The Mazruiana collection revisited

Ali A Mazrui debating the African condition
An annotated and select thematic bibliography, 1962-2003
Compiled by Abdul Samed Bemath
Published by Africa Institute of South Africa & New Dawn Press, Inc.
ISBN 1 932705 37 6 

A year ago, in a citation on Ali A Mazrui’s nomination as 100  Greatest Africans of all times by New African Magazine he is profiled as representing a positive image of Africa and its people.

A month ago Mazrui was yet again nominated as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world. The honour this time was bestowed by an American journal Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment.

Who is this man about whom the late Palestinian academic Edward Said observed in his classic Culture and Imperialism: “Here at last was an African on prime-time television, in the West, daring to accuse the West of what it had done, thus reopening a file considered closed.”?

He is undoubtedly a Global African and as this continent’s most respected contemporary scholar of repute is widely acclaimed as its foremost thinker and writer.

How pre-war Iraq intel was cooked

Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.

When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) - both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security - said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of "public reprimand" brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for "cherry-picking" questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.

Let's make lemonade this Thanksgiving

AUSTIN, Texas -- Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

I was particularly intrigued by this thought from peace activist Gen Van Cleve: It's 2009 and the Bush people are gone, leaving in their wake fury, suspicion, distrust -- basically, our name is mud, whether we've left Iraq by then or not. Most of the rest of the world considers us: A) insane, B) imperialist and C) morons. What to do?

Thanksgiving and more taking

When Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our blessings -- or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money.

In its unadorned state, the idea of being thankful is on a collision

Darwin dogma downed

T Huffman begins well, but lies his head off at the end.

Anyone who tells you intelligent design (ID) is poor science or creationist religion is out to deceive you.

You can't get the truth from any major media and certainly this commie news rag is not out to help steer you straight. This is one debate that requires getting to the sources and checking out what they say for themselves.

We are not, scientifically speaking, accidental occurrences. The probability is so small as to require nearly infinite universes. That leave the option we are manufactured goods.

Under evolutionist theology, scientific laws are broken. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy increases. Nothing in your experience ever falls upstairs in terms of functional complexity. Inert matter never shakes itself into highly complex functional forms one day and then sparks itself to life the next.

CIA’s “Torture Taxi” in the spotlight

Ft. Benning, GA – Sitting in a Georgia motel Saturday night, Kathy Kelly talked through a bad phone connection and a worse head cold to recount the previous day’s activities where she and 13 others were arrested at an airstrip outside Raleigh, North Carolina. 

The tiny Johnson County Airport is home to Aero Contractors Corp., a firm described by the New York Times as “a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service,” that shuttles prisoners abroad for interrogation and suspected torture.  The Times reports Aero was founded in 1979 by the chief pilot for Air America, a CIA “front” in Vietnam. 

In addition to Kelly, those arrested Friday included residents of a Raleigh Catholic Worker house and members of Stop Torture Now, a project of the Center for Theology and Social Analysis in St. Louis, Missouri.  Protesters walked onto company property and lowered the flags to half-mast before being arrested. 

Friday night Congress: what was that?

During the middle of the day on Friday, I spent an hour or two on a conference call with activists and congressional staffers discussing next steps to end the war.  We planned, among other things, to organize support for Congressman John Murtha's bill, H.J.Res. 73, which he introduced on Friday.  The bill resolves that:

"The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.  A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy."

Tallahassee voters were misused in the vote on coal burning plant in Taylor County

To set the coal based electrical power generating plant to be located in Taylor County perfectly clear language, in the list of power electrical producing plants used by communities the worst polluter is absolutely Nuclear power, proceeded by the fossil fuel burning coal plants (producing greenhouse gas accumulation, acidification, air pollution, water pollution, damage to land surface and ground-level ozone. sulphur and nitrogen by products). with the natural gas (Propane) burning plants, geothermal, wind, solar, etc. being the least polluters. (Google, McKinney, M.L. and Schoch, R.M., Environmental Science, Systems and Solutions. Third edition, University of Tennessee, Knoxville USA 2003)  Of this there is no doubt.

Getting out of Iraq

Thanksgiving week began with the New York Times noting that “all of Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in Iraq.” The debate -- long overdue -- is a serious blow to the war makers in Washington, but the U.S. war effort will go on for years more unless the antiwar movement gains sufficient momentum to stop it.

A cliche goes that war is too important to be left to the generals. But a more relevant assessment is that peace is too vital to be left to pundits and members of Congress -- people who have overwhelmingly dismissed the option of swiftly withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

On November 17, a high-profile military booster in Congress suddenly shattered the conventional wisdom that immediate withdrawal is unthinkable. “The American public is way ahead of us,” Rep. John Murtha said in a statement concluding with capitalized words that shook the nation’s capitalized political elites: “Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.”

Diebold attempts to evade election transparency laws

EFF Goes to Court to Force E-voting Company to Comply With Strict New North Carolina Law

Raleigh, North Carolina - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is going to court in North Carolina to prevent Diebold Election Systems, Inc. from evading North Carolina law.

In a last-minute filing, e-voting equipment maker Diebold asked a North Carolina court to exempt it from tough new election requirements designed to ensure transparency in the state's elections. Diebold obtained an extraordinarily broad order, allowing it to avoid placing its source code in escrow with the state and identifying programmers who contributed to the code.

On behalf of North Carolina voter and election integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, EFF asked the court to force Diebold and every other North Carolina equipment vendor to comply with the law's requirements. A hearing on EFF's motion is set for Monday, November 28.

"The new law was passed for a reason: to ensure that the voters of North Carolina have confidence in the integrity and accuracy of their elections," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "In stark contrast to every other equipment

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