Arthur Rimbaud’s brief career

Enrique Krauze: Latinoamerica -el siglo perdido

Cerca de 600 millones de personas viven al sur del Río Bravo de México, y una gran mayoría de ellas son, o bien, de clase media baja, o bien, pobres. Esto no debería ser así. América Latina es rica en recursos naturales, ventajas geográficas y capital humano. Y, sin embargo, su economía está sumamente rezagada en comparación con la de la parte angloparlante de América del Norte. ¿Por qué?

Carlos Fuentes - The buried mirror

The five-part BBC television series, THE BURIED MIRROR, for which Carlos Fuentes was the on-camera host, motivated him to produce this richly illustrated, exquisitely designed book. Musing on the five hundred years of Latin American history that began with Columbus’ arrival on the North American continent, Fuentes establishes as his controlling metaphor the mirrors often found in ancient Indian burial mounds. Mirrors, when held, up, permit people to see where they have been, where they came from.

The point of view in this book shifts continually between Latin America and Europe, focusing most notably on the Spain from which most early European settlers in Latin American came. In the Spain of the fifteenth century, Fuentes finds strong parallels to the Latin America of today. Whereas Spain was a country of mixed cultures, most notably European, Moorish, and Jewish, Latin America from its beginnings had an intermixture of the European and the native Indian cultures. This intermixing was intensified by an influx of people from Africa and the Orient into Latin America.

Fuentes asks what Latin America has to celebrate in this quincentennial year. Its countries are faced with great unemployment, high deficits, runaway inflation, pollution, and other problems common in modern, industrialized societies. His answer is that Latin America can legitimately celebrate its cultural heritage, which is manifested today in its art, its music, and its literature.

Fuentes’ metaphorical mirror reflects reality and projects imagination. In the broad, diverse cultural heritage of Latin American countries, he finds cause for optimism.

Steve Jobs

Raised by adoptive parents, Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock to two wizards, a.k.a. graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant pursuing his doctorate in political science, and Joanne Simpson, who was studying for her master’s in speech. He was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of San Francisco.

Latin America - The left turn left behind

Latin America, rich in natural resources, geographic assets and human capital.

With its colonial past, its Catholic church and missionaries who brought the Truth

to its pre-Columbian inhabitants.

With its central governments and its political instability and populism.

Vibrant region full of the interaction of ideas and power, nationalism and anti-Americanism.

With its secular saints, where theology and revolution marry.

Jose Vasconcelos, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Jose Marti, Che Guevara, Subcomandante Marcos.

A land of religious prophets and theological seriousness

The continent's lost century. Toxic mix of state repression and legalized plunder.

Peronism, first great populist movement in Latin America.

Argentina then among the fifteen richest in the world -a huge budget surplus.

Military dictatorships and radio melodramas.

Peron venerated Mussolini and studied "Mein Kampf".

From Goebbels he learned the importance of oratory and the medium of radio.

The political manipulation of the masses.

Evita(r) deeply bitter about her childhood.

Latin America, a volatile combination of populism and authoritarianism,

with its uneducated industrial workers and its cult of personalities.

Ruthless persecution of opponents, a large category that included classical liberals.

Evita owned 1200 gold and silver brooches, 1653 diamonds, and 120 wristwatches.

Meanwhile politicians applied policies that brought disaster and backwardness.

The story of 20th-century Latin America.

The failure to respect property rights, the erecting of (trade) barriers

that destroyed currencies and produced nothingness.

Politics set in motion by resentment, envy, and feelings of cultural inferiority.

The problem may have started with economic liberals' fell prey but finished with

the temptations of state intervention.

Creativity, openness, generosity were lost among socialist populisms.

Neither socialism nor populism, free of Spanish colonial masters and American influence.

Millions of Latin American men and women died or lived in political exile.

Heterogeneous, hardworking, conservative people who dislike US excessive individualism.

The Latin American enigma looking for models to benefit everyone

against the United States military interventions and coup d'Etats.

Latin Americanism evolved into nationalism and anti-Americanism.

The reaction of all things Anglo-Saxon would lead to embrace communism.

Fascism and communism two sides of the same coin.

Individual liberty versus collectivism.

The left turn in Latin America intellectual life, a tendency to give the heroes of the left

the benefit of the doubt because they were idealists.

The parallel between Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, a journey toward redemption.

Latin American intellectuals rejecting European fascism moved to communism and ideological

fanaticism determined to deliver social justice.

They did not brake free of colonial mentality that saw society as hierarchical,

governed from the top down by an elite.

Latin American intellectuals needed to let it go the socialist ideal that guided them

to swing toward democracy and social justice and stop trying to reconcile liberalism with socialism.

This is pure fantasy.

Private property and the rule of law are the most fundamental tenets of a free and prosperous society.

Are they really?

Corey Robin - Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fear has played a crucial role in US politics. During the last presidential campaign, for example, the Republican team ran a television ad featuring menacing wolves roaming a dark forest. Simultaneously, a woman announcer warned voters that “weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.” (Associated Press, 2004) In the context of a campaign centered on terrorism and national security, no one could miss the Republican message: only George W. Bush can adequately protect the United States against the terrorizing army of terrorist wolves. Only a few weeks before the ad appeared on television, Robb Willer, a young sociologist from Cornell University, published an online paper demonstrating that fear toward terrorism clearly advantaged the Republican President. Using time-series analyses, Willer showed that the Post-September 11 terror warnings have consistently increased popular support for the Republican President (Willer, 2004).

The Reactionary Mind

Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?

Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.

Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society--one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success.

Written by a keen, highly regarded observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

Political Fear - Total terror

Fear: The History of a Political Idea

Ideological truth: concentration camps and gulags. Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, Montesquieu

Schönbrunn Palace - Vienna

The palace was build to rival French Versailles in baroque beauty and importance but House Habsburg lacked funds to outdo its rivalling nation France.
In earlier times it served as summer residence to various Habsburg rulers.

Emperor Franz Joseph (ruled 1848-1916), who was born here in 1830, spent the last years of his life entirely in Schönbrunn. In 1918, the palace became the property of the new republic. Due to this historical importance, its beautiful location and its gardens this palace is one of the very top sights in Vienna. Furthermore, the entire complex was added to the UNESCO's world cultural heritage list.

Vienna

Tour of Schönbrunn Palace

La historia de Auschwitz

A 70 kilómetros de Cracovia, Auschwitz no es solo una visita turística, sino un recuerdo del holocausto más cruento de la Europa del siglo .

Adam Curtis - Machines of Loving Grace

How humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

Machines of Loving Grace claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on the Debt Ceiling Agreement

A declaration of war on the poor

The Black War Over Obama -“Call to Conscience”

There is a deep reservoir of frustration, confusion, and even rage among many in the African-American community -with unemployment hovering near 17 percent for African-Americans (the national average rate is 9 percent) and 11 percent of black homeowners facing imminent foreclosure, African-Americans have ample reason for anxiety about the coming budget cuts that Obama reluctantly signed into law this month. The Congressional Black Caucus chairman called the recent debt deal “a sugar-coated satan sandwich” that will do little to help communities already struggling.

“A beer summit won’t help our issues,” Princeton professor Cornel West adds, recalling the now-famous meeting the president had with a white police officer and Harvard’s Skip Gates following a tense confrontation between the two in 2009.

Gates stands by West, his longtime friend: “He is completely sincere in his concern for the poor. I may disagree, as brothers sometimes do, with the way the message is being handled, but I commend him for his work and his passion.”

Moving Planet

Global movement

September 24

Obama impersonator

Reggie Brown as Obama on Real Time

Art in America - contemporary women artists

If there is one central conclusion to be drawn from the recent array of books and catalogues on contemporary women artists, it is that there exists no such thing as women’s art, or even feminist art. Indeed, as many feminist scholars, critics and artists have long argued, possession of a uterus, or identification with feminism, in no way determines, much less defines, the nature of women’s artistic production. Despite the existence of an extensive bibliography seeking to codify feminine esthetics in visual art, the more women artists become critically visible, the less they reveal any overarching features that might be said to reveal their sex. This is not to deny that anatomy, sexuality, psychology and feminist politics may be factors in both the conception and meaning of an artist’s work, but this is far from constituting the artistic equivalent of sexual determinism.

Do terms like "identity", "identity politics", and "gender identity", typically

refused (or subverted) by white artists, have other valences for artists of color,

who obviously are "raced" in a far more concrete and oppressive fashion?

Berlin architecture

Famous Berlin buildings

Matrix

Neo es confrontado con la opción de si tomar la pastilla azul o la pastilla roja. La pastilla azul representa el regreso al mundo de las fantasías programadas donde, sin saberlo, vive la mayoría de la gente. Optar por la pastilla roja es decidirse por la libertad, por la posibilidad de construir una vida propia. Ahora bien, en el film esta segunda opción no se abre para todos. Implica, además, enfrentarse a una verdad dura pues es tomar conciencia de que la vida que estamos llevando es solo una fantasía impuesta por una súper computadora. Por último, tomar la pastilla roja significa comprometerse con la lucha ya que no es posible ninguna construcción alternativa si antes no se resiste la permanente asechanza de esa máquina de producción de ilusiones, la matrix, que pretende engullir los últimos reductos de libertad.

Post Anarchism

To live without dead time

From Tahrir Square to…Wall Street?

Thousands of Americans are preparing to march on Wall Street on Saturday Sept. 17. Their request: justice for a country that lost its shirt to traders and money managers in 2008.

Leonard Cohen

minimalismo zen,

existencialismo de alcoba,

constructiva sátira urbana para demoler ciudades,

íntimos himnos guerrilleros,

vertical armonización bíblica para el horizontal conocimiento bíblico,

euforia mística para depresivos agnósticos,

líneas rectas y perfectas para decir adiós

Judith Butler

Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity

The Rise of Hitler

From Unknown to Dictator of Germany

Eugenics and the Nazis -the California connection

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.