Nigeria's Self-Colonialism

I happened to stumble upon www.nigeria.gov.ng, which is billed as "The Official Information Gateway of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It has a bunch of useful information about the country, and there's even a link labeled "National Identity," and here's where it gets ironic: The first thing I noticed was a pull-down menu labeled "Choose language".

The menu included nine European languages and four Asian languages, but not a single African language. The country has eight official languages besides English according to ethnologue.com, all of which are indigenous to the country, but the Nigerian government choses not to show its face to the world in these languages, which is a pity because I would have liked to see it written in Igbo (not that I understand Igbo, but I like to see the look of foreign tongues).

The real tragedy is that the Nigerian government requires most of its citizens to read its website in a second language. This might not seem too dire in light of the country's other problems—militants run amok in the oil region, overzealous enforcement of Sharia in the north, endemic corruption at all levels of government, etc,—but it is symptomatic of a greater problem: the government's lack of responsiveness to its citizens.

Perhaps the government could begin to tackle its myriad problems with the simple gesture of being accessable online in the native tongues of its citizens which, when you think about it, can't be nearly as difficult as translating it into French, German, Russian, Greek, Korean, Japanese and two kinds of Chinese.

I Miss Ashcroft

I remember jumping for joy back in '04 when John Ashcroft resigned. It was his overall creepiness, the T.I.P.S Program, his handling of Guantanamo Bay, "Let the Eagle Soar" and clothing the Statue of Justice at his office that seemed to symbolize all that was wrong about the Bush Administration.

Enter the soft-spoken Alberto Gonzales. You know, the guy who called the torture provisions of the Geneva Convention "quaint." You know, the warentless wiretapping guy.

It's this last point I want to dwell on for a bit. I ran into this article on the BBC today, about how Senate is going to hold a no-confidence vote on Gonzales over the whole political firings of judges fiasco and I ran across this passage:

...Mr Gonzales had been to the hospital bed of then Attorney General John Ashcroft to try to persuade him to reauthorise a controversial domestic spying programme.

Mr Ashcroft, who was seriously ill in intensive care, refused despite the Bush administration's pressure because he had reservations about the legality of the warrantless wiretapping.

Yes, for all his creepiness, Ashcroft did have a decent bone somewhere in his body, and as bad as Gonzales is, I'd hate to see the beast that replaces him if he's forced to resign.

"The Quaint Mr. Gonzales" at Truthout

A Problem with Democracy

One of the inherent problems with democracy is that elected officials feel the need to pass ill-advised laws just so that they'll look like they're doing something about the "problem" of the day. The reason I put problem in quotes is because most of them were made up in order for politicians to have something that they can appear to be doing something about, but I'll get back to that later.

To give an example, I caught whatever crud was floating around last month, so I went to the supermarket to buy some Sudafed (of course). I'm sure many of you are aware of what I had to go through: I grabbed a card with a picture of Sudafed off the rack and took it to the pharmacy, where they took my ID to run a check. When they found that no, I wasn't cooking meth and that no, I hadn't been buying copious amounts of pseudoephedrine, they produced the box, which I had to pay for right there.

Well, enough of this, I thought, so I went down to the health food store when I ran out of pills and asked for ephedra root. The girl told me, "Sorry, it's been banned," and hooked me up with something just as good.

In case any of you have been hiding under a rock for the past few years, one of today's big "crises" is the crystal methamphetamine epidemic that's sweeping the nation. Never mind that it's been the mainstay of trailer parks everywhere since World War II, a group of politicians somewhere only recently dug it up because hey, they needed a problem to pass laws about, so they could appear to be doing something so they would get re-elected because they care about us!

After my great difficulty in procuring cold relief, I did some research, and it turns out that you don't even need pseudoephedrine to cook meth. Instead of pseudoephedrine, you can isolate speed from phenylalanine. I suppose you politicians reading this now want to do something about the menace of phenylalanine, but you can't because it's an amino acid which is what protein is made of. Yeah, I'd just love to see them try to ban protein!

I'd tell you where I got this information, but then I'd be linking to a crystal meth recipe and our elected officials might want to do something about me.

Go ahead and Google it.