Oh Africa.

and ...    The Earth is NOT our mother!

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TOMORROW!    An IMPORTANT event in Toronto. See also: Eco Sanity, GreenHeart Education, Compassionate Climate Action, & Bill McKibben. There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road, Dead skunk in the middle of the road. There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road, Stinkin' to high heaven. Take a whiff on me; that ain't no rose. (Loudon Wainright III) Something about the phrase 'cooperation framework' suggests a rip off. Don't you think? Or a jail. For the cynics and conspiracy believers among us that's enough eh? 'The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition' (NAFSN) is linguistically / semantically / rhetorically suspicious through and through: What is 'food security' exactly? Why is it coupled with 'nutrition'? Even 'new' ... new? Isn't this just more Norman Borlaug rah-rah-industry Green Revolution fol-de-rol? The way it is interwoven with sexual statistics stinks too; and the way the GMO aspects are so present and yet so soft-pedalled. Nobody believes this bureaucratic shit but billions (and more) live and (will) die with it. Does anyone imagine that Cargill and the rest of these corporations give a rat's ass for any advancement of women's rights? Or equality in any sense beyond viewing humans as production & consumption units? They like to see women in identical green uniforms smiling as they work an assembly line. That's Cargill; that's Kraft; that's 'the government'. Consider some of this official USAID bumph-by-the-bushel (baffle their brains with bullshit):         Cooperation Framework to support 'NAFSN' in Senegal;         Mozambique: 2011–2015 Multi-Year Strategy;         Cooperation Framework to support 'NAFSN' in Mozambique;         2014 Feed the Future Progress Report; and then consider:         The Great Land Heist: How the world is paving the way for corporate land grabs. Senegal: Agrophytex, Agroseed, CCMN (Comptoir Commercial Mandiaye Ndiaye), CODERIZ, Coumba Nor Thiam (CNT), Générale Alimentaire Africaine (GAA), Laiterie du Berger, La Pirogue Bleue, Grands Moulins de Dakar (GMD), Nouvelle Minoterie Africaine (NMA), NEGODIS, PATISEN, SEDIMA, Sentenac Group (Moulins Sentenac & Socas), SHAM Senegal, SODEFITEX, SOPASEN, Suneor SA, Teylium Group Sa (& Continental Foods Company), TROPICASEM, Vital Agro-Industries, Zena Exotic Fruits. Three out of 24 (1/8th) of the Senegalese companies were in for less than a million: ETS Adiou SENE, Mamelles Jaboot, and Société Générale d’Investissement et de Commerce (GIC). Mozambique: ENICA, JFS Holding Khulima Púnguè Agricultura e Serviços Lozane Farms Rei do Agro Sunshine Nut Company. Multinational: AfricaGraines (Agreenoval), Compagnie de Filature et de Sacherie (COFISAC) (Filtisac), Export Trading Group (ETG), Hortis (La Société Horticulture du Sénégal) (Green Seed), Novel Group SA, Copéol Senegal (Sofiproteol & Group Castel), Soldive Senegal (Soldive group), African Cashew Initiative ACi (Intersnack Group GmbH & Co. KG, Kraft Foods Inc., Olam International, SAP AG) AGCO, Cargill, Competetive African Cotton Iniative COMPACI (Cargill, Dunavant, Industrial Promotion Services West-Africa, and Plexus Ltd.), Corvus Investment International CII, Itochu, Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd. JISL, Nippon Biodiesel Fuel co. ltd.(NBF), SABMiller (Tanzania Breweries, Accra Brewery Ltd ABL) Sumitomo Corporation, Toyo Engineering Corporation TOYO, United Phosphorous Limited UPL, Vodafone, General Mills, Royal DSM, Bühler, Ecom Agroindustrial Corporation Ltd, AgroWays Ltd. Once again I find myself asking: Who's in charge - the metaph-or or the metaph-ee? Mother Earth?! That fricken rocket scientist, James Lovelock - his vege-pap Gaia crap-O-la has really taken hold eh? An intellectual root-kit virus and sepsis is settin' in. The Fibonacci series and the resulting infinite fraction, Tau; the fascinating and endlessly non-repeating spirals generated by face-joined tetrahedra; plots of the Mandelbrot set and infinite aperiodic tilings (Penrose and others) ... Man! I know (better than most) and love all of these beautiful mysteries BUT (as Donald Coxeter himself once explained to me in a letter) it can be categorically proven that the tetrahelix does NOT repeat, and as he explained elsewhere - the divine proportion is a tendency not a rule. The earth is not our mother. Physics will not wipe our arse. How can otherwise intelligent people not get this? Those who use this ridiculous phrase either do not know their mothers very well, know very little about planet Earth, or haven't really thought about it. As a beginning in the search for an antidote: Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland. And a suite of reports in The Guardian:         Corporate stranglehold of farmland a risk to world food security; and,         World Bank and aid donors accused of enabling land grabs There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road,  Dead skunk in the middle of the road. There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road, Stinkin' to high heaven. You don't havet'a look and you don't havet'a see  Cause you can feel it in your olfactory. (Loudon Wainright III) A reasonable question might be: Why a dead skunk?     I'll leave that one with you.   Another interesting question: I found this cartoon image some time ago and went looking for a higher-resolution copy - couldn't find one so here it is. The cartoonist might be making fun of those who quibble while people starve to death - it works at that level. But stepping back a bit a number of other questions pop up and I have to wonder. Maybe you wonder too.

 
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