Life in Central America

Badmouthing punch cards

From the Center for Voting and Democracy
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Much existing equipment, such as punch card systems, in addition to being unreliable, is not compatible with ranking candidates or "clumping" votes as in cumulative voting.
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NOT TRUE!

You can do very sophisticated processing with punch cards, it's all done mechanically, but you can see exactly what is going on. This business about their being unreliable is just not true.

This whole computer voting thing is just a distraction, a red herring. Before we know it we will end up with a system which looks flashy, but is easily corrupted. We need to keep things out in the open, instead of hiding them inside computers.

But I’m beginning to realize I have a hopeless task. Americans are so enamored of computers, they won’t listen to common sense. They think punch cards are an “obsolete technology”, the worst thing imaginable. To which I reply “Is the wheel obsolete?”

Badmouthing computers is like madmouthing someone else's wife. The husband can do it, but other people have to be careful.

A beautiful tailbone

The new women’s fashions lets us horny males view some new parts of the female anatomy, and I am enjoying the show. These fashions are more suitable for the young (or even the very young) it is true. But there is no shortage of young chicks down here; it is a young population.

Today, on the bus home, I saw a particularly fine specimen, I wish I had a picture of the rear view above her low-rider jeans – awesome! Someone should have a calendar displaying this choice part of the female anatomy.

Of course, I can’t think of any part of the female anatomy that is not awesome. Like the Japanese men, I notice the nape of the neck, which is shown off by a short haircut. Those little hairs back there radiate a frequency of their own. And I had a girl friend once who had the most beautiful feet, I loved to take her shoes off.

I could go on - and on. But you get the general idea.

The kleptocrats have taken over

I stole this directly from the Hightower Lowdown, written by Jim Hightower and Philip Frazer, the August 2003 issue. He likes the word kleptocrat, but in the last century these guys were called plutocrats. It amounts to the same thing: robber barons, but the kleptocrats are more sophisticated, they control the media.

First, he defines kleptocrat: 1. A nation ruled by thieves. 2. A government characterized by the practice of transferring money from the many to the few. 3. A ruling class of moneyed elites that usurps liberty, justice, sovereignty, and other democratic rights from the people. 4. The USA in 2003

The kleptocrats have taken over. Look at America’s leadership today – not just political, but corporate too. Tell me you wouldn’t trade the whole mess of them for one good kindergarten teacher. When looking at them, I can’t help mumbling to myself: 100,000 sperm and you were the fastest?

Yes, they’re in charge! We live in the wealthiest country in history - a country of boundless possibilities, a country committed to democratic ideals, a country with the potential for spectacular human achievement – but we find ourselves ruled (politically, economically, culturally, and ethically) by a confederacy of kleptocrats.

A couple of years ago, Japanese police discovered more than 400 pieces of women’s underwear in the home of Sadao Ushimora, a fellow who was a prominent official in Japan’s finance ministry at the time. Mr. Ushimura proclaimed total innocence of any possible scandal or perversion, explaining: “I picked up all the lingerie on the streets by pure chance.”

We still have our underwear in American, but we’ve been stripped of a garment far more delicate and precious: our democracy. The essence of democracy – our power to control decisions that affect us – has steadily and quietly been pilfered by corporate kleptocrats. They have collected up our democratic powers piece by piece, hoarding them in the privacy of their fiefdoms. These corporate elites (fully abetted by the governmental elites they have elected) now effectively control the decisions that affect We the People - everything from public-spending priorities to environmental degradation, wages to war, what’s on the “news”, to who gets elected.

Maria is giving Sonya the boot

There was a horrible scene today between Maria and Sonya. Maria expects Sonya to be her hired help, and do whatever she wants to her to do. In return, she gets to live here, and a suppose she gets a little money. Sonya is not happy with this arraignment, of being bossed around all the time.

Sonya now has a serious boy friend, and she has been spending more time with him – including nights. This is exactly Maria’s life style, but she will not tolerate this behavior in Sonya.

At first, Maria was delighted just to have Sonya around, because she is such a nice person. But now her bossiness is coming out, and she has gotten downright ugly. Sonya handles it very well, she never gets angry, and eventually Maria calms down. Scenes like this bring out my protective instincts, but in this case I am helpless.

I like living here when Sonya is around, this new development gives me some incentive to go somewhere else.

The Leave No Child Behind Act

I read an article in the New York times recently that supported this act. I queried the other members of my family about it, because all of them are school teachers, or have been. They were all critical of the act, and all the special testing that was killing them. I was especially looking forward to the response from my nephew Stan, who married a special Ed teacher. Here it is, and as you can see, he can hardly restrain himself.
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I'll be answering because this topic tends to make Barbara froth at the mouth. I can stay a little cooler because it's not my professional standards that are under criticism.

The Act may sound good to uninformed laymen, but all it accomplishes is laying the blame for the poor showing of some students on the teachers. I doubt that the politicians who enacted this ridiculous piece of drivel have ever spent an hour in front of the blackboard. Here is their simplistic solution. If a teacher's students don't do well, fire the teacher. Eventually you'll either find the teacher who can work with the students, or you'll run out of teachers.

Would it not make more sense to actually give the schools and teachers the funding they require. We're not only talking paychecks here. Many school systems can't afford up to date textbooks for their students. Some can't even furnish proper amounts of paper. Teachers will actually buy school supplies out of their own pockets and on what they get paid, those pockets aren't all that deep. Tax time is coming up and I'm looking over Barbara's W-2. She has a Master's in Education and 7 years experience and what she makes is appalling. I wouldn't do it for that much. Salaries for this year were frozen because the funding wasn't there. Not that the increase would have been all that astronomical. Missouri is hardly alone in this. The investment we make in our own future is laughable at best. I have seen blue collar workers treated with more respect than teachers get from the school boards and local citizenry.

Let's not forget our politicians, they may be all for better education while campaigning, but then they're cutting budgets when in office. As for Special Ed, Barbara's kids, I can only speak for the situation in Missouri because that's the system I can observe. I would imagine that most states are reasonably similar though. Missouri just made it that much harder to qualify for Special Ed. Yet Barbara has added eight new students to her classroom, with the possibility of four more coming. To qualify requires a significant variation between a child's IQ and their performance on a standardized test. These students are not dumped into special ed, they have a very real disability. Every child's problem is different from the next. That is why they have an IEP, Individual Education Program, which supposedly outlines a student's needs and what can be done for them.

Having seen some of the IEP's from students that move into the district, I have to sometimes wonder if other schools are as on the ball as Barbara is. Time is also an issue with these kids. Barbara can have Kindergartners through sixth graders in her classroom at any given time. Obviously the same lessons can not be given to the whole room. Also IEP's need to be reviewed, aptitude tests need to be given, and the amount of paperwork to be done for each student should drive any ecology fanatic into a spastic fit. She is supposed to have an aide, but Kelly is usually only in the room for 1 to 2 hours. The school steals Kelly for just about every other job, like monitoring the cafeteria. Her salary comes out of the Special Ed budget, but her other jobs are justified by saying that SE kids are in the lunchroom.

Requirements for all these reams of paperwork are also subject to arbitrary changes to suit the Politically Correct stance at the time. e.g. Students were expected to "Improve" in their area of study. Last year, it was announced that it was no longer proper terminology. The new word was "Increase". Barbara had to go through every IEP and change the wording. This meaningless task took more hours than I care to think about. The hours spent unravelling red tape and wading through paperwork suck a great many hours of instruction from the students all this idiocy is supposed to be helping.

There is a lot of turnover in Special Ed classes. The parents of these kids tend toward the lower class and are somewhat nomadic, avoiding monetary problems or problems with the authorities. Records from old schools may be spotty at best, contradictory, or even missing altogether. One of Barbara's set of parents were arrested for running a Meth lab in their basement. To most of these people, education is not a terribly high priority. Many parents won't even admit that their child has a problem. How can a teacher be effective if the parents won't work with them? Many of these kids come totally unprepared for school. Some have never so much as held a pencil or crayon in their hands. Children have come into Kindergarten who have not been potty trained. Some can barely even speak coherently.

With the head start these kids are given is it any wonder that they do so poorly? Every month, Barbara and her fellow SE teacher hold a reading marathon. An hour and a half after school to help the students reading and comprehension. Volunteers, high school students, parents, and myself help the kids read and take tests on the books they just finished. Some of these kids are never going to read at grade level regardless of how hard they or we try. These kids have a very real disability and this article acts as if these problems don't exist. This is the equivalent of telling a child in a wheelchair that he will have to be running with his classmates in gym class by the end of the year.

This approach ignores the real problem. Burying your head in the sand is not an effective way to help the kids in Special education. The politicians may "care" about the poor Peepul, but do you think they have as much concern for the individual students as the teachers who actually work with these kids and help to make something of their lives? No Child Left Behind is going to be about as meaningful as legislating morality. It's Ivory Tower theory at its very worst. It is scapegoating the people we won't give proper support to. It must be nice to be so sure that a simplistic solution can solve a terribly complex problem. How do I feel about this article? I think our author should spend a week or two in a Special Ed classroom before he opens his big mouth again. Then let's see what he has to say.

Preocupar

In Spanish, to say you care about something, you use the verb preocupar (preoccupied).

Recently, I was trying to have a conversation about the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with Javier, Maria’s boyfriend. Costa did not go along with the agreement accepted by the other Central American countries. But they did reach a separate agreement with Washington last Sunday. This treaty was negotiated, in secret, by the Tico business interests, and now they have to sell to the rest of the country. Not everybody is happy about it, especially some of the farmers who will be wiped out by the heavily-subsidized American agricultural products.

Costa Rica is puzzled. They have idealized American, as I have said before. Now they can’t understand why America is not interested in their problems – like poverty. Costa Rica still has a lot of poor people, and they have struggled to fix this problem. Now CAFTA will make the situation worse.

What could I say? I decided to be blunt: America doesn’t care about their problems. This is not totally true, of course, many Americans care about the poverty in Central America, and I see some of them everytime I go to Nicaragua. But when you put everything in the scale and check out the balance, it definitely tips in the negative direction. American business interests override America’s humanitarian interests, and it has been this way since day one - and this is especially true in Central America.

Central Americans have a short memory, and they quickly forget the suffering American has caused them. Nicaragua is an excellent example of this.

Of course, having a short memory can be a good survival strategy, when you have to forget the past and move on – but it can also get you into the same trouble all over again. In all of Central America, Costa Rica is the only country that seems to realize how difficult it is to have a powerful, selfish neighbor. It is also the best educated country, and maybe there is a correlation here. The intellectuals in other countries are well aware of the problem, but this awareness is now growing among the common people in Costa Rica, and it is a painful realization.

I tried to explain this to Javier, but my Spanish was inadequate. So I have researched the problem. I want to say that American does not care about poverty anywhere: el Estados Unidos no preocupa con la pobreza en ningun lugar. (I won’t go on to explain that this is true inside the US too.) Let me explain the Spanish construction, so you can appreciate how difficult it is to learn another language, even ones which have a common ancestor: Latin.

First, the verb in Spanish has many different forms depending on the person and the tense. Preocupa is the first person present tense of preocupar. 'La pobreza' is 'poverty', no big problem there, except that there is little resemblance to the English noun, and in Spanish all nouns have to be preceded by an article (el, la, los, las, instead of just plain 'the'). 'Anywhere', in Spanish, is three different phrases, depending on whether the sentence is a question, or it is a positive or negative sentence. 'En ningun lugar' is the negative form.

Obvious, isn’t it?

Women in Iraq Decry Decision To Curb Rights

From the Washington Post

BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 -- For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.

Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.

Revolutionary fervor and the paramilitary reaction

This posting is in two parts. The first part is due to my reading Fire from the Mountain, by Omar Cabezas, an autobiography of a Sandinista activist. The second is an article in the NACLA report of the Americas, called Latin American-style dirty war in Iraq? The first gives you a feel for what it feels like to be a rebel, and the second describes a typical reaction: the organization of paramilitaries to fight the rebels.

First, let me quote Cabezas:

The decision to join the Frente had a lot to do, I think, with our practice of compartmentalization, which meant that none of the compañeros knew the details of the organization as a whole. All you knew is what you heard, and the Frente made a lot of noise. We had posters plastered all over the streets; on the walls; we robbed banks, which the radio stations reported while the whole country hung on the beep-beep-beep of those famous flashes. And with news like that going out to the whole country we saw ourselves as much bigger than we really were through the magnifying glass of publicity. That was beautiful stuff.

I went to Mass at the cathedral of Leon just to hear what people were saying in the church lobby after the service – the same sort of thing you would hear in the stadium before the game. Or on the steps of the building of Letters and Sciences at the University, or in car repair shops, or in the barber shop when the barber is talking to the guy in the chair beside you. And deep down inside you said to yourself, “If they only knew I was in the Frente!”

Now here’s something interesting: armed actions of any revolutionary vanguard not only strengthens the masses spiritually and politically, I mean, their effect isn’t just outside the organization, but within the ranks too, raising the fighting spirit of the militants. It’s an incredibly delicious thing, and you’ve got the live it to understand it completely. In secret, in total silence, you know who you are: the vanguard.

Now, the NACLA article.

The US military is applying its infamous National Security Doctrine, so familiar to many Latin Americans. A primary component of the is doctrine is the use of paramilitary forces to gather intelligence and carry out strikes against suspected insurgents. …

The new paramilitary force will be drawn from the armed wings of the seven largest parties in the Governing Council - seen by the Bush administration to be the strongest supporters of the occupation. The new force will be divided into five companies, each of which will work temporarily with a ten-man US Army Special Forces team before operating on their own. Their mission: to hunt down Saddam loyalists and other anti-occupation insurgents.

[Here it describes the results of the counterinsurgency tactics in Guatemala, Peru, and Columbia. Tens of thousand of people, many of them innocent civilians, were destroyed in an especially brutal manner.]

Despite the horrific legacy of US counterinsurgency strategies in Latin America, the Bush administration appears intent on utilizing the same “dirty war” tactics to combat insurgents in Iraq. Some members of the 25-person Iraqi Governing Council have criticized the proposal to incorporate fighters from the various militias into one paramilitary force under the command of the US military. Independent council member Ghazi Yawar said “We should be dissolving the militias, not finding ways to legitimize them. This sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people.”

One concern – not to mention the potential for human rights abuses – us that the paramilitaries would undermine any future democratic development through intimidation of voters on behalf of the political parties with which there are affiliated. Leaders of these parties could also use the paramilitaries to suppress political dissent.

Perhaps some of you will want me to tie this all together. But I won’t. The parallels are obvious to me, and I sure they are to you too.

MoveOn ad

MoveOn.org has a good ad, but CBS refuses to show it.

I am now buying groceries for the whole house

Last week, Sonya started asking me for money for groceries each morning. At first it wasn’t much, only 1000 colones ($2.50). But now it has gone up to 5000. Sonya keeps saying Maria will pay me back, but this has never happened. We now seem to have a shortage of toilet paper, so I suppose I will be paying for that too.

This seems to be a Latino practice: you borrow money, but you don’t pay it back - or you don’t pay back very much. I seem to be doing this with my brother. I thought I could pay back the money I owe him much more rapidly, but the money always goes for something else at the last moment – such as supplies for the house.

I seem to be turning into a Latino.