Relevant Science

Islamists’ Ideas on Democracy and Faith Face Test in Tunisia

2012-02-17T15:31:00.001-08:00

By ANTHONY SHADID

This article by Anthony Shadid was written before he died on a reporting trip to Syria on Thursday. It is part of a project to assess the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

TUNIS — The epiphany of Said Ferjani came after his poor childhood in a pious town in Tunisia, after a religious renaissance a generation ago awakened his intellect, after he plotted a coup and a torturer broke his back, and after he fled to Britain to join other Islamists seeking asylum on a passport he had borrowed from a friend.

Twenty-two years later, when Mr. Ferjani returned home, he understood the task at hand: building a democracy, led by Islamists, that would be a model for the Arab world.

“This is our test,” he said.

If the revolts that swept the Middle East a year ago were the coming of age of youths determined to imagine another future for the Arab world, the aftermath that has brought elections in Egypt and Tunisia and the prospect of decisive Islamist influence in Morocco, Libya and, perhaps, Syria is the moment of another, older generation.

No one knows how one of the most critical chapters in the history of the modern Arab world will end, as the region pivots from a movement against dictatorship toward a movement for something that is proving far more ambiguous. But the generation embodied by Mr. Ferjani, shaped by jail, exile and repression and bound by faith and alliances years in the making, will have the greatest say in determining what emerges.

Their ascent to the forefront of Arab politics charts the lingering intellectual and organizational prowess of the Muslim Brotherhood, a revivalist movement founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher in a Suez Canal town in 1928. But intellectual currents that once radiated from Egypt now just as often flow in the other direction, as scholars and activists in Morocco and Tunisia, perched on the Arab world’s periphery and often influenced by the West, export ideas that seek a synthesis of what the most radical Islamists, along with their many critics here and in the West, still deem irreconcilable: faith and democracy.

More often than not, they are asking societies for trust that, given the experiences of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution or the Islamist-led coup in Sudan in 1989, authoritarian leaders and secular forces are reluctant to offer.

Mr. Ferjani, a 57-year-old self-taught intellectual as exuberant as he is pious, acknowledges the doubts. In one of several interviews, he declared that history — a word he uses often — would judge his generation not on its ability to take power but rather on what it did with power, which has come after four decades of activism.

“I can tell you one thing, we now have a golden opportunity,” he said, smiling. “And in this golden opportunity, I’m not interested in control. I’m interested in delivering the best charismatic system, a charismatic, democratic system. This is my dream.”

A Chance Encounter

Nothing in Mr. Ferjani’s childhood really set him on the path to realize this ambition. Born in Kairouan, a town reputed by some Muslims to be Islam’s fourth holiest city, he was not especially pious as a child. His father, a shopkeeper, never managed to provide enough for his family. He remembered going three days without food once, and wearing cheap sandals to school. “Poverty, we tasted it,” he recalled.

By his own account, he was unruly and rambunctious until he turned 16. That year, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, an Arab nationalist turned Islamist who had studied in Egypt and Syria before returning to Tunisia, took a job teaching Arabic in Kairouan. Mr. Ghannouchi would stay only a year before setting out to eventually form the Islamic Tendency Movement, then the Ennahda Party, but he left a legacy with his students.

“He was always talking about the world and politics,” Mr. Ferjani said. “Why as Muslims are we backwards? What makes us backwards? Is it our destiny to be so?”

The questions posed by Mr. Ghannouchi have shaped successive generations of Islamists, a term that never captures their diversity. The theme was examined in the work of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose notion of missionary work proved so successful over 50 years. It was there, too, in the works of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian thinker whose writings resonated long after he was hanged in 1966, helping give rise to a militant Islamism that bloodied the Middle East. Later, “The Hidden Duty,” a text that laid the groundwork for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, tried to resolve the issue. So did Mr. Ghannouchi, who endorsed pluralism and democracy, even as revolution raged in Iran.

In Kairouan’s colonial-era Negra Mosque, Mr. Ferjani and a hundred other youths gathered to study them all. “Read, read, read, read,” he recalled. “Even when I walked, I read.”

Mr. Ferjani eventually made his way to Tunis, the capital, where he joined his old Arabic teacher’s group. “Politics was there from the beginning,” he said in the interview.

Tunisia was ruled at the time by Habib Bourguiba, who was so secular that he once made it a point to drink orange juice on television during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. Mr. Bourguiba, in power since 1957, cracked down on Mr. Ghannouchi’s followers, and with the prospect of many of them being executed, Mr. Ferjani said he helped in plotting a coup d’état. He met many of the organizers at a video store he ran in a low-slung building of white stucco and blue shutters, across the street from Parliament.

Seventeen hours before they were to carry it out, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mr. Bourguiba’s interior minister, led his own coup. Ten days later, on Nov. 17, 1987, Mr. Ferjani was arrested. He spent 18 months in jail, where his interrogators strapped him to a bar in what he called “the roasted chicken” position and fractured his vertebra with an iron rod. Unable to walk, the pain searing, he would be carried by prisoners on their backs whenever he had to move.

“They were extreme experts in how to make the torture felt in every part of the body,” Mr. Ferjani recalled. “I would stay awake until 5 a.m. in the morning. I’d pray till dawn, then I’d sleep, and I’d only fall asleep because there was nothing left in me.”

Five months after his release, still in a wheelchair, he trained himself to walk 50 yards so that security would not notice him at the airport. He shaved his beard and borrowed a friend’s passport. Then he caught a flight to London and sought asylum.

Crucible of Exile

Islamists of Mr. Ferjani’s generation wear prison time like a badge of honor. But exile, especially for the Tunisians, was often no less formative.

The London where Mr. Ferjani traveled became a hub of sorts for Islamist politics in the 1990s. Mr. Ghannouchi soon arrived there, joining Mr. Ferjani. Salafis from Saudi Arabia mixed with their frequent adversaries, Shiites from Bahrain, finding more common ground in London than at home.

Ahmed Yousef, a scholar and Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, recalled a similar environment in the United States, where he made lifelong contacts at conferences in Washington. Among the connections: Saadeddine Othmani, a Moroccan scholar and politician; Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, a Syrian Brotherhood leader; Abdul Latif Arabiyat, an Islamist leader from Jordan; and Abdelilah Benkirane, a Moroccan who is now the prime minister.

The environment became less permissive after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, Mr. Yousef said, but until then, “it was like paradise.”

“In exile, people feel they need each other,” said Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian scholar and activist in London, who has written a biography of Mr. Ghannouchi. “Back home, the national environment imposes itself on you. Priorities become different.”

Mr. Ferjani compared his years in London to the intellectual awakening he underwent in Kairouan in the 1970s. Settling with his wife and five children in the neighborhood of Ealing, he remained in Islamist circles, soon embroiled in the debates over Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but broadening his horizons into civil society. He took classes on the history of Europe, democracy, the environment and social change.

He said he understood what Mr. Tamimi called the “common roots and common ground” of Islamist activists, many of whom never expected to return home.

“We know each other,” he said. “But knowing is one thing, doing things together in every sense — as many may think — is another. In politics, it’s not that we all agree.”

Embracing Democracy

Through Mr. Ferjani’s years in exile, the dominant image of political Islam was the bloody record of Egypt’s insurgency in the 1990s, the Algerian civil war and the ascent of Bin Laden, whose Manichaean view of the world mirrored the most vitriolic statements of the Bush administration.

But no less dramatic was the shift under way within various currents inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Ghannouchi, his own thoughts evolving in exile, became an early proponent of a more inclusive and tolerant Islamism, arguing a generation ago that notions of elections and majority rule were universal and did not contradict Islam. Early on, he supported affirmative action to increase women’s participation in Parliament, a break with the unrelenting notion of missionary work that so long defined the Brotherhood.

“Frankly, the guy who brought democracy into the Islamic movement is Ghannouchi,” Mr. Ferjani said. As Mr. Ghannouchi himself put it in an interview late last year, at a conference in Istanbul attended by Islamist activists from Tunisia to the Palestinian territories, “Rulers benefit from violence more than their opponents do.”

In debates that played out across the Arab world, though often ignored by the West, the questions of reconciling democracy and Islam raged from the 1990s on. In the middle of that decade, a young Egyptian Islamist named Aboul-Ela Maadi broke from the Brotherhood and formed the Center Party, declaring its support for elections and the alternation of power and, as important, dissent and coalitions with non-Islamic parties.

Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an enormously influential Egyptian cleric based in Doha, Qatar, often sided with the progressives. (In 2005, he turned heads by declaring on Al Jazeera satellite television that “freedom comes before Islamic law.”) Though the Brotherhood still resents Mr. Maadi for his defection, it has largely adopted his ideas, which had seemed so novel in 1996.

Those debates reverberated across the region. Mr. Yousef, the Palestinian, remembered the impact of reading Mr. Ghannouchi’s monthly magazine, Al Maarifa, as a student in Egypt. In Libya, Ali Sallabi, who once debated politics with jihadists in the prisons of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, cited Mr. Ghannouchi and Sheik Qaradawi as inspirations.

Critics view the shifts as tactical, even rhetorical. But the very essence of the debates has marked a fulcrum in the intellectual currents of today’s political Islam.

“Al-sama’ wa’l-ta’a,” went the old Brotherhood ideal, which translates as “hearing and obeying.”

“That’s over,” said Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar based in London and a grandson of Mr. Banna, the Brotherhood founder. “The new generation is saying if it’s going to be this, then we’re leaving. You have a new understanding and a new energy.”

He noted that in contrast to Mr. Ferjani’s earlier years, when Egypt was the source of new Islamist thought, the influences are now more pronounced of exiles in Europe, scholars in North Africa like Mr. Ghannouchi and Ahmed Raysouni, and Islamist parties like Ennahda in Tunisia and Mr. Benkirane’s Justice and Development Party in Morocco.

“It’s not coming just from the Middle East anymore,” Mr. Ramadan said. “It’s coming from North African countries and from the West. There are new visions and there are new ways of understanding. Now they are bringing these thoughts back to the Middle East.”

From his perch in London, Mr. Ferjani incorporated talk of Westminster when formulating his idea of a charismatic state, whether led by Islamists or others. After vehemently rejecting the left, he now embraces Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Exile, he said, “changed me a lot, profoundly.”

Applying Theories

On a brisk winter day, Mr. Ferjani sat in Ennahda’s offices in Tunisia, a five-story building whose plastic sign inscribed with its name lent a sense of the unfinished.

Nearly a year had passed since he had returned to Tunis, draped in the red national flag and walking effortlessly through the airport. He carried a passport that was his. His beard had gone gray, save for a mustache that served as a reminder of his youth in Kairouan. About 200 people met him at the terminal.

“No place for traitors in Tunisia, only for those who defend her!” he sang, joining the crowd as it recited the national anthem. “We live and die loyal to Tunisia.”

On this day, his mood was more somber. In protests, secular activists were denouncing the caliphate that they believed was sure to rise from the victory of Ennahda in elections in October. Newspapers opposed to the party were full of stories of abuses by puritanical Islamists and Ennahda’s supposed tolerance of extreme practices. In well-to-do cafes, some Tunisians viewed Ennahda’s success in existential terms, talking of an inevitable intolerance sanctioned by religion that would extinguish Tunisia’s cosmopolitanism. The cultural debates seemed to overshadow what everyone agreed was more pressing: an ailing economy.

“Frankly, we’re on top of things,” Mr. Ferjani said.

But in a less guarded moment, he asked, “Can you really solve problems of 50 years in less than one month with a government that is less than one month old?”

In an interview, Mr. Ferjani had once quipped, “You know, power corrupts.” As he sat at the party headquarters on this day, he wrestled with those questions of power. Next to him were stacks of the party’s newspaper, The Dawn. One column railed against “counterrevolutionary media”; another darkly hinted at conspiracies. The front page declared, “Parliament is against sit-ins and for listening to the demands of the people.”

“We don’t fear freedom of expression, but we cannot allow disorder,” he said. “People have to be responsible. They have to know there is law and order.”

He suggested that protesters should obtain permission from police. He worried that the news media was too reckless. He hinted that the forces of the ancien régime were still plotting. In the cramped room, his exuberance had turned stern, and his words were hesitant.

“Everybody has to be careful not to be dragged into a dictatorial instinct, no matter what happens,” he said. “We can’t lose the soul of our revolution.”

This, he said, was the test.

NYT

My Mother Always Laughed Also

2012-02-17T07:03:00.001-08:00

War?

2012-02-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

Iran (below) stopped oil deliveries to Greece. The price of oil went up all over the World. Greece is in great turmoil; this tells me that we are at war. Iranians hit where it hurts more.

A few years back, during Menem's presidency in Argentina, Iranians bombed a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires. Now Israel killed an Iranian scientist, and Iran attacked with the same kind of weapon, in several countries recently.

This could be the beginning of the end; as has been expected by Christian Fundamentalists. The end will be at December 21, 2012; they say.

According to Ferguson, the West has succeeded because of religious convictions. Iranians do not lack that kind of convictions. Whoever shares Ferguson's views, must be ready to take the Iranians at their word.

According to Thomas Bayes, we guess, then get more information, and guess again, in a never ending guess work. That is human knowledge in a nutshell.

My guess is that we are at War with Iran.

"The latest developments suggested to some analysts that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was deliberately lashing out at the West, though it was not clear whether his intention was simply to retaliate or to provoke a limited war with Israel. Some Iranian hard-liners are said to believe that such a war would benefit them, allowing them to close ranks and assert greater authority for the elite Revolutionary Guards."

NYT

Iran Issues Threat to Oil Buyers in Europe - NYTimes.com

2012-02-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Iran Issues Threat to Oil Buyers in Europe - NYTimes.com:

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Economic Growth Gives Lift to Obama in NYT/CBS Poll - NYTimes.com

2012-02-14T18:00:00.000-08:00

Economic Growth Gives Lift to Obama in NYT/CBS Poll - NYTimes.com:

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China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, Opens U.S. Tour - NYTimes.com

2012-02-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, Opens U.S. Tour - NYTimes.com:

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Obama Aims to Increase Federal Science Funding in 2013: Scientific American

2012-02-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

Obama Aims to Increase Federal Science Funding in 2013: Scientific American:

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Why Did Europe's Danube River Freeze?: Scientific American

2012-02-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

Why Did Europe's Danube River Freeze?: Scientific American:

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Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? - NYTimes.com

2012-02-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? - NYTimes.com:

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Yeast Genetics in ‘The Marriage Plot’ - Scientist Was Fiction, but Not His Work - NYTimes.com

2012-02-13T17:44:00.000-08:00

Yeast Genetics in ‘The Marriage Plot’ - Scientist Was Fiction, but Not His Work - NYTimes.com:

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Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher - NYTimes.com

2012-02-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher - NYTimes.com:

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Horny Readers?

2012-02-13T14:20:00.001-08:00

Most page views since May 2009. Topless at Davos is popular!

Etta James

2012-02-13T14:07:00.001-08:00

Jimmy Cliff

2012-02-12T19:07:00.001-08:00

solar flare - Wolfram|Alpha

2012-02-12T11:44:00.000-08:00

solar flare - Wolfram|Alpha:

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The Age of Big Data

2012-02-12T00:50:00.001-08:00

By STEVE LOHR

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.

In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”

Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

NYT

Whitney Houston (1963-2012)

2012-02-11T18:04:00.001-08:00

Reaction to Sensenbrenner

2012-02-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Senator Sensenbrenner started a Mexican American movement that drew millions of people to the streets of the US in 2006. That was not his intention!

Inmmigration Reform Protests

Six years later the awakened Mexican American community will join forces with the Occupy Movement.

This May First, be there or be square!

NYT article about the Occupy Movement.

May 1, 2012 ¡Sí se Puede!

2012-02-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

A few years back hundreds of thousands of people took the streets of the US. ¡Sí se Puede! , Yes it is Possible!, was their slogan, many undocumented workers lost their fear of deportation and made their voices heard loud and clear. We are human beings we deserve to be here.

Many LEGAL Americans, whatever that means, got scared, very scared.

Now the human rights issues of these, mainly Mexican Americans, will be put together with the demands of another historic US Mass Movement. The Occupy Movement.

You, and I, are welcome to show our support for what is right.

Be there, or be square!

Political Strategy

2012-02-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

Clausewitz, who started as a soldier when he was twelve years old, said that war is politics by other means. For humanity it is more important what do we want, than how to get it. I am happy to see somebody in the Obama campaign, (Axelrod?), that has sized the opportunity of the liberal movements in the US, and abroad, and clearly stated, we should spend not cut.

Priorities come, once the decision is taken, so one could spend in more scare the public campaigns, as Bush did: The Islamists are coming, the Islamists are coming!, or in heavily investing in Community Colleges, Research, & Development.

I am happy, because this is right up my alley, I am not a policeman!

My Foolish Heart

2012-02-11T09:04:00.001-08:00

Bless You

2012-02-11T08:56:00.001-08:00

David Axelrod and the Chess Brothers

2012-02-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

Axelrod packages black candidates for white voters, the Chess brothers did the same, but for music.

I love Jewish people!

Did They Consult Krugman?

2012-02-11T08:23:00.001-08:00

"WASHINGTON — President Obama will lay out a budget blueprint on Monday that amounts to an election-year bet that a plan for higher taxes on the rich and more spending on popular programs like infrastructure and manufacturing will trump concerns over the deficit."

"“We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building,” the document states."

"But deficit reduction may be beside the point. Mr. Obama appears to be laying out a campaign document that pits jobs programs paid for with tax increases on the rich against the deep spending cuts that will be the heart of the Republican Party’s economic program, rebuilding versus austerity."

NYT

I hope professor Krugman had a say on this.

Noam Chomsky: Anniversaries From ‘Unhistory’: Information Clearing House

2012-02-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky: Anniversaries From ‘Unhistory’: Information Clearing House:

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Amazon.com: Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance (City Lights Open Media) (9780872865372): Noam Chomsky: Books

2012-02-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com: Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance (City Lights Open Media) (9780872865372): Noam Chomsky: Books:

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Plan for a Greek Debt Bailout Puts the Banks First - NYTimes.com

2012-02-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

Plan for a Greek Debt Bailout Puts the Banks First - NYTimes.com:

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Disgruntled Greeks Start 48-Hour National Strike - NYTimes.com

2012-02-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Disgruntled Greeks Start 48-Hour National Strike - NYTimes.com:

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Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say

2012-02-09T22:30:00.001-08:00

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.

“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.

Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity?” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.

The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.

One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.

A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.

James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.

“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”

Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.

Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”

The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.

There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.

The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”

NYT

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T21:52:00.000-08:00

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show - NYTimes.com:

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Breath of Fresh Air!

2012-02-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

Professor Krugman has a well reasoned and insightful article today on the New York Times (below). I am reading Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's classic, "The Bell Curve." Now professor Murray has another important book, "Coming Apart."

Intelligence matters, for Whites and Blacks, and Latinos. The amphetamine scourge afflicting thousands of Americans of all colors is a symptom of a system gone awry.

Hey people, stop all this nonsensical argumentation that was the bread and butter of the Bush administration, and start being, rational, and intelligent.

Thank you Professor Krugman, I've learned so much from you, you have a well deserved Nobel Prize.

Money and Morals

2012-02-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.

So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

NYT

Suburban Chicago Schools Lag as Bilingual Needs Grow - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T18:49:00.000-08:00

Suburban Chicago Schools Lag as Bilingual Needs Grow - NYTimes.com:

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Mexico Seizes 15 Tons of Methamphetamine - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T18:42:00.000-08:00

Mexico Seizes 15 Tons of Methamphetamine - NYTimes.com:

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Is China Ripe for a Revolution? - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

Is China Ripe for a Revolution? - NYTimes.com:

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In the Maldives’ Strangled Democracy - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

In the Maldives’ Strangled Democracy - NYTimes.com:

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‘The Island President Deposed’ - NYTimes.com

2012-02-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

‘The Island President Deposed’ - NYTimes.com:

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Tijuana Journal - A Cultural Clash Over the Bad Old Days - NYTimes.com

2012-02-08T20:16:00.000-08:00

Tijuana Journal - A Cultural Clash Over the Bad Old Days - NYTimes.com:

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Martian Rock!

2012-02-08T12:32:00.001-08:00

Hole in a Big Underground Lake!

2012-02-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

Meteorite From Mars Is at Home in London, After a World Tour - NYTimes.com

2012-02-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

Meteorite From Mars Is at Home in London, After a World Tour - NYTimes.com:

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Amasia Supercontinent Will Form in the Arctic, Geologists Predict - NYTimes.com

2012-02-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

Amasia Supercontinent Will Form in the Arctic, Geologists Predict - NYTimes.com:

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Drilling Reaches Lake Vostok, Long Trapped Under Antarctic Ice Sheet - NYTimes.com

2012-02-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

Drilling Reaches Lake Vostok, Long Trapped Under Antarctic Ice Sheet - NYTimes.com:

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United Left in Mexico!

2012-02-07T14:02:00.001-08:00

United States Planning to Slash Iraq Embassy Staff by Up to Half - NYTimes.com

2012-02-07T13:56:00.000-08:00

United States Planning to Slash Iraq Embassy Staff by Up to Half - NYTimes.com:

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New Obama Plan to Help Math, Science Teacher Prep - NYTimes.com

2012-02-07T06:10:00.000-08:00

New Obama Plan to Help Math, Science Teacher Prep - NYTimes.com:

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Should I Stay, or Should I Go?

2012-02-06T22:55:00.001-08:00

School Linked to Sex-Abuse Claims Will Replace Faculty - NYTimes.com

2012-02-06T22:22:00.000-08:00

School Linked to Sex-Abuse Claims Will Replace Faculty - NYTimes.com:

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Obama Campaign Returning Funds Tied to Mexican Fugitive - NYTimes.com

2012-02-06T22:13:00.000-08:00

Obama Campaign Returning Funds Tied to Mexican Fugitive - NYTimes.com:

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Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself - NYTimes.com

2012-02-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself - NYTimes.com:

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Univision and Disney In Talks For An English-Language News Channel - NYTimes.com

2012-02-06T18:21:00.000-08:00

Univision and Disney In Talks For An English-Language News Channel - NYTimes.com:

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I Read Proceso!

2012-02-06T18:11:00.001-08:00

One of them, a long exposé in September by a Mexican magazine, Proceso, chronicled Pepe Cardona’s relatively swift rise to fortune and notoriety in Mexico after fleeing the American authorities. He obtained Mexican gambling licenses, and with help from investors in Louisiana, he started opening casinos in and around Monterrey, eventually becoming known as Mexico’s “casino czar.”

NYT

Major Obama Donors Tied to Fugitive Who Fled to Mexico

2012-02-06T18:02:00.000-08:00

Juan Jose Rojas Cardona, left, known as Pepe, with a fellow student, Vernon McKinley, at the University of Iowa in 1990.
By MIKE McINTIRE
Two American brothers of a Mexican casino magnate who fled drug and fraud charges in the United States and has been seeking a pardon enabling him to return have emerged as major fund-raisers and donors for President Obama’s re-election campaign.

The casino owner, Juan Jose Rojas Cardona, known as Pepe, jumped bail in Iowa in 1994 and disappeared, and has since been linked to violence and corruption in Mexico. A State Department cable in 2009 said he was suspected of orchestrating the assassination of a business rival and making illegal campaign donations to Mexican officials.

When The New York Times asked the Obama campaign early Monday about the Cardonas, officials said they were unaware of the brother in Mexico. Later in the day, the campaign said it was refunding the money raised by the family, which totaled more than $200,000.

As recently as January of last year, one of Mr. Cardona’s brothers in Chicago, Carlos Rojas Cardona, arranged for the former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party to seek a pardon from the governor for Pepe Cardona, according to prosecutors in that state. None was forthcoming.

Last fall, Carlos Cardona and another brother in Chicago, Alberto Rojas Cardona, began raising money for the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Cardona brothers, who have no prior history of political giving, appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the world of Democratic fund-raising, Democratic activists said.

The money Alberto Cardona raised put him in the upper tiers of fund-raisers known as bundlers, according to a list released last month by the campaign. He and Carlos Cardona each gave the maximum $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee, and a lesser amount to a state victory fund. A sister, Leticia Rojas Cardona of Tennessee, donated $13,000 to the national committee, and another relative in Illinois gave $12,600, records show. There is no record of Pepe Cardona making a donation.

Although the two brothers live and work in Chicago, they maintain ties to Pepe Cardona in Mexico. Alberto Cardona operates an advertising agency in Mexico that has worked for political candidates backed by his brother, according to public records and Mexican news reports. Public records also show that the domain name for the Web site of a restaurant Pepe Cardona owns is registered to Alberto Cardona.

Obama campaign officials said most of the money raised by the Cardona brothers came from themselves and other relatives, donations of about $200,000. In addition, the campaign was identifying other donations, believed to total less than $100,000, that was bundled from other people.

“On the basis of the questions that have been raised, we will return the contributions from these individuals and from any other donors they brought to the campaign,” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign.

Pepe Cardona is one of the largest players in Mexico’s violent and tumultuous casino trade. In 2007, he survived an assassination attempt that was attributed to members of organized crime. The State Department cable, which was part of the cache made public by WikiLeaks, said he was suspected of illegally funneling $5 million into Mexican political campaigns in 2006.

Multiple messages left for Alberto and Carlos Cardona over several days were not returned. A sister-in-law, Sarah Westall of Minnesota, said in a telephone interview that it would be wrong to tar other members of the family with the negative publicity surrounding Pepe Cardona.

Ms. Westall, who is married to another Cardona brother, Gabriel, said Alberto and Carlos took up Democratic fund-raising because their extended family had long been involved in helping the Latino community and because they supported the president. There were no other reasons beyond those, she said. “I understand that it looks real bad,” she said. “But the rest of the family are really good people. Pepe is actually a good person too.”

Whatever the family’s motivation, the president cannot pardon someone for state crimes. On Monday, Democratic fund-raisers who have had encounters with Alberto and Carlos Cardona expressed surprise upon learning about their family history. Manuel Sanchez, a Chicago lawyer who is deeply involved in Latino outreach for the Obama administration, said he first met them in December at a finance committee meeting for the president’s campaign in Washington.

He said he had been told that they were involved in “marketing and advertising.” They impressed him as “very smart young guys who wanted to support the president,” he said.

“I did get the distinct impression that both of them are very well-to-do and successful in their businesses,” Mr. Sanchez said, adding that he “had no idea” they had a brother in Mexico or what his background was.

In Johnson County, Iowa, the authorities are well acquainted with Pepe Cardona’s past.

One of nine children of Mexican parents who grew up in Iowa, Pepe Cardona, who was born in Mexico, was active in civil rights issues at the University of Iowa and became president of the Student Senate. While at the university in 1990, he was accused of misspending student government money, and a year later he was criminally charged with defrauding associates in a telemarketing company he started, according to court records.

He was sentenced to five years in prison, and while free pending an appeal, he was arrested in New Mexico on charges of trying to smuggle marijuana across the border, court records show. He pleaded guilty to federal drug charges in 1994, but disappeared while out on bail, later surfacing in Mexico.

In 1998, federal prosecutors obtained approval from a judge to quash the drug indictment, wiping clean Pepe Cardona’s federal court record. However, his current legal status in Iowa, where a county judge had ordered him jailed in 1992, is more precarious.

On Monday, the Johnson County attorney, Janet Lyness, said there was still an outstanding warrant for his arrest on a probation violation charge. She said that at least twice over the last four years, a lawyer approached the Iowa governor’s office asking about a pardon for Pepe Cardona.

The last such request came in the final days of the term of Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, and was filed by Gordon Fischer, a lawyer who is a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. In his pardon application, Mr. Fischer explained that he knew Pepe Cardona from his days at the University of Iowa. Mr. Fischer declined to comment on Monday, citing attorney-client privilege.

Ms. Lyness, also a Democrat, said she had been told that the application had been initiated by members of Pepe Cardona’s family in the United States. She opposed it, and it was not granted.

“I can think of few people who are less deserving of a pardon than Pepe Rojas-Cardona,” Mr. Lyness wrote in her response to the pardon request, adding that it would be “a travesty of justice.”

The first campaign donations by Alberto and Carlos Cardona came shortly after news articles revealing Pepe Cardona’s criminal past appeared in the United States and Mexico last fall.

The article reported that Tango Media, an advertising company it said is owned by Alberto Cardona, worked on the campaigns of politicians favored by Pepe Cardona in communities where he owned casinos. It also said Carlos Cardona was involved in one of Pepe Cardona’s business deals.

A review of public records found that several of the Cardona brothers’ business activities have intersected in the United States and in Mexico, sharing common addresses and doing work for one another’s companies. For instance, another brother, Arturo Rojas Cardona — Pepe’s main business partner in his casino and entertainment businesses — has an architecture and design firm that has done work for his brothers in the United States, including Alberto Cardona.

The nature of Alberto Cardona’s business is not exactly clear. On campaign finance reports, he listed his employer as Tango Latin, a Chicago company that seems to be connected to Tango Productions, a small video production, marketing and photography studio that Carlos Cardona listed as his employer.

A check of public records found that Alberto Cardona is the registered owner of domain names for the Web sites of Tango Media and 40 West, a restaurant owned by Pepe Cardona, both in Mexico.

Ms. Westall, the sister-in-law, said she did not know what sort of dealings Alberto and Carlos had with Pepe Cardona, but she added that it would not be unusual for large families to help each other in their business activities.

“If someone in the family does Web design, and Pepe needed someone to do that, he would hire that person first,” she said. “In Mexico, that’s the way it works.”

NYT

Major Obama Donors Are Tied to Pepe Cardona, Mexican Fugitive - NYTimes.com

2012-02-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

Major Obama Donors Are Tied to Pepe Cardona, Mexican Fugitive - NYTimes.com:

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Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart - The State of White America’ - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart - The State of White America’ - NYTimes.com:

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Magnitude 6.8 Earthquake Strikes Off Philippines - USGS - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T20:51:00.000-08:00

Magnitude 6.8 Earthquake Strikes Off Philippines - USGS - NYTimes.com:

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earthquakes phiippines - Wolfram|Alpha

2012-02-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

earthquakes phiippines - Wolfram|Alpha:

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Factbox - Mexico Ruling Party Picks Vazquez Mota as Candidate - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

Factbox - Mexico Ruling Party Picks Vazquez Mota as Candidate - NYTimes.com:

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Spinoza and The First Amendment - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

Spinoza and The First Amendment - NYTimes.com:

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17 Dead, 13 Rescued After Migrant Boat Capsizes - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

17 Dead, 13 Rescued After Migrant Boat Capsizes - NYTimes.com:

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Ready, Set, Go!

2012-02-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

Josefina Vazquez Mota (PAN) News

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (PRD)

Enrique Pena Nieto (PRI)

These three politicians want to be president of Mexico. The election is July 1, 2012.

Vazquez Mota Leads in Primary for Presidency, PAN Says - Bloomberg

2012-02-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

Vazquez Mota Leads in Primary for Presidency, PAN Says - Bloomberg:

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International Students Pay Top Dollar at U.S. Colleges - NYTimes.com

2012-02-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

International Students Pay Top Dollar at U.S. Colleges - NYTimes.com:

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Date Rape

2012-02-04T19:13:00.001-08:00

Separation of Church and State!

2012-02-04T10:51:00.001-08:00

Mexican teachers demand removal of union leader | Demotix.com

2012-02-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

Mexican teachers demand removal of union leader | Demotix.com:

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Left and Right

2012-02-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine defines thus these two concepts: Leftists are in favor of the majority, and rightists of the minority.

Yesterday in Mexico City there was a Teacher's Union march. It could be the beginning of a leftist movement stage, that could end with AMLO as president of Mexico on July 1, 2012.

In the US yesterday Komen backed off of a right wing inspired move to kill Planned Parenthood.

The left is waking up in this crucial year for humanity.

After all 2012 could be the year, when one world ends (right), and a new one begins (left).

Niall Ferguson and Gavin Menzies

2012-02-03T20:41:00.000-08:00

Civilization and 1434, these authors state two different versions of History.

Who is right?

I guess the Harvard professor, but sometimes I wonder.

BTW, Menzies also found Atlantis!

F.B.I. Admits Hacker Group’s Eavesdropping - NYTimes.com

2012-02-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

F.B.I. Admits Hacker Group’s Eavesdropping - NYTimes.com:

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Two Nobelists Offer Views of Human-Driven Global Warming

2012-02-02T09:15:00.001-08:00

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Given the flurry of attention this week around what two batches of scientists of various stripes think of evidence that humans are exerting a growing and disruptive influence on climate, it’s worth checking in with two Nobel laureates who’ve long been focused on the atmosphere and climate.

As I’ve written before, whatever your view of the science and policy choices related to global warming, you can probably find a Nobelist with matching views. But Mario Molina and Burton Richter deserve a prominent place at this table given their sustained attention to relevant issues.

Mario MolinaMario Molina, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, uses this image representing a partially completed jigsaw puzzle to convey the state of understanding of human-driven climate change. CLICK TO ENLARGE

While participating in a November conference connected with the International Year of Chemistry, I spent time talking with Molina of the University of California, San Diego, a 1995 laureate in chemistry for his work (with others) on the atmospheric impact of ozone-destroying refrigerants and related chemicals. In a talk at the event, he conveyed his view of the incomplete, but compelling, picture of greenhouse-driven climate change with this photo illustration (right).

I’ve posted a lot on contrasting climate manifestos published in the past week by The Wall Street Journal, but it’s worth adding the perspective of Richter, a physics Nobelist who’s been deeply focused on humanity’s energy challenge, including the climate impact of greenhouse gases. As I’ve noted before, he’s the author of “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors,” a cogent road map for facing the daunting long-term challenge of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases even as humanity’s growth spurt crests in the next few decades.

Here’s a note Richter sent in reaction to the initial 16-author op-ed article in the Journal, which challenged the need for prompt action to stem emissions:

The letter of the 16 scientists (physicists, I am sorry to say) published in the Wall Street Journal on 1/27/2012 says that more and more scientists doubt the dangers of global warming. That may be true of those who have not really looked at the issue, but it is certainly untrue of those that have.

There are two legitimate questions to ask about global warming. First, is the temperature going up? Second, if it is changing, what is causing it? The letter first casts doubt on the temperature rise, and then goes on to say even if it is rising, it is probably natural and has little to do with greenhouse gas emissions. I suppose it is nice to try to have two strings for your bow.

On the first question, the average temperature of our planet has, in fits and starts, been going up for more than 100 years. The average temperature each year fluctuates by a considerable amount and to see an effect one has to average over some period of time just as the technical analysts of the stock market look at the moving average over some number of day to discern trends.

Some of the authors of the letter know this; some do not. That the temperature has not gone up for a few years is irrelevant. To those who are interested in the most recent analysis, I point them to the work of Dr Richard Muller and his group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Muller was a climate skeptic and pulled together a group of scientists and mathematicians and reanalyzed all the data. He did an outstanding job and gets the same answer as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The letter quotes one of its authors, Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever, damning the American Physical Society’s statement that the evidence for warming is incontrovertible.

Armed with my own Nobel Medal, I say if you can read a graph, the evidence is indeed incontrovertible because the temperature has gone up. The Physical Society is right, he is wrong, and I can’t understand why he complains about the temperature rise issue when there is more to discuss on the second question; who is the villain?

We have seen in the past a temperature change of about the same amount as the current one and it was a cooling. The Little Ice Age that began in the 14^th century reduced the temperature of at least the northern hemisphere by about one degree centigrade in a couple of hundred years, and CO-2 emissions had nothing to do with it. The authors should be asking why today we are fairly sure the enemy is us.

In science we try analyze effects to discern their cause. When effects showed Newton was wrong on some things, Einstein put forward relativity which left Newton alone in his domain of validity and showed how new things happened when one left that domain. That is also the story of climate change.

In the 1950s we learned that CO-2 was going up faster than assumed previously. In the 1970s the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science put together a group to try to understand what might happen if trends continued. The UN took it over in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change was born. Its first report in 1990 said the temperature was going up and not enough was known to say if it was nature or us doing the driving. In its 1995 report humans were said to be contributing. In the 2001 report it said human activity was the likely cause. In the 2007 report it said it was very likely that humans were the drivers. The next report is due out in 2013.

As to the Little Ice Age, its origins were a mystery until very recently. New research ties it to a series of violent volcanic eruptions that threw material into the sky leading to a cooling. We will need more work to make sure this is true, but this is how science works; analyze effects to discern their causes and incorporate what you learn into a larger understanding.

The science is still evolving and new effects are being recognized and included. It may be that some of them will lower the predicted greenhouse driven rise while some will increase it. Meanwhile there are many things we can do that have multiple benefits. Going to 54 miles per gallon as the E.P.A. and the car companies agree can be done lowers our oil imports and reduces greenhouse gases. Switching from coal to gas to generate electricity eliminates a major harmful set of pollutants and improves health as well as reducing emissions. Improved efficiency can lower energy use in buildings, saving money and reducing emissions. It makes sense to do things that have economic benefits as well as potential climate benefits.

There is one place where the writers and I do agree. There are lots of uncertainties in the climate analysis and more investment in reducing those uncertainties is certainly warranted. Maybe we can at least get that done no matter who wins the next election.

Incidentally, The Physical Society has started a Topical Group on the Physics of Climate. The authors can join in the discussion without resigning from the society, and perhaps learn a few things. Of course, polemical letters are more fun.

NYT

Don Cornelius

2012-02-01T23:18:00.001-08:00

Do-It-Yourself Deportation

2012-02-01T23:07:00.001-08:00

By ANTONIO ALARCÓN

From the time I was just a baby in Mexico, I lived with my grandparents while my parents traveled to other Mexican states to find work. I was 6 in 2000 when they left for the United States. And it took five years before they had steady jobs and were able to send for me. We’ve been together in this country ever since, working to build a life. Now I am 17 and a senior in high school in New York City. But my parents have left again, this time to return to Mexico.

Last week, when asked in a debate what America should do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants living here, Mitt Romney said he favored “self-deportation.” He presented the strategy as a kinder alternative to just arresting people. Instead, he said, immigrants will “decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here.”

But really this goes along with a larger movement in states like Arizona and Alabama to pass very tough laws against immigrants in an attempt to make their lives so unbearable that they have no choice but to leave. People have called for denying work, education and even medical treatment to immigrants without documentation; many immigrants have grown afraid of even going to the store or to church.

The United States is supposed to be a great country that welcomes all kinds of people. Does Mr. Romney really think that this should be America’s solution for immigration reform?

You could say that my parents have self-deported, and that it was partly a result of their working conditions. It’s not that they couldn’t find work, but that they couldn’t find decent work. My dad collected scrap metal from all over the city, gathering copper and steel from construction sites, garbage dumps and old houses. He earned $90 a day, but there was only enough work for him to do it once or twice a week. My mom worked at a laundromat six days a week, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., for $70 a day.

But the main reason they had to leave was personal. I have a brother, 16, a year younger than me, still living in Mexico. He was too little to cross the border with me when I came to the United States, and as the government has cracked down on immigration in the years since, the crossing has become more expensive and much more dangerous. And there was no hope of his getting a green card, as none of us have one either. So he stayed with my grandparents, but last year my grandmother died and two weeks ago my grandfather also died. My parents were confronted with a dilemma: Leave one child alone in New York City, or leave the other alone in Mexico. They decided they had to go back to Mexico.

Now once again I am missing my parents. I know it was very difficult for them to leave me here, worrying about how I will survive because I’m studying instead of earning money working. I’m living with my uncles, but it is hard for my mother to know that I’m coming home to a table with no dinner on it, where there had been dinner before. And it’s hard for me not having my parents to talk to, not being able to ask for advice that as a teenager you need. Now that they are in Mexico, I wonder who will be at my graduation, my volleyball games or my birthday? With whom will I share my joy or my sad moments?

I know a girl named Guadalupe, whose parents have also decided to return to Mexico, because they can’t find work here and rent in New York City is very expensive. She is very smart and wants to be the first in her family to attend college, and she wants to study psychology. But even though she has lived here for years and finished high school with a 90 percent average, she, like me, does not have immigration papers, and so does not qualify for financial aid and can’t get a scholarship.

People like Guadalupe and me are staying in this country because we have faith that America will live up to its promise as a fair and just country. We hope that there will be comprehensive immigration reform, with a path to citizenship for people who have spent years living and working here. When reform happens, our families may be able to come back, and if not, at least we will be able to visit them without the risk of never being able to return to our lives here. We hope that the Dream Act — which would let undocumented immigrants who came here as children go to college and become citizens and which has stalled in Congress — will pass so that we can get an education and show that even though we are immigrants we can succeed in this country.

If, instead, the political climate gets more and more anti-immigrant, eventually some immigrants will give up hope for America and return to their home countries, like my parents did. But I don’t think this is something that our presidential candidates should encourage or be proud of.

Immigrants have made this country great. We are not looking for a free ride, but instead we are willing to work as hard as we can to show that we deserve to be here and to be treated like first-class citizens. Deportation, and “self-deportation,” will result only in dividing families and driving them into the shadows. In America, teenagers shouldn’t have to go through what I’m going through.

Antonio Alarcón is a high school student and a member of Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group. This essay was translated by Natalia Aristizabal-Betancur from the Spanish.

NYT

Do-It-Yourself Deportation - NYTimes.com

2012-02-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

Do-It-Yourself Deportation - NYTimes.com:

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Europe freeze kills 89, fears rise over Russian gas : Scientific American

2012-02-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Europe freeze kills 89, fears rise over Russian gas : Scientific American:

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Drought and Cold Snap Cause Food Crisis in Northern Mexico - NYTimes.com

2012-01-30T19:51:00.000-08:00

Drought and Cold Snap Cause Food Crisis in Northern Mexico - NYTimes.com:

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The Shining in depth analysis

2012-01-29T17:58:00.001-08:00

The Bookstore’s Last Stand

2012-01-29T09:50:00.001-08:00

William J. Lynch Jr., chief executive of Barnes & Noble, with a wall full of e-readers at its site in Silicon Valley, where 300 employees are building the company's digital side.

By JULIE BOSMAN

IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in Midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy — an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.

Like many struggling businesses, book publishers are cutting costs and trimming work forces. Yes, electronic books are booming, sometimes profitably, but not many publishers want e-books to dominate print books. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, wants to cut out the middleman — that is, traditional publishers — by publishing e-books directly.

Which is why Barnes & Noble, once viewed as the brutal capitalist of the book trade, now seems so crucial to that industry’s future. Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books. If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”

Shouldering the responsibilities of Barnes & Noble is one thing. Holding the fate of American book publishing in your hands is quite another. But William J. Lynch Jr., the C.E.O. of the company, says he is up for the battle. With all of three years of experience in bookselling, Mr. Lynch must pull off a balancing act that would be tricky even in good times. He must carve out a digital future for Barnes & Noble without forsaking its hard-copy past, all while his company’s profit and share price are under pressure, his customers are fleeing to the Web and Amazon is circling.

It might come as a surprise, but Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble is, in fact, a technology company. Never mind that it has 703 bookstores and operates in all 50 states. To the delight of publishers, he has pushed hard into e-books and, with the help of the well-reviewed Nook, even grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon. But he is playing David to Mr. Bezos’s Goliath. Barnes & Noble’s stock closed on Friday at $11.95, putting the value of the company at $719 million. Amazon’s shares closed at $195.37, valuing Mr. Bezos’s company at $88 billion.

“We could sit here and bang our head against the wall and get sick about it like we do every week,” Mr. Lynch, 41, said of his company’s stock price. But he contends that pushing into e-books with the Nook is the right way, and perhaps the only way, forward.

“Had we not launched devices and spent the money we invested in the Nook, investors and analysts would have said, ‘Barnes & Noble is crazy, and they’re going to go away,’ ” Mr. Lynch said.

BEFORE Mr. Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in 2009, he had never sold a book in his life. (The last book he read — on the Nook, he said last week — was “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” by John le Carré.) Mr. Lynch came to the job from IAC/InterActiveCorp, where he worked for HSN.com, the online outlet of the Home Shopping Network, and Gifts.com.

And yet, in three years, he has won a remarkable number of fans in the upper echelons of the book world. Most publishers in New York can’t say enough good things about him: smart, creative, tech-savvy — the list goes on. It helps that he has forged the friendliest relations between publishers and Barnes & Noble in recent memory. They are, after all, in this together.

Mr. Lynch grew up in Dallas and still speaks with a hint of Texas twang. But he has the foot-tapping intensity of a tech type running on four Mountain Dews. It seems fitting, then, that he usually works out of an office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where Barnes & Noble’s Web and digital operations are based, rather than at the company’s stately headquarters on Fifth Avenue, not far away. When he talks, you get the sense that he could be selling just about anything. As it happens, he is selling books.

Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble stores will endure. The idea that devices like the Nook, Kindle and Apple iPad will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense, he says.

“Our stores are not going anywhere,” he said in an interview this month in his office. He pointed to a surprisingly robust holiday season. In the nine weeks leading up to Christmas, sales were up 4 percent from the previous year. Titles for children and young adults are doing well, partly a result of the popularity of fiction with paranormal or dystopian themes, like “The Hunger Games.” And in the second half of 2011, Barnes & Noble picked up a big chunk of business from its vanquished rival, Borders.

Yet no sooner had the holidays passed than Barnes & Noble came out with some downbeat news for the year ahead. On Jan. 5, it projected it would lose as much as $1.40 a share in fiscal 2012. On top of that, Mr. Lynch said shareholders seemed to be underestimating the Nook’s potential so much that perhaps the company would be better off if it just spun off its digital business. Wall Street howled, and Barnes & Noble’s stock still hasn’t fully recovered. A bit of good news for the company is that, thanks to the Nook, it’s been grabbing e-book business from Amazon. Mr. Lynch said Barnes & Noble now held about 27 percent of the market, a number that publishers confirm gleefully. Amazon has at least 60 percent.

Responding to questions about the battle over e-books, Amazon issued a statement on Friday pointing to its own recent growth. In the nine-week holiday period ended Dec. 31, it said, “Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire and e-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year.”

Granted, Mr. Lynch inherited a company at a pivotal moment in its long, winding history. Barnes & Noble dates back to 1873, when Charles Barnes went into the used-book business in Wheaton, Ill. His company later moved to New York, bought an interest in an established textbook wholesaler, Noble & Noble, and opened a large bookshop on Fifth Avenue.

So it went until an enterprising young bookseller, Leonard Riggio, came along. After gaining a foothold in college bookstores, he bought that Barnes & Noble bookshop in 1971. Before long, he was offering deep discounts — and expanding wildly across the nation.

Early in his tenure, Mr. Lynch pressed Mr. Riggio’s brother, Stephen, his predecessor as C.E.O., to explain the business he’d gotten himself into.

“I had this ‘La Femme Nikita’ immersion with him,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “We went to lunch and I just told him, ‘Tell me everything you know about the book business.’ ”

But at that time, Amazon had already made the first successful move in e-readers: the first-generation Kindle hit the market in November 2007. Mr. Lynch had arrived in the C-suite, but was perilously late to the party.

ON Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is a tiny, two-story building that once housed the maker of Palo Alto Bread. It was here, in March 2009, that Barnes & Noble brought a few new hires to create the Nook. Outsiders weren’t quite sure what the company was up to. The landlord figured that Mr. Lynch wanted to open a store.

What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a 300-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mr. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.

In one room, a virtual wallpaper of Nook color devices hangs in rows neat as a checkerboard. A common area holds a foosball table and a cooler of VitaminWater. Some of the walls are made of silver-colored mesh. Some of the cubicles are lime green.

But there are also reminders of the old Barnes & Noble. Over here is a basket of actual books, including “Travels With Charley” and “The Little Prince.” Over there on a wall are enormous vintage covers of books like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.”

It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” That warning seems to hang over these offices. A sign above one group of engineers says: “We are changing the future of bookselling.”

For all the bells and whistles and high-minded talk, Barnes & Noble doesn’t exactly have the cool factor (or money) of, say, a Google or a Facebook.

Ravi Gopalakrishnan, the first engineer whom Mr. Lynch hired and now the chief technology officer for digital products, said his techie friends were incredulous when he joined Barnes & Noble.

“They were all wondering what I was up to,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan, 46, said. “I’m a technology guy — why I was working for a retail company? They thought I was nuts. There were a lot of e-mails that said, ‘Barnes & Noble?!’ ”

Bill Saperstein, a mild-mannered surfer and a veteran of Apple, said he was persuaded to leave retirement to join Barnes & Noble as vice president for digital products hardware engineering.

“We don’t see a lot of the stock and the free sushi bar and everything else that you find at Google, but there’s a lot of responsibility,” said Mr. Saperstein, 62, who spent seven years working for Steve Jobs. “It was stuff that I strongly believed in, which was reading.”

Barnes & Noble is trying to strike at Amazon with another device. At its labs in Silicon Valley last week, engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring. (A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined to elaborate.)

Back in New York, Mr. Lynch has been working to revamp the look of Barnes & Noble stores. Last year, the company expanded sections for toys and games and added shiny new display space for its Nook devices. In another sign of the digital revolution, Mr. Lynch expects to eliminate the dedicated sections for music and DVD’s within two years — while still selling some of them elsewhere in the stores. He also plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores. And, before long, executives will take the Nook overseas — a big switch, given that Barnes & Noble has focused almost exclusively on the American market for decades. The first stop is expected to be Waterstones bookstores in Britain.

All of this would be a tall order for any C.E.O., and some analysts wonder if Mr. Lynch has bitten off more than he can chew. Then again, given this industry’s pace of change, Barnes & Noble may have to adapt to new realities, or die trying.

“I think they realize they can’t continue at the rate they’re going,” said Jack W. Perry, a publishing consultant. “They need more money to invest, to slug it out.”

THESE are trying times for almost everyone in the book business. Since 2002, the United States has lost roughly 500 independent bookstores — nearly one out of five. About 650 bookstores vanished when Borders went out of business last year.

No wonder that some New York publishers have gone so far as to sketch out what the industry might look like without Barnes & Noble. It’s not a happy thought for them: Certainly, there would be fewer places to sell books. Independents account for less than 10 percent of business, and Target, Walmart and the like carry far smaller selections than traditional bookstores.

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.

What’s more, sales of older books — the so-called backlist, which has traditionally accounted for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the average big publisher’s sales — would suffer terribly.

“For all publishers, it’s really important that brick-and-mortar retailers survive,” said David Shanks, the chief executive of the Penguin Group USA. “Not only are they key to keeping our physical book business thriving, there is also the carry-on effect of the display of a book that contributes to selling e-books and audio books. The more visibility a book has, the more inclined a reader is to make a purchase.”

Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books," she said of the company. "Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.”

Mr. Bezos, for one, isn’t waiting. Amazon has set the book industry on edge by starting a publishing unit that has snagged authors like Timothy Ferriss and James Franco. And, each day, the stock market provides a sobering reminder that Mr. Bezos, not Mr. Lynch, has the deeper pockets.

While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it’s not all about them.

“Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

NYT

Cuba's Communists Map Out Party Future - NYTimes.com

2012-01-29T07:35:00.000-08:00

Cuba's Communists Map Out Party Future - NYTimes.com:

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Occupy Protesters and Police Clash in Oakland - NYTimes.com

2012-01-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

Occupy Protesters and Police Clash in Oakland - NYTimes.com:

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Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life - NYTimes.com

2012-01-29T07:30:00.000-08:00

Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life - NYTimes.com:

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Oakland police arrest more than a 100 Occupy protesters - latimes.com

2012-01-28T21:08:00.000-08:00

Oakland police arrest more than a 100 Occupy protesters - latimes.com:

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Just Don’t Call Her Che

2012-01-28T20:39:00.001-08:00

By WILLIAM MOSS WILSON

LATE last month the British newspaper The Guardian asked readers to vote for its person of the year. The candidates included household names like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Egyptian techno-revolutionary Wael Ghonim and the Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. All placed far behind a striking, nose-ringed student from Chile named Camila Vallejo.

Though far from a familiar face in the United States, the 23-year-old Ms. Vallejo has gained rock-star status among the global activist class. Since June she has led regular street marches of up to 200,000 people through Santiago’s broad avenues — the largest demonstrations since the waning days of the Pinochet regime in the late 1980s. Under her leadership, the mobilization, known as the Chilean Winter, has gained nationwide support; one of its slogans, “We are the 90 percent,” referred to its approval rating in late September.

Ms. Vallejo’s charismatic leadership has led commentators to make the obligatory comparisons to other Latin American leftist icons like Subcomandante Marcos and Che Guevara. Yet “Commander Camila,” as her followers call her, has become a personality in her own regard. She skewers senators in prime-time TV debates and stays on message with daytime talk-show hosts hungry for lurid details about her personal life, while her eloquence gives her a preternatural ability to connect with an audience far beyond her left-wing base.

In perhaps the most poignant set piece in the year of the protester, Ms. Vallejo addressed a dense ring of photographers and reporters in August while kneeling within a peace sign made of spent tear-gas shells, where she calmly mused about how many educational improvements could have been bought with the $100,000 worth of munitions at her feet.

Ms. Vallejo, like many of her fellow student leaders, is an avowed communist. But while she has publicly commended other regional leftists like Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, she and her generation have little in common with the older left of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. They are less ideological purists than change-seeking pragmatists, even if that means working within the existing political order.

Still, there’s no question that the movement is upending Chilean society. True, it is centered on a policy question, namely reforming an educational system that disproportionally favors the children of wealthy families. But the earth-shaking Paris protests in 1968 also began with calls for university reform — before spiraling into street battles between radicalized students and truncheon-wielding gendarmes, opposing symbols in the culture war between old and new France.

The same process is under way in Chile. As the protests increasingly devolve into rock and tear-gas exchanges between students and the police, it’s becoming clear that more than education policy is at stake: a nonviolent social revolution in which disaffected, politically savvy youth are trying to overthrow the mores of an older generation, one they feel is still tainted by the legacy of Pinochet. It is not just about policy reform, but also about changing the underlying timbers of Chilean society.

It’s no surprise that the movement should be led by someone as charismatic as Ms. Vallejo. Paris 1968 had its celebrity protesters, handsome faces that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, photogenic young men like Jacques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Chile has Ms. Vallejo.

Chile is perhaps Latin America’s greatest success story. After decades of authoritarian rule, it has spent the last 20 years building a thriving economy with a renewed democratic culture and a booming, educated middle class. But it is also confronting a dangerous imbalance: While the liberalization of higher education has led to improvements in access, tuition has consistently outpaced inflation and now represents 40 percent of the average household’s income.

At the same time, protesters say that wealthy students from private and expensive, co-pay charter schools have unfair access to elite universities, while the rest struggle to meet entrance standards at under-financed public institutions.

Criticism of the university system has been growing for years, but it was only in April that, energized by protests against a dam in Patagonia, students finally took to the streets. The protests grew over the winter; by the first press conference held by the national confederation of student unions, known as the Confech, Ms. Vallejo had emerged as its leader.

Echoing 1960s street activism, the Chilean Winter dabbled in the absurd, but with a high-tech, social-media twist. Thousands gathered in front of the presidential palace in June dressed as zombies, then broke into a choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In July, students again gathered in front of the palace for a huge “kiss-in.”

Though the ideas came, said Giorgio Jackson, former student president of Chile’s Catholic University, from “everywhere, absolutely every local space,” the movement’s success hinged on the leadership’s ability to channel such creativity while maintaining a unified front to government and the media. The organization used a Web site to gather ideas and disseminate content for placards and posters. And it has used Ms. Vallejo’s 300,000-plus Twitter followers to quickly initiate huge “cacerolazos,” a form of dictatorship-era protest where people walk the streets banging on pots and pans.

While they vow to continue until all their lofty demands are met, the students have already scored some political victories. The government’s proposed 2012 budget has a $350 million increase for higher education, with promises to finance scholarships for qualifying students from families up to the 60th percentile in household income. Meanwhile, the year began with the naming of Chile’s third education minister in six months.

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the movement’s focus on education began to broaden. As more support for the movement came from outside the universities, its interests changed accordingly. “This year we have already started talking about political reforms and tax reforms, and we think the students and youth in general play an important role in profound reforms in the country,” said Noam Titelman, the new student president at Catholic University.

Tax reform is, not coincidentally, now at the top of the government’s agenda. And rightly so: though it has the largest economy in Latin America, Chile is the 13th most unequal country in the world.

“Something very powerful that has come out of the heart of this movement is that people are really questioning the economic policies of the country,” Ms. Vallejo said. “People are not tolerating the way a small number of economic groups benefit from the system. Having a market economy is really different from having a market society. What we are asking for, via education reform, is that the state take on a different role.”

The movement has also begun to spread regionally. Ms. Vallejo lent her star power to Brazilian student protests in August, while in November students demonstrated in France, Germany and several other countries in support of Confech’s Latin American March for Education.

“The student movement here is permanently connected to other student movements, principally in Latin America, but also in the world,” Ms. Vallejo said. “We believe this reveals something fundamental: that there is a global demand for the recovery and defense of the right to education.”

But the students clearly have a lot to learn about real-world politics. Ms. Vallejo and other student leaders spent weeks lobbying in Parliament, only to be left out of the final budget negotiations.

Frustration with Ms. Vallejo’s strategy propelled a rival leftist, Gabriel Boric, to challenge her in the latest round of student-government elections. On Dec. 7, national TV news crews lingered past 5 a.m. outside the University of Chile to cover a stunning defeat for the world’s most famous student leader.

Yet even in her early-morning concession speech, Ms. Vallejo claimed victory, recognizing that the movement was greater than any one figure. Indeed, her rise has barely broken stride. She just left for a speaking tour in Europe, while her first book, a collection of her speeches and essays from the last year, is rising through the best-seller ranks. And she is being heavily courted by the Communist Party to run at the top of its list for the Chilean Congress in the 2013 elections.

For all its recent stumbles, the movement’s prospects of getting a woman under 26 elected to Congress would help fulfill one of its underlying aims, to kindle young people’s interest in traditional politics. This may be Ms. Vallejo’s greatest contribution: to restore faith in a discredited system by showing a new generation that politics can be responsive to the people’s demands.

William Moss Wilson is a freelance journalist based in Chile.

NYT

New Hit!

2012-01-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

I definitely have horny readers!

Beautiful Camila!

2012-01-28T20:13:00.001-08:00

Student Protests Rile Chile - NYTimes.com

2012-01-28T20:04:00.000-08:00

Student Protests Rile Chile - NYTimes.com:

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Topless protesters detained at Davos World Economic Forum - NY Daily News

2012-01-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

Topless protesters detained at Davos World Economic Forum - NY Daily News:

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Berkeley Energy Lab Plans Big Expansion - NYTimes.com

2012-01-27T20:46:00.000-08:00

Berkeley Energy Lab Plans Big Expansion - NYTimes.com:

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In Airport Run-In, Democrats See Help for Obama Among Hispanics - NYTimes.com

2012-01-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

In Airport Run-In, Democrats See Help for Obama Among Hispanics - NYTimes.com:

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Judge Orders Arizona Candidate Struck From Ballot - NYTimes.com

2012-01-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

Judge Orders Arizona Candidate Struck From Ballot - NYTimes.com:

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George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

2012-01-26T11:00:00.001-08:00

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

George Soros. , Photograph by Jake Chessum for Newsweek

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”

To many, the idea of Soros lecturing the world on “evil” is, well, rich. Here, after all, is an investor who proved—and profited hugely from—the now much-derided notion that the market, or in his case a single investor, is more powerful than sovereign governments. He broke the Bank of England, destroyed the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence, and reduced the value of the pound in British consumers’ pockets by one fifth in a single day. Soros the currency speculator has been condemned as “unnecessary, unproductive, immoral.” Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, once called him “criminal” and “a moron.”

In the U.S., where the right still has not forgiven him for agitating against President George W. Bush and the “war on terror” after 9/11, which he described as “pernicious,” his prediction of riots on the streets—“it’s already started,” he says—will likely spark fresh criticism that Soros is a “far-left, radical bomb thrower,” as Bill O’Reilly once put it. Critics already allege he is stoking the fires by funding the Occupy movement through Adbusters, the Canadian provocateurs who sparked the movement. Not so, says Soros.

Soros’s fragrant personal life will also prompt many to pooh-pooh his moralizing. Last year, Adriana Ferreyr, his 28-year-old companion for many years, sued him in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging he reneged on two separate promises to buy her an apartment, causing her extreme emotional distress. Ferreyr, a former soap-opera star in Brazil, said Soros had given the apartment he had promised her to another girlfriend. She also claimed he assaulted her. Soros has dismissed Ferreyr’s claims as “frivolous and entirely without merit” and “riddled with false charges and obviously an attempt to extract money.”

Despite his baggage, the man who now views himself as a statesman-philanthropist is undeterred. Having profited from unregulated markets, he now wants to deliver us from them. Take Europe. He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants.”

It is “now more likely than not” that Greece will formally default in 2012, Soros will tell leaders in Davos this week. He will castigate European leaders who seem to know only how to “do enough to calm the situation, not to solve the problem.” If Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy nurses any lingering hopes of finding their salvation outside the continent, they are mistaken. “I took a recent trip to China, and China won’t come to Europe’s rescue,” Soros says. Despite all its woes, he nevertheless thinks the euro will—just barely—survive.

While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. The main issue facing the electorate is whether the rich should be taxed more. It shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”

If there is a glimmer of hope for the world in 2012, Soros believes it lies in emerging markets. The democratic-reform movement that has spread across the Middle East, the rise of democracy and economic growth in Africa, even reform in Russia may yet drag the world out of the mire. “While the developed world is in a deep crisis, the future for the developing world is very positive. The aspiration of people for an open society is very inspiring. You have people in Africa lining up for many hours when they are given an opportunity to vote. Dictators have been overthrown. It is very encouraging for freedom and growth.”

Soros insists the key to avoiding cataclysm in 2012 is not to let the crises of 2011 go to waste. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.” Nor has he quite given up hope that the central bankers and prime ministers gathering in Davos this week have got what it takes to rally round and prove him wrong. This time, being wrong would make him happy indeed.

Newsweek

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War - The Daily Beast

2012-01-26T10:32:00.000-08:00

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War - The Daily Beast:

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We are in a crisis of the total system which must be faced: Bartlett Diaz

2012-01-26T06:20:00.000-08:00

2012-01-26 04:00:00

Manuel Bartlett Diaz in a lengthy interview
that made executives and reporters of this
publishing house

Manuel Bartlett Diaz (MBD) has returned to the state that ruled for nearly 20 years. It does so as a candidate to the Senate, but not the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-the political institution in which he fought all his life, but championed by the Workers' Party (PT) and supporting the cause Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leads.

Former federal interior minister paid a visit to the premises of La Jornada de Oriente (JO). In an extensive interview with executives and reporters made this publishing house, Bartlett talked about how he was always on the wing of the tricolor claimed social justice and revolutionary nationalism, of their struggle, since it occupied the Palace of Covián against the technocracy and how the PRI and the country eventually turn to the right when Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidency of the Republic.

He referred to the fruits that has given the marriage between the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN) with retrograde laws-some even sneak a fascist, that individual rights, the organization and repress social protest and have widened to levels never before seen the gap between rich and poor.

That brace of a PRI "derechizado" with National Action, he added, has had its replica in Puebla, where the PRI behave submissively, as comparsa Governor Rafael Moreno Valle Rosas, appearing as a "confused opposition."

In contrast, the former governor of Puebla, who already held a seat for two terms of six years, praised the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which he defines as "a genuine social force, strong and surprising." Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he is "the only truly popular leader in the country and the only real change is."

Bartlett finishes warning that, as a champion of the left, its mission is "to give a cleaned Puebla" and particularly "shake the PRI."

The talk is initiated by Bartlett Diaz with a diagnosis of the country, talking about a deep crisis that is not limited to economics, but has transferred to politics, social life, institutions and even moral. In sum, says, afflicts the country a "total crisis" and must confront.

"I think this election is crucial, I've never seen the country so badly as now. We have had financial crises, but this is a total crisis, a crisis of governance, is a crisis of state, a comprehensive crisis beyond an economic crisis. It is a moral crisis so. It has been decomposing in the management of the State, public affairs, corruption is widespread. I'm not trying to justify to anyone, it is generally awful, terrible, a country with a moral decline in the public sector in the governorate. Is an economic crisis, employment, social crisis is acute, not circumstantial, is not like the other crises we have had, because here you lost control, there was a financial imbalance, "he says.

He adds, "we see growing poverty, wealth and have more concentrated than we could have. What has led to this situation? ... No, not this crisis has brought us the current U.S. and Europe, which recently broke out, ours is much older than that, is more acute as presents additional challenges that Europe has no economic activity not buy, sell and America is the same, but the problem is that we have no domestic market, rather than an exporting country are an importing country, then it is dramatic because it assumes that globalization leads countries to market integration, but we are an importing country, we are exporting many things, but these exports, if we begin to analyze, they are much of multinationals that sell cars to the U.S.. Then it is a total system crisis. "

Bartlett Diaz then refers to the problem of violence and militarization of the country:

"The safety issue we generated several problems, we generated the militarization of the country. This country was not militarized, we assumed an army barracks, doing civil work, participating in civil defense programs, according to farmers (users) out there with Operation Condor, but was in the barracks, did not see the Army in the streets. "

To give an example of what is happening with the militia, Bartlett Diaz recalls the episode in which Gen. Alfonso Duarte complained in September last year, with Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, the behavior of Secretary of Government, Cuauhtemoc Cardona.

"Today the army is everywhere, has taken control of the police do not know if remember a scene that was terrible in Baja California after the report of the governor to enter the room, heard a scream and go into the general area, the governor, prying cameras are working, then yells General (Cardona) 'Come here you, you're a Bum!' and puts it in front of the governor. It is a scene, well, that placing military to civilian authority despised, is berating the authorities, that is very serious, that brings us another side to the disproportionate military spending since we do banana republic, as he spent all those South American resources on armies and weapons and had no schools, this is happening, it goes there. "

Then refers to the intrigue of Felipe Calderon Hinojosa by given contracts on natural resources like oil and mining.

Then goes on to talk about Enrique Peña Nieto, who says that "your party is Televisa." He criticizes the PRI presidential candidate statements about repealing the law that prevents the media propaganda space-charge during campaigns.

"Linking the PRI candidate pointer ferocious and insatiable these interests and bring others besides, it is certainly a danger, to use Spanish well, a danger to this country. Then the candidate pointer with all the strength back is the continuity of what is happening, is the Mexican drama.

JO - Is that why you agreed to join the left?

MBD-What we need is a change, calls for urgent change. There is a relationship years ago matches motivated by many years in government, in the Senate, marched up together! ...

JO-Con Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano ...

MBD-Yes, Cuauhtémoc, but I talked a lot with Senator (Alberto) Anaya (national leader of the Labour Party) and the invitation extended to me is to go to the Senate because they need people to give battle, like the one the Senate gave above (the force), six years ago.

JO - Why Left today is defined, or does it always been a leftist?

MBD-is the position I have ever had. Formally he was in a left-wing party when it was. The PRI gives rise to the left ...

JO-A few ...

MBD-An important part is of PRI, there is such as Cuauhtémoc (Cardenas) in Salinas, is the power of Lopez Obrador, is the Communist Party and those things are also important at the time. I hear many say "I am left," and what is that?, I answer what Bobbio says: "Left is a movement that stands for equality ', ie has a policy, strategy, an act of equality in society, that says Bobbio.

JO - That is the definition that pleases you?

MBD-Yes, there are leftist Trotskyites, Marxists, Maoists, finally, there were all these ranges, but with a common thread. The old PRI or former PRI had to democracy and social justice principles. The Constitution was ahead of social guarantees, so you could have qualified as a leftist party, which then has an open shift to the right.

JO - So you stayed in the same place, which were moved others?

MBD-so it proved.

JO - Holds his early 20 years ago?

MBD-Essentially I think so. Here I have things I have written, I have had positions, do not think that has changed radically, nor have I been invited to transform.

La Jornada de Oriente

Gingrich Says He’ll End Ad About Romney Immigration Stance - NYTimes.com

2012-01-25T19:33:00.000-08:00

Gingrich Says He’ll End Ad About Romney Immigration Stance - NYTimes.com:

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Demian Bichir Dedicates Oscar Nomination to Undocumented Immigrants | Fox News Latino

2012-01-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

Demian Bichir Dedicates Oscar Nomination to Undocumented Immigrants | Fox News Latino:

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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com:

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Megaupload Founder Faces Lengthy Extradition Battle - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

Megaupload Founder Faces Lengthy Extradition Battle - NYTimes.com:

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Obama State of the Union Address to Make Pitch for Economic Fairness - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T20:39:00.000-08:00

Obama State of the Union Address to Make Pitch for Economic Fairness - NYTimes.com:

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Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala Ex-Dictator, to Appear in Court - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala Ex-Dictator, to Appear in Court - NYTimes.com:

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Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico

2012-01-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

Me'phaa leader and Jody Williams

MEXICO CITY – Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams denounced in Mexico the impunity that prevails for crimes against women in this country and the lack of political will to seek solutions.

After meeting with a group of 50 women’s rights activists, Williams criticized the “pretty words” of the Mexican government and demanded real solutions to a problem that affects the entire population.

“There’s no more time for excuses. The families who are suffering in this country want to see action and the women who have been raped by police officers and soldiers want to see justice,” she said.

To reverse the situation, she said that joint action by civil society is necessary, and she demanded answers from the government, saying that “nobody can change society alone; it has to be a whole community that takes action.”

Therefore, she said that the unity that the victims’ associations had demonstrated in denouncing the cases of disappearances, rapes and murders has been a positive thing.

In addition, she said that one of the main obstacles in achieving justice and ending impunity in Mexico is the high number of people implicated in these crimes.

“This problem requires a continuous struggle if we want to see a society in which we can live without fear,” she said.

Williams’ visit comes within the framework of the investigation she is undertaking along with fellow Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu of the murders of women in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.

Williams is scheduled on Monday to visit the southern state of Guerrero to hold a meeting with women and on Tuesday she will meet with diplomatic representatives and women who hold high positions in political life and the Mexican judicial system.

The aims of the visit include making visible the role, contribution and actions that women have taken to eradicate violence and insecurity in the country, as well as urging the Mexican government to guarantee protection for human rights defenders.

During 2010, some 3,100 women were murdered in Mexico, while in Honduras some 1,500 were killed between 2008 and 2011 and in Guatemala more than 5,000 women died violently over the past 10 years.

U.S. activist Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her intense struggle to prohibit and remove landmines. EFE
Taken From Latin American Herald Tribune

Latin American Herald Tribune - Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico

2012-01-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

Latin American Herald Tribune - Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico:

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