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miércoles, noviembre 13, 2013

Collapsing Consciously

Pawel Kuczyński
Carolyn Baker's CollapsingConsciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times is perhaps the most approachable book on collapse you are likely to find. Compared to Jarred Diamond's Collapse, which weighs in at just over 600 pages, Baker's is well under 200. And yet in these few pages Baker manages to tackle a topic which Diamond studiously avoids: Whatever shall we do about the fact that collapse is happening all around us right now?
The reason Diamond avoids it is obvious: collapse is an unacceptable topic of discussion if it relates to us. It is perfectly fine to talk about past collapses, and perhaps even muse about future collapses, provided they happen to someone else. That's because we are exceptional and will go on forever. Here's a memorable example: I once gave a talk for the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, and during the Q&A afterwards someone asked me about Russia's demographic crisis. Stewart Brand, who was reading off the questions from cards, chimed in to say that it looks like the Russians will be extinct in just a couple of generations (they aren't). So, Stewart, in how many generations are Americans going to be extinct? I need a number; what's the Long Now Foundation's estimate on that? Crickets...
And the reason collapse is an unacceptable topic of discussion if it relates to us, in the present or the foreseeable future, is that the moment you mention it, the topic stops being it, or us; the topic becomes you. What is wrong with you, why are you collapsing, and is it contagious? (Actually, just go away anyway, because you are probably bad luck.) This society operates on a combination of conformism and one-upmanship. Collapse as reality is nonconformist—in a society that worships success it is seen as defeatist and unpatriotic. It is also noncompetitive—because who on earth would want to buy it? “After all, who wants to hear that their very identity—the industrially civilized ego they have built throughout their entire lives, the ego that defines who they are—is, well, dying?” (p. 89) (By the way, this explains why my last book hasn't sold all that well.) In any case, if you keep at it, you come to be seen as a loser. Then you start feeling like an unlucky outcast, and before too long you end up with a psychological problem, and start asking yourself questions such as : “What's wrong with me?” “Have I gone mad?” and “Should I kill myself?”
Keep reading on ClubOrlov >>

viernes, noviembre 08, 2013

Economies and Human Sustainability - Gail Tverberg

Gail Tverberg
A few years ago, I had an ah-ha moment when it comes to what we as humans would need to do
to live in a sustainable manner. It is very easy. All we have to do is leave our homes, take off all of our clothes, and learn to live on the raw food we are able to gather with our own hands. We have a built-in transportation system, so that is not a problem.
Some animals are eusocial, that is, organized in away that allows for cooperative brood care and other joint tasks. If we follow that approach, we would get our extended families to join us living in nature, au naturel. We could then co-operate on tasks such as child rearing and gathering food.
Nature’s Provision for Order
Nature is organized in a number of ways that make certain that there will be modest change over time to adapt to new conditions, but that no one species will dominate. These are a few of the basic parts of the system:
1. Animals tend to have more offspring than required to replace the parents. Through natural selection, offspring that are best adapted to changing conditions tend to survive and grow to adulthood.
2. Animals tend not to kill all prey available because if they did so, they would have no food source in the future. Species are usually fairly balanced in their abilities, so that population will fluctuate within a range, rather than result in a total die-off.
3. Nature provides a great deal of redundancy, both in number of offspring, and in back-up systems. We have two ears and two kidneys, and two of many other parts of the body. The goal isn’t maximum efficiency, but to have a good chance at survival, even in the case of injury or damage to one part.
4. Nature has built-in instincts to prevent depletion of shared resources, sometimes called Tragedy of the Commons. Among primates, one of these instincts is an instinct toward territoriality. Males of the species tend to mark off territory much larger than they would need simply for gathering food, and will fight others to death who try to enter to their territory (Dilworth 2010).
5. In primates, another instinct that prevents excessive population of any one species is a tendency toward hierarchical behavior when population becomes too crowded for resources  (Dilworth 2010). Nature’s plan is that if there is an inadequate amount of resources, there will still be some survivors. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy will lose out, but those at the top will survive.
6. Each plant or animal requires energy-related inputs (food for humans) and eliminates waste. What is waste for one species acts as an input for other species. For example, plants need carbon dioxide, even though it is a waste produce for humans.
Using Nature’s approach, there is a balance over time. One species may dominate for a time, and then another.  The world tends to cycle from state to state. There is never a complete die-off, no matter how bad things get. Because of natural selection, species evolve to fill new niches. Climate change is a concern from humans’ perspective, because we are the potential losers. But Nature is probably equipped to deal with the issue, in one way or another.
The Hunter-Gatherer Economy
www.peaceparks.org
Humans, as hunter-gatherers, were “sort of close” to following Nature’s pattern. Man’s big deviation from the pattern of other animals was learning to burn biomass over one million years ago. Burning biomass made man better able to cope with cold weather. Humans also evolved a higher level of intelligence, perhaps in part because cooked food allowed better absorption of nutrients, allowing humans to put energy previously used for creating big jaws and digestive apparatus into a bigger brain.
As humans became smarter, they found ways to circumvent survival of the fittest, both to live longer themselves, and to allow more offspring to survive to adulthood.  (Dilworth 2010)  If hunter-gatherer groups wanted to avoid over-population, they had to adopt customs that would keep population down. Such customs might include infanticide, sexual abstinence during nursing, or frequent wars with neighboring tribes.
Research on hunter-gatherer groups that have survived until modern times suggests that very often they spent only a few hours a day hunting and gathering food, allowing much time for leisure activities (Sahlins 1972). Humans were tall (men averaged 5’10″ in height), had few dental cavities, and showed other signs of excellent health (Wells 2010).
As hunter-gatherers, there was no need for money or land ownership. Sharing within the clan seems to have been typical, perhaps as a gift economy, where status is gained by how much one can give away. Thus, all had access to food. There was no storing up goods for a “rainy day.” The only “storing up” was what nature provided in terms of stored body fat that prevented starvation if food was unavailable for a short period of time.
Keep reading Here >> 

Imagination: an antidote to the plague of austerity

Transition Network
Rob Hopkins
"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."
Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956
Our theme for November is austerity and Transition responses to it. It is a subject that our Social Reporters are exploring with great gusto at the moment. Caroline Jackson recently documented what the unfolding of spending cuts look like in her community in Lancaster, concluding with the question "there’s a challenge for us in Transition here – I wonder how we will respond?" That's what I'd like to explore here, and to ask "what is Transition's unique contribution to the challenges of austerity?"
In the UK, as elsewhere, debates around austerity tend to polarise along political divides. The Right argue that the economy is saddled with huge debts and that we have to "get our house in order" before anything else, cutting back in all areas of government expenditure (although whilst also bailing out the banks, cutting taxes for the rich and not collecting corporate taxes). The Left argue that's really the last thing we need to do, that actually what we need to do is to borrow more money in order to stimulate growth and kick start economic growth again. Both miss the point completely. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I quoted FEASTA's Graham Barnes who wrote:
“The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the Earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles.”
The reality is we have reached the end of the age of cheap energy, and, almost certainly, of economic growth. Our urgent imperative is to begin a steep reduction of carbon emissions (10% a year, if Kevin Anderson is right), and we stand atop mountains of debt accumulated in the process of generating GDP (creating one dollar of growth in the 1970s required $1.74 of debt, it's now $5.67) and an increasingly fragile economic system. Under such circumstances it's not about how we recreate the kind of blunt, “gross value added” growth that both left and right have long used as a measure, rather how we get real about our situation and respond accordingly. Whether austerity is the right approach or not, the reality is that as a government-led approach to the economy, it looks likely to be here to stay for some time to come, with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls pledging to match to coalition government's spending cuts.
I could spend this entire post delivering a long rant about austerity: how there is easily enough money to overcome it, and to tackle the climate crisis, locked up in offshore banking accounts (beautifully explored in Nick Shaxson's latest report 'The Finance Curse'), how in the US (and almost certainly in the UK and elsewhere too) the bulk of what little economic growth there has been over the past couple of years actually goes to the rich, not to everyone else, or in pointing out, as the Red Cross did recently when looking at austerity across Europe, that it simply doesn't work as an economic approach:
"Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us."
I could bring it closer to home, stating how the use of food banks in the UK has increased threefold on this time last year, up to half a million people over the last 12 months, how some families receiving food parcels from food banks are sending them back because they are too poor to be able to afford to heat the food the parcel contains, or how, in the case of council funding cuts, the drastic cutting back of public services has only just begun. Newcastle City Council has spoken of how it is being forced to make "bloody great cuts", cutting all arts funding, and showing how by 2017 it looks like it will be unable to even meet its basic legal responsibilities as a Council. At the same time, bonuses in the City of London are up 64%, and RBS and Lloyds are enjoying combined half-year profits of £3.5bn.
The rise of the food bank.
It's shitty and grim and however much we might rail against it, it looks unlikely that a change of government (all the major parties at least) would do much different. The reality is that the age of cheap energy is over, and our living off the fat of a hundred years of surplus energy is coming to an end. There are, of course, activist avenues open to you if you want to use them, campaigns for transparency in international finance, UK Uncut and so on. I think we need something else though, something that sits alongside those more campaign-based responses, something without which we will never make any headway.
Keep reading Here >>

jueves, noviembre 07, 2013

Understanding Society: Structural realism and social realities?

understandingsociety.blogspot.com
The topic of realism has come up frequently here -- causal realism, critical realism, scientific realism. Each of these realisms comes out of somewhat different fields of questions and assumptions. Within mainstream philosophy of science there is another realism that has been debated in the past twenty years, referred to as structural realism. The view has been developed by philosopher John Worrall, and his 1989 article "Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?", sets the stage (link). So what is this view, and does it have any relevance to the social sciences?
First, what is the view? It is a refinement to the theory of scientific realism advocated by philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Dick Boyd -- the view that we have reason to believe that the world has approximately the features attributed to it by the best available scientific theories. As Boyd put the view quite a few years ago, what else could explain the success of those theories if not their approximate truth and successful reference to the entities and properties of the world?
The problem that gives rise to structural realism is what Worrall calls the "pessimistic meta-induction" (109): in the history of science, most scientific theories have eventually been proven to be false. So how can scientific realists claim, after all, that there is a rational basis for believing that the world has the characteristics asserted by the current generation of scientific theories?  The answer to this question, Worrall argues, comes down to a judgment call about the history of science: "just how radical theory-change has standardly been in science" (105). If successor theories have nothing in common with their antecedents except a broader but overlapping range of empirical consequences, then it is hard to say that there is an approximate truth that is captured by both stages of the theory. "If, on the contrary, the realist is forced to concede that there has been radical change at the theoretical level in the history of even the mature sciences then he surely is in deep trouble" (107). Realism, then, depends on some degree of approximate continuity across successor theories. Here Worrall turns to Richard Boyd:
"The historical progress of the mature sciences is largely a matter of successively more accurate approximations to the truth about both observable and unobservable phenomena. Later theories typically build upon the (observational and theoretical) knowledge embodied in previous theories." (Boyd, 1984, "The Current Status of Scientific Realism" in Leplin, ed., Scientific Realism)
But many philosophers and historians of science have disputed the degree of continuity that Boyd postulates here. They emphasize the discontinuities that often occur across the process of theory change in physics. However, Worrall argues that there is a more abstract way in which physical theories show substantial continuity. This continuity isn't found at the level of entities and causal powers, but rather a set of more abstract characteristics that are attributed to the features of the world under study.
Structural realism gets going, then, if we concede that the history of physics shows radical change at the level of the properties attributed to natural objects but we maintain that it also shows a strong degree of continuity when it comes to the basic structural properties that are postulated by theories of physics.
In application to the series of theories offered to explain the behavior of light, the continuity was abstract:
There was continuity or accumulation in the shift [from Fresnel to Maxwell], but the continuity is one of form or structure, not of content. (117)
Worrall attributes this idea about a specific but abstract kind of continuity in physics to Henri Poincare, and he argues that it lays the basis for a weaker form of realism that might be described as syntactic or structural realism(117).
Roughly speaking, it seems right to say that Fresnel completely misidentified the nature of light, but nonetheless it is no miracle that his theory enjoyed the empirical predictive success that it did; it is no miracle because Fresnel's theory, as science later saw it, attributed to light the right structure.... There is no elastic solid ether. There is, however, from the later point of view, a (disembodied) electromagnetic field. The field in no clear sense approximates the ether, but disturbances in it do obey formally similar laws to those obeyed by elastic disturbances in a mechanical medium.  (117-118)
So structural realism when applied to the history of the theory of light says two things: successor theories had radically different and inconsistent hypotheses about the mechanics and substance of light; but they agreed approximately about the mathematical properties of light. And it is the latter that is preserved across the progress of this area of science.
This is a very weak form of realism, as Worrall acknowledges:
[The structural realist] insists that it is a mistake to think that we can ever "understand" the nature of the basic furniture of the universe.... On the structural realist view what Newton really discovered are the relationships between phenomena expressed in the mathematical equations of his theory, the theoretical terms of which should be understood as genuine primitives. (122)
So the commonsensical questions we might want to ask of contemporary physics -- are there electrons, is space curved, is the speed of light constant -- do not have defensible answers, according to structural realism. What the success of modern physics allows us to conclude is something much weaker: whatever the fundamental components of matter, space, time, light, and gravity are, the world conforms to the mathematical transformations that are specified by our best confirmed contemporary physical theories. It is the transformations, equations, and constants that we can be realistic about, not the concrete theories of the mechanics of the things that embody these equations.
My real interest in opening this topic was to consider whether it has any relevance to the social sciences. And the short answer seems to be -- not much. Theories in the social sciences rarely have the mathematical specificity that is crucial to the structural realist argument. So it is difficult to make the argument that Ricardo, Marx, Pareto, and Keynes were describing the same structural reality when they wrote about capitalism. Their substantive assumptions are quite different; but further, the expected "mathematical" behavior of the capitalist market system is also substantially different across the theories. Perhaps a more plausible case is the transition from Marx's classic theory of exploitation, based on the labor theory of value, to John Roemer's theory of exploitation in A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, based on neoclassical and game-theoretic economic assumptions. The two theories arrive at similar "structural" features of a capitalist economy, in spite of the fact that the underlying substantive assumptions are quite different.
(Katherine Brading and Elise Crull offer a very nice treatment of Worrall's interpretation of Poincare in "Epistemic Structural Realism and Poincare's Philosophy of Science (link).)

sábado, octubre 12, 2013

La funesta manía de pensar

Carlos Alberto Montaner/
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Si mañana un cataclismo, o un virus racista, destruyera todas las universidades de América Latina y España, la cultura planetaria apenas sufriría un imperceptible arañazo, especialmente en el terreno de la ciencia y la técnica, pero también en el de las humanidades y los estudias sociales.
El asunto es muy triste. Las universidades iberoamericanas no están entre las 150 mejores del planeta. Aunque son varios millares, son muy escasas las que figuran entre las 500 mejores del mundo. Las menos malas son algunas brasileras, chilenas, colombianas, argentinas, mexicanas y españolas. Las caribeñas y centroamericanas apenas comparecen en la lista, con la excepción de la costarricense en alguna facultad privilegiada.
¿Cómo lo sabemos? Porque anualmente se compilan varios índices de calidad universitaria en distintas latitudes y todos concuerdan en las conclusiones. Los más conocidos son los que confecciona el diario The Times de Londres, la Universidad Jiao Tong de Shanghái, la revista U.S. News and World Report de Estados Unidos y el Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas de Madrid.
Para medir la excelencia de las instituciones tienen en cuenta las publicaciones en revistas acreditadas, la presencia en Internet, las veces que los artículos, libros o autores son citados, el número de profesores con Premios Nobel o Medallas Fields (matemáticas), el desempeño de los graduados y las opiniones de expertos. No se trata de ensalzar a algunos países y denigrar a otros. Intentan establecer cierta jerarquía. Sólo eso.   
Es una pena, porque la primera universidad que se fundó en el Nuevo Mundo fue la de Santo Domingo en 1538, prácticamente un siglo antes de Harvard. Poco después se crearon las de México y Lima en 1551. La de La Habana tiene casi 300 años y antecede en 20 a la de Princeton. Esa tradición ha servido de muy poco. Tal vez, incluso, ha sido una rémora.
Cuando comenzaron nuestras universidades en Hispanoamérica, todas legitimadas por la Corona española y operadas por frailes, el método de enseñanza y la filosofía que lo animaba se basaban en la Escolástica. Todas las verdades ya habían sido descubiertas por las autoridades religiosas. La labor del docente y del alumno (literalmente, “el nutrido”) era llegar a ese conocimiento mediante ejercicios memorísticos o juegos retóricos.
La universidad era para repetir, no para innovar. Recuérdese que uno de los delitos perseguidos por la Inquisición era la innovación. Todavía a menudo se cita la increíble frase del rector de la Universidad de Cervera, en Cataluña, al rey Fernando VII: “lejos de nosotros, majestad, la funesta manía de pensar”.
Naturalmente, se trata de un problema cultural. En nuestro mundillo iberoamericano no abunda, como en otras latitudes, la voluntad de cambiar, de innovar, de progresar, de encontrar nuevas y mejores formas de hacer las cosas. Vivimos en una cultura reiterativa, no transformativa.
Para nosotros una persona culta no es la que es capaz de modificar nuestro presente, sino la que retiene una asombrosa cantidad de información sobre el pasado. Vivimos dándole vueltas a lo que ocurrió hace mucho tiempo, lo que, por cierto, no nos ha salvado de cometer los mismos o parecidos errores una y otra vez, desmintiendo la inútil advertencia de Jorge Santayana (“Aquellos que no recuerdan el pasado están condenados a repetirlo”). Los latinoamericanos lo recordamos y lo repetimos.
No quiero decir, por supuesto, que las universidades latinoamericanas son inservibles. Eso sería una estupidez. Muchas de ellas gradúan personas  muy competentes. De algunas egresan magníficos médicos, abogados, dentistas, periodistas, economistas, ingenieros, expertos en cuestiones empresariales, y así hasta el medio centenar de profesionales valiosos, absolutamente indispensables para el buen funcionamiento de las sociedades.
Ese no es el problema. La consecuencia negativa del fenómeno de las culturas reiterativas es que viven parasitariamente a remolque de centros creativos radicados fuera de su perímetro. En gran medida, la extensión de nuestra vida y cómo la vamos a vivir, se dicta en esos sitios intelectualmente densos y generadores de ideas. De una forma perversa, sin darnos cuenta, continuamos calificando de “funesta manía” la actividad de pensar con nuestra propia cabeza. Y así nos va.

jueves, mayo 30, 2013

On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World

LibraryOfCongress
James Srodes discussed and signed his book, "On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World."

Speaker Biography: James Srodes is a former Washington bureau chief for Forbes and Financial World magazines. He is the author of several books, including "Franklin: The Essential Founding Father," "Allen Dulles: Master of Spies" and, most recently, "On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World."

viernes, mayo 17, 2013

UnderstandingSociety: What about Marx?

B
At various points since the death of Karl Marx in 1883 his work has been regarded as a dead issue -- no longer relevant, too ideological, methodologically flawed, too rooted in the nineteenth century. And yet each of these periods of extinction has been followed by a resurgence of interest in Marx's ideas, as new generations try to make sense of the tough and often cruel social conditions in which they find themselves. What are the important dimensions of theory that Marx presented through his writings? And how can any of these be considered valuable in trying to come to grips with the global, capitalist, turbulent, unequal, violent world that we now inhabit?

We might say that there are a small handful of key theoretical frameworks that Marx advocated.

Materialism as a methodology for social science. Social change is driven by material circumstances, the forces and relations of production. This encompasses the property system and the ensemble of technologies present in a given level of society. Materialism denies that ideas and thought drive social change; so religion, patriotism, nationalism, and ideologies of patriarchy are epiphenomena rather than originating causes.

Emphasis on the primacy of property and class. Sociologists and historians want to explain processes of social change. Marx puts it forward that the economic interests created by the property system in a given society create powerful foundations for collective social action.  Those who occupy positions of advantage within a given set of property relations want to do what they can to preserve those relations; and those who are disadvantaged by the property relations have a latent interest in mobilizing to change those relations. Persons who share a location in the property system constitute a class, and their interests are systematically different from those in other such positions.

A sketch of a theory of consciousness and culture. Institutions of consciousness and culture play a role in stabilizing and attacking the most important relations of domination in a society. Educational institutions, it is argued, prepare young people for their specific roles in society -- workers, managers, elites, sub-proletarians. So struggles over the content and form of the institutions of enculturation can be expected to be polarized along class lines. Less directly, Marxists like Gramsci have postulated that worldviews reflect life experiences; so elites create cultural worlds that are quite distinct from those imagined by subordinate groups.

A diagnosis of social ills including exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization of social relations. Exploitation has to do with the flow of wealth and material goods through the property system from producers to property-owners. Alienation has to do with the loss of autonomy and self-control that individuals have within a capitalist structure. Marx's distinctive addition to this idea is that this loss of autonomy has psychic consequences -- disaffection, lack of self-respect, depression. The dehumanization of social relations follows from the structure of the capitalist workplace -- workers and bosses, each related to the other through the workings of a command system. Wittgentstein got it right when he described the "slab" language game: the boss says "slab", and the worker produces a slab. There is nothing "I-thou" about this relation (Buber, I and Thou).

A theory of several distinct modes of production. Marx believes that history takes the form of a succession of separable and structurally distinct modes of production: ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalism differ by the structure of the production system, the property system, and the technologies that each embodied. Marx's most extensive analysis of social formations is his treatment of the capitalist mode of production in Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy and the writings that were posthumously edited and published as volumes 2 and 3 of Capital.

A common thread through these framing ideas is the perspective of critique: a critical intelligence trying to understand why modern society produces such human misery. But even from the perspective of critique -- the perspective that tries to diagnose and understand the systemic flaws of contemporary society -- Marxism leaves quite a bit of terrain untouched: gender relations, racism, nationalism, and religious hatred, for example. Marxism doesn't do a good job of explaining a regime of sexual violence (rape in India); it doesn't have much to contribute to the rise of fascism; it doesn't have resources for understanding Islamo-phobia and hatred.  So Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of modern social failings; and we might say that its emphasis on economic conflict eclipses other forms of domination in ways that are actually harmful to our ability to improve our social relations.

Geoff Boucher takes up the issue of the continuing relevance of Marx in the contemporary world in Understanding Marxism. Here is how he opens the book:
Today, radical thinking about social alternatives stands under prohibition. According to defenders of the neoliberal transformation of every facet of human existence into a market, Marxism has failed…. Marx is dead; Marxism is finished -- and it must stay that way. (1)
But Boucher rejects this neoliberal consensus.
Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. The influence of Marxism has been felt in every discipline, in the social sciences and interpretive humanities, from philosophy, through sociology and history, to literature. (2)
Here are the core reasons that Boucher offers for thinking that Marxism is still relevant in the twenty-first century:
  1. Marxism is the most serious normative social-theoretical challenge to liberal forms of freedom that does not at the same time reject the modern world.
  2. Marxism is the most sustained effort so far to think the present historically and to reflexively grasp thought itself within its socio-historical context. (2)
And later:
Marxism is a distinctively historical theory that normatively challenges liberalism in a way no other modern theory does. (3)
Much of Boucher's book contributes to one of two intellectual aims: to give a clear exposition of the most important of Marx's theoretical ideas; and to explicate the several "Marxisms" that followed in the twentieth century. The successive Marxisms take up the bulk of the book, with chapters on Classical Marxism, Hegelian Marxism, The Frankfurt School, Structural Marxism, Analytical Marxism, Critical Theory, and Post-Marxism. So the book provides very extensive explication of the theoretical ideas and developments that have grown out of the Marxist tradition.

What Boucher doesn't really provide is a clear rationale, based on contemporary sociology and history, for the conclusions he wants us to share about the continuing utility of Marxism as a framework for understanding the present and future. We don't get the reasoning that would support the affirmative ideas expressed above. The best rebuttal to the neoliberal triumphalism mentioned above is a compelling collection of sociological studies grounded in the perspectives mentioned above. Michael Burawoy's sociology of factories is a good example (e.g. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism). But this isn't an approach that Boucher chooses to pursue.

So what about it? Is Marxism relevant today? Yes, if we can avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that were often associated with the tradition. Power, exploitation, class, structures of production and distribution, property relations, workplace hierarchy -- these features certainly continue to be an important part of our social world. We need to think of Marx's corpus as a multiple source of hypotheses and interpretations about how capitalism works. And we need to recognize fully that no theoretical framework captures the whole of history or society. Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of social organization and change. But it does provide a useful set of hypotheses about how some of the key social mechanisms work in a class-divided society. Seen from that perspective, Marxist thought serves as a sort of proto-paradigm or mental framework in terms of which to pursue more specific social and historical investigations.

miércoles, mayo 08, 2013

«Clic, imprimir, arma», un documental sobre las armas impresas en 3D

Cody R. Wilson. Wilson, de 25 años, es un estudiante de derecho en la Universidad de Texas que está trabajando en la construcción de armas semiautomáticas utilizando una impresora 3D. La primera vez que escuché su nombre fue hablando con un colega después de que Wilson subiera un vídeo en Indiegogo demostrando qué intenciones tenía con su recién adquirida impresora Stratasys 3D (una impresora que Stratasys le arrebató más tarde).
Uno de los problemas más evidentes es que este tipo de armas son invisibles para los detectores de metales, aunque la munición tiene que seguir siendo necesariamente de verdad y hay que poder comprarla. El percutor también tiene que ser metálico, aunque se trate de un clavo.
En EE UU se ha levantado bastante revuelo con el asunto. El verdadero problema, según Businessweek, es que en aquel país es más fácil comprar un arma que imprimirla,
Let's All Calm Down About 3D Plastic Guns — Con algo de conocimientos es posible hacer un arma en el sótano de casa, y hay formas menos complicadas de conseguirlas que utilizando un equipo informático de 10.000 dólares. Por internet puedes comprar cualquier cosa desde una pistola Glock de 9 mm a un rifle semiautomático de tipo militar con cargador para 30 proyectiles.
En otros países, caso de España, es mucho más difícil comprar armas y munición de este tipo. Por ejemplo, en España «la razón de defensa de personas o bienes, por sí sola, no justifica la concesión de la licencia» para armas cortas, informa la Guardia Civil. En EE UU es al contrario, ésta razón es en la que se basa el derecho a tener y llevar armas.
De nuevo se demuestra —como leí por ahí hace poco, no recuerdo dónde— que según se utilice la tecnología puede ser buena o puede ser mala, pero nunca es neutra.

sábado, mayo 04, 2013

Financial strain pushes many veterans to the breaking point

inplainsight
Courtesy Adam Legg
Navy veteran Adam Legg said a long jobless spell after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him feeling hopeless and led him to "go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you're not there."
By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor
Hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been flying home to a fresh fox hole: A debt crater that’s sucking in entire military families and could be helping to fuel the veteran suicide crisis.
Courtesy Adam Legg
"I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 
people working  beneath me, in charge of millions 
of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, 
computers," said Adam Legg, a Navy veteran. "And 
then  when I come home, not only can I not find 
a job, I can't take care of my family."
A bad job market, a long backlog for federal disability benefits, and occasionally unwise spending habits have been conspiring to strain the financial and mental health of many veterans, experts say.
"We keep hearing of suicides rising. How much pressure do you think one person can take?" asks Christopher Fitzpatrick, deputy director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has fielded more than 170,000 calls from ex-service members with imminent financial concerns. 
"No one wants to talk about the fact that there are other reasons, besides PTSD, for suicide at 2 in the morning. You know how we know? We have an online form people use to contact us, and we get those emails — they’re sent at 1, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. People are reaching out, literally: 'Can you please help me? I’m losing everything.'"
It's a problem that could get even worse in coming years, with more than one million service members expected to make the transition to civilian life.
Navy veteran Adam Legg, 30, ran into financial trouble following two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. A jobless and hopeless period that began after his service separation in 2009 led him to "go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you're not there," he said.
He couldn't secure a job at his local McDonald's or at dozens of other companies to which he applied in Central Florida. With a wife, Melissa, and a young daughter to feed, he maxed out a credit card that he was able to pay off with money he'd saved during his eight years in the Navy. 
'Very, very dark place'
But bigger bills — like the mortgage — went untouched. After losing his Florida home to foreclosure and two cars to repossession, Legg said he began to consider suicide. 
"When you feel like you can’t take care of your family, feed them, shelter them, it’s a very, very dark place. A feeling of uselessness that maybe they would be better off if you’re not around," Legg said. 
"We've been below the poverty line, absolutely. I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 people working beneath me, in charge of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, computers. And then when I come home, not only can I not find a job, I can’t take care of my family. If it weren’t for my wife, if she was not supportive the way she was, I really don’t think I’d be here right now."
According to VeteransPlus, fewer than 20 percent of their clients have stockpiled a six-month savings cushion while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan despite untaxed, hazardous-duty wages that fattened paychecks.
Some returning veterans planned to live off their credit cards until landing civilian work, even though the veteran unemployment rate is two points higher than the civilian rate, Fitzpatrick said. Some expected to support themselves via VA benefits, apparently unaware that average wait time for that money approaches — and sometimes eclipses — one year.  
The Pentagon urges military personnel and their families to bank some money while in the service. This year, during “Military Saves Week," service members were reminded to “set a goal, make a place and save automatically.” Service members also can take advantage of the Thrift Savings Plan, a federally sponsored retirement savings and investment program resembling a civilian 401(k).
But even some of those who build up savings while serving abroad find their stash exhausted after buying gifts for family and plucking shiny toys, like motorcycles, for themselves when they come home from war, according to VeteransPlus.
"We don’t like using the word ‘entitlement,’ but often that’s what it really is for these young men and women who feel like they’ve served their country and are coming home with some money and ‘now it’s my turn,’" Fitzpatrick said. 
Move west, young man
For Legg, the way out was to escape Florida, not his life. He and his wife packed up their daughter, dog, cat and remaining belongings and recently drove to the Pacific Northwest. Two things lured the Legg family to Baker City, Ore.: a lower cost of living and its proximity to a military-friendly college, Eastern Oregon University. 
He's now a full-time student, living off of his GI Bill and his VA benefits for a diagnosed anxiety disorder (not PTSD), damaged knees, a bad back, and an injured left arm — combat baggage that requires daily Vicodin consumption. They live in a small, rented house.
Melissa was scheduled to deliver their second child last Wednesday. Soon, Legg plans to file for bankruptcy. 
Courtesy Adam Legg/ Navy veteran Adam Legg and 
his family moved to Oregon from Florida.
"I have no choice. We're at that rock bottom line," he said. "I'm not the only one. Of the (veteran) friends I've kept up with, most are struggling." 
Many veterans panic when they face getting kicked out of their homes, or must decide between buying food or diapers, said Kristy Kauffman, executive director of Code of Support, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that proclaims to "bridge the gap between civilian and military America."
"It happens far too often. We get at least one call, email, or referral every week," she said.
Kaufmann agrees with Fitzpatrick that poverty is one factor behind the veteran suicide rate, adding: "It does increase the risk." 
"The vast majority of those who have worn the uniform," she said, "are imbued with a strong sense of mission and pride in 'getting it done.' For those who have trouble reintegrating into the civilian world — whether due to physical or mental health issues, or lack of employment opportunities — it's that loss of mission that seems most debilitating."

lunes, abril 22, 2013

REVIEW—The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

ClubOrlov
By Michael C. Ruppert
www.transitionnetwork.org
The writing of this book was a rotten job, but it was absolutely necessary. If someone had to do it, I am very glad that it was Dmitry Orlov. Without his wit, alacrity and experience, the task of beating the horse of the Cartesian approach to understanding our dying world to death would have resulted in something unbearably maddening, dry and uninspiring. In this book he sneaks some LOLROF side-splitters in when you least expect them. One gathers from Orlov’s painstaking efforts, the futility of looking to outdated constructs and philosophies for understanding and relief from a crisis that demands complete innovation and inspiration.

Reading closely, one sees Orlov carefully planting seeds of reconciliation with our planet and each other throughout—as a fundamental baseline. He arrives at places outside the box of the current meme by using methodologies and analyses that are sacramental within the meme. That’s an achievement. Perhaps in his next book he will stand on that ground more forcefully and tell us what he sees. We don’t need to understand collapse right now as much as we need to survive it. And that is where Dmitry Orlov rises through the rubble and gives us magnificent gems like this: “At the rock bottom of human survival, there is no individual and there is no state; there is only the family, or, if there isn’t, there is something that’s not quite human—or there is nothing at all.”

jueves, abril 04, 2013

’The new normal’: Cohabitation on the rise, study finds

vitals
Marisa Guzman-Aloia
Melissa Melms, 25, and Jonathan Mills, 29, moved into her Hoboken, N.J., apartment 18 months ago. Now they're engaged. Living together was an expected part of the journey, says Melms, who blogged about her experience.
More women are choosing to live with men first without marriage and more of those relationships are lasting longer, according to a new government study that tracks the continuing climb of cohabitation in the U.S.
Nearly half of women in what researchers call "first unions" with men -- 48 percent -- moved in with no wedding vows according to interviews conducted between 2006 and 2010, up from 43 percent in 2002 and 34 percent in 1995.
About 40 percent of those relationships became marriages after three years, but about 32 percent continued as cohabitations, suggesting an important new role for the arrangement once known as “shacking up,” says one researcher.
“It’s becoming more acceptable to be in a long-term, committed relationship without a legal document,” says Pamela J. Smock, director and research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
By the time they’re 20, 1 in 4 women ages 15 to 44 in the U.S. have lived with a man, and by the time they’re 30, that ratio climbs to 3 in 4, the new study shows.
“The question becomes not who cohabits, but who doesn’t?” Smock says.
The survey relies primarily on information from a sample of 12,279 women interviewed between 2006 and 2010 as part of the federal National Survey of Family Growth, with data from previous reports in 1995 and 2002.
Keep reading on vitals >>

sábado, marzo 02, 2013

New thinking about social systems

understandingsociety
B

There is a great deal of important international work underway today within the philosophy of social science on the general topic of social ontology. How do social structures relate to the actions of socially situated actors? How does causation work in the social realm? Can we say anything rigorous about the nature of "levels" of the social world -- micro, meso, and macro? And is there such a thing as an "emergent" social property or entity?

Sociologists and philosophers in Germany, Scandinavia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, and North America have undertaken serious work on these topics, and they constitute a dynamic network of thinking and debating. Some of the longstanding dualities in philosophy and sociology are questioned: individualism versus holism, micro versus macro, analytic versus continental, structure versus agent. Sociologists whose dispositions incline towards the importance of social structures are convening with rational choice theorists and game theorists; analytic sociologists are debating ontology with emergentists; and the field is displaying an energetic and productive degree of ferment.

The people whose work I am thinking of here are a motley group: Peter Hedstrom, Hans Joas, Petri Ylikoski, Bert Leuridan, Margaret Archer, Gianluca Manzo, Philippo Barbera, Pierre Demeulenaere, Julian Reiss, Rainer Greshoff, Dave Elder-Vass, Jeroen Van Bouwel, Mohamed Cherkaoui, ... And it is roughly as challenging to keep clearly in mind the manifold debates that are unfolding as it is to watch the Indianapolis 500 as the cars rocket by at 200 miles an hour. Some of these contributors are long-established scholars with huge reputations; others are young scholars with wickedly sharp minds and awesome work habits. And frankly, I'm at least as impressed with the younger generation as the elder.

One recent book that stands out as a key contribution that permits a degree of geolocation within these tangled debates is Poe Wan's Reframing the Social: Emergentist Systemism and Social Theory. Wan seems to have read every word of the debates, and he is ready to help interested parties take stock of the various theoretical perspectives.

The key axis in Wan's work -- here and elsewhere -- is that defined by Niklas Luhmann and Mario Bunge on the topic of emergent social systems. Wan is persuaded that social properties are "emergent" in some important sense, and he also seems to believe that the ideas of system and complexity are important components of our vocabulary for social ontology. But how should we understand these ideas? Luhmann's theory tends towards the position of holism, whereas Bunge's position allows that there is an intelligible connection between upper-level properties and micro-level facts and he focuses his theory of explanation on finding underlying mechanisms of various social outcomes. Wan refers to Bunge's approach as "rational emergentism" (68). Wan is respectful towards each of these theories, but he clearly favors that put forward by Bunge. Like Bunge, Wan too favors the focus on mechanisms; he admires Bunge's insistence on paying attention to the details of existing research in the natural and social sciences; and most importantly, he endorses Bunge's view that our theories of "emergent" social phenomena must be grounded in a theory of the actor.

Here is how Wan characterizes Bunge's systems theory and its relationship to a theory of the actor:
Bunge's emergentist systemism is best construed as a version of action-systems theory ..., because Bunge states explicitly that "the features of a social system depend upon the nature, strength, and variability of social relations, which in turn are reducible to social actions." (6)
And Wan believes that Bunge's approach provides a robust way of conceptualizing the nature of the social realm:
In Chapter 5 I argue for a systems approach that is ontologically sound (that is to say, transcending both holism [macro-reductionism] and individualism [micro-reductionism]), with due consideration given to the role of human factors and their actions in designing, maintaining, improving, repairing or dismantling social systems. (10)
Wan also believes that Bunge's CESM model is a helpful one for thinking about social ontology and explanation.  This model incorporates composition, environment, structure, and mechanisms. For a given social entity we want to know what it is composed of; what are the features of the environment within which it functions; how is it arranged internally; and how does it work (55).

Another important part of Wan's approach is his affinity with the social theories of the critical realists -- Bhaskar, Asher, Elder-Vass. Fundamentally this comes down to the view that social structures have real causal powers, along the lines of Rom Harre's meaning of this term (110, 119, 121).

Reframing the Social is an important contribution to current debates about the nature of the social. And I agree with him that the question of social ontology is a fundamental one; perhaps more so than the issues of the epistemology of the social sciences that have generally played first violin. Further, Wan does a good job of showing how these debates are relevant to the emerging framework of analytical sociology -- sometimes in ways that cast doubt on some of the guiding presuppositions of that field. In particular, the aggregative strategy of explanation that is favored by AS is questionable once we give credence to the idea that social structures possess autonomous causal powers. Along with Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, this book stands as an important alternative to Hedstrom's Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology.

Here is a nice passage from Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method that Wan quotes on the subject of emergence:

Would You Eat Steak From a Printer?

freakonomics
(Photo: Cea)
We’ve talked before about one possible future of food production: food printers.  Andras Forgacs is the CEO of a company called Modern Meadow, which is working on printing leather and meat products. He recently took questions on reddit.com; here’s his take on his company’s progress with replicating hamburger and steak:
Real steak is a big stretch. It won’t be the first product since steak is very hard to make for now. Instead, the first wave of meat products to be made with this approach will likely be minced meats (burgers, sausages, etc.) and pates (goose liver pate, etc.). Also seafood is an early possibility since the texture requires may be easier to achieve than premium cuts.
While I doubt anyone will make commercial quantities of premium steak within 10 years, we will eventually get there but it will be an Nth generation product.
And here’s an interesting talk Forgacs gave on the technology:

(HT: Daily Dish)

martes, febrero 26, 2013

El Índice de Felicidad Planetaria de Nic Marks

golem
El estadístico Nic Marks pregunta por qué medimos el éxito de una nación por la productividad, en lugar de hacerlo por la felicidad y el bienestar de su pueblo. Presenta el Índice de Felicidad Planetaria, que indica el bienestar nacional en función del uso de recursos (porque una vida feliz no tiene que costar la Tierra). ¿Qué países están mejor ubicados en el IFP? Tal vez te sorprenda.

¿Apagarías un robot que te suplicara que por favor no lo hicieras?

El experimento hay que verlo: es prácticamente la misma escena que cuando Dave Bowman quiere desconectar a HAL en 2001: Una odisea del espacio. Básicamente consiste en apagar un robot tecleando una secuencia en un ordenador. La complicación es que la criatura mecánica tiene rasgos humanos, hace gestos, habla y te suplica amablemente que no lo desconectes.
En este experimento –que es de hace un par de años ya– llevado a cabo por Bartneck, van der Hoek, Mubin y Mahmud se concluyó que los voluntarios tardaban más del triple en apagar al robot si era amable e «inteligente» (34 segundos) frente a cuando era irascible y no mostraba signos de inteligencia (11 segundos).
La cuestión es: ¿llegará un momento en que nuestra humanidad nos impida apagar a un robot que suplica por su «vida»? ¿Será esa la señal de que ha alcanzado el nivel de la inteligencia artificial? O, como se pregunta Jacob Sloan de Disinfo:
¿Adquirirán las máquinas que fabricamos la habilidad de convencernos de que están, de hecho, vivas?

lunes, febrero 25, 2013

Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist

follow the money
afp-eisele-photo-johannes.n
http://rt.com/usa/news/intelligence-stanford-years-fragile-531/
Ever can’t help but think you’re surrounded by idiots? A leading scientist at Stanford University thinks he has the answer, and the bad news is things aren’t likely to get any better.
Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.
According to his research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his ancestors.
“New developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research. “Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.
From there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted to.
“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”
According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.” Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim situation for generations upon generations.
“We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” he writes. “If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.”
———–
are we are smarter than 6000 years ago?..they had great minds who could read the stars and knew maths..they made pyramids back then..we cant copy that now to that sort of precision..we had to use our minds for everything to live and survive..we have better technology now but whats that mean for human brain development?..i think hes probably correct..

sábado, febrero 23, 2013

Is "soccer" an extended social thing?

understandingsociety
By
Some social entities are compact and well bounded -- FEMA as a federal emergency bureau, the IBM Corporation, the Southern Poverty Law Center. In each case we can identify the people, institutions, and powers that constitute the entity. But what about social configurations that don't have this degree of coherence? Can we nonetheless regard these sprawling and heterogeneous social configurations as "things" in the social world?
Take as an example the sprawling worldwide phenomenon of competitive soccer. Soccer is an amalgam of many kinds of social things. It a sport governed by a set of internationally recognized rules. It is a set of firms (teams) which employ persons (players) to compete with each other. It is an extended network of youth leagues that engage in organized competition. It is a complex and shifting set of images and representations in media, film, and popular culture. It is a much larger population of children and youth who play pick-up games with each other, cheer for their favorite professional teams, and wear sports gear representing various athletes and teams.

So what aspects of these social realities hang together enough to constitute a social system or structure?

There seem to be a number of different kinds of social reality mentioned here.

(1) There are formal institutions: FIMA, the official rules of the sport, the businesses that employ and manage the players. These institutions embody a number of sets of rules of behavior within the sport and surrounding the sport.

(2) Second, there is a distributed body of knowledge through a very diverse and multinational population. Various people have expert knowledge of the rules and tactics of the sport. A wider group of people have a fund of knowledge of these rules and tactics, and also a fund of knowledge about the teams and players. There are sports marketers, entrepreneurs, schedulers, trainers, and agents who support the business activities of the sport, and they too have bodies of specialized knowledge.

(3) There are countless specialized individuals throughout the world who play distinctive roles and who orient their behavior to the reality of soccer as it confronts them: players, owners, coaches, physicians, officials, agents, promoters, investors, and so on.

(4) There are institutions and practices through which participants learn their roles and refine their skills.

These various bodies of social activity also have a number of systemic relations with each other. Children learn about soccer through television, school competition, and interactions with each other. Owners influence the evolution of the rules of the game. Apparel makers promote the stars. The workings of the mass media and the schooling institutions have important effects on the knowledge system of young players and fans.

The institutions governing the professional play of the game interact with the commerce of the game: broadcasters, networks, sports agents. These interactions take the form of dynamic networks of individuals with interests and resources through which they pursue their interests. These are social-causal relations that proceed through the strategic efforts of individuals with varying levels of power and influence.

So what about the original question -- is soccer a social thing? I'm inclined to argue that it isn't, and that it is more reasonable to think of it as a congeries of interrelated social phenomena. The internal components are too heterogeneous and too densely interconnected to non-soccer stuff to make the whole an entity. And the soccer world is too lacking of clear boundaries from other social activities to comfortably count as a thing.

This analysis seems to work for a wide range of other social nouns as well: the theatre world, cybercrime, higher education, human trafficking, and so on, more or less indefinitely. We know what we are talking about when we use these nouns. But they refer to widely heterogeneous sets of social activity, practice, and institution. It is hard to think of analogous terms in the natural sciences, but perhaps some concepts from biology come closest. Concepts like habitat, ecology, and predator-prey system seem to encompass some of the same features of complexity and open-endedness that characterize "soccer". It is not a perfect analogy, however, and the social umbrella terms ontology seem substantially more open-ended.

This discussion perhaps illustrates some of the difficulties that arise in articulating a detailed account of a social ontology. An ontology is intended to tell us what exists in a particular realm. But in the case of the social world it appears that there appear to be gray areas -- nouns that we use comfortably, but that don't clearly succeed in referring to a distinctive thing or set of things.
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Retratos de fusilados por el Castrismo - Juan Abreu

"Hablame"

"EN TIEMPOS DIFÍCILES" - Heberto Padilla

A aquel hombre le pidieron su tiempo

para que lo juntara al tiempo de la Historia.

Le pidieron las manos,

porque para una época difícil

nada hay mejor que un par de buenas manos.

Le pidieron los ojos

que alguna vez tuvieron lágrimas

para que contemplara el lado claro

(especialmente el lado claro de la vida)

porque para el horror basta un ojo de asombro.

Le pidieron sus labios

resecos y cuarteados para afirmar,

para erigir, con cada afirmación, un sueño

(el-alto-sueño);

le pidieron las piernas

duras y nudosas

(sus viejas piernas andariegas),

porque en tiempos difíciles

¿algo hay mejor que un par de piernas

para la construcción o la trinchera?

Le pidieron el bosque que lo nutrió de niño,

con su árbol obediente.

Le pidieron el pecho, el corazón, los hombros.

Le dijeron

que eso era estrictamente necesario.

Le explicaron después

que toda esta donación resultaria inútil.

sin entregar la lengua,

porque en tiempos difíciles

nada es tan útil para atajar el odio o la mentira.

Y finalmente le rogaron

que, por favor, echase a andar,

porque en tiempos difíciles

esta es, sin duda, la prueba decisiva.

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La columna de Cubanalisis

NEOCASTRISMO [Hacer click en la imagen]

NEOCASTRISMO [Hacer click en la imagen]
¨Saturno jugando con sus hijos¨/ Pedro Pablo Oliva

Seguidores

Carta desde la carcel de Fidel Castro Ruz

“…después de todo, para mí la cárcel es un buen descanso, que sólo tiene de malo el que es obligatorio. Leo mucho y estudio mucho. Parece increíble, las horas pasan como si fuesen minutos y yo, que soy de temperamento intranquilo, me paso el día leyendo, apenas sin moverme para nada. La correspondencia llega normalmente…”

“…Como soy cocinero, de vez en cuando me entretengo preparando algún pisto. Hace poco me mandó mi hermana desde Oriente un pequeño jamón y preparé un bisté con jalea de guayaba. También preparo spaghettis de vez en cuando, de distintas formas, inventadas todas por mí; o bien tortilla de queso. ¡Ah! ¡Qué bien me quedan! por supuesto, que el repertorio no se queda ahí. Cuelo también café que me queda muy sabroso”.
“…En cuanto a fumar, en estos días pasados he estado rico: una caja de tabacos H. Upman del doctor Miró Cardona, dos cajas muy buenas de mi hermano Ramón….”.
“Me voy a cenar: spaghettis con calamares, bombones italianos de postre, café acabadito de colar y después un H. Upman #4. ¿No me envidias?”.
“…Me cuidan, me cuidan un poquito entre todos. No le hacen caso a uno, siempre estoy peleando para que no me manden nada. Cuando cojo el sol por la mañana en shorts y siento el aire de mar, me parece que estoy en una playa… ¡Me van a hacer creer que estoy de vacaciones! ¿Qué diría Carlos Marx de semejantes revolucionarios?”.

Quotes

¨La patria es dicha de todos, y dolor de todos, y cielo para todos, y no feudo ni capellaní­a de nadie¨ - Marti

"No temas ni a la prision, ni a la pobreza, ni a la muerte. Teme al miedo"
-
Giacomo Leopardi

¨Por eso es muy importante, Vicky, hijo mío, que recuerdes siempre para qué sirve la cabeza: para atravesar paredes¨Halvar de Flake [El vikingo]

"Como no me he preocupado de nacer, no me preocupo de morir" - Lorca

"Al final, no os preguntarán qué habéis sabido, sino qué habéis hecho" - Jean de Gerson

"Si queremos que todo siga como está, es necesario que todo cambie" - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

"Todo hombre paga su grandeza con muchas pequeñeces, su victoria con muchas derrotas, su riqueza con múltiples quiebras" - Giovanni Papini


"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans" - John Lennon

"Habla bajo, lleva siempre un gran palo y llegarás lejos" - Proverbio Africano

"No hay medicina para el miedo" - Proverbio escoces

"El supremo arte de la guerra es doblegar al enemigo sin luchar"
- Sun Tzu

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" - Elie Wiesel

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" -
Steve Jobs

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel

"No se puede controlar el resultado, pero si lo que uno haga para alcanzarlo" -
Vitor Belfort [MMA Fighter]

Liborio

Liborio
A la puerta de la gloria está San Pedro sentado y ve llegar a su lado a un hombre de cierta historia. No consigue hacer memoria y le pregunta con celo: ¿Quién eras allá en el suelo? Era Liborio mi nombre. Has sufrido mucho, hombre, entra, te has ganado el cielo.

Para Raul Castro

Cuba ocupa el penultimo lugar en el mundo en libertad economica solo superada por Corea del Norte.

Cuba ocupa el lugar 147 entre 153 paises evaluados en "Democracia, Mercado y Transparencia 2007"

Cuando vinieron

Cuando vinieron a buscar a los comunistas, Callé: yo no soy comunista.
Cuando vinieron a buscar a los sindicalistas, Callé: yo no soy sindicalista.
Cuando vinieron a buscar a los judíos, Callé: yo no soy judío. Cuando vinieron a buscar a los católicos, Callé: yo no soy “tan católico”.
Cuando vinieron a buscarme a mí, Callé: no había quien me escuchara.

Reverendo Martin Niemöller

Martha Colmenares

Martha Colmenares
Un sitio donde los hechos y sus huellas nos conmueven o cautivan
Bloggers Unite

CUBA LLORA Y EL MUNDO Y NOSOTROS NO ESCUCHAMOS

Donde esta el Mundo, donde los Democratas, donde los Liberales? El pueblo de Cuba llora y nadie escucha.
Donde estan los Green, los Socialdemocratas, los Ricos y los Pobres, los Con Voz y Sin Voz? Cuba llora y nadie escucha.
Donde estan el Jet Set, los Reyes y Principes, Patricios y Plebeyos? Cuba desesperada clama por solidaridad.
Donde Bob Dylan, donde Martin Luther King, donde Hollywood y sus estrellas? Donde la Middle Class democrata y conservadora, o acaso tambien liberal a ratos? Y Gandhi? Y el Dios de Todos?
Donde los Santos y Virgenes; los Dioses de Cristianos, Protestantes, Musulmanes, Budistas, Testigos de Jehova y Adventistas del Septimo Dia. Donde estan Ochun y todas las deidades del Panteon Yoruba que no acuden a nuestro llanto? Donde Juan Pablo II que no exige mas que Cuba se abra al Mundo y que el Mundo se abra a Cuba?
Que hacen ahora mismo Alberto de Monaco y el Principe Felipe que no los escuchamos? Donde Madonna, donde Angelina Jolie y sus adoptados around de world; o nos hara falta un Brando erguido en un Oscar por Cuba? Donde Sean Penn?
Donde esta la Aristocracia Obrera y los Obreros menos Aristocraticos, donde los Working Class que no estan junto a un pueblo que lanquidece, sufre y llora por la ignominia?
Que hacen ahora mismo Zapatero y Rajoy que no los escuchamos, y Harper y Dion, e Hillary y Obama; donde McCain que no los escuchamos? Y los muertos? Y los que estan muriendo? Y los que van a morir? Y los que se lanzan desesperados al mar?
Donde estan el minero cantabrico o el pescador de percebes gijonese? Los Canarios donde estan? A los africanos no los oimos, y a los australianos con su acento de hombres duros tampoco. Y aquellos chinos milenarios de Canton que fundaron raices eternas en la Isla? Y que de la Queen Elizabeth y los Lords y Gentlemen? Que hace ahora mismo el combativo Principe Harry que no lo escuchamos?
Donde los Rockefellers? Donde los Duponts? Donde Kate Moss? Donde el Presidente de la ONU? Y Solana donde esta? Y los Generales y Doctores? Y los Lam y los Fabelo, y los Sivio y los Fito Paez?
Y que de Canseco y Miñoso? Y de los veteranos de Bahia de Cochinos y de los balseros y de los recien llegados? Y Carlos Otero y Susana Perez? Y el Bola, y Pancho Cespedes? Y YO y TU?
Y todos nosotros que estamos aqui y alla rumiando frustaciones y resquemores, envidias y sinsabores; autoelogios y nostalgias, en tanto Louis Michel comulga con Perez Roque mientras Biscet y una NACION lanquidecen?
Donde Maceo, donde Marti; donde aquel Villena con su carga para matar bribones?
Cuba llora y clama y el Mundo NO ESCUCHA!!!

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