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Archive for the ‘Sociology’ Category

The following article about beliefs is just an expression of my thoughts. It is certainly not definitive.

In my opinion, we live our life on the basis of beliefs. We, literally live in a huge belief system. So seamlessly integrated (into our world) are some beliefs that most people assume that they are natural and accepted them without questioning.

The very act of reading this article is belief-based, because the very construct that is formed in your head now is conceptual & of the thinking mind. Perhaps, what really is does not just exist as concepts, but also exists in the NOW as experience. Although one is able to describe or conceptualize a truth, the conceptualization is itself a thought.

Beliefs can be very powerful, especially when the majority of the population buys into it. Sometime a certain belief when set in motion, causes catalytic reactions, triggering the formation of yet other beliefs. Gradually, layers upon layers of beliefs mire directness and truth. So thickly laden with beliefs and far removed from the original spontaneity that life becomes unnecessarily complex and ritualized.

Major beliefs operating in our world are:

Identification of self with physical body.
When in actual fact, we are much more than that. This belief can be very difficult to un-ravel. And it takes many series of self-discovery to realize our true nature. The entire scope of this belief is beyond what can be expressed within this article. So I will leave it as that.
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The father in the Roman family (paterfamilias) exercised absolute and lifelong power over all other family members (patria potestas): his wife, children, and slaves. If the father’s father was alive – then he was the supreme authority in the household. Fathers were even allowed to execute their grown sons for serious offenses like treason.

Each house maintained a cult of ancestors and hearth gods and the paterfamilias was its priest. The family was thought to posses a “genius” (gens) – an inner spirit – passed down the generations. The living and the dead members of the family shared the gens and were bound by it.

Legitimate offspring belonged to the father’s family. The father retained custody if the couple (rarely) divorced exclusively at the husband’s initiative. The father had the right to disown a newborn – usually deformed boys or girls. This led to a severe shortage of women in Rome.

The father of the bride had to pay a sizable dowry to the family of the groom, thus impoverishing the other members of the family. Moreover, daughters shared equally in the estate of a father who died without a will – thus transferring assets from their family of origin to their husband’s family. No wonder females were decried as an economic liability.
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Their arrival portends rising local prices and a culture shock. Many of them live in plush apartments, or five star hotels, drive SUV’s, sport $3000 laptops and PDA’s. They earn a two figure multiple of the local average wage. They are busybodies, preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional altruists.

Always self-appointed, they answer to no constituency. Though unelected and ignorant of local realities, they confront the democratically chosen and those who voted them into office. A few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are the non-governmental organizations, or NGO’s.

Some NGO’s – like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Amnesty – genuinely contribute to enhancing welfare, to the mitigation of hunger, the furtherance of human and civil rights, or the curbing of disease. Others – usually in the guise of think tanks and lobby groups – are sometimes ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special interests.

NGO’s – such as the International Crisis Group – have openly interfered on behalf of the opposition in the last parliamentary elections in Macedonia. Other NGO’s have done so in Belarus and Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Israel, Nigeria and Thailand, Slovakia and Hungary – and even in Western, rich, countries including the USA, Canada, Germany, and Belgium.

The encroachment on state sovereignty of international law – enshrined in numerous treaties and conventions – allows NGO’s to get involved in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like corruption, civil rights, the composition of the media, the penal and civil codes, environmental policies, or the allocation of economic resources and of natural endowments, such as land and water. No field of government activity is now exempt from the glare of NGO’s. They serve as self-appointed witnesses, judges, jury and executioner rolled into one.

Regardless of their persuasion or modus operandi, all NGO’s are top heavy with entrenched, well-remunerated, extravagantly-perked bureaucracies. Opacity is typical of NGO’s. Amnesty’s rules prevent its officials from publicly discussing the inner workings of the organization – proposals, debates, opinions – until they have become officially voted into its Mandate. Thus, dissenting views rarely get an open hearing.

Contrary to their teachings, the financing of NGO’s is invariably obscure and their sponsors unknown. The bulk of the income of most non-governmental organizations, even the largest ones, comes from – usually foreign – powers. Many NGO’s serve as official contractors for governments.

NGO’s serve as long arms of their sponsoring states – gathering intelligence, burnishing their image, and promoting their interests. There is a revolving door between the staff of NGO’s and government bureaucracies the world over. The British Foreign Office finances a host of NGO’s – including the fiercely “independent” Global Witness – in troubled spots, such as Angola. Many host governments accuse NGO’s of – unwittingly or knowingly – serving as hotbeds of espionage.

Very few NGO’s derive some of their income from public contributions and donations. The more substantial NGO’s spend one tenth of their budget on PR and solicitation of charity. In a desperate bid to attract international attention, so many of them lied about their projects in the Rwanda crisis in 1994, recounts “The Economist”, that the Red Cross felt compelled to draw up a ten point mandatory NGO code of ethics. A code of conduct was adopted in 1995. But the phenomenon recurred in Kosovo.

All NGO’s claim to be not for profit – yet, many of them possess sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to increase the market share of firms they own. Conflicts of interest and unethical behavior abound.

Cafedirect is a British firm committed to “fair trade” coffee. Oxfam, an NGO, embarked, three years ago, on a campaign targeted at Cafedirect’s competitors, accusing them of exploiting growers by paying them a tiny fraction of the retail price of the coffee they sell. Yet, Oxfam owns 25% of Cafedirect.

Large NGO’s resemble multinational corporations in structure and operation. They are hierarchical, maintain large media, government lobbying, and PR departments, head-hunt, invest proceeds in professionally-managed portfolios, compete in government tenders, and own a variety of unrelated businesses. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development owns the license for second mobile phone operator in Afghanistan – among other businesses. In this respect, NGO’s are more like cults than like civic organizations.

Many NGO’s promote economic causes – anti-globalization, the banning of child labor, the relaxing of intellectual property rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGO’s lack economic expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their beneficence. NGO’s are at times manipulated by – or collude with – industrial groups and political parties.

It is telling that the denizens of many developing countries suspect the West and its NGO’s of promoting an agenda of trade protectionism. Stringent – and expensive – labor and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges.

Take child labor – as distinct from the universally condemnable phenomena of child prostitution, child soldiering, or child slavery.

Child labor, in many destitute locales, is all that separates the family from all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As national income grows, child labor declines. Following the outcry provoked, in 1995, by NGO’s against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan, both Nike and Reebok relocated their workshops and sacked countless women and 7000 children. The average family income – anyhow meager – fell by 20 percent.

This affair elicited the following wry commentary from economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern:

“While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child workers and their families.”

This is far from being a unique case. Threatened with legal reprisals and “reputation risks” (being named-and-shamed by overzealous NGO’s) – multinationals engage in preemptive sacking. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were let go in 1993 by German garment factories in anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act.

Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed:

“Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school and receive the education to help them leave poverty.”

NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70% of all children work within their family unit, in agriculture. Less than 1 percent are employed in mining and another 2 percent in construction. Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not a solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries – 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia.

Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.

“The Economist” sums up the shortsightedness, inaptitude, ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGO’s neatly:

“Suppose that in the remorseless search for profit, multinationals pay sweatshop wages to their workers in developing countries. Regulation forcing them to pay higher wages is demanded… The NGOs, the reformed multinationals and enlightened rich-country governments propose tough rules on third-world factory wages, backed up by trade barriers to keep out imports from countries that do not comply. Shoppers in the West pay more – but willingly, because they know it is in a good cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies, having shafted their third-world competition and protected their domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from locally owned factories explain to their children why the West’s new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve.”

NGO’s in places like Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Albania, and Zimbabwe have become the preferred venue for Western aid – both humanitarian and financial – development financing, and emergency relief. According to the Red Cross, more money goes through NGO’s than through the World Bank. Their iron grip on food, medicine, and funds rendered them an alternative government – sometimes as venal and graft-stricken as the one they replace.

Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even journalists form NGO’s to plug into the avalanche of Western largesse. In the process, they award themselves and their relatives with salaries, perks, and preferred access to Western goods and credits. NGO’s have evolved into vast networks of patronage in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

NGO’s chase disasters with a relish. More than 200 of them opened shop in the aftermath of the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999-2000. Another 50 supplanted them during the civil unrest in Macedonia a year later. Floods, elections, earthquakes, wars – constitute the cornucopia that feed the NGO’s.

NGO’s are proponents of Western values – women’s lib, human rights, civil rights, the protection of minorities, freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable. The arrival of NGO’s often provokes social polarization and cultural clashes. Traditionalists in Bangladesh, nationalists in Macedonia, religious zealots in Israel, security forces everywhere, and almost all politicians find NGO’s irritating and bothersome.

The British government ploughs well over $30 million a year into “Proshika”, a Bangladeshi NGO. It started as a women’s education outfit and ended up as a restive and aggressive women empowerment political lobby group with budgets to rival many ministries in this impoverished, Moslem and patriarchal country.

Other NGO’s – fuelled by $300 million of annual foreign infusion – evolved from humble origins to become mighty coalitions of full-time activists. NGO’s like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and the Association for Social Advancement mushroomed even as their agendas have been fully implemented and their goals exceeded. It now owns and operates 30,000 schools.

This mission creep is not unique to developing countries. As Parkinson discerned, organizations tend to self-perpetuate regardless of their proclaimed charter. Remember NATO? Human rights organizations, like Amnesty, are now attempting to incorporate in their ever-expanding remit “economic and social rights” – such as the rights to food, housing, fair wages, potable water, sanitation, and health provision. How insolvent countries are supposed to provide such munificence is conveniently overlooked.
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Lost Relatives and Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide

“Collecting Dead Relatives and Sometimes a Live Cousin” and “My Family Tree is Lost in the Forest” are just some of the catchy slogans found printed on the shirts of genealogy enthusiasts. These avid researchers are looking to fill the holes in their family trees. It’s work that most have been at for decades.

My wife and I wanted to get started finding our lost relatives, but we didn’t know where to begin. She had a binder full of information that one of her relatives had put together, but other than that, we were the ones who were lost.

We started by going to the Genealogy library at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, but you can also do this online.

The first step to finding your lost relatives is to download all the information that has already been compiled. We did this by using the Ancestral File database that is indexed at the world’s largest genealogy library, The Family History Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. We remotely accessed the database and first found my wife’s records. We saw on her pedigree chart that some relatives had already compiled information on her mother’s line, but her father’s line was empty. After downloading my wife’s pedigree chart onto a GEDCOM file, we did some research on her father’s line. The family history consultant told us that it’s possible that there has been work done on her father’s line, but it just hasn’t been connected to my wife’s file.
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