A non domesticated look at the Black Middle Class.

Kai Wright explains why many people who appear to be middle class quickly fall into need during economic strife.

Myth of Black middle class

The wealth of knowledge that will die with this man and an entire culture and people will also die with him. Sad…..

Sole survivor of Amazon tribe is most isolated man on Earth

by Sean McLachlan

He’s the last of his kind.

Nobody knows his name, nobody knows his tribe’s name, and nobody knows what happened to the rest of his people. The last man of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is now being protected from the outside world by the Brazilian government.

Officials have created a 31 square-mile exclusion zone in his patch of rain forest to keep out loggers, something local logging companies aren’t too happy about. In fact, nobody is allowed inside.

Isolated tribes have always fascinated outsiders. Early explorers tracked them down to photograph them, like this Amazonian tribesman photographed in the 1922 publication People of all Nations. Anthropologists have tried to contact the sole survivor of the unknown tribe for 15 years now, but he’s always shied away. Once an agent got too close and received an arrow in his chest.

A report by Slate says he’s the most isolated man on Earth. His patch of rain forest is now an island amid ranching and logging areas, a potent symbol of what’s happening to isolated tribes all around the world. Tribes that have little or no contact with outsiders are highly susceptible to disease and exploitation and there’s a growing movement to help them. For example, there’s an ongoing controversy in the Andaman Islands over a resort built near the Jarawa tribe. The government wants to close it in order to take pressure off this tribe of only 320 people.

Grim evidence suggests what may have happened to the unknown Amazonian’s people. He is known to build a distinctive style of hut, and a village of identical huts was found in the rain forest–run over by a bulldozer.

A flyover of another uncontacted tribe two years ago resulted in some dramatic photos showing the startled tribesmen shooting arrows at the airplane. While the media made a big hype about how they had probably never seen planes before, that seems unlikely. They’re simply protecting their territory from an outside world they perceive as dangerous and hostile. In other words, they want to be left alone.

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Fighting Drugs With Drugs: An Obscure Hallucinogen Gains Legitimacy as a Solution for Addictions

By Steven Kotler

Trippy Medicine Ibogaine, derived from a plant root, acts on the brain’s nicotine receptors to help alleviate cravings for alcohol and drugs like heroin. Courtesy Christopher Hansen/Clare S. Wilkins/Pangea Biomedics

Giving a heroin addict one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs seems like a bad idea. Yet that’s exactly what a group of scientists will do this month. Ibogaine, they say, might be the best way to break drug addicts of their habit.

Ibogaine, a brown powder derived from the African Tabernathe iboga plant, has intrigued researchers since 1962, when Howard Lotsof, a student at New York University and an opiate addict, found that a single dose erased his drug cravings without causing any withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, the hallucinogen can increase the risk of cardiac arrest, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency lists it as a Schedule 1 substance, a classification for drugs like ecstasy and LSD with “no known medical value” and “high potential for abuse,” making it difficult to get federal funding to run clinical trials.

Ibogaine Roots:  Laurent Sazy/Fedephoto

Animal tests, however, have shown the drug’s medicinal promise. “Rats addicted to morphine will quit for weeks after receiving ibogaine,” says Stanley Glick, the director of the Center for Neuropharmacology and Neuroscience at Albany Medical College. And addicts have reported positive effects in Mexico and Europe, where ibogaine therapy is legal. “Going cold turkey is horrible. There’s vomiting and diarrhea and pain and a constant drug craving,” says Randy Hencken, a drug user who was treated in Mexico. “After ibogaine, I didn’t feel any symptoms or cravings. I’ve been clean for nine years. Heroin and cocaine no longer have any power over me.”

Despite these successes, ibogaine lacks scientific credibility. “As great as ibogaine seems, no one knows exactly how effective it is as a treatment,” says Valerie Mojieko, the director of clinical research for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS), a privately funded Massachusetts-based nonprofit. So starting this month, MAPS will enlist Clare Wilkins, the director of Pangea Biomedics, to run the first long-term study to gauge the drug’s lasting effects at her clinic in Mexico (where patients already pay $5,000 for the treatment). She will treat 20 to 30 heroin addicts and, for the next year, MAPS will subject them to psychological and drug tests to quantify ibogaine’s effectiveness.

The study will also help establish how to prescribe the drug safely. “Most psychedelics are relatively harmless,” says neurologist Deborah Mash of the University of Miami, “but ibogaine has a much narrower margin for error.” Mash runs an ibogaine clinic in St. Kitts and has treated more than 400 addicts without incident in the past decade. But in the early 1990s, overdoses of the drug at a clinic in the Netherlands led to several deaths, which ultimately scared off the National Institute of Drug Addiction (NIDA) from starting its own research program in the U.S.

From the limited research, though, scientists have two theories about how ibogaine works. Some say it’s purely biological—that ibogaine degrades into a compound that binds with opiate receptors in the brain to quiet cravings. Others believe that it is also psychological, with the “whole-life review” part of the hallucination providing perspective on the negative aspects of drug use, and so the subject strives to quit.

Regardless of the mechanism, proving ibogaine works is essential to winning approval and funding for clinical trials in the U.S. The sooner the better: Nearly seven million Americans abuse illicit drugs, costing the nation an estimated $181 billion a year in health care, crime and lost productivity.

The MAPS study should begin to answer questions about ibogaine’s efficacy and safety, but most experts think prescriptions are 10 to 15 years away. Until then, desperate patients will continue to seek out treatment in unregulated places such as Mexico, and that’s ideal for neither the patients nor the researchers. Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, hopes this study will force regulators’ hands. “If we can show great results, it could increase support for ibogaine clinics and maybe get NIDA interested again—because that’s who really should be doing this research.”

Drugs and Needles:  Marianne Williams/Getty Images

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Sex Tourism

By Annan Boodram

August 1-15, 2001: “Amidst the hand-gliders, speedboats and sunbathers on the beaches of the Caribbean, there are the buffed (and not so buffed) bodies of young men hoping to catch the eye of a single tourist woman looking for a good time. And if that is the case, they have come to the right place.
Indeed “BEACH BUMS” are on the increase. And some teenaged boys are leaving school to get involved. This is according to Barbadian-born Dr Joan Phillips, a post doctorate research fellow at the University of London.
“Fourteen to 15-year-old boys are leaving school to go on the beach to get to the big money. The big money is having sex with tourists. They tell you that school was not doing anything for them. They usually start during summer and then don’t go back to school,” she said.
“From my study carried out in Barbados, I argue sex tourism is about all the above, including romance, remuneration and entrepreneurship. It is based on racialised sexual fantasies of the black man; it’s about the black man trying to be white. It’s the new commodity on sale for the tourist dollar and the newly liberated in search of the post-colonial Mandingo.”
Phillips did not give figures, but said, “A guestimate could be one in five couples on the beaches and perhaps one in three couples at certain nightclubs. What is significant is that it has become more visible over the last ten years.”
She stressed also that “beach bums” were not the only ones involved in sex tourism, which also took place in the privacy of hotels and massage parlours.
As to the financial rewards, Phillips added: “There are cases where he gets to travel to a European country with all expenses paid for a couple of months, up to a cash sum of US$15 000, the gift of an 18-carat gold ring, the underwriting of shopping sprees, apartment rentals, jetski and general subsistence.”
“It begins with the woman paying for drink and entry to clubs, then after about two weeks, when she is about to leave, she accompanies him to Bridgetown, where he is treated to a shopping bonanza of brand name articles.”
Dr. Phillips emphasized that sex tourism, a product of slavery, was not new to the Caribbean. White women always wanted to sample black men, while the latter saw them as their hope of financial and social boost, she added.
American sociologist Klaus de Albuquerque agrees with the erotic element to sex tourism. He believes that for the white woman who flock to the Caribbean for sea, sun and mostly sex, it’s a ‘phallic sojourn’ in search of the ‘big bamboo’.
If an ‘escort’ plays his cards right, being with a tourist sexually can raise him a pretty penny. Most of the women are into oral sex, largely taboo among Jamaican males; for this act, some of the women are reportedly willing to pay as much as US$100. According to a Jamaican beach bum ‘Jim’, this is normally played out in their hotel room.
The success of the Terry McMillan’s book and film ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’ added a fillip to sex tourism as many successful American women flocked to the Caribbean beaches to find sex and romance.
Indeed the majority of these adventurous tourists travel to Jamaica in the winter season. They are single women in their mid-forties and are from major cities in the United States. They are not necessarily into long-term relationships, but Jim says they return regularly to their island boy, bringing gifts like jewellery, designer sneakers and clothing.
But while they like the gifts the ‘escorts’ ultimate hope is to be like Winston, Terry MacMillan’s lover – marrying and migrating, preferably to the United States. It gives them an opportunity for a new life and better days for their children
But to Dr Anthony Bryan, a prominent Caribbean scholar and professor of international relations at the North-South Centre of the University of Miami, the desire of white women and men to pay for sex can be traced, in part, to “The racist stereotype of the exotic and erotic black or mixed-race woman or man”.
Writing in Caribbean Tourism: Igniting The Engines Of Sustainable Growth, a paper published by the North-South Centre, Dr. Bryan examines several facets of the tourism industry, including its growth, the social and cultural impact, the problem of HIV-AIDS, sustainable development and the future of the industry in countries that run the gamut of tourist destinations.
Dr. Byran defines sex tourism as activities by foreign visitors that include ‘typical prostitution’; the trafficking of women, men and young girls. In addition, he pointed out, it caters to a diverse group, heterosexuals, homosexuals and pedophiles.
“One of the most serious yet inconspicuous activities causing far-reaching and sometimes irreversible damage to the social and cultural fabric of local societies is that of sex tourism,” he warned.
The Trinidad born researcher, believes white men and women go to the Caribbean and other parts of the world for sex because of a quest for ‘gender equality’ and what they do is spurred on by ‘racialised power’.
He pointed out that many sociologists think some male tourists who resent ‘women’s perceived power’ at home turn to women in third world tourist destinations, because it gives them a chance to escape the pressures from their wives, girlfriends, or colleagues for equal rights and status in the home and on the job.
“Female prostitutes in the Caribbean, in contrast, typically neither challenge nor demand anything much from male sex tourists,” he said.
White women are also turning to Caribbean men to challenge some of their own men’s traditional roles or to live out their sexual fantasies.
“Such female sex tourists affirm their sense of womanliness by being sexually desired by other men,” wrote Bryan who is also director of Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami. He added, “in their home countries, these women may be stigmatized for having either illegitimate or casual relations with black men or younger men, or for having many sexual partners” .
“In holiday resorts such as Negril, Jamaica, white women are allowed anonymity to enjoy liaisons with black males, younger boys, or as many men as they desire, out of view of neighbors and friends in their home countries.”
“Some argue that sex tourism provides an economic opportunity for marginalised subgroups of the population,” wrote Dr. Bryan. But it is also “one of the contributing factors to the HIV-AIDS epidemics, Hepatitis B and C, and other diseases.”
And this is a critical reality in a region where AIDS is a sustainable development issue that could affect the very economic survival of the Caribbean.

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Why oh why do they give equal marks for the working out in Maths as they do for the right answers? “You know I can work it out in my head, unless you think I guessed every answer. So let me get this straight. You think that it’s equally important for me to prove to you that I would still be able to do this if I was useless at Maths as it is for me to prove to you that I can actually do it? You want me to do this without thinking?” I hated history at school. They managed to suck all the life out of it. History isn’t about memorising dates, as long as the events are in the right order. It’s about putting the present into context. They seemed to teach Science backwards. They’d tell you how something works but not why it does. The whole system is geared towards knowing things by memory rather than understanding them.

MJ Speaks on Black history. Michael knows what he was talking about. “The history books are lying.” – MJ

What a waste

As you approach Gaza’s main dump by road you see a massive wall of trash looming over the plain.

It’s crawling with around one hundred scavenger dogs and dozens of poor children, combing through the trash for anything they can sell.

In this cesspit of disease is 20 percent of all the donated medicine Gaza has received since the end of the January 2009 war with Israel.

The Health Ministry in the deposed government of Hamas and the World Health Organisation say this aid had already expired or was close to expiring, before it arrived in Gaza.

So now officials are left with the job of disposing of it. But how? Gaza doesn’t have the proper facilities to do it, so it’s dumped in a landfill and bulldozed along with the rest of the garbage.

Millions of dollars of aid – going to waste.

Men use their bare hands to push boxes of medicine off the back of a truck, into the dump. The stench is disgusting and flies are everywhere.

Not only are donors sending expired medicine, the Health Ministry says most of the aid they receive is unsuitable, poor quality, and the wrong types of drugs.

As for medical equipment, doctors say it’s often outdated, up to 10 years old, broken, and incompatible with the local electricity supply.

In total, the Ministry claims they have to dispose of 70 percent of all the medical aid they’ve received in the last 18 months.

A dumping ground for aid?

One doctor told us he believes Gaza has become a dumping ground for aid. But Gaza isn’t alone. He says sometimes medicine is sent to El Arish in Egypt, before going overland to Gaza. When Gaza’s officials are told it’s expired, they reject it, and it’s then sent to Darfur in Sudan!

The Health Ministry says two months ago it received $2 million worth of Tamiflu drugs for the H1N1 virus, enough for a third of Gaza’s population.  The ministry didn’t want these drugs, saying the H1N1 threat had passed. So the Tamiflu is also in the rubbish dump now.

They also say sometimes donors send huge supplies of drugs, more than Gaza could use in five years. Unable to get through it all, it expires and has to be dumped.

Co-ordination with Hamas

Dr Ehab Hjazi, the Head of the Donations Committee in the Health Ministry for the deposed government of Hamas, says if countries and organisations co-ordinated with the ministry directly, they would find out exactly what Gaza needs. And the list is long. Hospitals are critically short of 115 drugs, including antibiotics and cancer drugs.

But while Hamas is listed in many countries as a ‘terrorist’ group, donors’ hands are tied. If they deal with Hamas, they risk being banned and losing their funding.

However, donors can find out what Gaza needs from the World Health Organisation.

So it”s time for the international community to get it right.

Sending millions of dollars worth of aid may give a country or Non Government Organisation (NGO) some positive short-term publicity.  But if it’s ending up in landfill where children and dogs sift through it, then it’s more than a problem for the people of Gaza, it’s an insult. 

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Trinidad as a ‘Contact Society’

By Derren Joseph

There has been much discussion around the AG’s recent appointment of a five member legal and forensic audit team to investigate certain state enterprises and the call for information from whistleblowers. It recognizes the importance placed on addressing alleged corruption. After all, one can argue that perceived government corruption was at least partly responsible for our last two changes in government. But what exactly is corruption?

Much of our focus as a nation tends to be around public sector procurement. This focus makes sense given that a privately held company is not generally accountable to the wider public for its decisions. At the same time however, public sector corruption can hardly take place without private sector assistance. So the focus needs to be on both the state entities and the members of the private sector who play a facilitating role.

Some argue that we are a “contact society”. They go on to say that in Trinidad, everything is about who you know. Personally, my choice of bank branch is driven by who I know working in that branch to help minimize my waiting time. Even my choice of carnival band is influenced by any familiarity we may have with the band’s Committee Members. But is this notion of a “contact society” at the heart of corruption?

From my undergraduate days at UWI, I remember having to read Geert Hofstede who contributed much to our understanding of how cultures differ. But it was another, less famous Dutchman, Fons Trompenaars who opened my eyes to this notion of a “contact society”. Among the dimensions of culture which he identified to assist us in conceptualizing how cultures differ – one stood out for me. The scale of Universalism vs. Particularism explores the degree to which people believe that various ideas and practices can be effective in all circumstances. So on one hand, societies that are high in universalism believe they can develop rules and standards that can be reasonably applied to everyone in every situation and they rely heavily on contracts, formal systems, and procedures to convey what they expect from others.

On the other hand, societies which are low in universalism or high in particularism develop their expectations of others based on their personal relationships and their trust in relationships rather than on rules. So the theory says that when negotiating deals, people from highly particularistic cultures will want to develop a relationship with the other party before getting down to business. While those from highly universalistic cultures prefer to get down to business quicker, and they expect to document their agreement with an enforceable contract. Trompenaars’ studies suggest that the US, Australia, Germany and Switzerland are examples of countries high in universalism. Venezuela, the former Soviet Union’s countries, Indonesia and China are examples of nations high in particularism. I suspect that most would agree that generally speaking, Trinidad would score higher in particularism than universalism.

One approach may not be better than another. They are simply different. Two other countries that score high in particularism and low in universalism are Japan and South Korea. As we know, Japan’s post war economic expansion was driven by the various Keiretsu. The keiretsu are groups of associated companies usually centered around one bank, which lent money to the keiretsu’s member companies and held equity positions in the companies. Wikipedia explains that there are apparently two types of keiretsu – vertical and horizontal. Although the divisions between them have blurred in recent years, there are six major postwar keiretsu: such as the Tokai or Toyota group which is built around the Tokai Bank

In South Korea, the equivalent would be the Chaebols and include well-known international brand names, such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG. So is a contact society or a society that scores high in particularism more “corrupt”? Some would vociferously argue that this is the case and that to completely root out corruption, particularism itself needs to be rooted out.

To be honest, I can see both sides of view. That is, those who want to root it out and those who think it just needs to be controlled. While this debate rages, the definition of corruption that works best for me is the one used by the Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute (TTTI) – the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Let us support the TTTI in making our country better. For more details please visit www.transparency.org.tt

My name is Derren Joseph and I love my country. As always, I end by saying that despite our challenges, we are so blessed to live in this beautiful land. Let us continue to have the audacity of hope in our country, as we embark upon the next chapter in our nation’s history.

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Many people are under the erroneous assumption that rice cultivation is a strictly Asian accomplishment since Asians have dominated the industry inother countries outside of Asia where they currently reside. Asians are also touted by historians in such a way that history diminishes the African origins and acheivements in the cultivation and development of rice as a staple American food by the Africans Europeans kidnapped and forcefully enslaved. The article below informative and brief gives and understanding of this history. – Khalif ‘Ras’ Williams

Divine Rice, Artist Sonya Y. Clark, The Art of African/American Foodways

To launch this series, we introduce you to the prolific and smart textile artist Sonya Y. Clark and her piece, Divine Rice, that she made specifically for the show. Read her words below for a more detailed description of how rice was cultivated in the Americas. Carolina Gold Rice succeeded because of West Africans’ intimate knowledge of rice cultivation.

     In this piece rice grains honor ancestral knowledge. These seeds hold wisdom and stories that survive well beyond our years. Here, they represent the principles of Yoruba Ifa divination that have guided the spiritual practice of many of the same folks who worked the Southeastern rice fields many years ago, their progenitors, and their descendants.” –Sonya Y. Clark

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Iceland Set to Become a Press Freedom Haven

After Iceland’s near-economic collapse laid bare deep-seated corruption, the country aims to become a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from around the globe by creating the world’s most far-reaching freedom of information legislation.

The project is being developed with the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

It flies in the face of a growing tendency of governments trying to stifle a barrage of secret and sometimes embarrassing information made readily available by the internet.

On 16 June a unanimous parliament voted in favour of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a resolution aimed at protecting investigative journalists and their sources.

‘We took all the best laws from around the world and pulled them together, just like tax havens do, in order to create freedom of information and expression, a transparency haven,’ Birgitta Jonsdottir, the member of parliament behind the initiative, said.

Describing herself as an ‘anarchist’, the 43-year-old said she had decided to get into politics to seize the opportunities to change the system in Iceland following its dramatic financial collapse at the end of 2008.

Ms Jonsdottir was shocked to witness the attempts at censorship in her country, which had long been held up as a model democracy.

In the most resounding example, a court injunction in August 2009 forced Icelandic public broadcaster RUV to back down at the last minute from transmitting a report on one of the country’s three largest banks that all collapsed less than a year earlier, pushing Iceland to the verge of bankruptcy.

Instead of its report on the Kaupthing bank’s loanbook, RUV broadcast images from whistleblower site WikiLeaks, which had published the incriminating documents, in an attempt to draw attention to the limits being put on freedom of expression in Iceland.

‘Freedom of information and freedom of speech are the pillars of democracy. Now, if you don’t have that, you don’t really have a democracy,’ said Ms Jonsdottir, wearing ‘Free Tibet’ and ‘Wikileaks’ pins on her jacket.

Blaming the threat of terrorism, ‘all countries are facing new sets of laws which are making it more difficult in particular for investigative journalists and book writers,’ she said.

The aspiring ‘island of transparency’ aims to strengthen source protection, encourage whistleblowers to leak information and help counter so-called ‘libel tourism’, which consists in dragging journalists before foreign courts in countries with laws that best suit the prosecution.

The idea is to imitate and combine the existing most far-reaching laws in countries renowned for their freedom of expression, like the US, Sweden and Belgium.

‘I don’t think that there is anything radical in (IMMI). The radicalism around it is to pull these laws together,’ Jonsdottir said.

‘We have seen that really (such protections) are necessary’, said WikiLeaks founder Assange, whose name became known after his site last month published nearly 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

‘That’s our experience in the developing world and in most developed countries: that the press is being routinely censored by abusive legal actions’, he said recently in a video posted on Youtube.

Mr Assange, who spends much of his time in Iceland and other countries where the legislation is more in his favour, created WikiLeaks’ first global scoop in Reykjavik earlier this year.

Locked up for weeks at a time in a house in the Icelandic capital, he and a handful of other WikiLeaks supporters managed to decrypt and post online a military video showing a US military Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007 that killed two Reuters employees and a number of other people.

WikiLeaks along with a number of non-governmental organisations and international celebrities like European member of parliament Eva Joly have contributed to developing IMMI.

Journalists in Iceland and abroad have applauded the initiative.

‘By offering tight protection to the sources, it will be a lot safer to report on abuses in the government or in the corporate community,’ said Wikileaks insider and Icelandic freelance reporter Kristinn Hrafnsson.

‘When you know you can pass on information safely, you’re more prone to do it,’ he said.

But the resolution will also have implications beyond Iceland’s borders.

‘In countries where they are oppressed such as China and Sri Lanka, journalists risk their lives,’ Ms Jonsdottir said.

‘We can’t help them with that, but at least we can ensure that their stories won’t be removed’ from the internet, by posting them on servers located in Iceland where the censors cannot get at them, she said.

According to Ms Jonsdottir, it will take about a year-and-a-half – the estimated time required to change at least 13 existing laws – before IMMI will go into effect.

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