What else didn't Sarah Palin know? It's starting to leak out of the McCain camp now. Check out this site and Bill O'Reilly video. It shows that Sarah Palin was abhorrently uninformed about basic matters affecting national security and that John McCain was trying to commit a fraud on the…
Not very difficult, according to Jeffrey Sachs. Hard as it is for us to imagine, Africa's households simply can't afford even $10 for a net, or a dollar for medicines when a child falls sick. Nor can African governments carry these costs on meager budgets or take extra vital steps…
National Geographic's Genographic Project offers all of us an extraordinary opportunity: a method of tracing each of our family trees back to our African roots. Yes, each of us is African. An ever-growing collection of DNA studies unambiguously demonstrate that each of us had ancestors who lived in Africa more…
[This idea was born as a comment here, but I decided to create a separate post out of it]. What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother's mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years. The woman at the end of that 300 foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You'd still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. Isn't it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I'm assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago? Now think even further back. In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That's about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute. It wouldn’t take long to reach the last of your relatives who looks like you. In fact, your trip would have barely begun. Biologically modern humans (those whose bodies are the functional equivalent of our own bodies) came onto the scene between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Driving at highway speed parallel to that line of your own relatives, you'd run out of your biologically modern human relatives less than one-minute after beginning your trip. That's only 4,000 generations. [More . . . ]
I haven’t seen Hotel Rwanda. I actually rented the movie, and my husband and I started to watch it, but we had to stop. We knew what was going to happen, and we didn’t want to see it: we would have known what was going to happen even if we hadn’t had advance knowledge of the story. He and I know all about Africa. Personally, I am too broken-hearted about what is happening there to watch it played out on a 42-inch plasma TV screen.
It’s not just happening in Rwanda. We only hear about Ruanda more often now because this particular story has given that region a voice.
The stories are endless, one more chilling than the next. In South Africa, gangs of black youths who suspect an individual of not being “one of them” inflict horrible death. And they do not reserve the torture for adults. Children are not immune. One favorite form of execution involves soaking a tire in gasoline, placing the tire around the neck of the bound victim, and setting it alight. I repeat, this is done to children as well as adults. It is done to blacks by blacks, and the rationale behind the brutality is obscure. Sometimes it is tribal – amaZulu against any black not Zulu – sometimes there is a loosely formulated political agenda. Sometimes it is simply a case of bloodlust.
This is no urban myth. We have witnessed something like it personally. On our last trip to South Africa …
