I feel like sports has been a first step in warming relations between countries in the past, no?
Members of the United States men’s team will come home from Saturday’s World Cup qualifying match with an uncommon souvenir — a stamp in their passports from La República de Cuba.
Summer of 2007 I switched from Bloglines to NetNewsWire for rss feeds. A little over a year before that I’d switched to Bloglines from NewsGator. I’d been happy with NetNewsWire. I liked having a program to open and read the feeds and I kept it limited to feeds where I read everything.
A few days after coming home from Brazil I got caught up on all my feeds. Mostly just a couple comics (PhD comics and xkcd) and my friends’ blogs and photos (I marked my Latin America news feeds as all read figuring I’d start again fresh). The program said there was an update ready. So I clicked to install it. It took me to the site to download the new version and had me drag that to replace the old one. Perhaps I missed something as I was just clicking through things, but that should have been made clear since people often simply click their way through things. I opened the program and all my feeds were gone replaced by the default feeds for a new installation. I figured my hard drive clone might be of use, but dragging the older versions of preference files did nothing. I searched help and it told me to register for a forum and/or sign up for an email list. There was no contact info on the site for someone who could help me. Mind you this is a paid program. This is in marked contrast to the folks at SuperDuper (cloning program) who provide prompt support when I need them. That’s what we expect from paid software, no?
So now I’m using Google Reader. I’d messed around with it a bit in an earlier version. I really like it and it’s nice to be able to read things on campus without having to enter additional information. I guess I’d felt committed to NetNewsWire because I’d paid for it (and the folks at MacWorld rave about it). I got over a year’s use out of it, so it’s fine and now it’s time to change news readers yet again.
A stack of issues piled up while I was in California in June (and in NC but too busy to stay on top of them). So I took them to Brazil and read them there. I of course returned to a new stack. As I find articles on Latin America I’ll post them. This one resonated with me as I was in Gutemala observing the 2003 election when Colom lost to Berger.
Early last November, the novelist Francisco Goldman was shouldering his way through the Texas leg of a reading tour for his first nonfiction book, The Art of Political Murder. Published by Grove Press in September, the book had received glowing reviews in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it would soon be included by The New York Times Book Review in its list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. On November 5 Goldman was relaxing in his hotel before a reading at a Houston Barnes & Noble when his BlackBerry pinged with an e-mail from an innkeeper in the Guatemalan town of Santiago de Atitlán. One day earlier, Guatemalans had voted in a general election, and the winner of the presidential contest was Álvaro Colom, a self-proclaimed Social Democrat and head of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) Party. Quite unexpectedly, Colom had come from behind in the polls to defeat Otto Pérez Molina, a salt-and-pepper-haired general who had campaigned on the slogan of Mano Dura (Firm Fist), a sturdy platform in a country that was ruled by the military and repressive right-wing parties almost without interruption from 1954 until the late ’90s. As it happens, the election was also the subject of the e-mail Goldman received from the innkeeper, David Glanville: The Art of Political Murder, Glanville wrote, may have been a decisive factor in Pérez Molina’s loss.
I got an email saying that Witness for Peace has a newly redesigned sight. Still busy getting settled in, but the top page looks quite good and they appear to have a lot of new content. Check it out!
So, anyhow, Thursday I’ll have been back for a week. I’ve been reflecting on whether I should keep blogging here and decided that even if I only post a few items a month people seem to find them interesting and it doesn’t take very much time. I have to ambitions of being a top blog with a huge readership. I just post things as I come across them and as I have time, especially things from The Nation, Common Dreams, Inter Press Service and solidarity groups. As I do my dissertation research I’ll probably link to some articles in Portuguese and provide a brief summary. Sound good?
Head to the airport at 2 p.m. tomorrow (post about trip here). Still need to put footnotes on a paper for an incomplete (appropriately enough summarizing Brazilian political history). It’s for John Chasteen and I’m intimidated because he’s such a good writer and I’m not very happy with the paper. It’s an attempt at a narrative, telling Brazilian history with a focus on the lot of the poor and the question of how Brazil managed to maintain such great inequality.
Also need to pack, pay bills, do laundry, etc.
Anyhow, I won’t be posting to this blog while there. I want to really limit time online. I’ll post to my personal blog from time to time, however. Speaking of that blog, I don’t think I’ve plugged it in a while: it’s where I put all my off-topic things. I recently got an op-ed published in the Carrboro Free Press, which I a posted to the blog a little while back.
Also, I’ve been meaning to mention the release of my album, Going Away. So now I have.
Saw this at the newsstand as I was flying from California to North Carolina. Thought it looked interesting but it cost to much so I said to myself “I’ll just get it online.” It says some things I’ve been thinking for a while about how the net makes it hard to focus. Appropriately enough, even though it’s just a bit over 7 pages printed I ended up reading it in two sittings. I do find that my ability to read longer pieces is much greater with print. I don’t think I could ever read a novel on a computer screen. The screen just puts me in a skimming mindset much of the time. I don’t think I’d want to read a novel on a computer screen.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Nice to see NYT covering some of the positive things that are going on in Venezuela, too.
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.
‘The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,’ said Ms. Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. ‘But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.’ Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.
In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.
link:
First I tried having a second blog about food politics. Then I had a separate del.icio.us account (called ediblepolitics). Recently it dawned on me that I could simply tag relevant stories with “ediblepolitics,” making it easy for others to participate in the project (I had thought of giving the login for the del.icio.us account to others to do so, but that’s more complicated). I just found it a pain to have multiple del.icio.us accounts. My account, by the way, is simply rbt. Anyhow, if you use del.icio.us and come across good stuff on food politics (it’s weird having my disseration topic become all the rage lately), please tag it with ediblepolitics.
I’ll be in Brazil in a week! This piece is a really in-my-face reminder that I really need to cut my meat consumption…
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 21 (Tierramérica) - The global food crisis and climate change have cast the spotlight on negative aspects of the cattle industry, such as the high consumption of vegetable protein to generate relatively little meat, and the sector’s role in global warming.
Because of its cattle, Brazil is among the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases. The livestock industry has encroached on the Amazon rainforest and is a leading cause of deforestation. According to its first national inventory, in 1994, logging represented 75 percent of Brazil’s greenhouse gases.
The destruction of forests, which has accelerated since the 1980s, coincides with the expansion of cattle-raising. From 1994 to 2006, the national herd grew from 158 million to 205 million head, and 82 percent of that increase took place in the Amazon region, according to the study ‘The Cattle Kingdom’ by the environmental group Friends of the Earth-Brazilian Amazon, released in January.
I’m sure there will be commentaries on this on my favorite blogs soon. This increases my respect of Chavez. People will certainly speculate about why he’s changed course. We’ll have a better idea as time goes on, but I think we should not be too quick to dismiss the simple explanation that maybe he simply changed (something that happens to many people’s views over time) and really did come to realize FARC’s war isn’t doing Colombia any good. Who knows?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has urged the new leader of Colombia’s Farc rebels to end their four-decade struggle and release all hostages.
Mr Chavez, who Colombia has accused of financing Farc, said the rebel group was “out of step” and that its “guerrilla war is history”
UNITED NATIONS — The Rev. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, an outspoken leftist critic of the United States and a former foreign minister in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.
Mr. d’Escoto, 75, an American-born Roman Catholic priest, said he would not use his new position as a platform to disparage the United States, but wasted no time at taking a few oblique swipes at Washington.
In his inaugural speech, he said member states had to unite against “acts of aggression, such as those occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And, without naming the United States, he said no countries should act as if collective agreements applied to all but them.
Asked about his past anti-American statements, including calling President Bush a liar during a June 2004 radio interview, Mr. d’Escoto said, “It is no secret to anyone that some of its policies have made for difficult relations, not only in Latin America, but for the rest of the world.”
It’s been in the news a good deal lately. Thanks to Lars for telling me about a Study from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School
Raleigh, N.C. — North Carolina’s rapidly growing Hispanic population contributes more than $9 billion to the state’s economy through its purchases, taxes and labor, while costing the state budget a net $102 per Hispanic resident in health care, education and correctional services, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If recent migration trends continue, the total economic impact of Hispanic spending in the state could increase to $18 billion by 2009.
There’s been a legislative battle over letting undocumented residents attend community college.
Illegal immigrants would continue to have access to state universities and community colleges under legislation filed this week by Democratic Reps. Pricey Harrison, Paul Luebke and Rick Glazier.
Their bill would prevent the UNC Board of Governors and the state Board of Community Colleges from requiring prospective students to disclose their immigration status. It was among the dozens of bills lawmakers filed this week just before the Wednesday deadline for legislation to be considered this session.
The bill does not prevent the universities and community colleges from charging much higher out-of-state rates for students who are not U.S. citizens. That’s what they do now.
The legislation counters two other bills filed this session by Republican lawmakers that would prevent illegal immigrants from attending the state’s universities and community colleges. The issue of those students’ admission surfaced late last year when the community college system announced a new policy telling all 58 campuses that they should admit students regardless of their immigration status.
The national furor over that announcement led the system to get an opinion from state Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office. That subsequent opinion found that the system could not admit illegal immigrants. The system has now announced it will no longer admit them. UNC officials say the issue isn’t settled and therefore have not changed their policy to admit illegal immigrants.
The community colleges and the UNC system say a tiny percentage of their students are illegal immigrants.
Gov. Mike Easley has come out against barring these students from attending community colleges and UNC schools. (link)
Here’s the News and Observer’s immigration page. Just glancing at it the headlines strike me as framing things in anti-immigrant fashion.