Loomnie

Manan Ahmed in The National:

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America’s imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of “expert”. We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens – Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan – a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of “experts” such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation – that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised.

Continue reading here.

Manan Ahmed’s blog, Chapati Mystery, comes highly recommended.

From the BBC:

A team of observers from Commonwealth countries has arrived in the UK to watch how the election is conducted and suggest how it could be improved.

It will be the first time a Commonwealth team has observed elections in a developed country.

They will observe candidates’ campaigns, polling stations and the count, before submitting final reports.

Already voter apathy in the UK has surprised the 11 observers from Africa and Asia.

The team includes

young parliamentarians from from Bangladesh, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Jamaica, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

In full here.

1. Is China a developing country?
2. Swedish think tank wants to clean up relief deliveries with a new ethical aid tool
3. Why cycling in Berlin is a dream
4. The corrupt reign of Emperor Silvio
5. Don’t cry for Wall Street
6. Towards a new world economy
7. Why some Egyptians are becoming vegetarians

Image via Wikipedia

Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former minister for finance, and currently a managing director of the World Bank:

intra regional trade in Africa remains low and accounts for less than 10% of total trade . Between 1999 and 2006, for example, intra-African trade increased by an average of just 14 per cent per year, while trade with the United States and China expanded by 26 per cent and 61 per cent respectively. Despite the low level of intra-African trade at the regional level, in some African countries intraregional trade is significant. Five countries export more than half of their goods within Africa, while another 14 export more than a quarter.

She goes on to write about how it works in East Asia.

Intra-regional trade in East Asia has increased rapidly and now represents most of the region’s total trade. The most prominent manifestation of the intensification of Asian intra-regional trade is “production fragmentation” enabling producers and countries to specialize in particular products along an integrated supply chain. As a result, products and components travel repeatedly across borders before becoming final goods. In East Asia, Japan made a conscious decision to outsource production of component electronic parts to Thailand and Malaysia as part of its overall industrial strategy.

Her recommendations include political commitment to regional trade in particular and regional integration in general. And:

A policy framework for intra-regional coordination must be developed and countries must be willing to commit to this framework. This means the leader must handle issues of multiplicity of membership for example which weakens member-state’s commitment to coordinate policies to promote intra-regional trade.

(Know the difference between ECOWAS and WAEMU?)

I would add transport infrastructure. Basic stuffs that make it very difficult, practically, to move things around.

Read the full article here.

The clothes are being produced in a “green” factory in Sri Lanka – the first in the world to be awarded a gold rating for environmental responsiblity by LEED, the international green building certification system.

And they are:

made from end of line Tesco stock which would otherwise end up in landfill….

Full article.

is the title of a Reuters report on Africa. Read this excerpt:

The International Monetary Fund believes growth in sub-Saharan Africa will be 1 percentage point above the global average, and puts eight African countries in its top 20 fastest-expanding economies in 2010. Oil-rich Angola and Congo Republic will lead the charge with growth rates of more than 9 and 12 percent respectively, both beating China, according to the IMF’s most recent projections.

According to the report, China is an important part of the mix:

Massive Chinese investment, in return for resources to fuel its own economic boom, has helped drag the awful roads in many parts of Africa into the 21st century. Trade with China now tops $100 billion a year, and China has overtaken the United States as Africa’s main partner.

In giving the countries where the resources lie an economic boost, China’s need for oil and raw materials has transformed them into an investment proxy for the Asian giant’s growth, and handed the continent as a whole unprecedented negotiating clout.

China last year promised $10 billion in infrastructure funding over three years, amid talk by Chinese officials that Africa can experience a boom like the one in their country. But the challenges — or opportunities — are still vast.

And:

“Not investing in Africa is like missing out on Japan and Germany in the 1950s, Southeast Asia in the 1980s and emerging markets in the 1990s,” said Francis Beddington, head of research at emerging market investment house Insparo Capital.

He believes that in the long term, Africa has the potential to be home to a sizeable chunk of the factories and warehouses of tomorrow’s world.

The Africa of old — aid-dependent, and with large tracts of the economy controlled by corrupt and capricious governments — has not disappeared.

But for all the previous false dawns, there is a growing belief that the continent — home to 53 countries, a rapidly urbanizing young population of a billion people and as much as a third of the world’s natural resources — is changing.

The full report. The future might just be that bright.

From NYTimes: TRUNG SON, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the residents hoped.

Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing completion. But only a few hundred Vietnamese ever got jobs. Most of the workers were Chinese, about 1,500 at the peak. Hundreds of them are still here, toiling by day on the dusty construction site and cloistered at night in dingy dormitories.

“The Chinese workers overwhelm the Vietnamese workers here,” said Nguyen Thai Bang, 29, a Vietnamese electrician.

China, famous for its export of cheap goods, is increasingly known for shipping out cheap labor. These global migrants often work in factories or on Chinese-run construction and engineering projects, though the range of jobs is astonishing: from planting flowers in the Netherlands to doing secretarial tasks in Singapore to herding cows in Mongolia — even delivering newspapers in the Middle East.

But a backlash against them has grown. Across Asia and Africa, episodes of protest and violence against Chinese workers have flared. Vietnam and India are among the nations that have moved to impose new labor rules for foreign companies and restrict the number of Chinese workers allowed to enter, straining relations with Beijing.

In Vietnam, dissidents and intellectuals are using the issue of Chinese labor to challenge the ruling Communist Party. A lawyer sued Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung over his approval of a Chinese bauxite mining project, and the National Assembly is questioning top officials over Chinese contracts, unusual moves in this authoritarian state.

Chinese workers continue to follow China’s state-owned construction companies as they win bids abroad to build power plants, factories, railroads, highways, subway lines and stadiums. From January to October 2009, Chinese companies completed $58 billion of projects, a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

From Angola to Uzbekistan, Iran to Indonesia, some 740,000 Chinese workers were abroad at the end of 2008, with 58 percent sent out last year alone, the Commerce Ministry said. The number going abroad this year is on track to roughly match that rate. The workers are hired in China, either directly by Chinese enterprises or by Chinese labor agencies that place the workers; there are 500 operational licensed agencies and many illegal ones. Continue reading.

I decided this morning to quit Facebook. I agree that it has its uses, but it recently struck me that there are probably more people – my facebook ‘friends’ – who have access to information about me than I would normally want. So yesterday I started restricting access to my profile information. But then I got thinking about the things I have gained from being on Facebook. Yea, it has helped me find old friends whom I probably would not have found if there were no Facebook. But that that was about it… I don’t care so much for being slapped, turned into a zombie, getting sent pictures of small girls telling small boys about how they would control their lives with the thing inside their panties. So I set about looking for how to delete my account.

Hotel California
I remember someone likening Facebook to Hotel California, a place from which you can check-out but can never leave. Well, it was close to that once I decided to delete my account. I looked under the accounts tab but the only thing I got was a link to deactivate my account, but then there was this:

Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.

But that was not what I wanted. I wanted to be off it so that I would not be tempted to log into it again. So I googled and I got these results. I clicked on the search result item from Facebook and it took me to a page where I could fill in a form for them to delete my account. I thought I should be in control of whether I want my account to be deleted or not; Facebook does not give me that kind of choice. I filled in the form and got this message:

Thanks, your inquiry has been forwarded to the Facebook Team.

That is how they treat a request to have ones account deleted – an inquiry.

Then I got this email in my mailbox:

Hi,

The Facebook Team has received your inquiry. We should get back to you soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to review our Privacy and Security Help page (http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=433). There, you’ll find answers to many common questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

The Facebook Team

I want to get my account deleted but it is an inquiry, a response to which might already be on the help page of Facebook. All I can do now is wait. I hope getting out of all the other social networking sites is not as long-winded and convoluted as this.