The Need for Rastafari

Fifty years ago, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I visited Jamaica, one of the most memorable and frenzied events to have taken place here. It's not that all Jamaica was enamoured by the Rastafarians' claim that God had visited Jamaica. It was just that we dared not ignore Rastafari. Then.
Today, his grandson has come to visit on the 50th anniversary, and there is no such national excitement over his visit. Rastafari holds neither the threat nor the promise it did 50 years ago. It has largely been conquered by Babylon, enjoying greater influence and support in exile than at home. Rastafari has been eclipsed by the forces of globalisation or, more properly, by cultural imperialism.
As a cultural resistance, Rastafari is a largely spent force. Or perhaps one could say, at best, that what we are witnessing is not so much its decline as evidence of its success: The things it fought for are now taken for granted. It has been so successful, its influence now so mainstreamed that we are tempted to say it has outlived its usefulness.

The Rastafarians have given us a lot. They forced black consciousness on many Christian churches which had a Eurocentric Gospel and which could not entertain a black representation of Christ.
Today, it is no longer radical for Christians to talk about a cultural identity as part of Christian identity. Even Evangelical Christians are now saying that black consciousness and Black Power can be taught alongside going to Heaven and accepting the Lord Jesus. Church liturgy and music have been significantly impacted by Rastafari acceptance of our cultural expressions and forms. We must never underestimate the positive impact Rastafari has made on us as a society, and how much we are indebted to this despised, oppressed and formerly marginalised group.

When we could only see God through the eyes of our colonisers and oppressors, Rastafari taught us to see a God in our own image. And what we were taught as the unvarnished, unadulterated Gospel, we later discovered, not least of which through Rastafari-influenced perspectives, were simply Western cultural baggage under the guise of universality. We must pay homage to Rastafari for opening our eyes to the deception foisted on us by Babylon.

Our youth need something beyond just grasping for prosperity. Prosperity has to have a philosophical foundation. If it is driven by sheer narcissism and an obsession with wealth and glory - what Rasses call vanity - then can't sustain a nation. Our social-media generation is hooked on the hip, the trendy, the cool things as defined by an American culture of hedonism and atomism. The medium is the message. Our youth are committed to nothing beyond themselves and their narrow dreams.

Read More _Ian Boyle

To Chi and Beyond

Maybe am afraid It'll spit fire
In this hearts streets and illuminate like night

Or perhaps spit water
Into these barren womb and give life
now see the things that pulls the heart to fight
Is the same things that pulls a human being to the light:
The love of love
A means to cope

They say that love will come
Like a whisper in the night
yet perhaps we shall see love come
through the pen when we write
In the pain that we bleed
perhaps in things that we read
And the things we recite

So I try to inhale her dreams and exhale hope
my man told me either she  feel it or don't
So all you want, you can inhale her dreams and exhale hope
But you better also treat her right and understand what she wants

"The most high will not change the persons condition,Until the person changes the condition that's in themselves,"

In short, empress believe, I won't falter
Steady as island rock
Swift traversin' waters
Verses  authored,

I offer
As a solemn sacrifice upon her altar
In order to alter
The current conditions
make we better lovers, better Sons and better Fathers

Because we are caught in a culture
Of defeatism, worshipping victims and martyrs
empress divine we are not victims but victors
If we but witness or honor
your brilliance, your resilience and for sure your beauty is farther
with or without the don chici, fendi, Gucci and Prada

thoughts of loosing you got me shook in a trauma
heart in terror that supercedes Al Qaeda and Osama
palms sweaty damm Karma
moist lips damm mama
like in a dream
But we caught in a coma
Sleep

so see you came to me
Like a whisper in the night
But if you're awake, you'll hear it
through the pen when we write
In the pain that we bleed
In the things we recite
love will come
Like a whisper in the night
Being awake, I've learned
Is the essence of life

Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim

10 Reasons Why Democracy Doesn’t Work

It is an accepted fact that liberal democracy is the worst possible political system—except for all others (thank you, Sir Winston). This list doesn’t aim to advocate tyranny, but to review the flaws and failures of the democratic process.

We are not perfect—and neither are our governments, since they are made by humans too. It is most advisable to be skeptical, even of democracy itself. After all, even Thomas Jefferson was wary of the “tyranny of the masses”.

10 Aphoristic Equality

One of the foundations of democracy is the assumption that all votes are equal. Well, that’s the theory—but in fact it is rarely so (more on that later). It assumes that all opinions are worth the same, which is quite a big leap of faith, since we are putting the same value on the opinions of the educated and the ignorant, and the law-abiding citizens and crooks.

Even if you think that all people are created equal, it is obvious that their environments are very different—and as a result, so is their character. By assuming that all opinions are equal you are also assuming that most people are able to reach a rational, informed decision after seriously exploring all pros and cons.

9 Populism

A common criticism of democracy is that in the end it devolves into a popularity contest. Polls don’t decide who is right—that’s simply decided by whoever is most willing to say what people like to hear. As a result, many candidates to political office resort to populism, pursuing policies that focus on the immediate satisfaction of whims instead of long-term improvements.

Populist leaders focus on emotion before reason and “common sense” over more academic wisdom, which often produces bad ideas that will be defended with the stubbornness of a mule, regardless of whether they are good or bad.

8 Tribal Mentality

Let’s be honest here: mankind has not evolved much since the Stone Age. Yes, we have tamed the forces of nature and discovered a lot of things—and this Internet business is amazing. But human nature remains the same, more or less. We still think in tribal terms, “my people vs. your people”. Call it class struggle, xenophobia, nationalism, or whatever you like—the thing is that most of us identify with one group or another, and almost every meaningful group has alliances or enmities with other groups. This is part of human nature, and can work peacefully . . . or not.

In a democracy, tribal mentality is very dangerous, because it will make you vote “for your team” instead of voting according to issues. That means that whoever leads “your team” can rest assured that they have your vote, and instead of focusing on your interests, they can proceed to deal with their own. Unfair legislation can be passed if there are vocal groups in the majority (by oppressing the minority) or in the minorities (by entitling them to privileges that the majority can’t enjoy).

7 Corruption

This is not a specific flaw of democracy, and in fact it can be argued that democracy tends to be less prone to corruption than other systems, since it leaves open the possibility of ejecting someone from office. But that possibility also favors a very specific kind of corruption: machine politics, a political organization in which the bosses dole out rewards in exchange for the vote.

It can be as simple as paying money to someone in exchange for their vote, or giving someone a job in the office of the politician who commands the machine. A softer form of machine politics (or “clientelism”) involves the earmarking of federal funds for certain districts or states, so that Representatives and Senators vote for the programs those funds are allocated to.

6 Entitlements

Another side-effect of democracy is that if the State starts providing a service or a pay to someone, they begin to feel entitled to it. So if someone tries to stop providing it—well, they just made a large number of deadly foes. When Margaret Thatcher cut coal subsidies, for example, coal miners felt that their jobs had been threatened and became bitter enemies of Thatcher and her ilk. Most people will never vote for the party of someone who “took their jobs”, no matter how long ago this might have happened.

  

5 Mob Rule

An unrestricted democracy means that the majority decides over the minority. This leaves the minority relatively powerless—and the smaller it is, the less power it wields. Which means that the smallest minority of all—the individual—is effectively depending on his agreement with the majority.

To account for this problem, mature democracies have developed a set of checks and balances in an attempt to make sure that it doesn’t happen; chief among these is the separation of the powers of the State. But this actually makes a system less democratic, since it interferes with the principle of “people’s power.”

4 Complex Accountability

When a dictatorship falls, it is fairly easy to hold someone accountable for any crimes committed by the State. It is certainly easier than in a democracy, since in that case, officials have been elected by the people. If those officials have committed a crime in opposition to their official platform and without the knowledge of the public, it is simply their own fault and the people who voted for them are innocent. But if a candidate advocates curtailing human rights for a minority, and upon finding himself elected to office, carries out his plan . . . are not the voters also responsible in some degree?

3 State Secrets

All states have dirty skeletons in the cupboard. In a dictatorship they are just discreetly hidden, sometimes in plain sight. In a democracy, which tends to rely on moral superiority, this is difficult to carry out.

People have a right to know—at least in theory. Spying and covert operations are part of the daily workings of the state, admittedly sometimes for the greater good (such as when the police infiltrate a criminal organization to put their members on trial). But their efficiency runs against their transparency. A perfectly democratic system would be transparent, and as such, no covert operations could be effectively carried out.

  

2 Democracy Is Unsustainable

As seen in points three, four, and five, a perfect democracy is unsustainable—but a mostly democratic system can (and does) work. In many democratic countries, your vote only measures up against other votes in your district. So if your district runs a majority system and you vote for a losing runner, then your vote was useless. You can use a proportional system, but that doesn’t solve the problem: the issue still remains that large numbers of people can effectively “waste their vote.”

1 It Can’t Really Work

That pure democracy cannot work is not a personal opinion—it is a mathematical result of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. According to this theorem, so long as there are more than two candidates, there is no possible voting system that can ensure the satisfaction of three crucial criteria for fairness:

– If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.

– If every voter’s preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group’s preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged.

– There is no “dictator”; no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group’s preference.

If these criteria are left unsatisfied, it effectively means that democracy—at least in its purest form—cannot work.

READ MORE A. J. SIMONSON

Stori Ni Mob

sio lazima nikuambie ati ukimwi inamadaa,
sii ata wee unajua wasee wamedie juu ya kitanda
juu ya udanda,
juu ya....
kutotumia rubber...
baggy clothes kuteremka ni faster
milima na mabonde, kushuka kupanda
panda lift na stairs za kenyatta,
hadi gorofa ya saba
uone vile wasee wanaukata,
ni kijana lakini place tuu anaona ni langata.
Stori ni mob zingine sijataja

Kwisha

For-Profit Juvinile Prison Accused of 'Disgraceful' Conditions

G4S already stands accused of human rights violations from Israel to South Africa to the United Kingdom

The firm G4S operates the Highlands Youth Academy in Avon Park, Florida, where young men and boys from 16 to 19 years old are incarcerated. A riot at the prison two years ago prompted the investigation.

"The buildings are in disrepair and not secured, the juvenile delinquents are improperly supervised and receive no meaningful tools to not re-offend, the staff is woefully undertrained and ill equipped to handle the juveniles in their charge, and the safety of the public is at risk," the presentment states. "Yet, G4S has a 9 percent profit margin and expects to make $800,000 in profit this year from the operation of the Highlands Youth Academy."
G4S runs 28 other juvenile detention centers in Florida alone. According to The Ledger, G4S has a $40 million contract to run the Highlands Youth Academy for five years. The presentment emphasizes: "While the citizens are essentially being ripped off—the juveniles are being even more poorly served."

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Odde To Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi

In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.
After NATO’s intervention in 2011, Libya is now a failed state and its economy is in shambles. As the government’s control slips through their fingers and into to the militia fighters’ hands, oil production has all but stopped.

On one side, in the West of the country, Islamist-allied militias took over control of the capital Tripoli and other cities and set up their own government, chasing away a parliament that was elected over the summer.
On the other side, in the East of the Country, the “legitimate” government dominated by anti-Islamist politicians, exiled 1,200 kilometers away in Tobruk, no longer governs anything.

America is clearly fed up with the two inept governments in Libya and is now backing a third force: long-time CIA asset, General Khalifa Hifter, who aims to set himself up as Libya’s new dictator. Hifter, who broke with Gaddafi in the 1980s and lived for years in Langley, Virginia, close to the CIA’s headquarters, where he was trained by the CIA, has taken part in numerous American regime change efforts, including the aborted attempt to overthrow Gaddafi in 1996.
In 1991 the New York Times reported that Hifter may have been one of “600 Libyan soldiers trained by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerrilla skills…to fit in neatly into the Reagan Administration’s eagerness to topple Colonel Qaddafi”.
Hifter’s forces are currently vying with the Al Qaeda group Ansar al-Sharia for control of Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi. Ansar al-Sharia was armed by America during the NATO campaign against Colonel Gaddafi. In yet another example of the U.S. backing terrorists backfiring, Ansar al-Sharia has recently been blamed by America for the brutal assassination of U.S. Ambassador Stevens.

Hifter is currently receiving logistical and air support from the U.S. because his faction envision a mostly secular Libya open to Western financiers, speculators, and capital.

Perhaps, Gaddafi’s greatest crime, in the eyes of NATO, was his desire to put the interests of local labour above foreign capital and his quest for a strong and truly United States of Africa. In fact, in August 2011, President Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank.
For over 40 years, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse as thousands of Filipino health workers flee the country, institutions of higher education across the East of the country are shut down, and black outs are a common occurrence in once thriving Tripoli.
When the colonel seized power in 1969, few women went to university. Today, more than half of Libya’s university students are women. One of the first laws Gaddafi passed in 1970 was an equal pay for equal work law.
A decade of failed military expeditions in the Middle East has left the American people in trillions of dollars of debt. However, one group has benefited immensely from the costly and deadly wars: America’s Military-Industrial-Complex.
Building new military bases means billions of dollars for America’s military elite. As Will Blum has pointed out, following the bombing of Iraq, the United States built new bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
Given that Libya sits atop the strategic intersection of the African, Middle Eastern and European worlds, Western control of the nation, has always been a remarkably effective way to project power into these three regions and beyond.
NATO’s military intervention may have been a resounding success for America’s military elite and oil companies but for the ordinary Libyan, the military campaign may indeed go down in history as one of the greatest failures of the 21st century.

 Read More by Garikai Chengu research scholar at Harvard University

Dr Patrick Ngugi Njoroge - An Independent Mind

INDEPENDENT MIND

“Totally devoid of ego and instinctively averse to self-advertisement” is how a senior Treasury official and long-serving central banker described him.

His style brings to public service a rare quality of humility and an aversion to the trappings of power and opulence.

During vetting Dr Njoroge demonstrated an independent mind, taking a different position to what MPs were pushing and also going against the government position on some issues.

He was, for example, forthright that he considers Kenya’s external borrowing excessive, saying the country must be careful in considering more debt and where the money was going.

This contradicted the National Treasury position, which is that the country’s borrowing is healthy and within the limits.

He also dismissed proposals by MPs to form a government bank to provide cheaper loans and bring interest rates down or simply introduce legislation to control bank lending rates.

“I think it would be a big mistake to even think that we can control interest rates through legislation. It will not work. That is why we moved from price control. Commercial banks just need to get confident to move ahead with market-based solutions that are sensitive for their businesses like control on inflation. This is something we have done in other countries by assuring the banks that the economy is under control, we will come up with a plan that is acceptable to all,” said Dr Njoroge.
 
The man in charge of Kenya’s money has turned down the offer to live in an expansive home in Nairobi’s Muthaiga and ride in a motorcade.

Dr Patrick Ngugi Njoroge, will instead be housed in communal accommodation in Nairobi’s Loresho estate with his fellow members of Opus Dei (Latin for "work of God"), an institution of the Catholic church.

The institution teaches that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. Most of its members are lay people, with secular priests under a bishop.

When he was being vetted by MPs before his appointment by President Uhuru Kenyatta, Dr Njoroge was asked why he does not own property in Kenya and is still single at 54 yet his monthly salary at the International Monetary Fund was Sh3 million a month.

A MATTER OF CHOICE

“Yes I don’t have a single asset here in Kenya and this is where I am at this point and it doesn’t mean that this how it will be forever. I subscribe to being very deliberate about that. This is my economic model and may be years after retirement, I would want to invest in other things. That should not mean I have any financial inabilities. It comes with the profession,” the country’s ninth Central Bank governor said.

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