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19:31 Border Incursions & Proxy Wars
» Kenyanentrepreneur.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_anjGPLCD4 I am surprised that this story about a couple of Italian nuns who were abducted from El-Wak in northeastern province, is not on the front pages of the Kenyan dailies (continuously). What these Somali Islamist group did is very dangerous. They essentially crossed the border into Kenya, abducted these nuns and took them back to Somalia. [...]
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17:18
The Stock Market Crash of 2008
» For Love and Money The Stock Market Crash of 2008
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16:18
Cheap, Safe Option: Kibaki for Local Tribunal
» You Missed This Unlike Justices Kriegler and Akiwumi before him, Waki knew better the naivety of entrusting the hyenas to guard the choicest of steak. He fully understood the deceptive ways of Kenyan leaders and you can imagine the fate of the secret envelope and its contents if he was naive . The secret envelope has totally rattled the powerful leaving them no option but to manufacture legal loopholes to save their scalps. And true to form and tradition Kibaki will fall for the cheap solution that leaves his DECEPTIVE hands strengthened in offering clemency to murderers.
Kenyan political class may have the monopoly to rape Kenya but one thing is certain, the Waki report will not be theirs to decapitate. Waki knew them inside out and there is absolutely nothing they can do to reverse the process and verdict. Annan will have to do what the world expects him to do to earn his EMINENT PERSON label. He must fill the void left by the chronic lack of leadership that has sees a president stay mum when during serial self-inflicted crises (PEV, arms/pirates etc) only to emerge from his slumber and declare an Obama holiday with political expediency top on his agenda.
The adage THE GUILTY ARE ALWAYS AFRAID has never proved so apt. Why then all these political heat when nobody knows the content of the envelope handed to Annan? Waki has stirred the political hornet’s nest. They have been left to do what they are best at in drumming TRIBAL support ala Kimunya.
Uhuru may been a late convert to seeking Justice but he is fooling nobody. You don’t make history in abandoning your office as leader of official opposition to neatly place your headon the chopping block. Political favours have sell-by date and Jomo Junior knows what Emilio will do. Even Njenga Karume now has the guts and temerity demand implementation of Waki report. Please tell me another believable gimmick.
Kenyans are no fools and Waki didn’t mention TRIBES but specific people whom his committee felt had cases to answer. Sirma’s outburst ‘you are either with us or against us’ may have made him sound intellectual but only to himself. If Ruto is innocent he has nothing to fear and he is better advised to free his conscience by clearing his name at the earliest opportunity.
Bondage of impunity
Waki’s noose is tightening. The good Judge has proved an a competent driver to Hague Express. The political class may enjoy the charade in buying time but this matter is one that has been cast far and wide. Pseudo patriots will foam at the mouth shouting sovereignty oblivious the fact that the same international they now derive snatched Kenya from the jaws of the near-Armageddon.
Ours is a country crying and begging for HONEST leadership bereft of cronyism and fraud. Kenya is yearning to be freed from the bondage of IMPUNITY. Make no mistake! Kibaki is no fool to implement Waki’s report that correctly identified State House address as the venture of planning of the massacres. He knows better than put a gun to his own head.
Meanwhile Kibaki’s 'SMART' apologists arel calculatively corrupting Obama’s virtues by asking us to borrow his inspiration. Give it to them for meticulously peddling such lies oblivious of how they conveniently and shamelessly mask over the common thread running through our locally minted yet stillborn YOTE YAWEZEKANA and the exotic YES WE CAN.
But again you don’t mention bones where old people are lest you unwittingly invite a curse for reminding them of their imminent demise. Well, no amount of political posturing will ground Hague Express which in the fullness of will be packed by fully-paid passengers.
A tribute to Miriam Makeba
Free DVD movies delivered to you anywhere in Nairobi. Order online.
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15:12
Why do we import food from China?
» Rants, Raves & Reviews Tanzania imported melamine-laced milk & milk products. I would not be surprised if some Kenyan firms unwittingly did the same.
The chinese on the other hand have been lobbying African governments not to 'penalize' chinese milk imports! The chinese trade representative in Kenya issued a statement indicating that Kenya should not ban chinese milk products. Sure that's his job but are we fools?
Why do we need to import so many food products?
Why not have:
Weetabix not Kellogg's Cornflakes?
local Cadbury's not Lindt's/Hersheys/imported chocs?
local Minute Maid not Ceres/imported brands?
EABL products not Heineken/Castle (brewed in TZ & S.Africa)?
local sodas not same brands from middle east?
I have consistently argued that Kenyan (& African) consumers have a warped sense of consumerism regarding food products. We 'idolize' imported foods. Some local firms need to be do better & we have to hammer them on quality BUT the obsession with imports?
Go to any Nakumatt & it seems 50% of the food products are imported!!!
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12:38
The Shoes That Keep Coming Back
» Cock And Bull Once again I am wearing the shoes that I have had since 2002. I bought them in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and have carried them with me to all the places that I have lived since. Though they are made from high quality leather and have a genuine rubber sole, I rarely wear them and so they are still in remarkably good shape. I am wearing them today because my favorite office boots are torn. It must have happened yesterday since I notice the hole this morning. It is a rip actually, and from the look of it, it seems like the shoe got caught by a sharp edge and tore violently, perhaps in a moment of haste while walking through town.
Unlike the office boots which look costly, shine to a high glow and have ‘manly’ written all over them, the 2002 shoes are dull at their best – both in design and even after intense shining – plus they have a flat sole which is not quite my style. In fact, the only reason why I still have them is because they never got picked whenever I gave away shoes. With the boots, many people have paid their compliments and with the 2002 shoes, only my sister-in-law ever noted that they are made from good leather. Between 2002, many shoes have come and gone and these shoes have prevailed, it even seems like they are the shoes that keep coming back. Why?
Perhaps it is to remind us about the cyclical nature of life and all those things that often pop up in our midst once in a while…or perhaps to show us that there are many good things that are already in our lives that we rarely use and that we should perhaps pay more attention to…or perhaps to remind us of those people that can always be counted on during tough times despite the fact that we rarely remember them unless we need them.
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11:28
Everlasting Rain
» Cock And Bull Yesterday it rained. The downpour just came out of nowhere and I was caught between my house and the bus stop. And so I ran for a few meters to shelter at the local meat shop. Njino the shop owner was sitting on the customer’s wooden form looking at an old newspaper. After saying hello and having a small conversation about the unexpectedness of the rain, Njino went back to his outdated newspaper and I leaned against the door frame as I watched the rain fall. The huge rain drops landed heavily on the ground and immediately made numerous small ochre colored splashes on coming into contact with the pool of muddy water that was frantically looking for the easiest route to flow downhill. I could hear the roar of fury as the rain drops pounded the iron sheet covered building that houses a morgue across the road. And as a phrase came to mind, I idly wondered if this is the kind of ruckus that would qualify as ‘noise that would raise the dead’.
Suddenly Njino startled me from my thoughts by saying, “It is amazing that even after this rain stops falling, there will still be more where it came from in the sky!” I agreed with him as he continued to marvel at the fact that there will still be more rain in the sky next year and the next and the next…despite the fact that it rained last year and the year before that and the one before that…” I once again was impressed by Njino’s simple logic that always makes sense often when I listen to him.
“Isn’t God great!”, Njino exclaimed in reference to the abundance of the rain falling on earth and that still waiting to fall from the sky. “And yet, people take God for granted and turn away from Him”, and as I thought about this he added, “Fortunately God is merciful, and His compassion is as much as the rain that is falling now”. When I looked inside the shop at Njino unsure about what to say, I saw that he was still engrossed in reading the outdated newspaper that he would later use to wrap meat for his customers. And as suddenly as the rain had started, it stopped.
As I bid Njino goodbye and walked towards the bus stop, I realized that in those few minutes, I had learnt a lesson that I will want to remember for as long as I live.
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10:37
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
» Cock And Bull The following is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
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10:13
Sticks and Stones, words do hurt us
» Kenya Imagine Just got this from Juan Cole’s blog. Well, US security people say that when Sarah Palin went on the attack against Obama, particularly when she suggested he had been ‘palling around with terrorists’, the effect on some of her constituency was to suggest that he(Obama) posed such a great threat to the USA, that he deserved to be killed, hence an upswing in assassination plots.
It is sad that Waki did not think the three year campaign of hate from Raila and the ODM chiefs against the Gikuyu was at all significant, or that it served to whip up passions to such a level that friends saw no evil in hacking their neighbours.When you see people in prominent positions calling for a Lesotho, when you see Ngilu, Orengo and the thug himself frothing against the privilege of the Gikuyu, or telling the people that Kibaki will hand over to Uhuru and the Gikuyu will rule for ever, then you know a storm is coming.
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10:07
The Two 100 Shilling Notes
» Cock And Bull When I got into a number 48 public transport “matatu” near Odeon Cinema in Nairobi today, I sat next to a guy with Indian features. He seemed a bit agitated and was preoccupied with tinkering with a fat expensive looking Nokia phone and didn’t look up until the conductor began collecting fare from the passengers. The guy put his hand in his pocket and came out with several bank notes from which he selected an old and battered 100 shillings. In the meantime, I had reached into my wallet and fished out a crisp, very clean 100 shillings note. When we handed over our fare, the conductor looked at each of the notes briefly before folding them horizontally into half and wrapping them around his middle finger as is common in the “matatu” .
As the “matatu” moved towards Kileleshwa, I began thinking about the two bank notes lying next to each other. What were they thinking about one another? Perhaps the crisp new looking note was looking down at the dirty old note and wondering how on earth it ever allowed itself to become that way. And perhaps the old note was looking at the new one and envying it for looking so clean and fresh. But what if the two bank notes were to tell their stories to each other?
The crisp note would most certainly talk about exciting escapades. It would talk about being handled by soft, carefully manicured hands and sleeping in an alligator skin wallet, surrounded by the waft of ethereal fragrance inside a lady’s handbag. It would talk about gracing exclusive clubs and what the thrills are inside of an international Casino. It would talk about how important it feels to be part of a bundle of a million, and about the rude awakening of being ejected from an ATM. If the bank note was to sum up its existence in one sentence, it would say; “What a life!”
The old worn out bank note would talk about the feel of the rough hands of the peasant woman who got her pay for laboring in the countryside farms. It would explain how it was folded many many times in order to be tied into a tight knot on the edge of the woman’s headscarf. It would talk about being exchanged for flour and cooking fat and beans at a local shop, and riding in ramshackle rural “matatus”. It would describe the smells of fish, cow hide, and spices on a market day and how stuffy it is to be hidden inside a brassiere. If the bank note had to sum its contribution to the world in one sentence, it would say; “What lives!”
As I thought about the story of the two bank notes I wondered which one had a more meaningful existence; one having lived the crème de la crème life of money in glamour and the dazzling lights of night life, or the other that lived the seemingly mediocre life of the poor; the feeding of a family for several days or financing a trip to take a sick person to hospital or buying the local brew that was used to make merry at a wedding?
That is when I was startled from the reverie by the conductor as he gave out the change: For my crisp new 100 shillings note, he gave 70 shillings change. For the Indian looking guy’s old and worn out 100 shillings note, he gave 70 shillings change. The value of a 100 shillings note is the same whether old, new, crisp, folded, clean, or dirty.
Between any two bank notes of the same denomination there are differences in looks and experiences in their existence. And yet, even though one bank note might feel superior to another, the fact is that their value remains the same. It is clear for you and I that if this kind of thinking were going on amongst bank notes, then it is very foolish for any one of them to judge themselves as better or worse because of being old, new, crisp, folded, clean, or dirty, or because of being exposed to any particular lifestyle. But what about human beings?
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Do Not Forget Congo
» Kenya Imagine It is very tragic the events in Congo. Below are links to two of our latest published articles on Congo.- Fear of emancipatory history in the DRC: From Kimpa Vita to Lumumba to the women of Panzi. As events unfold in the DRC the usual questions are being asked: who is responsible for the current war within the war which never really ended in 2003 and its ensuing humanitarian crisis? In the pages of one of the most respected dailies of Kinshasa (Le Potentiel) well-known philosophers have offered conflicting ways of looking at, and analysing, the conflict. Who is General Nkunda, and why has he said that this time around that he will not stop in Goma (threatening to go all the way to Kinshasa)?
- What The World Owes Congo. Last summer, the national news media announced the deaths of four gorillas killed in a national park in eastern Congo. A United Nations delegation was quickly dispatched to investigate. As a Congolese living in the United States and hungry for news from back home, I was thankful for the coverage. But since my grandparents still live in east Congo, I would have also liked to have heard about some other recent breaking news items: women being raped, children being enslaved, men being killed and many more horrors.
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The Absurdity of Hopelessness
» Kenya Imagine First we are the only country in the world to declare a public holiday to honour the election of a foreign head of state. That was bad enough. But our national obsession with Barack Obama knows no bounds.
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8:20
Allowing Life To Work
» Cock And Bull I have been trying to make my life “work” for a while now. That meant getting more serious with my business with the focus of making bags of money, settling down with the love of my life and starting a family, cultivating more “serious” social contact, keeping regular schedules with the hope of being more accountable with my time, and so on. By yesterday, I was so tired that I couldn’t bear to hear my cell phone ring and so I switched it off.
When I woke up this morning, I didn’t jump out of bed as usual, and neither did I switch on my phone. I lingered under the covers until around 11 o’clock when it finally became apparent that life has to go on. And as I ate my breakfast, I half distractedly watched a program on TV as I also prepared to go to the office. The program was about the life of a wild hamster in the bush.
The particular family of hamsters that was the focus of the program consisted of a mother, father and their seven children. It documented about how the mother takes care of the children, the challenges of life through the seasons of the year, and how the rodents survive in an environment surrounded by predators. When the seven youngsters left the nest for the first time, they were so overwhelmed by the new world that many of them forgot to look out for predators and they perished. I remember one that was whisked off by a kite while it was in the process of grooming by licking its paw and slicking it over its face.
It was while I was watching this program that I realized that there is much more to a hamster’s life than meets the eye. For example during winter, a hamster’s metabolism, heart rate, breathing, all slow waaaay down in a form of hibernation called torpor. Animals that hibernate go into a deep sleep during the winter months when it is very cold, and their food is in short supply. But before hibernating, the animal eats more food than usual, which is stored as excess fat. The animal then lives off that fat as it sleeps through the winter. Another interesting fact about a hamster is that it eats its own poop. Yes! Hamsters have a different digestive system than humans. Hamsters produce two types of excrement - one that is partially digested containing lots of nutrients, and one that is just garbage. Hamsters practice coprophagy, eating the nutrient-filled excrement to get the nutrients from it and digest it fully.
It then occurred to me that there must be a higher intelligence that orders the lives of not only hamsters, but all the other animals in the wild. That intelligence understands that it is just as important for some hamsters to live to adulthood as it is for others to be whisked off as food for birds of prey. For a while this higher intelligence which is what I have learnt to label as “God” seemed to metamorphosize from just a concept in my mind that I have to worship and into something that not only contains my existence, but that of everyone, and everything else as far and my thinking will ever go and imagination can ever take me, and beyond.
When I asked myself if I could trust this intelligence to guide my life, I decided to suspend making my life “work” for a while and see what happens.
As I stepped out of my house, I met the neighborhood kids and spent a few minutes helping them with their bikes. It felt quite good to share just as small bit of what I know with them, and they seemed quite happy. On a day of making life “work”, perhaps I might just have rushed off with all my thoughts focused on what I would need to do as soon as I got to the office. I might not even have noticed or welcomed the warm sunshine on my skin or the clean dustless air after the last few rainy days. As I got into a public transport “matatu”, I realized that a story had began to form in my head, and that I would just need to sit at a computer to put it down. On a day of making life “work”, I would not entertain day dreams considering that I would have more important matters of “business” to think about. When I got to the office, I couldn’t wait to sit down to start writing, but then I was called to look at some computers that had some minor problems – the kind that take a lot of time to sort out. Well, it didn’t take as much time as I initially thought and the computer users were genuinely grateful for my efforts. On a day of making life “work”, I would have fixed the problems while grumbling to myself about being above “manual” computer work, and would most probably have made the users feel like it was their fault that the computers had problems.
After several months, I am inspired to write and post something online. On a day of making life “work”, I normally do not have what is required to write what is in my mind coherently enough for any other person to read.
In Matthew 6 in the New Testament Bible Jesus Christ said:
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
With this in mind, it is easy to let go of all those things that don’t seem to “work” and let God take care of them: at His time, in His place, in His way. Amen!
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8:12
Honourable Members
» tHiNkEr'S rOoM Much ado has been made about the Kenyan MP, that curious creature, like the cockroach, that seems to resist all attempts to wipe it out (except the boot of a well fed human being of considerable girth).
What one needs to understand about the Kenyan MP is as follows:
- The Kenyan MP is generally of questionable utility, and of indeterminate paternal origin
- The Kenyan MP fondly believes that an IQ of room temperature is remarkable
- The Kenyan MP has an IQ of just below room temperature
- The Kenyan MP fondly believes that everyone else is less intelligent
- See #2
Once you have these basic principles in mind, it is pretty easy to understand these freaks of nature.
The Waki ReportThe instant I heard that a commission was being formed to look into the unrest and name suspects, I bitterly remarked that Kenya would yet again provide another contribution to one and two ply tissue that battle valiantly to clean the human backside. Few supplies of paper are as steady as Kenyan commission reports.
There is no way that report is going to be implemented. Either it will be summarily rejected or a tribunal with the bite of a very large dog (a hot dog) will carry out the recommendations and find nothing. But that is neither here nor there. What I found hilarious was that about 8 months ago ODM were on TV refusing to go to court over the election results. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to debate the wisdom of that. What they said was that there was “no way they would get justice in a Kenyan court”.
Just the other day the same fellows were waxing lyrical about Kenya’s “sovereignty and ability of the judiciary to handle matters”.
Now you and I might find this to be a contradiction, but keep in mind this is the Kenyan MP. See #1 - #3
TaxationIn terms of appearing to care for the welfare of the Kenyan, few can match the performance of the Kenyan MP. Even when out of office, the Kenyan MP can display a touching concern and affection for the average Kenyan, especially if the average Kenyan is female, has the right dimensions and has access to funds of say, a Nigerian. (How’s it going Raphael?)
Kenyan MPs have no problem playing the David to the working man’s Uriah. In fact if you work in the city and think your MP will reappear at the constituency only at election time you’d better establish and maintain contact with your neighbours so you can be notified when David comes hunting your Bathsheba.
Sadly, this is the only interest your MP may show in you. He however expects you to pay for his fuel, for the roads he travels on, for the sugar cane he eats on the way, for the v1agr@ he pops en route and for the roof over his head. I was very amused when Amos Kimunya tried to tax these garden gnomes. Perhaps his current woes may be traced to this very act.
But let me not belabour the point. It is futile to expect these Orcs to return to the forge from which Saruman created them. The older I grow the more I realize that Guy Fawkes was onto something.
AOBObama had better not get too complacent about his victory. From past experience, once Juja results arrive everything might change!
Pic Of The Day
What the fuzz is this guy doing to Spiderman?
© M for tHiNkEr'S rOoM, 2008. | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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