Life in Central America

Ideological captivity

This is from the book Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson, subtitled A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. He points out, over and over again, that Luther grew up in another era, and was a formative element of yet another era, neither of which we can really appreciate, no matter what we think.
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An appreciation of the sincerity in an idealogical system other than our own is extremely difficult. This is partially because our own idealogy, as it must, forbids us to ever question and analyze the structure of what we hold to be true, since only thus can we maintain the fiction that we chose to believe what in fact we had no choice but to believe. While we are more than eager to find the logical flaws, and particularly the insincerity and captivity, in one who operates in another system. We may fail to understand that the indoctrinated individual of another era or country may feel quite at peace and quite free and productive in his ideological captivity.

Tico parks are in state of emergency

This story is from the Tico Times.

Costa Rica’s national parks don’t have enough money to keep on operating. They now have 100 fewer employees than they did a decade ago, but the poaching pressures on the parks have increased enormously.

Alvaro Ugalde, named in 1999 as one of Time magazine’s Latin American Leaders of the Century, said “I was so sure, 10 or 15 years ago, that we only needed time to see the parks producing money, and then the army of protectors would be huge. The army of moneymakers is huge but the defenders of the parks are very small.”

Revenue brought in by the parks is absorbed by the national budge, and rarely makes it way back in the form of park guard salaries or other much-needed funding.

In the past, international funds were available for operating the parks, but most international funding has been diverted to protect areas in the Amazon region, Africa, or Asia.

The only source of funding now would be the tourist industry, who has been sympathetic towards the parks plight, but has been unwilling to fork out hard cash.

Several parks may have to close as early as June - a move that would devastate nearby businesses, who tout the protected areas and their wildlife as a main attraction.

Costa Rica has been getting a free ride from the international environmental community, and eco-tourism. But that gravy train has ended.

Freedom and Liberty in Silicon Valley

No one gets excited about these words anymore. How strange! Is there is some much Freedom and Liberty in our lives that we don’t need any more? Or is it in such short supply, and so difficult to get, we don’t want to be frustrated by thinking about it?

I just talked on the phone to one of my old engineering buddies in Silicon Valley. He is overworked; he even had to work during last year’s year-end holidays. He used to be hopeful that his workload would become sensible, once his company became established (it is a startup, his fourth one in a row). But he now realizes this condition is permanent. He has no freedom to do anything else. There is no way he can make himself a better software engineer/supervisor, he is over-qualified already. He can manage to keep his job, if he keeps running full-speed on the treadmill, but he doesn’t have much else to look forward too.

He is not angry, “This is just the way it is,” he says. His wife, who is also an over-qualified software professional, is living on a series of contract positions. Nothing permanent is available.

This is not Bangladesh, this is Silicon Valley.

What does Freedom, or Liberty mean to them? It meant something to their parents, who came from China to find a better life. But here, in the New World, the Old World patterns are reasserting themselves. The New World is getting old.

Freedom, or Liberty no longer mean anything, because they are no longer possible.

Free culture

Subtitle: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity

The is Lawrence Lessig’s new book. He has a PDF version of it online at the Stanford Site.

He is one of my heroes, his books always turn me on. A few months ago, he got to argue this general idea before the Supreme Court. He got shot down in flames. I'm glad to see he is back on is feet, and writing again. This is a thorny subject: copying of digital versions of music on the Internet. But he deals with it gracefully - and logically. He is a professor of law at Stanford. If you can, spend a little time reading it one the Internet - and if you have more time, and more money, buy the book. I think I will.
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There’s no doubt that “piracy” is wrong, and that pirates should be punished. But before we summon the executioners, we should put this notion of “piracy” in some context. For as the concept is increasingly used, at its core is an extraordinary idea that is almost certainly wrong. The idea goes something like this:
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Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission.
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The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy. This is the perspective that led a composers’ rights organization, ASCAP, to sue the Girl Scouts for failing to pay for the songs that girls sang around Girl Scout campfires.

But the “if value, then right” theory of creative property has never been America’s theory of creative property. It has never taken hold within our law. Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around.We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw—the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both.

The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit—certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well. Thus, as we’ll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law’s role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties.

We may be seeing, as Richard Florida writes, the “Rise of the Creative Class.” Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary rise of regulation of this creative class.

The myth of debt cancellation for Nicaragua

Countries like Nicaragua have far more debt than they can pay. Indeed, it is a misnomer to call them “countries”. They are more like feudal states, where the rich rob the poor systematically. When the “nation” gets a loan, the rich simply deposit it in their Swiss bank accounts, but the “nation” has to pay off the loan. The last president of Nicaragua was good at this, and now spends his time alternating between house arrest at his luxurous villa, and doing time in a real jail. Meanwhile, he still controls the country, wherever he is at.

At the same time, school teachers get $68 dollars a month, and can’t afford to send their own children to school.

The International Financial Institutions (IFIs), like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed a series of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that reduce state spending, privatize public services (like the water supply) and encouraged higher levels of export-driven production, instead of producing for the local economy. (Because a self-sufficient local economy does not benefit the global economy.)

It became obvious to many people that something was wrong here. The rich countries were robbing the poor. The global economy was simply a feudal economy on a larger scale.

As a result, the IMF and the World Bank responded in 1996 with a “debt relief” initiative for the world’s most Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) - if these poor countries complied with the IFI’s SAPs. So far, 11 of the 41 countries that entered into the HIPC initiative have reached the “completion point”. All of these countries are at a higher level of debt then they were before entrance into the HIPC.

So far, they have received nothing. The IFIs are still trying to decide how much debt relief they “should” provide. The rules call for a maximum of 80%, but the minimum is not specified.

Martin Luther and the sow

Martin Luther was a writer, among other things, and a master of the German Language. He also had an off-beat sense of humor. Consider this:

Thou shalt not write a book unless you have listened to the fart of an old sow, to which you should open your mouth wide and say 'Thanks to you, you pretty nightingale; do I hear a text which was meant for me?

And this:

'For a sow,' he writes, 'Lies in the gutter or on the manure as if on the finest feather bed. She rests safely, snores tenderly, and sleeps sweetly, does not fear king nor master, death or hell, devil or God's wrath, lives without worry, and does not even think where the clover (Kleien) may be. And if Turkish Caesar arrived in all his might and anger, the sow wuld be much too proud to move a single whisker in his honor.'

Naming babies after products

The Scranton, Pennsylvania Tribune reports on a new trend: parents naming their babies after products. A recent study of four million babies born in 2000 revealed that boy's names included Chevy, Camry, Courviosier, Dodge, Darvon, and Ronrico.

Girls were named Armani, Nautica, Cateras (a Cadillac), and Cartier.

Bin Laden Al-Qaeda and the Islamist Apocalypse

Note that I have used Islamist as apposed to Islamic to denote the more radical elements of Islam.

Christians usually believe the Apocalypse is a Christian invention. But, as Joseph Cambell put it, “Death-and-rebirth, rebirth through ritual...is an extremely ancient idea in the history of culture.” The Christian Apocalypse is just another elaboration of ancient mythology. Apocalyptic thought has pervaded many movements, including Nazism. The Islamic varieties have always existed, but the West didn’t worry about them until 9/11. Maybe we ought to take them seriously now.

Americans find Bin Laden baffling because he seems to want something more than money, which is the ultimate American reality. Beyond any political goal, he expresses a powerful, amorphous impulse to destroy a tainted world and renew Islamist perfection. He has combined jihad and apocalypse in a way that has great revelance for contemporary Islamists. He wants to “put an end to the humiliation of the people of Islam that has lasted too long.”

The defeat of the Soviet Union by Islamic forces was a turning point. This miracle meant God was with them. Of course, this overlooked the tenacity of the native Afgan warriors, and the military support of the United States. But the victory in Afganistan contributed to an apocalyptic confidence on the part of the Islamists: the existing world could be overturned and pure Islamist rule established.

Even the American government, which is ignorant of much that goes on in the world, could not miss this challenge to its hegemony – one that it had financed itself. But it was unable to imagine at any level the apocalyptic dimensions of the Al-Qaeda project, which made it the religious duty of every Muslim to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military.

Instead of a multi-faceted, international response to this religious/cultural/political threat, the American government responded with unilateral military force. To Arab eyes, this confirmed that we were the Evil Empire, detirmined to humiliate God’s people yet again.
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Much of this material is from the book SuperPower Syndrome, America’s Apocalyptic confrontation with the World, by Robert Jay Lifton. I would like to end with a direct quote from him:
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We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but not less visionary in their projection of cleansing war-making and military power.

Both sides are energized by versions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose.

Flower Fair at Boquete

Click on the photo to see the big picture.

Boguete, Panama has a country fairground and once a year they have a flower festival there. They were getting ready for it when I was there. This shows one of the flower gardens, and the river that flows thru the middle of the town.

This will be the cover photo for my photo album on Boquete.

Gruesome death of Taliban prisoners

Newsweek Magazine had a cover story on this during the Afganistan war, I saw it in a newstand here in Costa Rica. This story has now surfaced on the Online Journal.
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Disturbing reports about the fate of up to 3,000 suspected Taliban fighters at the hands of General Abdul Rashid Dostum's men have been circulating since December 2001, but strangely no official investigation has been authorised.

Allegations, which began as hushed rumours, have now been fleshed out by the stomach-churning first-hand accounts of three recently released British detainees, as well as the findings of pathologists commissioned by the United Nations to unearth mass graves, and a gruesome documentary, produced and directed by the award-winning Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran.

Despite a growing mass of evidence, the Pentagon refuses to launch an enquiry, but a spokesman for the State Department told Doran that the United States would only consider a probe of the possible Afghan involvement in the slaughter, and would not subject its own troops to scrutiny.

The movie The Convoy of Death reveals eyewitness testimony concerning the way in which detainees, who gave themselves up or were handed over to one of America's allies, were crammed into airless containers and left to suffocate as temperatures soared.