Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
The last place most of us look to for useful information is television soap operas. But Makutano Junction, a Kenyan-produced soap opera set in the fictional town of the same name is not your average TV drama. Broadcast in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and throughout English-speaking Africa on Digital Satellite Television (DSTV), Makutano Junction doesn't deal with the evil twins, amnesia, and dark family secrets typical of U.S. daytime dramas. Instead, the show's plot lines revolve around more grounded (although not necessarily less dramatic) subjects like access to health care and education, sustainable income-generation, and citizens' rights.
Funded by the U.K. Department for International Development, produced by the Mediae Trust, and broadcast by the Kenya Broadcast Corporation, the show was originally designed as a 13-part drama in 2004. But Makutano Junction was since developed into a six-season TV phenomenon, with over 7 million viewers in Kenya alone. Its website provides all the information one might expect from a television show site, including episode summaries and character profiles. It also features "extras" on themes from specific episodes and encourages viewers to text the producers for more information.
In Episode 8 of Season 6, which aired in 2008, the character Maspeedy gets into trouble for soaking seeds. Seed soaking works by essentially tricking the seed into thinking it has been planted, allowing it to soak up in one day as much water as it would in a week in the soil. This speeds up germination and significantly shortens the time between planting and growth, leading to a vegetable harvest in a quick amount of time.
But the other characters in the show are unfamiliar with this practice and, when they discover Maspeedy's project, have him thrown in jail because they are convinced that he is brewing alcohol illegally. After some plot twists and a little slapstick humor involving two trouble-making characters who attempt to drink the water in order to get drunk, the truth comes to light and Maspeedy is released from jail. He then teaches the rest of the town the simple technique of soaking seeds to speed plant-growth time.
After the episode aired in May 2008, thousands of viewers sent texts to Mediae requesting more information about seed-soaking techniques. These viewers were sent a pamphlet with detailed instructions on how to soak their own seeds. Follow-up calls- which were part of a study to test the effectiveness of the show's messaging- revealed that 95 percent of those who had texted for more information had found the pamphlets helpful. And 57 percent had tried out seed soaking even before the pamphlet arrived, just based on the information provided on the show. Ninety-four percent said that they had shared the information with up to five other people.
By peppering the drama-infused lives of its characters with demonstrations of agricultural practices, trips to the doctor for tuberculosis tests, and Kenyan history, Makutano Junction serves to both entertain and provide reliable information for families throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This is soap opera drama that people can actually relate to-and learn from.
Thank you for reading! As you may already know, Danielle Nierenberg is traveling across sub-Saharan Africa visiting organizations and projects that provide environmentally sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty. She has already traveled to over 19 countries and visited 130 projects highlighting stories of hope and success in the region. She will be in Benin next, so stay tuned for more writing, photos and video from her travels.
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The ISP that serves The American Liberalism Project and many other liberal websites is called SoapBlox and operates out of Denver with computers in Texas. Yesterday and early this morning massive hacker attacks brought SoapBlox to its knees.
(+) SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.
Thanks for all the fish.
All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.
So I hope the Hackers are happy.
If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.
Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.
Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.
We do not know when they will come back online.
We do not know if they will come back online.
"Pacified" gets a little emotional, so if you are reading this, you know that the servers were restored and everything is working at least temporarily. ALP still is going out of business at the end of the day January 31st, however. We need to comment on things that have no bearing on Liberalism, so we need a new venue.
The free speech business is tough these days. When I return to the internet after ALP closes, my website will probably be called "Iron Mountain." I will endeavor to be inscrutable so that fascist hackers don't know whether to hack me or not.
Rob Kall, proprietor of OpEdNews, where I sometimes post articles that I have written for ALP, has an excellent article today that poses the strawman question of "which progressive positions are extreme left?" He enumerates the classical liberal agenda, calls it the Progressive agenda because he is still not comfortable with the L-word, and then makes the point that each one of the positions is really a "centrist" position.
This is a confusing essay in the sense that it is so well written that one comes to believe that there is something radical about basic liberal platform planks. Then we find out they are centrist, but that all of rightwing Christendom is against them. Okay, that is false. All of the right, including the neocons and the religious right, are not against returning to constitutional government characterized by a rule of law. They just don't understand the principle of steadfastness, and trot out the idea that the "constitution is not a suicide pact" whenever they get really frightened.
"All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance -- unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment]."
Justice William J. Brennan
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Roth v. United States, 1957
On my recent trip to L.A. I noted that SUVs were less abundant than usual. I saw many more Priuses in L.A. than I expected, but lots and lots of BMW 6-series. One guy had a 10 cylinder BMW and I walked up to him at the pump and asked how he liked his gorgeous new toy. Twelve mpg, he said, and a small tank, so I spend lots of my time here at the pump. That pump was $5.05.9/gal! He probably doesn't care, since this was Brentwood, but his Beamer is just as much a dinosaur as the Expeditions and Navigators on our streets. Mark Morford up in San Francisco thinks the SUV era is over. I sure hope so.
The NYT this morning has an article about computers that I thought interesting enough to spoon your way so you don't miss it in the rush to consume Monday and move on. The report does not amount to a revolution, per se, but it does get to the issue of access. The lower the cost, of course, the broader the access ... and clearly the internet is the place to be these days.
On a separate subject I was down on the Mexican border yesterday visiting friends in mining town Phelps-Dodge turned into a horror of the imagination, an open pit for strip-mining copper (until 1972 or so, when the price went down too far to continue operations), but which local ingenuity and a great climate have turned into the weirdest little tourist trap you have ever seen. Bisbee, AZ is a scant five miles from the border and so we went down to look at "the fence."
It was like being thrown back to Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and "Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin!" It was ugly and it went on over the horizon of hills. Riding back I had a feeling of revulsion and embarrassment. Yet, the stories in this part of the country are fully ripe not only with tales of "coyotes" herding eager workers across the border at upwards of $5k a head, but also drug lords and drug czars battling it out at and across the border. We really need to work with the Mexican government to stop this, for the alternatives do not seem very pleasant at all.
I have a thing about the U.S. Air Force. Being a former Naval Officer I am admittedly prejudiced, but I think the facts back me up. The Air Force is irrelevant, corrupt, shot through with religious zealots, and—no surprise—replete with senior officers whose backsides need a sound kick for their prissy finagling over "comfort capsules". The hard facts are that generals and senior AF civilians would be better off in web seats near the back door of C-130s ... so we could jettison them easily if the cost of fuel goes up. Air Force planes fly too high to be effective in modern warfare, their "surgical" strike mythology is just that ... bullhockey. You will read more and more about this as the other services are called to fix what the AF cannot do right in three or four tries.
The firing of the AF Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force recently is loud testimony to the case for disestablishing the Air Force before it accidentally nukes a city in CONUS for, you know, the AF brass shrugged off the implications of the North Dakota nukes ending up in Louisiana as if running unaccounted for nukes across our fair land was what they do routinely. Thoroughly corrupt, the Air Force must go. Put me in charge and I could do it in a month!
A correspondent in Florida noticed this article about things that are becoming so rare they just might disappear entirely. The internet is one of the replacements, and please notice that the infrastructure for the internet is vulnerable and that the back-ups for internet replacements and substitutions are not at all a sure thing. But, then, cities are like that. We trade self-reliance at marginal effectiveness for efficiencies of other kinds.
Yesterday I came into possession of a link to an essay by a writer whom we have featured here several times. Stephen Pizzo is a good writer and he unloaded on us yesterday with a hair-raising story about the U.S. and world finanical markets situation. You should read this essay now before going further here.
The rest of my comments are below "the fold" and are meant to make a point that several of us learned the hard way.
Mark Morford's column in the San Francisco Chronicle today is a pleasant yoyo exercise between the shocks encountered as we forge ahead into our new era and the pleasantness that—we get the feeling—are unintended consequences. Still, I noticed particularly that Mark reads the NYr, and is pondering the reliability of George Packer's article (posted here yesterday).
I play golf. I have no handicap. I don't play well enough to have one. Also I don't play often enough to have one, even though my little neighborhood is surrounded by golf courses. I do know something about golf, though, and it is that whatever is wrong with your "game," including the fact that you don't really have "a game (predictable skills producing something you can count on)," you will come up with endless excuses for the deficits and flaws in your thrashing around out in Mother Nature's green paradises. Very few of the excuses will actually relate to something you're doing wrong, and most will center on things happening around you: someone coughs during your backswing, there was an ant on your ball, the wind was so bad the balls went backwards, it was the day of my wife's funeral and I couldn't keep my mind on the game, etc.
Oh well. My Bruins never figured it out. They were outmanned and outcoached. They never reached the level of intensity that the Memphis Tigers brought in. And, althought the Tar Heels are generally the bogeyman to my Cavaliers in the ACC, they too looked stunned and wanting of intensity most of their game. We cannot cry for these teams because, well, since my UCLA days at the height of the Wooden era, college basketball has become an appendage of the NBA. Bruin fans are said to have cheered the phenom freshman center Kevin Love with "one more year!" The point being that these are not student atheletes, they are not even witless stooges of their campus booster organizations, gladiators for keeping the alumni contributions coming. They are using the universities as staging grounds for their jump into bling and money, and they really don't care about "the program" or about academics. What they do care about is getting hurt before they can immerse themselves in all that money. The only cure is to prohibit the NBA from signing a matriculated student before his (or her) senior year. The rationale is pure selfishness. It is a pleasure to watch these young athletes compete. Go JayHawks! Go Tigers!
My colleague Susan (SueZ) is in the hospital since Wednesday. The family is not ready to say what the problem or prognosis is. Of course we are hoping that she returns to her computer and postings for ALP as soon as possible. Best wishes to you SueZ!
In today's Huffington Post you will see an article by Jeff Chang, who purports to understand both the Hispanic and Asian votes in California back on Tuesday. I am usually ready to acquire new terminology, but in this case I think Mr. Chang has opened a crock of baloney. Word play is fun, but sound-bite intelligence does not need new vocabulary. More to the point, though, the proof of his thesis is almost impossible to demostrate.
One of my great interests is cognition. I have been studying it for decades. Some of my interest in politics stems from my interest in the cognitive aspects of ideology, which naturally comes from my studies of Russia and the Soviet Union, Lenin, Marx, and the 19th century intellectuals who prepared the way for the October Revolution. I cannot say that I have discovered anything new about cognition, ideology and politics, except that in isolated circumstances, where very little counter-argument seeps in, such as in people who watch Fox for news exclusively or Pravda during the nearly 75 years of the Communist regime in Russia, a peculiar mental condition emerges. It is very much like a "conversion" or "born-again" experience, I imagine. It is a short-circuiting of reason that is manifested by increasing transparency of the founding premises. These premises become "taken for granted" and recede into the background where they work, but do not take up much "room" in daily thoughts. Thus, this report from well-known bloggist David Sirota begins to make some sense. The "private sector," Republican candidate in Ohio may truly have believed that he had no agenda! It is interesting to note that this kind of effect is seen rarely among Democrats, largely because Democrats are used to a wide variety of inputs and so challenge their presuppositions more or less on a daily basis.
Sometimes in the dead of winter with driveways to shovel and fragile plants to cover up from overnight freezes we get a little despondent. Mark Morford last Friday offered up a bunch of things to be happy about, and I swore that I would publish a link to them, and finally have gotten around to it.
The last place most of us look to for useful information is television soap operas. But 
On my recent trip to L.A. I noted that SUVs were less abundant than usual. I saw many more Priuses in L.A. than I expected, but lots and lots of BMW 6-series. One guy had a 10 cylinder BMW and I walked up to him at the pump and asked how he liked his gorgeous new toy. Twelve mpg, he said, and a small tank, so I spend lots of my time here at the pump. That pump was $5.05.9/gal! He probably doesn't care, since this was Brentwood, but his Beamer is just as much a dinosaur as the Expeditions and Navigators on our streets. Mark Morford up in San Francisco thinks 