Good Mourning Umaru Yar’Adua, Good Morning Goodluck Jonathan

By Glenn 

Good morning. Umaru Yar’Adua, the President of Nigeria has died. Today shall be a day of mourning, similar to the one I instituted when the President of Poland and many of their top governmental officials died in that plane crash last month. The first time I ever heard of Yar'Adua was during the run-up to the 2007 elections in Nigeria. At that point I was still in college and thus motivated to know much about the world around me, even outside the borders of this great nation. I was worried Olusegun Obasanjo was going to change the constitution to procure a third term, just like our African President will attempt in 2016 and what Michael Bloomberg successfully did in New York City - the Lagos of the United States. Instead there was a peaceful transfer of power after a flawed election. Now there has been another transfer of power to new Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. I am not joking. I am not Paul Reiser telling you jokes. That is his actual name.

Good luck Goodluck, you will need it.


Today's Weather
I went to Weather Underground, my favorite domestic terrorist organization and weather website, to check on the forecast for Abuja, the capital of Nigera. How shocked was I to see in red letters This station is not reporting! It is a well known fact that in many African coups you take control of the media to broadcast the new leadership but usually weather forecasts are unaffected. There has been no known coup in Nigeria, but I'm a little scared those "scattered clouds" might be a metaphor for the scattered nation-states always on the brink of forming from Nigera's dissolution. There is some comfort to be drawn from the wind's status: calm. Let us hope that stability blows through the country.


Today's Militant Group
The Niger Delta is an area of Nigeria and the world that needs a dose of calm wind and new military and energy policies. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is in strife with both the central Nigerian government and the foreign oil companies that suck the oil out of the ground and take it somewhere else. The profits from this enterprise have flowed through various Nigerian dictators and Shell Oil, among other companies. MEND is the logical consequences of exploitative and environmentally destructive policies towards the people of that region. No response from them yet on the death of the President, but they did warn the oil industry in 2006

It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.... Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.

No word on when the new chapter of MEND, Movement for the Emancipation of the Gulf Coast, will form. But David Vitter, Republican Senator from Louisiana and leisure diaper enthusiast, will probably be their first victim.


Today's Christmas Day Bomber

As a Christian and strong supporter of secular holidays, I have many reasons to celebrate Christmas. However this past December I was furious with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for ruining my holiday and less so for trying to kill people that live in the Detroit area. This man is the youngest of 16 children and also son of the richest men in Africa. What would lead him to attempt such an act? Hopefully Republican politicians can help figure it out, preferably those who have never been outside of the United States. Around the same time as our friends at MEND were sending their warning, Abdulmatallab issued his own, towards himself, about sexual temptations:

The hair of a woman can easily arouse a man. The Prophet advised young men to fast if they can't get married but it has not been helping me much and I seriously don't want to wait for years before I get married. But i am only 18 ... It would be difficult for me to get married due to social norms of getting to the late 20's when one has a degree, a job, a house, etc before getting married. So usually my fa[n]tasies are about islamic stuff. The bad part of it is sometimes the fantasies are a bit worldly rather than concentrating in the hereafter.

I cannot relate to many things in his life, but the desire to get married at 18 so you can have sex is the one place besides that fateful flight where our paths converged.


Today's Prediction
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will be acquitted in his trial for the Christmas Day bombing after a mistrial and severe prosecutorial misconduct. Just kidding! He'll be sent to some prison without a trial by President Bush Obama. Frustrated by our President's betrayal of "one of his own," the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta will move operations to the Mississippi Delta with B.B. King fronting the new group. His smooth guitar licks will convince Shell Oil to change their corporate attitude and BP to clean up the oil currently flooding the Gulf of Mexico before it reaches Mississippi, which has been renamed "Little Nigeria" by the new governor Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - succeeding Republican piece of shit Haley Barbour after what outside observers call a "very flawed" election.