Nine suspected members of the Central Florida ring were recently charged by federal prosecutors in Orlando as part of a complex investigation that spanned to Texas and involved multiple federal and local law-enforcement agencies.
Investigators executed search warrants throughout Florida and in Texas, and seized more than 6,000 pounds of marijuana, more than 90 firearms and cash.
An 81-page criminal complaint filed in the case details much of the group's suspected activities, including previous interactions with law enforcement.
The case, in some ways, is a textbook example of what's happening in the American drug trade, said Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America," which will be published in October.
"I wouldn't find this incident unusual at all," Carpenter said. "The Mexican cartels have connections with domestic trafficking gangs.
"Their tentacles are quite extensive in the United States."
In the Central Florida ring, agents say, marijuana was shipped in bulk from a trafficker in McAllen, Texas, to Panama City then picked up and brought to Central Florida or Jacksonville for distribution.
After the marijuana was sold locally, the cash was picked up and taken back on the same route, to Panama City and then to Texas.
Once the cash made it to Panama City in the Florida Panhandle, a new load of marijuana was picked up for distribution, and the cycle continued.
Court documents detail the roles of each of the suspected Central Florida ring members. Some were organizers, some were drivers, and others were involved with offloading and delivery.
Sources told agents each shipment of marijuana produced $800,000 to $1 million in proceeds.
The group buried the cash on various properties until it was ready to be shipped back to Texas.
It may seem a risky way to store millions, but Carpenter said it's not surprising.
Unlike legal businesses, drug traffickers can't simply deposit their revenue into a bank account.
"You can't just walk into a Bank of America … and deposit $80,000 in cash," Carpenter said. "That would ring alarm bells all over the place."
Source: Orlando Sentinel
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Internet rumours
Chinese police have arrested six people and shut 16 websites after rumours were spread that military vehicles were on the streets of Beijing, officials say.
The web posts were picked up last week by media outlets around the world, amid uncertainty caused by the ouster of top political leader Bo Xilai.
The country will begin a once-in-a-decade leadership change later this year. But one of the main contenders for promotion - Bo Xilai - has just been sacked, suggesting a fierce fight behind the scenes for control of the ruling Communist Party.
Mr Bo was removed from his post amid allegations that his police chief and former ally had tried to seek asylum at a US consulate.
Chinese censors had previously blocked searches on various sites for terms linked to Mr Bo.
There have also been lurid, and unsubstantiated, rumours that Mr Bo's fall was also linked to the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who last year was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing, the city where Mr Bo was Communist Party chief.
The State Internet Information Office (SIIO) said the rumours had a "very bad influence on the public".
Two popular microblogs have temporarily stopped users from posting comments.
The two sites, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, are still letting people post to their own sites. But they said commenting on other people's posts would be disabled between 31 March and 3 April, so they "could act to stop the spread of rumours".
A spokesman for the SIIO told state news agency Xinhua earlier that the two websites had been "criticised and punished accordingly".
To be completely correct we should say we do not know what's going on. The fact is there is no evidence of a coup. But it is a subject that has obsessed many in China this week.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of reporting on China in the past few days. Coup rumours ricocheted back and forth, most over the internet, but some were picked up by western newspapers. China's microblogs were awash with speculation. Hard facts were non-existent.
Purges and power-struggles
Photographs of tanks and armoured cars on city streets were flying around Twitter and elsewhere. On closer inspection though, some of the pictures seemed to be old ones from rehearsals for military parades, others did not even seem to be of Beijing, as they claimed, but different Chinese cities.
There has been no evidence to substantiate the coup allegations but the authorities considered them damaging enough to take this extreme action.
Internet forums, microblogging sites, are perhaps the only area in which people could freely express their views, and many have done so anonymously.
In a country where there is very little information from the authorities, rumours take on an added value in a way they perhaps would not in other countries.
The web posts were picked up last week by media outlets around the world, amid uncertainty caused by the ouster of top political leader Bo Xilai.
The country will begin a once-in-a-decade leadership change later this year. But one of the main contenders for promotion - Bo Xilai - has just been sacked, suggesting a fierce fight behind the scenes for control of the ruling Communist Party.
Mr Bo was removed from his post amid allegations that his police chief and former ally had tried to seek asylum at a US consulate.
Chinese censors had previously blocked searches on various sites for terms linked to Mr Bo.
There have also been lurid, and unsubstantiated, rumours that Mr Bo's fall was also linked to the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who last year was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing, the city where Mr Bo was Communist Party chief.
The State Internet Information Office (SIIO) said the rumours had a "very bad influence on the public".
Two popular microblogs have temporarily stopped users from posting comments.
The two sites, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, are still letting people post to their own sites. But they said commenting on other people's posts would be disabled between 31 March and 3 April, so they "could act to stop the spread of rumours".
A spokesman for the SIIO told state news agency Xinhua earlier that the two websites had been "criticised and punished accordingly".
To be completely correct we should say we do not know what's going on. The fact is there is no evidence of a coup. But it is a subject that has obsessed many in China this week.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of reporting on China in the past few days. Coup rumours ricocheted back and forth, most over the internet, but some were picked up by western newspapers. China's microblogs were awash with speculation. Hard facts were non-existent.
Purges and power-struggles
Photographs of tanks and armoured cars on city streets were flying around Twitter and elsewhere. On closer inspection though, some of the pictures seemed to be old ones from rehearsals for military parades, others did not even seem to be of Beijing, as they claimed, but different Chinese cities.
There has been no evidence to substantiate the coup allegations but the authorities considered them damaging enough to take this extreme action.
Internet forums, microblogging sites, are perhaps the only area in which people could freely express their views, and many have done so anonymously.
In a country where there is very little information from the authorities, rumours take on an added value in a way they perhaps would not in other countries.
children in Colorado are experiencing rising rates of hunger and obesity
October 27, 2011; Source: Westword | Nutrition education programs promoting healthy eating habits are spreading in schools throughout the country, and one Colorado-based nonprofit provides an interesting case study for why the country’s changing demographics makes this focus on food so important right now. According to Westword, at an event last week in Denver representatives from the Colorado Children’s Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy organization focusing on health and education, revealed that children in Colorado are experiencing rising rates of hunger and obesity. As indicators of this relatively recent shift, representatives from the organization explained that between 2000 and 2009 the number of children living in poverty in the state doubled, and that the state jumped from having the second lowest rate of obese and overweight children in 2003 to having the tenth highest rate in 2007 (the second highest rate of growth, behind Nevada). As added evidence of the severity of the situation in the state, last year one in five children was living in a household where the availability of food was uncertain or “insecure” at least once, and one in six children currently lives in poverty.
In an effort to reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings of rising rates of obesity and food insecurity, the Children’s Campaign invited Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a research organization focused on advancing social and economic equity, to speak. Blackwell explained that “both are driven by poverty,” and emphasized the value of food programs such as the Pennsylvania Food Financing Initiative that provide nutrition education and fresh food to underserved communities.
Bill Shore, founder and CEO of Share our Strength and also an attendee at the event added that preexisting free and reduced-price lunch programs could make it possible to definitively end childhood hunger by 2015. "If you think of our school lunch or school breakfast programs or summer meals, these are programs that have been around for 35, 40 years, they have bi-partisan support, they are one of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on by and large, and the amazing thing is, even in this era of budget constraints, they're funded," he said. Shore also highlighted the ongoing problem of children and families not being aware of state and federal benefits, and as a result not claiming them. As a gentle reminder for an audience of adults, he noted, "They're kids, they don't belong to political actions committees, they don't have lobbyists, they don't make campaign contributions."—Anne Eigeman
In an effort to reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings of rising rates of obesity and food insecurity, the Children’s Campaign invited Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a research organization focused on advancing social and economic equity, to speak. Blackwell explained that “both are driven by poverty,” and emphasized the value of food programs such as the Pennsylvania Food Financing Initiative that provide nutrition education and fresh food to underserved communities.
Bill Shore, founder and CEO of Share our Strength and also an attendee at the event added that preexisting free and reduced-price lunch programs could make it possible to definitively end childhood hunger by 2015. "If you think of our school lunch or school breakfast programs or summer meals, these are programs that have been around for 35, 40 years, they have bi-partisan support, they are one of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on by and large, and the amazing thing is, even in this era of budget constraints, they're funded," he said. Shore also highlighted the ongoing problem of children and families not being aware of state and federal benefits, and as a result not claiming them. As a gentle reminder for an audience of adults, he noted, "They're kids, they don't belong to political actions committees, they don't have lobbyists, they don't make campaign contributions."—Anne Eigeman
Friday, March 30, 2012
the looting of history
Dr. Bruhns is Director of the Cihuatán/Las Marías Archaeological Project for the Fundación Nacional de Arqueología de El Salvador (FUNDAR).
Dr. Kelker is Professor of Art History at Middle Tennessee State University. In 2009 they co-authored Faking Ancient Mesoamerica.
Worldwide art and antiquities forgery is big business, yet despite periodic exposés of the more dramatic forgery rings such as that of the Bolton forgers or of individual high ticket fakes, such as the Chicago Art Institute’s faux Gauguin faun, the forgery business continues unabated. It will continue to do so just as long as there are covetous collectors who believe themselves incapable of being fooled or who have been convinced by their dealers that forgery isn’t a problem. This is especially true if the desired item has acquired a provenance dating prior to the magical year of 1970, before which, for some daft reason (pecuniary?) the art-dealing world claims forgeries were few and far between.
1970 marked the Pennsylvania Declaration, when the Penn Museum announced it would no longer accept objects without legitimate provenience. Although many museums signed on to that premise, disgracefully, many American museums still ignore that dictum, and purchase, and proudly display, smuggled objects.
In the New World this assumption is especially problematic, as the earliest Precolumbian fakes and near-fakes known date back to the period of the Spanish Conquest. The dealing and collection world’s rosy view of the forgery problem is that only about 40% of any collection is potentially fraudulent. Based on our own observations and analysis of museum collection donations to which we have had access, as well as auction listings, we estimate that at this moment, a conservative estimate of the percentage of forgeries on sale or bought (and ultimately donated) within, say, the past 30 to 50 years, is about 85% and growing exponentially. Entire auctions at prestigious houses and galleries and museum exhibitions often push the 100% forgery mark.
The staying power of early and even more recent fakes can best be illustrated with a few examples: the British Museum Xipe Masks, the Mexico Museum of Anthropology Olmec Wrestler, the British Museum Aztec Crystal Skull and the Rio Pesquero (various collections) stone masks and other jade doodads.
Xipe Totec Our Lord the Flayed One
Although The British Museum Xipe masks were thoroughly debunked by Esther Pasztory in the late 1970s, the museum’s current web site blithely presents them as genuine. In the museum world there is no beautiful artifact so false that, given a few years’ cooling off period, it cannot be made “true” again. Turning this sentence around would make it clearer. “In the museum world, the collective memory of the general public and scholarly community is apparently believed to be equivalent to the lifespan of a gnat.”
The Xipe masks are definitely in the upper echelon of forgeries. The maker of these masks was, for his time, very knowledgeable about motifs in Aztec art, and he seems to have borrowed elements from other works, such as the heavy, closed eyes of Coyolxauhqui, along with her large ear spools and striated hair. The fatal flaw in these works is to be found on the inside of the masks. Represented in bas relief are four-armed figures similar to those found in Hindu art. The Aztecs did not depict their deities as multi-armed. Pasztory suggests that this peculiar element may have been inspired by the illustrations of Isidro Gondra in William Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. Gondra’s drawings were heavily influenced by his knowledge of a great many other ancient art styles: Hindu, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek (Gondra, 1844-46).
That these masks are once again presented as authentic is a tremendous problem. Museums and their curators do not want to admit that they were fooled or that a beautiful piece is modern. Forgeries often have far more appeal than genuinely ancient pieces, simply because the artist knows his time and culture and he can make pieces that fit the current view of what “native” art ought to be.
The “Olmec Wrestler”
Even more beloved than the Xipe Masks is the so-called Olmec Wrestler, a three-quarter life-sized basalt sculpture of a seated man wearing only a loincloth that is the star of the Mexico City Museum of Anthropology. Since its purchase by the museum in 1964, a lot of ink has been spilt by scholars attempting to rationalize the eccentricities of this beautifully carved piece. But no amount of hyperbole can excuse the very real fact that the work is consistent with a western canon of art rather than with an Olmec one. The piece exhibits several eccentric characteristics pointing to its maker’s familiarity with western art, including a Renaissance ratio of proportion, Classical anatomical detail, and contrappostal movement. There are also several characteristics that illustrate the artist’s unfamiliarity with Olmec monumental art, such as an incorrect loincloth, bare head, ear lobes drilled rather than carved with ear spools, and use of the wrong type of stone. Despite all of this and more, the Wrestler is passionately supported by those who see in it what they want Precolumbian art to be. This is an enormous problem because the picture of Mesoamerican history presented by such works is a false one that distorts, and thus retards, our understanding of that history.
The British Museum Crystal Skull
This piece is so well-known that it warranted a role in the latest Indiana Jones movie. However, recognition by the Hollywood fantasy machine does not make it real or Indiana Jones an archaeologist. Still, the provenance of the British Museum crystal skull is a work of fiction worthy of the cinema industry. Supposedly brought to Europe by a “Spanish officer” sometime before the French invasion of Mexico, the skull was sold to an English collector and then to M. Eugène Boban, a well-known French antiquities dealer (Riviale 2001). Boban, in turn, sold the skull to Tiffany and Company, who sold it to the British Museum.
Over the years, there have been rumblings in the scholarly community about the authenticity of the crystal skull. By 1967 the roar had become so loud that the British Museum had the skull investigated by its Research Laboratory, which examined both the base material and the fabrication of the piece.
The skull was determined to be made of Brazilian rock crystal (Jones 1990, 296-97), although a recent analysis suggests that the crystal may be from Madagascar (Sax et al 2008); neither of these sources was exploited by the ancient Mesoamericans. Next, the British Museum Research Laboratory concluded that the lines of the teeth were cut by a jewelers’ wheel, not by string sawing as the Aztecs would have done. This, too, was recently confirmed again with more modern equipment by Sax and his colleagues.
The piece is also inconsistent with the canon of Aztec art in that it is too anatomically detailed and western in appearance. Depictions of skulls in Aztec art are blocky and highly stylized with the facial bones compressed into a moon-shaped disk, the mandible rotated forward to create a u-shaped element. The nasal opening is triangular, the eyeballs retained in the sockets, and the teeth are set into the upper and lower jaws with a scalloped contour line.
The Rio Pesquero Masks
The discovery of the Rio (or Arroyo) Pesquero masks in southern Veracruz in 1969 appears to be another example of cinematic inspiration. According to the story told by a prominent collector who happened to be the audience for the performance, the masks were discovered by some simple fishermen who waded out into the river to get into their canoes – the wrong way. They stepped on something hard in the muddy river bottom and dove in to discover an Olmec treasure trove. Another version has them going in their canoes out to a spring in the middle of the brackish river and dropping a bucket; then, while diving in to retrieve the bucket, finding the treasure. Of course, by the time the Mexican archaeologists arrived, all the artifacts had vanished into the maw of the U.S. art market.
The Río Pesquero masks are carved from an assortment of white, gray, and greenish jadeite, some of which is mottled with darker hues of green or brown which make them very appealing to modern eyes. The ancient Mesoamericans, however, would have considered this beautiful mottling to be a flaw, preferring the unblemished stone typical of unquestionably authentic pieces. The masks all appear to the work of a single very talented carver who, in the best tradition of forgery, did not simply copy known works. The masks are well carved and highly polished and some of them feature incised designs, including were-jaguars, supernaturals, and esoteric symbols. To enhance contrast, the lines were selectively and carefully rubbed with ochre or cinnabar. Interestingly, the so-called “Sainsbury mask” was shown in recent conservation work to have had its facial embellishments carved after it had been broken and glued back together. (Leyenaar and Pillsbury 1997, 18-21).
Another problem with these masks is that they show emotion, a feature uncommon in most ancient American art. The presence of drill holes beneath the earlobes and of drilled out irises on several of these masks suggests the possibility of their having been worn and thus being ancient precursors to Colonial masking traditions. Recently, a noted Olmec scholar hypothesized that they were mummy bundle masks. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of these European masking traditions nor of mummy bundles among the ancient Olmec. Still, it shows that there is no theory too far-fetched that it cannot be used to justify a beloved artifact of spurious origin.
Why is so much of this still going on today? Besides the fact that some people want to believe so badly that anything seems plausible to them, there seems to be a serious problem in the museum world. Many museum curators, often highly earnest people, are called upon to work in areas about which they know little or nothing. Also, they are usually under immense pressure — all museum personnel are — to accept things, even obvious fakes, from wealthy donors. These are people who are financially and politically important and thus in a position to “help” the museum in other ways. This is how museums find themselves with 85% or more fakes. There are some U.S. and European museums and a couple of Latin American ones too, where the “Precolumbian” collections are actually nearly 100% “Postcolumbian”.
The art market is virtually unregulated and, even though many galleries and auction houses are dealing in stolen objects and a goodly number of fakes, legal measures are seldom taken against them. Why? In many western countries collecting antiquities is seen as a prestigious hobby and, at most, a victimless crime. And if your collection is mostly fakes? Well, no collector we have ever met has admitted to owning a single fake, and they wouldn’t believe they did no matter how many ways you proved it.
The problem is that the paradigm is wrong. People claim that looted Precolumbian art is genuine until proven fake, when the reality is that nothing can be assumed to be genuine unless it is properly excavated from a legitimate archaeological dig. Science cannot prove that your beautiful mask or Maya Codex vase is real. Perhaps it can lower the odds that it is a fake, but scientific tests such as thermoluminesence and radiocarbon dating can be forged or the results skewed by various means. So, unprovenanced works (virtually all looted or forged) accepted as genuine present a real problem. These dubious pieces usually end up in “important” collections, and, from there, move into books, art history, and archaeology classes, becoming the exemplars on which scholars are trained. Thus, they pervert current and future history as they go.
References cited:-
• Batres, Leopoldo
1909 Antigüedades mejicanas falsificadas, falsificaciones y falsificadores. Imprenta de Videncia S. Sorio, México, D. F.
• Gondra, Isidro R.
1844-1846 Esplicación de las láminas pertenecientes a la historia antigua de México y a la conquista. William H. Prescott, Historia de la conquista de México, Vol. 3. Ignación Cumplido, México, D. F.
• Jones, Mark (editor)
1990 Fake? The Art of Deception. British Museum, London.
• Leyennar, Ted J. J. and Joanne Pillsbury
1997 Mesoamerica. In The Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Vol III, Precolumbian, Asian, Egyptian and European Antiquities. Edited by Steven Hooper, pp. 2-84, Yale University Press, New Haven CT.
• Pasztory, Esther
1982 Three Aztec Masks of the God Xipe. In Falsifications and Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art, edited by Elizabeth H. Boone, pp. 77-106. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
• Riviale, Pascal
2001 Eugène Boban ou les aventures d’un antiquaire au pays des americanistes. Journal de la Societé des Americanistes 87, pp. 351-362. Paris.
• Sax, Margaret, Jane M. Walsh, Ian C. Freestone, Andrew H. Rankin, and Nigel D. Meeks
2008 The Origins of Two Purportedly Pre-Columbian Mexican Crystal Skulls. Journal of Archaeological Science 35, pp. 2651-2760.
Further reading:-
These problems with specific reference to fraudulent objects and dubious practices and beliefs are treated in more detail in:-
• Kelker, Nancy L. and Karen Olsen Bruhns
2010 Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, Left coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
The words Latino and Hispanic
The Hispanic/Latino naming dispute refers to the ongoing disagreements over the use of the ethnonyms Hispanic and Latino to refer collectively to the inhabitants of the United States who are of Latin American or Spanish origin, i.e. Hispanic and Latino Americans, a vast group. The usage of both terms has changed and adapted itself to a wide range of geographical and historical influences. Both Hispanic and Latino denote people of Latin American or Spanish descent living in the U.S.,[1][2] so that "Outside the United States, we don't speak of Latinos; we speak of Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth
The term Hispanic has been the source of several misunderstandings and debates in the US. It was first used officially by the U.S. government in the 1970 Census to refer to "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." However, many people felt that the term was artificially imposed and started to campaign against its use. Some started to favor the term Latino because of its alleged openness towards any people from Latin America. Since the 2000 Census the identifier has changed from "Hispanic" to "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino"
The adoption of the term Latino by the US Census Bureau in 2000[8] and its subsequent media widespread brought about several controversies and disagreements, specifically in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Regarding it as an arbitrary generic term, many Latin American scholars, journalists and organizations have objected against the mass media use of the word "Latino", pointing out that such ethnonyms are optional and should be used only to describe people involved in the practices, ideologies and identity politics of their supporters.[9][10][11][12] They argue that if Hispanic is an imposed official term, so is Latino (perhaps from latinoamericano, "Latin American"),[13] since it was the French who imposed the name Latin America (French Amérique latine) on the Spanish, French, and Portuguese-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere, during their support of the Second Mexican Empire,
In the US, the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" are officially voluntary, self-designated classifications.[15][16][17][18][19] Yet the mass media has helped propagate them irrespective of this fact. The rapid widespread of "Latino" in the US has been possible due to the policies of certain newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and other California-based media during the 1990s.
Essentially, politicians, the media, and marketers find it convenient to deal with the different U.S. Spanish-speaking people under one umbrella. However, many people with Spanish surnames contest the term "Latino".
Michael Grande - 7/5/2005
The words Latino and Hispanic have been so carelessly thrown around, used to label individuals, taken advantage of by some of the popular media (ie: Latin Grammy's, AOL Latino, and the Hispanic Heritage Awards), and even used by some unknowing people as a tool to define their heritage. Yet do we really know what these words mean?
The term Hispanic has been the source of several misunderstandings and debates in the US. It was first used officially by the U.S. government in the 1970 Census to refer to "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." However, many people felt that the term was artificially imposed and started to campaign against its use. Some started to favor the term Latino because of its alleged openness towards any people from Latin America. Since the 2000 Census the identifier has changed from "Hispanic" to "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino"
The adoption of the term Latino by the US Census Bureau in 2000[8] and its subsequent media widespread brought about several controversies and disagreements, specifically in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Regarding it as an arbitrary generic term, many Latin American scholars, journalists and organizations have objected against the mass media use of the word "Latino", pointing out that such ethnonyms are optional and should be used only to describe people involved in the practices, ideologies and identity politics of their supporters.[9][10][11][12] They argue that if Hispanic is an imposed official term, so is Latino (perhaps from latinoamericano, "Latin American"),[13] since it was the French who imposed the name Latin America (French Amérique latine) on the Spanish, French, and Portuguese-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere, during their support of the Second Mexican Empire,
In the US, the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" are officially voluntary, self-designated classifications.[15][16][17][18][19] Yet the mass media has helped propagate them irrespective of this fact. The rapid widespread of "Latino" in the US has been possible due to the policies of certain newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and other California-based media during the 1990s.
Essentially, politicians, the media, and marketers find it convenient to deal with the different U.S. Spanish-speaking people under one umbrella. However, many people with Spanish surnames contest the term "Latino".
Michael Grande - 7/5/2005
The words Latino and Hispanic have been so carelessly thrown around, used to label individuals, taken advantage of by some of the popular media (ie: Latin Grammy's, AOL Latino, and the Hispanic Heritage Awards), and even used by some unknowing people as a tool to define their heritage. Yet do we really know what these words mean?
Thursday, March 29, 2012
end to U.S. military and police aid to Honduras
Over 1,000 of you contacted your representatives urging them to sign on to a Dear Colleague letter calling for an end to U.S. military and police aid to Honduras. Thanks to your efforts, 94 members of Congress signed on to this important letter!
To read the final version of Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s letter to Secretary Clinton with the full list of signatures, click here. Also, to hear a great interview with Rep. Schakowsky discussing the letter, please click here.
We are inspired by the response we received from you. In addition to taking the time to send a letter to your representatives, we know that some of you continued to make follow-up calls to your representative until she/he signed on. You are part of the grassroots movement seeking justice for Hondurans suffering the impact of military and police aid. Thank you.
If your representative signed on to the letter, please take a moment to thank her/him. Call the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be connected to your representative's office. You can find the full list of signatories here.
As independent Honduran journalist, Gilda Silvestrucci stated in our recent interview with her, “Historically [U.S. military aid] is one of the biggest things that supports the violations of human rights in this country.” Thank you again for your support in helping end this cycle.
In Solidarity,
Brooke Denmark, Christine Goffredo and Riahl O'Malley
Witness for Peace Nicaragua International Team
tens of thousands of people make their way to Mexico on mixed migration routes every year. They include victims of gang violence who need protection.
orphanage emmanuel
To read the final version of Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s letter to Secretary Clinton with the full list of signatures, click here. Also, to hear a great interview with Rep. Schakowsky discussing the letter, please click here.
We are inspired by the response we received from you. In addition to taking the time to send a letter to your representatives, we know that some of you continued to make follow-up calls to your representative until she/he signed on. You are part of the grassroots movement seeking justice for Hondurans suffering the impact of military and police aid. Thank you.
If your representative signed on to the letter, please take a moment to thank her/him. Call the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be connected to your representative's office. You can find the full list of signatories here.
As independent Honduran journalist, Gilda Silvestrucci stated in our recent interview with her, “Historically [U.S. military aid] is one of the biggest things that supports the violations of human rights in this country.” Thank you again for your support in helping end this cycle.
In Solidarity,
Brooke Denmark, Christine Goffredo and Riahl O'Malley
Witness for Peace Nicaragua International Team
tens of thousands of people make their way to Mexico on mixed migration routes every year. They include victims of gang violence who need protection.
orphanage emmanuel
pepper-spraying at Occupy UC Davis
During peacefully Occupy Movement, police came in to tear down tents and proceeded to arrest students who stood in their way. Once students peacefully demanded the release of the arrested, a police officer unnecessarily pepper sprays the students to open a path for the rest of the officers.
Brazil's economic links with China
URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.
Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times
A new railroad line in Uruaçu, Brazil, will carry soybeans to a port for shipping to China. Brazil's economic links with China have helped it prosper, but Brazil is selling mostly raw materials.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China.
“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”
The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.
Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.
“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”
While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.
“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.
China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.
Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68 percent in 2000. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.
“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”
While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”
China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.
Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.
“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.
A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.
Foreigners own an estimated 11 percent of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20 percent of São Paulo State.
International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.
“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.
Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.
China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.
But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.
In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.
“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.
Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.
In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.
“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.
Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.
“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”
“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”
The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.
Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.
“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”
While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.
“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.
China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.
Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68 percent in 2000. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.
“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”
While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”
China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.
Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.
“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.
A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.
Foreigners own an estimated 11 percent of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20 percent of São Paulo State.
International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.
“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.
Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.
China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.
But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.
In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.
“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.
Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.
In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.
“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.
Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.
“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”
your job or your religion
Everything changed for Glenn Mack Jr. when his supervisor at Whole Foods found out he's Muslim.
Glenn had been a rising star at Whole Foods, recruited to work in a prestigious Philadelphia store and even winning a special meeting with the company's CEO. But when his supervisor found out Glenn would be spending his vacation making pilgrimage to Mecca -- for which vacation time was approved months in advance without any questions -- his boss suddenly had a change of heart.
"You can choose. It's either your job or your religion," Glenn was told. He was subsequently demoted, harassed and wrongfully terminated in November.
Glenn's not bitter, though -- he honestly just wants his job back. So Moein Khawaja, who is working with Glenn to get Whole Foods to do right by him, starteda petition on Change.org calling on Whole Foods to reinstate Glenn and create sensitivity training for all staff.
Will you sign Moein's petition calling on Whole Foods to reinstate Glenn Mack, who was harassed and fired for being Muslim, and end religious discrimination in the company?
Whole Foods actually has a zero-tolerance discrimination policy and says on its website that "supporting team member happiness and excellence" is one of its seven core values. So the chronology of Glenn's mistreatment by the self-styled home for forward-thinking shoppers is like a slap in the face:
Glenn returned from his vacation demoted to part-time status and stripped of all his benefits -- even health care. He complained to HR, and got only harassment in response. When he would use his off-the-clock breaks for 5-minute prayers, he was heckled and suffered anti-Muslim comments to the point that he had to pray next to the dumpsters. When Glenn was finally fired, it was for absenteeism -- something he had not been approached about before.
Glenn's mistreatment completely clashes with what Whole Foods says it stands for. He thinks that maybe that's why the company has basically chosen to ignore his harassment, perhaps hoping others will, too. But if customers tell Whole Foods that they won't stand for religious discrimination and that they want Glenn back on the job, the company will have to act.
Please sign Moein Khawaja's petition to get Glenn Mack's job back and end religious discrimination at Whole Foods. Stand with Glenn and Moein now to help them win.
Thanks for being a change-maker,
Amanda and the Change.org team
Glenn had been a rising star at Whole Foods, recruited to work in a prestigious Philadelphia store and even winning a special meeting with the company's CEO. But when his supervisor found out Glenn would be spending his vacation making pilgrimage to Mecca -- for which vacation time was approved months in advance without any questions -- his boss suddenly had a change of heart.
"You can choose. It's either your job or your religion," Glenn was told. He was subsequently demoted, harassed and wrongfully terminated in November.
Glenn's not bitter, though -- he honestly just wants his job back. So Moein Khawaja, who is working with Glenn to get Whole Foods to do right by him, starteda petition on Change.org calling on Whole Foods to reinstate Glenn and create sensitivity training for all staff.
Will you sign Moein's petition calling on Whole Foods to reinstate Glenn Mack, who was harassed and fired for being Muslim, and end religious discrimination in the company?
Whole Foods actually has a zero-tolerance discrimination policy and says on its website that "supporting team member happiness and excellence" is one of its seven core values. So the chronology of Glenn's mistreatment by the self-styled home for forward-thinking shoppers is like a slap in the face:
Glenn returned from his vacation demoted to part-time status and stripped of all his benefits -- even health care. He complained to HR, and got only harassment in response. When he would use his off-the-clock breaks for 5-minute prayers, he was heckled and suffered anti-Muslim comments to the point that he had to pray next to the dumpsters. When Glenn was finally fired, it was for absenteeism -- something he had not been approached about before.
Glenn's mistreatment completely clashes with what Whole Foods says it stands for. He thinks that maybe that's why the company has basically chosen to ignore his harassment, perhaps hoping others will, too. But if customers tell Whole Foods that they won't stand for religious discrimination and that they want Glenn back on the job, the company will have to act.
Please sign Moein Khawaja's petition to get Glenn Mack's job back and end religious discrimination at Whole Foods. Stand with Glenn and Moein now to help them win.
Thanks for being a change-maker,
Amanda and the Change.org team
Mountain Meadows Massacre
First, nothing that any of the emigrants purportedly did or said, even if all of it were true, came close to justifying their deaths. Second, the large majority of perpetrators led decent, nonviolent lives before and after the massacre.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre was the killing of roughly 120 emigrants who were passing through Southern Utah in September 1857. The massacre occurred on September 11, 1857. The emigrants–men, women, and children–were traveling from Arkansas to California, part of the Baker-Fancher wagon train. They were killed by a group of Mormons with the help of local Paiute-Americans.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre was the killing of roughly 120 emigrants who were passing through Southern Utah in September 1857. The massacre occurred on September 11, 1857. The emigrants–men, women, and children–were traveling from Arkansas to California, part of the Baker-Fancher wagon train. They were killed by a group of Mormons with the help of local Paiute-Americans.
science as government regulation
Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. Fewer than 35 percent of conservatives say they have a "great deal" of trust in the scientific community now, compared to nearly half in 1974.
"The scientific community ... has been concerned about this growing distrust in the public with science. And what I found in the study is basically that's really not the problem. The growing distrust of science is entirely focused in two groups—conservatives and people who frequently attend church," says the study's author, University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat.
In fact, in 1974, people who identified as conservatives were among the most confident in science as an institution, with liberals trailing slightly behind, and moderates bringing up the rear. Liberals have remained fairly steady in their opinion of the scientific community over the interim, while conservative trust in science has plummeted.
Interestingly, the most educated conservatives have led that charge. Conservatives with college degrees began distrusting science earlier and more forcefully than other conservatives, upending assumptions that less educated people on the whole are more distrustful of science.
Gauchat attributes the changes to two forces: Both science and conservatives have changed a lot in 40 years. In the post-WWII period, research was largely wedded to the Defense Department and NASA—think the space race and the development of the atomic bomb. Now the scientific institution "has come out from behind those institutions and been its own cultural force." That has meant it is increasingly viewed as a catalyst of government regulation, as in the failed Democratic proposal to institute cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions and stave off climate change.
"People are now viewing science as part of government regulation," Gauchat says.
Previous studies have shown that climate change, the widely-accepted theory that man-made carbon emissions are causing the world to grow warmer, is very unpopular among conservatives, and especially white conservative males. In 2008, half of all conservatives believed in climate change. By 2010, only a third did, compared to more than 70 percent of liberals, according to a Gallup poll.
The issue has caused a bit of a hubbub in the Republican primary. Failed candidate Jon Huntsman wrote in August, "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy," before later walking that back and saying there were still doubts. Newt Gingrich has been pounded repeatedly by rival Rick Santorum—who says global warming is a "hoax"—for appearing in an anti-climate change ad with Nancy Pelosi in 2006. (He's since said there is evidence "on both sides of the issue.") And Mitt Romney says he believes the Earth is getting warmer, but isn't sure how much humans are contributing to that.
The study was based on answers to the General Social Survey, which began asking people about their level of trust in various public institutions, including Congress and the Supreme Court, in the 1970s. The dip in trust toward the scientific community didn't correlate to a decrease in trust for all political institutions, since conservatives showed increased trust in political institutions during the Bush presidency, but still found science suspicious.
Gauchat says he's done other analyses that show in Europe, the trend is flipped on its head. Liberals show a greater distrust of the scientific community. "It's which debates are salient in the public. Maybe this is a trend that will reverse if genetically modified foods becomes a big deal in the U.S." he said.
"The scientific community ... has been concerned about this growing distrust in the public with science. And what I found in the study is basically that's really not the problem. The growing distrust of science is entirely focused in two groups—conservatives and people who frequently attend church," says the study's author, University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat.
In fact, in 1974, people who identified as conservatives were among the most confident in science as an institution, with liberals trailing slightly behind, and moderates bringing up the rear. Liberals have remained fairly steady in their opinion of the scientific community over the interim, while conservative trust in science has plummeted.
Interestingly, the most educated conservatives have led that charge. Conservatives with college degrees began distrusting science earlier and more forcefully than other conservatives, upending assumptions that less educated people on the whole are more distrustful of science.
Gauchat attributes the changes to two forces: Both science and conservatives have changed a lot in 40 years. In the post-WWII period, research was largely wedded to the Defense Department and NASA—think the space race and the development of the atomic bomb. Now the scientific institution "has come out from behind those institutions and been its own cultural force." That has meant it is increasingly viewed as a catalyst of government regulation, as in the failed Democratic proposal to institute cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions and stave off climate change.
"People are now viewing science as part of government regulation," Gauchat says.
Previous studies have shown that climate change, the widely-accepted theory that man-made carbon emissions are causing the world to grow warmer, is very unpopular among conservatives, and especially white conservative males. In 2008, half of all conservatives believed in climate change. By 2010, only a third did, compared to more than 70 percent of liberals, according to a Gallup poll.
The issue has caused a bit of a hubbub in the Republican primary. Failed candidate Jon Huntsman wrote in August, "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy," before later walking that back and saying there were still doubts. Newt Gingrich has been pounded repeatedly by rival Rick Santorum—who says global warming is a "hoax"—for appearing in an anti-climate change ad with Nancy Pelosi in 2006. (He's since said there is evidence "on both sides of the issue.") And Mitt Romney says he believes the Earth is getting warmer, but isn't sure how much humans are contributing to that.
The study was based on answers to the General Social Survey, which began asking people about their level of trust in various public institutions, including Congress and the Supreme Court, in the 1970s. The dip in trust toward the scientific community didn't correlate to a decrease in trust for all political institutions, since conservatives showed increased trust in political institutions during the Bush presidency, but still found science suspicious.
Gauchat says he's done other analyses that show in Europe, the trend is flipped on its head. Liberals show a greater distrust of the scientific community. "It's which debates are salient in the public. Maybe this is a trend that will reverse if genetically modified foods becomes a big deal in the U.S." he said.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters
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rating of the film "Bully"
For a bullied kid, school can be torment.
Daily taunts and physical abuse turn into feelings of hopelessness when teachers won't help.
School bullying has already made too many young lives painful and frightening. It's going to take a huge effort to put a stop to it – from schools, parents, politicians, and cultural icons.
That's why I am extremely disappointed that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to give a new documentary about bullying an "R" rating, making it nearly impossible for most schools to screen the film or for kids and teens to see it on their own.
Our partners and allies have already delivered over 200,000 signatures asking the MPAA to amend their decision – and now it's up to us to keep the pressure on by flooding their inboxes.
Ratings are there to help parents and families make the best decisions about what their children should see, but in this case, the "R" rating does the opposite – keeping a huge part of the target audience away from the film.
What's more, Bully was only given an "R" rating due to profanity, and the MPAA has made exceptions for swearing in the past.
In fact, the MPAA gave a 2005 documentary about the military a PG-13 rating even though it had 36 more instances of the f-word than Bully simply because they thought it was important for young people to see the film.
Arnulfo, you and I agree: bullying is far more harmful to kids than a little coarse language, and over 200,000 of our friends and allies have already spoken out asking the MPAA to change the ruling. Will you send a letter now to keep the pressure on?
This documentary has the potential to change – or even save – lives. But we’ll never know its full impact if kids and teens are kept away.
With your help, we can make sure the MPAA does the right thing here. Thanks for standing up for our kids.
Sincerely, Joe Solmonese
President
Katy Butler appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show while Ellen gave her support for Katy's petition on Change.org urging the MPAA to lower their rating of the film "Bully" from R to PG-13. You can sign Katy's petition at http://www.change.org/bully
Old Folks at Home
"Old Folks at Home" (also known as "Swanee Ribber" or "Suwannee River") is a minstrel song written by Stephen Foster in 1851.
Written in the first person from the perspective of a black slave (at a time when slavery was legal in half of the states of the US), the song has its narrator "longing for de old plantation,"[4] which has long drawn criticism as romanticizing slavery, although Foster himself supported the North during the American Civil War and supported abolition of slavery.
A word now long reckoned an ethnic slur, "darkies", that is used in the lyrics has become such an embarrassment for singers and audiences alike that at public performances words like "lordy," "mama," "darling," "brothers" or "dear ones" are typically used in place of the offensive word.
The text is written, as is usual in minstrel songs, in a cross between the dialect generally spoken by black American slaves (as well as their descendants) and standard American English — the former being attested to as in use as late as the 1940s in the works of the black Floridian folklorist Zora Neale Hurston,[5] and is an archaic form of contemporary African American Vernacular English — and this is seen by some as racism against black Americans.
In practice, the pronunciation as written in dialect has long been disregarded and the corresponding standard American English usage has been sung, as witnessed by the song's performances at the 1955 Florida Folk Festival.
"Old Folks at Home", by Stephen Foster, 1851
Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.
All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.
Chorus
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb-rywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
2nd verse
All round de little farm I wandered
When I was young,
Den many happy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.
When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I;
Oh, take me to my kind old mudder!
Dere let me live and die.
3rd Verse
One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love
Still sadly to my memory rushes,
No matter where I rove.
When will I see de bees a-humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo strumming,
Down in my good old home?
Written in the first person from the perspective of a black slave (at a time when slavery was legal in half of the states of the US), the song has its narrator "longing for de old plantation,"[4] which has long drawn criticism as romanticizing slavery, although Foster himself supported the North during the American Civil War and supported abolition of slavery.
A word now long reckoned an ethnic slur, "darkies", that is used in the lyrics has become such an embarrassment for singers and audiences alike that at public performances words like "lordy," "mama," "darling," "brothers" or "dear ones" are typically used in place of the offensive word.
The text is written, as is usual in minstrel songs, in a cross between the dialect generally spoken by black American slaves (as well as their descendants) and standard American English — the former being attested to as in use as late as the 1940s in the works of the black Floridian folklorist Zora Neale Hurston,[5] and is an archaic form of contemporary African American Vernacular English — and this is seen by some as racism against black Americans.
In practice, the pronunciation as written in dialect has long been disregarded and the corresponding standard American English usage has been sung, as witnessed by the song's performances at the 1955 Florida Folk Festival.
"Old Folks at Home", by Stephen Foster, 1851
Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.
All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.
Chorus
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb-rywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
2nd verse
All round de little farm I wandered
When I was young,
Den many happy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.
When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I;
Oh, take me to my kind old mudder!
Dere let me live and die.
3rd Verse
One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love
Still sadly to my memory rushes,
No matter where I rove.
When will I see de bees a-humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo strumming,
Down in my good old home?
Afghanistan - Bacha Posh
When Azita Rafhat, a former member of the Afghan parliament, gets her daughters ready for school, she dresses one of the girls differently.
Three of her daughters are clothed in white garments and their heads covered with white scarves, but a fourth girl, Mehrnoush, is dressed in a suit and tie. When they get outside, Mehrnoush is no longer a girl but a boy named Mehran.
Azita Rafhat didn't have a son, and to fill the gap and avoid people's taunts for not having a son, she opted for this radical decision. It was very simple, thanks to a haircut and some boyish clothes.
There is even a name for this tradition in Afghanistan - Bacha Posh, or disguising girls as boys.
In a report, it said that women were punished for fleeing domestic abuse and violence while some rape victims were also imprisoned.
Sex outside marriage - even when the woman is forced - is considered adultery, another "moral crime".
The I Had to Run Away report was released in Kabul on Wednesday.
The report said that the government of President Hamid Karzai had failed to fulfil its obligations under international human rights laws.
"It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage," HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said.
The report called on the government to release about 400 women and girls held in jails or juvenile detention centres.
"Some women and girls have been convicted of mina, sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution," it said.
"Judges often convict solely on the basis of 'confessions' given in the absence of lawyers and 'signed' without having been read to women who cannot read or write.
"After conviction, women routinely face long prison sentences, in some cases more than 10 years."
It said that the situation had been made worse by Mr Karzai frequently changing his position on women's rights.
"Unwilling or unable to take a consistent line against conservative forces within the country, he has often made compromises that have negatively impacted women's rights."
Earlier this month the president endorsed a "code of conduct" issued by an influential council of clerics which allows husbands to beat wives under certain circumstances.
The BBC's Emily Buchanan says that the lack of women's rights under the Taliban helped to justify Western military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.
Our correspondent says that since then there has been much progress on girls access to education and participation in public life.
Many activists fear that hard-won rights are increasingly being undermined as the government tries to woo conservative religious forces.
A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter.
The murdered woman's husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has since fled.
The murder took place two days ago in Kunduz province. The baby girl, who is now two months old, was not hurt.
The birth of a boy is usually a cause for celebration in Afghanistan but girls are generally seen as a burden.
Some women in Afghanistan are abused if they fail to give birth to boys. And this is just the latest in a series of high-profile crimes against women in the country.
Late last year a horrifying video emerged of the injuries suffered by a 15-year-old child bride who was locked up and tortured by her husband.
'Crime against humanity'
This murder took place in the village of Mahfalay, in the district of Khanabad in Kunduz.
Khanabad's police chief, Sufi Habib, told the BBC that "the mother gave birth to a third girl two months ago. The husband and mother-in-law strangled her for giving birth to a third daughter".
Senior officials told the BBC that the mother-in-law, known as Wali Hazrata, tied the feet of the 22-year old woman, who was known as Stori, while Stori's husband strangled her.
He is thought to be a fighter with an illegal armed militia which is believed to have some political support. Local villagers say that Stori often urged her husband to lay down his arms.
"She lived in a hell not a house. But then she also asked her husband to stay home and avoid going out with these thugs," one neighbour who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC.
While militia groups have some political support, they have often been accused of violence against women, robberies and extortion.
Afghan women's rights activists brought this case to the attention of the media.
The Director for Kunduz Women's affairs, Nadira Gya, condemned the incident saying: "it was a brutal crime committed against an innocent woman".
Local religious and tribal elders in the district also condemned the killing, saying it was an act of ignorance, and calling it a crime against Islam, humanity and women.
They called for immediate punishment. Wali Hazrata appears to have made no public comment as yet.
Three of her daughters are clothed in white garments and their heads covered with white scarves, but a fourth girl, Mehrnoush, is dressed in a suit and tie. When they get outside, Mehrnoush is no longer a girl but a boy named Mehran.
Azita Rafhat didn't have a son, and to fill the gap and avoid people's taunts for not having a son, she opted for this radical decision. It was very simple, thanks to a haircut and some boyish clothes.
There is even a name for this tradition in Afghanistan - Bacha Posh, or disguising girls as boys.
In a report, it said that women were punished for fleeing domestic abuse and violence while some rape victims were also imprisoned.
Sex outside marriage - even when the woman is forced - is considered adultery, another "moral crime".
The I Had to Run Away report was released in Kabul on Wednesday.
The report said that the government of President Hamid Karzai had failed to fulfil its obligations under international human rights laws.
"It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage," HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said.
The report called on the government to release about 400 women and girls held in jails or juvenile detention centres.
"Some women and girls have been convicted of mina, sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution," it said.
"Judges often convict solely on the basis of 'confessions' given in the absence of lawyers and 'signed' without having been read to women who cannot read or write.
"After conviction, women routinely face long prison sentences, in some cases more than 10 years."
It said that the situation had been made worse by Mr Karzai frequently changing his position on women's rights.
"Unwilling or unable to take a consistent line against conservative forces within the country, he has often made compromises that have negatively impacted women's rights."
Earlier this month the president endorsed a "code of conduct" issued by an influential council of clerics which allows husbands to beat wives under certain circumstances.
The BBC's Emily Buchanan says that the lack of women's rights under the Taliban helped to justify Western military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.
Our correspondent says that since then there has been much progress on girls access to education and participation in public life.
Many activists fear that hard-won rights are increasingly being undermined as the government tries to woo conservative religious forces.
A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter.
The murdered woman's husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has since fled.
The murder took place two days ago in Kunduz province. The baby girl, who is now two months old, was not hurt.
The birth of a boy is usually a cause for celebration in Afghanistan but girls are generally seen as a burden.
Some women in Afghanistan are abused if they fail to give birth to boys. And this is just the latest in a series of high-profile crimes against women in the country.
Late last year a horrifying video emerged of the injuries suffered by a 15-year-old child bride who was locked up and tortured by her husband.
'Crime against humanity'
This murder took place in the village of Mahfalay, in the district of Khanabad in Kunduz.
Khanabad's police chief, Sufi Habib, told the BBC that "the mother gave birth to a third girl two months ago. The husband and mother-in-law strangled her for giving birth to a third daughter".
Senior officials told the BBC that the mother-in-law, known as Wali Hazrata, tied the feet of the 22-year old woman, who was known as Stori, while Stori's husband strangled her.
He is thought to be a fighter with an illegal armed militia which is believed to have some political support. Local villagers say that Stori often urged her husband to lay down his arms.
"She lived in a hell not a house. But then she also asked her husband to stay home and avoid going out with these thugs," one neighbour who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC.
While militia groups have some political support, they have often been accused of violence against women, robberies and extortion.
Afghan women's rights activists brought this case to the attention of the media.
The Director for Kunduz Women's affairs, Nadira Gya, condemned the incident saying: "it was a brutal crime committed against an innocent woman".
Local religious and tribal elders in the district also condemned the killing, saying it was an act of ignorance, and calling it a crime against Islam, humanity and women.
They called for immediate punishment. Wali Hazrata appears to have made no public comment as yet.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
danger to operators of power plants
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — When a computer attack hobbled Iran's unfinished nuclear power plant last year, it was assumed to be a military-grade strike, the handiwork of elite hacking professionals with nation-state backing.
Yet for all its science fiction sophistication, key elements have now been replicated in laboratory settings by security experts with little time, money or specialized skill. It is an alarming development that shows how technical advances are eroding the barrier that has long prevented computer assaults from leaping from the digital to the physical world.
The techniques demonstrated in recent months highlight the danger to operators of power plants, water systems and othercritical infrastructure around the world.
"Things that sounded extremely unlikely a few years ago are now coming along," said Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit group that helps the U.S. government prepare for future attacks.While the experiments have been performed in laboratory settings, and the findings presented at security conferences or in technical papers, the danger of another real-world attack such as the one on Iran is profound.
The team behind the so-called Stuxnet worm that was used to attack the Iranian nuclear facility may still be active. New malicious software with some of Stuxnet's original code and behavior has surfaced, suggesting ongoing reconnaissance against industrial control systems.
And attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing. The Idaho National Laboratory, home to secretive defense labs intended to protect the nation's power grids, water systems and other critical infrastructure, has responded to triple the number of computer attacks from clients this year over last, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has revealed.
For years, ill-intentioned hackers have dreamed of plaguing the world's infrastructure with a brand of sabotage reserved for Hollywood. They've mused about wreaking havoc in industrial settings by burning out power plants, bursting oil and gas pipelines, or stalling manufacturing plants.
But a key roadblock has prevented them from causing widespread destruction: they've lacked a way to take remote control of the electronic "controller" boxes that serve as the nerve centers for heavy machinery.
The attack on Iran changed all that. Now, security experts — and presumably, malicious hackers — are racing to find weaknesses. They've found a slew of vulnerabilities.
Think of the new findings as the hacking equivalent of Moore's Law, the famous rule about computing power that it roughly doubles every couple of years. Just as better computer chips have accelerated the spread of PCs and consumer electronics over the past 40 years, new hacking techniques are making all kinds of critical infrastructure — even prisons — more vulnerable to attacks.
One thing all of the findings have in common is that mitigating the threat requires organizations to bridge a cultural divide that exists in many facilities. Among other things, separate teams responsible for computer and physical security need to start talking to each other and coordinate efforts.
Many of the threats at these facilities involve electronic equipment known as controllers. These devices take computer commands and send instructions to physical machinery, such as regulating how fast a conveyor belt moves.
They function as bridges between the computer and physical worlds. Computer hackers can exploit them to take over physical infrastructure. Stuxnet, for example, was designed to damage centrifuges in the nuclear plant being built in Iran by affecting how fast the controllers instructed the centrifuges to spin. Iran has blamed the U.S. and Israel for trying to sabotage what it says is a peaceful program.
Security researcher Dillon Beresford said it took him just two months and $20,000 in equipment to find more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the same type of electronic controllers used in Iran. The vulnerabilities, which included weak password protections, allowed him to take remote control of the devices and reprogram them.
"What all this is saying is you don't have to be a nation-state to do this stuff. That's very scary," said Joe Weiss, an industrial control system expert. "There's a perception barrier, and I think Dillon crashed that barrier."
One of the biggest makers of industrial controllers is Siemens AG, which made the controllers in question. The company said it has alerted customers, fixed some of the problems and is working closely with CERT, the cybersecurity arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Siemens said the issue largely affects older models of controllers. Even with those, the company said, a hacker would have to bypass passwords and other security measures that operators should have in place. Siemens said it knows of no actual break-ins using the techniques identified by Beresford, who works in Austin, Texas, for NSS Labs Inc.,
Yet because the devices are designed to last for decades, replacing or updating them isn't always easy. And the more research that comes out, the more likely attacks become.
One of the foremost Stuxnet experts, Ralph Langner, a security consultant in Hamburg, Germany, has come up with what he calls a "time bomb" of just four lines of programming code. He called it the most basic copycat attack that a Stuxnet-inspired prankster, criminal or terrorist could come up with.
"As low-level as these results may be, they will spread through the hacker community and will attract others who continue digging," Langer said in an email.
The threat isn't limited to power plants. Even prisons and jails are vulnerable.
Another research team, based in Virginia, was allowed to inspect a correctional facility — it won't say which one — and found vulnerabilities that would allow it to open and close the facility's doors, suppress alarms and tamper with video surveillance feeds.
During a tour of the facility, the researchers noticed controllers like the ones in Iran. They used knowledge of the facility's network and that controller to demonstrate weaknesses.
They said it was crucial to isolate critical control systems from the Internet to prevent such attacks.
"People need to deem what's critical infrastructure in their facilities and who might come in contact with those," Teague Newman, one of the three behind the research.
Another example involves a Southern California power company that wanted to test the controllers used throughout its substations. It hired Mocana Corp., a San Francisco-based security firm, to do the evaluation.
Kurt Stammberger, a vice president at Mocana, told The Associated Press that his firm found multiple vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to control any piece of equipment connected to the controllers.
"We've never looked at a device like this before, and we were able to find this in the first day," Stammberger said. "These were big, major problems, and problems frankly that have been known about for at least a year and a half, but the utility had no clue."
He wouldn't name the utility or the device maker. But he said it wasn't a Siemens device, which points to an industrywide problem, not one limited to a single manufacturer.
Mocana is working with the device maker on a fix, Stammberger said. His firm presented its findings at the ICS Cyber Security Conference in September.
Even if a manufacturer fixes the problem in new devices, there's no easy way to fix it in older units, short of installing new equipment. Industrial facilities are loath to do that because of the costs of even temporarily shutting its operations.
"The situation is not at all as bad as it was five to six years ago, but there's much that remains to be done," said Ulf Lindqvist, an expert on industrial control systems with SRI International. "We need to be as innovative and organized on the good-guy side as the bad guys can be."
___
Jordan Robertson can be reached at jrobertson(at)ap.org
Friday, March 23, 2012
Air traffic controller errors soaring
WASHINGTON (AP) — Errors by air traffic controllers in the vicinity of airports as well as incidents in which there was an unauthorized plane, vehicle, or person on a runway have increased sharply, a government watchdog said in a report released Thursday.
Mistakes by controllers working at radar facilities that handle approaches and departures within about 30 miles of an airport that cause planes to fly too close together nearly doubled over three years ending in March, the Government Accountability Office report said.
Separately, runway incursions at airports with control towers increased from 11 incidents per million takeoffs and landings in the 2004 federal budget year to 18 incidents per million takeoffs and landings in the 2010 federal budget year. Most large and medium-sized airports have control towers. Such "runway incursions," as they are called, can involve anything that's not supposed to be on a runway, from a stray baggage cart to a plane that makes a wrong turn while taxiing.
The deadliest accident in aviation history occurred on March 27, 1977 on an airport runway on the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands when two Boeing 747s collided, killing 583 people.
The Federal Aviation Administration attributed the increases in controller errors to better error reporting. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has also said previously that the agency is using new a plane-tracking system at approach control facilities better able to spot planes too close together. But the report said technologies aimed at improving automated reporting of incidents have not yet been fully implemented
Apart from the automated system, the FAA has also adopted a new error reporting policy that encourages controllers to disclose their mistakes by not punishing them for those errors.
"As a result of this culture change, the FAA expected to see an increase in reported operational errors. More information will help us find problems and take action before an accident happens, which will help us build an even safer aviation system," the agency said in a statement.
The GAO report acknowledged that changes in reporting policies and procedures at FAA may be partly responsible for the increases.
"However, trends may also indicate an increase in the actual occurrence of incidents," the report said.
The FAA statement doesn't address the increases in runway incursions. The FAA has had a program to reduce runway incursions since at least 2007, and officials have claimed significant success.
The GAO report says that while FAA officials have met their goals for reducing runway incursions overall, the rate of incidents at airports with towers has increased.
"The increase in runway safety incidents raises significant concerns," said House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla. He said his committee would host a meeting with FAA officials and others on the issue.
The Unsustainable Future
Decisive policies must be urgently put in place to stop the euro area sovereign debt crisis from spreading and to put weakening global activity back on track, says the OECD's latest Economic Outlook. Watch Pier Carlo Padon, Chief Economist of the OECD.
For more information, visit: www.oecd.org/oecdEconomicOutlook
Read press release: http://www.oecd.org/document/47/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (also titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) is a 2005 book by Jared M. Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles. Diamond's book deals with "societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses" (p. 15). In writing the book Diamond intended that its readers should learn from history (p. 23).
Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and failure to adapt to environmental issues.
He also lists 12 environmental problems facing mankind today. The first eight have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:
- Deforestation and habitat destruction
- Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
- Water management problems
- Overhunting
- Overfishing
- Effects of introduced species on native species
- Overpopulation
- Increased per-capita impact of people
- Anthropogenic climate change
- Buildup of toxins in the environment
- Energy shortages
- Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity
Why There Really Are No Limits to Growth
by Ralf Schauerhammer
From Spring 2002 21st Century issue
The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Danish: Verdens sande tilstand, literal translation: The True State of the World) is a book by Danish environmentalist author Bjørn Lomborg, controversial for its claims that overpopulation, declining energy resources, deforestation, species loss, water shortages, certain aspects of global warming, and an assortment of other global environmental issues are unsupported by analysis of the relevant data. It was first published in Danish in 1998, while the English edition was published as a work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001.
Due to the scope of the project, comprising the range of topics addressed, the diversity of data and sources employed, and the many types of conclusions and comments advanced, The Skeptical Environmentalist does not fit easily into a particular scientific discipline or methodology. Although published by the social sciences division of Cambridge University Press, the findings and conclusions were widely challenged on the basis of natural science. This interpretation of The Skeptical Environmentalist as a work of environmental science generated much of the controversy and debate that surrounded the book.
Lomborg has read through an impressive amount of scientific research and attempted to reach general conclusions about the state of the environment. Most of what he says in the book is true, but keep in mind that he has an agenda. He is trying to convince us not to worry so much about the environment. Whenever possible, he prefers to put a positive spin on the numbers.
Skip this book, and go straight to the online debates that followed. Specifically, what you want to read is Scientific American's angry 11 page reply to this book. Then read Lomborg's equally angry reply to Scientific American. You can find both of these on Google. Lomborg no longer posts Scientific American's original reply, but a group called Greenspirit has it up.
After you've done that, go to the Scientific American website and search for their follow up replies, which are in response to Lomborg's response to them.
If you read all of these, you'll have a pretty good idea of what the environmentalists and the anti-environmentalists agree on, and what they disagree on.
A lot of the debate boils down to "Is the glass half full, or half empty?" In his book, Lomborg essentially said at one point, "The environmentalists lied about endangered species! Only 0.7% of species are expected to go extinct over the next 50 years." Then Scientific American said, "Lomborg is trying to trick you! Thousands of species will go extinct over the next 50 years!" But, if you kept reading the debates, eventually you learned that , since there are millions of species, the numbers Lomborg was using meant the same thing as Scientific American's numbers. The only difference was, Lomborg represented the numbers in a way designed to make them seem good, but Scientific American prefered to write them in the way that made them seem bad.
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This review is from: The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment (Hardcover)
There are a limited number of good books that cover this very important topic - the relationship between population size, resource scarcity, and the competition that ensues from this struggle. And when this "struggle for existence" is tied together with major advances in medicine and relative world peace; the effect has been low fertility rates in democratic countries, people living much longer lives, and an unprecedented world wide population surge. Without what had been the traditional population checks in place (war, disease, and famine) the consequences will be devastating. The first person to have achieved any understanding of, and notoriety for articulating, this reality was Rev. Thomas Malthus with his, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford World's Classics). And that was first published in 1798! The complete and total lack of those in political power to develop mechanisms to deal with this problem is the single greatest tragedy to befall the civilized world. Now, I simply said that to say this: Chris Martenson's book, The Crash Course, is the best book pertaining to this dilemma I have ever (yes, ever) read - and the most important book published since Garrett Hardin's, Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos, or Jared Diamond's, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition. I believe this for two primary reasons. First, everything I read in this book is factually accurate, sincerely delivered, and vitally important. Secondly, and what is honestly more important, the presentation is magnificent. Perhaps it is from Dr. Martenson's experience with developing the material, and making presentations over the years, but as Randy Olsen pointed out in, Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, presentation is (practically) everything. Here are some great quotes (from just the first twenty pages!): - "In truth, our predicament goes far deeper than even these recent, disquieting economic events might suggest. It's time to face the facts: A dangerous convergence of unsustainable trends in the economy, energy, and the environment will make the "twenty-teens" one of the most challenging decades ever. The Crash Course explains this predicament and provides sufficient context to support the idea that it is well past time to begin preparing for a very different future."
- "The big story is this: The world has physical limits that we are already encountering, but our economy operates as if no physical limits exist. Our economy requires growth. I don't mean that growth is "required" as if it's written in a legal document somewhere, but it is "required" in the sense that our economy only functions well when it's growing. With growth, jobs are created and debts can be serviced. Without growth, jobs, opportunities, and the ability to repay past debts simply and mysteriously disappear, causing pain and confusion...It is only when we assemble the challenges we find in the economy, energy, and the environment - which I call "the three E's" - into one spot that we can fully appreciate the true dimensions of our predicament. The next 20 years are going to be shaped by fundamental resource scarcity in ways that we have never experienced in history. The developed world is entering this race economically handicapped, with no one to blame but itself."
- "The mission of this book is larger than helping people build more resilience into their lives and portfolios. At our current pace, we are on track to leave behind more than a few predicaments for our children, as part of a substantially degraded world with fewer opportunities than we ourselves were granted. If we make the right choices from this point forward, we have the opportunity to leave a very different legacy. This is what The Crash Course is about - helping us to individually and collectively understand that our choices matter significantly and that the time to make the right choices is running dangerously short."
- "We cannot beat around the bush on this "third-rail" topic any longer: We need to stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained. If we don't, then nature will do it for us, and not pleasantly, either. This means stabilizing world population in perpetuity, not only for a little while longer. We may not know what this stable level is just yet, and more study is certainly needed, especially in light of declining energy resources. But we should do everything we can to avoid badly overshooting the number of humans that can be sustainably supported on our planet while carelessly avoiding an examination of the role of petroleum in supporting those populations." (actually, this quote came from page 253)
- "To me, a world worth inheriting is one where the inhabitants are living within their economic and natural budgets. It is a stable world where people and businesses can plan for the future because they can trust what will be there when they arrive. It is a world in which the brittle architecture of our just-in-time food systems and businesses is replaced by robust, sustainable, locally focused operations. In this world worth inheriting, communities take on more responsibility for their destinies, and stronger and more fulfilling relationships develop among neighbors."
In sum, this book is a must-read for anyone who cares one iota about their own future. Everything everyone needs to know is in this one book. I really could go on-and-on extolling the benefits and advantages of this book - compared to others - but I won't. Some people just won't be convinced...and that's really their problem. I know that may sound harsh, but the fact is: it's time to get serious. Some further evidence can be found in: Nafeez Ahmed's, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save it, Ellen Brown's, Web of Debt, or John Greer's, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age.
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