Uganda be kiddin' me*: Kony 2012, Ugandan Oil Boom, and America's Next Bin Laden

A parody pic by a hadtodoittoo posted here.

Kony 2012 has been perceived by many as one of the most effective advocacy strategies in the recent age of viral memes and social networks. Created and launched by the non-government organization Invisible Children, it has a simple objective: to stop and arrest international criminal Josephy Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army in any way possible. It's strategy is simple as well: get as much international support to push the United States (and possibly other states - they are very ambiguous on this) to do its usual thing of saving the world. But an originally all-American movement, the mobilization of support will naturally target the US populace. It's tactic: a year long spectacle of raising awareness, selling campaign paraphernalia, lobbying and leveraging  important personalities, and finally, direct action on April - seemingly riding the fad of creative protest actions sparked by of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.

Unfortunately for them, Kony 2012, which gained considerable success in its air war - million hits for its videos, #stopkony trending globally, and sparking a global discourse on Africa and the existence of Christian fundamentalist militias (not unlike that created by the joint US and Philippines forces during the late 1980s, but more on this later) - backfired. Various criticisms had been hurled, from the mild accusation of oversimplification and misplaced attention, to moderate criticism on its failure to highlight and expose Uganda's poor human rights record - in effect condoning or even supporting it, to a vicious assault on Invisible Children itself - exposing the fact that very little actually goes to Uganda and African nations. Then there is also its push for US intervention, which flies in the face of sovereignty issues and the reputation itself of the US military. There are more comprehensive criticisms here, here, and here. (All of these prompted Invisible Children to issue a reply here).

Invisible children graphic. Click image to see it.
Picture from the Guardian.

But, as we know, the issues can can still go deeper. For instance, we can think about how the Kony 2012 phenomenon is placed in the current political milieu. After all, Joseph Kony, the repressive Ugandan state, as well as "US-as-the-policeman-of-the-world" concept didn't emerge in a vacuum. There is always a historical and political context behind any phenomenon.

One of my most insightful friends Primo Morillo had this hypothesis about Kony 2012 and Uganda, a hypothesis I want to share with you. He proposed that Kony 2012's timing is impeccable - in fact, it coincides with the fact that there is recently discovered oil in Uganda. Verifying this assertion, I found out that there are indeed recent interests on a "Ugandan oil boom". This is what prompted me to write this post - which would center on Kony 2012 and the probable US interest on Ugandan oil amid rising oil prices, and its more important implication - that the US establishment is to create pretext for its petro-imperialism, similar to the demonization of Muammar Gaddafi. But I go further and propose that Kony is America's new Osama Bin Laden, meant to justify military intervention in resource-rich Africa.

Santiago's Bar Exam Result, UP Law Education, and the "Top Ten" Fetish

Recently, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago was target of various attacks on her supposedly arrogance towards Atty. Vitaliano Aguirre of the prosecution team during the Corona impeachment trial. If we have been monitoring news, we may have already heard that Aguirre was cited in contempt after covering his ears during a tirade by Sen. Santiago, which included calling the prosecution team "gago" (stupid) for withdrawing the five of the eight articles of impeachment. While criticized for its perceived non-stellar performance, the "gago" (stupid) comment hurled to the prosecution was deemed by many as uncalled for, which may seemed to have given Aguirre the moral reason to reciprocate. Knowing Filipino's behavior towards perceived arrogance, Santiago must have already expected to be admonished publicly, even if she is simply acting out her extreme intolerance to what she perceives as incompetence.

But what troubled me is the propaganda pic below circulating in Facebook, apparently designed as an offshoot of the release of the 2011 Bar Exam results. It capitalizes on the fact that Aguirre got a higher score than Santiago:

An attack against Sen. Santiago circulating in Facebook. The one above is
circulated by a certain Ma. Stella A. Vizmanos 

The argument of the propaganda pic suffers from many loopholes. For one, difficulty in bar exams varies across the years. Compare, for instance, the 2001 and 2002 bar exams passing rate: 32.89% and 19.68% respectively. But let us leave it at that and focus on the essence: I don't think we should be equating achievement with grades, in law and in any other field. It gives a false impression to lawyers (as well as other students) that getting a high mark in the bar (or in any other exam) makes you a good lawyer (or professional). For all that people rant on her bar grades, Miriam is a recognized international and constitutional law expert. Prior to becoming elected in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), she was in fact a legal officer of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

This fetish on Bar Exam results as a barometer for a lawyer puts into light another issue, that no student from the University of the Philippines College of Law was able to make it to top ten in the recent Bar Examinations Result.

Corona and the Numbers Game (by Emmanuel Hizon)

Photo by Matikas Santos/INQUIRER.net photo.

Apologists of impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona asserted that they are not only winning the battle in the impeachment court but also the one that is being waged in the streets. This assertion stemmed from an alleged 7,000-strong pro-Corona mobilization that was held not long ago in front of the Supreme Court, and of late, a mammoth evangelical rally held at Luneta, which they said outnumbered all previous anti-Corona mobilizations organized by the different anti-corruption groups.

Minority action, one-dimensional

At first glance, the “big” pro-Corona rally held last February 8, 2012 in Padre Faura, which defenders of the chief justice boast and brand as the "true voice" of the public is somewhat impressive. But in retrospect, one can see that the said event is the action of a minority. Of course, the action of a minority is not necessarily wrong, that is not the intention of this piece. Rather, it wants to deconstruct the perception that is being peddled by Corona's spin masters that they are winning the numbers game in the streets.

Games, Politics, and Society

Should Syria continue its costly war against terrorism? Did Myanmar's junta make a good choice in letting Aung San Suu Kyi campaign for a parliament seat? Why did Ahmadinejad decide to disclose new nuclear projects amid apparent opposition of the US and NATO countries on its nuclear program? How will the Philippine Senate vote on the impeachment case of the Supreme Court Justice given the President's obvious preference?

The political arena is defined by such decisions on conflict and cooperation involving civilians, political parties, religious groups, social movements, corporations, and even revolutionary groups. The process with which one can arrive at a rational, well-thought-of decision in politics seems to be overwhelming, given the complexity of individual and social behavior. Several variables have to analyzed, and possible scenarios have to be completely scanned. To make things worse, the cost of wrong decisions can take a toll on lives, properties, and positioning. With all the complexity involved, is there a tool one can actually use to make political decision making easier?

Here comes "Game Theory" - a subfield in applied mathematics that deals with modelling "strategic situations" i.e. situations wherein an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others (Myerson, 1991). Emerging from the field of economics, game theory has been increasingly applied to analysis of political situations - gaining prominence during the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.

But game theory's application is not just limited in political science or economics. In fact, social morality and ethics may have evolved from social conventions that are, as will be explained later, "Nash equilibrium". For starters, check out the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) comic below:

  

That DVD Incident, Intellectual Property, and Innovation

This photo is being circulated in Facebook
 by a certain Jerry Ocampo. It may be part of
the systematic demolition job vs. Llamas.

This is related to an earlier article: http://bitly.com/plagiarismculture.

We all know that Presidential Political Adviser and known socialist Ronald Llamas is again the subject of another controversy – that of being caught buying “pirated” DVDs. We all know that he apologized (for putting the government in an awkward position) and that President Aquino announced that he will stay in office despite the protestations of the noisier members of the chattering class. But amid the brouhaha, the question of substance remains unasked: what should be our government’s policy on intellectual property?

Here is an unsolicited advice: the government can continue with the rhetoric against intellectual property “theft”, but it should be lax in its implementation. It’s simple: placate the international community by token efforts to address “piracy” (and even this can be staged – just set up a DVD booth and pretend to smash it in front of international TV) while letting the underground economy persist, providing millions of unemployed Filipinos a lifeline while keeping digital entertainment cheap.

Persisting Problems on the link between Macroeconomics and Microeconomics

Permanent link: http://bit.ly/microfoundations
As a requirement for our macroeconomics class, Dr. Dante Canlas asked us to submit a survey paper on a macroeconomic issue of our choice. I especially took interest on the approach of modern macroeconomics based on so-called "microfoundations" - microeconomic assumptions used to explain aggregate phenomenon. New classical economists see this as the final bridging of macroeconomics and microeconomics, spurring hopes of a single economic theory that would explain both the individual and aggregate economic phenomena. (note how this parallels physicists' dream of uniting large-scale relativistic physics with quantum mechanics). This spurred an orientation in economic research and pedagogy characterized by complex mathematical models capturing "deep" parameters in taste, technology, and expectations.

Recently, the microfoundations approach came under attack after models with "deep" microeconomic parameters supposedly failed to predict and recommend effective policy recommendations to mitigate the current global economic crisis. Even recent Nobel Laureate Thomas Sargent - one of the pioneers of modern macro - is under fire. Why this is so - as well as earlier, almost forgotten challenges to the microfoundations approach - is the subject of the survey paper I submitted. Read the abstract and full text below:

Abstract

The history of economics, for the most part, has been bifurcated between the study of individual economic decisions (microeconomics) and the aggregate economic phenomena (macroeconomics). The attempt to marry the two, via incorporating “microeconomic foundations” or “microfoundations” to explanations for macroeconomic observations and predictions, has so far taken sway a majority of mainstream economists with the failure of Keynesian models to accurately predict aggregate behavior in the presence of government policy. Robert Lucas Jr. posited that people form “rational expectations” of government policy and act so as to render forecasts unstable.

However, there are some persisting theoretical and empirical challenges on this research direction – the empirical instability of macro-models which incorporated microfoundations, the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu result which may spell the theoretical dead end to economic aggregation, the still unresolved Cambridge capital controversies started by the reswitching argument by Italian economist Pierro Sraffa and American economist Joan Robinson in the 1960s, and the missing “representative consumer or firm” that can take into account the behavior of the aggregate. These challenges give the idea that aggregate economic behavior is almost impossible to deduce from microeconomic behavior of agents. Post-Keynesianism – which asserts that long-term expectations are largely determined by non-economic, psychological processes exogenous to the model – is posited as a possible way forward.

To read full text, click:

The Legacy of Dennis Ritchie

This has escaped my attention. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C and Unix, died on October 8 - his death overshadowed by the death of another pioneer Steve Jobs. Much of our modern information technology backbone - from web servers to operating systems to network software - had been developed using the C programming language. To quote a google Engineer, the internet "is basically a C shop". His legacy, indeed, is incalculable.

main() { printf("Thank you Dennis Ritchie!"); }