06.27.08
Posted in About the Site, Brazil at 10:24 pm by russ
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.
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06.26.08
Posted in Blogs at 8:54 pm by russ
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?”
link
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06.22.08
Posted in Venezuela at 10:55 pm by russ
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:
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Posted in About the Site, Blogs, Food at 2:52 pm by russ
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.
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Posted in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Environment, Food at 2:46 pm by russ
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.
link
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06.08.08
Posted in Venezuela, Colombia at 10:18 pm by russ
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”
link
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06.07.08
Posted in U.S. Policy, Nicaragua at 8:26 pm by russ
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.”
link
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06.06.08
Posted in Immigration at 5:45 pm by russ
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.
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06.05.08
Posted in Activism, Brazil at 1:57 pm by russ
Includes a video of “remarks made by Ariel Dorfman, winner of the NACLA 2008 Latin America Peace and Justice Award, at the NACLA Benefit Gala.” I was going to try to go, but a friend was passing through town. I’ll watch the video when I get a chance. Right now I’m having lots of timed sucked up trying to get my student visa to Brazil, but that’s another story.
link
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06.02.08
Posted in Chile at 10:05 am by russ
Joan Jara: Justice for Victor Jara, Justice for Chile (CommonDreams.org)
Here’s the intro:
After the death of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet in December 2006, many people in the Chile took to the streets in jubilant celebration. Others, who had sought for years to bring him to justice for his crimes, had mixed feelings when Pinochet passed without having spent a single day in prison for the human rights abuses committed under his 1973-1990 regime.
Perhaps one of the most well known of the crimes that followed Pinochet’s September 11th, 1973 military coup was the torture and execution of the internationally renowned folk singer Victor Jara. Like thousands others, Jara was rounded up and taken to Estadio Chile following the violent ouster of Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government. With his public persona as a well known folk singer in the country’s leftist Nueva Cancion movement, Victor Jara was targeted, tortured, and machine gunned to death soon after.On May 15th, after nearly 35 years, a conviction was handed down in the murder case of Victor Jara. As the commanding officer in charge of Estadio Chile in 1973, Colonel Mario Manriquez was found guilty of first degree murder. However, no one else was found responsible for the death of Victor Jara, including the actual person or persons involved in his torture and murder. The family of Victor Jara, including his daughter Amanda and his widow Joan, has responded in protest asking that the case be re-opened immediately and that justice be served. The Victor Jara Foundation in Santiago Chile, founded by Joan Jara, has organized public demonstrations and petition drives to achieve that end. With Pinochet dying without having been held accountable for crimes committed under his rule, finding justice in the case of Victor Jara is of upmost importance in the movement for truth and justice in Chile.
Uprising Radio’s Gabriel San Roman spoke with Victor Jara’s widow, Joan Jara, about the closing of the case of her late husband’s murder without the actual killer being identified and brought to justice.
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05.26.08
Posted in Latin America at 9:43 pm by russ
Or that indigenous groups in the Amazon spoke a language related to one of the Mayan languages?
Or that a truck could drive from Peru to Iguazu (Paraguay/Brazil/Argentina border area) in 1957 without running out of fuel? (Liz caught this one).
…just wondering (and apparently I’m not alone).
(If you haven’t seen Crystal Skull and want to not know anything about it when you see it you should probably have seen it by now. Failing that you might want to avoid those links).
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Posted in Mexico, Trade / Debt, Haiti, Food at 8:28 pm by russ
Starts by discussing Mexico. The Philippines is the other major example. The same issue also has a sub-only article on the food crisis in Haiti.
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
link
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