Escrache in Argentina means public shaming when there is no justice

While the Senate acts politically with its hearings of Gonzales et al and impeachment is “off the table” those plucky Argentineans have developed a tactic of public justice known as the Escrache.

What do you do when the people who kidnapped, tortured and killed your parents or relatives go free? When the doctors who attended your pregnant mother while in a concentration camp escape unpunished? The answer that many members of HIJOS, an organization of the children of the disappeared, extra-judicially executed and exiled in the Southern Cone countries, have come up with are escraches. An escrache involves setting up a demostration in front of the house or place of employment of a known torturer or killer, alerting the public as to his identity and his crimes. In a recent week, Argentinean doctor Raul Sanchez Ruiz was the object of an escrache. Sanchez Ruiz worked in the ESMA (Naval Mechanics School), the largest concentration camp in Argentina, where he made sure the disappeared did not die during the torture sessions, so that they could continue being tortured. He also attended the pregnant women who gave birth at the concentration camp, and is suspected of knowing the whereabouts of their children – most of whom were given to families and friends of the military to adopt as their own. The escrache included a play about a doctor who helped a military man adopt the child of a disappeared woman, and ended with red paint being thrown at the walls of the doctor’s house.

Like the sex offender registry, these events aim to make the neighbors of the Escrache target very aware of what kind of creep they live next to. The goal here is to make it hard for the meatball to move around without people calling him out for the scumbag he is. These Escraches involves targeted flyerring, noisemaking, graffiti painting, and mass rallies by the douche-bags own home. It’s a public justice thing.

A video (among many online escrache videos) advertising the public shaming of this Argentinian, Alfredo Bisardo, who looks like Karl Rove!! Twins missing at birth? Perhaps. They both seem to share a gene for complicity in genocide. The video shares the fleck of dirts home phone and address.

Thanks Jennifer Flores Sternad.

Radio Bob Dylan, the BBC and the curse of endless choice,

London Review of Books | Vol. 29 No. 14 dated 19 July 2007
David Runciman

Before he discovered literature in a friend’s apartment in New York, Bob Dylan’s connection to the world beyond the narrow one into which he was born came almost exclusively from the radio. The radio is usually on somewhere in the background of his memoirs, and it’s always broadening his horizons, letting him know what American music could sound like, in all its unexpected variety. Now he has his own radio show – he started broadcasting in the US last year – and it should be no surprise that it is deeply nostalgic for the music of his own youth. What’s more surprising is that the show doesn’t sound at all dated. This is one of the wholly unexpected blessings of Dylan’s later years: it turns out that he is a wonderful disc jockey. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be better.

What makes Dylan such a magnificent radio presence is his obvious love of the medium coupled with his refusal to be bound by its conventions. His voice, for example, is almost a cliché in radio terms – its gravelly, nasal drawl is perfectly suited to the business of introducing records – but his delivery is very strange. Sometimes he mumbles, more often he over-enunciates, speaking a touch too slowly, regularly sounding as though he is reading a script. The result is weirdly rhythmical and somehow comforting. The format of the show is one of its many delights: it’s called Theme Time Radio Hour, and each week Dylan plays a series of records around a particular theme – marriage one week, divorce the next. Many of his selections are obscure to anyone under the age of 60, his taste tending towards the 1940s and 1950s over the 1980s and 1990s. But he is not wilfully obscure, nor is he a musical snob. For the divorce show, he played Tammy Wynette’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ For the show about fathers, he played the Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’. For the show on coffee, he played Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’ (but not his own ‘One More Cup of Coffee’). The pleasure of listening to pop music on the radio is always finely balanced between the wish to hear something different, and the hope that the next song will be a familiar one. Almost all radio stations tilt the scales heavily in favour of the familiar for fear of scaring people off. Theme Time Radio Hour doesn’t pander to anyone, and as a result it gets the game pretty much right.

Dylan also seems to understand the balance between the intimacy that is the essence of good radio and the more functional role of the DJ, which is to play the records. He often introduces or back-announces a record by simply reading out the first or last verse of the lyric in his incantatory style, making the words sound like poetry. But he also gives his listeners occasional glimpses into his own world. For the show about flowers, he talked about picking out his favourites at his local garden centre. For the show about cars he remembered the ones he’d coveted as a child. It’s never easy to know how seriously to take all this stuff, given his predilection for faking his own biography, but that is part of the pleasure (as it is with his memoirs). You often get the sense that he treats the whole thing as a big joke, and that, too, is part of the show’s easy charm. Occasionally, he reads out a communication from a lucky listener. In the show on the theme ‘rich man, poor man’, he told us about an email he’d received from, as he put it, ‘someone named Alan Dershowitz, who describes himself as a feisty civil libertarian from Harvard Law School’ (it’s hard to convey on the page the exquisite irony with which he spoke these words). Alan had an eager-beaver question about one of the records he’d been playing, and Bob was only too happy to help, though he warned Alan that he might be coming back to him ‘for some free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride.

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The Festival of Endless Gratitude

spirit of orr presents:
the festival of endless gratitude
in brattleboro vermont

evening sets at the tinderbox
afternoon sets at the weathervane music hall
both venues on elliot street

saturday july 28 & sunday july 29 2007
sets start at two pm.

——–saturday july 28 evening at the tinderbox
fat worm of error
spectre folk
byron coley
soil sing through me
mr. tyte
bunwinkies
john levin (starts at 7 pm)

———saturday july 28 afternoon at the weathervane music hall
red favorite
meara o’reilly
chris carmody
hatched and hungry
christopher weisman
fieldwire (starts at 2 pm)

———–sunday july 29 evening at the tinderbox
mv & ee with the golden road
tarp
noho wools
burnt hills
jow jow the death knell rung
shrinnirs
sunburned hand of the man (starts at 7 pm)

—————– sunday july 29 afternoon at the the weathervane music hall
asa irons
dredd foole
matt krefting
kyle tomzo
ruth garbus
kurt weisman (starts at 2 pm)

"A Case of Cheney Paranoia" by Charles Potts

A Case of Cheney Paranoia

To go with the case of Chivas Regal.
I am the first vice president of the United States
To actually be the president of the United States
Simultaneously, but really I am
President of the Senate and in the legislative branch
So subpoenaing me about documents related to executive privilege
Will be futile since I am between branches
No law actually covers me
And everything the president does, as Nixon said, is legal.
Like conservatives everywhere
I hate and fear the government except when we can milk it like
The cash cow it is.
Since I am the government
I hate and fear myself.
And you wonder why I’m trying to keep it a secret.

Will trees suffer from water stress?

arthurblog_treeco2.jpg

Trouble for forests of the Northern U.S. Rockies?

published Science News, June 16, 2007; Vol. 171, No. 24 , p. 382

Climate change expected to occur in the coming decades may cause forests in northern stretches of the U.S. Rockies to stop absorbing carbon dioxide and even to release some to the atmosphere, exacerbating the planet’s warming.

Trees pull carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. Much of the carbon from that gas is stored in wood and foliage, but some ends up in material littering the forest floor and in the underlying soil. From there, it can make its way back into general circulation, says Céline Boisvenue, an ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula.

She and her colleague Steven W. Running used computer models to estimate how three climate-change scenarios might affect carbon storage at forest sites in Idaho, western Montana, and northwestern Wyoming.

The good news: By 2089, the growing season in the forests will be at least 3 weeks longer than it was in 1950. The bad news: Over that same period, higher temperatures will cause the trees to suffer water stress—slowing or stopping their growth—for an additional 8 weeks each year. Even under a climate scenario with higher precipitation than at present, trees will have insufficient water for 54 more days each year in 2089 than they did in 1950.

By the year 2020, under a scenario with reduced precipitation, dieback of trees and decomposition of leaf litter at three of the six studied sites will cause the forests to emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb. By the year 2070, the forests at five of those sites will be net producers of carbon, says Boisvenue.

reported by Sid Perkins from the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico.

"Assholes of the Week" by Paul Krassner

In the ’60s, “Assholes of the Month” was a feature in my satirical magazine, The Realist. In the ’70s, “Asshole of the Month” was a feature in Larry Flynt’s Hustler. Currently, on MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann has a feature, “Worst Person in the World,” which is usually Bill O’Reilly. And now I’m posting “Assholes of the Week” in this cyberspace. I avoid targets like President Bush and Cardinal Mahony, because they’re such ongoing, obvious choices. The beauty of Comments is that readers can post their own asshole selections that I neglect to include. Here are mine for this week:

*Scholastic, publisher of the Harry Potter series, for setting midnight Friday as the opening salvo for sales of the latest book, thereby forcing countless children to stay up way past their bedtime. Just for that I’m going to reveal how it ends. Harry and his friends and enemies are all having dinner at the same restaurant, but when you turn over the final page, it’s totally blank.

*Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, for telling reporters, “We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely in running the security file if the international forces withdraw at any time they want,” but the next day his advisor announced that Maliki meant that efforts to bolster Iraq’s security forces would continue “side by side with the withdrawal.” Dick Cheney had called to remind Malaki that those videos of him humping a camel during Ramadan were hidden away in a safe place.

*The unknown White House official who ordered Dr. Richard Carmona–George Bush’s Surgeon General for four years–to mention Bush’s name three times on each page of every speech he gave. He was fired for writing this sentence: “When it comes to abstinence, you can be sure that George Bush practices what he preaches.”

*Lousiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux, for signing legislation that penalizes doctors who perform a late-term abortion–they would face fines up to $10,000 and prison up to ten years–making her state the first to restrict such surgery since the federal ban in 2003. The new law allows the procedure only when a woman’s life would otherwise be endangered. However, it will be considered a crime if the pregnancy is expected merely to cause health problems. That’s not a joke.

*The owners of several medical marijuana dispensaries in California, for–if it’s true, as alleged by the Drug Enforcement Adminstration–profiteering from the illegal distribution of pot by charging patients two or three times the street value. Presumably, other government agencies will follow the lead of the DEA and coerce other businesses to stick to free-market protocols.

*Nebraska Judge Jeffre Cheuvront, for ordering a college student who was raped not to use the words “rape,” “victim,” “assailant” or “sexual assault” on the witness stand for fear of prejudicing the jury. Perhaps she can testify that “He stuck his thing in my thing against my will.” George Carlin is expected to introduce a bit in his next HBO performance about “The five words you can’t say in court.”

*Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, for insisting that the FDA’s decision to close seven of its 13 laboratories would enhance the agency’s ability to target unsafe food–this in the face of severe criticism from Congress–but he is as determined as salmonella swimming upstream.
——-
Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist, and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available from paulkrassner.com.