A Sad moment for Venezuelan justice

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

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?

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

On Brain Plasticity

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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.