Posts Tagged ‘Ecuador’
Monday Links!
* Somebody thinks 2015 could be a doozy: Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees.
* Trends We Can Work With: Higher Ed in 2015.
* Remembering the reason for the season: During Holiday Season, City Erects Cages To Keep Homeless People Off Benches.
* Christmas Eve Document Dump Reveals US Spy Agencies Broke The Law And Violated Privacy.
* But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? No. The opposite is true. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, “the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.”
* Ending excessive police force starts with new rules of engagement.
* What Does It Mean to Be Anti-Police?
* How to Survive a Cop Coup: What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From Ecuador.
* And whether or not people accept it, that new normal—public life and mass surveillance as a default—will become a component of the ever-widening socioeconomic divide. Privacy as we know it today will become a luxury commodity. Opting out will be for the rich.
* “Enhanced interrogation” is torture, American style. Exceptional torture. Torture that insists it is not torture. Post-torture? This uniquely American kind of torture has six defining characteristics.
* “The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled”: In praise of The Usual Suspects.
* Decades of Bill Cosby’s shadow ops.
* Justice Denied to Steven Salaita: A Critique of the University of Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure Report. This was my reaction as well.
* Anti-intellectualism is taking over the US.
* Are ideas to cool the planet realistic? Meanwhile: Pope Francis Could Be Climate’s Secret Weapon Next Year.
* The architecture of dissent.
* The red state economic miracle that wasn’t.
* Airlines want you to suffer.
* Games are ancient, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But their stock is not rising at the rate that their fans’ Twitter streams and Web forums might suggest. Instead of a ludic age, perhaps we have entered an era of shredded media. Some forms persist more than others, but more than any one medium, we are surrounded by the rough-edged bits and pieces of too many media to enumerate. Writing, images, aphorisms, formal abstraction, collage, travesty. Photography, cinema, books, music, dance, games, tacos, cats, car services. If anything, there has never been a weirder, more disorienting, and more lively time to be a creator and a fanatic of media in all their varieties. Why ruin the moment by being the one trying to get everyone to play a game while we’re letting the flowers blossom? A ludic century need not be a century of games. Instead, it can just be a century. With games in it.
* Death toll among Qatar’s 2022 World Cup workers revealed. Migrant World Cup workers in Qatar are reportedly dying at alarming rates.
* Enterprise, TOS, and “the scent of death” on the Federation.
* How Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
* I am no fan of the North Korean regime. However I believe that calling out a foreign nation over a cybercrime of this magnitude should never have been undertaken on such weak evidence.
* Longreads best crime reporting 2014.
* A Drone Flew Over A Pig Farm.
* The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter fare among the reading public in Africa proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
* I’m a pretty big fan of “Jean & Scott”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
* A profile of David Letterman from 1981.
* How Colonel Sanders Became Father Christmas in Japan.
The filmmakers’ cartoonishly evil vision of Saruman is unfortunate, as it deprives a fascinating narrative of its complexity, while also being untrue to Tolkien’s own vision. Jackson and his team seem incapable of imagining that a person can be wrong without also being evil. For example, the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit was greedy, but he was an elected official, generally well regarded by the community (at least until he absconds with the municipal funds, a fact revealed only on the last page of the book); in the film The Desolation of Smaug, he is a murderous tyrant who opposes even the idea of elections. An even worse example is the case of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who in the books has been driven mad by grief and despair, partly owing to the cruel machinations of Sauron himself; in the film (The Return of the King), he is made so irredeemably evil that Gandalf actually attacks him, while we the viewers are expected to cheer. If this is what Jackson does to weak and pitiable characters, what must he do to Saruman, who is a legitimate “bad guy” in The Lord of the Rings?
* Quiz: Find out how your salary stacks up against other American workers. You know, fun.
* L.A. studio to restore venerable ‘King’s Quest’ to its gaming throne.
* Is the anti-vax movement finally dying?
* You can’t beat the media at its own game.
* America’s own 7 Up: Johns Hopkins’s Beginning School Study.
* Sober People against New Year’s Eve SuperPAC.
* And of course you had me at Grant Morrson’s All-New Miracleman Annual #1.
#HaveWeekendLinksLandedYet
* New leaks show NSA spying on European regulators and charities. UNICEF, man.
* NSA had secret deal on back-doored crypto with security firm RSA, Snowden docs reveal.
* Shock decision: Federal Judge Rules That Same-Sex Marriage Is Legal in Utah. I’m hoping this is finally the watershed. In Striking Down Utah’s Gay Marriage Ban, Judge Gives Scalia Big Bear Hug.
* #slatepitches we can believe in: There Are Two Americas, and One Is Better Than the Other.
* Aaron Bady deconstructs the Twitter “event” of the week, #HasJustineLandedYet.
* Another good post on education policy from Freddie de Boer: Is there such a thing as static teacher quality?
Now, these numbers are particularly stark, but this is not really a surprising result, if you been paying attention. Why did New York end its teacher performance pay program in the first place? In large part because of incoherent results: teachers would be rated as terrible in one class and excellent in another, within the same semester. Teachers that had been among the top performers one year would be among the worst performers the next. Teachers that were believed by administrators and parents to have serious performance issues would be rated highly; teachers that were believed by administrators and parents to be among a school’s best would be rated poorly. On and on.
* Six questions for Teach for America.
* Conservative groups spend $1bn a year to fight action on climate change.
* Fracking chemicals disrupt human hormone functions, study claims. FDA should be looking into this in about forty years.
* Gasp! Researchers Find Factors Tied To Voting Restriction Bills Are ‘Basically All Racial.’
* Stop and Frisk Is Everywhere.
* Rogue death scene cut from Days of Future Past, it looks like.
* “Where we’re losing them is at the full professor rank,” she continued. “Somehow we’re losing women.”
* Pharmacists Frequently Misinform Teens About Whether They’re Allowed To Buy Plan B.
* A 54-year old American woman was given increasingly invasive and fruitless cavity searches after a drug dog was instructed to “alert” in front of her by U.S. border guards. The victim, according to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, was then ordered to consume laxatives, endure x-rays and other scans, and subjected to further medical rectal and vaginal probes—all conducted by doctors at University Medical Center El Paso over over her protests and without any form of warrant.
* Wealthy Tech Investor Backs Plan To Split California Into Six States.
* A court in Canada has ruled Ecuadorean farmers and fishermen can try to seize the assets of oil giant Chevron based on a 2011 decision in an Ecuadorean court found it liable for nearly three decades of soil and water pollution near oil wells, and said it had ruined the health and livelihoods of people living in nearby areas of the Amazon rainforest.
* What happens if you make a mistake with a planet?
* Great moments in neocolonialism: Is It Time to Make Knowledge of English a Human Right?
* Florida is sticking with legal murder: Florida Man Who Shot Acquaintance For Threatening To Beat Him Won’t Face Charges, Judge Rules.
* Finally, the story of Harry Potter’s years of neglect and staggering abuse can be told. BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Under Seattle, a Big Object Blocks Bertha. What Is It?
* Peter Singer, maximum-utility troll: “How Many Kids Died Because of Batkid?”
* New York Times to murder its last lingering shred of journalistic integrity.
* And MetaFilter has a mega-post all about the great Alice Sheldon, a.k.a. James Tiptree, Jr.
Lovely Country You Have Here, Shame if Something Happened to It
Post of the day goes to Henry Farrell:
So on the one hand, the Washington Post believes that the notion that the US has an ‘empire’ is self-evidently ridiculous. On the other hand, it suggests that if Ecuador is impertinent enough to host an individual whom the US doesn’t like (but would have a hard time pressing charges against), it should and will express its displeasure by crippling Ecuador’s economy and threatening the livelihood of 400,000 of its citizens. These few sentences are rather useful, despite themselves, in talking to the nature of the American imperium, the doublethink that maintains it, and the usefulness of providing/withholding market access as a means of imperial coercion.
La Guerra de Los Mundos
Somehow I’d gotten this far without hearing about the 1949 War of the Worlds broadcast in Equador that left six dead after a riot. Thanks to my dad for the link.
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009/2010
Top 25 censored stories of the year. Don’t miss:
2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
Monday Night Links
Monday night links.
* After a brief flirtation with “top five” status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.
* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware’s Chicago. Via MetaFilter.
* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.
* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.
* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature’s right to exist.
* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina’s newest resident.
Ecuador’s New Constitution Grants Inalienable Rights to Nature
Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
With the public ratification of its new constitution last week, Ecuador has for the first time anywhere in history granted inalienable rights to nature. The new constitution also includes strict egalitarian provisions about food production, water access, and protection for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes.
As the Guardian link makes clear, this unprecedented act stems in part from Ecuador’s custodianship of the Galápagos Islands and in part from its long history of abuse at the hands of multinational corporations:
The origins of this apparent legal tidal shift lie in Ecuador’s growing disillusionment with foreign multinationals. The country, which contains every South American ecosystem within its borders, which include the Galapagos Islands, has had disastrous collisions with multi-national companies. Many, from banana companies to natural gas extractors, have exploited its natural resources and left little but pollution and poverty in their wake.
Now it is in the grip of a bitter lawsuit against US oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco, over its alleged dumping of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Amazonian jungle over two decades.
It is described as the Amazonian Chernobyl, and 30,000 local people claim that up to 18m tonnes of oil was dumped into unlined pits over two decades, in defiance of international guidelines, and contaminating groundwater over an area of some 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) and leading to a plethora of serious health problems for anyone living in the area. Chevron has denied the allegations. In April, a court-appointed expert announced in a report that, should Chevron lose, it would have to pay up to $16bn (£8.9bn) in damages.
Chevron, which claims its responsibilities were absolved in 1992 when it handed over its operations in Ecuador to the state-owned extraction company, Petroecuador, immediately set about discrediting the report. A verdict on the case is still thought to be a long way off, and Ecuador’s government could face US trade sanctions for its refusal to “kill” the case.
It remains somewhat unclear what this law will mean in practice, especially in the context of a country whose economy is so heavily dependent on petroleum extraction. However things shake out, though, this should be a fascinating test case for protection of the environment outside the failed paradigms of property rights on the one hand and “securitization” on the other.
Here’s the full text of the relevant articles, including an intriguing bit of commentary that suggests a codified right to civil disobedience in defense of the environment: “Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.
There’s still more at MeFi. This has received almost no press in the States, but it’s an amazing and very important development, definitely worth keeping your eyes on.
(cross-posted at culturemonkey)
Gerry Canavan 