Month: June 2009

By Rashweat Mukundu

I CANNOT claim to be schooled in economics apart from growing up vending fruit and vegetables in Marondera. However, economic imperatives affect all of us and the Zimbabwean situation is no different.
Everyone agrees that Zimbabwe’s industry is at its lowest ebb ever, if there is any industry to talk about at all. A good example is the fact that Zimbabwe’s famous brands such as the Mazoe drink, available in supermarkets in Windhoek, Namibia, are manufactured in South Africa.

The only product from Zimbabwe I have encountered with a sense of pride in a foreign country is Tanganda’s silver tea on the supermarket shelves. Nothing more demonstrates industrial collapse than the near collapse of Mutare Board and Paper Mills, where machinery that appeared on ZBC news recently looks like relics from the German Krupps factories of the early 1900s. Zimbabwe’s industrial capacity of the 1980s and early 1990s is gone.

This brings us to the current public media push on the subsidies and duties that captains of industry have been asking from government. For some time now industrialists in the food industry, especially millers, have been pushing vigorously for a revision of government policy on food imports, especially maize meal.
The argument goes that the imported maize meal is too cheap hence it is pushing them out of the business or stopping them from coming back into business. The argument goes further that the millers should be protected so that they can have the sole rights to Zimbabwe’s consumers.
And, in my thinking, also raise prices to meet their production costs in an environment in which almost 90% of people are unemployed and five million surviving on donor food and millions surviving on less than a dollar a day.

In this regard the argument being advanced by Zimbabwe’s millers and food producers is very selfish and self-serving.
This argument is not driven by the national interest that people have no food, no money and are poor, but the desire by a few to resuscitate their “industry” and make money.

Granted, industry needs to be supported to get back to reasonable productive capacity. The question is, whose responsibility is it to do so? The second question is what is the Zimbabwe government’s priority under the current circumstances?

The priority should be to feed the people and avert the disaster of people starving. The majority of poor Zimbabweans have benefited from the decreasing food prices. At some point it became impossible to buy anything with US$100 in Zimbabwe.

I am, however, sure that civil servants can now afford to buy maize meal and cooking oil. This is not a justification of their paltry salary but an acknowledgement that US$100 now makes a difference in Zimbabwe. This is largely as a result of the reasonably priced food imports flooding the country.
Zimbabwe Independent for more

By Michael Shermer

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness).
Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.
Scientific America for more

Getting punishment instead of empowerment? Photo: Iqbal Ahmed/ Drik News

By Moazzem Hossain

I wish I did not have to write this piece. One must do it since there has been a silence on the part of the commentators and the politicians, except this daily which published a strongly worded editorial on this issue on May 26. Moreover, the incident had taken place next door to the upazila where I come from. Yes, I am talking about the recent incident at a village in Daudkandi, where a girl was whipped with 39 lashes in the presence of a few hundred peoplethe outcome of a decree of a local salish.

This is not the first occasion that such a crime has been committed by the so-called moulanas and their accomplices in this nation. The aim of this piece is to remind the politicians at all levels that, under any circumstances, this kind of atrocity cannot be allowed and must be stopped immediatelyby making new laws if required.
There is no excuse for tolerating such a heinous act in rural Bangladesh during the so- called era of women empowerment and emancipation. Most importantly, it makes one doubly puzzled that no politician has come forward and shown empathy towards that poor injured girl in the hospital. Perhaps they do not want to be stigmatised, and feared a backlash from the bigots.

Some readers may have thought that the village where the incident took place was located in a remote and illiterate part of the country. No, Daudkandi has one of the highest literacy rates, close to 80%, and is located not too great a distance from Dhaka (only 50 km).
Politically, this is certainly one of the violence-ridden areas of the country, although it has a very high level of per capita income. Although the famous Goalmari fight had taken place here during the war of liberation (Pakistan army even lost some its officers in this fight), the post-liberation period has been infested with violence after violence.

The infamous killers of the father of the nation come from this area (Khandakar Mushtaq and Col. Rashid). Since General Zia’s time this locality has been dominated by BNP-Jamaat politics led by Khandakar Musharaf, who lost the last election to AL’s Subed Ali Bhuiyan.
If I am correct, neither the incumbent MP, nor the former MP has visited the victim until now. None of the 45 MPs elected in the women’s quota has visited the poor girl, either. One may ask, what kind of democracy we are heading towardsdemocracy for the elite, or democracy for the masses?

Daily Star for more

By Achara Ashayagachat

Health advocates have urged Asean governments to print the World Health Organisation (WHO)-advised picture warnings on cigarette packs as part of Sunday’s World No Tobacco Day.
The Bangkok-based Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (Seatca) has called on governments in the region to immediately implement their commitments under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

So far only Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei have pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs, said Seatca director Bungon Ritthiphakdee.

“We are calling on Asean governments who are lagging behind to follow suit and pass laws requiring strong, prominent pictorial health warnings as required by the WHO framework.

“Pictorial pack warnings are one of the best ways to educate the more than 100 million smokers in the region on the dangers of smoking. It does not cost governments much money to implement this measure,” said Ms Bungon.

• Related content: Showing the truth about tobacco

Under the framework, parties are given a three-year deadline to implement Article 11 of the WHO framework which states warning messages on tobacco product packs should cover at least 50% of the principal display areas of the package. It also requires that multiple health warning messages be rotated, encourages the use of pictures and pictograms and prohibits misleading terms such as light and mild, or low tar.

The Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam missed their 2008 deadline to introduce prominent health warnings on tobacco packs. Laos has only a few months left to comply.

“Tobacco companies use graphics on their packs to attract established smokers and first-time smokers among teenagers. But when governments want to use graphics on packs to educate smokers, the companies fight these measures as they are in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia,” Ms Bungon said.

Indonesia has not ratified the WHO framework and is lagging far behind other Asean countries in tobacco control measures.
Studies in the region have found that prominent graphic warnings on cigarette packs are far more effective in educating smokers and the public in general.

Bangkok Post for more

By Kripa Krishnan (Press Trust of India)

Manali, May 28 (PTI) Dressed in their deep red robes, monks and nuns of a 800-year-old Buddhist sect have begun a marathon padyatra to propagate environmental conservation and spread awareness about the indiscriminate use of plastics and motor vehicles.

Led by their spiritual leader the Gyalwang Drukpa, 600 monks would travel across the snow-clad Himalayas in a month long ‘padyatra’ that will culminate in the Hemis Festival in Ladakh later next month.

“The yatra is a way of embracing the ‘walking life’, which is beautiful and stress free. Why should we quit walking for cars and helicopters, when they cause so much damage to nature,” the Gyalwang Drukpa told reporters here before commencing the journey on May 25.

The ‘walkathon’ is expected to gather more volunteers and fellow Drukpas along the 400-km stretch.

The Drukpa leader says he is expecting upto 1000 followers to join him en route the journey where they would talk to villagers about the environment and also distribute pamphlets and canvas bags.

“We want to spread the message of environmental protection and are not marching for Buddhism. The aim is to interact with people living in the remotest corners of the Himalayas and get to know nature more intimately,” the spiritual leader said. PTI

PTI

Submitted by Pritam Rohila