You're Not My Father?

Video here.  I love how they all include the bizarre hand clench moment.

Is that the Honeymoon Bungalow (that is an incredibly bad site) about 1:30 in?

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Everything Old Is New Again

Hoping to prevent a replay of last months rebel siege, the Chadian government is building a moat around the capital city N'Djamena.  

And while the government of Chad is building moats and chopping down trees to protect their citizens, the world is busy taking pictures of their fleeing compatriots from the relatively safe distance of 200 miles above the earth.  These are images (pdf) from UNOSAT (via War and Health) taken on Feb. 4th during the mass exodus from the capital, and you can't deny their power.  Satellites and moats.  Moats and satellites.  Its a crazy world.

  

Conspicuous Candidate Consumption

I was going to link to Richard Florida, re: his ideas about the creative class being necessary for economic development, in a post earlier today but didn't because, well, to be honest I've never read his book, only essay summarization's he's written and I often find myself agreeing with his critics more than him . . . but that's not the point, the point is that I saw this and now Tyler has linked to it and it got me thinking about the elections and the barrage of over-simplistic generalizations that will be making their way out of the mouths of pundits between now and November in attempts to explain how the nation is lining up behind the candidates and parties, I'm gonna stop this sentence right here because its getting out of hand.  Anyway, here are maps from some stats folks at Columbia U visualizing the number of Starbucks and Wal-Marts per capita.

Nothing too terribly surprising there.  Lots of Starbucks on the coasts, and lots of Wal-Marts in the heartland and the deep south.  (Insert blue state/red state corollary here)  Seeing this I was reminded that earlier in the primary season Obama was often referred to as "the Starbucks candidate" - a label intended to communicate, well, you know all the Starbucks cliches.  Hillary, likewise, was occasionally referenced as the Wal-Mart candidate in comparisons with Obama. So, how well do those characterizations hold up against actual Starbucks and Wal-Mart per-capita distribution?  Here's a map of Democratic primary results to date:

 

And, its pretty obvious that with only rare exceptions they don't match up - in fact they are a lot closer to being reversed with Clinton winning more of the coasts, Starbucks country, and Obama showing strong in the heartland and the deep south, Wal-Mart country.  Interestingly, both did well in Texas just as both Wal-Mart and Starbucks do well there.  Ok.  Well.  That was fun.  What do you know, generalizations don't usually hold up.  Good use of time there.

You Better Watch Your Ass Dracunculiasis

As far as I can determine this is the list of diseases slotted for eradication/elimination by the International Task Force for Disease Eradication and the WHO.

International Task Force for Disease Eradication - Sanctioned by The World Health Organization

Eradication and Elimination Programs Currently Sanctioned by The World Health Organization

Eradication

Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease): 1988 AFRO, 1991 WHA44.5, 2004 WHA 57.9. Target: 1995; revised to 2009

Poliomyelitis: 1988 WHA41.28. Target: 2000

Elimination

Neonatal tetanus: Original target: 1995.1989 WHA42.32 (environmental)

Leprosy: 1991 WHA44.9. Target: reduce cases to <1>Onchocerciasis (West Africa OCP): 1973 Agreement. Target: eliminate onchocerciasis "as a public health

 problem" in OCP area by 2002 (qualitative)

Onchocerciasis (Americas): 1991 PAHO:XIV. Target: eliminate "as a public health problem in the Americas" (morbidity) by 2007 (qualitative geographic)

Trachoma: 1998 WHA51.11. Target: "global elimination of blinding trachoma" (informally: by 2020; "GET 2020") (symptomatic)

Lymphatic filariasis: 1997 WHA50.29. Target: eliminate globally "as a public health problem" (informally: by 2020) [cites International Task Force for Disease Eradication]

Note:

WHO Press Release in March 1997 reports that leprosy, river blindness (onchocerciasis), Chagas' disease, and lymphatic filariasis "can be eliminated as public health problems within ten years"; cites a new report by the Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases.

Article in The New York Times, dated May 6, 2001 ("Ten Diseases on the Way Out"), names polio, Guinea worm, measles, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, blinding trachoma, leprosy, hepatitis B, maternal/neonatal tetanus, and iodine deficiency disorders.

And while you might think that such a list would contain, well, you know, EVERY disease there are apparently good reasons why it doesn't.  

Prompted by this article in yesterday's NYT and in light of this previous post.

Also worth a look:  For those interested the Malaria Atlas Project makes available some great maps and data on global malaria stats.

The Blunt Instrument of Democracy or The Mathematics of Big Vegetable

Thanks to that whole presidential hullabaloo going on the Farm Bill has pretty much receded into the nether from which it attempted to emerge last year.  However, hat tip to Marginal Revolution for bringing to light this op/ed piece by a farmer in Minnesota in The New York Times.  Its worth a read, here's a taste:

. . . . The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables. . . . Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

Furthering the frustration is the sense of . . . "well, what the hell do you do now?"

Comic Books and Development

I wonder if there is any connection between economic development and indigenous comic book creation?  Aya is penned by Marguerite Abouet and set in her native home of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and now available in an English translation in the U.S.  At what point in the economic development of a country do "fringe" artistic pursuits like comic books/graphic novels become economically viable?  While working with youth/children in Botswana I noticed first hand that they are just as likely to doodle fantastical fight scenes and explosions in the margins as westerners.  

This one probably doesn't signal that there is such a market in Ivory Coast as I'm sure that the bulk of sales took place in Europe and now America.  Are there indigenous comics being produced and marketed in more established African markets like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria?  Or are comic book writers and artists part of the brain drain as well (Abouet herself now lives in France.)?  Are there viable African super heroes?  I don't really get a good sense of things from either here or here.  

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