A picture appears to be in the process of going viral:
Via UNILAD / Facebook
I saw it on the Facebook page of the British website (magazine?) UNILAD (h/t Jason), with the following caption:
There are poachers in Africa currently hunting Rhino. This woman hunts the poachers.
The “hunts the poachers” line sort of caught my attention. (Yes, yes, other aspects of the photo caught my attention, too. I’ll get to that.)
The awesome blog TYWKIWDBI wrote about this woman, Kinessa Johnson, yesterday, and clarified that the organization where she works, VETPAW, employs ex-military servicemembers to secure locations where poachers are known to operate. The goal is to dissuade poachers from trying anything in that area, not to seek them out and engage them (which is what “hunt” sort of implies). That doesn’t make it any less bad-ass by any measure. Continue reading →
According to the criminal complaint filed on Sunday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, the two men — Cherno Njie, 57, and Papa Faal, 46 — separately left the United States last month to travel to the Gambia. Once there, they allegedly joined with another 8 to 12 co-conspirators as part of an attempt to launch a coup against Gambia President Yayah Jammeh. Both Njie and Faal hold dual U.S. and Gambian citizenship.
Not only that, but it has been illegal for a very long time.
Both men are charged with violating the Neutrality Act, a 1794 law that makes it illegal for an American to prepare an attack on a country the U.S. is at peace with, as well as arming themselves in order to violate that law. The last time the law was invoked was in 2007, when 10 men were accused of attempting to overthrow the government of Laos. The charges in the Laos case were later dropped.
There really are only six northern white rhinos left, after a 34 year-old male died on October 17, 2014. He was one of only two surviving males, meaning the species has very grim prospects for survival (and yes, I’m trying to avoid sounding defeatist.) Only four of them are actually in Africa, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The other two are at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in California. I saw one of them back in 2011:
The northern white rhinos in Kenya have been under 24-hour armed guard for a while, as reported by the Telegraph back in 2012. Even with the guards, though, poachers have continued to pick the rhinos off: Continue reading →
Greg Laden, writing at ScienceBlogs, addresses the argument that diseases like malaria still pose a greater threat in Africa than the Ebola virus, and whether Ebola is taking attention away from other diseases (at least one person went so far as to call Ebola the “Kardashian of diseases”). Africa is a big place, and while it’s easy to say that malaria is a bigger danger than Ebola in places that have few or no Ebola cases, the same cannot be said in the countries that are directly being affected right now. Laden looked at the annual death rate due to malaria in Liberia, Guniea, and Sierra Leone, divided those numbers by twelve to get an estimated monthly rate, then compared those numbers to the average number of deaths per month in the 3-6 months of the Ebola outbreak:
Liberia: 142 malaria, 92 Ebola
Guinea: 49 malaria, 67 Ebola
Sierra Leone: 145 malaria, 144 Ebola
It’s not the most scientific survey, but it does indicate that while of course malaria is a huge problem, Ebola is a crisis in those countries right this second.
Laden also addresses the question of resource allocation:
[C]onsider the thought experiment where you have $10,000,000 that you want to give to either developing an Ebola vaccine, or a Malaria vaccine. Since billions have been spent on developing a Malaria vaccine and there still isn’t one, your donation would be a drop in the bucket. Retrospectively, it would be equivalent to something like the combined costs of couriers and mail by researchers working on a Malaria vaccine over the last few decades. Or the cost of coffee and donuts in the break room. Or conference travel fees. Or something like that. The point is, a bunch of millions of dollars might actually produce an Ebola vaccine given the starting point we have now, or at least, move us a good deal in that direction.
At Quartz, Gregg Gonsalves writes about people’s tendency, when faced with something unfamiliar and scary, to focus on the personal: Continue reading →
Atrios asks a question about the U.S. military’s planned expansion of drone use in Niger that is so sensible, it probably hasn’t occurred to most of the warmongers in our government and our pundit class:
There’s this weird country on the other side of the world that flies killing machines over your city on a regular basis. Does no one consider how one might grow up in that environment?
When Nigeriens start to hate the United States as much as people in certain other countries, we will not get to act surprised or perplexed.
Photo credit: By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonMarsRover at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.
This week’s Newsweek magazine cover features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America. (The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.) While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
Far from presenting a legitimate public health concern, the authors of the piece and the editorial decision to use chimpanzee imagery on the cover have placed Newsweek squarely in the center of a long and ugly tradition of treating Africans as savage animals and the African continent as a dirty, diseased place to be feared.
For whatever reason, I have spent most of my life so far thinking that Toto was singing about “Kilimanjaro ris[ing] like a leopress above the Serengeti.”
I am now pretty much certain that they’re singing that “Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.”
This makes perfect sense, considering that Kilimanjaro and Olympus are both mountains (well, one’s a volcano, but you get the idea), and Kilimanjaro looms over the Serengeti—or at least the general vicinity of the Serengeti—in a way that is surely reminiscent of the divine nature ascribed to Olympus at various points in history. (The Olympus in Greece, I mean. Not so much the ones in Washington, Utah, or Mars.)
It also makes sense because:
I’m not sure “leopress” is even an actual word used to describe a female leopard (although it does describe a WordPress theme), and
In what possible way could a volcano rise above the savannah in a way that is reminiscent of a mostly-jungle-dwellinglarge cat?
Think about it. But hurry, boy—it’s waiting there for you.
I’m going to be honest here: I’m not really feeling it this year. I suspect that is approximately 100% due to the fact that I moved into a new house at the beginning of this week, and am experiencing the associated anxiety and odd depression that always seems to come with that. Don’t get me wrong, I love our new house. It’s just that I also sort of hate it at the moment.
It was in the midst of this chaos that I embarked on my second year as a badge holder at SXSW Interactive. Once again, I don’t really have a clear notion of my goals, other than to meet people, learn more about tech, blogging, and social media, and just be around talented, interesting, and occasionally self-important people. I’m sucking at the “meeting people” part so far, but being at the Austin Convention Center in a relatively festive atmosphere is a welcome reprieve from a week spent mediating between furniture deliveries, movers, and contactors. (Also, the purchase of a house with enough repair needs to quickly burn through most of our money, but let’s not go there just now.)
I took the Capital Metro rail for the first time, parking where I’m probably not supposed to park and riding the train to the final stop just outside the Convention Center. I don’t know if the train is usually that crowded, or if that is a SXSW effect, but it was a decent ride. It certainly beats trying to find parking downtown.
Since I don’t do much late-night partying anymore, I was able to arrive downtown at about 9:30, give or take, and it took a mere 5 minutes to get my badge. I remember last year needing about 20 minutes, but then seeing that the line had circumscribed the Convention Center later in the day. This would be an example of the hipness of being square – less time waiting in lines, or something.
I spent much of the morning catching up on work, and found the environment to be oddly conducive for work. Maybe there was some osmosis of creative power, or maybe I was just determined to finish so I could move on to fun things.
By the time I broke away from the siren call of legal-blogging-for-hire, I was not sure where I wanted to go. I considered catching a shuttle to a different venue for a panel on the business potential of animated GIFs, but ran into a friend who was going to a panel on disaster relief.
Disaster: The Future of Crisis Communications addressed how the Coast Guard has made use of social media and other technologies in disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Irene. Very interesting stuff. Much of what they said seems obvious at first, but when you consider conditions after a disaster, you understand their importance, and how easy it might be to overlook them. In sufficiently serious crises, the very network we rely upon for information might be out of commission. How would we get information without our smartphones? Yes, many people still use things like radio or newspapers, but social media allows responders to get information out in, to use a cliché, real time.
Teaching Cheetahs: Disruptive Education in Africa was the only other panel I went to this day, partly because it sounded interesting, and partly because I didn’t have to change rooms. A group of panelists included two executives from a nonprofit that funds scholarships for top students from African to study at American universities, the founder of a Kenyan startup that provides tablets to students loaded with school curricula, and the director of an organziation that produces documentary videos highlighting educational needs. There was far more than I can justifiably summarize here, but the overall theme was “African solutions to African problems.” I just read an article the other day about well-intentioned but catastrophic efforts at aid to Africa, most of which amounted to dumping America’s leftovers in rural Africa rather than supporting infrastructure and education. It is also generally annoying that people in the U.S. often refer to “Africa” in a unitary sense, when in reality it is a continent with 54 countries (I think that’s the right number), about 1 billion people, and a wide diversity of culture, history, and language. It’s also more than twice the size of the U.S., so it’s big. Here are the organizations and companies represented, and I’d say they are worth checking out:
African Leadership Academy in South Africa
African Leadership Bridge in Austin, Texas
The Nobelity Project, also in Austin
eLimu, a startup based in Nairobi, Kenya
After that, I went home to assemble IKEA furniture.
Other highlights of the day included getting my picture taken in the Iron Throne…
…and also with Clifford the Big Red Dog…
There was also this odd display by 3M, which I call 3M’s 2D Hottie.
![By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonMarsRover at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/640px-MQ-9_Reaper_taxis.jpg "By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonMarsRover at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons")
