December 22, 2006
Second Life Campus
The OU campus in Second Life that I have spent months developing is going live to the public on January 3rd. As loyal readers of my blog (all 2 of you :)), you get the first sneak peak at some screen shots of the campus:
December 18, 2006
How to Save Money at Christmas
Wonderful tactic for saving yourself some dough this season:
December 14, 2006
Spam wins
For those of you who send emails to my personal email address, the one ending in keeseys.com, it has been temporarily deleted to try and see if a couple weeks of bouncing spam back to the perpetrators will make the problem more manageable. Over the last month or so it has gotten to the point where I can't possibly filter through the 100s of spam mailings to get at the few personal emails I get. If you need to get in touch with me please post a response to this blog or send your email to my university account.
December 13, 2006
OK, Back to Meaningless Stupidity
This is funny. Probably want to wait until you get home from work or at least turn it down a bit:
http://www.keeseys.com/music/nutts1.WMV
December 06, 2006
Charbon, Charcoal and Haiti
I’m really tired of myself and my idiotic superficiality. Now that I have your attention, I actually want to talk about a subject that I am serious about; a rarity for this blog.
Honestly, I know most of my blog readers won’t have the interest or stake in the development of Haiti as my family does so I write this more for search engines in the hopes that someone with the proper background knowledge in international development and energy subsidies discovers this post and can engage me and give informed feedback.
On a very meta level, there are many niches to development in Haiti and other developing countries. Aid resources are disseminated to a variety of topics from Health, Ecology, Agriculture, Communication, Education and a massive variety of other topics within and outside of the aforementioned.
I see a certain hierarchy of needs in Haiti and at the bottom of my self-created hierarchy is a people’s ability to actually sustain themselves with food staples grown in country. The possibility for self-sustenance in Haiti is made a near impossibility for many reasons from lack of education on modern agricultural techniques to political turmoil driving people off of farms into cities with a false hope of jobs along with a variety of other complex factors. None of these factors however are root causes but rather symptoms of the root cause. The root cause is the ecological disaster due to almost complete deforestation. Deforestation and its many disastrous effects such as “Lavalas” or landslides and wind depleted topsoil render agriculture a useless exercise.
Aid organizations and governments then swoop in to “help” via aid packages that include “participatory development” techniques learned by Upper East Side types in American universities where communities are “empowered” by addressing community-defined needs. Aside from perhaps addressing immediate health-related needs which I also see at the foundational level of a hierachy of needs, these are futile and short lived exercises and when the aid organizations leave, these exercises were just that, exercises with no lasting effect on the culture because ultimately they are still not of the culture.
Even worse is the dumping of food staples or livestock to meet the immediate needs. Haiti’s agricultural difficulties caused by deforestation were further undercut but the dumping of rice from overseas that cut any remaining legs out of an already difficult local agricultural economy.
My proposal is to simply divert large amounts of the resources coming from governments and aid organizations into an extreme emergency subsidization of Charbon or charcoal. Charcoal is the most widely used cooking fuel in Haiti and it is the sole cause for Haiti’s deforestation. The only way to quickly end the cutting of trees is to quickly destroy Haiti’s charcoal economy. Make it so there is no way for a Haitian charbon vendor to compete with the cheap prices from piles of cheap charcoal shipped in and dumped from Canada and the US, the same as we do with rice but do it with charbon. Destroy the charbon economy in the hopes that people will finally leave their hands off of the trees and consequently allow for the re-emergence of agricultural possibililties.
Along with the extreme emergency subsidization of charcoal are continued funding of health initiatives. If people aren't healthy they can't participate in the new agricultural economy that will emmerge when the trees come back. Substantial funding will also be put into the development of alternative cooking fuels that can be phased in as the charcoal subsidies are phased out once reaching the end goal of reforestation. Reforestation will naturally create the ecological conditions for the country to re-engage in successful and self-sustaining agriculture. Without the foundation of food self-sustenance to the Haitian economy, the country will remain a ward of the world's states and aid organizations for the forseeable future. From the new emmerging agriculture economy and food self-sustenance then aid organizations can re-engage in efforts for deepening educational initiatives around more effective agricultural techniques along with other topics that will be more readily adopted with the base needs met.
I have repeatedly brought up this idea for the diversion of a large amount of aid funds into extreme charcoal subsidies with the same blank stare reaction as the most common response. What I have yet to hear yet is why it would not work. Aside from undercutting a multitude of useless jobs by elite and clueless development officials working on fluff projects, I haven’t heard any real reasons. Can someone please shoot some real holes in this proposal so I can move on or be driven harder to actually get people thinking about actually making it happen.