American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
LIVE now – US-Latin America stories with Jerry Brewer, by Silvio Canto Jr http://t.co/KyOFowVwbq
— Fausta (@Fausta) July 8, 2015
Live at 8PM Eastern, and archived for your convenience, in Silvio Canto’s talking about US-Latin America stories with Jerry Brewer
Also, don’t miss my post on Business at the BBC: Firing Clarkson will cost them BIG
The Top Gear Christmas special airs this weekend on on December 27 and 28. The lads covered a lot of ground,
And they were run out of town:
Tricks for bucks: Sex, Dollar Bills, and the Venezuelan Black Market. Just like in Cuba,
Venezuelans are living in a two-tiered society, in which those with access to dollars can buy goods that are unavailable to others, as Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, points out.
Trix from Doral: Shippers send more boxes of groceries from Doral to Venezuela
Companies specialized in shipping boxes to be delivered at people’s front doors in Venezuela say that boxes now carry products not usually sent to that country. Amazon books, spare parts for cars and electronic items are now being replaced with cans of tuna, rice packages, coffee, medicines and even bathing soap.
The BBC visits Hugo Chavez’s own Potemkin village, complete with Chavista tour guide.
Leopoldo Lopez was interviewed from jail. Caracas Chronicles has the story. PanamPost has more on Leopoldo López and the Death of Freedom
The Spirit of Venezuelan Freedom Fighters Will Triumph, Redeem His Sacrifice.
Daniel observes how All is dissolving, slowly but surely
Michael Moynihan has an excellent article on the oh-so-enlightened travel guys and their fascination with purity in penury,
Leftist Planet
Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?
The West’s misreading of Cuba is an old staple for this crowd, and a new generation of lefty guidebooks doesn’t fail to disappoint on this score. The Rough Guide to Cuba, for example, even has a kind word for the draconian censorship implemented by the Castro regime, lecturing us that it’s “geared to producing (what the government deems to be) socially valuable content, refreshingly free of any significant concern for high ratings and commercial success.” Sure, the guidebook says, one can read dissident bloggers like Yoani Sánchez, but beware that opponents of the regime can be “paranoid and bitter” and are “at their best when commenting on the minutiae of Cuban life [and] at their worst when giving vent to unfocused diatribes against the government.”
We’ve also apparently got it all wrong when it comes to Cuba’s notorious Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), a Stasi-like network of neighborhood-level informers that monitors and informs on troublesome dissidents like Sánchez. Lonely Planet: Cuba thankfully assures tourists that the group is, in fact, a benign civic organization: The CDR are “neighborhood-watch bodies originally formed in 1960 to consolidate grassroots support for the revolution [and] they now play a decisive role in health, education, social, recycling and voluntary labor campaigns.”
WHY ALL THE bending over backward to excuse the world’s most thuggish regimes? For the guidebook writer, as well as the starry-eyed travelers who buy them, there is no characteristic more desirable in foreign travel than “authenticity” — places uncorrupted by the hideousness of Western corporate advertising and global brands-and many of these pariah states are the only destinations that offer it. Lonely Planet enthuses that Cuba is “a country devoid of gaudy advertising,” possessing a “uniqueness [that] is a vanishing commodity in an increasingly globalized world.” Indeed, the dictatorship protects its citizens from the poison of consumerism in a manner other states might want to emulate:
Almost completely cut off from the maw of McDonald’s, Madonna and other global corporate-cultural influences, Cuba retains a refreshing preserved quality. It’s a space and place that serves as a beacon for the future — universal education, health care and housing are rights people the world over want, need and deserve.
Writing in the Ecologist, a venerable British environmentalist journal, Brendan Sainsbury, co-author ofLonely Planet: Cuba, contends that there is purity in Cuban penury:
Falling into step alongside pallid, overweight and uncoordinated Western wannabes out on two-week vacations from Prozac and junk food, the Cubans don’t just walk; they glide, sauntering rhythmically through the timeworn streets like dancers shaking their asses to the syncopated beat of the rumba. Maybe the secret is in the food rationing.
THERE IS AN almost Orientalist presumption that the citizens of places like Cuba or Afghanistan have made a choice in rejecting globalization and consumerism. From the perspective of the disaffected Westerner, poverty is seen as enviable, a pure existence unsullied by capitalism. Sainsbury refers to Cuban food as “organic” and praises the Castro brothers’ “intellectual foresight [that] has prompted such eco-friendly practices as nutrient recycling, soil and water management and land-use planning.” Meager food rations and the 1950s cars that plod through Havana’s streets, however, don’t represent authenticity or some tropical version of the Western mania for “artisanal” products, but, rather, failed economic policy. It’s as much of a lifestyle choice as female circumcision is in Sudan.
But it takes a special lack of integrity to write a Lonely Planet guide: Thomas Kohnstamm, who authored the Lonely Planet guide to Colombia admitted that
“They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating—an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”
Because?
Lonely Planet didn’t expect me to go to Colombia. They knew full well that I wasn’t going.
Hey, if you’re buying a book from people who are going to palm off their ideology under the guise of a travel guide, don’t expect anything resembling the truth.
UPDATE
Linked by Midnight Blue. Thanks!
Government spending at its worse,
BBC World Service to sign funding deal with US state department
Low six-figure investment will aim to help combat censorship of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China
Let me get this straight, the US is broke, borrowing money from China, and will be funding the BBC to broadcast in China?
Yup:
The BBC World Service is to receive a “significant” sum of money from the US government to help combat the blocking of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China.
In what the BBC said is the first deal of its kind, an agreement is expected to be signed later this month that will see US state department money – understood to be a low six-figure sum – given to the World Service to invest in developing anti-jamming technology and software.
The funding is also expected to be used to educate people in countries with state censorship in how to circumnavigate the blocking of internet and TV services.
Why should the US fund this? In case you’re wondering, what about the Brits?
The Brits are cutting funding to the Beeb!
The US government money comes as the World Service faces a 16% cut in its annual grant from the Foreign Office – a £46m reduction in its £236.7m budget over three years that will lead to about 650 job cuts. The money will be channelled through the World Service’s charitable arm, the World Service Trust.
Not only will your tax dollars fund NPR, now they’ll fund the BBC.
(h/t T. Lifson
I’ve never understood why electric cars are supposedly more energy efficient, since you have to recharge the battery by plugging into the power grid. However, one shouldn’t underestimate the value of a placebo in soothing the green conscience.
So go ahead and get an electric car; just don’t be in a hurry to get anywhere:
London to Edinburgh by electric car: it was quicker by stagecoach
The BBC’s stunt of taking an electric Mini to Edinburgh reveals just how impractical rechargeable cars are, writes Christopher Booker
In its obsessive desire to promote the virtues of electric cars, the BBC proudly showed us last week how its reporter Brian Milligan was able to drive an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh in a mere four days – with nine stops of up to 10 hours to recharge the batteries (with electricity from fossil fuels).
What the BBC omitted to tell us was that in the 1830s, a stagecoach was able to make the same journey in half the time, with two days and nights of continuous driving. This did require 50 stops to change horses, but each of these took only two minutes, giving a total stopping time of just over an hour and a half.
In case you don’t know, the distance from London to Edinbugh is 332 miles. In US terms that means can get from Princeton today and be in Akron, Ohio (364 miles) by Friday, but only if you leave right now.
Just make sure you don’t turn on the heat, and wear longjohns.
We’re going from the space age to the spaced-out age in 4…3…2…
