2012 in review

I forgot about Patriots on Fire‘s third anniversary and have therefore not shared some of its stats. But, fortunately, WordPress is here to remind me of it and spare me the hassle of collecting the data.

So here’s WordPress’ message unedited. I am grateful to Oumelkhir (what happened to her?!) and Chatnoir for having made the comments section very interesting and lively. I must also thank algerianna for her rare but enthusiastic and engaging posts. I am also grateful to all the visitors, those who comment and those who don’t, those who share links to the blog and those who don’t, those who like the blog and those… well you know the story.

This year’s challenge will be to have some visitors from Iceland.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 37,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 9 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Two years after PoF

Many things happened this past year. The so-called Arab Spring for example. Who would’ve thought two Arab dictators would be toppled and one killed in a few weeks/months?! NATO and a tiny Arab state waged a new war in (on?) an Arab country, right next to us. Other bloody episodes are being endured by the people of Syria and Yemen with their dictators still mistaking themselves for their countries. Abbas became a hero among his people after he had requested and had been denied a UN membership for his pseudo-state, etc. All these events and yet you won’t find more than two posts which I wrote earlier this year on Tunisia.
I believe I would have written many more some fifteen years ago. But then I was younger; I even used to demonstrate in the streets. Let’s be honest, I demonstrated only a few times and only on sunny days, but, 15 years ago, I voted in an Algerian election. That is to show you how I was.

I do not vote any more and will not do it so long as the elections are rigged. But as much as I’ve lost most of my interest in the Arab world affairs (comparatively that is) I feel entirely involved in and engaged by what happens in Algeria. Unfortunately nothing seriously crucial happened these past months. The same old problems, the same old faces… the same old farces. But I did write a few posts and a little more comments. I guess I had to, and

“Patriots on Fire” is one year old!

I have to say that I didn’t think I would write this post one day as I wasn’t sure the blog would live that long. But it did. We started the blog after what I call the Egyptian crisis (I believe Algeria had nothing to do with it) following the Algerian qualification for WC2010; but we knew, from the beginning, that it wouldn’t be dedicated to football… or to Egypt.

I guess I should share some statistics.

The most influential Arab country is…

Some Algerian and Moroccan forumers spend waste their time online arguing over which country is stronger, better and more important. There are reasons which could explain the “animosity” we can see between these people, but this is not the object of this post.

I remember on the same forums I linked to above, somebody seemed to link the importance/weight of a country to the strength of its relationships with Europe (mainly France and Spain when we consider Algeria and Morocco) and the United States. This meaning that you are important only if Europe and the USA think you are. While I disagree with this statement, I thought why not suppose it’s true and take it a little further. So I would add that a country’s (or anything for the matter) importance to the US could be measured by the number of occurrences of this country (or thing) in the American president’s speeches.

On the unemployment rate in Algeria

Numbers are used to make accurate quantifications, and we rely a lot on them in our daily lives because we trust them. They are indeed independent and objective, and their perception is supposed to be the same by everybody. Nonetheless, numbers can lie: Statistics are one domain where numbers are used but disagreement and distrust are the standard.

Algeria’s ONS just published the labour and unemployment figures for 2009. They carried the study in last October on a sample of 15000 representative population, and the results are as follows:

• Unemployment rate is 10.2% (18% for the females, and 8.6% for the males),
• 73.4% of the unemployed are below 30 yo (86.7% are below 35 yo),
• 34.2% of the employed population works in the public sector (50.5% for the females, 32% for the males),
• 56.1% of the employed population works in the tertiary sector, 13.1% in agriculture and 12.6% in the industry.

Source: Algerian ministry of labour

These official figures show a constant decrease of the unemployment rate since 1999 (Bouteflika’s first mandate start) as it can be seen in the graph. 2008′s figure, missing in the graph, was 11.8%. I won’t stress on the usual doubts about the ONS’s honesty: the dramatic decrease of the unemployment rate after Bouteflika’s arrival and after a very long stagnation period at around 30%, and also the diminution of this rate despite the economic crisis which affected the globe, including Algeria.