Check the picture...

from Windows Phone Thoughts
And see if you can pick out what's missing and why that's a problem.

This is an invite only Microsoft meeting. Folks who are invited are from the tech industry writers. This could have easily been any other company doing the invite so WHO invited is not at issue here.

Makes Sense

It should be clear that a Muslim is not allowed to transgress against non-Muslims as long as he or she resides in their lands under their protection. Any aggression from their quarter is unsanctioned treachery. If they feel they can no longer accept the perceived or real abuses or injustices of the host people then they are obliged to leave that land if remaining there would push them into acts of violence or aggression against the host community.

-New Islamic Directions

I have been making this very argument for a while now.

Of course an oppositional argument to this is that since non-Muslims are occupying Muslim lands and have corrupted Muslim leadership to the extent that the would be Jihadist does not feel that they are safe in said Muslim lands, then the would be Jihadist has nowhere to go and therefore must commit Jihad where he or she is. Even with that argument I believe that the quoted text is the best and those Jihadist that are so annoyed at the status quo in their lands, take to overthrowing those regimes.

Hat tip Planet Grenada

Everyone looking to take from we

In a series of meetings, Saudi government officials, bankers and agribusiness executives told an institute delegation led by Zeigler that they intended to spend billions of dollars to establish plantations to produce rice and other staple crops in African nations like Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Ethiopia. “They laid out this incredible plan,” Zeigler recalled. He was flabbergasted, not only by the scale of the projects but also by the audacity of their setting. Africa, the world’s most famished continent, can’t currently feed itself, let alone foreign markets.

NY Times

How mad can I be when Garvey had long since warned Africa what would happen we didn't get our acts together. How many African nations depend on volunteer doctors. How many wells are dug instead of water works? How much clothes are dumped on the market rather than home grown? How much diamonds for Jewelry is taken? How much coultan for cell phones are taken? Uranium? How surprising should it be that they'll look to grow food for themselves?

Update:

Daewoo Logistics had signed an agreement to take over about half of Madagascar’s arable land, paying nothing, with the intention of growing corn and palm oil for export.

Paying nothing? Who are we kidding here? Either the leadership of Madagascar is so incompetent as to give up use of land for nothing or, more likely the leadership of Madagascar pocketed some "nice" change in this deal. C'mon now.

Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with “romanticism.”

I've been saying this for years. People think it's all cute that people are pulling water up from a well when they know full well THEY wouldn't live like that. What? Can an African get a sink and faucet please? And yeah, boo hoo that some old ways of living are going to have to change. How's that depending on foreigners to eat working out. Thought so.

TD Jakes Justifies the Taliban

So last night I'm doing my laundry when I chanced upon a TV with CNN on with Larry King interviewing TD Jakes. Larry King asked TD Jakes whether he was opposed to war. I expected a so-called follower of Christ, you know the one that folk tell me said something in regards to turning the other cheek among other things, to make a bold statement in the vein of Martin Luther King Jr. and state his moral opposition to warfare. People still do know who he is and what he stood for now that we have a African-American president right?

He did not.

What Jakes said was that War is sometimes justifiable. Particularly in defense of one's country and countrymen.

Stop and think on that for a minute. TD. Jakes, perhaps one of the most prominent black Christians in the US, articulated a position, as a religious leader that it is OK, spiritually and morally to conduct warfare in defense of one's country and countrymen. Ladies and gentlemen is not the Taliban in Afghanistan expressing the exact same sentiments? Is not Al-Qaeda opposed to the US bases in "Muslim lands"? Are they not opposed to the oppression of Palestinians by Israel with the support of "foreigners"? Is there any difference between the fighter in Afghanistan who believes that his country and his people are being slaughtered and occupied by a foreign force just as moral as T.D. Jakes (assuming you think Jakes is a moral person)?

If one accepts Bishop Jakes position, then one must accept the Afghani's position and therefore reject any argument for any troop increase or presence in Afghanistan. The fighters in Afghanistan, by Jakes logic have the moral upper hand since they are defending their country.

Dr. King (and I suppose Ghandi) made the point clear war is like poking someone in the eye. eventually there are no more eyes to poke out. You'd think Bishop Jakes would have understood that, being so spiritually informed and all (*eye roll*).

Sosa and Latin American White Supremacy

I've been telling people about the racism that exists "south of the border" for the longest. It's part of the reason there is so much hate for Hugo Chavez who is known to have made very favorable commentary about the Africans in his lineage. So since we've been exposing negative attitudes world wide (South Korea, China) lets take on the Dominican Republic:

Don't blame Sammy Sosa. Blame Rafael Trujillo. The late Dominican dictator's rule (1930-1961) left generations of his countrymen without families, hope, and a demonized view of Afro-Dominicans and Haitians. During his reign he ordered the execution of tens of thousands of Haitians (The Parsley Massacre) and opened the doors to Jewish refugees from Europe in hopes of adding more Caucasians to his mostly Afro-Latino isle. His self-hatred was ever clear when Trujillo powdered his skin to appear lighter. So, in retrospect, Sosa is simply carrying out the racist ideologies that have permeated Latin America for centuries.

Essence

About a 10 on the Duh scale

'Africa must think big to thrive'

Many African states are too small to continue to exist independently, Sudan-born magnate Mo Ibrahim has told a conference in Tanzania.

Mr Ibrahim said the idea that 53 small African countries thought they could compete with China, India, Europe and the US was a "fallacy".

BBC

you don't say. This was said by Garvey before any country other than Ethiopia gained "independence". This is not rocket science. Anyone who knows history knows that the colonial borders of Africa were created with the express purpose of making it easy for the colonial powers to get the resources out of the country. Now it is a means to play one government against another for concessions and cheap labour, where they aren't simply dumping cheap goods on the local markets.

Obama and the Twitter Question

In china Obama gave a speech in which he encouraged the use of Twitter by the Chinese. He said that the use of such social media tools makes American democracy stronger. Too bad he didn't recall the American citizen who had the police barge into his home and take his stuff and placed under arrest for using this democracy strengthening tool to tweet the publicly available police communications to G20 protesters in Pittsburgh PA.

I'm sure they like Hip Hop though...

Last week it was an article in the NY Times about South Koreans hating on dark foreigners, now this:

"In Guangzhou, to be frank, they don't like Africans very much," said Diallo Abdual, 26, who came to China from Guinea 1 1/2 years ago to buy cheap Chinese clothes to ship back to West Africa for sale.
With the recession, his business has dried up, his money is gone, and he has overstayed his visa. Now, like many Africans here, he spends most of his days at Guangzhou's Tangqi shopping mall avoiding the police.
"The security will beat you with irons like you are a goat," he said. "The way they treat the blacks is very, very bad." He and others pointed out the spot where in July several Africans jumped from an upper-floor window to escape an immigration raid. One migrant was reported critically injured in the fall, and a large number of Africans marched on the local police station in protest...

The racial animosity here reflects a prejudice dating to China's mainly agrarian past: Darker skin meant you worked the fields; lighter skin put you among the elite. The country is rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, but that historical prejudice remains. High-end skin-whitening products are a $100 million-a-year business in China, according to industry statistics.

Chen Juan, 27, a secretary in an English-language training school in Beijing, regularly uses skin-whitening products and carries an umbrella on summer days. "For me, the whiter, the better. Being white means pretty," she said. "If someone looks too black, I feel they look countrified and like a farmer. . . . Being white is prettier than being black."
"In my impression, black people, especially Africans, are not clean enough," Chen continued. "To be frank, I just feel black people are too black. Definitely, I wouldn't consider having a black guy as my boyfriend even if he were rich."

But I am sure they love Hip Hop and other black or black derived music though.

Let Them Bow Their Heads

For nearly eleven weeks they have been living on the street opposite the house that was theirs for 53 years. On August 2 Israeli soldiers threw them out; minutes later, settlers from the violent organization Kach (“Thus”, founded by the late Meir Kahane), moved in and have been there ever since. And so the Ghawes are once again refugees, re-living a nightmare they had thought was buried in the Nakba. They watch from the street as settlers carry on life in their former home. When we visited, a guard hired by the settlers picked limes and gave them to one of the Ghawe women: “I am not against Arabs,” he said, “This is just my job.”


In 1979 I reported from Kiryat Arba, a major Gush Emunim stronghold. A settler interviewee whispered with pride that Meir Kahane had an apartment there. For the Gush settlers, Arabs were at very least inferior. One woman said she believed in a “chain of being”: on top, Jews. Then, lesser human specimens. Then animals, vegetables, minerals. Somewhere in the lower reaches of lesser humanity were Arabs. “Let them bow their heads. If they won’t, they should leave,” was a frequent Gush statement about the untermenschen.

from counterpunch

Remember this the next time someone like David Brooks tells you that certain Muslims are merely choosing to have a dour outlook on life.