Of Zimbabwe and Human-Animal Embryos

Where to begin?
Thankfully, no new news to report from the US Presidential race, which is getting into that stage where it resembles an over-hyped movie that starts out amazingly well, then slips into a few doldrums, before coming up with a fantastic finish...as you may have guessed, we are well into the doldrums.

News out of Zimbabwe suggests that Robert Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980 (when Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain), is desperately seeking ways to usurp the election results from last weekend, and foist himself on his people for several more years. In fact, he has told the opposition that until he dies, no one else will be President of the country. Imagine that!
If I were the opposition, I'd begin to figure out the best way to send the old man to meet his maker...it's not like he isn't old enough to do so...
Of course, Senile Bob (my new nickname for him) would have been better off taking lessons from his counterpart in Nigeria, who didn't even bother trying to manipulate actual results, but simply recorded his purported voting numbers on the computer and presented them to the world. Who after all, can argue with a computer-generated result in this day and age?

On a more serious note, when will so-called African "freedom fighters" like Senile Bob and others of his ilk, realize that they only do themselves (and their legacy) harm with such despotic and barbaric behaviors? It's the same type of thing that brought down Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Winnie Mandela of South Africa, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Houphet Boigny of the Ivory Coast, Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia and several others. I don't know what it is about our leaders that convinces them that they are indispensable, messianic and all-powerful, but it's got to stop, otherwise we will be no better off than when the colonials were in power. At least then, we knew what we were dealing with.

That being said, I do question the manner in which the Western media has portrayed Senile Bob. It seems the recent Western (and in particular, British) noticing and sub-policing of Zimbabwean events only started when Senile Bob removed the white landowners from their farms and handed them over to the black population. This is a move I agreed with in principle, if not in practice, but ever since then, the Western media has portrayed Mugabe as Hitler's second coming. It's situations like this that prevent one from being sympathetic to a white minority.

In other serious news, researchers in the UK claim to have fused the first human-animal embryo. Apparently, it is for test reasons, but if we needed a clear sign that the world was coming to an end (and soon), I think we just got it....I mean, who THINKS of such a thing??? More on that (and the whole cloning issue) in a future piece.