Michael Kevane

This opinion piece reviews the first two months of the new Burkinabè administration.  Notable is that every “fact” is an action by some actor other than the government.  Not a single “act” by the government in the first 60 days worth noting?  I’ll have to do a little more reading; somebody must have a review piece saying what the government has done besides reacting to terrorism, strikes, domestic militias, and failed coup revanchists.

29 décembre 2015 – 29 février 2016. Deux mois que Roch Marc Christian Kaboré a été investi dans ses fonctions de président du Faso. Trop tôt pour un quelconque bilan mais que de nombreuses secousses qui ont fait tanguer le pavillon battant Burkina Faso au cours de ces 60 jours. Pataarbèba Burkindbila Zagré, dans cette analyse revient sur les faits qui ont jalonné cette période et énuméré les défis des nouvelles autorités du Faso.

Source: Roch Marc Christian Kaboré : 60 jours à Kosyam : dépits et défis

Probably Trump meant “consideration” but something in him said “use a bigger word”…

By the way, the Trans-Pacific, if you look at the TPP, a total disaster, which, by the way, Marco is in favor of, they need — it is a disaster for our country. It’s trying to be approved by various people, including President Obama. And I’ll tell you something. The biggest problem with that is: They don’t take into concurrence the devaluation. They’re devaluing their currency.

Source: The Fox News GOP debate transcript, annotated – The Washington Post

Suggests just how easy it is to make a ton of money through corruption when you have a billion dollar company basically wanting to “give” you $500,000 with no oversight.

In a contract signed several years ago, Nike agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in honorariums and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus,” which the former employee called a bribe. The money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Kenyan Runners Accuse Officials of Stealing From Sponsorship DealNOV. 23, 2015 Instead, it was immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.

Source: Money Given to Kenya, Since Stolen, Puts Nike in Spotlight – The New York Times

I read Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. Definitely compares nicely to Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, if you have read that. A missionary travel to Oasis, where the Oasans are a remarkably simply, vulnerable, Jesus-loving agrarian society. It is not unintentional that the colony of humans sent to the distant world is specifically recruited to be just like (almost) the Oasans: simple, vulnerable, Jesus-indifferent high tech society solving exactly the same problems (food, water, shelter) that the Oasans are solving. Peter, the missionary (Peter?!) lives in both worlds (well, for a few months). For me, with my anthropological background and lots of exposure to people “going native,” the book had lots to appreciate… Faber has a keen ear for how 10 days of immersion in another culture makes one an “expert” compared to those whose attitude is “So what do they do all day?” He has some really nice descriptions of that immersion experience. Peace Corps volunteers would totally appreciate the book. Steve Davies would appreciate it too!  It is  a significant brief for travel: for people like Peter, immersion experience accelerates (to light speed?) mental processes of identity and character.  Who are you and where are you going?  May as well be Gauguin in Tahiti.  The book has several neat tricks: a rendering of Oasan speech in English that is clever; excellent description of the thick, humid atmosphere of the planet; “shocker” ending as the reason for the Oasan Jesus-loving is suddenly revealed.  I did not like so much the device of the epistles from Peter to his wife back on Earth.  And in the end, for me, all novels that are fundamentally about “belief in a deity” seem sort of weird, especially even in a world of travel beyond light-speed.  At one level I understand: that’s the way people are.  At another level I cannot understand: how can their thoughts be so different?  But that, ultimately, is the goal of science-fiction, no? To find the stranger/alien inside of us.

And just for fun after that I read through David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.  I had seen the movie, I believe while under some kind of mind-altering influence, some years back. I remember it being really annoying, because the breathtaking reach of the story just didn’t match the excruciating mundanity of the journey of the story: to travel ten centuries you still have to have a car chase… Ben Hur, right? So the book was the same, except that since it is in your brain you can skip more easily the mundane parts and go straight to the shivery sections. Reading really is much better.  By the way, Gauguin permeates Cloud Atlas, too, I think. Arsenic poisoning, Pacific islands, masterpieces, missionaries.

Tidjane Thiam, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, has asked the company’s board to reduce his bonus, days after the Swiss bank reported a multibillion-dollar loss in the fourth quarter. “I have asked the board of directors for a significant reduction in my bonus,” Mr. Thiam said in a statement issued by the bank on Sunday. Mr. Thiam, who joined the bank in July, did not indicate the size of the reduction in his bonus, but said his was the largest reduction within the management team.

Source: Credit Suisse C.E.O. Asks for a Cut in His Bonus – The New York Times

The amazing astronaut is Sunita Williams.

My brother gave me this CD for Christmas.  It makes an addictive present, and you will never, ever, forget Yuri Gagarin, Alexei Leonov (did you even know he was the first person to walk in space?) and the three astronauts who died in the cockpit of Apollo 1 (Grissom, Chafee and White).  My kids like it too.

In his positive review of the album for Drowned in Sound, Marc Burrows wrote that “the joy [in The Race for Space] is in how the duo marry theme and function”, citing specifically the album’s instrumentals and their fit to the archival recordings used, such as “the beeping signal of the pioneering “Russian moon” built into the loping, housy rhythm of ‘Sputnik'”, and “‘E.V.A”s portrayal of Alexey Leonov’s first spacewalk through quietly disorientating switches in timing and mood, breaking from excitement and speed to a gentle drifting.”[7] He also commented positively on the album’s unbiased use of both positive and tragic moments from the space race as context to the music; something Harley had also noted in his review.[10] Burrows also notably concluded the review in emotionally-charged praise of “The Other Side”, describing it as “history and melody and wonder hitting you all at once in a moment of complete joy and release. Just wonderful.”[7] At The Arts Desk, Thomas H Green wrote that The Race for Space is an effective reminder of “the 1960s media’s wild excitement about the space race” and “the era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut”, which had been “almost forgotten”. He also stated that the band took advantage of the current trends in electronic music, such as sampling, comparing them to The Egg, in a positive light. He wrote that The Race for Space was “a rich and thoroughly enjoyable nine-track journey”, and stated that the band “reinvented the concept album as a delightful, historically engaged rave-up.”

Source: The Race for Space (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Smith accuses economists of being blithely callous.  But he seems unable to appreciate how narrow-minded his own “attack on economists” is, because by his notion of what is fair and just only Americans matter. Who cares what happens to the billion people in China, whose incomes by the way are one 20th those of Americans.  If you want to take fairness seriously, you can’t just assert it only matters for people who happen to live in the United States.

Why are economists so willing to declare to the world that free trade is good, even after reading papers like the one by Autor et al.?

Source: Free Trade With China Wasn’t Such a Great Idea for the U.S. – Bloomberg View

Nice perspective from Anthony!

I come not to praise the superiority we feel about library service in the United States, but to bury it. This issue of VOYA [February 2016] concentrates on how technology continues to move evermore rapidly to the center of an information professional’s life in the U.S. In this constant narrative of technological advance, however, less apparent is how little we learn about the provision of YA services from other places. Professional curiosity ought to, inherently, take advantage of the growing transnational flows of ideas and communication. To not inform such curiosity represents either a stunning culture of laziness or, worse, supreme arrogance–an assumption that the U.S., by definition, simply owns the apex of YA library service. Increasingly, there are fewer and fewer excuses for this incuriosity and greater and greater professional need to pursue global experiences. This coming August 11th, the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) is co-hosting a one-day “satellite” conference, “Child and Youth Reading in the Transition to a Digital Culture: Emerging Perspectives on the Role of Libraries” in Northern California.

The conference, sponsored by IFLA’s Libraries for Children and Young Adults unit, promises to bring librarians the world over to our shores–no passport required! Many international attendees will then fly to Columbus, Ohio, to participate in the annual IFLA Congress, between August 13-19, to meet, learn from, and interact with colleagues from all over the globe. (http://2016.ifla.org/) In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to establish relationships in South Korea, Africa, and Germany. In some cases, these relationships required travel, in others, not. Each experience sharpened and qualified my own comparative perspectives of what our profession claims to accomplish here “at home.” Not all countries, for instance, address youth services with relatively high paid graduate-degree-holding professionals. Not all countries envision or construct youth as mere at-risk candidates for adult status or projects for “development.” Neither does the U.S. corner the market on all of the important institutional resources required to support youth services professionalism.

Read the full article here.

Slade House, by David Mitchell. A haunted house horror story, sort of. More interesting as a technical challenge: create a vivid character and virtual reality, one for each decade, from 1970 to present.  In some ways Dorian Gray, and the same disappointment at the end… really, he stabs the picture and thus stabs himself?  “I’m melting, I’m melting, What a world!”  Worth a couple nights of reading, not more.

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta.  Pure pleasure for a mid-50-year old parent.  It is like reading a friend’s well-written novel: I immediately know all the references, and all the adult characters are people just like me.  I rarely enjoy reading those kinds of novels though (well, I liked The Marriage Plot) and so Perrotta’s plot device of a quasi-Rapture was brilliant.  The apple cart is upset just enough that anything is possible.

Air, by Geoff Ryman.  The first half is a great science fiction novel.  But the second half cannot keep the momentum going (partly because Ryman nicely makes just what Air is hazy for the first half, but then increasingly gets downright mystical in the second half, and it does not work within the realism of a sci-fi novel).  And the village flood is in many ways too prosaic and too drawn out as a plot device.

A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge.  Now the third time I have read this.  I just think it is the perfect science fiction novel.  How can you not like Sherkaner Underhill?

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel.  Could not resist reading this again over a couple of days. Much better than the first read.  I paid more attention to her writing and style, which is quite interesting. James Wood review worth reading again, too.

It looks like the Splendid Hotel and Cafe Cappuccino attack of January 15 2016 evening in Ouagadougou was an AQIM-organized attack, with the possibly declared purpose of attacking France, which leads operations against AQIM in northern Africa and the Sahel.  The similar November 2015 attack on the Radisson Bleu Hotel in Bamako suggests that AQIM may be moving to a strategy similar to that of other armed groups in North Africa and the Middle East: regular attacks on high-profile civic-security targets.  The elites of French West Africa organize and run the security apparatuses.  The people meeting and eating and staying at a hotel like Splendid, and cafes like Cappuccino, are basically one or two degrees of separation from the power elite.  There are a dozen targets like these in Ouagadougou.

So in the short run there will be all the usual stuff: construction of barriers and walls and hiring of security personnel in Ouagadougou; tightening of border with Mali and Niger, and increase in security forces in northern Burkina; even more military cooperation with France and USA and even more “pre-deployment” of French and American military personnel and equipment so they can carry out joint operations with Burkinabè forces; self-censorship by Muslim religious leaders, who are quite well-aligned with the government anyone, but now presumably less likely to assert their interests openly (Burkina Faso has an extremely powerful Catholic and Protestant elite that dominates government and formal business); tension between the media/press (which will want to write about how the security forces “let” the attack happen) and the security apparatus (which will want to shut down criticism); weird stuff with Compaoré and Diéndéré (who of course have serious contacts and background with AQIM forces as the hosts of the peace negotiations and negotiators over the years for hostage releases and all kinds of other possible ties like arms dealing, money transfer… lots of allegations).

In the longer run, harder to predict what the fallout from the attack might be.  Both Pres. Roch Kaboré and Assembly Speaker Salif Diallo have emerged from the Compaoré regime, so a top-down authoritarian impulse flows in their veins.  Their reflex may not be that the best defense against a hardy and committed terrorist group is to encourage an even more open society, with more debate, more free press, more rule of law.  What they do with Diéndéré will be a test, I think.  Do they put him on a speedy, open trial, and let all kinds of nasty truths come out in the testimony?  Or do they postpone, gradually re-incorporating Diéndéré and his team?  More broadly, their choices will be shaped by donors and France and USA.  They might pour money into an expanded security apparatus, rather than into the kinds of longer term development oriented investments that would make Burkinabè economic growth more inclusive and less vulnerable.

As usual, nice summary commentary from Jean-Pierre Bejot:

Discours très généraliste. En cette journée qui vient clore « la glorieuse page de l’histoire récente de notre peuple », Roch Kaboré s’est bien gardé d’évoquer quoi ou qui que ce soit de précis, ni Thomas Sankara, ni Norbert Zongo qui ont pourtant été un fil rouge tout au long de la « transition ». Il y a eu, reconnaît-il, « l’insurrection populaire » des 30-31 octobre 2014, « le coup d’Etat » des 16-17 septembre 2015, mais pas question de fustiger qui que ce soit. Ni Blaise Compaoré, victime de « l’insurrection populaire », ni Gilbert Diendéré, instigateur du « coup d’Etat ». Roch Kaboré, en ce jour d’investiture ne cite même pas le parti au nom duquel il est parvenu au pouvoir ; tout au plus rappelle-t-il que sa « formation politique d’origine » appartient à l’Internationale socialiste. S’il cite les trois personnalités majeures de la Transition, son président, son premier ministre et le président du CNT, il ne rend un hommage appuyé qu’à Michel Kafando « dont la sagesse et la riche expérience nous ont été très utiles particulièrement aux moments troubles et complexes de la Transition »

Source: Le Burkina Faso de Roch Kaboré & Salif Diallo. Chronique d’une alternance (…) – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso

I agree with Tyler Cowen that this summary is extremely helpful.  Unfortunately the media is not going to let this story go unless something more serious happens (like a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran? No this story would probably still dominate U.S. news…)

The arson fires lit by the Hammonds in 2001 and 2006 may have actually represented sensible land management, but the Hammonds lost the high ground by their failure to coordinate with the government agency managing the land they burned. Prescribed fire is a tool used to improve wildlife habitat, increase land productivity, and control wildfire. The 2001 fire aimed at improving productivity, but the government says the ranchers didn’t bother informing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) they planned to burn until two hours after they lit the fire. While they lit the fire on their own land, it escaped and burned 139 acres of federal land, but that burning probably did not do serious damage to the grassland and they put the fire out themselves.The 2006 fire was more questionable. A wildfire was burning on BLM land near the Hammond’s ranch, so to defend their land they lit a backfire on their own land. That would be standard procedure except, again, they didn’t tell anyone and when their fire crossed over onto federal land it endangered firefighters who the Hammonds apparently knew were located between the wildfire and their backfire. Due to severe fire hazards, the county had a no-burn rule which the Hammonds apparently violated, but this was hardly a terrorist act.

Source: No Good Guys in the West | Cato @ Liberty

The trouble with fans and reviews like this one is that they are dreadfully wrong about one important point.  It is a movie for 12 year old children.  Land Before Time also created a “mythology”… Doc? The Mysterious Beyond? But it was for 8 year olds… Created by a corporation, for consumption.

The creators of The Force Awakens played safe and simply gave fans of the original trilogy their childhood dreams back, ignoring the fact that Star Wars is not a mere children’s movie, but an imaginative mythology. Even worst, the writers thought that they needed a movie to pander to the fans to apologize for the creative vision of the prequel trilogy.

Source: In Review: The Force Awakens – Right Reason

Returning to Mali, how are policymakers supposed to act on Elischer’s analysis? The “international community” is supposed to “note” the “destabilizing” influence of Dicko and other Salafis in southern Mali. Then what? Demand that Malian politicians repudiate Dicko? Seek to influence elections to the High Islamic Council? Advocate for the arrest of non-violent Salafi preachers? Elevate Sufi Muslims and empower them to marginalize Salafis within Malian institutions and public life? Would any of those actions make it less likely that jihadist groups would storm hotels in Bamako? Or would this kind of suspicion of non-violent Salafis make it even harder to resolve Mali’s many interlocking crises? Analysts and policymakers desperately need more complicated maps of the religious and political terrain of the Sahel. Nearly a decade into my thinking about the region, I realize how little I understand. But I do believe that “good Muslim/bad Muslim” dichotomies serve everyone poorly, and can have dangerous and unintended consequences when applied in policy.

Source: On Salafism and Terrorism in Mali: A Response to the Monkey Cage | Sahel Blog