It has been a long time since my last post and many things have happened ever since: some personal and some public but mostly sad or worrying. I will skip the exclusively personal and will take your sympathy as implicit in the time you will spend reading. Thank You! I am happy to see SJG back in action after the scary moments at the hospital. In spite of the ‘smoking’ root-cause, I am sure it gets every contributor of an article or a comment worried to think of how the drama that is created around the posts might have had a share on the stress. I get heart attacks reading…

Disclaimer: Say you are telling a friend in Adi-Qontsi about an argument you had with an ugly woman in Siberia, who had long nails. Your next-door neighbor (you never mentioned her name) jumps in and starts explaining. Applying simple logic: (a) your neighbor thinks she is ugly; (b) she has long nails; or (c) she is up to something. The probability of meeting an ugly woman from Adi-Qontsi in Siberia and meeting her again next-door in Adi-Qontsi a week later is close to zero. Since probability can never be zero, however, in case you find anything offensive, please skip because if you obsess on these things, they become about you.…

ABSTRACT In this article, I intend to do four things: (a) Defend the position of the Tigrigna elite in our struggle by arguing that their missteps be excused for reasons of the “Ethio-Fixation Disorder” (EFD). (b) Touch on the argument that the Eritrean struggle is a package of good and bad and that no Eritrean (lowlander or highlander) can claim the former and walk away cleared of the latter. (c) Test the waters for approaching the concern of the “prototype lowlander” embedded in the ELL’s Wathiqa that I touched on in the previous article. How the ELL perceives and accommodates the profile of this “prototype lowlander” is what will make…

OFF TOPIC This year 2015 – my new year and that of family and friends, was clouded by the sudden deaths of at least two great landmarks in the way many of us have come to know and approach Eritrean politics. The first in my case, was the loss of Yassin Mender, who, as far as I know, had distanced himself from the mess of Eritrean politics – opposition & PFDJ alike – right around the time that “mess” was first introduced into Eritrean politics in the 1980s. Apart from contributing to purely humanitarian aspects of the Eritrean tragedy, throughout these years, he managed to keep his mouth shut, his…

Background: I am not someone who is ruled by some “dictatorial chauvinistic regime” running my mind. I am of the belief, however, that women have ways of getting things into your head if you are a man simply because only the survivalist concerns that they raise (when they are serious and acting feminist) are true and cannot be ignored because there can only be one truth. It could also be in the way women tend to frame their arguments and not necessarily in the truth contained in the arguments. I will give an example: a few months ago, a good friend of mine and me had a little discussion with…