Zimbabwe Agricultural Bonanza: Mice

Posted by James Bowery on Thursday, 08 March 2007 22:24.

Less than ten miles from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s mansion in Harare—the largest private residence on the African continent—Cleophus Masxigora digs for mice. On a good day, he told me, he can find 100 to 200. To capture the vermin, he burns brush to immobilize them, then kills them with several thumps of a shovel. This practice has become so widespread in Zimbabwe that, as a Zimbabwean journalist informed me, state-run television has broadcast warnings against citizens setting brush fires. Masxigora began hunting mice to support (and feed) his wife and three children soon after Mugabe began confiscating thousands of productive, white-owned farms in 2000, a policy that has since led to mass starvation. Not long ago, Zimbabwe, the “breadbasket of Africa,” exported meat and produced what was widely considered to be Africa’s finest livestock. Today, Masxigora tells me that each mouse nets $30 Zim dollars, about 12 cents, which makes him a wealthy man in Zimbabwe.

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Comments:

Posted by onetwothree on Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:28 | #

Funny.

But: Aren’t most non-pet-shop mice brown, rather than white?

Posted by stari_momak on Fri, 09 Mar 2007 07:05 | #

Mostly..but in Zim they only hunt the white ones ; )

Posted by Jean Depression on Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:27 | #

“GnXp star blogger Randy McDonald ought to see this entry”

What does that tell you, Fred, about GnXp, that someone like Randy McDonald was/is a “star blogger?”

More to the point, why does Majority Rights link to GnXp and, doing so, actually has the gall (or misguided confusion) to put that politically motivated, ant-white blog under the category of “science”, when one of the blog’s founders does not even understand the difference between a sister chromatid and a homologous chromosome?

Yes, I know they have some deluded white boys there actually do post some reasonably competent scientific pieces, but that’s not what the blog is about, is it?

Don’t you, and Guessedworker and others, have personal experience about what that blog is about? What about James Bowery’s more recent experience there when he attempted to honestly and rationally discuss certain correlations related to autism?

Was he met with dispassionate scientific analysis and rational argument?

Posted by gnxp irony on Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:28 | #

Jean Depression,
It is somewhat ironic that on “Gene Expression” is the following quote from Schopenhauer:

http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist28.htm

“This is chiefly practicable in a dispute between scholars in the presence of the unlearned. If you have no argument ad rem, and none either ad hominem, you can make one ad auditores; that is to say, you can start some invalid objection, which, however, only an expert sees to be invalid. Now your opponent is an expert, but those who form your audience are not, and accordingly in their eyes he is defeated; particularly if the objection which you make places him in any ridiculous light. People are ready to laugh, and you have the laughers on your side. To show that your objection is an idle one, would require a long explanation on the part of your opponent, and a reference to the principles of the branch of knowledge in question, or to the elements of the matter which you are discussing; and people are not disposed to listen to it. For example, your opponent states that in the original formation of a mountain-range the granite and other elements in its composition were, by reason of their high temperature, in a fluid or molten state; that the temperature must have amounted to some 480 degrees Fahrenheit; and that when the mass took shape it was covered by the sea. You reply, by an argument ad auditores, that at that temperature - nay, indeed, long before it had been reached, namely, at 212 degrees Fahrenheit - the sea would have been boiled away, and spread through the air in the form of steam. At this the audience laughs. To refute the objection, your opponent would have to show that the boiling-point depends not only on the degree of warmth, but also on the atmospheric pressure; and that as soon as about half the sea-water had gone off in the shape of steam, this pressure would be so greatly increased that the rest of it would fail to boil even at a temperature of 480 degrees. He is debarred from giving this explanation, as it would require a treatise to demonstrate the matter to those who had no acquaintance with physics.”

It’s ironic of course because many at “Gene Expression” are masters of the ad auditores “argument”; think David B and his – to the feeble brained – “plausible” (sic) attacks on Salter. Or, for examples, arguments by race-deniers, distorting genetic data, making Lewontian arguments, etc. It’s very easy to confuse the masses, and make the truth seem like a lie, or a lie like the truth, to those most comfortable watching football, MTV, or Oprah. Of course, to the intelligent who are educated in the subject and capable of logical thought, the ad auditores “argument” falls apart upon rational dissection. But, we live in a dumbed down “democracy”, and the verdict of the irrational masses, carried away with snide, self-described “vulgar attacks” and by easy to digest slogans (“race does not exist, but racism does”) is decisive. The problem of ad auditores is a difficult one and will become increasingly so as average intelligence declines. Interesting how folks allegedly in favor of a cognitive elite are willing to exploit ignorance and irrationality to make their points. Another bit of irony, I suppose.