Day: September 18, 2000

Nigeria: Teenage Girl to Be Publicly Whipped for Pre-Marital Sex

    The ongoing takeover of Afghanistan by the Islamic extremist Taliban movement has received a lot of coverage in the United States, especially among feminist organizations who have rightly highlighted Afghanistan’s ongoing war against women’s human rights. Less well reported, however, are the victories that Islamic extremists are gaining in Nigeria, putting that country on the verge of civil war.

    In January 2000 the Nigerian state of Zamfara adopted Islamic law, Sharia, and since then it has been joined by seven other Nigerian states. Although not carried quite to the extremes that Sharia has been in Sudan and Afghanistan, it is nonetheless turning Nigerian into a nightmare.

    One of the more egregious violations is a return to public whipping of both men and women who engage in pre-marital sex. Several months ago a young couple caught engaging in sex were sentenced to a public lashing, and last week a court in Zamfara sentenced a pregnant 17-year-old girl to 180 lashes. The sentence is to be carried out 40 days after the girl gives birth.

    This sentence is particularly cruel since 100 of the lashes come for engaging in premarital sex, but 80 of the lashes are punishment for the girl’s compliance with a court order to name any men she had sex with. The girl complied and named three men she had slept with, but after police were unable to “prove” any of the men had sex with her, the Islamic court convicted her of falsely accusing the three men.

    Among other punishments, the BBC reports that “in August, two motorcycle taxi riders in Zamfara were lashed in punishment for carrying female Muslim passengers.”

    Like Sudan, Nigeria has a majority Muslim population in the north, but a majority Christian population in the south, and the spread of Sharia and Islamic extremist has led to violent clashes between Christians and Muslims that threatens to erupt into a full-fledge civil war along the lines of what has transpired in Sudan over the past few decades.

Source:

Sharia sentence for pregnant teenager. The BBC, September 14, 2000.

Can the Web Replace the Library?

That’s the question asked by a Wired news story. I think the answer is: absolutely, provided some sort of cheap, efficient solution presents itself to solve the problem of managing the copyright issue. There are a number of different library-like sites on the Internet already, but who wants to subscribe to 4 or 5 different sites for library access? (Which brings up the issue of how all of the stuff that in print is going to make it economically to the web — I do not think people who have never worked at a large university library realize just how much material there is produced on paper).

The article says that with an electronic library, “[students] can write an entire paper without ever visiting the campus library or cracking open a textbook.” Umm, many students already write entire papers without visiting the library or opening a textbook (I would be seriously surprised if more than 20 percent of students here ever check out a book).

Some academics are concerned that the commercial on-line libraries will threaten the not-for-profit academic libraries. I certainly hope so. Academic publishing is one area where the Internet is really going to explode the market. Academic publishers take a bath on most books they publish anyway, libraries have been cutting acquisition budgets, and it’s getting very expensive to store and maintain millions of books.

The real challenge will not be preserving the local university library or worrying about how poor kids are going to have access to commercial sites, but rather if the schools and universities are going to be able to do a better job teaching kids how to think critically, find and sift through information, than they did with traditional libraries.

Source:

Do You Still Need a Library Card? Kendra Mayfield, Wired, September 18, 2000.

Levenger.Com

If you are a writer looking for ways to increase your efficiency or just find cool gear to buy, there is simply no place on Earth like Levenger. They stock the sort of items that make you go, “I’d never thought of that — but now that I have, I need at least five of them.”

A lot of their items are expensive, but I’ve always been completely satisfied with the merchandise. It is always of the highest quality.

As a writer, one of the things I find indispensable is their Circa notebook system. I try not to be very far away from a computer of some sort, but there are just times when there is no other option except pen and paper. For those times you just cannot beat the Circa system which combines the best features of a three-ring binder with a spiral notebook. Like I said, the whole package can get pretty expensive pretty quickly, but it’s worth it. Circa, by the way, is just Levenger’s brand name for this ring system and you can find the same thing under different brand names for less, though from what I’ve seen the quality in competing products is also much lower than the Levenger system. I especially love the Levenger paper with the wide right-hand margin for notes.

European Governments: High Prices Are Good for Consumers

    If you thought gasoline was high in the United States for much of the summer, you can be thankful you weren’t living in Europe where gas prices dwarf the U.S. prices. Throughout Europe many consumers recently said “Enough” and engaged in protests and civil disobedience to urge governments across the continent to do something.

    And in Europe government is definitely the source of the problem. In Great Britain, for example, the market price of a gallon of gasoline isn’t that much different from the United States — currently about $1.31. But the UK government then tacks on almost $3.40 per gallon in taxes, so the cost per gallon to consumers is a whopping $4.71. The case is similar in the other European nations. Italians pay $2.53/gallon in taxes, and Germany $2.56/gallon. Fuel taxes in the United States are too high, but in Europe they’re downright exorbitant.

    And the response of European governments boils down to a simple sentence: live with it. French truck drivers won a temporary 15% cut in the fuel tax, but other countries are holding the line. Both the UK and German governments have said they will not be lowering fuel taxes.

    German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had to be helicopter in to an event in the city of Schwerin after protesters blockaded the land routes with trucks and tractors. Schroeder wanted protesters to “drop this dangerous game because it could threaten the growth and employment prospects we currently have.” If the German state blocks growth with confiscatory gas taxes, that’s okay with Schroeder. Let the consumers who bear the brunt of idiotic tax policies dare to protest, however, and they become a threat to the entire nation’s economic prospects.

    European governments in general seem to view end consumers of goods as annoying pests who don’t understand the joy of government intervention in the market. Germany, for example, recently took the bizarre act of ordering Wal-Mart and several other large grocers to raise their prices in that nation. The German Cartel Office complained that Wal-Mart as well as grocers Aldi and Lidl were selling some products such as milk, butter, flour and cooking oil below cost which is illegal in Germany (in the United States such actions are legal or illegal depending on the prevailing winds of antitrust politics, with the U.S. going after Microsoft for allegedly under pricing while simultaneously going after record companies for overpricing the cost of goods).

   The Germans apparently think the grocers are lowering prices to drive smaller concerns out of business, after which they will raise prices, but I have yet to see any concrete example of this happening in the real world. Much more likely is that the sort of economies of scale enjoyed by advances companies such as Wal-Mart have made in inventory management allows them to offer some basic goods that have mature pricing schemes at a slight loss since they more than make up the small loss on the wide range of other products such huge mega-markets sell.

    The sheep weren’t buying the justification, with one man telling the Associated Press that, “Life in Germany is expensive enough as it is. When the likes of Wal-Mart come along and force the others to pull down their prices, that’s a good thing.”

    Leave it to Europe’s pseudo-socialist governments to enter the new millenium championing the fine art of screwing the consumer with high prices.

Sources:

World ‘faces oil crisis’. The BBC, September 12, 2000.

Fuel crisis grips Europe. The BBC, September 12, 2000.

European leaders remain defiant over fuel protests. CNN, September 13, 2000.

Germany targets Wal-Mart. Stephen Graham, The Associated Press, September 9, 2000.