Setsuden-chuu

節 setsu: cut off something wasteful, restrain
電 den: electricity
中 chuu: centre, middle, in progress, underway
Up, Down, Appendices.

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Setsuden-chuu: restraint of electricity use underway.




節電中

Or just setsuden: conservation.

There are no proof-readers at the Globe anymore, and considering the undefined 'setsuni' in the second-last sentence, and the second period closing the final sentence, I at first relegated this article (below) to the 'noted and binned' category.

Then I just so happened to be having a few beers with a Japanese man and the topic came up (when it was vociferously asserted by some nearby neanderthals that conservation is emphatically not an alternative to increased energy consumption) ... so I came back to it (so I could send the link to this fellow) and discovered that Mr. Rubin had in fact under-stated the case (again par for the Globe on issues related to climate change). See these articles (also below) in the Guardian and New York Times.

As of 2005 Japan used about half as much energy per person as United States (the table comes from the EIA via the NAE).

With the tsunami in March and the Fukushima fiasco, and the subsequent shut-down of many of Japan's nuclear plants, something had to give. Enter Setsuden, 'electricity conservation' - with 15-20% reductions already reported and 25% hoped for. In less than six months!

So, round numbers - about 60% of energy consumed in North America is squandered, doesn't have to be squandered, could be conserved without mass-starvation &etc.



Wowzers!

The word itself is interesting:
       Major Japanese buzzword: 'Setsuden',
       節 --- cut off wasteful something, and,
       Chuu.

That's it. A quickie.

I presume I do not have to beat you over the head to see that our governments at all levels (royal, corporate, federal, provincial, & municipal) have been lying outrageously, dragging their heels, don't really care what goes on beyond the end of their trough &etc.

Similarly I presume anyone can see that you don't need a tsunami and nuclear melt-down to make this happen - what you need is simply the will to do it.

Be well.

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Appendices:

1. Setsuden poised to replace nuclear power in Japan, Jeff Rubin, August 3 2011.

2. Energy-saving 'setsuden' campaign sweeps Japan after Fukushima, Suvendrini Kakuchi, August 22 2011.

3. Japanese, in Shortage, Willingly Ration Watts, Norimitsu Onishi, July 28 2011.

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Setsuden poised to replace nuclear power in Japan, Jeff Rubin, August 3 2011.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan was recently quoted as seeing the country as a nuclear-free nation. But unlike similar pronouncements from Germany, which pledges to be nuclear-free by 2022, Japan may become nuclear free literally within a year.

That would be quite a feat for a country that only five months ago relied on nuclear plants for about 30 per cent of its electrical power.

By some measures, the country is already two-thirds of the way to becoming nuclear free. Thirty eight of the country’s 54 reactors are currently shut down, and there are no dates set for their return to service.

Aside from the irretrievably damaged reactors at the Fukushima power plant, reactors have been shut down across Japan for maintenance checks. The only problem is once the nuclear plants are shut down, none have been restarted as local governments have balked against their reopening.

By law, all Japanese reactors must be temporarily shut down for maintenance every 13 months. All of the currently operating reactors have maintenance scheduled by next spring. As a result, if the present pattern of indefinite shutdowns after maintenance inspections continues, Japan could effectively be nuclear free by next spring.

But will the lights go out on the world’s third largest economy when that happens? Even with boosting hydrocarbon-based power generation to the hilt, the Japanese government estimates it will still be at least 10 per cent short of peak power demand expected for next summer.

If, however, you look at Tokyo this summer, there is reason for the Japanese to be optimistic.

When the March 11 tsunami knocked out more than half of the nuclear power plants servicing Tokyo, the 30 million person metropolis lost about one-fifth of its power supply just as it was heading into the peak summer power season. But there have been no power shortages in Tokyo this summer despite the sweltering heat.

The reason is setsuden - the Japanese word for power conservation. It’s suddenly the new watchword of post- Fukushima Japan. And this new mantra of energy conservation mandates as much of a change in the practices of Japanese business and the lifestyles of Japanese households as the OPEC oil shocks did three decades ago.

From convincing staid Japanese businessmen to stop wearing suits and turning down the office air conditioning to closing the energy-sucking visitors gallery of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Japanese government is asking for 15 per cent to 20 per cent power cuts from the boardrooms of the country’s powerful corporate sector. And it is asking no less in power savings from the Japanese in their homes.

As setsuni continues to pare back the power requirements of the Japanese economy, maybe the country won’t need the power from the 54 reactors that it might mothball by next year.

If so, setsuden isn’t just an energy solution for Japan.

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Energy-saving 'setsuden' campaign sweeps Japan after Fukushima, Suvendrini Kakuchi, August 22 2011.

Neon lights are switched off, trains are running slower and billboards flash energy savings as Japan looks to alternative sources of energy beyond nuclear power.

After decades of not bothering to switch off the lights in unoccupied rooms in their Tokyo home, Masayoshi Sakurai and his children now meticulously make sure they do.

"My wife used to badger us to switch off the lights because she was worried about high electricity bills. Now all of us have begun saving energy, by reducing the use of air-conditioners, turning off the computer and so on," explained the corporate employee.

Sakurai is part of a growing movement in Japan, led by a media campaign called 'setsuden' (power saving in Japanese), that has begun to spread support for limiting electricity consumption.

"Public support is strong for setsuden mostly because they fear power blackouts of the type caused by the disastrous Fukushima nuclear accident," says Kazuko Sato, of Soft Energy Project, a non- government organisation that lobbies for renewable energy expansion.

Sato told IPS that the energy saving mood sweeping the country is a new trend in Japan that gives an opportunity to push for clean energy over national policy that favours nuclear power.

She explained that the challenge facing green activists is to link the setsuden mood to banning nuclear energy.

"To push renewable and safe energy to the national forefront and reduce Japan's reliance on nuclear energy, it is important to sustain the current public setsuden mood. I am worried that the public support could be temporary," she said.

Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind provide for less than two percent of Japan's total power consumption.

Tokyo, a bustling capital famous for its neon lights, has now turned into a city of darkened buildings and slower running trains. Billboards at major crossings flash daily rates of power consumption that tell whether the city has conserved sufficient energy to avoid a blackout.

Hisayo Takada, energy expert at Greenpeace Japan, a leading environment organisation, says such developments are important but do not necessarily translate into public anger against nuclear power.

"The public setsuden sentiment is merely symbolic. Everybody is joining the bandwagon as an expression of solidarity at a time of distress. What is more important is to create a deeper front against dangerous nuclear power," she told IPS.

A massive earthquake and tsunami on Mar. 11 destroyed Japan's largest nuclear power plant at Fukushima, forcing the government to review the national policy on nuclear energy that currently meets 30 percent of the national demand.

Japan has 54 nuclear reactors of which only 15 are in operation currently, with some of them set to undergo stress tests as a precaution after the Fukushima disaster.

As a result, the total electricity supplied by the ten major utilities in July dropped by almost nine percent, or 83 billion kilowatt hours, in comparison to supply in 2010, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies.

Well-known Japanese author Kazutoshi Hanto, in an interview on Japanese television, likened the current power-saving efforts to 1945 post-war Japan when people worked hard to rebuild their country.

"National unity in the form of setsuden mirrors the early post-war diligence of the Japanese who worked single-mindedly to rebuild the country.

"There are new ideas and efforts rising from the worst nuclear disaster in Japan," Hanto said.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan is pushing a national goal to generate 20 percent of electricity from alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. Japan will legislate to mandate utilities to buy electricity generated from these sources at prices set by the government.

Such steps are long overdue, environmentalists say. There is also increasing interest among equipment manufacturers to develop energy saving products.

Major companies such as Toshiba Corp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp announced collaboration last month to promote next generation energy-saving housing that will use solar panels and home appliances linked to a computer network to save power.

The fear that the Fukushima accident is threatening massive radiation contamination has led to rising opposition in Japan to nuclear power. Its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, is struggling with huge compensation payments.

"The difficult times we face today present an opportunity which we must not miss. Post-disaster Japan has to change and we can only do this through a long-term approach to develop a safer Japan," Sato said.

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Japanese, in Shortage, Willingly Ration Watts, Norimitsu Onishi, July 28 2011.

TOKYO — With Japan suffering from electricity shortages this summer, Michio Kuniyuki has stepped up his conservation patrols of Rikkyo University.

Mitsuharu Taniyama has the lights dimmed in his insurance business in Yokohama. In many places, that fan isn't allowed.

As he has done these past six summers, Mr. Kuniyuki spends his days making sure the lights and air-conditioning have not been left on in empty classrooms. Whenever he finds students in a classroom, he turns off the air-conditioning and inquires about the lights.

“Should I leave them on or can I turn them off?” Mr. Kuniyuki asked one day.

“Uh,” one young man hesitated, giving Mr. Kuniyuki the opening for his next move.

Click. Off.

Now backed by a colleague newly assigned to the patrols, Mr. Kuniyuki has been able to strategically map out their routes throughout the campus and outwit students who used to switch the lights back on as soon as they saw his back. “It’s doubly effective,” he said.

Already a leader in conservation, Japan consumes about half as much energy per capita as the United States, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But it has been pushed to even greater lengths since the nuclear disaster even as it tries to revive its economy. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the resulting backlash against nuclear power have left only 17 out of Japan’s 54 reactors online as the nation steels itself for August, the hottest month of the year.

Preliminary figures indicate that regions under conservation mandates have been able to meet reduction targets and even exceed them, providing a possible model of conservation’s potential when concerns about global warming are mounting. In the Tokyo area, the government is pushing to cut electricity use by 15 percent between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays to prevent blackouts — and on Thursday, for example, that target was met compared with last year.

Japanese are bringing to the conservation drive a characteristic combination of national fervor, endurance, sloganeering, technology and social coercion.

A “Super Cool Biz” campaign, which builds on the option of no-tie summer business attire begun in 2005, now encourages salarymen to dress down even further by wearing polo shirts or the traditional aloha-style shirts worn on the Japanese tropical islands of Okinawa.

To back up the call to conserve, electricity reports that forecast the day’s power supply and track demand in real time have become as much a part of this summer as the scorching sun and humid air. They are delivered along with the weather on the morning news and announced along with the next stop aboard some trains.

Government alerts are also sent to subscribers’ cellphones if overall demand nears capacity, prodding households to turn down the air-conditioner or, better yet, turn it off altogether.

The forecasts, available since the start of the month on the Web sites of power companies and in the news media, show the amount of electricity currently being used in a utility’s service area, as well as the consumption for the same day last year.

In the Tokyo area, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima plant, issues a forecast in the evening for the next day, then refines the forecast the following morning depending on the changing weather. During the day, Tepco updates electricity use every five minutes, in a bar graph that predictably shows use rising steadily in the morning and peaking in the afternoon.

In the past week, forecasts and actual use have hovered around 75 percent of capacity, thanks to unseasonably cool weather brought on by a typhoon. Yukihiko Tayama, a Tepco manager specializing in demand and supply, said that so far this summer, overall demand had yet to come dangerously close to capacity, and so it was unclear whether the real-time reports would influence people’s behavior in a crunch. The real test lies ahead in August, Mr. Tayama said.

Local governments are holding contests soliciting conservation ideas; households are cutting back beyond the hours during which conservation is in effect, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and companies have shifted days off to weekdays and undertaken other measures not only to avoid penalties — maximum penalties are less than $13,000 — but also to contribute to the national effort.

At Meiwa Rubber, a manufacturer of printing equipment with factories in Tokyo, lights were dimmed, the use of hot water was restricted, and the air-conditioning was curtailed. An employee tracked the factory’s real-time power use, using software supplied by Tepco. If demand neared the company’s maximum use for the year before, orange lights flashed on the factory and management floors; if demand threatened to outstrip maximum use, red lights flashed, leading employees to shut down three air-conditioning units.

“The government’s figure is 15 percent, but we’re aiming to cut by 25 percent,” said Tatsuo Nakahara, 63, the company’s administrative manager. He added that in the months after the March disaster, the company had already succeeded in conserving 20 percent.

Offices here, already balmy by American standards, have been directed to set the room temperature to 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit, though the real temperature, especially on hot days, has climbed above 86 degrees in many offices.

“We’re doing this for Japan, so it can’t be helped,” said Jun Nakada, 36, a salaryman whose office lighting has been dimmed to two fluorescent tubes from eight.

Not cooperating is frowned upon. Some companies have forbidden employees to plug in desktop fans; in others with no such bans, doing so can be considered harmful to one’s career.

Weekly magazines are making sure there are no cheaters. Several have sent reporters armed with thermometers to the offices of those popularly considered responsible for the nuclear disaster, particularly the triumvirate of Tepco, nuclear regulators and pro-nuclear politicians, widely seen as collusive. The nuclear establishment was also enduring a sweaty summer, the weeklies reported with great satisfaction.

But perhaps the checks were hardly necessary given the power of social disapproval here.

Mitsuharu Taniyama, 73, the owner of a small insurance business, has directed his staff to dim the lights at their office on the second floor of a small building in Yokohama.

“As you can see, our office is surrounded by windows, so after dark people walking outside would notice if it was all lit up inside here,” Mr. Taniyama said. “Now I would feel guilty.”

Like some Japanese of his generation, Mr. Taniyama said the current national campaign reminded him of restrictions on the use of lights during World War II. To avoid becoming the targets of nighttime air raids by American warplanes, families huddled around a single light bulb while making sure that no light was visible from the outside.

Behind the current enthusiasm for conservation, Mr. Taniyama also saw a rethinking of postwar Japan’s single-minded focus on economic growth. Many, he believed, were ready to renounce nuclear power even if that meant “time travel to the lifestyle that Japan had when it lost the war to America.”

Conservation has made Tokyo, a city famous for its neon lights and giant television screens, a little dimmer this summer. It has caused the Japanese to forgo, for now, the energy-hungry gadgets and appliances that provide life here with particular pleasures.

Sakuko Saeki, 75, said she had not only switched off but also unplugged her household appliances. She barely turned on the air-conditioning, instead using a fan in her living room. But there was one appliance she could not give up after all: an automatic toilet, called a washlet, the kind that flushes by itself, raises and lowers the lid on its own, and never ceases to amaze foreigners visiting Japan for the first time.

“I’d turned off my washlet,” Ms. Saeki said, “but I stopped doing that.”

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Down.

Waltzing on air.

(Cause they'll catch you wherever you're hid.)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

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A multi-dimensional cartoon from Ysope, which I think may be subtler than he intended.

It might not have been obvious enough last week that the infinitesimally small transcendent forces might include gravity and candles in the dark ... speaking of which:

Out listening to the leaders of k-k-Canada's protestant churches: The Most Reverend Colin Johnson, Anglican Archbishop of Toronto; Mardi Tindal, Moderator of the United Church of Canada; and, The Reverend Doctor Herb Gale, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada; at a 'retreat' organized by Mishka Lysack of Oikos. Why does he call these things retreats I wonder? How can these people even pronounce their astounding titles without choking (I also wonder)?

Mardi Tindal is the best of a bad lot - here she is in 2010: Stephen Harper fails the tests of truth and accountability.

Surprisingly, they do seem to be intersted in Ivan Illich's Good Samaritan vision. Lame then, but not committed to being so. (Como diria a chatonilda: Há duas espécies de chatos: os chatos propriamente ditos e os amigos, que são os nossos chatos prediletos.)

It was all a mistake you see, that I was even there; a misunderstanding on my part, an accident. I got the news of the retreat during the first week of April - just exactly when I was seriously wondering why no one: certainly not the Conservatives, less surprisingly the NDP, but also the Green Party; why no one at all was talking about the environment nevermind climate change. And I thought, "My goodness! The churches of k-k-Canada are going to pick up the slack!" So I set out on the evening of April 11, arrived at the meeting place and found no one there. Well after that, there was obviously nothing for it but to show up on May 11 as well, was there?

The Brand New Tennessee Waltz, Jesse Winchester way back in 1970. Here's the lyrics and himself singin' it a bit later on in 2008 & 2009, and a version by Joan Baez back in the day, 1971, and the Everly Brothers in 1972.

Who's feelin' like leavin' another town,
But with no place to go if he did;
Cause they'll catch you wherever you're hid.

I really wasn't going to post anything this week; musing on Jean Luc Godard and revisiting Pierrot le fou, l'art et la mort and then that song came to me ... so.

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Opacity ... maybe it is some quality of cultural space that when people don't take the time to understand one another they eventually become mutually invisible. Is that it?

How about a regular-old literal moral universe then? And a regular-old literal hell to go with it? "If you act like this you are going to wind up in hell ..." and presto-whiffo here we are!

Or the quality of experience; sure you see something, but is there a regular-old literal way of seeing which is also ... sublime?

Sorry to be cynical but this is not news: Libyan migrants' boat deaths to be investigated by Council of Europe ... it was the same thing back in 2009 (and long before 2009 as well).

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Does it get much worse than infibulation?

"So pardon the bluntness," says our Nicholas Kristof in the NYT this week; or try reading this excerpt, The Cutting Time, a chapter from Slave: my true story by Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis.

It seems de rigueur in these stories to repeat that the mother loves her daughters; or that the parents really, truly, believe they are doing the best for their daughters. Makes me wonder what the worst could be then? I am still waiting for Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya where he devotes a chapter to the subject as I remember ... when I get it I will post that chapter as well.

(Just for my ailing memory: see previously here & here.)

Two films: A 2010 film version of Mende Nazer's story: I Am Slave (at IsoHunt); and, in 2009, Desert Flower, the story of Waris Dirie (also at IsoHunt).

And yes, it probably gets worse than infibulation; operating as sex does on so many axes ... I am thinking of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye where she cuts her tits off with garden shears; of Bergman's Cries and Whispers where she uses broken glass in some imitation of masturbation; of women I have known, fully equipped with clitorises, who could not 'achieve' orgasm, no way, never; or who came in colours but could not accept any degree of intimacy; of Frank Zappa's Dinah-Moe Humm;

... and ... of several elderly couples I knew in whixh the partners were true to one another for fifty years and more and who could sometimes be overheard giggling in their bedrooms ... What could they have been doing in there I wonder?

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I found this cartoon at PolitiComix but I couldn't figgure out who Ken Tanaka is? So I changed it a bit from the original.

Naoto Kan, the Japanese prime minister is waffling: one day the headline reads, "Japan committed to nuclear energy," and the next it's "no more nuclear in Japan," so who knows?

Germany is making motions too. But trying to find optimism in this kind of news makes me think of soothsayers and tea-leaves and 'reading entrails' and the like.

The politicians are all just leaves blowing around in the wind. A-and looking over their shoulders and stocking up their personal granaries.

I think we need a straightforward decision matrix listing the energy options and their development, operational, and decommissioning/cleanup costs per kW. One side of one 8½ by 11 piece of paper. Not rocket science, but nowhere have I been able to find such a simple table and I don't have the numbers to cook one up. Hell, I can't even get any of these pundits to help me convert GHG emission targets from one baseline to another!

How can you possibly think about these issues properly without such basic tools?

I asked Danny Harvey about it at the retreat the other evening and he dismissed me with a "none of these targets can be achieved anyway" sort of thing. I do not know where to turn?

It has been foggy in Toronto the last few mornings. I remember the sudden chill when you run the boat into a fog bank and how quickly the day changes; and of getting lost in it, bungling the compass and heading off towards Boston from Marticot instead of home ... I've always loved the fog.

I had a rare telephone call from Rio this morning too. No idea where she got the phone card but for once there was no time pressure. Not enough to make me believe in miracles, but tending ...

Be well.

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Postscript:

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Appendices:

1. Stephen Harper fails the tests of truth and accountability, Mardi Tindal, December 14, 2010.

2. Libyan migrants' boat deaths to be investigated by Council of Europe, Jack Shenker, May 9 2011.

3. A Rite of Torture for Girls, Nicholas Kristof, May 11 2011.

4. The Cutting Time excerpt from Slave, Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis, 2003.

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Stephen Harper fails the tests of truth and accountability, Mardi Tindal, December 14, 2010. (The source link to the Ottawa Citizen no longer works.)

Last week, Canada was ranked the fourth worst out of 57 countries evaluated for their climate change performance by environmentalists. It’s a shameful ranking for a country that could do so much better.

As the elected leader of Canada’s largest Protestant church, I have some sympathy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Every day people appear with countless expectations — many of which are contradictory.

The challenge of leadership is to meet such contradictions with integrity. I believe our integrity as elected leaders is rooted in accountability: accountability to truth, which requires a clear-sighted view of the present; accountability to democracy, which requires that we honour our communities; and accountability to our children, which calls us to envision the future we are creating.

When the Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311) was defeated in the Senate after three times being supported by the House of Commons, Prime Minister Harper called the bill “irresponsible” and argued that its targets would throw “possibly millions of people out of work.”

This was a failure of leadership on at least three counts. Harper was not the first prime minister to fail this test. But his response is instructive for anyone wishing to understand the demands of leadership in this emerging crisis.

First, the prime minister fails the test of truth. The science of climate change is based on scientific concensus. The accuracy of various future scenarios can be disputed, but there is no longer any serious question that significant change is accelerating.

Nor is there any doubt that ignoring climate change has serious economic consequences. The major conclusions of economist Sir Nicholas Stern’s 2006 Review on the Economics of Climate Change are widely accepted: that the financial benefits of early action on climate change outweigh the costs — and that costs will increase rapidly if we fail to act.

This understanding is also shared by senior business leaders. On Nov. 8, for example, the week before the Senate killed Bill C-311, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives called for “a comprehensive national policy on carbon pricing that recognizes the imperative of addressing climate change.”

Yet the prime minister takes precisely the opposite position, without even acknowledging this broad consensus. Hardly a clear-sighted view.

Second, leaders must be accountable to the community.

I’ve just returned from visiting communities in Western Canada, hearing troubling stories about the effects of global warming. It was, in fact, in Alberta where people of every economic sector — the oil industry included — shared with me their deep concern about our economic future if we don’t understand the need to limit emissions. These concerns were given expression, however imperfectly, in the Climate Change Accountability Act.

The United Church of Canada’s national governing body, like the House of Commons, is composed of elected representatives from across the country. As the elected leader and presiding officer, I am accountable to my community for respecting the decisions of this body.

It would be irresponsible of me to ignore the deliberations of duly elected representatives in favour of others with whom I might agree more. I believe it is equally irresponsible of the prime minister to disregard the will of a majority of the elected members of the House of Commons.

Third, leaders must be accountable to the future. The climate change impacts that we have seen are modest compared to what our children and grandchildren will experience if we don’t act. The next few generations will need to cope with increasing food shortages due to drought, dislocation of coastal populations, and a multitude of impacts on health. Tomorrow’s children may judge far more harshly than today’s polls.

Ultimately, in a democracy, all of us are called to exercise leadership. For the sake of our own integrity, we too must be accountable to truth, to our communities and to our children. Each of us must search our own conscience on this issue. How are we meeting the test of leadership? How are we failing? How can we be more effective leaders?

That said, a prime minister has a unique position of leadership, and there are some actions which only government can take.

It’s time for the prime minister to exercise accountable leadership on climate change. Now is the moment to introduce urgently needed legislation to follow the failure of the Climate Change Accountability Act. I believe he would find wide support if he did.

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Libyan migrants' boat deaths to be investigated by Council of Europe, Jack Shenker, May 9 2011.

Human rights body demands inquiry into failure of European military units to save 61 migrants on boat fleeing Libya.

Lampedusa - Europe's paramount human rights body, the Council of Europe, has called for an inquiry into the deaths of 61 migrants in the Mediterranean, claiming an apparent failure of military units to rescue them marked a "dark day" for the continent.

Mevlüt Çavusoglu, president of the council's parliamentary assembly, demanded an "immediate and comprehensive inquiry" into the fate of the migrants' boat which ran into trouble in late March en route to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the boat encountered a number of European military units including a helicopter and an aircraft carrier after losing fuel and drifting, but no rescue attempt was made and most of the 72 people on board eventually died of thirst and hunger.

"If this grave accusation is true – that, despite the alarm being raised, and despite the fact that this boat, fleeing Libya, had been located by armed forces operating in the Mediterranean, no attempt was made to rescue the 72 passengers aboard, then it is a dark day for Europe as a whole," Çavusoglu declared. "I call for an immediate and comprehensive inquiry into the circumstances of the deaths of the 61 people who perished, including babies, children and women who – one by one – died of starvation and thirst while Europe looked on," he added.

Çavusoglu's intervention came as news emerged of another migrant boat which sank last Friday, according to the UN's refugee agency. Up to 600 were on board the overcrowded vessel as it fled the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Witnesses who left on another boat shortly afterwards reported seeing remnants of the ship and the bodies of passengers in the sea. The International Organisation for Migration, which has staff on Lampedusa, said it had spoken to a Somali woman who lost her four-month-old baby in the tragedy, and said that it was unclear how many passengers had managed to swim to safety.

According to testimony collected by UNHCR workers in Lampedusa, migrants on the second boat setting sail from Tripoli attempted to disembark when they saw the first boat sink, but were prevented from doing so by armed men.

The UNHCR has insisted that more communication is needed between coastguards, military and commercial ships to minimise migrant deaths at sea.

"We need to take heed of a situation that is very much evolving. We have to cooperate much more closely," said a spokesperson, Laura Boldrini, adding that ships should not wait for a problem to arise before attempting to help migrant boats. "Rescue should be automatic, without waiting for the boat to break apart or the engine to stop running," she said.

Following the Guardian report into the plight of the migrant boat left to drift in the Mediterranean after suffering mechanical problems, Nato rejected suggestions that any of its units were involved in apparently ignoring the vessel. Officials pointed out that the Charles De Gaulle, a French aircraft carrier identified as having possibly encountered the boat, was not under direct Nato command at the time – although it was involved in the Nato-led operations in Libya.

"Nato vessels are fully aware of their responsibilities with regard to international maritime law regarding safety of life at sea," said a spokesman.

French defence officials denied that any of their ships were involved. "The [Charles De Gaulle] was never less than 200km (160 miles) from the Libyan coast," read a statement. "It is therefore not possible that it could have crossed the path of this drifting vessel which came from the Misrata region. If this was the case, it would have obviously come to the rescue of these people, in some way or another."

In 2010, the statement added, French naval vessels intercepted around 40 refugee boats and came to the assistance of more than 800 people.

Campaigners believe that calls for European ships to be more active in assisting migrants are now becoming more urgent. "All of these migrant boats are incredibly overcrowded and these are desperate people," said Professor Niels Frenzen, a refugee law specialist at the University of Southern California. "Given the hundreds of deaths we know about – and many more we probably aren't aware of – any migrant boat that's being observed right now is by definition a vessel that is in distress, and one which needs rescue."

Frenzen added that with Nato, the EU border agency Frontex, national coastguards and other unilateral forces all operating simultaneously in the Mediterranean, there was an "incredible mess of overlapping missions and jurisdictional confusion over the boundaries of different search and rescue regions".

"We've got this incredible concentration of ships and aircraft in that sea, many of which are there under security council resolution 1973 [which authorises military operations in Libya], the primary purpose of which is to protect civilian life," he said.

The UN refugee agency issued a warning for all vessels to keep an eye out for unseaworthy migrant boats in the Mediterranean.

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A Rite of Torture for Girls, Nicholas Kristof, May 11 2011.

HARGEISA, Somaliland - People usually torture those whom they fear or despise. But one of the most common forms of torture in the modern world, incomparably more widespread than waterboarding or electric shocks, is inflicted by mothers on daughters they love.

It’s female genital mutilation — sometimes called female circumcision — and it is prevalent across a broad swath of Africa and chunks of Asia as well. Mothers take their daughters at about age 10 to cutters like Maryan Hirsi Ibrahim, a middle-aged Somali woman who says she wields her razor blade on up to a dozen girls a day.

“This tradition is for keeping our girls chaste, for lowering the sex drive of our daughters,” Ms. Ibrahim told me. “This is our culture.”

Ms. Ibrahim prefers the most extreme form of genital mutilation, called infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision. And let’s not be dainty or euphemistic. This is a grotesque human rights abuse that doesn’t get much attention because it involves private parts and is awkward to talk about. So pardon the bluntness about what infibulation entails.

The girls’ genitals are carved out, including the clitoris and labia, often with no anesthetic. What’s left of the flesh is sewn together with three to six stitches — wild thorns in rural areas, or needle and thread in the cities. The cutter leaves a tiny opening to permit urination and menstruation. Then the girls’ legs are tied together, and she is kept immobile for 10 days until the flesh fuses together.

When the girl is married and ready for sex, she must be cut open by her husband or by a respected woman in the community.

All this is, of course, excruciating. It also leads to infections and urinary difficulties, and scar tissue can make childbirth more dangerous, increasing maternal mortality and injuries such as fistulas.

This is one of the most pervasive human rights abuses worldwide, with three million girls mutilated each year in Africa alone, according to United Nations estimates. A hospital here in Somaliland found that 96 percent of women it surveyed had undergone infibulation. The challenge is that this is a form of oppression that women themselves embrace and perpetuate.

“A young girl herself will want to be cut,” Ms. Ibrahim told me, vigorously defending the practice. “If a girl is not cut, it would be hard for her to live in the community. She would be stigmatized.”

Kalthoun Hassan, a young mother in an Ethiopian village near Somaliland, told me that she would insist on her daughters being cut and her sons marrying only girls who had been. She added: “It is God’s will for girls to be circumcised.”

For four decades, Westerners have campaigned against genital cutting, without much effect. Indeed, the Western term “female genital mutilation” has antagonized some African women because it assumes that they have been “mutilated.” Aid groups are now moving to add the more neutral term “female genital cutting” to their lexicon.

Is it cultural imperialism for Westerners to oppose genital mutilation? Yes, perhaps, but it’s also justified. Some cultural practices such as genital mutilation — or foot-binding or bride-burning — are too brutish to defer to.

But it is clear that the most effective efforts against genital mutilation are grass-roots initiatives by local women working for change from within a culture. In Senegal, Ghana, Egypt and other countries, such efforts have made headway.

Here among Somalis, reformers are trying a new tack: Instead of telling women to stop cutting their daughters altogether, they encourage them to turn to a milder form of genital mutilation (often involving just excision of part or all of the clitoris). They say that that would be a step forward and is much easier to achieve.

Although some Christians cut their daughters, it is more common among Muslims, who often assume that the tradition is Islamic. So a crucial step has been to get a growing number of Muslim leaders to denounce the practice as contrary to Islam, for their voices carry particular weight.

At one mosque in the remote town of Baligubadle, I met an imam named Abdelahi Adan, who bluntly denounces infibulation: “From a religious point of view, it is forbidden. It is against Islam.”

Maybe the tide is beginning to turn, ever so slowly, against infibulation, and at least we’re seeing some embarrassment about the practice. In Baligubadle, a traditional cutter named Mariam Ahmed told me that she had stopped cutting girls — apparently because she knows that foreigners disapprove. Then a nurse in the local health clinic told me that she had treated Ms. Ahmed’s own daughter recently for a horrific pelvic infection and urinary blockage after the girl was infibulated by her mother.

I confronted Ms. Ahmed. She grudgingly acknowledged cutting her daughter but quickly added that she had intended only a milder form of circumcision. She added quickly: “It was an accident.”

---

The Cutting Time excerpt from Slave, Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis, 2003.

p 78ff

It wasn't until I was about eleven years old that I finally learned what the blood on Kunyant's wedding sheet had really meant. One day, my mother told me that I was to be circumcised. In our tradition, circumcision marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Boys are circumcised when they are around twelve years old or so and the girls even earlier.

I asked my mother to explain to me what circumcision was. She took me into the hut and shut the door. She sat me down on the bed and asked me to open my legs. Then she showed me where they would cut my genitals and sew me up again, leaving only a tiny hole. I was terrified. It sounded so horrible and so painful. I told my mother that I didn't want it done. All that month, whenever she tried to talk about it, I started crying. When my father found out how upset I was, he took me on his lap and stroked my hair and my eyebrows gently.

"Don't cry, Mende. All the girls in the village your age will have it done, so you're not alone."

My mother sat down next to us and held my hand. "Ba is right, Mende. It's healthy for you too. And if you don't do it, then you can't be married."
Eventually, I was convinced that it was the best thing to do. I trusted my parents and so I decided to try to get it over with as quickly as possible. The woman who does the circumcision in our village is also the midwife. But she spends most of her time working in her fields. My mother went to see her and arranged for me to be cut in three days' time. Meanwhile, some of my friends, the older ones who had already been circumcised, told me that it was terrible, that I shouldn't have it done. I went back home in tears. My mother asked me what was wrong.

"I don't want to have this done," I sobbed. "Do I have to?The other girls said it's horrible. Please, don't make me do it."

"Don't believe what they said," my mother told me. "Don't worry. I'll make sure the woman does it especially gently for you."

Three days later, just before dawn, the circumcision woman arrived at our house. Kunyant and Shokan came over too. My father went to the men's house, because it was my cutting time. The circumcision woman sat me down on a small wooden stool, and pushed my legs apart as far as they would go. She scooped out a hole in the bare earth beneath me. I was numb with terror as she got out an old razor blade and washed it in some water. Then, without a word, she crouched down between my legs.

I could feel her take hold of me. I let out a bloodcurdling scream: with a swift downward cut of the blade she had sliced into my flesh. I was crying and kicking and trying to fight free. The pain was worse than anything I could ever have imagined.

"No! No! Umi! Umi! Make her stop!" I screamed. But my sisters and my mother held me down and forced my legs apart, so the woman could continue cutting away. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," my mother mouthed at me silently, with tears in her eyes.

I felt blood gushing down my thighs onto the ground. I felt the woman taking hold of my flesh, slicing it off and dropping it into the hole in the ground that she had made. I felt as if I was dying. My father must have heard my screaming, as he broke all the rules of our tribe and came running into the hut. He sat down and held me tight and he kept repeating in my ear, "Please don't cry, Mende. I know it hurts. Please be brave and don't cry."

But the worst was far from over. The woman then reached down and I felt her grab hold of something and start sawing with the razor blade. The pain was even worse than before. I was screaming and bucking and trying to shake her off, but I was held down so tightly I couldn't escape. Finally, her arms covered in blood, she pulled something else out of me, and threw it down into the hole. I remember that she had a satisfied look on her face, as if everything was going very well.

"Put some water on the fire to boil," the circumcision woman said coldly, turning around to my mother.

As I lay there panting and sobbing and trembling, I saw that she had started threading some thick cotton through a needle. Then, she dunked the needle in the pan of boiling water. After a few seconds, she removed it and bent back down between my legs.

"No!" I started screaming, fighting to get free. "No! No! No!"

But again I was held down tightly, as she began to sew up the raw remains of my flesh. I cannot describe the pain I felt. Through a haze of shock and agony, I remember thinking vaguely, "My mother promised me that it wouldn't hurt. She lied to me. She lied to me. She lied to me."

When the woman had finished, I was delirious with pain. The circumcision woman filled in the hole in the ground with earth and trod it down with her foot. Where my vagina had been there was now only a tiny little opening, about the size of the end of my little finger. Everything else had gone. The whole, horrific process must have taken over an hour. After the cutting, the circumcision woman was paid half a sack full of sorghum by my parents.

Immediately after she left, my aunts came and did the "illil" for me. "Aye, Aye, Aye, Aye," they chanted, as they danced around me. Then, all our relatives came and there was a big feast to celebrate. My mother tried to get the children to sing and dance for me, to make me forget my pain and my loss. But I was barely aware of their presence. For three days, I lay in a kind of half-coma. I couldn't sleep because of the pain, but I couldn't come to my senses properly either. My parents couldn't sleep cither, because I was in so much agony that I couldn't stop crying. I think they tried to comfort me and make up for the part they'd played in my butchery. But I can't remember much. Any movement was agony. I think I must have been suffering from an infection.

"Why did you do this to me?" I asked my mother, during a lucid moment. "You lied to me. You said it would be OK. That it wouldn't hurt. You lied to me."
"It will make you more healthy. It will make you clean. And it will keep you a virgin," my mother kept repeating. I could tell that she didn't really believe what she was saying.

The first thing I can remember clearly was trying to have a pee. I couldn't crouch down because of the pain, so my mother had to support me standing up. But as soon as the first drops started coming out, there was a stinging, burning sensation down between my legs. I was crying and shaking and holding onto my mother.

"I can't pee-pee," I whimpered. "It hurts too much." My mother helped me back inside the hut. Then she bathed me in warm tea. As she trickled it over me, it made me want to pee, and I was just able to dribble some out.

As I lay recovering, I had lots of time to think about what had happened. There was little difference, from all that I had seen, between circumcision and marriage. With both, you bled and you were in agony and unable to get up from your bed. So I decided, there and then, that I didn't want to get married. I had been tricked into circumcision. I would not be tricked into marriage.

I was angry with my mother and my father and my sisters Kunyant and Shokan too. They had told me it was a good thing to get circumcised. They had promised me that it wouldn't hurt. When I had tried to make the woman stop, they had all held me down. But most of all, I was angry with the circumcision woman. She had butchered me without any attempt to be gentle, without even one word of kindness. After a week, she came back to our house. When she appeared, I refused to talk to her. She had come to remove the stitches, but I refused to let her near me.

"Don't you touch me!" I screamed at her. "Don't you dare touch me! Get away from me! Get away from me!"

She seemed a little shocked by my reaction. She tried to explain that she had come to remove my stitches and that she wouldn't hurt me.

"Just like you didn't hurt me last time," I shouted. "You're not touching me. My mother's going to take the stitches out, not you."

I could see my mother standing to one side, squirming with embarrassment. But I just didn't care. I didn't want that cruel woman anywhere near me. Finally, the circumcision woman realized that she'd need to get my sisters and my mother to hold me down again, just to get a look at me. My mother apologized to her for my behavior. "Don't worry. I'll take the stitches out myself. Leave it to me."

All that week, my mother soaked my stitches in warm tea and oil, to try to soften them. But each time she tried to start removing them, I had to tell her to stop. My mother was very gentle and caring. If it was too painful, she would soak the stitches some more. Then, after an hour or so, she'd try again. It was three weeks before we'd completely finished. Both my mother and my father looked very sad and guilty during this time.

Some of the girls in our tribe died after their circumcision because of infections. Still more died in childbirth, because after circumcision their vaginal opening was too narrow to allow them to give birth properly. But it was even more common for the baby to die in childbirth, for the same reason. That's probably why Kunyant's first baby died. It took me at least two months to forgive my parents for allowing me to be circumcised. I knew that they allowed it to be done to me because they feared that if I wasn't circumcised, I would never be married. No Nuba man will marry a Nuba girl unless she is "narrow," which proves she is a virgin. My parents really, truly believed they were doing the best for me.

---

Down

What shall we do then?

or Good from far but far from good.
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

---

Good Friday, Earth Day 2011, Queen's Park, Toronto:

"Oh, that's good," I thought as I walked up the hill, "couple'a hundred at least."

And looking at the police keeping their distance ... I wondered if it would be maybe possible to talk with one of them?

Mingling in the crowd (without my glasses on) I talked with a young woman and her horse, explaining what 350 means, and what a nexus is; and she then explained to me that they were not there on the nuclear question but were protesting the 1,000 hectare (that's 2,300 acres!) Mega-Quarry planned by The Highland Companies (aka 1712665 Ontario Inc. aka 3191574 Nova Scotia Company) for Horning's Mills north of Shelburne in Melancthon and Mulmur Townships - near Orangeville 60 miles north-west of Toronto, here's a map. More on this below.

So anyway ... I wandered over to the UofT Vote Mob where I did meet a policeman, all by himself, and we had a ten minute conversation. He didn't understand (or pretended not to understand) why I was upset over the behaviour of police at the G20. "Shit happens," was his view. What he wanted to know was who I was 'with'? and when I said I was alone he lost interest. At least he was civil. He made a good point on name tags: that maybe number tags would be better, to protect police from subsequent harassment. OK I guess.

And finally I found the very small group of nuclear protesters. What can I possibly say?

Everyone I met there had a reason and was on some kind of mission; promoting something or themselves, politicians, news people, activists specifically aligned & affiliated (or assororiated as the case may be) with this or that group ... Is that the way it has to be? You probably don't understand why I say this - Good from far, but far from good.

At least this delightful young woman didn't mind if I took her picture - and gave me a smile worth the price of admission. I guess that was the high point of the day. My feet began to hurt and I came back to this place that is not a home and forced myself to sleep.

I wanted to go up to the People's Assembly on Saturday - but there was Mister Gout again, barring the door. Oh well.

---

Luke, chapter 3 verse 10ff:

And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?   He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you. And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.

This is John the Baptist doing the answering here; John the son of an old man and a barren woman, Zacharias & Elisabeth ... still, this is what comes to my mind this Easter Sunday morning - What shall we do then?

It ended badly for John the Baptist, Mark, chapter 6 verse 16ff:

... and the king was exceeding sorry ...

Herod that is ... but that's another story.

---

Pachamama ... if it was 'Paschamama' you could invent an Easter connection eh?

Our Oxum is pictured on Rio Guaíba (aka the part of Rio Jacuí between Triunfo and the delta) which runs through Porto Alegre in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, then into the Baia de Guaíba and Lagoa dos Patos which finally meets the Atlantic Ocean down at Rio Grande and São José do Norte - which is where I took that picture of Não sou de Ninguém. Small world! Here's a view of the whole area.

This statue of Iemanjá is at Mar Grosso, a few miles east of where the Guaíba water meets the sea; not marked but straight towards the ocean from São José do Norte on this map. It was late January so the young lad is up there decorating for the upcoming Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes celebration on the day of Iemanjá, February 2.

Damned Papists hijacked Iemanjá's day for their own purposes! They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery though eh?

Where do you live? In the spirit? Hardly possible these days, but ok then, does your spirit still take flight and soar sometimes? And there is so much co-opting and put-on pretence and flat-out distortion that goes on, especially around anything like Iemanjá ... it's almost better to keep it private.

I'm not sure if she put the web of what looks like hooks and lines onto Pachamama intentionally, or if they are fortuitous drips (and I am afraid to ask); but her picture looks to me like Pachamama being dragged along, legs locked, in a web of manipulation to do some human bidding one way or another way.

So.

Credits: Meera Zavita Parmar - Pacha Mama, Naro Lokuruka at Push Creative Management, Zoom Br - Religiões Afro-Gaúchas.

Someone like Terry Jones or Wayne Sapp (the preachers who burned the Koran in Florida) might use the phrase 'daemonic parody' in an effort to incite you to join him (in his own personal hell); a social worker, or better, a manager of social workers, might be tempted to use it ... but wouldn't, quite; an NDP candidate (while wringing her hands) might use it referring to, say, Stephen Harper's government; I never heard Northrop Frye say it, so I don't really know what kind of baggage (if any) he attached to it; ...

I worship as well as I am able to, and if the gods and goddesses have all been painted over and repeatedly buggered ... well ... I worship what's left.

---

I mentioned Richard Peck a few weeks ago. At the time I sent a bunch of emails out with the question, "What is going on with Richard Peck deciding if Dziekanski's killers will be charged?" to various columnists & politicians.

Lo and behold! I got two answers: one from Neal Hall at the Vancouver Sun; and one from Vicky Huntington the independent MLA for the BC riding of Delta South - she defeated Wally Oppal, the BC Attorney General who decided not to charge the RCMP killers the first time round, by just a very few votes in 2009.

Of all the politicians in Canada, this woman (I believe) is not complacent. I just looked it up - she won by 2 votes! and on official recount it came to 32. No, she's not complacent. I would bet on it.

And Neal has now printed this: Mountie involved in fatal Dziekanski incident begins preliminary hearing today, Vanccouver Sun, April 18 2011.

So there is hope.

---

I mentioned before about having to go back and have another look at Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo because of this pesky Alzheimer's, so I am:

Wizard of the crow, 2006,
Something torn and new : an African renaissance, 2009, and,
Dreams in a time of war : a childhood memoir, 2010.

And I decided I had better know a bit more about Mau Mau, so I got this: Mau Mau : an African crucible by Robert B. Edgerton, 1989, which I have been reading first.

Edgerton's remarkable assertion that circumcised women are capable of normal sexual relations (whatever 'normal' may turn out to be) and orgasms has two footnotes (see below): one from Jomo Kenyatta (apparently here, Facing Mount Kenya though it was not published in 1965 as indicated in the footnote), and one from hearsay 'assurances'.

I mentioned Kenyatta's defence of it before; now I will go back and re-read and possibly post the chapter. And I think there is a chapter in Dreams in a time of war which bears on it; maybe I will include that as well.

I admit - I obviously do not know what it is like to be a circumcised woman. My toenails go convex just thinking about it. But I do know enough anatomy - the clitoris is equivalent to the end of the penis (not the foreskin, the penis) - to seriously wonder ... This doesn't make tribal rituals inherently bad or evil either, but could we not at least start with facts rather than ideology and wishful thinking?

There was a blog entry and some videos on this subject at the Guardian this week.

More on this later maybe.

---

OK, here's a question.

Al Jazeera reports in Japan: Lives under pressure on April 12: "... a crowd of 12,000 gathered in Tokyo on Sunday to protest the country's nuclear policy, but that state TV did not cover the rally because they don't want to draw attention to the discord," with a video that leaves no doubt about the size of it.

Here's another report from Press TV (in Iran) Japanese protest Tokyo nuclear policy on April 10, the day of the demonstration: "About 15,000 Japanese people took to streets in different parts of Tokyo on Sunday, chanting 'No to nuclear bombs! No more Fukushima!'"

Here's another Al Jazeera report Japan nuclear debate on safety and energy and video from April 3 which suggests a clue.

It is easy to say, oh yeah, Al Jazeera and Press TV are shills; but the fact is that there have been numerous protests in Japan over nuclear energy since the earthquake and my question is this: Why is there not a single word about it ANYWHERE in the North American press?
?Fierce makes good copy, but it cuts both ways. "We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now," said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, and Obama likes to quote this when he thinks it will serve him. Robert Edgerton used in in his Chapter 8 - "Their Fierce Self-Interest", quoting Winston Churchill this time. Fierce self-interest on all sides.

That's it. No music. A little verse maybe: "One Ring to rule them all. One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them," that's what I say - Bah Humbug! No Easter hymn in here gawdammit!

Be well.

---

Postscript:

The politicians and their masters like big capital projects - nuclear power plants are perfect. The politicians and their masters don't like small distributed projects (like wind and solar) because they don't get a big enough cut.

As my friend Rolf used to say (in a fake German accent, though Rolf really was German), "Cooperation iss goot ... but control iss bettah!"

Why the politicians and their masters are not gung ho for large scale geo-thermal & solar-thermal is beyond me. Maybe they just haven't figgured it out yet? Maybe there's a problem with the vig. Dunno.

Oh, and if you happen to wonder about what will happen to the heroes and heroines who come forward for whatever reason to clean up the mess, say, 25 years down the road, check this out: Thousands protest benefits cuts for Chernobyl cleanup workers. You can Google around and find out that this pension is a princely $200 per month (month!).

And here's a video with prefix advert or without (but probably still with the adverts that 'No Evil' shoves in there).

The 1.6 or 1.8 (call it 2) ... the TWO BILLION $ they will spend to refit the Chernobyl sarcophagus is in the bag though - well, if this ain't a parody, at least its daemonic.

---

Turns out it's 3,400 hectares (8,500 acres) and growing - everytime I see a number it is bigger. Here's a report in the Star, and here's a better map, and here's the guy himself, John Lowndes (who apparently doesn't like to be photographed) and his sidekick Michael Daniher. The American connection, The Baupost Group, keeps a website (which is totally locked and secured).

So then I went fossicking around Baupost, wondering what Seth Klarman might look like ... and found this: Seth Klarman Buys Land Worth $120 Billion for $80 Million!
WOWZERS!
That's what I call a BARGOON!The author of this extraordinary (for me) news is Jacob Wolinsky, who looks like a BIG fan, he says, "Klarman is undoubately one of the greatest investors of our time," (and by his 'undoubately' there he might be a fan of Sarah Palin too).

It seems that Baupost started out as an investment vehicle for "four families", see here, four very rich families one assumes ... according to Wikipedia Seth Klarman who runs it, does the things that investment wizards do: complex derivatives, put options ... these terms have a vaguely rotten smell since 2008 but who can say? all very legal no doubt ... and he's a philantropist, he gives some of it away, Cornell got 5 million. He and his wife have a foundation, The Seth A. and Beth S. Klarman Foundation, with a website, which, like The Baupost Group site noted above, says very little ... whatever.

So, for 80 million he gets to mess with three separate watersheds, AND support Canadian politicians when they decide to build roads at election time (it's the jobs y'unnerstan) AND make lots of cement AND take a big bite out of Ontario's hinterland (and that includes the people who live there too eh) AND make truckfulls of money. Hell, John Lowndes is merely a convenient tool for this fellow, a Canadian instrument.

---

Appendices:

1. Mountie involved in fatal Dziekanski incident begins preliminary hearing today, Neal Hall, April 18 2011.

2. Mau Mau - An African Crucible, Robert Edgerton, 1989, excerpt p. 40-41.

3. Mau Mau - An African Crucible, Robert Edgerton, 1989, excerpt p. 236-49.

4. Thousands protest benefits cuts for Chernobyl cleanup workers, April 17 2011.

5. U.S.-backed company proposes mega-quarry north of Orangeville, John Goddard, April 24 2011.

6. Seth Klarman Buys Land Worth $120 Billion for $80 Million!, Jacob Wolinsky, April 24 2011.

---

Mountie involved in fatal Dziekanski incident begins preliminary hearing today, Neal Hall, April 18 2011.

METRO VANCOUVER - An officer involved in the 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver's airport begins his preliminary hearing today in Surrey provincial court.

Cpl. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, 41, is accused of obstruction of justice after being involved in a 2008 accident in Delta that killed motorcyclist Orion Hutchinson, 21.

The preliminary inquiry is being held to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to order Robinson to stand trial. It is set for four days, ending Thursday.

Hutchinson was killed the night of Oct. 25, 2008, when his motorcycle was struck by a Jeep driven by Robinson, who was off duty at the time.

Robinson said he was coming from a party earlier in the day, where he had had two beers. After the accident, he claimed he walked to his nearby home and had a couple shots of vodka, then returned to the scene of the accident.

He was then arrested and gave two breathalyser samples at 11:56 p.m. and 12:16 a.m. He blew .12 and .10, over the legal limit of .08. Delta police had recommended a charge of impaired driving but the Crown decided there was insufficient evidence. Robinson was charged with obstruction of justice. A coroner's investigation found that the accident victim also had been drinking alcohol, was over the legal limit and was travelling between 66 and 96 km/h. The investigation estimated that Robinson was not speeding.

Robinson was the senior officer on duty when Dziekanksi, 40, died at Vancouver's airport after he was repeatedly shot with an electronic stun gun on Oct. 14, 2007.

Thomas Braidwood, the retired judge who headed a public inquiry into tragedy, found the four officers mishandled the situation by approaching Dziekanski as though they were dealing with a pub brawl instead of a distraught and exhausted visitor, who had spent more than 10 hours in the airport after arriving from Poland.

The Polish man had come to Canada to live with his mother. He spoke no English and was unable to find his mother at the airport. Seconds after he was confronted by Robinson and three other Mounties, one of the officers repeatedly shocked Dziekanski with a Taser, even after he fell to the floor writhing in pain.

Dziekanski died after police handcuffed his hands behind his back. The Braidwood inquiry decided last June that the four officers displayed "shameful conduct" and were not justified using the Taser. The incident prompted an international outcry after a citizen's cell phone video of the officers' actions was posted on the Internet. The Crown decided there was insufficient evidence to warrant any charges being laid against Robinson and his fellow officers: Constables Kwesi Millington, Bill Bentley and Gerry Rundel.

Two weeks after Braidwood released his bluntly worded report, however, B.C.'s attorney general announced a special prosecutor was being appointed to have a second look at charges against the four Mounties.

The special prosecutor, Richard Peck, decided last June 29 that there was sufficient reason to re-consider whether the four officers should be charged. Peck still hasn't delivered his final decision, 10 months later.

---

Mau Mau - An African Crucible, Robert Edgerton, 1989, excerpt p. 40-41.

       Another deep rift in Kikuyu society was created by missionaries from the African Inland Mission (AIM) who first opened their doors to converts in Kikuyuland in 1903. Initially, many Kikuyu sought out the missionaries in search of Western education or personal advantage; later they hoped that the missionaries would protect them against the tyranny of the chiefs. Soon a division emerged between the Christian converts and other Kikuyu, often including members of their own families, who continued to maintain traditional religious beliefs and practices.

       An even more serious rift took place in 1929, when AIM and its African converts attempted to prohibit the traditional Kikuyu practice of circumcising girls prior to marriage. For reasons that remain obscure, the church did not object to the Kikuyu practice of circumcising teen-aged boys, but it regarded the circumcision of adolescent girls as barbaric. The Kikuyu, like many other African societies, made female circumcision a prerequisite for marriage and for full participation in the traditional world of women. From time to time, groups of girls were circumcised in a traditional ceremony which included the surgical removal of the tip of each girl's clitoris and some portions of her labia minora. The operation, which was performed without anesthetic by old women whose knives would never be mistaken for surgeons' scalpels, was terribly painful, yet most girls bore it bravely and few suffered serious infection or injury as a result.²¹ Circumcised women did not lose their ability to enjoy sexual relations, nor was their child-bearing capacity diminished.²² Nevertheless, the practice offended Christian sensibilities.

       Many Kikuyu members of the AIM, left the church in protest against its anti-circumcision policy; they were known as aregi, while those who supported the policy were known as kirore. The two groups hurled insults at one another and there was violence. The aregi formed a new Christian church with its own schools, which later became known as Kikuyu Independent Schools, while the kirore remained within the AIM. Antagonism between the two groups grew worse over the I ensuing years and when the Mau Mau rebellion broke out, the aregi largely joined its ranks, while the kirore remained loyal to the British: government and fought against the Mau Mau.

Notes:

21 Kenyatta (1965).

22. Kikuyu men and women, like those of several other East African societies that practice female circumcision, assured me in 1961-62 that circumcised women continue to be orgasmic.

Bibliography:

Kenyatta, J. Facing Mt. Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. 2d ed. Introduction by B. Malinowski. New York: Vintage, 1962.

---------. Suffering Without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968.

Facing Mount Kenya; the traditional life of the Gikuyu, Jomo Kenyatta, 1938.

---

Mau Mau - An African Crucible, Robert Edgerton, 1989, excerpt p. 236-49.
EIGHT
"Their Fierce Self-Interest"
Mau Mau in Perspective
The rebellion of the Land and Freedom Army did not achieve its goals. When the fighting ended in 1956, white settlers still owned their farms in the highlands, and white Colonial administrators still ruled Kenya. The leaders of Mau Mau had hoped that their rebellion would become an irresistible force for freedom spreading throughout Kenya. Not only did it not unite the African peoples of Kenya, it even failed to unite the Kikuyu. Instead, it led Kenya's largest tribe into a bitter and bloody civil war. By 1956, most of Kenya's Africans had repudiated Mau Mau. The rebellion was over, its goals unmet, it legacy uncertain.
       Nevertheless, even though the leaders of Mau Mau did not realize it, their rebellion inadvertently brought about one vitally important change in Kenya. Before the rebellion, Kenya's white settlers were determined to achieve a form of self-rule that would assure their continuing control. Once the Mau Mau rebels forced the settlers to call for British military support, the political dominion of whites in Kenya was over. It was obvious to everyone except the least intelligent and most intransigent settlers that Kenya's future would be decided by Britain. The British Government poured enormous resources into Kenya to defeat Mau Mau, but by 1954 the cost of intervention had become such a heavy burden that if the rebellion had not ended when it did, Britain would have had difficulty continuing its military commitment in Kenya much longer. In fact, by 1956 British economic and military power had declined so much that Britain had to accept the humiliation of an American-imposed retreat from its invasion of the Suez Canal Zone. At the same time, Britain's African Colonies had become serious economic liabilities, and as European and American pressure to decolonize intensified, they became a political embarrassment as well. It was obvious that Britain could no longer afford the cost of holding Kenya by military might.
       Yet only a few whites in Kenya seem to have understood that the end of colonialism in Africa was approaching, and only a few began to work toward the goal of economic reform buttressed by some form of a multi-racial government. If the white settlers had seized this opportunity to enhance economic and social justice, they might yet have assured a place for themselves as full partners in Kenya's future. But most would have nothing to do with reforms or African participation in government. They insisted on their economic privileges, their political power, and their racial superiority. In the fullness of their victory over Mau Mau, they overestimated their strength, and they badly misread the course of world events. "Their fierce self-interest," as Churchill had noted 50 years earlier, would bring about their final ruin.
       The settlers' ruthless pursuit of their interests during the rebellion not only embittered the supporters of Mau Mau, it helped to radicalize educated young Africans as well. The white Kenyans' implacable refusal to share Kenya's future with the country's African population turned even many loyalist Africans against them just as it weakened their support in Britain. Only a few years after the fighting had ended, world developments having little to do with Kenya itself would persuade Harold Macmillan to grant independence to Britain's East African territories. But one critical event did involve Kenya, and it was a direct result of the settlers' excessive use of force against the Mau Mau. That event was the massacre at Hola. For many in Britain, Hola symbolized white Kenya's lawlessness. But for Macmillan and Macleod, Hola was more than a symbol; it was a bloody reminder that white minority government could only continue in Kenya by the use of deadly force. The unlimited use of force by the white settlers and the colonial administration had given them victory over the Mau Mau rebellion, but in the end it lost them Kenya. They had only themselves to blame.
       In fairness, the white settlers cannot be held responsible for everything that led to Mau Mau. The gulf between prosperous land-owning Kikuyu and their poor, landless tenants existed before the whites arrived, and the settlers were not responsible for the disease and famine that had depopulated the highlands before they arrived. Nonetheless, the Government of Kenya had appropriated vast tracts of African land and urged whites to settle on it. When the settlers demanded more power and extended privileges, the colonial administration chose to accommodate them instead of protecting the interests of Kenya's Africans. Even when administrative officials attempted to assist Africans with various medical, livestock, and agricultural programs, their paternalistic arrogance in forcing these measures upon reluctant and uncomprehending tribal people alienated the very people they intended to help. So did government favoritism of chiefs and other wealthy supporters of the administration. What is more, colonial administrators allowed African grievances to reach a flashpoint by ignoring the needs of the rapidly growing numbers of urban poor, and by refusing to permit emerging African leaders to play a meaningful part in Kenya's political life.
       Whatever the failings of the colonial administration, accountability for the genesis of Mau Mau nonetheless falls primarily on the settlers. Although the white community in Kenya had varied interests that, to take one example, sometimes brought cattle ranchers into conflict with farmers, in general they were united in exploiting African labor for the lowest possible wages, and united too in denying Africans the opportunity to compete with them as farmers or stockmen. They also shared the belief that Africans were inferior, childlike beings who should be denied social equality, not to mention self-government. As a result of the settlers' racism and their demands for profit, they consistently ignored the welfare of Africans who grew poorer and more aggrieved whether they lived in reserves, labored on European lands, or gathered in the towns and cities searching for work. When African protest movements arose, the settlers demanded that the government smash them. The settlers professed to understand Africans and insisted that they were bringing the benefits of British civilization to them, but these claims were sanctimonious. What they understood was their own narrow self-interest; what they gave to Kenya's African populations was continuing social inferiority and economic exploition. Most significant of all in accounting for the origin of Mau Mau, the white community made it absolutely clear to Kenya's Africans that future would bring no fundamental change.
       The attitudes and practices of Kenya's whites were neither pathogical nor an aberration brought about by conditions unique to Kenya, as some have argued. They had deep roots in British culture and history. For one thing, British society was founded on the belief that some men were much more equal than others. The well-known bit of doggerel, "God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us in our proper stations," may have been partly derisive, but class distinctions were not merely remembrances of the nineteenth century for Kenya's whites — indeed, these distinctions gave legitimacy to white rule in Kenya. Even though the Labour Party had some success in challenging the authority of Britain's ruling class, few Britons in the 1950s disputed the idea that white people were superior to Africans. They were not unique. That black people were inferior to those of other races was taken for granted in much of Europe, Latin America, China, and Japan, as well as in the United States, which professed the equality of all yet maintained a color bar similar to the one in Kenya. It hardly needs saying that this belief is still widely-shared in many parts of the world.
       White Kenyans' antipathy for Kenya's Africans was not only based on ideas of racial superiority, it was also a product of fear. Kenya's whites feared black Africans as much as white Americans in the antebellum South feared their slaves when they began to grow in number. Even though whites outnumbered blacks in the South, these Americans established a virtual police state for self-protection. In Kenya, 40,000 whites were surrounded by perhaps 6 million Africans whom white Kenyans believed were only a few years removed from bestial savagery. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the white settlers failed to transcend their own racism as well as that of much of the developed world by working for a multi-racial society in Kenya. Yet the fact remains that the degrading racial policies they institutionalized went well beyond measures necessary for self-protection.
       There can be no doubt that the settlers' racist attitudes and practices contributed to the outbreak of Mau Mau, but so did the settlers' uncompromising determination to rule Africans. Like many other Europeans who colonized Africa, Kenya's white settlers were convinced that it was not their superior weapons but their "superior civilization" that gave them an indisputable right to rule. Bolstered by their deep-seated belief in the principle that a small elite class could rightfully dominate a majority, white Kenyans from modest middle-class backgrounds eagerly joined settlers from Britain's "ruling class" in governing Kenya's Africans. Supported by the ruling-class ideology of the colonial administrators, white dominion became so deeply ingrained in the culture of Kenya's whites that even the kindest and most thoughtful of them were held in its thrall. White Kenyans understood that they could survive only as long as their economic symbiosis with Africans continued, but they chose to ensure that continuity, not by compromise or even understanding, but simply by the use of force. There were few voices of protest. Theirs was a society that left little room for dissent, and when the violence of Mau Mau struck, there was virtually no dissent at all. White Kenya was a society of masters — of "bwanas" and "memsahibs" — and, like masters throughout history who were threatened by rebellion, they closed ranks and responded ferociously.
       When Mau Mau intimidation, arson, and violence first began, the settlers urged Draconian measures. When violence continued despite the government's declaration of a State of Emergency, the settlers took the destruction of the Mau Mau menace — and also took the law — into their own hands. Not all white men and women demanded the deaths of the "Kyukes," not all white Kenyans shot suspicious Kikuyu first and asked questions later, and not all whites in the Kenya Regiment or the Kenya Police Reserve tortured or murdered Mau Mau suspects. But many white Kenyans did all of these things, and those few who privately deplored what their friends and neighbors did rarely spoke out against them. Even the most liberal became entrapped in the convulsion of rage and revenge that engulfed the white community. The vicious reaction that swept through white Kenya grew in intensity as one example of brutality by whites was followed by another. White mothers whose children were cared for by Kikuyu women called for the execution of the inhabitants of entire Kikuyu "villages." Men who as children had played with young Kikuyu, and who later employed Kikuyu as servants and laborers, now thought of them as animals to be hunted, or vermin to be exterminated, while otherwise quite respectable white settlers became torturers and murderers.
       The severity of the white reaction was heightened by the earliest Mau Mau killings. The first white victims, women as well as men, were chopped and slashed to death with pangas and swords. Their mutilated bodies were terrible to see or even hear about. When six-year-old Michael Ruck was killed by a flurry of panga blows, most settlers were convinced that the Mau Mau rebels were inhuman savages. Their rage was also intensified by a profound fear that African savagery, if not repressed, would engulf them all. The settlers were convinced that Africans were "primitives" whose "savage" impulses had been unleashed by the Mau Mau oaths. At best, they said, Africans were not fully human, and the Mau Mau rebels were clearly not the best of Africans. The feelings of a 31-year-old settler who had been born in Kenya were widely shared: "I was raised with Africans, you know. Kyukes mostly. I thought I knew what they were like but when the Mau Mau terrorism began I realized I didn't know them at all. They weren't like us. They weren't even like animals — animals are understandable. They're natural. The Mau Mau were ... what's the word? Perverted, I guess. It was the oath, you see. Once they took it, life didn't mean anything to them. If we couldn't drive the (Mau Mau) poison out of them by getting them to confess, all we could do was kill them." Settlers like this one killed Mau Mau suspects in an attempt to save all that was dear to them, and to destroy all that they did not understand. Most of them killed because they believed they had no other choice.
       The settlers loved Kenya's beauty, its excitement, its comfortable and privileged way of life. As they saw it, Africans had done nothing to "develop" Kenya, and as a result they deserved their roles as servants and laborers for white men and women who had brought "civilization" to them. The Mau Mau rebellion was not only a direct threat to the lives of these white Kenyans, it was an affront to their sense of the natural order of things. If the challenge to white supremacy had come from a respected "fighting" people like the Somali or Massai, these settlers would still have insisted that the rebellion be crushed. But an uprising by "warriors" might at least have been understandable. Warlike peoples were expected to fight, and while they would have had to be killed, it would have been with some regret. The Kikuyu-led Mau Mau were thought of as cowards with no military tradition who had long been the subservient employees of whites. Many settlers thought of them as little more than slaves, and for people like these to repudiate white civilization and challenge white rule was galling.
       For many settlers, Mau Mau was a modem-day equivalent of a slave uprising, and like white slave masters throughout history, they exacted terrible vengeance. White Kenyans had always feared the disastrous potential of a violent uprising by some or all of Kenya's millions of Africans, but they usually masked their underlying fear with exaggerated assurances that Africans were loyal, docile, and — most comforting of all — cowardly. They reassured themselves that their African servants and farm workers, would not — could not — have the temerity to harm white people. When this carefully crafted illusion of trust and security was shattered, the settlers felt betrayed and violated. As slave holders had done for centuries, they fought back for their pride, power, and privilege, as well as for their lives. And like the slave owners of history, their reaction was more violent than the actions of the Mau Mau rebels, and far more cruel. It must be remembered that, whenever African slaves rebelled in the New World, they were not only killed in large numbers, they were tortured and mutilated to demonstrate futility of insurrection.
       C.L.R. James, who taught Kenyatta about political history in London, wrote that "The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression." Kenya's experience confirmed James' formulation. The whites were not content simply to kill the rebels, they insisted on teaching them an unforgettable lesson. The white Kenyans killed in the passion of the moment, as did the rebels, but unlike the Mau Mau, the whites routinely killed in cold blood, and they methodically tortured helpless captives. Many settlers believed that in order to teach Africans that whites would always be supreme, many more than 11,000 Kikuyu should have been killed. Three years before the Mau Mau rebellion erupted, tribal people on the island nation of Madagascar off Africa's east coast rose against French rule. While the world press paid virtually no attention, the French Army, aided by enraged French colonists, put down the rebellion with the same brutality that they would soon display in Algeria. When the French torture-chambers closed and thd killing stopped, somewhere between 50,000 and 120,000 Malagasy were dead. When news of the French slaughter reached Kenya, many settlers approved.
       The settlers often attempted to justify their brutality by referring tat the rebels as "niggers," "baboons," "vermin," and the like. White ruthlessness certainly was inflamed by racist bigotry, but their cruelty had as much to do with "property and privilege" as racism. Although human savagery has often been motivated by racial hatred, many of history's most ghastly atrocities have had nothing to do with race, Racial hatred played a part in the white reaction to Mau Mau just as it did in the actions of many Mau Mau rebels, but the rebellion was fundamentally about power, not race, as the killing between the Kikuyu loyalists and the rebels demonstrated.
       Whites were determined never to relinquish power, and many white men and women who considered themselves to be decent, fair-minded, and law-abiding used any means, however indecent, unfair,' and unlawful, to defeat the Mau Mau, without thinking any less of themselves. They knew that the acts they carried out or condoned were unlawful, and they conspired with one another to conceal what they did, but few admitted that their actions were morally wrong, and when they were accused of wrongdoing they were quick to justify themselves. It is tempting to think of the cruelty of their reaction to Mau Mau as a temporary outburst of hysteria, but, after the rebellion came to an end in 1956, few white Kenyans voiced any remorse. Even after the killings at Hola in 1959, very few expressed regret about what had happened there or elsewhere during the Emergency. Instead, they continued to insist that the Mau Mau had been a scourge so terrible that anything that had been done to destroy it was morally justified.
       Even after 1956, when the Mau Mau rebellion had suffered military defeat and it was clear that Britain would require that some form of multi-racial government be established in Kenya, most settlers still showed little sympathy or concern for the interests of Africans, including those who worked on their own farms. They continued to neglect Africans' needs, degrade them by the same words and deeds that had so offended them before the rebellion began, and opposed attempts to improve race relations. When a liberal settler offered his highlands farm to the government as an inter-racial boarding school, his offer was rejected by the Minister of Education on the grounds that "no community" in Kenya would accept the idea. He meant, of course, no white community. Frustrated by this kind of intransigence, Governor Baring wrote to the Colonial Office about the settlers, saying that "There is a block of die-hards who cannot and will not be reconciled. Their fear and hatred of the African cannot be removed by any reasonable argument."
       Baring neglected to say that there were those in the colonial administration who also feared and hated Africans. These men had behaved brutally and had covered up the brutality of others in government. Other high-ranking officials believed that they were serving the interests of Britain or Kenya by ordering or condoning actions that were both callous and unlawful. Governor Baring himself was deeply implicated. Although Baring took both his Roman Catholicism and his personal honor very seriously, he was nevertheless directly involved in rigging the trial of Kenyatta and five other defendants, and he helped to cover up the murderous brutality of the screening teams. His policy of enforced labor was punitive and cruel, and, as a result of his support for so-called villagization, many Kikuyu, particularly elderly persons and children, died of disease and malnutrition. By intervening to dismiss murder charges against Home Guardsmen in an attempt to bolster the morale of the loyalists, he made it abundantly clear that defeating the Mau Mau was more important than either principle or law. Yet in one of colonialism's many contradictions, Baring also worked devotedly to bring economic reform and multi-racial government to Kenya. Like other colonial officials in other lands, he had done his duty by crushing the rebellion, but now that the fighting had ended his duty called for him to lead Kenya toward lasting peace and prosperity.
       Baring was not the only high official who sacrificed principles to defeat Mau Mau. Other members of the government cynically supported policies that were unlawful and indecent, then lied to cover their tracks. What is more, there were men in the Colonial Office in London who knew that the Government of Kenya was condoning criminal violence in its fight against the Mau Mau. Two successive Colonial Secretaries expressed concern over the excessive violence of Kenya's settlers, and even demanded that Baring explain allegations of brutality; but both Oliver Lyttleton and Alan Lennox-Boyd defended the actions of Kenya's colonial administration in Parliament and they did not demand impartial investigations of alleged misconduct. They may not have liked what was happening in Kenya, but they chose not to have it exposed.
       It would be unfair not to acknowledge that there were white men and women in Kenya who displayed admirable qualities throughout the rebellion. Some colonial officials never wavered in protecting rights of Africans, even though they had to oppose their superiors, police, and the settlers to do so. Until Baring had him replaced, Attorney-General John H. Whyatt unfailingly insisted that all security forces act within the law, and some judges upheld the law despite pressures and threats. There were officers in prisons and detention camps who were fair and compassionate, and some settlers opposed the indiscriminate use of brutality against Mau Mau suspects; a few even took the risk of doing so openly. There were also men in the Kenya Police and Kenya Regiment who openly deplored the brutality of their fellow Kenyans, and showed truly remarkable courage devotion as they repeatedly led small patrols into the forests. Some of these men were killed, and others were killed in return, but they did so in open combat, took prisoners when they could, and refused to allow the use of torture.
       A great many settlers, women as well as men, showed great courage and fortitude in defending their homes and families. They fought for the country they loved and they fought bravely. But the fact remains that many whites in Kenya did commit atrocious acts and many others approved. What is more, they believed that what they did was not only necessary but right. Many who have fought in other brutal wars later developed self-doubts and feelings of guilt, and some repudiated their actions. If white Kenyans felt any guilt, it did not compel them to make public disavowals of what they did. Like the Americans who settled the West, these white settlers were tough, self-reliant people, and like those same Americans, they were ruthless in pursuit of their interests. In earlier times, such ruthlessness might have insured their continued survival and dominance, but the wind of political change that swept through Africa as the 1950s came to a close was far too strong.
       The pressures that drove so many whites to lawlessness also imposed terrible stresses on the Kikuyu, and to a lesser extent on other Africans, especially the Embu and Meru. The ordeal of the Mau Mau was not confined to the forest-based combat units or the detention camps; it was felt throughout the cities, towns, and reserves. Except for chiefs, well-educated people, and devout Christians, for whom there was no choice, almost every individual Kikuyu had to decide whether to join the emerging rebellion by taking the Mau Mau oath, or remain loyal to the government. It was not an easy choice. In the beginning, there was an exhilarating emotional appeal to the rebellion, but there was fear too: fear of the government, fear of the whites' power, and fear of the unknown. Soon there was even greater fear of the oath-administrators who began to force people to swear allegiance to Mau Mau. Many who refused, or who later gave evidence to the police, were killed. Friends, families, and clans were soon divided as the commitments of rebels and loyalists hardened and led to more and more killing.
       Once a State of Emergency was declared, life became even more perilous. In addition to the danger from armed rebels or the loyalist Home Guards, all Kikuyu were now suspect in the eyes of armed white settlers, police, and soldiers. A man could be shot on sight, a woman raped, a house burned, all without apparent reason or warning. If a man or woman were picked up as a suspect, the danger was so terrible that many prisoners were too frightened to speak. Some would be released, but many would be tortured, some killed, and others sent to prisons or detention camps. Everyone, even those who remained uncommitted to either side, lived in perpetual fear of sounds in the night. No one, not even children, could be sure that they would not be attacked by rebels, Home Guards, the Kenya Police, or armed white settlers because someone regarded them as an enemy, or mistook them for one. For these Africans, the fear of sudden death became an inescapable part of daily life.
       The threat of sudden violence was only one of the ever-present horrors of life. Many worried about loved ones in the forests or in detention camps. While they waited for news of their sons or fathers or sisters, they were forced to build roads, dig ditches, construct new villages, and endure the spread of hunger and disease. Some loyalists suffered almost as much as Mau Mau sympathizers. Many were killed or wounded, saw their houses burned, their crops destroyed, and their livestock stolen.
       The Kikuyu suffered most during Mau Mau, but they were not the only people in Kenya who were tormented by the rebellion. Kenyans in some remote parts of the country were little affected by Mau Mau, but other people like the Maasai, Luhya, Luo, and Kamba were torn by divided loyalties. Still others, such as the Kipsigis and Nandi, chose to cast their lot primarily with the government. These peoples, along with the Kamba, provided most of the men who served in the expanded Kenya Police and as detention camp guards. Animosities between peoples who supported the government during the Emergency and those who did not endured for many years after Independence, as they did in families and clans. In some respects, Kenya's Indian community was the least divided. Many Indians were sympathetic to the idea of African independence, but they knew that the leaders of Mau Mau, like many other Kenyans, were so hostile to them that their only choice was to support the government. Their greatest concern was whether their loyalty to a government that treated them as second-class citizens would be appreciated. It was not, and their place in the life of Kenya is still uncertain.
       For most Kenyans, including those who actually benefitted through new employment or government aid, Mau Mau was a period of uncertainty and anxiety. For those most intimately involved with the conflict, the rebellion brought years of suffering. How the millions of people who were affected by the rebellion reacted to its pressures was as varied as the people themselves, but those Africans who had the closest connection to the ordeal reacted just as the whites did — with extremes of cruelty and courage. Many loyalists were corrupt, cruel, and cowardly, but so were some people who supported the Mau Mau, and some loyalists were as brave and steadfast to their cause as any of the rebels. It is impossible to do more than speculate about the motives of the vast numbers of people who were caught up in the horror of Mau Mau, but one thing seems obvious. Kenya's Africans were every bit as concerned about furthering their interests as the settlers were; but unlike the settlers, who knew where their interests lay, the interests of the majority of Africans could shift as rapidly as the fortunes of war. For most of them, principles like freedom and social justice were often secondary to economic survival, and to survive they continually had to assess the relative strengths of the Mau Mau rebels and the security forces. Many calculatingly changed loyalties more than once as they watched the balance of power oscillate. Many whites accused Africans of being opportunistic, and they were right. Most Africans knew full well that their lives depended on their ability to avoid being caught in the crossfire. They experienced the truth of the African proverb that when elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.
       Those who held power in colonial Kenya — the whites, the Indians, and the African elite — were the natural enemies of Mau Mau. Some wealthy and powerful Kikuyu, like the Koinange family, supported the rebellion, as did a few wealthy Indians, but they were exceptions. Mau Mau was primarily a rebellion by the poor and powerless. Unless most of the educated, wealthy, Christian government loyalists joined Mau Mau — something equivalent to Tsar Nicholas and the Russian nobility joining the Communist revolution — conflict between the poor and powerful was inevitable. As it happened, the earliest victims of Mau Mau violence were wealthy Kikuyu chiefs and headmen who opposed the movement.
       The conduct of the men and women who fought for Mau Mau included acts of conspicuous courage and military skill, senseless savagery and cowardice, and self-serving exploitation of others. These extraordinary differences reflect a similar diversity in the commitment of individuals to the causes of "land and freedom." Some who took the oath made no more than a pretense of supporting Mau Mau, because they believed that the rebels might win and because it was dangerous to oppose them. They also hoped for rewards if and when the rebels won. It is likely that the majority of those who actually fought for Mau Mau did so because their friends, relatives, or spouses did, and their commitment was more to these people than to the cause itself. Many marginally-committed Mau Mau gave up when it became clear that the rebellion could not succeed, and although some of the rebels who fought to the end did so because they knew that capture would mean death, many who were captured were profoundly committed to the goals of Mau Mau, and were therefore able to resist "rehabilitation" despite extreme duress.
       Whatever one may choose to conclude about the tactics and strategies of Mau Mau's leaders, the actual fighting was done by ordinary men and women. Some of these rebels fought with undeniable brutality. They mutilated animals, raped African women, killed innocent children and pregnant mothers, strangled old women, gouged the eyes out of living victims, and burned people alive. What is more, some of their oathing ceremonies were so ghastly that many participants were appalled. None of these facts should be glossed over. But many other rebels, almost certainly the majority, did not participate in the more extreme oath ceremonies, nor did they kill women and children or commit other brutal acts against their enemies.
       It must be kept in mind that most of the rebels had little if any knowledge of European ideas about the kinds of violence that should be permissible in warfare. In traditional Kikuyu battles, older women, men, and boys were always killed; only young women and girls were spared to be taken away as captives. With this conception of combat as their cultural heritage, it is remarkable that the majority of Mau Mau rebels showed as much restraint as they did. On the whole, they followed the rules of combat as their leaders defined them. With the military odds so hopelessly against them, many fought bravely by any standard, and when they were tortured in prisons and detention camps, their steadfast resistance was truly heroic.
       All of Kenya's peoples who were touched by Mau Mau showed courage, all made sacrifices and all suffered. Yet no faction, neither the rebels, nor the loyalists, nor the whites, should be glorified. They all behaved in ways that are as horrifying now as they were then, and they all fought for their own interests. The whites and the African loyalists fought to retain their privilege and power under British colonialism. The rebels of Mau Mau fought to improve their own lives, but their rebellion was also intended to end colonial rule and to benefit Africans throughout Kenya. If political freedom, economic opportunity, and social justice are laudable goals, then the rebels were laudable in ways that those who fought to defend the colonial regime were not.
       Ironically, most of the men and women who actively supported the movement gained nothing from it, while even before the Emergency ended, the Kikuyu loyalists and other tribes that opposed Mau Mau improved their land-holdings and many acquired new acreage. It is true that the lands of the white settlers were eventually sold to Africans, but only a handful of Mau Mau veterans had the money to afford this new property. In fact, most of those who had owned land before the rebellion began had their land and livestock confiscated, never to be returned. With a very few exceptions, former Mau Mau rebels were also not able to find jobs in government or in business. Loyalists retained the government jobs they held before the rebellion began, and when new positions became available, they were filled by the educated children of loyalists, not by uneducated rebels. Indians still dominated retail business, and former Mau Mau were not even allowed to serve in the army or police. Instead, virtually all of the Africans in the K.A.R. and the Kenya Police were retained by Kenyatta's government. These were the same men who had killed and tortured Mau Mau suspects. A rebellion by poor Africans forced Britain to withdraw from Kenya, but the land they had hoped to share and the government they had hoped to lead was taken over by wealthy and educated Africans who had either not fought at all, or had fought against the rebellion. There was no revolution in Kenya as a result of Mau Mau, only the replacement of elite white rulers by another elite, this time black.
       In Kenya today, Mau Mau is a fading memory, little taught in schools, seldom discussed by intellectuals, uncelebrated by monuments, holidays, or songs. Yet no one can be certain what Mau Mau's legacy may eventually prove to be. It may continue to recede into Kenya's past as a regrettable prelude to the nation's independence. But remembrances of the rebellion are very much alive for some Kenyans, and like many other historical events, Mau Mau may take on greater symbolic significance as time passes. That may already be happening: In 1987, a group of Kenyan exiles assembled in London on the thirtieth anniversary of Dedan Kimathi's execution to announce the formation of a movement dedicated to the overthrow of Kenya's Government. Calling themselves "Ukenya" — Movement for Unity and Democracy in Kenya — the leaders of the movement evoked the memory of Kimathi's strength in demanding that the Kenya Government end political detention, equalize wealth, restore democracy and, once again, return the "lost" lands to the people. In August 1988, Jomo Kenyatta's nephew, Andrew Kibathi Muigai, was sent to jail for six years for belonging to Ukenya's underground organization in Kenya.

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Thousands protest benefits cuts for Chernobyl cleanup workers, April 17 2011.

KIEV, UKRAINE—About 2,000 veterans of the Chernobyl cleanup operation have rallied in Ukraine’s capital to protest cuts in benefits and pensions.

Sunday’s protest in Kyiv comes just days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, as international attention is once again focused on the disaster that sent clouds of radiation over much of Europe.

Protesters expressed their anger at the government over drastically reduced pensions and the rising cost of health care, with more cutbacks to come.

President Viktor Yanukovych’s government says it simply does not have the money to meet promises made to the tens of thousands of workers who were sent in to clean up the radioactive site after the nuclear explosion on April 26, 1986.

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U.S.-backed company proposes mega-quarry north of Orangeville, John Goddard, April 24 2011.

An American-backed company that assembled farmland north of Orangeville to grow potatoes has applied to develop one of Canada’s biggest rock quarries.

But neighbouring farmers are warning of environmental and community consequences if it’s allowed to proceed.

The Highland Companies, backed by Boston-based hedge fund Baupost Group, proposes to dig what it calls a “mega-quarry” from a top-quality limestone deposit just north of Shelburne in Melancthon Township.

The quarry lands are to stretch five kilometres across and plunge 200 feet down, farther than the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara. A “mega-quarry” is defined as having a rock reserve of at least 150 million tonnes. The Highland reserve has 1 billion tonnes, part of a 6-billion-tonne deposit.

People protesting the quarry held a rally at Queen’s Park on Friday and began a five-day walk 100 kilometres north to the quarry site. The deadline for written objections to the project is their arrival day, Tuesday.

“The (company) application runs more than 3,100 pages, and took five years and 20 consulting firms to create,” says area cattle rancher and horse trainer Carl Cosack, a rally participant. “The public was given 45 days to respond.”

The Highland Cos. first showed itself in Melancthon Township in 2006, in the form of John Lowndes and the name Headwater Farms.

Lowndes started buying properties at $8,000 an acre in a region that has long been poorly serviced and economically depressed. The price included “a significant premium over market value,” company spokesman Michael Daniher says.

Eventually, Lowndes assembled more than 3,400 hectares (8,500 acres), including the area’s two largest potato operations — Downey Potato Farms and Wilson Farms — turning Highland into Ontario’s biggest potato grower, packer and distributor. It produces 45.5 million kilograms (100 million pounds) a year.

Lowndes, an Orangeville civil engineer and entrepreneur now living in nearby Alton, continues as sole company director.

In assembling its lands, the company bulldozed 30 farmhouses, many dating to the 1800s, along with trees, bush lots, and modern storage and processing facilities, says rancher Cosack, who is also vice-chair of the citizens’ group North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Task Force (NDACT).

“Rural communities are fairly small,” Cosack says of the destruction of the area’s rural character. “When you start taking out houses where people used to live, people who go to church and go to the hockey arena and who volunteer places — that just got under the skin of a lot of people.”

When Highland started drilling for what it said were irrigation wells, Cosack says, people got suspicious and began to organize. Although Highland didn’t have to, Daniher says, it held a public meeting in 2009 laying out the proposal for a quarry occupying 940 hectares.

“Aggregates are one of the foundations of our modern society,” a company report says of materials used for everything from highway construction to skyscraper windows.

The quarry would be ideally situated, the report says, close to markets but outside the environmentally designated Greenbelt and Niagara Escarpment. The quarry would serve Ontario’s needs for decades, it says, with 90 per cent of the aggregate going to construction in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, and 10 per cent to Barrie.

Opponents, which include Citizens’ Alliance for a Sustainable Environment (CAUSE), question whether the markets will stay local.

Three years ago, Highlands agreed to buy a rail line between Orangeville and Mississauga, and it’s negotiating purchase of a rail right-of-way to the Great Lakes port of Owen Sound, spokesman Daniher confirms. Just as potatoes form one of Highland’s business interests, so do railways, he says. No foreign markets and no expansion of the proposed quarry are planned, he says.

Opponents raise truck traffic and water management as other areas of top concern.

Because the water table in Melancthon Township is high, Highland would have to pump 600 million litres of water a day from the quarry, equivalent to the volume used by 2.7 million Ontarians. Having to store the water for three days to reduce sediment means having to handle 1.8 billion litres of water per day, both sides agree. The technology exists to manage such volumes, the company says.

As for truck traffic, Highland’s application proposes to finance road improvements if its requirements exceed 150 40-tonne trucks per hour, 24 hours a day, every day except statutory holidays.

Opponents also express concerns about groundwater degradation and other environmental damage.

“If I had a two-acre lot and wanted to build a house (in Melancthon Township),” Cosack says, “I would need an environmental assessment.”

Under Ontario law, an environmental assessment is not required for a mega-quarry.

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Seth Klarman Buys Land Worth $120 Billion for $80 Million!, Jacob Wolinsky, April 24 2011.

The title is not a typo!

I found some interesting things going on in Baupost from of all places an environmental group. When you look at Baupost’s 13-Fs you will notice that despite the company having $20 billion under management only about 5% is in domestic stock. Most of the questions where what is Klarman doing with the other $20 billion?

Half of the $20 billion is cash, so that leaves $9 billion that no one knows for sure where it is going. Klarman (my source tells me) owns a lot of foreign stocks and some Real Estate.

Klarman has been buying some expensive potato farms in Ontario, paying $8,000 an acre. It is clearly not a play on Potatoes (Only 1 year worth of demand left in the local reserves), but rather what can be done with the ground.

Here is the history according to http://www.inthehills.ca/back/melancthon/:

Baupost Group, a $14 billion, Boston-based hedge fund, headed by investment guru Seth Klarman. In partnership with Baupost, Lowndes founded Highland in 2006 to develop resources in Melancthon Township. Late that year, after extensive research, Lowndes approached a number of landowners, offering them $8,000 an acre, 30 per cent or so above market value. Lowndes hoped, he says modestly, to get 1,500 acres to run a profitable potato operation.

Lowndes purchased his first 25 acres in Melancthon in November 2006. Within six months he owned 4,400 acres; within a year, 6,500. Today, The Highland Companies owns 7,500 acres in Melancthon and additional lands in Mulmur Township and Norfolk County – 9,500 acres in all.

Now some more recent news from [www.avcanada.ca]:

The Highland Companies in Canada, owned by the Baupost Group Hedge Fund in Boston, have recently filed an application to dig what will be the largest open pit aggregates quarry in Canada right on top of the Niagara Escarpment! Just north of Shelburne, and south of Blue Mountain, Ontario they plan to mine an area that is almost 10 square kilometers to a depth 200 feet below the water table. This land is prime agricultural “Class A” soil situated at the highest point in southern Ontario. Three major watersheds have their headwaters here – the Saugeen, the Nottawasaga and the Grand Rivers – supplying fresh water to well over 1 million Ontario residents.

If successful the operation will run 24/7. Millions of tons of limestone will be extracted and sold for highway gravel or as lime for cement.

To date the companies have assembled 7000 acres (28 sq. km.) under the pretext of running the largest potato farm in Ontario.

According to HighLands website, the land contains over 6 billion tons of the highest qualities in reserve. Various types of institutions need the material, and demand in Ontario alone is close to 200 million tonnes a year, so Baupost would not have to do much shipping. The website states that the land is also valuable because it is right near a road (Road 124), there are minor environmental issues involved, it is surrounded by agriculture and wind farm, and there is no specialty planning zones.

However, environmental groups have claimed that the site of the proposed second largest quarry in North America is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

Costs are estimated to be $140 million a year. The cost of the land purchased is close to $80 million. Klarman is paying a hefty price, and besides the recent announcement about the opening of the quarry (which was only filed on March 7th 211) not much else has been said by Highlands. Klarman likely wants this land due to the supply/demand imbalance for aggregates (limestone). Lime price depends on a variety of factors that makes it tough to get an exact number here. However, assuming an average of $20 per tonne (this is probably low), Klarman paid $80 million for $120billion worth of resources! It will take decades to extract but assuming Baupost gets approval it is hard to see them not making a fortune off of this.

Highlands has filed an application with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to obtain a license to excavate this prime agricultural land into the 2nd largest open mine pit in all of North America, to start quarrying on some of the land they own containing 1 billion tonnes of the lime.

There will be the yearly costs, and there are a lot of environmental groups fighting this. I do not see any mention of royalty costs; only that Baupost will pay $1.2m in taxes a year to the township.

However, this looks like a steal based on the fact that the resources are worth over 1,000 times the purchase price of the land. The court will decide very soon whether the quarry can be built (According to the Highland Companies website, April 26th is “the last day for public objections). Even if Klaman is not allowed to build, it is an absurd risk reward ratio in the equation.

There is no way for the retail investor to coattail this idea even if they want to. However, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, and how much money Klarman will make from it.

I have reached out to the leader of the main environmental group fighting this (http://www.ndact.com) for comment. I have also contacted Baupost, and Highland to hear if they are willing to comment on the issue.

I am hoping both sides will be willing to answer questions on the record.

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