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Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. If you would like to send us a testimonial, please email it to glenn landofzinj. This book was read aloud to my family in its entirety. It is an Odyssey, the story of one man's journey, documenting the exciting life awaiting anyone who chooses to follow God's plan for his life. I received my M.
Needless to say, I have spent a great deal of time reading. The author created a sensation similar to riding a bicycle down the steep slopes of the gorgeous Oregon Coast, enjoying the great views, while waiting and wondering what lies behind the next slope, the next turn. Indeed, the story reads as well and as exciting as any great novel.
Yet in this book, a gift is revealed. One more precious than most novels could ever hope to convey. Glenn presents the prospect that every human being can come to know and discover God's plan for his personal life. Most importantly, his story invites the reader to enter the world God has waiting for each one of us to embrace. And in so doing, experience ultimate reality. Downing's book took me on an amazing adventure to one of the more remote places on earth. It explained how the Land Of Zinj and it's people have influenced the history of the world.
Enchanting stories, told through the eyes of a boy, a very motivated young man, and a highly trained pilot, took me around the globe and through history. The author seems to have led a charmed life, but in reality hard work, determination, and dedication to goals instilled by his family, and the Holy Spirit guided the path recorded in this book.
Of course, maybe in Western discourse the never-ending stream of lurid affairs and insinuations has desensitized me to sexuality-laden attacks on political figures. Watching a few hours of the John Edwards trial makes this painting seem rather trivial, but of course the Edwards trial does not have centuries of racial oppression clouding the nature of insinuations. We should just let it go. You must remember where we have come from. The experienced traveler or cultural connoisseur must take ever more drastic measures in to experience something new.
Cultural differences certainly exist below the surface today, but consumerism and urbanization are the norm, and even music, fashion, and architecture tend toward a global median with regional varieties. This phenomenon is accelerating as we speak. The combination of traditional justice and modern conflict has given rise to various forms of truth and reconciliation as alternative judicial processes to Western inspired punitive justice focused on individual agency and responsibility. Gross inequality is often treated as an unfortunate side effect of the transition to a market economy. However, in many Africa states and societies, organized labor played a key role in chasing the colonizers out, and historically, many leaders in local traditions maintained their position and prestige by giving away wealth.
Controlling the means of production was only powerful in so far as it allowed leaders in some cultures to bestow gifts on important power brokers in their communities. How will these deep-seated cultural attitudes toward inequality mesh with the notion that inequality is inevitable? Perhaps South Africa will square this circle over the next 15 years, and the world will be a much better place for it.
Favorable demographics, massively improved governance and stability, filthy rich in natural resources, etc…. These comparisons are useful to a point, but they assume a common trajectory for all societies. A ladder with the same rungs if you will. There is no set price in travel. The controversy last month when a Minneapolis television station discovered that Delta Airlines was charging its frequent flyer customers more for the identical booking than presumably newer, non-frequent flyer customers underscores how fluid travel pricing has become.
The pricing discrepancy is uncontested.
Two different people side-by-side on two identical computers accessed the Delta site and searched for a ticket price in exactly the same way and for exactly the same flights. The person who signed in as a frequent flyer customer was charged more. I doubt it was a glitch, and even if it began as such I suspect the IT department began to cultivate it.
Even hotels now sell the same room for the same date a hundred different ways, depending upon where the request comes from, how well the hotel is doing that day, and what the competition is doing. According to American Airlines, there are , changes in its prices every day. This is not done by , different clerks typing in new numbers. Airlines lead all travel pricing. Hotels follow immediate suit. And right afterwards, cruise companies, safari chains, and even amusement parks adjust their business practices to reflect what the airlines do.
And in the unregulated market that we live in, there really is no other way for a travel business to succeed. Travel is a commodity just like gas and potatoes, and the market demand begins to set the price. Some argue that Delta could be brought to court based on its own advertised commitments, but if you take the time to read the small print, I doubt it. But the problem with travel is that you generally pay a lot earlier than when you fill your car or buy dinner.
And this long delay between paying and getting opens up wide areas of ethical controversy. But new rules no longer allow the airlines to fool you about ticket prices by claiming after market increases are taxes, for example.
The result is utter confusion for the consumer and chaos for the travel business. The start of American deregulation of travel, which began in , is the direct reason for so many large airline bankruptcies and the economic dislodging of the industry as a whole.
Had this regulation not started and never been implemented, we most certainly would have higher airline ticket prices, today. The airlines would be more on-time and reliable… Seating would be more comfortable… Food would be better… Information and scheduling would make more sense…. Lots of communities, like Cleveland and Nashville and Flagstaff, would be guaranteed multiple airline services.
Global Warring and the Land of Zinj: Forty Anecdotes of Travel, Adventure, and Crises Origins [Mr. Glenn H. Downing] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on. Buy Global Warring and the Land of Zinj: Read 1 Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon .com.
And smaller communities like Dubuque and Fargo and Centralia would not be at the whim of so many seasonal changes. If you think demand is going to go up with time, then buy now.
Travel is a leading indicator of the economy, so it usually moves in the direction good analysts predict the economy will move. Although in my long tenure in travel, I still pretty much believe in a certain maxim:. My sarcastic PhotoShop impression of David Simpson. The Central African Republic is one of the most lawless and corrupt countries on the continent and known mostly today as the presumed home of LRA fugitive, Joseph Kony. Turns out he has some interesting company. The reason Kony is probably in the CAR, routed from Uganda and being hunted down by a posse of green berets recently sent by Obama, is that the CAR is ungovernable and unmanageable, in part because so much of it is remote, thick jungle.
The other part of the reason is because its leaders are thugs. Hunting companies are extremely small, highly lucrative businesses. Compared, for example, to the overhead of a photography safari company, today, a hunting company of similar size may require a tenth of the capital investment, have about the same operating costs, and yet provide a return ten times or more of a photography safari company with the same amount of assets and staff. In the old days this was reversed, but today a hunting camp is just above OK and maybe even not OK.
Flush toilets, for example, are unusual. Solar lighting or lighting of any kind other than kerosene lanterns is unlikely. Simple spring beds replace four-poster rosewood sculptures. The staff is pulled from a line of relatives in need of work, both African help-staff always black and so-called poorly named professional hunters which are almost always white.
Their resumes are short descriptions of Macho. What were you expecting? That they would send you a letter of commendation? I am no hunter. But in my long career I have known and worked with good hunters, a very rare breed, rarer than the bongo which companies like CAWA offer to assist making extinct.
But in the main, and especially today, hunting companies are not only bad businesses but directed by if not bad people pretty dumb ones. Bribing is second nature and those who play the game in places like the CAR generally get called out. It would otherwise go without saying that Simpson and the company owner are not guilty of this, and that only the basest and most corrupt justice on earth would dare pursue this case against them.
I prefer to believe that the British Foreign Office, like me, realizes that someone so stupid as to invite their arrest in the CAR is quite likely to do something equally stupid once sprung. Not every African country is so barbarous and primitive as the Central African Republic. It was specially good to see Richard Leakey so relaxed and forthcoming.
He is a man who has lived much of his life under attack or siege and a significant part of his non-paleontological public life remains clouded and unexplained. And until now, anyway, he has been withdrawn and reticent to assume such a grand public mantel. In the darker days of Kenya under the dictator Daniel Moi, Leakey held two important government posts.
The first was head of the Kenya Wildlife Service KWS and the second was head of an anti-corruption unit created in conjunction with the World Bank to rid Kenya of enough back room dealing that aid organizations would feel comfortable working with the country, again. There was wide speculation that the wife of the first president, Mama Ngina, was involved in the most massive poaching operation.
Leakey definitely stopped this, and the pyre episode was more than emblematic. But Kenya was not the only place in Africa where the problem existed; it was continent-wide.
But his brief tenure there and abrupt departure left many wondering:. A Was he just too frustrated without the authority denied him to clean house, or worse B was he corrupt, too. Did the head of the snake come round to bite the tail? I think that was wrong. Leakey never explained why he left the Dream Team and the accusations remain unanswered. Leakey was never the affable and sometimes flamboyant star that his father, Lewis, was. From the beginning he was much shyer, assuming I believe the shadow that most white Kenyans lived under during his generation. After all, remember that he lived not just through a global era of emancipation, but in a newly independent country previously ruled by a twelth of the population of which his ancestry played a significant part.
It was actually his mother, Mary, who was the discoverer of Zinj. Yet it was not until after her death in that scientific publications credited her, rather than her husband, Lewis, with the find. And the family was one of the most dysfunctional on earth. There were three feuding sons. One fled to Europe. One became an idiot politician in Kenya on the side of the dictator.
And that left Richard as the only publicly sane figure. When Richard needed a kidney to stay alive, the idiot politician balked for months before agreeing to the operation. Later I got to know him better when I was working with a Chicago filmmaker, Dugan Rosalini , who tried unsuccessfully to make an early documentary about him.
I then lost touch with him until meeting him again at a reception in Chicago honoring the th birthday of his father. Throughout these many years he remained withdrawn, terribly scarred I felt from the two public disasters in Kenya. Yet also during these years his successful scientific battles became legend, and his several books and other publications baseline studies for all paleontologists, today.
It was the position of his arch-rival, Donald Johanson , the discoverer of Lucy. Lucy was the closest rival to Turkana Boy in terms of completely found anatomy. There is no doubt in my mind that Leakey is a great man. And not just as a paleontologist. His love of Kenya and attempts to become a valuable civil servant and later politician there were perhaps ahead of his time. And the actual service he provided was probably necessary and beyond realism to suppose anyone else could have performed, then and there.
Torture is a crime against humanity. The United States has refused to prosecute him.