A Cheer For Christmas

You know the silly season is upon us when barbs start flying around over “holiday trees” and the supposed ethnicity or gender of Santa Claus, not to mention the unending barrage launched by vested interests to get you to buy stuff. Needless to say, the significance of the birth of Jesus to Christians is deeply overshadowed by this noisome pestilence.

Perhaps there is some use in one aspect of all this: namely of its supposed help in restoring the economy. The irony in such attempts to revive a moribund economy by trying to get poor us to spend more and more of the money we don’t have cannot be lost.  That irony is deepened further when it is realized that the economy is where it is today because it was driven there, in the first place, by the actions of those captains of commerce who did not care much about what they were doing to the public, quite against the Christian message. But instead, they just took and took until it hurt.

Holiday Trees, Black Santas or Santas of unspecified gender are good for a laugh, and talking about them should stimulate seasonal merriment that would otherwise be subverted by suspicion that overusing our credit cards is just creating opportunities for predatory elements in society. 

So, therefore, let us all be merry and, as well, wish for a really new and improved New Year.

Tell Fren Tru

PS. Some of you might be relieved to note that I haven’t even asked for a donation to the cause of the Sierra Leone Sickle Cell Disease Society this year. You may find details of what they do at www.sleonesickle.org

A Legacy For Mandela

A great man has died. He leaves behind a playbook on how to live a life.  But somehow, I feel that few of us would be smart enough to follow what is written therein. Anyway, by and large, it is wholly unimportant whether we do or not. Our personal lives may end in a shambles or we might succeed in wrecking the life chances of those nearest and dearest to us. But in the grand scale of things that matters not a fig.

But when we consider those who have the power of life and death over millions of their fellow citizens, I shudder at the potential they have for continuing to cause distress and suffering far and wide. Mandela’s playbook is one that the majority of African leaders refuse to read (or, more likely, are not literate enough to grasp) so that half a century after independence from European colonialism, African countries continue to languish at the bottom of all tables of human development.

Much eulogizing is coming from all quarters including from Africa itself. I have no desire to be a party-pooper, but many African leaders would be well advised to cut out their sanctimonious nonsense, and instead, commit themselves to delivering the good government that the continent has lacked these long fifty years. That would be a legacy worthy of the man.

Tell Fren Tru

Speaking Freely

In the week after I arrived in London, Oprah Winfrey breezes in to plug her movie, The Butler. Ordinarily this is one African-American icon I don’t pay much attention to, even with her massive media presence, business skills, and generosity all of which, I, myself, would love to emulate.  That aside, what captured my attention this time was a remark she made concerning the troubles of the Obama Presidency which, at the moment is enduring a near-death experience. Oprah was responding to a BBC reporter’s question about what she felt about American racism. She maintained that Obama’s troubles were in part due to a racism that was so pervasive that it was spilling over into disrespect for the office of the presidency itself.

Well, America’s Bill of Rights protects the country’s citizens in saying, writing or publishing whatever they like, restricted only by certain limits. So the American dissenter, whatever his stripe, gets away with expressing whatever he or she wishes. Even the American flag, that revered symbol, is not safe from the wrath of the citizen who harbours some grievance or the other. By permitting its citizens to express themselves so freely the system affords a safety valve through which harmful emotions can be released, it is believed.

Is this safety valve foolproof? Evidently not. It would seem that, for some, freely speaking the mind may not be enough, and in the unrestrained spirit of America, the temptation to go beyond just speaking one’s mind may be irresistible and, occasionally, extend into violent territory. The country has a few notorious examples of this tendency where, in spite of or because of First Amendment provisions a few get carried away and shoot up not only their fellow citizens but sometimes their President as well. Although the list of successful Presidential assassination is a short one, it is just too horrific, particularly for a much-celebrated democracy.  This intersect between freedom of speech and freedom of action is worrying, especially in this 50^th year of the Kennedy assassination.

The kind of freedom I am talking about is not enjoyed everywhere. In many other places you have to be pretty careful of what you say, write or blog. Otherwise you might find yourself in front of a judge. Or worse. I have been in places where free speech does not sit too well with the authorities. It was stifling, and even now, every time I think about it I get a minor attack of the creeps.  And, incidentally, there is, currently a big brouhaha over comments in the press in which the President of Sierra Leone was likened to a rat. I really can’t imagine why that rodent should have such a bad rap. That’s as maybe. But to reference a sitting president to one of the planet’s least attractive quadrupeds is, in my view, pushing the envelope too far.

Those who would wield such brickbats should not be surprised if the authorities become very annoyed.

I suppose, as in everything else, good manners apply, at the very least.

Tell Fren Tru

Hacked!

I am just recovering from another cyber-attack. This time, it came from someone (might even have been a machine) gaining access to my email account, by which they then persuaded my bank to transfer a significant sum of money to an account in America. Unfortunately, my account manager, who I will call Sam, was out of the office last Friday when the attack was launched. So it was his stand-in who had to deal with his mails and who was duped into processing the request through.

After the weekend, and on reviewing his emails on Monday morning, Sam sussed that something was very wrong. The giveaway for him was the differences between the way the scammer wrote and the way I write. Furthermore the scammer suggested that he would be 'unavailable for the rest of the day because he would be at his office'. Sam knew that unless my circumstances had changed drastically over the weekend, there was no way I could be at any office. So he promptly checked with his Friday stand-in to find out if any money had gone out. Indeed, money had gone from my account.

Now that I have had time to exhale, I am thinking that there could be a connection between my near-death experience (exaggerating here, of course) and the government impasse that has seized America during the last week. While I am not deluded in thinking that my few dollars will help Obama in his stance against the fundamentalist hordes, poor Federal government employees, forced to go on unpaid leave, might be tempted to use alternative means to keep the wolf from the door.

            I hope these poor guys will forgive my slander, but cyber-attacks come from all quarters these days. It was quite a body-blow when we learned this week that Canada has been conducting cyber spying on Brazil, through its shady CSEC that very few of us had heard about. I googled them to see what they are about and found out that the Communications Security Establishment Canada is a very swish organization which even have the brass to advertise openly online for operatives. I didn’t see anything that fitted my skills set, but I applied anyway, since I reckon I qualify on a number of general grounds: no criminal record, a clear conscience resistant to polygraph testing and, so far, an uninteresting credit and financial history. Perhaps I might get lucky. Then, there will be no hiding place for that villain.

I should say though, that apart from the inconvenience of having to go through the hassle of sterilizing my computer and changing passwords, the injury has been relatively slight. The bank fully reimbursed my account. They, in turn, suffered only a minor loss resulting from variations in Canadian-US dollar exchange rates that occurred over that weekend.

And now, finally. Apologies if you received an email, purporting to come from me, inviting you to buy foreclosed real estate.

Tell Fren Tru

“Do I seem like I smoke marijuana?"

 

This was how the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr Stephen Harper, responded when asked by a journalist whether or not he had ever smoked pot. The question came up because a number of other high-profile Canadian politicos have been confessing all over the place to having tried the weed.

Politicians who admit involvement with pot come in all shapes, sizes and genders, so the Prime Minister’s looks are not a reliable guide as to whether he indulges or not. In any case, the admission of pot-smoking by anyone seeking or occupying high office is, commonly, a well-crafted PR event, with the respondent being careful to say only that they merely “try” the substance. I suppose the use of the verb “to try” takes the edge off the perceived misdemeanour somewhat: Pot light, so to speak. Very few actually say they smoke it, implying that their engagement is that of a dilettante who wishes merely to investigate the substance’s possibilities. The hearer is left to flounder in a sea of ambiguity as to what is meant by “trying”; whether it means merely taking a puff (without inhaling), or inhaling (perhaps only shallowly), or going all the way and taking a reckless, deep, no-holds-barred drag that allows full exchange of the weed’s vaporous  ingredients with the blood circulating within the lungs.

Using or trying or smoking, according to the degree of ambiguity in the confession, can be casual, occasional, regular or even “all the time,” as the city of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford admitted on camera recently.

            Of course, in today’s Canada, the debate really is not whether a Prime Minister or wannabe Prime Minister or a colourful city mayor smokes a joint. The more serious issue is whether laws prohibiting smoking and/or possession for personal use should be repealed. Repeal would undoubtedly relieve the law-enforcement authorities of policing these relatively minor infractions and could perhaps, ultimately, render traffickers obsolete.

            For many, however, legalizing pot could be a step too far, the beginning of the slide toward legalization of “harder” drugs. On the other hand, fall-out from legalizing the hard drugs might be much more benign than doomsters suppose, considering that a major consequence of the legal prohibition of hard drugs, as well as of marijuana, is fostering the creation and maintenance of criminal cartels that cause more harm to individual lives and to society than the drugs themselves.

            Troublesome and complex, no doubt, but these are issues that need thorough debate if we are to achieve best solutions.

Tell Fren Tru

PS: As I finish writing this post, I hear that police in Toronto have been busy raiding a grow-op planted within innocent-looking corn-rows in a farmer’s field in the northern suburbs. The street value of the 600 plants confiscated was an estimated $2m. Meanwhile, the state of Washington in America is writing rules regulating the location of outlets out of which pot can be legally sold in the state.