, it has become a regular read for me since he covers a lot of issues that have arisen from technology-saturated societies and the natural marriage between IT, governments and corporations in creating ubiquitous surveillance.

Today’s quote is from a paper Clarke wrote in 2006 entitled “What’s Privacy?“, in which he offers this wonderful definition of privacy:

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a ‘personal space’, free from interference by other people and organisations.

We would do well to keep this definition in mind before privacy simply comes to mean that corporations and governments can still conduct massive surveillance and collect information on you, but they’ll try make sure it’s secured from unauthorized access. Privacy is not, and should never be, the same as data security.