Wild Think Storm

Saturns Rings....ehrrr, orbiting clumps

2009-10-07T09:16:00.002-04:00

The rings of Saturn are the most extensive planetary ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometres to metres, that form clumps that in turn orbit about Saturn. The ring particles are made almost entirely of water ice, with some contamination from dust and other chemicals.

Although reflection from the rings increases Saturn's brightness, they are not visible from Earth with unaided vision. In 1610, the year Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope to the sky, he became the very first person to observe Saturn's rings, though he could not see them well enough to discern their true nature. In 1655, Christiaan Huygens was the first person to describe them as a disk surrounding Saturn. Although many people think of Saturn's rings as being made up of a series of tiny ringlets (a concept that goes back to Laplace), true gaps are few in number. It is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk with concentric local maxima and minima in density and brightness.[citation needed] On the scale of the clumps within the rings there is a lot of empty space.

There are several gaps within the rings: two opened by known moons embedded within them, and many others at locations of known destabilizing orbital resonances with Saturn's moons. Other gaps remain unexplained. Stabilizing resonances, on the other hand, are responsible for the longevity of several rings, such as the Titan Ringlet and the G Ring.

Well beyond the main rings is the Phoebe ring which is tilted at an angle of 27 degrees to the other rings and like Phoebe has a retrograde orbit.

Venezuela-Colombia relations

2009-09-21T12:02:00.001-04:00

There is hope...

2009-09-08T19:50:00.002-04:00

Norwegians in Congo

2009-09-08T19:06:00.002-04:00

Joshua Olav Daniel Hodne French, sometimes called John Hunt (born April 7, 1982) and Tjostolv Moland, sometimes called Mike Callan (born 1981) are two Norwegian former soldiers who later worked in the security industry. French grew up in the municipality of Re in Vestfold county and has both Norwegian and British citizenship. Moland is from Vegårshei in Aust-Agder county. In May 2009, French and his partner and friend Moland were arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accused of murder and espionage for Norway.
On September 8, 2009, they were both found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death by a military tribunal in the regional capital, Kisangani.

In addition to the death sentence for both, the tribunal ordered the Norwegian government to pay (US) $1 compensation to each Congolese citizen; the Democratic Republic of the Congo has an estimated population of 66,020,000.
Contents

Until 2006, French served in the Norwegian Armed Forces and was also employed in the British Army where he trained as a paratrooper. In 2006, he successfully applied to the Telemark Battalion, the elite infantry unit, but was forced to resign in 2007 as he and his friend Moland were accused of having recruited military personnel to private security companies.

Moland also has a Norwegian Army background, having served in The King's Guard and later Telemark Battalion, where he held the rank of second lieutenant before his resignation in 2007. French and Moland later worked as security guards in several places, including pirate guards for a Korean company in the Gulf of Aden. French and Moland were also involved in security missions in various African countries, such as Angola, Sierra Leone, and lately in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Arrest and courtroom charges

French and Moland were reportedly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to set up their own security company. In May 2009, they were arrested in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve and charged in the killing of their hired driver, 47-year old Abedi Kasongo, which occurred on May 5, 2009. French was arrested on May 9 in the Epulu game reserve, around 200 kilometres from Kisangani. Moland was arrested two days later in the Ituri Province, a few hundred kilometres further northeast. Under Congolese law, the men were tried in a military court because firearms had been used in the crime.[8] The military tribunal convened in Kisangani on August 14. Congolese authorities believe French and Moland shot and killed Abedi Kasongo on an isolated section of road between Kisangani and the Ugandan border.

Prosecution evidence
During the criminal investigation, the Congolese authorities found Norwegian military ID cards, counterfeit United Nations caps, and employee ID badges with both the correct and false names of French and Moland. The employee badges were from a little-known security company named Special Interventions Group (SIG) which is owned by and mostly staffed by Norwegians. The investigators also found SIG-Uganda employee ID badges which bore the identical SIG logo and the false names of "John Hunt" and "Mike Callan" accompanying both French and Moland's respective photographs.[9] During a raid on French and Moland's apartment, authorities also confiscated at least one rifle and a camera containing images of French and Moland on their recent travels in Africa. In one image, believed to have been taken by French, Moland is seen smiling as he washes what is believed to be the blood of Abedi Kasongo from the inside of their hired car. French and Moland have said that Abedi Kasongo was shot and killed when their car was attacked by gunmen on the road.

Gina Kepo Aila and Kasimu Aradjabo said they were both present during the killing. Both witnesses told the court that Moland shot, while French threw himself over Gina Kepo Aila. According to the witnesses, several shots were fired, most probably three.

Verdict
On September 8, 2009, French and Moland were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. Along with the death sentence for both, the tribunal ordered the Norwegian government to pay a $1 (USD) compensation to each Congolese citizen, an amount Judge Claude Disimo said totals more than $60 million. Norwegian authorities have denied that the men were involved in espionage for Norway, and have expressed concern they were not receiving a fair trial. The case has been widely covered in the Norwegian media, which has described much of the evidence presented against French and Moland as "contradicting and seemingly absurd".

Reaction
Norway immediately condemned the sentence and rejected the allegations of spying. Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said the sentence was "completely unacceptable" and that he would protest to his Congolese counterpart. French and Moland's defence lawyer, Guillaume Likwela, said the verdict was flawed because the men were not given an interpreter for the trial, carried out in French, which neither speaks.

Facebook shifts privacy policy

2009-08-27T17:00:00.002-04:00

Facebook has agreed to make worldwide changes to its privacy policy as a result of negotiations with Canada's privacy commissioner.

Last month the social network was found to breach Canadian law by holding on to users' personal data indefinitely.

Facebook has now agreed to make changes to the way it handles this information and be more transparent about what data it collects and why.

It will also make it clear that users can deactivate or delete their account.

"These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected," said Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.

"We're very pleased Facebook has been responsive to our recommendations."

The decision could also have implications for other social networking websites, she said.

Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public policy at Facebook, said he believed the new policies set "a new standard for the industry".

'Unrestricted access'

As well as updating the privacy policy, Facebook has said it will make changes that will give users more control over the data they provide to third-party developers of applications, such as games and quizzes.

There are around 950,000 developers in 180 countries who provide applications for the site.

Specifically, the changes will require applications to state which information they wish to access and obtain consent from the user before it is used or shared.

"Application developers have had virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information," said Ms Stoddart.

"The changes Facebook plans to introduce will allow users to control the types of personal information that applications can access."

The site will also encourage users to review their privacy settings and make it clear to users that they can delete or deactivate an account, and what the difference is between the two.

Facebook's Michael Richter said if a user chose to deactivate their account, the site would still store their information "even if it is for 10 years".

"We're committing to that user," he said. "We want them to know that if they change their mind they can always come back."

The social network has said work on the changes will begin immediately but they would take around 12 months to implement.

The regulator first started its investigation as a result of complaints by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa.

The country is the first to complete a full investigation of Facebook's privacy practices.

Canada has around 12 million Facebook users, more than one in three of the population.

The bit does not end here, in California a group of 5 users brought an action against Facebook for violating privacy rights....after seeing whats been done in Canada, I am quite positive the Judge in California will become crafty and creative with its sentence...

Guardia NAZional Bolivariana de Venezuela speech to the opposition

2009-08-23T07:44:00.003-04:00

Yesterday Chavez loyalist armed forced stopped an opposition rally in Caracas. The rally or marcha as they called them was planned to oppose the recent approval of the Organic Education Law, which was passed in record time at midnite in the Venezuelan Parliament (Asamblea Nacional) and in general vacations. Venezuelan opposition rallied in Caracas, even though Chavistas forces with the help of the Chavez government also declared that they will rally too, but in favour of the Organic Education law. When the opposition found out that police and armed forces barricaded the rally, opposition minorities violently removed the barricade and some even fought back against the police. It was an obvious minority...

But that gave chance for Mr Antonio Benavides Torres, a commander of the Venezuelan Guardia Nacional, to use the public force, including tear gas and rubber shotguns. Not only that but got a microphone and started lecturing the opposition through loudspeakers, saying that acts of today were planned by the CIA and that the intention of the empire was to bring down Chavez's government. The footage was caught on live Television, while Antonio Benavides Torres stated that Venezuela will not become a next Honduras...

Lets not forget the face of Antonio Benavides Torres, a clear violator of the Venezuelan constitution by pretending to curtail and utilizing the armed forces to curtail Venezuelan citizens constitutional right to protest and to convert the armed forces into a political party...

Carlos Alberto Garcia Moreno [aka Charly Garcia] is back!

2009-08-20T15:23:00.002-04:00

Charly García (born Carlos Alberto García Moreno on October 23, 1951) is a musician from Argentina with a long career in rock.

Charly García was the eldest son in an upper-middle class family. His father taught mathematics and physics in elementary school, while his mother produced radio music shows, mainly shows featuring folkloric music.

Charly began to show musical talent at an early age. At three, he received a toy piano as a gift, and soon he surprised his mother with his ability to compose and play coherent melodies, leading her to enlist him in a prestigious conservatory, the Thibaud Piazzini. At age twelve, he graduated as a Music Professor. Charly developed perfect pitch as a child.

The beginning: Sui Generis

The Beatles appeared in Charly's life when he was thirteen. Having previously only been exposed to classical music and folk, he would describe the Beatles as "classical music from Mars". In high school he met Carlos Alberto "Nito" Mestre and the two fused their bands to give birth to Sui Generis.

Sui Generis bandmates Charly Garcia and Nito Mestre, 1975.The band at first experimented with psychedelic rock, but its style would quickly establish as folk-rock with some little influence from the symphonic rock of the day. At their first big gig, the band's bassist, guitarist and drummer all failed to appear. Only Charlie (García spelled his name with "ie" back then) and Nito showed up, playing piano and flute respectively. They were forced to play on their own, and were a hit with the audience despite the other musicians' absence. The band's strength lay in the songs' musical simplicity and romantic lyrics, which appealed widely to teenagers.

As the band gained in popularity, García faced mandatory military service. He performed extravagant stunts in an attempt to be discharged from service; for example, he took a corpse in a wheelchair for a walk in the sun because "he was too pale". Eventually, García ingested a large dose of amphetamines and feigned a heart attack, after which he was taken to a military hospital. There, he composed two songs: Botas locas ("Crazy Boots"), which was censored at the time, and Canción para mi muerte ("Song for my Death"). He was released from the military due to his purported mental health problems.

In 1972, Sui Generis released its first LP, Vida, which quickly became popular among Argentine teenagers. Confesiones de invierno ("Winter Confessions"), their second LP, was released in 1973. This album showcased higher production values and better studio equipment, and was very successful commercially.

1974 was a year of changes. Charlie lost interest in "the piano and flute" sound that Sui Generis had been developing, and decided that Sui Generis needed a change; the band would evolve to a more traditional rock sound, incorporating bass and drums. To that end, Rinaldo Rafanelli and Juan Rodríguez joined the band. In many live shows, Sui Generis also counted in with a gifted guitar player, David Lebón, whom Charly admired very much.

With new lining and style, the band was ready to launch its new album. Originally titled "Instituciones", its name was changed to Pequeñas anécdotas de las instituciones at the producer's suggestion. The album was intended as a reflection on the unstable nature of Argentine social and political institutions at the time. Charlie's initial concept was to write a song for every traditional institution: the Roman Catholic Church, the Government, the family, the Judicial System, the Police, the Army, and so on. However, two songs, Juan Represión, about the police, and Botas locas, about the army, were eliminated from the album by the censors. Two more, which referred to censorship itself, had to be partially modified. While Sui Generis achieved a different, more mature sound with "Instituciones", its public did not embrace it, preferring the old one. The album sold poorly.

Around this time Charlie met his future wife, María Rosa Yorio, a singer who became the mother of his first son, Miguel García.

Charly García continued composing, and during 1975, he prepared what would be Sui Generis´ fourth album, Ha sido ("Has Been"), or a play on the word ácido, acid. However, growing frictions between Charly and Nito and a wearying public prevented the album's release, and the decision was made to dissolve the band. Many songs from that ill-fated album were later included in other García's LPs, such as Bubulina (1976) and Eiti Leda (1978).

End of Sui Generis; beginning of "La máquina"
Finally, on September 9, 1975, Sui Generis scenified its farewell at the Luna Park Stadium, giving two shows for 20 thousand people — the largest audience in the history of Argentine rock at the time. Many years later, Charlie said that before the show he was going around the stadium in a car, scared by the huge number of people. He was so nervous, he said, that he smoked 24 joints (cannabis cigarettes). In the 1970s, he has said, weed was "like a religious thing". The shows have been recalled as delirium-inducing, adrenaline-fueled delivery of great music. Two LPs recorded at the live shows were released that year, Adiós Sui Generis ("Goodbye Sui Generis") volumes I and II.

In 1976, Sui Generis also recorded a long play with Argentine musicians León Gieco, Raúl Porchetto (who musically resembles a soft-pop version of Gieco) and María Rosa Yorio. The LP was called "Porsuigieco" (mix of Raúl PORchetto, SUI Generis, León GIECO).

After Sui Generis, certain things changed in Charly's life. From now on, he would be Charly instead of Charlie. Right after his son's birth, he broke up with María Rosa Yorio, who left with Nito Mestre. Charly met Marisa Pederneiras (nicknamed "Zoca"), who was from Brazil, and they became lovers.

Charly continued working on musical projects. He now wanted to form a symphonical rock band. With Gustavo Bazterrica (guitar), Carlos Cutaia (keyboards), José Luis Fernández (bass and cello), Oscar Moro (drums) and Charly García (keyboards and voice), "La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros" ("The bird-making machine") was born. Clarín, the most widely-read newspaper in Argentina, carried a comic strip called "El Sr. García y la máquina de hacer pájaros" ("Mr. García and the bird making machine") by Crist. Liking the name, Charly chose it for the band — not for egotistical motives, as it may seem.

La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros recorded two albums: La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros (1976) and Películas ("Movies", 1977). Some of the songs on "Movies" contained a political message directed against the military government of those years, during which Jorge Rafael Videla was the president of Argentina. At that time, repression, disappearances and censorship reached new heights. Perhaps as a result of the ambitious and complicated nature of its musical project, the band did not achieve popularity.

Finally, in that year, the band said goodbye during the "Festival del amor" ("Festival of Love"), which was recorded, and released three years later on the LP Música del alma ("Music of the soul"). After the concert, Charly went to a hotel with Zoca. There they made a decision to escape to São Paulo, Brazil.

São Paulo. The birth of a new sound: Serú Girán
In São Paulo, Charly met Zoca's parents. The Pederneiras being a family of artists, they were fascinated with Charly. Artistically speaking, García was influenced by certain Brazilian artists, notably Milton Nascimento. Despite Sui Generis' commercial successes, Charly was destitute. In 1978, he lived a nature-centered lifestyle with Zoca in Brazil, fishing and gathering fruit. Soon David Lebón, an Argentine musician and a friend of Sui Generis, joined them. Having a new musical partner, Charly again played, and the seed of a new musical project was planted. Charly was now determined to form a new band, but he was still broke. Making his way back to Buenos Aires, he began a new search for bandmates.

Charly needed a bass player and a drummer, and he found both when he saw a band called Pastoral play. There he recruited a talented 19-year-old bass player, Pedro Aznar, as well his old partner from La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, drummer Oscar Moro. The new band comprised Charly García on keyboards, guitar and voice, David Lebón on guitar, percussion and voice, Pedro Aznar on bass, keyboards and voice, and Oscar Moro on drums. Charly and David were the main songwriters.

Charly now had a complete band, but still lacked money. At this point Charly signed a contract with a production group, although the terms of this deal were not advantageous to Charly. He did raise enough money to return to São Paulo with his new band mates members and record their first album. The band chose the name Serú Girán. "Serú Girán" was a combination of meaningless words Charly had invented as part of an eponymous nonsense song he wrote in São Paulo. The other band members liked the name so much that they also called their first long play Serú Girán, featuring the song Serú Girán, by Serú Girán.

The band returned to Buenos Aires and great expectations for García's new project. Their first show, in the traditional Arena Obras Sanitarias, was again advertised as "Charly García... and Serú Girán", due to contractual reasons. Thereafter, however, the name "Charly García" would no longer appear in the advertising — the band would simply go by Serú Girán. That first show was poorly received, the public having expected a new incarnation of Sui Generis. Serú Girán was completely different. The band had a new sound in which Aznar's fretless bass guitar was a key component, and a striking aesthetic with lyrics full of poetry. Puzzled audiences requested Sui Generis' old songs. In 1978, disco music was fashionable in Argentina. As a joke, Serú Girán played a song called Disco Shock, angering the public, whose rejection marred the show.

The following day, the "specialized" press called Serú Girán the worst band in Argentina and charged that David Lebón's vocals on their songs sounded "homosexual." The band's relationship with the media was not cordial. One number of a popular Argentine magazine called Gente carried a disparaging article titled "Charly García: ¿Ídolo o qué?" ("Idol or what?"). Despite the chilly reception, Serú Girán's members were convinced they had a good project and persisted, organizing more shows. They eventually garnered some acceptance from an audience that warmed up to their style.

Serú Girán carried on during 1979 and evolved markedly. Their new LP was titled La grasa de las capitales ("Grease," or "Fat," "of the Capitals") and its cover was a joke directed at the magazine Gente. The stronger and more direct nature of the lyrics, which criticized the media, including specifically magazines (especially Gente), fashionable music, radio and so on almost got them sent to jail. The public, however, gave the album an enthusiastic reception. The band's shows improved progressively, and eventually were performed in larger venues. The "specialized" press changed its tune, and a romance seemed to develop between the people and Serú Girán.

Expectations were high in 1980 for Serú Girán's new long play, which would be called Bicicleta ("Bicycle") -- a name that Charly had favored for the band (but was panned by the other members). The band sounded more mature on this record. The music was modern and strong, a key feature being the melodies. The role of the bass guitar was again central, and Pedro Aznar's work became more prominent.

In 1979, Charly almost went to jail because of the band's lyrics, considered too clear and direct in some quarters. Even as the music's political message became stronger, it was concealed in an effort to avoid censorship and another close call with the authorities. But the message remained, ready to be heard by ears that wanted to hear it. Canción de Alicia en el país ("Song of Alice in the (Wonder) Land") drew an uncanny analogy between Lewis Carroll's story and the Argentine military government. Encuentro con el diablo ("Meeting with the Devil") is a reference to the band's meeting with Albano Harguindeguy, who was frequently referred to, behind his back, as the "Devil." A military man, he was Security Minister during those years. He gave talks to some artists, ordering them to tone down their work or leave the country—a policy that led many artists to leave Argentina at that time.

The band was very successful commercially, and fans found its shows amazing and considered the music Charly's best ever. Serú Girán was dubbed "The Argentine Beatles", and Charly began to receive recognition as a great artist. Serú Girán was the first popular rock band that drew a following from among both the rich and the poor; rock was no longer circumscribed to its historically marginal position. In a recent interview, David Lebón said, "Actually we were much more like Procul Harum than the Beatles, a legendary band: a rock "viola" player (Lebón), a classical pianist (García) an infernal percussionist (Moro) and a virtuoso bass player (Aznar)".

Luis Alberto Spinetta was another Argentine rock star of the time. His first band, Almendra, was one of the first in Argentine rock, getting its start before Sui Generis; now he had a band called Spinetta Jade. Perhaps because his style was darker, more complicated, and found harder to understand by many, he was a less popular star than Charly, and they were portrayed as enemies. Luis and Charly put that myth to bed on September 13, 1980, as their bands, Serú Girán and Spinetta Jade, played together in what has been considered one of the greatest shows in the history of Argentine rock.

Patricia Perea, a journalist who worked for a magazine called El Expreso Imaginario ("Imaginary Express"), was not among the fans of Serú Girán. The magazine disliked them and criticized them strongly after they played in Córdoba, Perea's hometown. Serú Girán took revenge on Ms. Perea through their fourth LP: Peperina, directed at her, featuring a song about her which was also called Peperina. In Córdoba, the traditional Argentine infusion yerba mate is mixed with the herb "menta peperina" (Bystropogon mollis, similar to peppermint), which is also used as a tea. Followers of the band considered Peperina a fantastic album with great melodies, superb performance from Aznar, and the songs—which are critical, especially of high society—poetic. Peperina can be viewed as a summary of Serú Girán's work.

One of the songs on Peperina is titled Llorando en el espejo ("Crying in the mirror"), and contains a phrase that says "La línea blanca se terminó/no hay señales en tus ojos y estoy/llorando en el espejo..." ("The white line is up, /(there are) no signs in your eyes and I'm/crying in the mirror..."). With its sad melody, the tears, the mirror, and that "white line," the song seems to portray cocaine addiction. At the time, those lyrics did not draw much attention.

Peperina carried a political message. The song "José Mercado" ("Market Joe") was a clear reference to José Martínez de Hoz, the minister of economy. The lyrics "José Mercado compra todo importado (...) / José es licenciado en economía, pasa la vida comprando porquerías" (which translate as "Market Joe only buys imported (...) Joe has a degree in economy, spends his life buying garbage") referred to Argentina's policy of economic liberalism, with its profusion of imported (and often low-quality) products.

1981 may have been the best year for the band in terms of live performances. In 2000, a Serú Girán fan found some tape recordings of a December 1981 show at the Teatro Coliseo and took them to Serú Girán drummer Oscar Moro, who "cleaned" them for the CD Yo no quiero volverme tan loco ("I don't want to go that crazy") published in 2000.

In early 1982, Pedro Aznar went to USA to study at Berklee College of Music and therefore left the band. (It is a very common mistake to assume that Aznar left Serú for Pat Metheny's band, one of his favorite musicians. Aznar joined Metheny's group just one full year later, in 1983). In March 1982, Serú returned to Obras Sanitarias to say goobdye to Pedro and put on a highly successful show which was recorded, and published that year as No llores por mí, Argentina ("Don't cry for me, Argentina"). With the loss of Aznar, the band initially considered the idea of having David Lebón play both guitar and bass. But David and Charly had some differences chalked up to "musical taste", and without Pedro things were not the same. Moreover, both were mature enough to begin their own careers. That was the end of Serú Girán, for the time.

Solo career
In 1982, Argentina was undergoing political change. After the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas/Guerra del Atlántico Sur) in June, social chaos erupted and the military government lost much of its power. The kidnappings had stopped and censorship had weakened.

Charly García debuted as a soloist with a double LP, Pubis Angelical ("Angelical Pubis"), which was the eponymous movie's soundtrack, and the powerful Yendo de la cama al living ("Going from the bed to the living room"). Four hit songs from this album left their historical mark:

No bombardeen Buenos Aires ("Do not bomb Buenos Aires") showed the panic in lived out in the city during the Falklands war, and strongly criticized the army, especially the President Leopoldo Galtieri (Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, on the other side of the trenches at that time, also criticized Galtieri in their Final Cut 1983 album).
Yendo de la cama al living used the experience of being trapped in a confined space as a symbol of the repression of ideas.
Inconsciente colectivo ("Collective unconscious") was a message of hope for the stricken Argentine people.
Yo no quiero volverme tan loco ("I don't want to go that crazy") was a beautiful song about the adolescent spirit of freedom and rebelliousness.
The LP's presentation took place in December at the Ferrocarril Oeste Stadium (or Ferro). As the song No bombardeen Buenos Aires drew to a close near the end of the show, backdrop props simulating Buenos Aires were destroyed with fireworks.

In 1983, Charly left Buenos Aires with a small suitcase. When he came back to Buenos Aires from New York, he brought a quality LP titled Clics Modernos ("Modern Clix") that was different from anything previously done in Argentine rock — it was highly singable rock music you could also dance to. Its strong message referred the past years: Exodus in Plateado sobre plateado (huellas en el mar) ("Silver on Silver, Footprints on the Sea"), repression in Nos siguen pegando abajo ("They keep hitting us down there"), and Los dinosaurios ("The Dinosaurs"), a nostalgic but defiant remembrance of those who were kidnapped or killed.

On December 10, the course of Argentine history took a turn as the government became a Democracy. Charly performed many well-received shows in 1984, and recorded another album during its last months. García also recorded an LP called Terapia intensiva ("Intensive cares"), another movie soundtrack. Piano Bar was released in 1984, completing García's golden trilogy. But in the grips of cocaine, García's personality was changing — he became more violent, unpleasant, and sometimes infantile. This new García's music also changed. While Piano Bar had great songs, the calm of the Sui Generis' days had given way to a cocaine-induced fury. Demoliendo hoteles ("Demolishing Hotels") expresses that anger, and its name recalls a hotel room that Charly destroyed completely because he did not like the décor. He also released the song after many years of not being able to say what he thought.

During these years, García's band was home to many future Argentine music stars, including Andrés Calamaro, Fito Páez, Pablo Guyot, Willy Iturri, Alfredo Toth and Fabiana Cantilo.

1985–1989
After the success of Piano Bar, which was García's consecration as a soloist, 1985 was a year to slow down. Charly met again with Pedro Aznar in New York by chance, but they took advantage of this meeting and recorded Tango. It was a calm stage for García after his days of anger. The disc had some interesting material, but it did not achieve commercial success primarily due to limited distribution.

In 1987, García came back with Parte de la Religión ("Part of the Religion"), a very interesting LP. Many songs from that LP became hits. Two of them, No voy en tren ("I don't take the train") and Necesito tu amor (“I need your love”) are the perfect symbol of García's dichotomies: the first one says No necesito a nadie a nadie alrededor (“I don't need anybody around me”), and the second one says Yo necesito tu amor/tu amor me salva y me sirve (“I need your love/your love saves me and is useful to me”). This LP is also featured a song, Rezo por vos (“I pray for you”), which was part of a project with Luis Alberto Spinetta that was never finished.

His personal life was changing. After ten years with Zoca, Charly's behavior with other women brought disorder to their relationship; they were still together, but their relationship was of a different nature.

In 1988, Charly made his acting debut at the age of 36, playing a nurse in the movie Lo que vendrá (“What is to come”), the soundtrack of which he also composed. Being a nurse had long been one of García's obsessions. Later that year, the Amnesty International festival wrapped up in Buenos Aires. Starring international and local rock stars, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Charly García and León Gieco were there. Before the show began, Charly was extremely nervous, sitting and standing up on a chair. It has been reported that Peter Gabriel was surprised, and Bruce looked at Charly askance, at which Charly confronted Bruce and told him, almost yelling, "Here, in Argentina, I'm the boss." The situation was tense, Springsteen was angry, and Sting forced Charly to sit down and began to massage him. Years later, Sting would be asked about Charly García: "Charly? Quite a character..." At that show, Charly was in a sorry condition: he was nervous and he could hardly sing. He was already a star, and he was applauded anyway.

In 1989, Puerto Rican pop star Wilkins invited Charly to record his classic "Yo No Quiero Volverme Tan Loco", alongside Ilan Chester, from Venezuela, as a tribute to "Rock en Español"; the song was featured in Wilkins' L.A-N.Y. album.

Later that year, Charly released a new album, Cómo conseguir chicas (“How to get girls”). This would probably be his last "normal" album. He described it as "Just a bunch of songs that were never published for different reasons".

Charly's father had long ago told him, "Never write an anagram for someone if you don't want him or her to be pissed off". During the Serú Girán years, his friend David Lebón told him something similar: "Do not write a song for a woman if you love her, because she'll leave you". The LP includes a song titled "Shisyastawuman" (a deliberately direct transliteration of "She's just a woman"), the first song García recorded in English that was written to a woman. The woman left him after hearing the song, just like Lebón had warned. A song named Zocacola that Charly dedicated to Zoca was included in this LP as well. A couple of months after the disc was released, Zoca left him.

García had changed. Physically, he looked older. His music was dark, and the earlier symphonical García from "La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros" was gone. Now, Charly's sound was closer to either punk rock, with violent songs such as No toquen (“Do Not Touch”), or a depressive and dark style as shown in No me verás en el subte (“You Won't See Me in the Subway”). Different and adverse times lay ahead.

For the international tour in 1989/1990, García formed a new band with Hilda Lizarazu, who sang backup vocals for Charly. He called her "the First Lady", but once in a show in Bolivia, García spat on Hilda. She hid her tears during the show, but quit the band afterwards.

1990-1993 The days of excess
In 1990, Charly had many ideas but no band. Another important member of the band, Fabián "Zorrito" Von Quintiero, had left to another band, Los ratones paranoicos (“The Paranoid Mice”). Hilda Lizarazu and Carlos García López started a band called Man Ray. Charly was now alone. For his new disc, Filosofía barata y zapatos de goma (“Cheap Philosophy and Rubber Shoes”), he called many of his old friends, who helped record most of the songs. Assisting him, among others, were Andrés Calamaro, Rinaldo Rafanelli, Fabiana Cantilo, "Nito" Mestre, Pedro Aznar, Fabián Von Quintiero and even Hilda Lizarazu. The first issue came once the disc was released. Its last song was a rock version of the Himno Nacional Argentino, or the Argentine national anthem. Amid controversy, García's version of the national anthem was forbidden for some days, but García was victorious, a judge authorizing the song. Many people liked it, seeing it as a fresh, sincere, strong and respectful version of the old song.

Charly's social life changed with Zoca's absence. Using cocaine and other narcotics, he could go days and days without getting any sleep as he searched for the precious "estado alfa" (“Alpha Condition”), as he called the ideal moment of inspiration for songwriting. He played every night in nightclubs until morning and drank whisky prodigiously, causing his friends to worry about him. He has said of that time: "Creatively, I was great, better than ever. But my mind and body weren't synchronized, my body was taking a different direction". That year, the Government of Buenos Aires organized "Mi Buenos Aires Rock" ("My B.A. rock"), a public rock festival on Avenue 9 de Julio, the city's most famous. The artists were to play for one half-hour, but Charly played for over two hours. He closed the festival with his version of the national anthem before one hundred thousand people.

Those strong days ended in June 1991. It became evident that Charly was feeling unwell, and he realized what had been clear to everybody else — he needed to rest. To this end, he went to a farm owned by evangelist preacher Carlos Novellis. Charly spent a few weeks there, but when he discovered that the place was actually a drug rehabilitation clinic, he decided to leave, and had a fierce argument with Novellis. While in the farm, he was only allowed visits with his friend Pedro Aznar. Those days gave rise to a new disc: Tango 4, illustrated with drawings of García's from that time at the farm. After Charly's stay at the farm, Zoca came back, becoming Charly's personal nurse for a time in 1991. But before the year was out, she had gotten completely tired of García's behaviour and left him for good.

In December, Charly returned to Ferro, the stadium where in 1982 he had introduced Yendo de la cama al living, after nine years. This time he arrived at the stadium exiting an "ambulance", assisted by some "doctors"; his band had even been re-baptized "The nurses". Charly thus chose to mock his "health problems". At that show, García seemed to have gained a good deal of weight, which was surprising since he had always been quite thin. Charly's fans felt that, far from helping him in any way, the management at the farm had taken money from him and brought about his weight gain. His voice was not the same, but he was still there.

In December 1992, Charly again embraced his past and surprisingly re-joined Serú Girán Charly García, David Lebón, Pedro Aznar and Oscar Moro were back after ten years. A new album was recorded, titled Serú 92. It enjoyed great commercial success, but musically was sharply different from Serú Girán's other discs.

Serú Girán performed two huge shows at the River Plate Stadium - Buenos Aires' largest. Serú Girán had always been at its best when live, the four members playing very well together. This time, in Moro's words, "the show sounded like Charly García and Serú Girán". Charly's demons were replacing Charly the artist. In the second show, Charly mocked David Lebón so much that David got upset and left the stage. Aznar followed him and convinced him to come back to finish the show. Things were obviously not the same. After that image, the dreams of those who looked forward to a new era for Serú Girán all but vanished. The Serú Girán reunion was just a meeting. "Of course it was for the money, what did you think?" commented García jokingly some time after the shows.

During that year, García's friends saw him in especially miserable conditions, and convinced his mother Carmen to sign an authorization that forced Charly to be confined at a clinic in order to get over his addictions. Things did not work as hoped; Charly escaped only a few days after being admitted, and was enraged with his mother, with whom he does not speak today because of that episode. Charly was free again to continue with his self-destructive lifestyle.

1994-2006 The Say no More era

Charly García in 2004.After not having released any new solo material since 1990, in 1994 García was ready to strike back. The new project was called La hija de "La Lágrima" (“«The Tear»'s Daughter”). It was a conceptual project which struck many as confusing and strange. It carried a prominent motif: the mercury tear, with which the album's cover is illustrated. Rumor had it that Charly had experimented, injecting himself with mercury. Officially, he spoke about "a fantasy of mine, in which there was a whole underground society that worshiped the mercury tear". The streets of Buenos Aires were filled with advertising: "The genius is back". But the new Charly seemed only a shadow of what he used to be. This LP would be an introduction to the future concept of "Say no more".

In 1994, Kurt Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, tragically ended his own life, adding to his legendary status in the eyes of the fans who saw him becoming a hero. Being one of them, García dyed his hair blonde.

Also during 1994, the Soccer World Cup was being played in the United States. Soccer player legend Diego Armando Maradona was involved in a dispute with FIFA regarding a drug test for ephedrine doping, which he failed, preventing him from playing. After Diego was sent home, Argentina lost two important matches and was knocked out of the World Cup. When the last match was about to end, Charly called Diego on his cell phone and sang to him "live" the Maradona's Blues, a song he composed for him. Diego cried when he heard "Un accidente no es pecado/y no es pecado estar así" (“An accident is not a sin/And is not a sin to feel like this”), and the two struck up a friendship.

This friendship would be threatened two years later, when Maradona became the poster boy for an anti-drug campaign let by the Argentine government whose slogan was "Sol Sin Drogas"("Sun without drugs"). Charly was among those who criticized the initiative as nasty, corrupt and altogether childish; during a concert he mocked the campaign with a play in words, saying "I bet 'Drugs Without Sun" is a whole lot better than 'Sun Without Drugs'." The remark earned him several appearances before a judge, accused of being an apologist for drugs. Charly was ultimately absolved.

After a fight with his mother he changes his name from "Carlos García Moreno" to "Carlos García Lange", removing his mother's surname and changing it for the second surname of his father.

1995 was again a musical year. García formed a new band for touring on summertime (with María Gabriela Epumer, Juan Bellia, Fabián Von Quintiero, Jorge Suárez and Fernando Samalea) and named it as "Casandra Lange". His idea with the band was play songs Charly had heard as a teen, such as "Sympathy for the devil" (Mick Jagger-Keith Richards) and "There's a place" (John Lennon-Paul McCartney). He recorded the performances and edit a live album, "Estaba en llamas cuando me acosté" ("It was on fire when I went to bed"). All of the songs in this album are in English except for "Te recuerdo invierno" ("I remember you, winter"), which García had written in the early 70's but never recorded with Sui Generis.

In May, Charly recorded "Hello! MTV Unplugged", often considered the last time that the rock star played his music to his full potential.

"Say no more" arrived in 1996. Charly's life was terribly twisted: drugs, arguments with old friends, and public scandals. "Say no more" was a new concept for García: "'Say no more' would be in music what painting directly on the canvas would be for a painter", he explained. He also said that the LP "will only be understood in 20 years". Some sparks of his genius showed, but longtime fans of Charly were not very fond of it at first. Today, however, the album is considered García's masterpiece, and "Say no more" the classic slogan identifying Charly García and all his music.

During 1997, García recorded "Alta Fidelidad" ("High Fidelity") with Mercedes Sosa. Both had known each other since his childhood, so they decided to publish a collaborative work on which Mercedes would sing her favorite García songs of all time.

In 1998, "El aguante" ("Holding On") was released. This production featured many covers translated to Spanish by García, like "Tin Soldier" (Small Faces), or "Roll over Beethoven" (Chuck Berry). A significant song which was not included was "A whiter shade of pale", originally released by Procol Harum, a band that Charly had always admired. Apparently, the former members of Procol Harum did not authorize García's version because it had a sly reference to cocaine, so it had to be removed from the album shortly before its release. The new version said: "(..)yo soy una cajita / con un polvo ya lo ves / todo parece ir conexo / con su blanca palidez(...)", which means "I'm just a tiny box / with a dust, as you see / everything seems to be connected / with its whiter shade of pale".

In February 1999, García performed at the close of the free public-rock festival "Buenos Aires Vivo III" (BA Live III). There he played a huge concert for 250.000 fans who attended one of the biggest concerts in Argentina to date. In July 1999, Charly agreed to give a private performance at the Quinta de Olivos (the Argentine Presidential residence), at the invitation of the president, Carlos Saúl Menem. On a televised bit of this event he was seen in good spirits, carrying out antics such as playing with the security cameras, or trying to teach the president how to play the piano. A limited edition of a disc memorializing the famous concert, "Charly & Charly", was released that year.

Maravillización 2000-2003
In 2000, Charly and Nito Mestre decided to bring Sui Generis back to life. For the special occasion, they both composed the songs for a new LP, "Sinfonías para adolescentes" ("Symphonies for Teenagers"). Of course, things were very different after 25 years, but young and older fans were excited by the idea of the return of Sui Generis. This new period would be marked by García's new "sound concept" of Maravillización or "Making something marvellous", replacing the old dark "Say no more" style.

Finally Sui Generis played again in the Boca Juniors's Stadium, for 25.000 fans on December 7, 2000. Charly respected his fans and his old partner, and played for almost four hours in front of a delighted public, despite of the "differences" between the old and the new model Sui Generis, as regards sound, Charly's voice and behaviour, etc

Many journalists and some fans criticized this return, stating that the main cause for it was the money and that both members of the band had changed so much, that the new album and show had nothing to do with the "real" Sui Generis.

During 2001, ¡Si! Detrás de las paredes (“B [the musical note]! Behind the Walls”) was edited as the second and last Sui Generis's LP in this new era. It was a mash up between live versions of the Boca Juniors's concert, new songs (as "Telepáticamente") and some versions of old songs. (such as "Rasguña Las Piedras", featuring Gustavo Cerati, former leader of Soda Stereo).

Besides on October the 23rd 2001, Charly reached age 50, despite of the forecasts of many journalists who forecast that his lifestyle would not let him to reach his sixth decade. For the occasion, a special concert in the Colliseum Theater was organized.

After this interruption in his solo Career, Charly got back to the spotlight after releasing "Influencia" ("Influence") in 2002. This new disc contained some interesting songs that made an impact in the Latin American world of Rock, such as "Tu Vicio" ("Your Vice"), "Influencia" ("Influence", translated cover from Todd Rundgren's original "Influenza") and "I'm Not In Love" (featuring Tony Sheridan). Even though it included old songs as "Happy And Real" (From Tango IV, 1991) or "Uno A Uno" ("One to one", from "El Aguante", 1998) and different versions of the same songs, this was probably García's best album since 1994.

Live concerts of "Influencia" were probably Charly's best in a long, long time. With the strong support of María Gabriela Epumer in chorus and guitar, Charly showed up in many different concerts, such as two in the Luna Park Stadium, Viña del Mar and Cosquín Rock with correct performances.

In a confusing and unfortunate episode, María Gabriela suddenly passed away on June 31 2003. The "first lady" or the "Charly's Angel" was just 39 years old and suffered a heart attack after having lived a very healthy life. García was hit by this, and his concerts were never the same.

Finally in October 2003, Charly released "Rock and Roll, Yo" ("Rock and Roll, Me"), dedicated to María Gabriela. The songs weren't as good as those in "Influencia", his voice often sounds out of tune and, once again the LP contained too many versions and translated convers such as "Linda Bailarina" ("Pretty Ballerina", Michael Brown) or "Wonder" ("Love´S In Need Of Love Today" by Stevie Wonder). This time his shows weren't so convincent, and Epumer's absence could be felt by the fans.

Since 2004

Charlie Garcia and a fan, Ex-President Nestor Kirchner.While some of García's shows in recent years were marked with tantrums that resulted in truncated concerts (one producer even printed "We don't assume the responsibility for the length of the show" on the tickets), there has, recently been a return to his strength. On April 30, 2007 he performed in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires at the invitation of the Madres de la Plaza for their 30th Anniversary. He routinely performs throughout Argentina and South America.

Also, since 2004, one of his most remarkable "positive" landmarks was to play once again in Casa Rosada, the Argentine government palace. This was one of the many concerts organized there by the Argentine ex-president, Néstor Kirchner.

The time since 2004, has largely been a time of composition and touring.

During 2006 and 2007 Garcia recorded "Kill Gil".

According to Clarín newspaper, on the 14th of June 2008, Charly García was taken to a hospital in the city of Mendoza, Argentina due to a violent episode that he carried out in a hotel in Mendoza. Some[who?] sources relate the incident to overdose of drugs and alcohol.

After that incident, Charly was taken to Palito Ortega's country house to be treated by psychiatrics and other doctors to get him out of his intoxication and addictions. It was a recovery that took more than a year.

Charly came back in August of 2009 with a song called “Deberías saber porque” (You should know why)

Follow me on Twitter

2009-08-04T18:00:00.002-04:00

Follow me on Twitter:

MrGonzcrespo

http://twitter.com/mrgonzcrespo

Attorney general proposes regulation of freedom of expression

2009-07-31T16:19:00.002-04:00

The Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega (botox anyone?) yesterday has proposed for a strict regulation of the right of freedom of expression. While the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega, recognized (thanks be to God) the constitutional right of freedom of expression, she proposes to regulate the freedom of expression by criminalizing the act based on "false news" that could trigger social reactions, including political retaliations by hecklers. She introduced a special law titled Law of Mediated Crimes. The rationale behind the law, according to Luisa Ortega, is that the constitutional right of freedom of expression must be curtailed and balanced. Now, I really think that Luisa Ortega is forgetting that the only limitation to the right of freedom of expression is defamatory laws or the criminalization of defamation. Venezuela provides for the criminal penalty of defamation, as the only limitation to the right of freedom of expression. If we compare legislations worldwide, there is not a single additional limitation to the right of freedom of expression. This limitation will surely constitute a further violation of the Venezuelan Constitution.

The proposed law includes a wording that any television reporter, broadcaster, artist or any citizen utilizing the media outlet for that matter, that bases itself on "false or erroneous news" will trigger criminal penalties, including prison from 2 to 5 years, depending on the case. Now, the keyword here in "false news", what really constitutes false news, when comparing it to "true news". Who will decide whether or not the news was false will be entirely based on political judgments, moreover in practical terms this will create difficulties for the prosecution, proving to the Criminal Court that the news was false. And what constitutes the truth? Definitely a spiritual exercise...

If this law is passed, this will create additional censorship on Venezuelan media outlets, now added to the current government financial and tax terrorism will virtually silence opinions in the media.

Artist review - Tim Burton

2009-07-30T15:24:00.003-04:00

Tim Burton was born in Burbank, California (August 25, 1958) the first of two sons to Bill Burton and Jean Erickson. His year of birth is sometimes mistakenly given as 1960. Burton described his childhood self as quirky, self-absorbed and highly imaginative. As he grew older, he found home life and school somewhat difficult, often escaping the reality by watching horror and low budget films, to which he would later pay tribute in his biography of Ed Wood. Burton grew up on Evergreen Street, very near the Valhalla Cemetery in Burbank. He has spoken in interviews about the "weirdness" of growing up near a cemetery. He attended Providencia Elementary School in Burbank, Luther Burbank Jr. High, and later Burbank High School, which his father Bill had also attended. His father Bill worked for many years in the Recreation Department for the City of Burbank. Another film figure of importance in Burton's childhood is Vincent Price, whose films would deeply influence the upcoming director's career. He was inspired early on by Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion films.

After high school, he won a Disney scholarship to attend the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He studied at the Character Animation program for three years. Burton's first job in animation was working as a cell painter on Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings. Burton was then hired by the Walt Disney Studios as an animator apprentice. Burton's job was to draw for The Fox and the Hound but he was dissatisfied with the artistic direction of the movie. He later commented on the refusal of Disney to use his design for The Fox and the Hound because his designs made the characters, in opposition to Disney's desires, "look like roadkill". Burton was unhappy during his Disney period, but it was then that he wrote and drew the poem and illustrations that would be the basis for The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Burton was married to a German-born artist for four years, whom he left for Lisa Marie, a model with whom he lived and was "engaged" to 1992 through 2001. Lisa Marie had parts in all of his films while they were a couple, most notably Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! Burton currently lives with Helena Bonham Carter, whom he met while filming Planet of the Apes. Burton abruptly left Lisa Marie for Bonham Carter and they now have a son, Billy Ray Burton, born October 4, 2003, and a daughter, Nell Burton, born December 15, 2007. Burton and Bonham Carter split time between Los Angeles and London.

Close friend Johnny Depp is a godfather of Burton's son. In Burton on Burton, Depp wrote the introduction, stating, "What more can I say about him? He is a brother, a friend, my godson's father. He is a unique and brave soul, someone that I would go to the ends of the earth for, and I know, full and well, he would do the same for me."

Microsoft takes on Yahoo

2009-07-29T10:30:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has long been after the purchase of Yahoo. Now almost 2 and half years after, lawyers from both sides reached an agreement which Yahoo will give control of its search engine to Microsoft, which in turn will power its own search engine site Bing.com. As consideration Yahoo will get 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales for the first 5 years of the deal.

In my opinion this is a work of art deal in terms of contractual law. I give credit to the negotiating teams and specially to the lawyers from both sides. Now, will this a first series of steps towards the purchase of Google? Then Youtube?

Is Microsoft is waking up from the golden slumbers that lead Steve Jobs and Apple take over the gadget world?

My bets are all in favour of Google and youtube.com, however.

2009-07-28T11:33:00.001-04:00

“It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Sometimes, time is against fate...

Back from Vacations

2009-07-27T17:44:00.001-04:00

Chavez v. Globovision (update)

2009-07-17T15:25:00.002-04:00

Yep, this is probably the fifth or sixth round in the personal battle of Hugo Chavez Frias against Globovision. It’s been almost 3 months since he ordered it to be shut down on several occasions on live television. This is without legal process or any reasonable objection against Globovision. Lets clearly remember that almost two months ago, Venezuelan tax authorities (SENIAT) audited Globovision and handed them a almost a 2 Million dollar outstanding tax fee along with applicable penalties. People from all parts of Venezuela quickly started gathering money to support Globovision and pay the Chavista inspired tax fee. Spontaneous manifestations of people on the streets trying to help keep Globovision on the airwaves with their spare change. This I am sure enraged Chavez even further…
Now, Chavez (or his goons, and I remember Machiavelli´s Prince trying to please the King) is after Globovision´s president and owner Guillermo Zuloaga. In a fascist fashion weeks ago they raided Zuloaga´s residence to find 23 Toyota trucks in the residence. The explanation behind this is that Zuloaga´s son owns a Toyota dealership in Caracas and he was using the parking space. This was supported by the fact that title deed showed they were all Zuloaga´s companies. During the raid, legal counsel for Zuloaga, Mrs. P. Jaime objected the illegal procedure was shortly after quickly charged with obstruction of justice, criminal process is pending. Now, the Chavez´s prize is to criminal prosecute Guillermo Zuloaga, Globovision´s president for Usury and conspiracy to commit usury.

Globovision is still on the airwaves, however. But the question for how long?

by Robert Frost

2009-07-15T09:59:00.001-04:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference...

Now by Dylan Thomas

2009-07-14T16:46:00.002-04:00

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
the come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Self Reliance

2009-07-10T09:45:00.002-04:00

Emerson

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt always drag her after thee. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

"Keeping my eye on today is about all I'm capable of. And today, I think I'll go for a run."

John Bingham, "Back to the Future,"

After 5 days Ledezma finishes hunger strike

2009-07-08T15:45:00.003-04:00

After giving in to his demands, Antonio Ledezma has recently finished his hunger strike. His first demand, to have a special commission of the OAS come to Venezuela, was declared by Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the OAS. His second demand to have the Executive government give him the money to comply with workers obligations was also declared by the Executive government.

Antonio Ledezma is a true representation of the tenacity and sacrifice of Venezuelans in crunch time all for the sake of Venezuelan democracy...My personal respects to Mr Ledezma!

A total of 5 days or 120 hours without food!

8th Tour de France for Lance?

2009-07-07T18:10:00.003-04:00

Lance Armstrong races on for his 8th Tour de France?

The race finishes on July 29, 2009, currently he is 0.13 seconds away from the yellowshirt...

Antonio Ledezma bolder than ever - more than 75 hours of hunger strike

2009-07-07T11:34:00.003-04:00

Antonio Ledezma continues his hunger strike, now from more than 75 hours. A dozen of workers from the Mayorship of the city of Caracas have also joined the elected mayor in his strike.

The hunger strike is taking place in the offices of the OAS (Organization of American States) in Caracas. My deepest solidarity for Ledezma and his courageous effort to restore democracy in Venezuela.

This is in spite of the media blackout doned by official media outlets and also private-chavista media outlets like Panorama, Ultimas Noticias and Vea. All Chavista editorial newspapers in Venezuela. Some day justice will be served...

Antonio Ledezma calls for hunger strike from OAS

2009-07-03T16:16:00.004-04:00

Antonio Ledezma Venezuela opposition leader and the elected mayor of the city of Caracas (Alcaldia Mayor), has today declare himself on a hunger strike from the offices of the Organization of American States in Caracas, Venezuela.

Let’s remember that Antonio Ledezma was elected Mayor of the City of Caracas (Alcaldia Mayor) last December. The President Hugo Chavez has not liked the idea of having an opposition mayor in the city of Caracas, important Chavista controlled zone. Chavez promoted through the National Assembly that officially creates an office of governorship of the City of Caracas (Primera Autoridad), and the appointment comes straight from President Chavez.

Antonio Ledezma in his hunger strike requests the OAS, the following:

1. The immediate release of the public funds for the workers of the Mayorship of the city of Caracas
2. To stop the arbitrary dismantlement of the Office of the Mayor of the city of Caracas by the Executive Government.
3. The OAS should designate a high level Commission to travel to Venezuela, with urgency status, to observe the grave situation democracy is going through in Venezuela, and how the national Constitution is violated, specially the office of the Mayor of the city of Caracas and the governorships of Tachira, Zulia, Miranda, Carabobo and Nueva Esparta.
4. To verify in the case of the Mayor Antonio Ledezma, the National government and the rest of its representatives mock Venezuela´s national sovereignty

If Ledezma continues with this hunger strike, it could be groundbreaking and perhaps ignite a social upheaval and could get the international attention on the democracy in Venezuela. In my mind, I can see parallels between Mel Zelaya and Antonio Ledezma. Or better yet, between Zelaya and Hugo Chavez who constantly violates the Constitution of Venezuela and remains, yet, unpunished.

Constitutional Crisis in Honduras?

2009-06-29T10:06:00.002-04:00

This past weekend the events in Honduras has raised international attention. The events that led the Armed Forces of Honduras to take action against the elected President, Zelaya.

The constitutional quagmire as I understand is as follows. President Zelaya requested in an additional referendum question in Honduras (political survey) asking the Hondurans whether or not they are in agreement with the establishment of a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution, and thus enabling himself for reelection. Now, the issue at hand is that the current Honduran Constitution provides in article 239 that anyone who has been previously elected president can not be eligle for President. Further, article 239 of the Honduran Constitution provides that anyone who breaches the rule or proposes its ammendment, and those who directly or indirectly give their support, will cease from public office and will remain politically disable for 10 years.

Now in my view President Zelaya has breached Honduran Constitutional law, specifically article 239, by submitting or trying to submit the possibility of his political reelection by the establishment of a Constitutional Assembly.

Cartoon

2009-06-26T17:04:00.002-04:00

Venezuelan National Assembly orders Telcoms to monitor communications 24/7

2009-06-25T16:53:00.003-04:00

The Venezuelan National Assembly approved today an amendment to the Organic Penal Procedure Code (in spanish Código Orgánico Procesal Penal) in first discussion. The amending Organic Penal Procedure Code expressly orders all the telecommunication operators in Venezuela to have a Surveillance Unit which will be readily available to the Public Prosecuting Office (Ministerio Público) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for real time surveillance. The law was approved in first discussion and now will be subject to review concerning human rights and open for second and third discussion.

It seems Chavez´s intention is to limit personal freedom, not only economic freedoms but also human rights, all in favour of a greater social good.

Goicochea clarifies absence

2009-06-25T16:50:00.002-04:00

Yon Goicochea, the Venezuela student leader has clarified from Mexico City, Mexico, that his absense will solely be a short 2 month stint. He will participating in a book of "Responsible Governance" by a private entity in Mexico. Goicochea will write the respective Venezuelan chapter.

Now, who is paying Goicocheas trip?

Venezuelan student leader bails from communist Venezuela

2009-06-23T16:19:00.003-04:00

Yon Goicochea, a Venezuelan student leader recently has left Caracas, Venezuela with his young son and his wife, to Mexico. Apparently the student leader, who graduated from the Law School of my alma mater, Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, left Caracas because of the political tension against the opposition.

Yon Goicochea was the leader of the student movement which in 2006 organized against the Constitutional Reform present by the socialist President, Hugo Chavez. Goicochea was severely critizied for not taking a more proactive approach towards politics and with certain shyness was involved with the political party, Primero Justicia.

For his involvement in the student movement against the Constitutional Reform back in 2007, Goicochea was given the Milton Friedman award for Freedom with a check of US$500,000.

Now what has Yon Goicochea done with the money so far? Obviously buy a home in his now beloved Mexico...I seriously think hes got a lot of explaining to do, specially student who remain here in Venezuela!

The Existential and Pessimist Jose Saramago

2009-06-22T16:24:00.006-04:00

Jose Saramago, a nobel literature prize winner and writer of one of my favorite novels "The Gospel according to Christ", "Baltazar and Blimunda" and "Blindness" recently gave some declarations from his home in Portugal. He stated: "Nothing is getting better, nothing changes"

Saramago was born in Portugal even though in the 1990s he sought political asylum in Spain (Canary Islands). The reason was his book on The Gospel according to Christ, a narration of the gospel from the point of view of Jesus Christ, as a completely normal human being. The book was thought to be heretic by Portuguese religious authorities. Saramago has been a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, as well as an atheist and self-described pessimist.

"I am not a pessimist; it is the world that is pessimist"

His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus Christ as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries (Spain).

He is publishing a new book, The Notebooks, which contain a collection of his blog entries dealing with several issues. Jose Saramago´s blog can be accessed here.

He ends this recent interview stating that "nothing is getting better, even the British democracy, which seemed untouchable, is now having Members of Parliament charging for their pets food, is a real shame." He furthers by saying that even tough humanity has seen some technical changes; morally things are getting worse than before. He even states that with the economic crisis they are trying to save some furniture, but capitalism will remain.

Saramago´s only hope is recently elected US President Barack Obama while at the end of his interview he categorically rejects the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez by stating that it is dangerously close of being a totalitarian regime.

High Court in the UK- No Privacy for bloggers

2009-06-18T15:25:00.003-04:00

Bloggers have no expectation of privacy

The Times Newspaper could reveal the identity of the 'Night Jack' blogger, said the High Court on 16 June 2009 in a landmark ruling (Author of a Blog v Times Newspaper Limited [2009] EWHC 1358 (QB)). The court ruled that blogging is essentially 'a public rather than private activity'.

The complainant - a policeman by day - operated a blog in which he would write about the social and political issues affecting the police force and the administration of justice. When a Times reporter managed to identify him, the blogger sought an injunction from the court to stop the newspaper from disclosing his data as he believed that this would put him at risk of being exposed to disciplinary action for discrediting and bringing unwanted media attention to the police force. In his blog, the policeman - now named as DC Richard Horton - allegedly made references to the cases he worked on, although he denied providing any information that identified the parties involved. He was also said to have 'criticised a number of ministers'.

The court ruled that, even if Horton had a right to anonymity, he would not have passed the public interest test: '[I]t would seem quite legitimate for the public to be told who it was who was choosing to make, in some instances, quite serious criticisms of police activities and, if it be the case, frequent infringements of police activities.'

“Mr Justice Eady [the judge in the case] is to be thanked on three accounts", said Francis Aldhouse, Consultant at Bird & Bird. "First, he has recognised breach of privacy as a routine, if still novel, cause of action with well-established elements. Secondly, he has given us practical guidance in drawing a line around the private sphere and declaring “blogging” as a public activity. Thirdly, the media, often unfairly critical of this judge, should welcome the emphasis he gives to the recent remark of Toulson, L. J. in Napier v. Pressdram that ‘freedom to report the truth is a precious thing’".

Iran is on the verge of a revolution

2009-06-16T16:07:00.002-04:00

Iran is on the verge of a revolution. The presidential elections last friday were doubted by candidate Mousavi, who claims that another election should take place. People are flocking the streets of Tehran against president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Time is ticking against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Gary Larson -Artist Review

2009-06-12T16:28:00.002-04:00

Gary Larson was born and raised in University Place, Washington. His parents are Vernon, a car salesman, and Doris, a secretary. He attended Curtis Senior High School before attending Washington State University, from which he graduated in 1972 with a degree in communications. In 1987, Larson married Toni Carmichael, an anthropologist. Ms. Carmichael graduated from Safford High School in 1972, before pursuing a higher education.

Larson credits his older brother Dan for his "paranoid" sense of humor. Dan would pull countless pranks on Gary, taking advantage of his phobia of monsters under the bed by, for example, waiting in the closet for the right moment to pounce out at Gary. Dan is also credited with giving Gary his love of science. They caught animals in Puget Sound and placed them in terrariums in the basement, even making a small desert ecosystem. His use of snakes in his cartoons stems from his long-standing interest in herpetology. Dan died of cancer in 1991.

Venezuelan Health Ministry prohibits Coke Zero

2009-06-12T09:21:00.005-04:00

The Venezuelan Health Ministry orders the Coca Cola Company in Venezuela to retire its Coke Zero brand off of Venezuelan shelves. The argument behind the Venezuelan Health Ministry is that the soft drink contains a suspicious ingredient that could possibly be harmful for human consumption. Please note that this is the same Ministry that declared that Venezuela was armored against the H1N1 virus. As of today Venezuela has 57 confirmed cases.

This topic was recently discussed in internet spam emails and appears to be a media campaign against the soft drink giant from the US. The ingredient is actually an artificial sweetener called Cyclamate. Cyclamate was banned from the United States in the 1970s.

Cyclamate is an artificial sweetener that was discovered in 1937 at the University of Illinois by graduate student Michael Sveda.

Like many artificial sweeteners, the sweetness of cyclamate was discovered by accident. Michael Sveda was working in the lab on the synthesis of anti-fever medication. He put his cigarette down on the lab bench and when he put it back in his mouth he discovered the sweet taste of cyclamate. The patent for cyclamate was purchased by DuPont but later sold to Abbott Laboratories which undertook the necessary studies and submitted a New Drug Application in 1950. Abbott intended to use cyclamate to mask the bitterness of certain drugs such as antibiotics and pentobarbital. In the US in 1958 it was designated GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe). Cyclamate was marketed in tablet form for use by diabetics as an alternative tabletop sweetener, as well as in a liquid form; one such product was named 'Sucaryl' and is still available in non-US markets. In the European Union, it is also known under the E number (additive code) E952. Since 1969, its sale and use has been banned by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.

Now Coca Cola argues that the product does not contain cyclamate, instead they argue that it contains aspartame and acesulfame. Two artificial sweeteners that they claim are safe for consumption.

Smells like a revolution in Iran

2009-06-11T16:30:00.004-04:00

Suprisingly it smells of revolution in Iran, in presidential elections coming up tomorrow Friday, June 12, 2009. The news cables have indicated that the race is very tight and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trails behind ex prime minister Mousavi.

Should President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loose the Presidency this could mean a serious blow for the inestability of the region and a step towards rationalization in politics and true democracy in Iran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has also gone on the media declaring that should the people crowd the streets in protest, the Revolutionary Guard will crush any attempts for a "velvet revolution"...

Tomorrow is a big day in Iran!

The "Velvet Revolution" or "Gentle Revolution" (November 16 – December 29, 1989) refers to a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government. It is seen as one of the most important of the Revolutions of 1989.

On November 17, 1989, a Friday, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swollen from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

With the collapse of other Communist governments and increasing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 that it would relinquish power and dismantle the single-party state. Barbed wire and other obstructions were removed from the border with West Germany and Austria in early December. On December 10, President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-Communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on December 28 and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989.

In June 1990 Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946.

The term "Velvet Revolution" was used internationally to describe the revolution, although the Czech side also used the term internally. After the dissolution of the nation in 1993, Slovakia used the term "Gentle Revolution", the term that Slovaks used for the revolution from the beginning. The Czech Republic continues to refer to the event as the "Velvet Revolution".

Thomas Paine and Rebellion

2009-06-08T16:04:00.002-04:00

Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice.

The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

Government's sole purpose is safeguarding the individual and his/her inherent, inalienable rights; each societal institution that does not benefit the nation is illegitimate — especially the Monarchy, the Nobility, and the Military.

Thomas Paine was an English-American pamphleteer (agitator), revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.

If Paine were alive today and lived in Venezuela he would be blogging (agitating, pamphleteer) against Chavez and calling people to rise in arms.

Franklin on Chavez

2009-06-07T09:20:00.004-04:00

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin sought to cultivate his character by a plan of thirteen virtues, which he developed at age 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice in some form for the rest of his life. His autobiography lists his thirteen virtues as:
"TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation."
"SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
"RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing."
"INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
"SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
"JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve."
"CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
"TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable."
"CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
"HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

Corapi on perils of US socialism

2009-06-05T09:22:00.003-04:00

I read this article written by Father John Corapi, reflecting on the perils of socialism in government. I think its groundbreaking for a priest to address issues, such as governance and politics.

"Flash point: The point at which something is ready to blow up. That has been my perception of Western society in general for some time now. Perhaps, a train wreck waiting to happen would be another way to put it. All evil can claim its ultimate origin in moral evil. Those that deny objective standards of morality merely facilitate the demise of their society. When it happens they will be nowhere to be found.

That apparently large numbers of people seem to be intellectually and morally numb is not news, but the near light-speed evaporation of our way of life is. Actions have consequences, and sometimes the consequences can’t be seen this side of eternity. That does not mean they aren’t real. You will be seeing some of the consequences very soon, however, not the worst, but the most immediate.

Personal liberty has already begun to be compromised. Various governments, including the United States, now own car companies like General Motors and Chrysler, mega insurance companies, soon perhaps health care and energy. Injustice is beginning to be seen from the smallest of individuals to the largest of corporations. The only problem with that is that governments have never been able to operate anything profitably, efficiently, or equitably. The little guy and the large corporation will all be equal opportunity recipients of heavy-handed injustice very soon.

The government is about to dictate what car you can drive, how you insure it, what your bank can pay you or not, what kind of heating you have in your home, if you can have air conditioning or not. And, oh, if you eat a Twinkie your health insurance premium is going up. If you get sick, perhaps the Twinkie did it, and you aren’t covered.

You might say that the government needs to control things to keep us safe, etc. That might work if the people in government could be trusted. They can’t, but we elected them. We get what we deserve, and many chickens are about to come home to roost.
One of the inherent difficulties with a democratic republic is that it is only as good as the people in it. When a people lose their moral equilibrium, live in sin, and suffer the consequent loss of wisdom, then that nation’s days are numbered.

Why? How have we come to this? It can be traced to the most compelling moral issue of our times, and we can’t escape from it, no matter how uncomfortable it is—abortion and other life issues. No matter what other rosy picture is painted by those that would have you believe all is well, God is not a disinterested spectator. Regardless of the high sounding rhetoric of the day, seeming progress in this or that area, it is an illusion. Nothing will ultimately go well for the United States or any other country until the injustice of all injustices is remedied. Until every human being is respected and reverenced, from the moment of conception to the last moment of natural life, no one will be safe and secure. Whether it is the helpless infant in the womb or the misguided and/or evil abortionist on the wrong end of a bullet, all deserve the safety and security of the law. Only God can in justice and wisdom decide when life begins and when life ends. When we attempt to usurp God’s job description we always come up short.

God Bless You,

Fr. John Corapi"

David Carradine RIP

2009-06-04T10:30:00.002-04:00

Kung Fu and Kill Bill star David Carradine was found yesterday dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand. Apparently he was found in his robe...

Carradine was an excelent actor, reminding the mythical Kung Fu star who roamed the earth and mostly recently Bill in Kill Bill series delivered by Quentin Tarantino...

A sad loss for movies.

Cuban Style in Venezuela-Venezuelan journalist predicts Chavez next moves

2009-06-03T08:14:00.007-04:00

Venezuelan journalist Nitu Perez Osuna has recently predicted what is to come for Chavez. I totally agree with Mrs Perez Osuna, I think it will be the natural effect of all Chavez's regulation. Now with an increase of upwards of 30,000 state workers (oil industry, cements, banking, and iron/steel workers it is expected to have at least a tough time to come up with workers wages. The economic strain will be felt and the private medical industry, consequently, expropriated and nationalized. Also the expropriation of private television and radio networks.

This is a free translation of Perez-Osuna note:

The gratuity of the now private health service will be issued on decree, all medical and auxiliary personnel will be added on the employees list of the state. Their installations will be expropriated by paying their owners 5% of market value in state bonds.

The use of cable and other satellite communications will be restricted to official departments and to hotels and tourist establishments. The use of mobile telecommunications will be solely for State representatives.

Internet access will be eliminated for natural persons. All private radio and television stations will be expropriated and will contribute for a sole national state network.

The dissapareance of Hugo Chavez

2009-06-01T11:27:00.003-04:00

Last week celebrating the 10th anniversary of his Television show, Alo Presidente (Hello President), Hugo Chavez announced the transmission of the presidential show for 4 consecutive days (with its respective pauses). Now, he started the television show on Thrusday from my hometown of Zulia, and Friday in Caracas, when he dissapeared from public view. The television show was cancelled on Saturday and that very day public sources announced that it will back on Sunday from central Venezuela with Bolivian President Evo Morales. Suprisingly (or not) Chavez was no where to be found...

Presidential sources confirmed that the television show, Alo President was also cancelled on Sunday citing "technical problems". The public channels are broadcasting general news on Venezuela and remain suspisiciously silent as to where is Hugo Chavez and the real reason behind his dissapareance.

Chavez announces internet cutback

2009-05-28T16:29:00.004-04:00

Even though President Hugo Chavez initially supported internet, with the enactment of a Presidential Decree in the year 2000 whereby internet was declared a national priority, today he has grown scare of its effects. Now Chavez has recently announced that the internet is a "luxury and must be eliminated from public spenditure". This is just an effort to curtail freedom of expression.

Now, this is just the beginning of the regulation of the internet. The obvious first step is to eliminate public offices and officials from accessing the net, then it will obvious that the regulation must reach private individuals, which mostly feed the internet with not so-Chavez friendly messages. Or better off, without the Chavez government directly or indirectly regulating the content of the internet on Venezuela. This is just a product of Chavez´s frustration with his lack of jurisdiction to regulate the content on internet.

In my opinion, this will slowly transform into the regulation of internet for private individuals (and maybe to yours truly, this humble blogger). Maybe Chavez will outright ban the access to internet to everyone, or either regulate the connection frequency times or perhaps issue a government clearence to whom could access the net.

The days of internet accesss in Venezuela are counted...

First Hispanic in the US Supreme Court

2009-05-27T07:49:00.004-04:00

Obama has recently nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court, if approved by United States Congress, she will be the first Hispanic ever in the United States Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor (born June 25, 1954) is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.[2][3] Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent, and was born in the Bronx. Her father died when she was nine, and she was raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with a B.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Princeton in 1976, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She worked as an Assistant District Attorney in New York for a time before entering private practice in 1984. Considered a political centrist, Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and confirmed in 1992.

Sotomayor has ruled on several high profile cases. In 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 Baseball Strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster's suicide note. In 1997, she was nominated by Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After more than a year, she was confirmed and joined the court in 1998. Sotomayor was an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law from 1998 to 2007 and has been a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School since 1999.

CD Review - the Crystal Method - Divided by Night

2009-05-26T08:54:00.003-04:00

Just in time for summer, the Crystal Method launched a new CD this past May 12th, 2009, the title Divided by Night...

This is one of my favorite electronic acts, even though the mainly play nowadays, dj live sets, still one of the truest and most innovative sounds in the electronic movement.

The first single, Drown in the Now, features Matisyahu on vocals. This track absolutely rocks, its sort of mantric with deep bass sounds and also recommend Come back clean, a great deep song.

In an interview with The Boston Herald, Scott Kirkland of the Crystal Method said:

“The album is different. There are big, organic live drums and distortion and lots of bass and that sort of bombastic sound that we’ve been doing for so many years. But lots of collaborations have taken it in lots of different directions. I think people are going to be happy with it."

by the Power of the 3 wolves shirt

2009-05-21T16:29:00.003-04:00

Funny things on the internet

A T-shirt has become one of the most popular items sold by online retailer Amazon in the past few weeks.

Sales of the kitsch Three Wolf Moon T-shirt shot up 2,300% after a spate of ironic reviews went viral.

The first review gave the shirt five stars, saying it "Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women" but "cannot see wolves with arms crossed".

That prompted hundreds of others to post frivolous reviews, turning the page into an internet phenomenon.

"When I put this T-shirt on for the first time, my wife left me! Thank you, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt," wrote one wag, while another said that "the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt gave me a +10 resistance to energy attacks, +8 Strength... and I have successfully solved 7 crimes in my city".

Amazon's senior manager of community content, Russell Dicker, said the T-shirt was currently the top selling item in their clothing store.

"The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt recently moved up 2,300% in sales rank," he said. "We are grateful that our reviewers are so passionate."

However, the firm which actually makes the T-shirt appeared less than pleased at some of the comments.

"The Mountain is a wholesale company and does not sell shirts on Amazon, so this viral assault went under our radar until the shirt made it into the top 10 in the Amazon apparel section," they said in a posting on the Amazon site.

"We appreciate humour as much as the next company, but we don't approve of some of the remarks.

"Not everyone can start out at the top and not everyone from our neck of the woods lives in a trailer or cruises Walmart to hook up."

This is not the first time comedy reviews on Amazon have gone viral. In 2006, there were more than a thousand reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk.

They ranged from soap opera-style script - "That was when I knew. He was tired of this life with me, tired of bringing home the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz" - to stating the obvious: "Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!"

Masochistic Baby

2009-05-21T11:33:00.005-04:00

by Shel Silverstein

Oh, ever since my Masochistic Baby went and left me
I got nothin' to hit but the wall.
She loved me when I beat her,
But I started actin' sweeter,
And that was no way to treat her at all.
Yes, she is the one that I'm dreamin' of,
And you always hurt the one you love.
And ever since my Masochistic Baby went and left me,
I got nothin' to hit but the wall, oh no...
Nothin' to beat but the eggs
Nothin' to belt but my pants
Nothin' to whip but the cream
Nothin' to punch but the clock
Nothin' to strike but a match

Mario Benedetti RIP

2009-05-18T14:10:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, poet Mario Benedetti passed away. Lets remember him with some of his quotes. Born in Uruguay, Benedetti was, in deed, one of the best living Latin American poets...

“No vayas a creer lo que te cuentan del mundo (ni siquiera esto que te estoy contando) ya te dije que el mundo es incontable.”

"Do not go on believing what they tell you of the world (not even this that I am telling you) I told you the world is untellable."

“Yo no sé si Dios existe, pero si existe, sé que no le va a molestar mi duda.”

"I do not know if God exists, but if he does, I know he will not be mad at my doubt."

“Un torturador no se redime suicidándose, pero algo es algo.”

"A torturer does not redeem himself after commiting suicide, but something is something"

“Acá hay tres clases de gente: la que se mata trabajando, las que deberían trabajar y las que tendrían que matarse.”

"There are three kinds of people, those who die working, those who should be working, and those who deserve to be dead."

Los Maracuchos

2009-05-17T21:17:00.001-04:00

Life in Venezuela’s Oil Boomtown

By Brian A. Nelson

Published: Summer 2008 in The Southern Humanities Review

The travel books, if they mention it at all, will tell you to stay away from Maracaibo. Venezuela’s second largest city is “dangerous,” “crime-ridden,” and “lawless.” It has also been described as “an environmental disaster area,” “disease-infested” and, of course, “infernally hot.” This is a town with a Surgeon General’s warning. One of the more optimistic reviews put it this way: “Maracaibo has absolutely no must-see attractions.” (1)

“Lawless” is certainly fair. This is the wild west; where everyone carries a pistol and where carjacking is such a formal industry that local merchants sell vacunas or “vaccinations”—for a thirty-dollar window sticker (the money somehow makes its way back to the mob) the carjackers will, like the angel of death at a blood-soaked doorway, pass you and your car over…for a month.

You can do whatever you want in Maracaibo, no one will stop you. Sell pirated DVDs from your front porch, drive as soon as your feet reach the pedals, throw McDonalds bags out your car window at high speeds, cut into queues (honestly, there really aren’t any queues, just mobs; only fools and foreigners wait their turn) and in Maracaibo, as a general rule, if it isn’t bolted down, it’s yours.

I landed here for the first time, mullet-haired and pimple-faced, in 1988 as a high school exchange student. It was all a big mistake really. I was too naïve/trusting/stupid to specify a country of preference on my application and instead wrote, “Spanish-speaking.” What a relief I must have been for the main office—“Ha! Finally, a kid we can send to Maracaibo.”

I soon learned that Maracaibo, with its 2.1 million residents, was home to Venezuela’s infamous redneck population. I had landed in Hazard County, Venezuela. Maracuchos, as they are known, have a reputation for being so ill-mannered, so vulgar and rude, that all over Venezuela they are summarily turned away from hotels and restaurants simply because of their zip code. They all cuss (and I mean all of them—toddlers to grandmas) like sailors, and in a marvel of modern linguistics have managed to make the word “cock” (verga) fit every part of speech, far eclipsing the ubiquity of “fuck” in English. Let’s take a look. In a greeting: “How’s the verga?” As an adverb of quantity: “That rally contained a verguero of people!” (a lot or a “cock-load”). As a noun in an (un)conditional: Q: “Are you going to the ballet?” A: “Not even with the verga!” (no way). As an indefinite noun: “Could you pass me that verga?” As an interjection: “Vergación!” (Wow!). Etcetera.

I say that Maracuchos cuss like sailors not because it is an easy cliché, but because it is literally true. Dating back to Spanish colonialism, Maracaibo, which sits on the Caribbean near the eastern border of Colombia, has always been a port city and, thus, has absorbed races and cultures from all over the world. Nowhere is this sailors’ legacy (and the sailors’ disdain for convention and etiquette) more apparent than in the naming of children. Venezuelan parents are already famous for bestowing bizarre names on defenseless offspring, often of historic figures (Mao, Nixon, Elvis), but in Maracaibo anything goes. Creating acronyms from the parents’ names is common (Yoma, for example, was begat by Yolanda Ortiz and Marco Alvarez); some names, while good, are too ordinary for Maracuchos so they reverse the spelling, as in the case of my host-sister-in-law whose name is Legna, Angel spelled backward (this one actually “back”fired since her friends, to this day, tease her that she is the anti-Christ); Greco-roman figures are favorites, too (Socrates and Plato), and in a salute to all things maritime, the names of ships are always popular; hence, Usnavy is now a common name for little girls (makes you wonder where daddy was from, doesn’t it?).

Hot, Hotter and Vergación!”
Did I mention it’s hot here? Sitting right at sea-level next to South America’s biggest lake (the aforementioned environmental disaster), Maracaibo is one of the most uncomfortable places on earth. Citing the average temperature (in the 90s) doesn’t quite do it justice since it is the humidity that makes it so unbearable. How humid? It’s that perpetually sweating, never completely dry, fungus-sprouting-in-every-adjoining-body-part humid. Drying yourself after a shower is an exercise in futility because you are eventually just wiping away sweat. I survived only through the grace of air conditioning and by coating half my body in talcum powder.

The combination of heat, humidity, and poor sanitation make Maracaibo the perfect incubator for tropical diseases, a paradise for germs. I know this not because the travel books warned me (they didn’t) but because many, if not all, of these diseases have been kind enough to take up residence in my overly pampered first-world body.

In a six-week period in 2003 I was host to the following Maracucho maladies: a pectoral fungus (how careless of me not to put talcum powder there), scabies (that wonderful ailment that necessitates burning half your wardrobe and boiling your underwear), a prostate infection (I’ll spare you further details), and intestinal amoebas (between trips to the bathroom I would devour obscene quantities of refined sugar—chocolate, bonbons, coke, anything—because, as you may know, one’s diet gets a bit quirky when you are eating for a million).

But c’est la vie; I’m sure I am better for it. Not only has my Spanish vocabulary improved enormously (phrases like, “I need a Petri dish for my fecal sample,” are now second nature), but if it is really true that whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, then I must have a preternaturally primed immune system. In fact, I fancy that when the next big one hits—whether it is a killer comet like in Armageddon, or an eco-apocalypse like The Day After Tomorrow, or a new (Monsanto-made) disease á la 12 Monkeys—it won’t be Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt and Dennis Quaid who survive. No, it will be the cockroaches and the Maracuchos (and yours truly). We will be the ones (you’ll know my offspring by the blond hair) who will carry on the human experiment after you and your wussy, need-a-flu-shot-every-six-months immune system are gone.

South America’s Beverly Hillbillies
Now I have to tell you about one of history’s great moments and the culminating moment in Maracaibo’s past. Even a hundred years ago Maracuchos already had their infamous reputation, and other Venezuelans—particularly the more aristocratic Caraqueños (residents of the capital Caracas)—already looked down their noses at the backward Maracuchos in their forgotten, mosquito-infested little town. Then on the seemingly ordinary morning of December 14, 1922 something very extraordinary happened. From across Lake Maracaibo there came a deafening howl from deep within the earth, “a roar that froze the blood,” and Barrosa oil well Number Two erupted as if the very skin of the earth had been punctured.(2) It blew for ten days straight, spewing over 840,000 barrels of oil 200 feet into the air and inundating the surrounding jungle. The villagers were up to their knees in the stuff, and The New York Times declared it “the most productive [well] in the world." (3) Literally overnight, Maracaibo became an oil boomtown with twice as many brothels as churches (which probably wasn’t much of an increase, really) and Venezuela became a major player in the global energy game. Today it ranks sixth in the world in proven reserves, higher than any country outside the Middle East.(4)

Suddenly Maracuchos were Venezuela’s Beverly Hillbillies. The place was flooded with businessmen and oil workers from around the world and Maracuchos—who had basically been living in 18th century conditions thanks to caudillo warfare and disease—found themselves in a bustling 20th century city. Yet even after the discovery of oil, Maracaibo remained oddly isolated. There were still no roads connecting Maracaibo to Caracas—or any other city for that matter—and for a long time, the trip to Caracas required a visa, since the three day boat ride made a stop at the Dutch island of Curacao.(5) So Maracaibo, with its back to the Colombian jungle and its face to the lake, continued to grow as it had in colonial days: through its port. It was not until the 1960s that the largest concrete bridge in the world was built connecting Maracaibo with the rest of the country. But by then it was too late. Maracuchos were a breed apart, and—they were quick to add—a better breed. They had their own music, Gaita; their own Creole cooking; their own sport, baseball, which is now the national sport thanks to North American oilmen; and of course their expletive-filled vernacular that used the antiquated vosotros tense and dropped the 'd' on all past participles.
But it was not just oil that fueled the Maracuchos’ faith in their superiority. Zulia (the state in which Maracaibo resides) also turned out to be the nation’s breadbasket. Today, between hydrocarbons and agriculture, the state produces over sixty percent of the country’s GDP, yet its population is only 13 percent of Venezuela’s total of 25 million.(6) If it is hard get your mind around it, imagine if the U.S.’s only export was oil and that one state (say Texas) produced two-thirds of it AND that same state generated most of the sugar, poultry, beef, and milk that the country consumed, AND that this state had evolved in cultural isolation from the other lower 47 until the 1960s. (7) Now shrink that mighty mighty Texas to one fifteenth its size and that, that ultra-concentrated little state would be Zulia, and their residents would be Zulianos and Maracuchos, Texans with ten times the ego and one tenth the subtlety. And you thought Dallas was bad.

The only problem is that, unfortunately for the Maracuchos and Zulianos, little of this tremendous wealth is ever seen in their home state. Venezuela’s centralized economy means that all oil revenues go straight to Caracas and never come back. While corrupt politicians spend lavishly on wasteful projects and fill their foreign bank accounts, Zulia and Maracaibo are left neglected. One can easily imagine how the Maracuchos feel about this. Which brings us to another similarity they share with their North American simulacrum. Maracuchos would be perfectly happy seceding from the union, which, in fact, they have petitioned to do several times.

Driving
In 1989 it appeared in a local paper that Venezuela had the highest number of car accidents in the world, per capita. Surprise surprise, Maracaibo, where traffic lights are optional, has the most car accidents within Venezuela. Now, in Maracaibo there is a famous street, 72nd Street, notorious for being the most perilous street in town—this is where teenagers simultaneously cruise and drag race on weekend nights. Following this irrefutable deductive reasoning, 72nd Street was immediately (and quite proudly) christened the most dangerous street in the world, a fact that may very well be true. (Who said this place had no must-see attractions?) My friend Alvaro lives on 73rd Street and on weekend nights in high school we would sit on his patio and listen to the revving engines, window-vibrating bass, and the honking horns that came from the next block. Every now and then we would hear a sudden screeching of tires and would turn our heads in anticipation, waiting for the promised clap of metal on metal and the sudden wailing of a car alarm. We were rarely disappointed.

How bad is it? I was in three car accidents in my first 11 months in Maracaibo, (luckily none of them serious) and collisions are so common that insurance companies will not cover an accident that occurs in an intersection. (What the $#^%!) Words fail me.

It isn’t only how they drive, it’s what they drive: In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it looked like Venezuela was about to break out, about to become a little Saudi Venezuela, a Qatar-like state awash in oil wealth, the kind of place where instead of paying taxes, the government rewarded you with money every year. The world oil “crisis” of 1973 marked a massive boom for the country. Drowning in oil revenues and cheap loans, Venezuelans started buying imported cars like Imelda Marcos bought shoes. And with Venezuelan gasoline costing only pennies a gallon, they bought the biggest cars they could find, with hoods like king-sized beds and trunks like Jacuzzis. Of course, the boom didn’t last. Venezuela finished the decade with the highest per capita debt in Latin America and stuck in the same debt trap that plagues so much of the developing world—exporting their natural resources to finance debt instead of funding social programs.

But the cars remained. And with the end of the oil boom those cars had to last. To this day, the most common cars in Maracaibo are Dodge Darts and Ford Mavericks. And other big dinosaurs— Chargers, 440 Road Runners, and Impalas—still roam the highways. Some are in pristine condition, most are held together with coat hangers and Bondo.

Love
I have discovered through my extensive ethnographic research that Maracuchos like to copulate with a certain leporine vigor. Yes, I must say, they probably like it more than you and I and, I hypothesize, even other Venezuelans. Unfortunately, most of this sex is not the steamy, Lambada-like concupiscence you’d expect. It is actually hard to imagine, literally… mechanically. It is toy poodle, Saint Bernard sex. The typical Maracucha (female) is Wile E. Coyote-drooling-over-the-roadrunner gorgeous. (Venezuela, you might know, has had more Ms. Universe winners than any other country—many of them from Maracaibo.) But the Maracuchos (males)…well, they are a different story. More often than not they are extremely fat, corpulent beings who have been overstuffed by their doting mommies with too much pabellón—the quintessential dish of shredded beef, rice, and fried plantain. In addition to this endomorph meets ectomorph mating convention, there is usually a big (and when I say big, I mean Nabakovian) age difference between papi and the mamacita.\

I present the following case study: Once, early on, I was invited to el Club Nautico, Maracaibo’s famous (and only) yacht club. Having spent most of my time with my middle and lower class friends and host family, I was anxious to get a good look at the uppers, los sifrinos as they are known, the snobs. Picture the scene: it is Friday night in the most exclusive nightclub in town. The place is full of beautiful nymphets, and hulking middle-aged men. My first thought was, ah, it must be “bring your daughter night,” wait, did you see the way that man just kissed his daughter? What can I say, I was naïve. I was also shocked, repulsed. Just watching the couples make out on the dance floor made me queasy. This can’t be love, I thought, it’s economic opportunism, a way for women to gain power in a macho society. But I came to understand that this phenomena did not occur just among the elites. Yes, while it is more socially acceptable to “marry up” in Venezuela, the accepted age standards have been dramatically widened among all classes. Men in their forties often marry girls in their teens—my friend Alvaro’s mom was married to his father (a doctor…a gynecologist in fact) when she was fourteen (she was also from a prominent family).
I suspect a big reason for this is Venezuela’s beauty queen culture. Femininity in Venezuela embraces, without question, the idea that a woman’s power comes from her beauty. And Venezuelan beauty means sexuality. I suppose that the stereotype of the hyper-sexual Latina was born here because in all of Latin America—and I can personally speak for Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Argentina—I have never seen anything like it. From the girls in their dental-floss bikinis to the semi-pornographic cerveza commercials, the objectification of women as sexual objects is everywhere, constantly reinforcing the cultural definition of beauty. Sound familiar?

Accordingly, there is a major emphasis on clothes, fashion and make-up. Then there is etiquette. I sometimes suspect that there is a secret school in the Andes that all Venezuelan girls attend because they have all mastered a very complicated system of feminine mannerisms and protocols. They know just how to be women—when to touch your arm during a casual conversation, how to double wrap your whiskey in napkins so it doesn’t chill your fingertips(!!!), and, at the appearance of a camera, how to instantly strike a pose. This secret training, I know, starts very young. Once I asked my host-niece if she wanted to go to the corner for an ice-cream. She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Por favor, tio Brian. You know that I can’t go out looking like this. Just look at my hair. You have to give me at least a half an hour to get ready.” She is five.

Maracaibo and the Rest of Venezuela
Now we have come to the part where I am supposed to tell you that despite certain socio-economic-political-environmental-medicinal-sexual-penal problems, Maracuchos, and, by extension, Venezuelans, are really wonderful people—generous, outgoing, selfless, and they will open their hearts to you.

But I can’t say that. Just as you don’t make such sweeping generalizations about your own culture—“Oh, Americans are such generous people!”—I don’t make them about my adopted country folk. Of course, I am very attached to the people here (the real reason I keep coming back year after year) and I have a profound relationship with my host family who adopted me (and my ego), gave me 10 brothers and sisters, and have never stopped caring for me. However, Venezuela is a basket case of a country, a country whose every indices of health have been deteriorating since the late ‘70s; a country that even now, with the price of oil so high, is still sinking lower and lower. I have watched this steady decay for close to two decades now; I have watched this country—which once seemed so close to first-world prosperity—sink deeper and deeper into unremitting recession. On every visit, people say to me that it shouldn’t, it can’t, get any worse and every year it does. And that is why I am writing this… because, humor aside, I want you to see what I have seen: the tragedy of a society’s collapse.

Crime is perhaps the most important indicator of this social decay. In 1988 the scariest thing that happened to me was when the police picked me up, cleaned out my wallet, and drove me home. (To collect and serve.) Now Venezuela is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and I get guns waved in my face over the slightest things, like fighting over a parking space at the grocery. The country now has more kidnappings than Colombia and has had a 67 percent increase in homicides since 1999 (it wasn’t exactly Mayberry before).(8) In Caracas—the 9th level of crime purgatory—the inner city hospitals have become little more than war hospitals. One such hospital I visited received over 100 gunshot victims a week on average and seventy five percent of the broken bones were caused by bullets.(9) I know a lot of people in Venezuela, probably close to a thousand, and I don’t know a single family that hasn’t been the victim of a violent crime—whether it be kidnapping, carjackings, muggings, or rape. In 1997 my host-brother Marco escaped death only because a carjacker’s gun jammed when he tried to execute him. As cars with blood-soaked headrests flow West out of Maracaibo into Colombia, drugs flow in. Helped by Chávez’s assistance to Colombian guerilla groups, Venezuela has become the principal corridor for drugs leaving Colombia. (10)

To give you an indication of people’s desperation, one day Alvaro and I caught a teenager stealing the copper gas line that led into his neighbor’s house. We heard the hiss from the cut line and found the young man with the piping slung over his shoulder like a brown garden hose hopping over the neighbor’s wall. He then led us on a mile-long footrace (actually, just me, since Alvaro doesn’t believe in cardiovascular exercise and was begging for oxygen after the first block). I don’t think the kid had eaten in several days, which is probably why I eventually caught him. People in cars had seen the chase and a small mob formed around us—some wanted me to turn him over to the police, others wanted to beat him. It was an odd moment: privileged North American enforcing Venezuelan law. I knew that the copper piping was worth no more than six dollars at a scrap yard and I considered just letting him take it, yet despite my empathy for him (and probably more importantly, my understanding of the economic policies that drive Venezuela’s poverty) I couldn’t reward him for stealing. I took back the piping and let him go.
How is it that the world’s fifth largest oil exporter has come to this? How is it that 70 percent of its population lives in ranchos—the slums and shantytowns? How is it that the streets here are not paved with gold?

Who is to blame for all this? At the root of Venezuela’s woes is its class conflict, the gap between rich and poor. You have probably heard that in Latin America a small elite controls all the wealth. While this stereotype doesn’t exactly fit Venezuela, it is a good place for us to begin, as it is the very stereotype that fuels Chávez’s populism. (Venezuela escaped having the same intense caste system as most of Latin America because it was not important to the Spanish crown. There was nothing to exploit here…yet.)

Still, there is an elite class, the “oligarchs” as they are called, and they are a fascinating breed. There is no way to describe them that won’t sound like hyperbole, so you will just have to trust me. In short, all of the most outrageous stereotypes of the rich will be found among them. The yapping lap dogs; wives forged into Barbie dolls with plastic surgery; spoiled kids who attend bi- and trilingual schools, drive Land Cruisers, and converse in English and French at the mall while they look down their noses at the hoi-polloi. They are perceived (usually correctly) as infinitely shallow and materialistic. They are a leisure class: A group whose primary function is the consumption and display of wealth. (This is who Thorstein Veblen was talking about.) In a country that has so much poverty, it is hard to believe that such a class could exist, but there they are. They are out to advertise; for invidious display. Perhaps due to the oil culture, they behave like new money—they show it off—even when they are old money. Of course, this only aggravates class tensions because they are always sticking it in everyone else’s nose. “I have 7 series, nah-nah-na-na-nah.”

Although Maracaibo has its share, Caracas is where you find the greatest concentration of oligarchs, they live in the posh neighborhoods of Chula Vista, Altamira, and Country Club (not translated) behind ten-foot walls topped with razor wire guarded by men with sawed-off shotguns. From here the oligarchs sortie into the adjoining affluent shopping districts completely insulated from greater Venezuela. Most have never ridden the Metro, nor, heaven forbid, a bus. And that is the strongest feeling you get from the oligarchs: that they don’t see! That they live in some alternate, Bizarro universe where they are blind to the sprawling poverty that is all around and incapable of even considering that they might play a role in it. Sometimes, in my moments of frustration, I myself hope that mi comandante (Chávez) will round them all up and ship them to worker’s communes.

Of course, it is more complicated than that, and my description is a simplification. Many of the oligarchs are very active in social programs and have a profound patriotism for Venezuela. They are business people who fund schools in poor neighborhoods; doctors who go into the shantytowns and give free care; and attorneys who dedicate themselves to public service. Yet, what is important here is not the truth, but the stereotype—the widespread perception of the selfish oligarch who has gotten fat on Venezuela’s oil and neglected the poor. Oh, how easy it is to blame the country’s woes on them! They have made Chávez’s job so simple; they are the perfect scapegoat and have given him all the rope he needs to hang them with.

What’s more, the problem is not just the existence of the oligarchs, but the way that they influence the rest of the culture; the way the dwindling middle class and the lower class try to emulate them, idolize them. They are the goal: the Venezuelan Dream. Oh, to live in a penthouse in a gated community and shop in the nicest malls and vacation to Disney and have my nails done and get a new Xbox for junior and buy and buy and buy as only new (oil) money can buy.
How did this become Venezuela’s ideal? Let me give you a quick primer on Venezuelan politics and the answer should become clear.

How to Become the President of Venezuela
Now we won’t invite Jimmy Carter and, even though it is completely unprecedented, we will assume there is no corruption. Repeat the following: “I [insert your name] will turn Venezuela’s oil wealth into riches for all Venezuelans, including you [point finger]. I will SOW THE OIL so that you can fly to Miami to shop. The government of [insert existing president’s name] is corrupt. He [it’s always a “he”] is stealing the oil money for himself and his cronies.”

That’s it! Just say it over and over again and spend a little bit more money than your competitor and you’ll win. Decade after decade—for almost a century now—Venezuelans have fallen for this. (And why shouldn’t they? They are sitting atop the biggest fountain of wealth outside of the Middle-East.) Venezuelan culture is driven by this fantasy, by the hope that someday through hydrocarbon magic, and through little toil on their part, everyone will become as rich as Donald Trump and Paris Hilton. (By the way, Chávez and his bolivarianos are in no way immune to the dream. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the president and his quasi-socialist comrades are the nouveau riche, the new oligarchy [four legs good, two legs bad better].(11) Chávez’s mother, Elena, who raised her six boys in a shack with a dirt floor, now appears in papers with Coqui, her poodle, wearing designer clothes and a cumbersome amount of gold jewelry.(12) Oh, yes, now it is the former guerilla fighters who drive SUVs, get boob jobs, and look down their noses at the proletariat in the shantytowns.)

And what of those shantytowns? What of those helpless masses, who have been cheated by the oligarchs and corrupt politicians and must live in so much filth and squalor?

On your next visit to Venezuela stop and take a close look at the shantytowns. Remember this is where an estimated 70 percent of Venezuelans live. You will immediately notice some odd things. Many of these cheap brick homes are two and three stories high, painted and well taken care of. They are also well lit thanks to free (pirated) electricity—paid for by the legit customers. And what’s that? Yes, the rooftops are dotted with DirecTV dishes, about one every sixth house. (Unlike electricity, this cannot be stolen, although one dish can be shared with three of your neighbors.) (13) While there are few phone lines, most people have cell phones and if you walk through the shantytowns you will likely hear as many ring tones as you would on a college campus between classes. Like all Venezuelans, shantytown residents enjoy free education through college. Fifty-six percent of Venezuelans have a bachelor’s degree, which is more than twice the U.S. figure of 27 percent. And even before Chávez’s Cuban-led literacy programs, Venezuela had a 93 percent literacy rate, one of the best in Latin America. Venezuelans also get (albeit quite substandard) free healthcare. So what you have is perhaps the best educated, best connected, best electrified, moderately well medicated poor in the world with attorneys, engineers and nurses living among them.

Why do they live in this squalor? First, I hope I have shown that it is not always squalor. While there certainly is abject poverty in Venezuela and it is getting worse, the 70-80 percent poverty rate often cited in the media is deceptive because within the shantytowns there is a broad social stratification with business professionals on one end and the unemployed and destitute at the other. Second, like their oligarch counterparts, the poor believe in the fantasy of easy oil wealth; they believe—because the oil in the ground legally belongs to all Venezuelans—that they have the right to suckle from the teat of the state. Are they lazy? Yes, in a way, but mostly because the successive governments of Venezuela have created a system where the shantytowns are the best and logical choice for millions. In addition to the aforementioned social programs (that Chávez acts like he invented) the government has also subsidized building materials for the ranchos, encourages squatters, and subsidizes food staples—milk, rice, beans, sugar, meat—which makes it surprisingly easy to live, quite literally, on a couple of dollars a day.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that the shantytowns are not a new phenomena. The Venezuelan government has tried various initiatives over the last forty years to move shantytowners to proper housing, but with no luck. When offered subsidized housing, most Venezuelans will say thanks but no thanks. Living with no rent and no utilities is much better than being on the grid and paying more, even if it means more security. Hence, Venezuelans use their college-level reasoning skills to conclude that free is better than cheap. I know of one business owner in Zulia who already owned a house in town (on the grid), but then invaded some land with a group of squatters, built a new house there (off the grid) and now rents out his old house for extra money. So the “poor” remain in (or move into) the shantytowns and spend their money on DirecTV, cell phones, their pimped out Dodge Darts, and trips to the beach. They are waiting, biding their time until the next oil boom, when the state will have enough money to give them more. Oh, wait, we are in the midst of the biggest oil boom in history and still the country plunges down.

While we are talking about stereotypes, the most important stereotype of all is that Venezuela is a nation of adolescents. For boys, the stereotype holds that they are worshipped by their parents as incarnations of Jesus (the popular joke begins, how do you know that Jesus was Latino?). For girls the stereotype is that, because of the beauty queen culture, they are raised to be objects of idolatry and little else. As a result, neither sex ever truly grows up. In a way, I must admit that the stereotype has its kernel of truth but for a different reason: the bad parenting is not the fault of the biological parents, but rather the state, which has over many decades, given the poor (and continues to give them) just enough to keep them believing in the fantasy of easy wealth with little toil and—in the name of short-term political gain—has kept them from feeling any impetus to change and given them little opportunity to do so when they do.

Which leads us now to the hardest truth: that the fantasy of oil wealth, of the great oil-state that the politicians have foretold where everyone is fabulously rich, will never happen. That door has closed. Venezuela’s population is now too big and is growing too fast for this one commodity, as precious as it is, to support it. Without diversification of the economy, job creation, and a lot of hard work, Venezuela will continue to sink lower each year.

The real tragedy, however, is that the fantasy is too deep to exorcise. Venezuelans are still, to this day, so desperate to believe this Arthurian Legend, to believe that they will someday enjoy fabulous oil wealth, that they have finally surrendered their democracy in pursuit of the delusion, allowing Chávez to change and rechange the constitution, pack the Supreme Court and Election Council with his cronies, make laws by decree, place gag rules on the media, and otherwise systematically undermine Venezuela’s democratic institutions. All in the name of a fantasy that can never come true.

I admit that I had high hopes for Chávez at first. I’m a liberal democrat after all, and when he campaigned on the promise of revolutionizing Venezuela, I though, it’s about time. Unfortunately, Chávez is far worse than his predecessors and exponentially more corrupt because now graft is done in the name of the revolution—stealing land and oil company profits is done under the guise of redistributing wealth. Twenty-first century Robin Hoodism (emphasis on hood). All the money that Chávez injects into the streets—fish instead of fishing poles—cannot disguise the problems or build lasting change. While his government produces bogus statistics that laud his cultural transformation, the hard facts remain. Venezuela is a nation dependent on one very volatile commodity and the engine for reaping that harvest, the national oil company, is in trouble. In 2003 Chávez (illegally) fired half of the company’s employees—17,000 people—because they went on strike to oppose him. Concerned more with his political survival than long-term sustainability, Chávez has been churning and burning the company ever since to keep himself afloat. The result is that now, four years after the strike, ten thousand oil wells are shut down because of mismanagement, forcing Chávez to buy oil from Russia to meet contractual obligations.(14) What’s more, the country is still so burdened with debt, and the quality of Venezuelan oil so poor that oil has to remain above fifty dollars a barrel for there to be any net gain for the treasury. In short, the wide-held belief that Venezuela is once again awash in oil wealth is a myth. Economists warn that the Central Bank’s foreign reserves have already been spent—converted to local currency and earmarked for short-term spending.(15) Inflation is running at 18 percent and Chávez’s baffling price control system has run thousands of Venezuelan farmers out of business because they can’t make a profit: Supermarkets are full of imported liquor and cheese, but the only meat available is pork neck bones and rabbit.(16) Chávez’s recent move to nationalize other private companies like the phone company, CANTV, is not motivated by socialism, but by capitalism: he is running out of money.

As a student of Latin American history I have, for many years, excused this country’s fate as something beyond the control of most, if not all, Venezuelans; that the continuing social decay was the work of macroeconomic forces, oil prices, Structural Adjustment Programs, even meddling from the CIA and the State Department. Yet, the more I learn, the more I see that the history of Venezuela is not the history of its neighbors, not the history of coups and puppet governments, of flagrant economic imperialism and exploitation. There was no Pinochet here, no Batista, no Trujillo. The history of Venezuela is the history of Venezuelans cheating, defrauding, and robbing other Venezuelans and then trying to blame someone else for their crimes.

And so to conclude we return to Maracaibo, to Lake Maracaibo, to that 5,099 square miles of environmental disaster (about half the size Lake Erie), where oil contamination, careless dredging, and a Duck Weed infestation have killed most of its wildlife. In the ‘60s you could see dolphins playing in the lake, now it is not even safe for swimming and you take your life in your hands if you eat the fish. Chávez is quick to point his finger at the U.S. and Big Oil for the catastrophe, but the fact of the matter is that while there was certainly some pollution by the oil companies, it was not until after the industry was nationalized in 1975 and Big Oil was completely out of Venezuela that the preponderance of the damage was done. (It is also interesting to note that when the first oilmen arrived here in the 1910s, they commented on how polluted the lake was, before oil was even discovered.) Venezuelans, in the final analysis, have not taken care of their own house. Examples of this carelessness abound: Malaria was eradicated in this region in the 1930s by a massive humanitarian campaign led by, believe it or not, the company that is now Exxon Mobil; but now, because of lackadaisical prevention programs and mismanagement, malaria is back in pandemic proportions. As for Venezuela’s debt, while I understand the hardship a country faces when strapped with huge external debt, I experience compassion fatigue when I remind myself of the foolish way that Venezuela accumulated this debt, mostly in the early ‘70s, based on the asinine assumption that oil prices would stay at their all-time-high. So is the World Bank to blame? I know that their programs have proved disastrous in most of the developing world, but the only time Venezuela has experienced sustained economic growth since the ‘70s (that wasn’t just because of a spike in the price of oil) was during the early ‘90s under Carlos Andrés Pérez. While I am no fan of Pérez (he was impeached on corruption charges) the difficult economic package he implemented under World Bank guidelines showed more promise than any alternative before or since.

Sigh. Venezuela has some hard lessons to learn. In my darker moments, when I am frustrated, I want to throw up my hands and renounce my adopted citizenship. I tell myself that they are getting what they deserved; they have asked for this. But not the Maracuchos. To their credit, they were the first to see through Chávez’s ruse, to see that his is just a new twist on the same old corruption. They know the truth because, as they are quick to tell you, they are a cock-load smarter than everybody else.

Endnotes:

1. Dydynski, Krzysztof, Lonely Planet, Third edition, Melbourne, 2001. P. 233.

2. Venezuela and the Oil Pioneers, (Caracas: Lagoven S.A, 1993), 28.

3. “Biggest Oil Well Yet,” The New York Times, 18 March 1923, 13.

4.U.S. Department of Energy, International Energy Annual 2003, (Washington, DC: DOE, 2004) (4 March 2006). I have removed Canada from the list of producers (sometimes listed second) because most of its proven reserves are made up of oil sands.

5. Gonzalez, David, “Maracaibo Oil Region a Critical Battleground for Chávez as Venezuelan Conflict Rages,” The New York Times, March 4, 2003, P. A9

6. The 2000 Venezuelan census put the population at 24.2 million. I am rounding up to 25 million which is conservative estimate given that between 1990 and 2000 the population grew 34 pecent.

7.…two-thirds of all of it comes from Maracaibo. Dydynski, Krzysztof, Lonely Planet, Third edition, Melbourne, 2001. P. 233.

8. Romero, Simon “Chavez keeps lid on boom in murders,” Chicago Tribune, 3 December 2006.

9.Author’s interview, Dr. Ricardo Serbenescu, Caracas, 18 July 2003.

10. Robinson, Linda, “Terror Close to Home,” U.S. News and World Report, 6 October 2003, 20.

11. From George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Don’t ask me to slow the bus down again.

12.Romero, Simon, “Expanding Power Puts Family of Venezuelan President Under Increasing Scrutiny,” The New York Times, 18 February, 2007.

13. Author’s interview, Alfonso Rubio, Atlanta, GA, 18 January 2007.

14. Duarte, Joe, “Venezuela Buys Oil to Meet Contracts,” Rig Zone. 02 May 2006. > Accessed on 6 December 2006.

15.Lakshmanan, Indira A.R. “Critics slam Venezuelan oil windfall spending.” The Boston Globe. 13 August 2006.

16. Romero, Simon. “Chávez Threatens to Jail Violators of Price Controls.” The New York Times. 17 February 2007.

350

2009-05-14T18:42:00.003-04:00

Article 350 of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution:

The people of Venezuela, true to their republican tradition and their struggle for independence, peace and freedom, shall disown any regime, legislation or authority that violates democratic values, principles and guarantees or encroaches upon human rights.

Chavez announces that Globovision will be taken off the airwaves...

2009-05-11T10:10:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, in his personal efforts to also control the media, Hugo Chavez Frias, Venezuela´s current President announced that he will close Globovision or his name will no longer be Hugo Chavez Frias.

Emulating a very intellectually poor barrio thug, Chavez made a personal threat to close Globovision (or take them off the Venezuelan public airwaves) or he will change his name. So lets wait and watch the press closely to see whether or not, Chavez will close them or to see if he changes his name to something like CheGuevara, Fidel or Camilo Cienfuegos...

Lets remember Chavez´s war against private media en Venezuela. Even though that Chavez was democratically elected back in 1999 by strong collaboration of the status quo media outlets at that time, after more than a decade of governing Venezuela, he has waged a personal battle against the private media.

Back in 2006 Chavez ordered the closure of the first Television station in Venezuela, Radio Caracas Television, on account that they had collaborated with the coup de etat in April/2002 against his government. On account that the Television Station did not politically support his government, Chavez did not grant the extension of the television concession to Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) and orderred the transfer of all their assets to a socially motived television station called, TVES. No compensation was paid by the government in a clear ilegitimate confiscatory measure. Chavez´s argument for this government intervention was the lack of government news in television, which was clearly not the case, since the government had at that specific more more than 10 television stations, 4 of them transmitting nationally and more than 100 community radio stations.

Not only that but on account of the political violence of Chavez against Globovision and their reporters, some reporters filed a lawsuit before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), which after strong litigation, ordered the state of Venezuela to stop the violation of free press against Globovision and their reporters. What is Globovision´s mistake? What are Globovision´s reporters doing wrong? They just disagree with Chavez and its government.

What I find really sad and pathetic is that because of Chavez direct intervention, several private media outlets (Venevision, Panorama, Televen) have had no choice but divert their editorial to favour or support Chavez and his socialist ideologies. This is also called censorship...

Now, why do you think Chavez wants to censor the media?

Chavez expropriates Oil Contractors in Lake Maracaibo

2009-05-08T11:43:00.004-04:00

In his personal efforts to control Venezuela´s economy, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has enacted a new law to expropriate the provision of goods and services related to the Oil Industry. The law is termed, Organic Law that Reserves to the State Goods and Services related to the primary activity of the Oil Industry.

The law was quickly prepared by the National Assembly and last night was enacted by Hugo Chavez himself. What is really important about the law is that all activities involving goods and services related to the Oil Industry will now be owned by the State in what Chavez calls "social property" or in spanish "propiedad social". The law provides that the expropriated shareholders will be paid book value for their shares and permits the avenue of public bonds.

And what is social property, is it the same treatment as public goods destined for public utility, like say public parks, benches and plazas, or is Chavez reffering to public goods destined for private utility, such as the huge network of private companies owned by the State, such as PDVSA (Oil), Pequiven (Petrochemicals), CVG (Steel, Aluminum), the Venezuela Cement Corporation? Chavez has a very confused and troubled head...

Chavez wants to totally control Venezuela´s economy and his advisers have come up now with the idea that all the Oil contractors in Venezuela should be expropriated and its assets and employees transferred to state owned PDVSA. Lets consider that the Oil contractors in Venezuela and even more in the State of Zulia significantly contribute to the local economy. What we are seeing is just a revenge against privately own contractors, most of them owned by European families with highly technical and ethical corporate histories, to wipe them out of the oil economic scene.

I personally think that Hugo Chavez has a personal and hidden agenda against the State of Zulia and the city of Maracaibo.

Murdoch bites back / Internet in market failure

2009-05-07T10:13:00.005-04:00

The net is in market failure. Could you believe that?

The efforts of the status-quo in Wall Street are trying to turn the internet into a (more efficient) cash machine. They have plans to eliminate or signficantly reduce free online content in a move that will definitely change internet. Or at least thats what they will try to do...

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move he says could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.

Murdoch said the existing Internet business model was "malfunctioning."

Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.

"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximises revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

Murdoch said the experience of the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal had proved that charging for content could be made to work. Would you pay to use news Web sites? Sound Off below

He said 360,000 people had downloaded an iPhone WSJ application in three weeks and said users would soon be made to pay "handsomely" for accessing WSJ content.

Murdoch said he envisaged News Corporation titles introducing charges within 12 months.

Now the real issue will be if Rupert Murdoch will go after Google and Youtube and charge them for the free online content. This will obviously create a hurricane of legal fees in major IP law firms in London and New York. Covington & Burling, White and Case and the likes...

Venezuelan anomie

2009-05-06T16:06:00.003-04:00

Anomie, is a sociological term that signifies in individuals an erosion, diminution, or absence of personal norms, standards, or values, and increased states of psychological normlessness. It also translates into a social condition in which norms are weak, conflicting, or absent. When applied to a government or society, anomie implies a social unrest.

Émile Durkheim described anomie as a state of relative normlessness or a state in which norms have been eroded. A norm is an expectation of how people will behave, and it takes the form of a rule that is socially rather than formally enforced. Thus, in structural functionalist theory, whether at a personal or societal level, the effect of normlessness is to introduce alienation, isolation, and desocialisation as norms become less binding for individuals.

In my opinion, what we are living in Venezuela is a sense of chronic anomie. With the high levels of crimes commited, it also makes no sense to report them to the police. Yesterday, Tuesday May 5, 2009 my brother got mugged at gun point at around 7pm while going in a pizza joint in front of a major hospital in Maracaibo. The burglar took his cellphone and his wallet.

It is true here in Venezuela theres always a sense of normlessness, everything from the guy that watches your car and demands his tip to the bank officer who expects his bottle of whisky if he approves your credit. The worst part is that we Venezuelans often take advantage of the chaos around us, or anomie, and often use to our own convenience.

While I remain in agreement with Ralph Dahrendorf that a legal system that prosecutes all the crimes renders it ineffective, at the same time, a system where no or little crimes are prosecuted gives a sense of unrest, where people tend to take the law into their own hands, into a violating-the-law-down-whirl-spiral, wheres theres nothing in the end. There are loads of examples in Venezuela, from local lynch mobs killing local barrio thugs to blunt fragrant violation of exchange laws by thousands of people selling their Cadivi rights to obtain foreing currency, buying pirate hollywood dvds or software in the street in broad daylight or just paying to get your legally free passport.

The sense of law is absent in Venezuela...

Social-who?

2009-05-04T19:58:00.003-04:00

Social-me, social-forever, social-comics....what is socialism?

Edmund Burke on (the Venezuelan) Revolution

2009-05-04T17:30:00.005-04:00

Do not be fooled, it is virtually impossible that Edmund Burke wrote something about Venezuela, let alone about the Chavista so-called socialist Revolution...

Edmund Burke was a famous Irish born political thinker back in the 18th century and served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution.

In 1789, soon after the Fall of the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution; Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter became Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790.

As per his Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously, because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the huge complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing:

'What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor."

Founded upon St. Augustine, Cicero, and Plato, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in Divine Moral Order and Original Sin, saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes's assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.

Burke has been termed as a cornerstone of the conservative intellectual in Britain, eventhough that he was a member of the Whig party which in turn became the Liberals. So it is also natural to see classic liberal thinkers supporting Burkes view on government and society.

Swine flu in Venezuela?

2009-04-29T17:41:00.003-04:00

Of course the swine flu is all over the news. The alert level was recently raised to 5 (of 6) which means that its a worldwide pandemic.

However, it was a regular day for Venezuelan politics. President Hugo Chavez went yesterday on national television saying that there was not a single case of swine influenza in Venezuela. Also, continuing with the dictated line, the Health Minister also went on national television saying that some cases in Merida where they initially thought was swine flu, they are not, so Venezuela is protected against swine flu.

Now, do you really believe what these public officials are saying? Apparently it has been almost 4 weeks since the first case of swine flu in Mexico, and now a world pandemic. I do not want to sound alarming or controversial, but did you Mexicana has a daily non stop flight between Caracas and Mexico City? How many people came into Venezuela from Mexico in that timeframe? 2 weeks of daily flights transporting people from Mexico to Venezuela? And thats not considering the people that might connect in the United States from Mexico? And Panama? And Colombia? Aruba?

I understand that the risks of Venezuela are minimal in contrast to say, United States, but to go on national television and say that Venezuela is secure from swine flu is just down right irresponsible in my book.

Emerson on Travelling (Self Reliance)

2009-04-29T06:48:00.002-04:00

It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Traveling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so not by rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place and that the merry men of circumstance should follow as they may. The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and is not gadding abroad from himself, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, and sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of traveling is itself only a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the eyes of a maid follow her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought the model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

On Imperialism

2009-04-28T10:40:00.004-04:00

I make huge efforts not to laugh when I hear Venezuelan President Chavez attacking the United States on account that it represents the Empire. Any argument that this or that specific nation or company represents or is in fact the Empire, really reflects ignorance about history. But this naive ignorance is not as bad as when it is mixed with Marxist or Socialist arguments...

Not going into detail about Marxism and Socialist and its failed concepts in this post. Two really clever academics came up with a contemporary view of the empire and a view from Marxism. Their names Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Negri and Hardt wrote a book, title "Empire" and it has been deeply studied by constitutional academics in law schools around the world. Negri and Hardt have outlined the revised marxist concepts. Concepts with have failed throughout history in my personal opinion.

What is truly important is that two neo-marxists have seem to agree that

"Imperialism...is over."

Classical 19th and early 20th c. imperialism, as the extension of national sovereignty beyond the borders of the nation-state no longer organizes nor articulates the world economy. For Negri and Hardt imperialism has been replaced by imperium (Empire) or "a series of national or supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule."

Empire is a consequence of the globalization of Capital which they claim is unlike the global spread of capitalism which has characterized the previous 450 years of the world economy. As such, Empire, is a qualitative break with the past and all previous forms of hegemony.

Therefore to talk about Imperialism against a specific country, company or even product is really naive. What remains as the empire is the single logic of rule, and the rule seems to dictate towards the economic gain of the individual. For me money is empire, in the sense that everyone works for it and needs it.

Does Chavez know what is talking about? Would he give his personal wealth on currency just to abolish the empire? Would his Ministers and Chavista businessmen give away their money for socialist causes? I do not think so...

Perhaps the abolition of currency could entail the end the empire? If so...welcome to Utopia City, Population 1.

Oh the places you will go

2009-04-25T12:07:00.002-04:00

by Dr. Seuss

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.

It's opener there
in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.

OH!
THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!

You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don' t
Because, sometimes, you won't.

I'm sorry to say so
but, sadly, it's true
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.

You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You'll be left in a Lurch.

You'll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you'll be in a Slump.

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both you elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

NO!
That's not for you!

Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,
once more you'll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you're that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. there are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don't.
Because, sometimes, they won't.

I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.

And when you're alone, there's a very good chance
you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.

But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.

On and on you will hike
and I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.

You'll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You'll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3 / 4 percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
you're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!

Haile Selassie the I of Ethiopia

2009-04-23T18:29:00.002-04:00

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

"We have finished the job. What shall we do with the tools?"

Haile Selassie I (Ge'ez: ኃይለ፡ ሥላሴ, "Power of the Trinity"; 23 July 1892 – 27 August 1975), born Tafari Makonnen, was Ethiopia's regent from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. The heir to a dynasty that traced its origins to the 13th century, and from there by tradition back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Haile Selassie is a defining figure in both Ethiopian and African history.

At the League of Nations in 1936, the Emperor's condemnation of the use of chemical weapons against his people was a pivotal moment in the onset of World War II, as well as a foreshadowing of the "barbarism" which was to come.His internationalist views led to Ethiopia's becoming a charter member of the United Nations, and his political thought and experience in promoting multilateralism and collective security have proved seminal and enduring.His suppression of rebellions among the nobles (mekwannint), as well as what some perceived to be Ethiopia's failure to modernize adequately, earned him criticism among some contemporaries and historians.

Haile Selassie is revered as the religious symbol for God incarnate among the Rastafari movement, the number of adherents of which is indeterminate due to the loose structure of the religion, but is estimated between 1 and 2 million. Begun in Jamaica in the 1930s, the Rastafarian movement perceives Haile Selassie as a messianic figure who will lead the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora to a golden age of peace, righteousness, and prosperity.

A dream

2009-04-23T09:31:00.002-04:00

"A dream is not what you see in your sleep.
A dream is what does not let you sleep"
Vishal Katariya, Pune India

Manuel Rosales, Maracaibo´s elected mayor seeks political assylum

2009-04-22T11:03:00.002-04:00

Maracaibo´s elected mayor, Manuel Rosales, yesterday requested political assylum in the Republic of Peru, on account of politicial prosecution of the Chavez regime. Manuel Rosales is being criminally prosecuted by the Chavez regime on 2 counts of unjust enrichment. The judicial process has been tainted from the getgo, including leaking a draft of the judicial decision by the Judge to the media before the hearing. The judicial process started when President Chavez went on national television and declared "that Rosales is going to be put in jail"...and "the mission is called, lets put Rosales in jail"

Not only that but Chavez has also blocked Antonio Ledezma as Metropolitan mayor of Caracas, by enacting a law creating a superior official for Caracas which is appointed by the President. Also, the inconstitutional reversion of jurisdiction of State governorships over highways, ports and airports.

This is further evidence of the lack of democracy in Venezuela and that even though some democratic features are still present (aka freedom of speech) the Chavez regime is on offensive mode to control their political adversaries. Its what we term as Neodictatorship. What is really shocking is that lack of division of powers in Venezuela and the obsene control exerted from Chavez to all public powers in Venezuela.

Do not be surprised if communications are heavily monitored...

ala Sieyes for the Sixth Venezuela

2009-04-20T19:59:00.004-04:00

What is the third [Sixth Venezuelan] Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something.

This is a manifesto for the establishment of the next Venezuelan state. The Fifth State starting from 1999 proved to a failure. After constantly violating human rights, freedom of expression and electoral fraud.

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (3 May 1748 – 20 June 1836) (pronounced [sjejɛs] or [sijɛs]) was a French Roman Catholic abbé and clergyman, one of the chief theorists of the French Revolution, French Consulate, and First French Empire. His liberal 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate? became the manifesto of the Revolution that helped transform the Estates-General into the National Assembly in June 1789. In 1799, he was the instigator of the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), which brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. He was also the first to coin the term "sociologie" (French for "sociology") in an unpublished manuscript. Sieyès and his party "spoke the language of democracy", unlike Jean Joseph Mounier and his party the Monarchiens.

In 1788, Louis XVI of France proposed convocation of the Estates-General of France after the interval of more than a century and a half, and the invitation of Jacques Necker to writers to state their views as to the organization of the Estates, enabled Sieyès to publish his celebrated January 1789 pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? ("What Is the Third Estate?") He begins his answer:
"What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something."

This phrase, which was to remain famous, is said to have been inspired by Nicolas Chamfort. The pamphlet was very successful, and its author, despite his clerical vocation (which made him part of the First Estate), was elected as the last (the twentieth) of the deputies the Third Estate of Paris to the Estates-General. He played his main role in the opening years of the Revolution, drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, expanding on the theory of national sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and representation implied in his pamphlet, with a distinction between active and passive citizens that justified suffrage limited to male owners of property.

Impact on the Revolution

The contributions of Sieyès’s pamphlet were indispensable to the revolutionary thought that projected France towards the French Revolution. In his pamphlet he outlined the desires and frustrations of the alienated class of people that made up the third estate. In many senses of the expression, he was the force that ripped the band-aid off the Ancien Régime in France by arguing the nobility to be fraudulent and preying on an overburdened and despondent bourgeoisie. The pamphlet was essentially the rallying cry that united a hitherto neglectable class into an unheard-of political force outlining and stating grievances that for the first time were not to be overlooked in the convocation of the Estates General.
Whereas the aristocracy defined themselves as an elite ruling class charged with maintaining the social order in France, Sieyès saw the Third estate as the primary mechanism of public service. Expression of radical thought at its best, the pamphlet placed sovereignty not in the hands of aristocrats but instead defined the nation of France by its working class, whose daily trials and tribulations “are the activities which support society”. The French Revolution could not have been what it was without this patriotic and radical message, more importantly one so eagerly dispersed by the rising revolutionary politics within the third estate.
In being perhaps the most daunting of his rhetorical repertoire, Sieyès essentially argued from the nobility's privileges that to establish the aristocracy as an alien body acting outside of the nation of France and deemed noble privilege “treason to the commonwealth”. As a consequence, the resulting conflict between the orders inspired the proper political sphere from which the revolution grew.

Perhaps most significant was the influence of Sieyès’s pamphlet on the structural concerns that arose surrounding the convocation of the Estates general. Specifically, the third estate demanded that the number of deputies for their order be equal that of the two privileged orders combined, and most controversially “that the States General Vote, Not by Orders, but by Heads.” The pamphlet took these issues to the masses and their partial appeasement was met with revolutionary reaction. By addressing the issues of representation directly, Sieyès inspired resentment and agitation that united the third estate against the feudalistic traditions of the Ancien Régime.
be

Obama's lack of street smarts

2009-04-20T07:33:00.003-04:00

The infamous handshake that over shadowed the Americas Summit at Trinidad & Tobago. As the press covered it, Obama surprised Chavez with an initial handshake. Clearly in the picture Chavez seemed very surprised. In the second meeting, Chavez entered a room where Obama was giving a press conference and gave him a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. Obama was surprised and said that he "thought that it was one of his books, I was going to give him mine". How naive can you be? The book in my opinion represents the message Chavez wants to send to Americans, please dont be stupid and naive and read history...

Lets remember that recently Chavez cursed against Obama in relation to the report of Human Rights in Venezuela. The political prisoners and the constant violations of human rights, including freedom of speech and economic freedom. Chavez said to Obama, "go and clean your suit Mr Obama" [vaya a lavarse el palto Mr Obama]....if not to say "go and clean your ass Mr Obama"...

Chavez appears to be a local barrio thug with this language and antics. Now, Obama appears to be a golden boy from Harvard Law who clearly lacks street smarts to deal with latin thugs.

I think this is a political disaster against the United States and could be an omen for Latin American relations...

GI JOE gone wrong...

2009-04-16T19:22:00.004-04:00

I think this picture is really funny...or pathetic...

or both

Jeff Koons- Artist review

2009-04-15T17:16:00.004-04:00

I remember going almost a year ago to the Metropolitan Museum with my childhood buddy, NYC Brooklyn resident Diego Dax Rooks *aka prux, and going in an elevator to the roof top of the museum. The day was sunny and the people in the elevator crowded, I remember the elevator made a stop at some floor and some staff of the Met came in the elevator. I remember flirting with a girl staff she was really cute...and at the roof top they were displaying some works of Jeff Koons...

Jeff Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist whose work incorporates kitsch imagery using painting, sculpture, and other forms, often in large scale.

Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent of visiting him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. After college, he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker while establishing himself as an artist. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode to Andy Warhol's Factory.

Copyright litigation

Koons has been sued several times for copyright infringement over his use of pre-existing images in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.[21]
Koons also lost lawsuits in United Features Syndicate, Inc. v. Koons, 817 F. Supp. 370 (S.D.N.Y. 1993), and Campbell v. Koons, No. 91 Civ. 6055, 1993 WL 97381 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 1, 1993). More recently, he won a lawsuit in Blanch v. Koons, No. 03 Civ. 8026 (LLS), S.D.N.Y., Nov. 1 2005 (slip op.),[22] affirmed by the Second Circuit in October, 2006, brought over his use of a photographic advertisement as source material for legs and feet in a painting, Niagara (2000). The court ruled that Koons had sufficiently transformed the original advertisement so as to qualify as a fair use.

Manuel Rosales speaks from his safehaven

2009-04-14T18:07:00.004-04:00

Manuel Rosales, who recently has been subject of judicial criminal prosecution by the Chavez regime, has today issued a letter to the people of Venezuela. I will free translate some relevant parts of the letter.

Manuel Rosales was democratically elected to be Mayor of the city of Maracaibo (Western Venezuela, and second most populated city in Venezuela) in the last election of November 2008. During the campaign Chavez declared publicly that he was corrupt and leader of local mafias and that "he will send Rosales to jail" and even further insulting him as "one thousand times disgraced". Rosales and his candidate for the Zulia State governorship Pablo Perez won cleanly and notwithstanding Chavez's efforts to include last minute people in the electoral college, and including electronic fraud. Rosales won fair and square and the difference in the city of Maracaibo was brutal. Recently, Rosales has been the center of a criminal investigation prompted by the National Assembly concerning corruption charges. The core issue was his economic gain for private endeavors in a cattle ranch he invested some time ago. Now, according to the prosecuting lawmakers (Representative Mario Isea) they argue that Rosales can not lawfully admit such economic gains. The amount in question is roughly $70,000 and considering that Rosales has been a public official for the last 15 years, previously 2 time governor and 2 time elected Mayor for the city of Maracaibo, at least he can account for $70,000 as private economic gain. From another side the prosecuting party also argues that Rosales executed a donation of a 10 year old pick up truck to a Governorship employee of more than 30 years. Rosales has gone in the media and has declared that he will stand by the legal process and will submit his defense and further evidence. Now, do you really think that after a President of Venezuela on live Television declaring that "he will send Manuel Rosales to jail" is not a political trial? It is obvious that it is, and Rosales is a trophy for any Chavez government official.

Excerpt of the letter from Manuel Rosales to the people of Venezuela

"Dear and beloved people of Venezuela

From my safehaven, protecting my physical integrity with the support of democratic factors, I have reflected upon the last events produced in the national political scene, and remain expectant to observe the fashion in which the Government and his boss, Hugo Chavez, without shame or remorse, is conducting us to the establishment of a totalitarian and authocratic regime, that without a doubt, has closed all the democratic spaces.

We are in front of a President that has proposed to control the functioning mechanisms of our country, and has obtained the silent support of the public powers, who remain dominated and directed in a obscene fashion, just like dictators have done when comparing history."

Bernie the Relentless

2009-04-13T16:05:00.002-04:00

Yes, I agree with Gore Vidal who recently said about Bernie Madoff that he was "relentless". He fooled everyone and thats not quite easy to do. 13 years without ever processing a single financial transaction. The lists of clients include Wall Street CEOs, CFOs, Hollywood actors, directors and producers, international banks from Spain, Swiss, Japan, Hong Kong and loads of charitable foundations. Bernie was relentless because he had no favorites, I mean everyone has to have to favorite, specially when you see charitable foundations on the list. Not only that but he also rejected thousands of investors, apparently the minimum to invest with Bernie was US 20 Million.

Now, a UK High court approves of data transfer to the US in Madoff case

The Chancery Division of the High Court gave its nod of assent - on 27 February 2009 - to the transfer of personal data to the Unites States (US) to further ongoing legal proceedings against Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

In the case (Re Madoff Securities International Ltd, 2009 EWHC 442), Justice Lewison ruled that although such transfers are normally barred under the Data Protection Act of 1998 (DPA), certain exemptions apply "when the transfer is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest and ...for the purpose of, or in connection with, any legal proceedings (including prospective legal proceedings)”. Section 4 of the DPA specifically forbids the transfer of personal data to countries outside of the European Economic Area, unless that country ensures an adequate level of protection – the US is not deemed to have such an adequate level of protection.

"I am satisfied that it is in the public interests for an alleged fraud on this scale and of this complexity to be investigated," said Justice Lewison, "and on the evidence before me, I am therefore satisfied that the transfers of the information scheduled to the draft order are necessary for reasons of substantial public interest."

The Court was also satisfied that the exemption relating to legal proceedings was applicable in this situation as well.

"The unravelling of the fraud will undoubtedly involve legal proceedings", said Justice Lewison. "Indeed...there are two such proceedings already on foot, namely the liquidators both in New York and in this country, and the establishment of legal rights will no doubt be necessary in order to wind up the affairs of both companies in an orderly fashion."

Madoff Investment Securities LLC, including its English subsidiary Madoff Securities International Limited, is alleged to have been at the heart of a $50 billion fraud, involving a number of charities and public authorities. The provisionally appointed UK liquidators, under the request of the US liquidators, had requested the UK High court to consider the data transfer under Section 112 of the Insolvency Act of 1986.

The Roots take Manhattan by storm

2009-04-07T16:44:00.003-04:00

My favorite Hip Hop band, the Roots, and probably best musical live show ever, are taking NYC by storm...a really good article and pics...

The Roots Take Manhattan
Meet the new kings of late-night, God (and Jimmy Fallon) willing
By Rob Harvilla
Tuesday, February 24th 2009 at 4:02pm
Chad Griffith

Now let's just hope their new boss is funny. More photos of the Roots and the set here.

The Roots, perhaps hip-hop's most deified live act—and an increasingly rare sure-thing concert draw for a desperately flailing music industry—have now largely confined their tour bus route to the lonely 100 miles or so between Philly and New York City, there and back again four or five times a week, having tied their future success and viability to Jimmy Fallon's decidedly unproven skills as a late-night talk-show host.

This is a time of great possibility and profound terror.

Late Monday/early Tuesday, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon will premiere on NBC: The Saturday Night Live alum is replacing Conan O'Brien, who is replacing Jay Leno, who is jumping to an unprecedented prime-time slot as part of a bizarre internal fiasco you're better off avoiding entirely—except the Roots did not, as they have agreed to be Fallon's house band. Doc Severinsen begot Paul Shaffer begot Max Weinberg begot ?uestlove (a/k/a Ahmir Thompson), the Roots' drummer and bandleader, who now sits with rapper Black Thought (a/k/a Tariq Trotter) in a Manhattan recording/rehearsal studio, a scene from the imminent Fame remake being shot right outside, acknowledging the fact that Jimmy's quest for greatness and longevity is far from assured.

?uestlove: "It's a concern."

Black Thought: "Yeah, it's definitely a concern, but I wouldn't call it a worry. It's a concern. We're all putting forth the best effort to make sure he's the next Conan and not the next . . ."

"Chevy."

"I'm not gonna say . . ."

"Magic."

"Yes."

"Joan."

"Right. The list goes on and on."

"Whoopi."

"Whoopi, I was gonna say next—the list goes on and on," Black Thought allows. "It's definitely an everyday, ongoing thing of trying to figure out what is gonna set this show apart from all these late-night shows that flopped or whatever."

"NBC's very committed—they're very excited," ?uestlove adds. "Watching it yesterday on the monitor, I see this as a staple. I don't see this as a Pat Sajak Hour."

It was actually the Pat Sajak Show, but who cares, really? The Late-Night Graveyard is a terrible and dangerously overloaded place, and however affable and likable Fallon may be, the notion that the dude perhaps best known for biting his drumsticks in a failed attempt to stop himself from cracking up during the SNL "more cowbell" sketch will now prevail over the next great witching-hour empire is, not a stretch exactly, but a roll of the dice, a leap of faith—pick your cliché, atheistic or devout.

The Roots are here to help. With apologies to Sheila E. (she of The Magic Hour, RIP, June to September, 1998), they're easily the most established and revered musical entity to go the talk-show-band route, with eight studio albums (including last year's fantastically surly Rising Down) and nearly 20 years of nonstop touring to their credit, their status as tireless, peerless globe-trotters pounding out two-hour-plus concert spectaculars beyond dispute. But that's just the thing. Consider the possibility that they're tired, and consider the draw of something a bit more stable, or at least somewhat stationary.

"This is the beginning of a new phase," Black Thought says. "I don't know, we may have different opinions on this, but I definitely don't look at this like the end of the Roots, the end of touring. A lot of people are like, 'Aw, yeah, you guys retired.' We're, we're—no. No. It's just, we're gonna be touring like a normal, human band now."

Flying cars, closer than you think...

2009-04-06T19:09:00.002-04:00

A Boston startup is confounding naysayers with a plane that combines the ease of driving with the thrill of flying, and it could shake up the industry by ushering in a new wave of recreational aviation.
Terrafugia's unusual aircraft just made a 30-second test flight as historic as it was brief, proving that flying cars aren't as outlandish as you might think. But as much as people might want to call the Transition a flying car, Terrafugia insists it's actually an airplane you can drive.
"We're excited by the reality of what we're doing here, but this is not the start of the flying car," company CEO Carl Dietrich told Wired.com. "This is a light sport plane that can be driven home after a day of flying and parked in the garage. It's designed for pilots. That's our target market."
Inventors, engineers and crackpots have been promising promising flying cars since the 1920s. The Aerocar is perhaps the most famous and successful attempt, but it is hardly the only one. All of the Big Three automakers have considered them at one time or another. Boeing toyed with them. And everyone from the Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division to guys in their garages have pitched ideas for flying machines we can drive to the airport.
They've all been beaten to the punch by Terrafugia, which has already received 49 orders for a $194,000 plane it won't start delivering until 2011.

Murdoch unloads against Google, Yahoo

2009-04-06T16:32:00.002-04:00

According to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp. and The Wall Street Journal, Google and Yahoo are giant copyright scofflaws that steal the news.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright ... not steal, but take," Murdoch says. "Not just them, but Yahoo."

But whether search-engine news aggregation is theft or a protected fair use under copyright law is unclear, even as Google and Yahoo profit tremendously from linking to news. So maybe Murdoch is right.

Murdoch made his comments late Thursday during an address at the Cable Show, an industry event held in Washington. He seemingly was blaming the web, and search engines, for the news media's ills.

"People reading news for free on the web, that's got to change," he said.

Real estate magnate Sam Zell made similar comments in 2007 when he took over the Tribune Company and ran it into bankruptcy.

We suspect Zell and Murdoch are just blowing smoke. If they were not, perhaps they could demand Google and Yahoo remove their news content. The search engines would kindly oblige.

Better yet, if Murdoch and Zell are so set on monetizing their web content, they should sue the search engines and claim copyright violations in a bid to get the engines to pay for the content.

The outcome of such a lawsuit is far from clear.

It's unsettled whether search engines have a valid fair use claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The news headlines are copied verbatim, as are some of the snippets that go along.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that "There's not a rock-solid ruling on the question."

A Sad moment for Venezuelan justice

2009-04-03T16:04:00.002-04:00

Today a Judge in the city of Maracay, Aragua State has issued a judicial decision against three former Police officers of the Metropolitan Police force in Caracas. The Judge Marjory Calderon handed down sentences of 30 years in jail. Albeit the maximum amount of time permitted by the Venezuelan Constitution under Article 44 subsection 3.

This is further evidence of the lack of justice in Venezuela. The three policemen were held prisoners from 2002 and now in 2009 after infinite appeals and Judges recusing themselves, the Chavista Judge handed down the veredict.

According to Chavistas, trying to reconstruct history in their favour, the three policemen were directly responsible for ordering other policemen to fire upon the Chavista population gathering at Puente Llaguno in Caracas. The time was April 2002, when a civil manifestation of people requesting the outing of Hugo Chavez from the Presidency after a general strike supported by the majority of Venezuelans.

The sad part is that the real shooters are not held accountable. On the contrary Chavez has publicly recognized the shooters as supporting the honor and dignity of the Venezuelan people. So far from the truth.

I will post a few pictures of the shooters at Puente Llaguno in April 2002. Lets remind the people that during that specific time a general protest was called in Venezuela and Chavez at the same time, in order to block Televisions from transmitting the protest feed, ordered a National interest transmission that was previously recorded and ordered the activation of what was called Avila Plan. The Avila Plan was a code name for a plan to militarize the whole city of Caracas, with tanks and whatever force means necessary. What happened was that the military did not recognize Chavez as legitimate President, and was ordered arrested. He was transferred to a military jail in Orchila Island and he himself requested to be flown with his family to Cuba. Shortly thereafter, Pedro Carmona Estanga a leader of the Chamber of Commerces in Venezuela and a group of illed advised Generals, ordered the dissolution of public powers in Venezuela (executive, legislative and judicial) and the celebration of general election in 90 days. Shortly thereafter a General in the State of Aragua started asking himself that Chavez was still the President and that he must return to power. Following the Statement of that General (whose name is General Raul Baduel) military Generals started retracting and to recognize Chavez as legitimate President. He was return to Power as President, and since then has absurdly and ilegitimately exercised power in Venezuela. A military regime with a mask of socialism...

Russian President Medvedev at the LSE

2009-04-03T10:47:00.002-04:00

Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was elected President of the Russian Federation in March 2008. In November 2005 he was elected First Deputy Prime Minister, previous to this he was Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office. The President graduated from the Faculty of Law of Leningrad State University in 1987 and completed his post-graduate studies at Leningrad State University in 1990. The President holds a PhD in law and the title of associate professor. The President lectured at St Petersburg State University from 1990-1999. At the same time, between 1990-1995, he was an adviser to the Chairman of the Leningrad City Council and an expert consultant to the St Petersburg City Hall’s Committee for External Affairs.

In August, during the third month of Medvedev's presidency, Russia took part in the 2008 South Ossetia war with Georgia, which drove tension in Russian-American relations to a post-Cold War high. On 26 August, following an unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly of Russia, Medvedev issued a presidential decree officially recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, an action condemned by the G7. On 31 August 2008, Medvedev announced a shift in the Russian foreign policy under his government, built around five main principles:[54]

Fundamental principles of international law are supreme.
The world will be multipolar.
Russia will not seek confrontation with other nations.
Russia will protect its citizens wherever they are.
Russia will develop ties in friendly regions.
In his address to the parliament on 5 November 2008 he also promised to deploy the Iskander missile system and radar-jamming facilities in Kaliningrad Oblast to counter the U. S. missile defence system in Eastern Europe
Medvedev is married and has a son named Ilya (born 1996). His wife, Svetlana Vladimirovna Medvedeva, was both his childhood friend and school sweetheart. They married several years after their graduation from secondary school in 1982.

Dmitry Medvedev and his wife Svetlana MedvedevaMedvedev is a devoted fan of English hard rock, listing Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin as his favorite bands. He is a collector of their original vinyl records and has previously said that he has collected all of the recordings of Deep Purple.[57][58] As a youth, he was making copies of their records, although these bands were then on the official state-issued blacklist. In February 2008, Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov attended a Deep Purple concert in Moscow together.

Despite a busy schedule, Medvedev always reserves an hour each morning and again each evening to swim and lift weights. He swims 1,500 meters (approximately one mile), twice a day. He also jogs, plays chess, and practices yoga. Among his hobbies are reading the works of Mikhail Bulgakov, and following his hometown professional football team, FC Zenit Saint Petersburg.

Medvedev keeps an aquarium in his office and cares for his fish himself.Medvedev owns a Neva Masquerade male cat named Dorofey. Dorofey used to fight with a cat belonging to Mikhail Gorbachev—who was Medvedev's neighbor—so the Medvedevs had to have Dorofey neutered.

Medvedev's reported 2007 annual income is $80,000, and he reported approximately the same amount as bank savings. Medvedev's wife reported no savings or income. They live in an upscale apartment house "Zolotye Klyuchi" in Moscow.

On the Runet, Medvedev is sometimes associated with the Medved meme, linked to padonki slang, which resulted in many ironical and satirical writings and cartoons that blend Medvedev with a bear. (The word medved means "bear" in Russian and the surname "Medvedev" is a patronymic which means "bear's son"). Medvedev is familiar with this phenomenon and takes no offence, stating that the web meme has the right to exist.

Reportedly,Dmitry Medvedev uses an Apple iPhone, despite the fact that this cell phone is not officially sold or even certified in Russia.

Medvedev speaks English, but due in part to protocol he speaks Russian in interviews.

Hotel-Copter?

2009-04-02T07:21:00.002-04:00

if you thought you've seen it all, you better think again...

My initial thought was....wow thats cool, reminds me of the movie the Fifth Element

3 minutes later....some people just dont know what to do with their money

Apocalypse

2009-04-01T17:34:00.002-04:00

Apocalypse as published in the Harvard Lampoon

The townspeople called me crazy for building a bomb shelter in the post-Cold-War era. But who’s crazy now? The guy with a shelter stocked to the roof with Lite-Brites and bedpans? Or the dead townspeople riddled with meteorites? Probably a toss-up.

Having the town to myself was great at first. I could walk through Wal-Mart naked and no one was there to stop me! But no one was there to greet me either. No one was there to tell me about the low, low prices. No one was there to scold me for stomping on the plasma TVs and wearing them as shoes. What good are TV-shoes if no one’s there to see you dance in them?

You might ask, “Why don’t you go down the road to another town? Meteorites can’t have hit every town on Earth.” Oh, how naïve you are, my friend. Sure, another town might have drinkable water or acceptable levels of radiation. But if I don’t keep on living my life like I used to, the meteorites win. Plus, I have all my stuff here.

CRS '09

Electronic election fraud? 2004? 2006? 2009?

2009-03-31T10:01:00.002-04:00

The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.

Appearing last month before a U.S. Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil U.S. relations with the Latin leader.

In a presentation that could provide disturbing lessons for the United States, where electronic voting is becoming universal, Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now.

Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

"You heard the old adage 'follow the money,' " Stigall said, according to a transcript of his hour-long presentation that McClatchy obtained. "I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen."

Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren't connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn't always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines.

While Stigall said that he wasn't speaking for the CIA and wouldn't address U.S. voting systems, his presentation appeared to undercut calls by some U.S. politicians to shift to Internet balloting, at least for military personnel and other American citizens living overseas. Stigall said that most Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure.

The commission has been criticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment without first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that U.S. systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails.

The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago, Stigall said, after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems. He said he couldn't elaborate "in an open, unclassified forum," but that any concerns would be relayed to U.S. election officials.

Stigall, who's studied electronic systems in about three dozen countries, said that most countries' machines produced paper receipts that voters then dropped into boxes. However, even that doesn't prevent corruption, he said.

Turning to Venezuela, he said that Chavez controlled all of the country's voting equipment before he won a 2004 nationwide recall vote that had threatened to end his rule.

When Chavez won, Venezuelan mathematicians challenged results that showed him to be consistently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. The mathematicians found "a very subtle algorithm" that appeared to adjust the vote in Chavez's favor, Stigall said.

Calls for a recount left Chavez facing a dilemma, because the voting machines produced paper ballots, Stigall said.

"How do you defeat the paper ballots the machines spit out?" Stigall asked. "Those numbers must agree, must they not, with the electronic voting-machine count? . . . In this case, he simply took a gamble."

Stigall said that Chavez agreed to allow 100 of 19,000 voting machines to be audited.

"It is my understanding that the computer software program that generated the random number list of voting machines that were being randomly audited, that program was provided by Chavez," Stigall said. "That's my understanding. It generated a list of computers that could be audited, and they audited those computers.

"You know. No pattern of fraud there."

A Venezuelan Embassy representative in Washington declined immediate comment.

The disclosure of Stigall's remarks comes amid recent hostile rhetoric between President Barack Obama and Chavez. On Sunday, Chavez was quoted as reacting hotly to Obama's assertion that he's been "exporting terrorism," referring to the new U.S. president as a "poor ignorant person."

Questions about Venezuela's voting equipment caused a stir in the United States long before Obama became president, because Smartmatic, a voting machine company that partnered with a firm hired by Chavez's government, owned U.S.-based Sequoia Voting Systems until 2007. Sequoia machines were in use in 16 states and the District of Columbia at the time.

Reacting to complaints that the arrangement was a national security concern, the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an investigation. Smartmatic then announced in November 2007 that it had sold Sequoia to a group of investors led by Sequoia's U.S.-based management team, thus ending the inquiry.

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Stigall said, hackers took resurrecting the dead to "a new art form" by adding the names of people who'd died in the 18th century to computerized voter-registration lists. Macedonia was accused of "voter genocide" because the names of so many Albanians living in the country were eradicated from the computerized lists, Stigall said.

He said that elections also could be manipulated when votes were cast, when ballots were moved or transmitted to central collection points, when official results were tabulated and when the totals were posted on the Internet.

In Ukraine, Stigall said, opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko lost a 2004 presidential election runoff because supporters of Russian-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych "introduced an unauthorized computer into the Ukraine election committee national headquarters. They snuck it in.

"The implication is that these people were . . . making subtle adjustments to the vote. In other words, intercepting the votes before it goes to the official computer for tabulation."

Taped cell-phone calls of the ensuing cover-up led to nationwide protests and a second runoff, which Yushchenko won.

Election Assistance Commission officials didn't trumpet Stigall's appearance Feb. 27, and he began by saying that he didn't wish to be identified. However, the election agency had posted his name and biography on its Web site before his appearance.

Electronic voting systems have been controversial in advanced countries, too. Germany's constitutional court banned computerized machines this month on the grounds that they don't allow voters to check their choices.

Stigall said that some countries had taken novel steps that improved security.

For example, he said, Internet systems that encrypt vote results so they're unrecognizable during transmission "greatly complicates malicious corruption." Switzerland, he noted, has had success in securing Internet voting by mailing every registered citizen scratch cards that contain unique identification numbers for signing on to the Internet. Then the voters must answer personal security questions, such as naming their mothers' birthplaces.

Stigall commended Russia for transmitting vote totals over classified communication lines and inviting hackers to test its electronic voting system for vulnerabilities. He said that Russia now hoped to enable its citizens to vote via cell phones by next year.

"As Russia moves to a one-party state," he said, "they're trying to make their elections available . . . so everyone can vote for the one party. That's the irony."

After reviewing Stigall's remarks, Susannah Goodman, the director of election reform for the citizens' lobby Common Cause, said they showed that "we can no longer ignore the fact that all of these risks are present right here at home . . . and must secure our election system by requiring every voter to have his or her vote recorded on a paper ballot."

Should the expectation of privacy test apply to the Net?

2009-03-27T16:43:00.003-04:00

Bruce Schneier who is Chief Technology Officer for British Telecommunications (BT) wrote this article which I will post concerning privacy on the internet published on Wired Magazine. I think Schneier is totally correct. I will even say that the more we are connected with information (downloads and uploads) the more we will see the privacy issue extending.

"In the United States, the concept of "expectation of privacy" matters because it's the constitutional test, based on the Fourth Amendment, that governs when and how the government can invade your privacy.

Based on the 1967 Katz v. United States Supreme Court decision, this test actually has two parts. First, the government's action can't contravene an individual's subjective expectation of privacy; and second, that expectation of privacy must be one that society in general recognizes as reasonable. That second part isn't based on anything like polling data; it is more of a normative idea of what level of privacy people should be allowed to expect, given the competing importance of personal privacy on one hand and the government's interest in public safety on the other.

The problem is, in today's information society, that definition test will rapidly leave us with no privacy at all.

In Katz, the Court ruled that the police could not eavesdrop on a phone call without a warrant: Katz expected his phone conversations to be private and this expectation resulted from a reasonable balance between personal privacy and societal security. Given NSA's large-scale warrantless eavesdropping, and the previous administration's continual insistence that it was necessary to keep America safe from terrorism, is it still reasonable to expect that our phone conversations are private?

Between the NSA's massive internet eavesdropping program and Gmail's content-dependent advertising, does anyone actually expect their e-mail to be private? Between calls for ISPs to retain user data and companies serving content-dependent web ads, does anyone expect their web browsing to be private? Between the various computer-infecting malware, and world governments increasingly demanding to see laptop data at borders, hard drives are barely private. I certainly don't believe that my SMSes, any of my telephone data, or anything I say on LiveJournal or Facebook -- regardless of the privacy settings -- is private.

Aerial surveillance, data mining, automatic face recognition, terahertz radar that can "see" through walls, wholesale surveillance, brain scans, RFID, "life recorders" that save everything: Even if society still has some small expectation of digital privacy, that will change as these and other technologies become ubiquitous. In short, the problem with a normative expectation of privacy is that it changes with perceived threats, technology and large-scale abuses.

Clearly, something has to change if we are to be left with any privacy at all. Three legal scholars have written law review articles that wrestle with the problems of applying the Fourth Amendment to cyberspace and to our computer-mediated world in general.

George Washington University's Daniel Solove, who blogs at Concurring Opinions, has tried to capture the byzantine complexities of modern privacy. He points out, for example, that the following privacy violations -- all real -- are very different: A company markets a list of 5 million elderly incontinent women; reporters deceitfully gain entry to a person's home and secretly photograph and record the person; the government uses a thermal sensor device to detect heat patterns in a person's home; and a newspaper reports the name of a rape victim. Going beyond simple definitions such as the divulging of a secret, Solove has developed a taxonomy of privacy, and the harms that result from their violation.

His 16 categories are: surveillance, interrogation, aggregation, identification, insecurity, secondary use, exclusion, breach of confidentiality, disclosure, exposure, increased accessibility, blackmail, appropriation, distortion, intrusion and decisional interference. Solove's goal is to provide a coherent and comprehensive understanding of what is traditionally an elusive and hard-to-explain concept: privacy violations. (This taxonomy is also discussed in Solove's book, Understanding Privacy.)

Orin Kerr, also a law professor at George Washington University, and a blogger at Volokh Conspiracy, has attempted to lay out general principles for applying the Fourth Amendment to the internet. First, he points out that the traditional inside/outside distinction -- the police can watch you in a public place without a warrant, but not in your home -- doesn't work very well with regard to cyberspace. Instead, he proposes a distinction between content and non-content information: the contents for example. The police should be required to get a warrant for the former, but not for the latter. Second, he proposes that search warrants should be written for particular individuals and not for particular internet accounts.

Meanwhile, Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School has tried to reinterpret (.pdf) the Fourth Amendment not in terms of privacy, but in terms of security. Pointing out that the whole "expectations" test is circular -- what the government does affects what the government can do -- he redefines everything in terms of security: the security that our private affairs are private.

This security is violated when, for example, the government makes widespread use of informants, or engages in widespread eavesdropping -- even if no one's privacy is actually violated. This neatly bypasses the whole individual privacy versus societal security question -- a balancing that the individual usually loses -- by framing both sides in terms of personal security.

I have issues with all of these articles. Solove's taxonomy is excellent, but the sense of outrage that accompanies a privacy violation -- "How could they know/do/say that!?" -- is an important part of the harm resulting from a privacy violation. The non-content information that Kerr believes should be collectible without a warrant can be very private and personal: URLs can be very personal, and it's possible to figure out browsed content just from the size of encrypted SSL traffic. Also, the ease with which the government can collect all of it -- the calling and called party of every phone call in the country -- makes the balance very different. I believe these need to be protected with a warrant requirement. Rubenfeld's reframing is interesting, but the devil is in the details. Reframing privacy in terms of security still results in a balancing of competing rights. I'd rather take the approach of stating the -- obvious to me -- individual and societal value of privacy, and giving privacy its rightful place as a fundamental human right. (There's additional commentary on Rubenfeld's thesis at ArsTechnica.)

The trick here is to realize that a normative definition of the expectation of privacy doesn't need to depend on threats or technology, but rather on what we -- as society -- decide it should be. Sure, today's technology make it easier than ever to violate privacy. But it doesn't necessarily follow that we have to violate privacy. Today's guns make it easier than ever to shoot virtually anyone for any reason. That doesn't mean our laws have to change.

No one knows how this will shake out legally. These three articles are from law professors; they're not judicial opinions. But clearly something has to change, and ideas like these may someday form the basis of new Supreme Court decisions that brings legal notions of privacy into the 21st century.

---

Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT. His new book is Schneier on Security.

Hugo Chavez vs.Manuel Rosales

2009-03-27T16:02:00.004-04:00

Chavez has acted what he publicly said in Maracaibo this past February, that is that he is going to put Manuel Rosales in jail. Manuel Rosales is the elected mayor of the city of Maracaibo, a former governor of the state of Zulia elected for 2 terms and was candidate against Chavez in the 2006 presidential elections.

The legal rationale behind Chavez´s intentions is an undeclared amount of roughly Bs. 147,000 (or $25,000) in gains that according to the Comptroller´s Office could not be accounted for. According to Rosales the amount was a product of yearly gains of his family´s cattle ranch in rural Zulia (cattle ranch La Milagrosa). Last week a Public Prosecutor (Ministerio Publico) flew in from Caracas to engaged a criminal action based on unjust enrichment against Rosales. The accusation was admitted by the Criminal Court in Maracaibo. Now this week on Monday, the Public Prosecutor requested a change of venue (radicacion) due to the stress of the public opinion in the legal criminal process. Obviously the change of venue was ordered by the Court and now the case will be heard in Caracas.

This is obviously a politically motived legal action against an opposing political leader that Chavez simply does not want in the picture right now. Or perhaps he is trying to steer the public opinion from the financial abyss that we are heading into...In any event Manuel Rosales prepares his defense and publicly stated that he will give face.

The list of political prisoners in Venezuela grows constantly, the problem resides in the fact that the Executive government exerts all its leverage to the Judicial System, who practically kneels and follows orders. Ivan Simonovics and Lazaro Forero, two Policemen who are in prison for more than 3 years and still have not been rendered a legal decision. Also former Zulia Police Commisioner Mazuco has also remain in prison for more than 1 year without a court hearing whatsoever.

I think the solution is a Civil Resistence movement against the ilegitimacy of the Presidency on account of its violation to the Venezuelan constitution, international human rights agreements and treaties. The acting party would be a General of any component of Armed Forces along with a representative group of social groups. The President should be held in custody with a public criminal process for every Venezuelan to see...Only time will tell.

Caracas remembers Marulanda´s death

2009-03-26T18:08:00.002-04:00

Today people in Caracas (obviously paid by the Venezuelan government-Chavez) gathered at the Statute of Manuel Marulanda Velez to remember his first anniversary of his death. This is a very sad situation, because anyone who lives near Venezuela´s border with Colombia, knows that Marulanda was directly responsible for thousands and thousands of innoncent lives, including Venezuelans, in a personal war against the status quo in power in Colombia. He started his personal war on account that Gaitan was murdered and initiated an era known in Colombia as La Violencia.

Its sad to see fellow Venezuelans putting flowers and remembering such a violent and archaic political leader, in the sense that he never conceded this war, and brought an era to Colombia of bombings, kidnappings and all sorts of organized crime. Not counting for the ilicit drug trade involved. Marulanda´s Farc always utilizes whatever antagonist argument they could shield in name of dethroning the status quo in Bogota. This is chiefly paid and endorsed by Hugo Chavez since his government has publicly supported the FARC, has requested they are not termed as terrorists and are contrary to any politics of Colombian president Uribe and the United States Colombia Plan.

I am very sorry for those Colombians and Venezuelans who lost their lives directly or indirectly by Marulandas or his terrorist organization, the FARC.

Chavez honors Cuban Communism

2009-03-26T09:36:00.006-04:00

Yesterday in a event with representatives of the national assembly of his supporting party, PSUV, Chavez said that the Cuban regime has reached the point of no return. Surving for decades against the American Empire. He continued to praised the Cuban regime and wished that his Venezuelan Socialist Revolution would some day be comparable to the Cuban Communist Regime.

Latifa Echakhch - Artist Review

2009-03-24T16:28:00.004-04:00

Echakhch was born in Morocco, but her parents immigrated to France when she was a child. She has made a number of works incorporating materials such as tea glasses, carpets or couscous that provide her with a way of reflecting on her Moroccan heritage although, as she points out, they were never part of her everyday life in Paris. ‘They are as strange to me as any Westerner’, she has said. ‘I just show what I do with them. I can identify them as part of my own culture and, at the same time, they are completely alien to me. There are no tea glasses in my home.’ She has also engaged with the form filling and complex bureaucratic language that define the status of an immigrant in the West. Hospitality 2006, for example, consists of the text ‘Espace a remplir par l’etranger’ (Space to be filled out by the foreigner), which appears at the top of the application for a French residency permit. Removed from their original context and carved into the gallery wall, these words become a reflection on Echakhch’s own practice.

Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco. She lives and works in Paris and Martigny, Switzerland.

On Fate

2009-03-24T09:25:00.003-04:00

"If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real and elemental. There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a truth, or their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe possible for any finite will. But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations in this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis written on the gate of Heaven, `Wo unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate!'" Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite opinion show! A little whim of will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of chemistry.

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; "un des plus grands malheurs des honnetes gens c'est qu'ils sont des lafaches." There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will. There can be no driving force, except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and the will him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger. 'Tis only a question of time. Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon. His science is to make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding forces. Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on change! What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a Providence. But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules."

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Fate

No more Columbus reverence in Venezuela

2009-03-20T11:23:00.002-04:00

The executive government (Chavez) acting through Fundapatrimonio this week after so much talking decided to remove the statute of Cristopher Columbus from el Calvario Plaza in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. The rationale behind the removal of Columbus was that Venezuelans could not continue to honor him. Columbus according to Chavistas did not discover the new world but came to the Americas to kill, loot, rape and plunder.

A car-toon

2009-03-20T10:31:00.002-04:00

On Brain Plasticity

2009-03-20T10:00:00.002-04:00

The discovery that the human brain can change its own structure and function with thought, and experience, turning on its own genes to change its circuitry, reorganize itself and change its operation is the most important alteration in our understanding of the brain in four hundred years. We shall explore how, given that the human brain has been plastic, we have missed this core feature. Many new cures for neurological and psychiatric conditions are described. This discovery has major implications for understanding the humanities, social science and culture, for it means that our individual cultural practices and experiences actually rewire our brains, so that differences between cultures give rise to different kinds of brains in the members of those cultures.

This is proposed by Norman Doidge, MD from Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

An important example of neuroplasticity is how we gain skills. Doidge presents an experiment performed by Pascual Leone where he mapped the brains of blind people learning to read Braille. Braille reading is a motor activity, which involves scanning with a reading finger, and a sensory activity, which involves feeling the raised bumps. The brain maintains a representation of these sensory and motor aspects and they are located on the sensory and motor cortexes respectively. The blind subjects practiced 2 hours a day, Monday through Friday, with an extra hour of homework. The mapping of their brains took place on Monday, after the weekend, and Friday, immediately after their week cram. What the scans ultimately showed is that the maps dramatically increased in size on Friday scans but returned to a "baseline" size on the following Monday. It took 6 months for the baseline Monday map to gradually increase and by 10 months they plateaued. After the blind subjects took a two month break, they were remapped, and their maps were unchanged from their last Monday mapping. What this shows is that long lasting changes as the result of skill learning took 10 months of repeated practice. The reason why short-term improvements were made based on the Friday mappings, but eventually disappeared, is the result of the type of neuronal connections that were taking place. The Friday mappings were the result of the strengthening of existing neuronal connections. Monday mappings, though showing little progress initially and plateauing at 10 months, were the result of the creation of new neural connections.

Chavez cuts back on Federalism, strong on Centralism

2009-03-18T17:47:00.004-04:00

Chavez yesterday enacted an ammendment to the Descentralization Law in Venezuela. Venezuela has been traditionally a federalist country. In fact after the United States Revolution, the first country in North and South America to adopt the federalism as a form of the State, was Venezuela. Yes, it was the United States of Venezuela and was adopted back in 1864 by Juan Crisostomo Falcon. The United States of Venezuela existed from 1864 to 1953, when the country is termed Republic of Venezuela.

In 1999, Venezuela decided to change its name from Republic of Venezuela to Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, that is following Chavez intention to constitute Venezuela a Bolivarian State. Whatever that means and/or entails.

However, the 1999 Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Constitution provides that the form of the Republic is a Federalism. This is provided under Article 4. Which entails that the States are political units protected under the Constitution. Further, it provides exclusive jurisdictions of the States of the Republic to manage airports, ports, highways and streets. This can be found under Article 164. And yes, the language it provides "exclusive jurisdiction of the States"...."competencia exclusiva de los Estados"...and we can find under subsection 10) the administration of airports, ports, highways and streets.

Now, Chavez has once again violated the Constitution. Or probably it was the National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional) by enacting a law clearly in contravention of the Constitution. The ammended law (Ley de Descentralización published 17/3/2009 under Official Gazzette 367.985) directly provides that the National Government or Executive power (i.e the Presidency) will have concurrent jurisdiction along with local States. This is evidence of the shift of government policies, from a mild federalism to a strong centralist government in Caracas. In my opinion, this is mainly due to the influence of Cuba in Venezuelan politics. Perhaps Cuban consultants are advising Chavez of a way to control the exercise of power in Venezuela.

Now my question is, how can the National Assembly (acting as Chavez's agent or otherwise) ammend a direct provision of the Constitution by enacting a law? Or, better off for you attorneys, how can a law abrogate the Constitution?

Well my friends only in a country with dictatorship and lack of rule of law you can see such things.

The perils of Google

2009-03-17T16:52:00.003-04:00

Have you ever thought what happens with the information you just entered in Google? Lets say you need to check your bank account, web browers nowadays make it really easy to search for something on google without even opening the browser. So, you search for say "Citibank" and Googles directs you to the specific website for your bank. But what happens with the key word searched in google? Well Google stores it and directly caters adverts to what sale experts think you need. So now that they know you are banking with say Citibank now they are going to send you specific adverts against Citibank or something more broader like "are you happy with your (blue) bank?"...The possibilities are endless...

One of the inventors of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee, addressed the House of Lords with the specific problem of privacy and data protection of the internet users. Speaking to the House of Lords, the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has criticised deep packet inspection ('DPI'), a technique used to monitor traffic on the internet and other communications networks. Mr Berners-Lee said "clearly we must not interfere with the internet. If we snoop on clicks and data, we can find out a lot more information about people than if we listen to their conversations." Targeted advertising services such as Phorm in the UK and, most recently, Google (see below) use DPI to monitor anonymised user behaviour and target adverts at those users. UK government initiatives such as the Intercept Modernisation Programme have also proposed using DPI to perform mass surveillance of the web communications of the entire UK population. Mr Berners-Lee declined to comment about any particular company or government initiative, but said internet service providers should not perform DPI.

Online publishers and agencies have defended the use of behavioural targeting following Tim Berners-Lee's warning against the collection of online data. Stuart Colman, head of digital for Europe at the Financial Times, said "if users want to access a site for free they need to be prepared to accept such things. Behavioural targeting is anonymous and it's helpful." Kent Ertugrul, founder and CEO of UK based target advertising company Phorm, defended his company's service, which he said is supported by the Information Commissioner's Office, the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, Ofcom, and the Home Office.

Also, Google has launched a behavioural advertising system which will use data gathered from tracking users' online activity to send them relevant adverts. Behavioural advertising systems (such as that of UK based Phorm) have recently run into controversy over the degree to which people are informed about their use and the ability to opt out of the system. Google's system allows users to edit the list of interests that Google creates. Users will also be able to opt out of the service altogether, and because of a new plug-in for browsers that means that the opt-out will survive any deletion of cookie files.

Happy St Paddys Day!

2009-03-17T08:55:00.003-04:00

Of all the holidays this one is my favorite. Happy Saint Patricks Day!
Why is it my favorite?, Basically because its a holiday where you drink and wish for luck. And if something I believe in more is luck, small luck, lots-of-luck, first-time luck, ladyluck, smart luck, geeky luck, whateva...

I remember back in 1999, 2000 and 2001 at the parade in New York City. For this holiday they have a huge parade with everyone drinking at the bars and in the streets. The parade usually starts around 12pm. Its definitely a tradition for all new yorkers.

"May the Irish hills caress you.
May her lakes and rivers bless you.
May the luck of the Irish enfold you.
May the blessings of Saint Patrick behold you."
Irish Blessing

Is the Chavez regime a Dictatorship? That is according to Carl Schmitt

2009-03-16T11:48:00.006-04:00

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and law professor. Along with Heidegger he was regarded as philosophers of the Third Reich. Therefore, he was famous for supporting the Nazi regime with his legal thoughts and theories. Basically he argued that the exception (i.e. state of emergency) to any norm justifies the existence of the rule in first place. Consequently, sovereign is he who decides on the exception. He is studied by Constitutional lawyers henceforward.

In 1921, Carl Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald in Nazi Germany, where he published his essay "Die Diktatur" ("On Dictatorship"), in which he discussed the foundations of the newly-established Weimar Republic, emphasising the office of the Reichspräsident. In this essay, Schmitt compared and contrasted what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution of his country. To him, the office of the president could be characterized as a comparatively effective element within the new constitution, because of the power granted to the president to declare a state of emergency. This power, which Schmitt discussed and implicitly praised as dictatorial, was seen as more effective, more in line with the underlying mentality of political power, than the comparatively slow and ineffective processes of legislative political power reached through parliamentary discussion and compromise.

Schmitt was at pains to remove what he saw as a squeamish taboo surrounding the concept of "dictatorship" and to show that, in his eyes, the concept is implicit whenever power is wielded through pathways outside the slow and rusty processes of parliamentary politics:

“If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.”

For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution. Although the German concept of Ausnahmezustand is best translated as "state of emergency", it literally means state of exception which,according to Schmitt, frees the executive from any legal restraints to its power that would normally apply. The use of the term "exceptional" has to be underlined here: Schmitt defines sovereignty as the power to decide the instauration of state of exception, as Giorgio Agamben has noted. According to Agamben, Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence, which didn't enter into any relationship whatsoever with right. Through the state of exception, Schmitt included all types of violence under right. According to Giorgio Agamben, this kind of violence, which necessarily bears a juridical value, is another example of the fusion of right to "bare life" (It. vita nuda, Greek) that transforms the juridical system into a "death machine," able to perform acts of pure violence as needed for self-legitimation, creating Homo sacer, a being that cannot be "murdered" or "sacrificed" but only killed.

Schmitt opposed what he called "chief constable dictature", or the declaration of a state of emergency in order to save the legal order (a temporary suspension of law, defined itself by moral or legal right): the state of emergency is limited (even if a posteriori, by law), to "sovereign dictature", in which law was suspended, as in the classical state of exception, not to "save the Constitution", but rather to create another Constitution. This is how he theorized Hitler's continual suspension of the legal constitutional order during the Third Reich (the Weimar Republic's Constitution was never abrogated, underlined Giorgio Agamben; rather, it was "suspended" for four years, first at February 28, 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree, with the suspension renewed every four years, implying a -- continual -- state of emergency).

The direction all this leads, and the reason why Schmitt has been taken so seriously by political theory, is to the theorisation of the crisis and state of emergency as not exceptional moments in political life opposed to some stable normality, but themselves the predominant form of the life of modern nations.

I had to think about Schmitt, because yesterday Chavez addressed the Venezuelan people at his Alo Presidente "What I want means a direct order" he said on National Television...."yo quiero significa una orden"...I would go even further: Chavez is the law, because currently the rule of law comes from Chavez´s orders, this constitutes in my opinion a dictartorship...

Ordoñez booed by Venezuelan fans!

2009-03-16T09:47:00.004-04:00

This past Saturday Magglio Ordoñez played for the Venezuelan baseball team that played and won against the Netherlands. The Venezuelan team won and today will play Puerto Rico for a spot in the Semis the World Baseball Classic 2009.

The issue was that when Magglio Ordoñez was about to take his turn, Venezuelan fans in the stands started booing Magglio and linking him with Anti-Chavez rants. Now this issue was highly addressed by the media yesterday Sunday, when a Government Television depicted zoomed videos of the fans booing and ranting against a Venezuelan baseball player, followed by "the opposition does not have a country"..."la oposición apatrida". Even Chavez at his Presidential address talked about the issue saying that the oposition is acting against their own country and its because they are "bastards". Major baseball analysts and journalists are now condeming the actions against Magglio arguing that he was playing for "Venezuela".

Now the problem is when you mix Politics and Sports. Magglio Ordoñez should have known that his public support for the Chavez regime would get radical people acting and being loud against him. Magglio was the first one to mix Sports and Politics and now he is paying a price of being labeled by us, Venezuelans, on account of his support to the Chavez regime. Magglio is currently making $85 Million Dollars and his contract expires in 2010 in the Major Leagues. However, he is also making lots of money in Venezuela, playing politics with Chavez, and has even built a 40 Million Dollar Soccer Stadium in Eastern Venezuela (Estado Anzoategui), and loads of construction works for Chavez in Falcon State. What are Magglio´s qualifications for these government contracts? Well, he publicly supports Chavez...Does he or his Wife Dagly live in Venezuela? No, they have several homes in the United States? Do their two daughters, Maggliana and Sophia live and are educated in Venezuela? Not really...Does Magglio know something about the insecurity in our streets? No again, probably he knows more about 8 Mile Road in Detroit.

Now, the Venezuelan fans attending the game in Miami, most of them loud against the constant violations of Human Rights in Venezuela, including the violations against the freedom of press, when they see Magglio on the field, they sure want to get their message accross, Magglio played with Chavista politics and now he has to pay a price!

Chavez kicks Bodies out of Venezuela

2009-03-13T09:20:00.003-04:00

After the promised criminal investigation by the Venezuelan government, the Tax Administration (SENIAT) decided to kick out Bodies out of Venezuela and to temporarily close the business that brought the show (Evenpro). The tax authority gave 10 days for Bodies to abandon the country and revoked the customs permits because Evenpro declared they were plastic parts and not real bodies.

The funny side is that some journalist apparently wrote that this was ordered by Chavez himself after he saw the advert of the show. They figure the only way they could easily go after the Bodies exhibit is through customs and they were quite effective. On the downside, they promised to engage criminal action which they figured they couldnt do.

Madoff admits 50 Billion Dollar Fraud

2009-03-12T11:00:00.004-04:00

Bernie Madoff has just pleaded guilty and admitted the charges relating to the 50 Billion Dollar fraud scheme. Now, my question is where did all the money go? Talking last night with a close friend (JimmyJoe) he told me, it was never there to begin with...

I would like to think that it was wasted paying high end goods, like Yachts, Cars, Jets, Limos, Jewelery and hotel expenses...Or better yet, all the money ended on 100 women goldigger wallets and spent on stupid business and real estate...

Now, where did all the money go?

Chile sues US Banks for Pinochets accounts

2009-03-12T10:47:00.003-04:00

The Government of Chile is pursing a legal action against 4 US banks for hiding information relating to Augusto Pinochets accounts. If this legal action is succesful, this would be a landmark case for jurisdictional issues relating to banking operations. Specifically, all bank accounts relating to Chilean citizens can be legally requested to banking institutions worldwide. The legal action included Riggs Bank which was the first bank that leaked information on Augusto Pinochets accounts. I do not know why I see that this would Chavez case in 10 years. Lets remember the initial investigation...

In 2004, a United States Senate money laundering investigation led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Norm Coleman (R-MN) — ordered in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks — uncovered a network of over 125 securities and bank accounts at Riggs Bank and other U.S. financial institutions used by Pinochet and his associates for twenty-five years to secretly move millions of dollars.[44] Though the subcommittee was charged only with investigating compliance of financial institutions under the USA PATRIOT Act, and not the Pinochet regime, Sen. Coleman noted:

“ This is a sad, sordid tale of money laundering involving Pinochet accounts at multiple financial institutions using alias names, offshore accounts, and close associates. As a former General and President of Chile, Pinochet was a well-known human rights violator and violent dictator.[44] ”

Over several months in 2005, Chilean judge Sergio Muñoz indicted Augusto Pinochet's wife, Lucia Hiriart; four of his children --Marco Antonio, Jacqueline, Veronica and Lucia Pinochet; as well as his personal secretary, Monica Ananias, and former aide Oscar Aitken on tax evasion and falsification charges stemming from the Riggs Bank investigation. In January 2006, daughter Lucia Pinochet was detained at Washington DC-Dulles airport and subsequently deported while attempting to evade the tax charges in Chile. In January 2007, the Santiago Court of Appeals revoked most of the indictment from Judge Carlos Cerda against the Pinochet family. But Pinochet's five children, his wife Lucia Hiriart, and 17 other persons (including two generals, one of his ex-lawyer and his ex-secretary) were arrested in October 2007 on charges of embezzlement and use of false passports. They are accused of having illegally transferred $27m (£13.2m) to foreign bank accounts during Pinochet's rule.

In September 2005, a joint-investigation by The Guardian and La Tercera revealed that the British arms firms BAE Systems had been identified as paying more than £1m to Pinochet, through a front company in the British Virgin Islands, which BAE has used to channel commission on arms deals. The payments began in 1997 and lasted until 2004.

Furthermore, in 2007, fifteen years of investigation led to the conclusion that the 1992 assassination of DINA Colonel Gerardo Huber was most probably related to various illegal arms traffic carried out, after Pinochet's resignation from power, by military circles very close to himself. [10]. Huber had been assassinated a short time before he was due to testify in the case concerning the 1991 illegal export of weapons to Croatian paramilitaries. The deal involved 370 tons of weapons, sold to Croatia by Chile on 7 December 1991, when the former country was under a United Nations' embargo because of the war against Serbia. In January 1992, the judge Hernán Correa de la Cerda wanted to hear Gerardo Huber in this case, but the latter may have been silenced to avoid implicating Pinochet in this new case ] — although the latter was not anymore President, he remained at the time Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Pinochet was at the center of this illegal arms trade, receiving money through various offshores and front companies, including the Banco Coutts International in Miami

LSE´s wining photographs 2009

2009-03-11T09:52:00.003-04:00

London School of Economics holds an annual competition for LSE student and staff. These are this years winners

4. House of Terror. This photo was taken by Xuan Cao.

'A museum in Budapest. It contains exhibits related to the fascist and communist dictatorial regimes in 20th century Hungary. The background wall is a memorial to the victims of these regimes.'

3. Firewall. This photo was taken by Matilde Emma Gawronski.

'Going to Ramallah is an experience. This piece of wall tells the story of a conflict. If only it was enough to press CTRL+ALT+DEL then, the wall seems to be saying, the war would be over too.'

2. Deeper. This photo was taken by Sylvia Chant.

'An impressively long spate of underwater plumbing - the capacity of humankind to adapt to any environment. Picture taken in The Gambia, 2008'

1. Memories from Poland. This photo was taken by Bruno Serdoura.

'Taken during my Erasmus period, during the first large snowfall.'

Chavez-Restaurants and government regulation of the arepa

2009-03-10T09:17:00.004-04:00

Yes people Chavez has finally outdone himself. Recently he has announced the creation of the restaurants for lower income Venezuelans, of course he suggested the name "Restaurante Chavez". As if no dictador has tried to engrave his name in the conscience of its population. I remember the president of Turkmenistan requesting to change the first month or January to his last name. His name is Saparmurat Niyazov, and coincidently he was named president for life of Turkmenistan...

At the same time, an recently insane appointed Minister of Commerce, Mr Eduardo Saman, a week ago declared to the media a "War for the Arepa", because his office could not conceive the Venezuelan arepa being sold at Bs. 18 to Bs. 20 each. The fair price, he argued would be around Bs. 1,5 to Bs. 2. He argued that the cost structure of the arepa would be usury. Now, today Mr Eduardo Saman argues that he never intended an official regulation of the arepa, like regulation of oil or foreign exchange, but an argument that consumer protection agency could prosecute Arepa business owners for usury should they sell arepas above Bs. 2.

Now this is really insane, no direct price regulation but threaten restaurant owners with criminal usury charges should they sell arepas (or any other product for that matter) above what the government deems is a fair price and falls according to their cost structure. I do not want to sound pessimist but this constitutes evidence that the government is moving to destroy private capitals.

The argument of usury is truly insane and constitutes a further violation of freedom of commerce (libertad de comercio) and protection of private property (propiedad privada). Further a clear violation of the principle of economic freedom (articles 112 and 115 CRBV) Usury clearly consitutes a limitation of freedom of commerce, but however can only be conceived when considering loans of sums of money or tradable assets, not when considering the sale of wholesale goods and services. Now, is the Venezuelan government going to prosecute everyone in Venezuela for usury as applied to sale of goods and services? Does the new Commerce Ministry going to review the cost structure of every economic activity in Venezuela so they can prosecute usury? I do not want to sound alarmist, but I do not like where this line of reasoning is going to take us...

"When money is lent on a contract to receive not only the principal sum again, but also an increase by way of compensation for the use, the increase is called interest by those who think it lawful, and usury by those who do not." (Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, p. 1336).

In the United States, usury laws are state laws that specify the maximum legal interest rate at which loans can be made. Congress has opted not to regulate interest rates on purely private transactions, although it arguably has the power to do so under the interstate commerce clause of Article I of the Constitution.

In Venezuela the regulation of usury dates back to 1946. When the then President Romulo Betancourt enacted the regulation of usury.

In its article 1 provides:

Cualquiera que intencionalmente se valga de las necesidades apremiantes de otro para obtener para sí o para un tercero una prestación, cesión, garantía o algo análogo que implique una ventaja o beneficio que, tomando en cuenta las circunstancias concomitantes, resultare notoriamente desproporcionada a la contraprestación o entrega que por su parte verificare, será castigado con prisión hasta de dos años o con multa hasta de diez mil bolívares (Bs. 10.000,00)

Sin perjuicio de la limitación que establece el Código Civil en su artículo Nº 1.746, se considera constitutivo del delito de usura el préstamo de dinero en el cual se estipule o de alguna manera se obtenga un interés que exceda de uno por ciento (1%) mensual.

"Anyone who intentionally benefits from strigent neccesaties of another in order to obtain for himself or to a third party a loan, assignment or collateral guarantee or any other form, that implies an advantage or benefit to, taking into consideration the surrounding circumstances, that results notoriously disproportioned to the original obligation or consideration will be punished with up to 2 years in prison or a fine of ten thousand bolivars (Bs. 10,000).

Without prejudice of the provision of the Civil Code article 1746 that provides for the crime of usury the loan of money that stipulates or in some other form produces an interest exceeding one percent (1%) a month."

Now recently Chavez has produced his own version of the still effective Usury decree. That is the enactment of the Special Law for the Defense of Hoarding, Speculation, Boycott and any other Conduct that affects the consumption of Food or Products subject to Price Control. With that name he clearly gives in their (or Chavez´s) frustration to control the inflationary economy. The funny thing is that the government forgot to include provision for the usury and it was left out...an evident mistake?

My prediction, Chavez government will try to regulate, whether directly through pricing controls or indirectly through legal action, sale of goods and services. Specially those considered neccesary for the population at large. This is no more than an excuse to try to control the inflationary economy. At the same time we should also see a direct devaluation of the Venezuelan currency and/or loads of economic measures, such as new taxes, increase in the value added tax (iva, currently at 9%) and increase in the tax unit (unidad tributaria). Tough economic times for Venezuela...

Do you believe?

2009-03-09T19:33:00.003-04:00

Come, my friends,
is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Excerpt from Alfred Lord Tennysons' Ulysses

Chavez vs. Bodies Exhibition

2009-03-06T08:27:00.003-05:00

The Chavez regime has started their case against Bodies exhibition, in this case Premier Exhibitions, or their Venezuelan agent, Evenpro. What is really funny is that it was the tax administration would confiscated the bodies, since their where brought by international courier. Now the Venezuelan Public Prosecuting office (Fiscalia Ministerio Publico) is pressing charges against the company. To this very moment they are investigating where did the bodies come from and have even considered to press criminal charges against the promoters. What is on Chavez mind is that this could easily be a way for black market homicide....Ugh! Chavez thinking like the crook that he know he is...

I personally find it amusing to exhibit for medical or scientific purposes the remains of humans who previously have given their informed consent. On contrast, my fathers opinion is that he finds it awful and does not think it should be exhibited.

However, their has been a past with this Bodies exhibition. Prior to the 2005 U.S. premiere of the Bodies exhibit, the Florida Attorney General expressed the opinion that the State Anatomical Board’s approval should be required. The Board fought the Tampa Bodies exhibit, with its director expressing the opinion that the exhibit should be shut down. Premiere Exhibitions officials disagreed, claiming that the Board had jurisdiction only over medical schools and not museums; the exhibit opened two days ahead of schedule at the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry.

Questions regarding the origins of the bodies continue to be raised. In 2006, reporting from Dalian, China for the New York Times, David Barboza described "a ghastly new underground mini-industry" with "little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs." Premier representatives say "the bodies were not formally donated by people who agreed to be displayed." The director of the Anatomical Committee of the New York Associated Medical Schools (NYAMS) worries that "you have no documentation of who this is."

ABCNews' program 20/20 produced a major report exposing the "secret trade in Chinese bodies." Claiming that bodies are sold on the black market for $300, the report spawned not only a series of other articles but also a Congressional inquiry, an investigation by the NY Attorney General,and the resignation of Premier's CEO Arnie Geller.

On the front of their exhibition website reads a disclaimer describing the presumed origin of the bodies, and fetuses:

Disclaimer:

-This exhibit displays human remains of Chinese citizens or residents which were originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police. The Chinese Bureau of Police may receive bodies from Chinese prisons. Premier cannot independently verify that the human remains you are viewing are not those of persons who were incarcerated in Chinese prisons.

-This exhibit displays full body cadavers as well as human body parts, organs, fetuses and embryos that come from cadavers of Chinese citizens or residents. With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and embryos you are viewing, Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that they do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated in Chinese prisons.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo concluded his investigation of Premier, finding "The grim reality is that Premier Exhibitions has profited from displaying the remains of individuals who may have been tortured and executed in China. Despite repeated denials, we now know that Premier itself cannot demonstrate the circumstances that led to the death of the individuals. Nor is Premier able to establish that these people consented to their remains being used in this manner. Respect for the dead and respect for the public requires that Premier do more than simply assure us that there is no reason for concern. This settlement is a start."

In June 2007, Elaine Catz quit her job of 11 years as science education coordinator for the Carnegie Museum of Science in protest over the exhibit, citing religious objections and questions regarding provenance, including the issue of reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong in China.

In 2007, a Washington State bill was introduced to ban exhibits of bodies without clear documentation of consent, and a similar bill was introduced in January 2008 by California legislator Fiona Ma.

In June 2008 New York State passed a bill requiring anyone showing an exhibit that uses real human bodies in museums across New York to get a permit to show where exactly the bodies came from. Senator Jim Alesi sponsored the bill.

Professional ethicists, human rights activists and religious leaders have also objected. "Given the (Chinese) government's track record on the treatment of prisoners, I find this exhibit deeply problematic," said Sharon Hom, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China. Professor Anita L. Allen, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, argued spending money to "gawk" at human remains should raise serious concerns. Thomas Hibbs, Baylor University ethicist, compares cadaver displays to pornography in that they reduce the subject to "the manipulation of body parts stripped of any larger human significance." Even if consent were to be obtained, Rabbi Danny Schiff maintains that we should still question what providing "bodies arranged in showcases for a hungry public" says about a society.[29] Harry Wu, a long-time human rights activist, terms the practice of obtaining exhibit specimens from China "immoral" and describes how the Chinese label of 'unclaimed' on bodies may imply that families were not notified of the death.

Regarding the educational concerns around these exhibits, St. Louis Diocese Archbishop Raymond Burke directs Catholic Schools there to avoid field trips, citing serious questions for Catholics. Prior to the exhibit's opening in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese endorsed the educational content of the exhibition, while noting that it would not be appropriate for everyone and welcoming continued discourse regarding the place of such exhibits in society. Rev. Daniel Pilarczyk, Archbishop of Cincinnati, issued a statement: "I do not believe that this exhibit is an appropriate destination for field trips by our Catholic schools."

In 2006, citing concern over how "some kids will process these images," Abbotsford, British Columbia School Superintendent Des McKay barred field trips to exhibits of plasticized human beings. In an editorial, Lutheran Reverend Christoph Reiners questioned the effect on the values of children. Elaine Catz, who helped coordinate field trips for the Carnegie Science Center prior to resigning in June 2007, maintains "it teaches that, once he is deceased, there is nothing wrong with taking a person's body without his consent; it teaches that there is nothing wrong with exploiting the dead in order to make a profit, as long as it is in the name of science or education or art. It teaches that it is incredibly easy to dehumanize others."

In 2009, after a week of presence in Venezuela, on march 4th the authocratic president Hugo Chavez confiscated the corpses, that will remain under his jurisdiction for undetermined time.

Carl Andre / Artist Review

2009-03-05T09:41:00.005-05:00

Remembering my days in 2006 when I roamed what is now my favorite museum in the whole wide world, Tate Modern in Southwark, London. At the Tate Modern in one of the exhibitions I remembering seeing a sculpture of an artist called Carl Andre.

The sculpture in the picture is called Equivalent VIII. Nothing more than a pile of bricks. 120 white firebricks placed in a rectangular form, constitutes this piece of minimalist work.

Andre´s piece provocked an uproar in London in 1976 when it was subject to a piece in the Sunday Times, questioning the content of art of this Tate Modern art display...I would say he is a genius...

Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American minimalist artist recognized mainly for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures ranging from large public artworks (such as Stone Field Sculpture, 1977 in Hartford, CT) [1] and Lament for the Children,1976 [2] in Long Island City, NY) to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space (such as 144 Lead Squares [3], 1969 or Twenty-fifth Steel Cardinal, 1974)..

Andre was born in Quincy, MA. He completed primary and secondary schooling in the Quincy public school system and studied art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA from 1951 to 1953[4]. While at Phillips Academy he became friends with Hollis Frampton who would later influence Andre's radical approach to sculpture through their conversations about art[5] and through introductions to other artists[6].

Andre served in the U.S. Army in North Carolina 1955-56 and moved to New York City in 1956. While in New York, Frampton introduced Andre to Constantin Brâncuşi through whom Andre became re-acquainted with a former classmate from Phillips Academy, Frank Stella, in 1958. Andre shared studio space with Stella from 1958 through 1960[7].

Andre's early work in wood may have been inspired by Brâncuşi, but his conversations with Stella about space and form led him in a different direction. While sharing a studio with Stella, Andre developed a series of wooden "cut" sculptures[8] (such as Radial Arm Saw cut sculpture, 1959, and Maple Spindle Exercise, 1959). Stella is noted as having said to Andre (regarding hunks of wood removed from Andre's sculpture) "Carl, that's sculpture, too."[9]

From 1960-64 Andre worked as freight brakeman and conductor in New Jersey for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The experience with blue collar labor and the ordered nature of conducting freight trains would have a later influence on Andre's sculpture and artistic personality. For example, it was not uncommon for Andre to dress in overalls and a blue work shirt, even to the most formal occasions.."[10]

During this period, Andre focused mainly on writing and there is little notable sculpture on record between 1960 and 1965. The poetry would resurface later, most notably in a book (finally published in 1980 by NYU press) called 12 Dialgues in which Andre and Frampton took turns responding to one another at a typewriter using mainly poetry and free-form essay-like texts[11]. Andre's concrete poetry has exhibited in the United States and Europe, a comprehensive collection of which is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam[12].

In 1965 he had his first public exhibition of work in the "Shape and Structure" show curated by Henry Geldzahler at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Andre's controversial "Lever" was included in the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, "Primary Structures." In 1970 he had a one man exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and has had one man exhibitions and participated in group shows in major museums, galleries and kunsthalles throughout America and Europe.

In 1969 Andre helped organize the Art Workers Coalition.

In 1972 Britain's Tate Gallery acquired Andre's Equivalent VIII, an arrangement of bricks. It was shown several times without incident but became the center of controversy in 1976 after it featured in an article in The Sunday Times. It was defaced with paint later in the year. The "Bricks controversy" became one of the most famous public debates in Britain about contemporary art.[13]

In 1979 Andre first met Ana Mendieta through a mutual friendship with artists, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero at AIR Gallery in New York, N.Y.[14]. Andre and Mendieta eventually married in 1984 but the relationship ended in tragedy. Mendieta fell to her death from Andre's 34th story apartment window in 1985 after an argument with Andre. Andre was charged with second degree murder. He elected to be tried before a judge with no jury. In 1988 Andre was acquitted of all charges related to Mendieta's death.[15]

Jonathan Meese / Artist review

2009-03-04T09:29:00.006-05:00

Jonathan Meese (born January 23, 1970, Tokyo) is a German painter, sculptor, performance artist and installation artist based in Berlin and Hamburg. His (often multi-media) works include collages, drawings and writing. He also designs theater sets and wrote and starred in a play, "De Frau: Dr. Poundaddylein - Dr. Ezodysseusszeusuzur" in 2007 at the Volksbühne Theater.

Meese attended Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, but left the school before completing his studies and was picked up by Berlin gallery Contemporary Fine Arts. An early installation Ahoi de Angst was presented at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Susanne Titz, writing about the Biennale said, "It was thus clear that Meese had indeed put his finger on the pulse of his generation and presented it." [1] According to Karel Schampers, "Jonathan Meese can tell a story in such a gripping way that you would never have the idea to doubt its truth. Especially his installations benefit from this quality," [2]

He has been included in exhibitions “Spezialbilder” at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, “Grotesk!” at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and “Schnitt bringt Schnitte” at Ausstellungsraum Schnitt in Köln. Recent exhibitions include Thanks, Wally Whyton (Revendaddy Phantomilky on Coconut Islandaddy) at Modern Art, London, and a performance at Tate Modern, entitled Noel Coward Is Back — Dr. Humpty Dumpty vs. Fra No-Finger. [3] [4] He has exhibited at Modern Art, London, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, and Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca.

He is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, Leo Koenig in New York, and Modern Art in London. In 2007 he collaborated with the composer Karlheinz Essl on the installation FRÄULEIN ATLANTIS shown at the Essl Museum in Vienna/Klosterneuburg.

He has worked collaboratively with the painters Jörg Immendorff, Albert Oehlen, Tim Berresheim, Daniel Richter, Tal R and the composer Karlheinz Essl.