NMM-TV: The Other Faith-Based Political Movement

The ideological divisions within Catholicism, and their political ramifications, is the under-reported Latin American story of the election year. IMHO.

This advertorial — hosted on Arcoiris.tv — for the Fé e Política movement here in Brazil, which supports the Landless Rural Workers Movement, will give you some idea.

FOX’s Paradise Lost: Stranger Than a Fictional Blog

Terra has the Brazilian take on the upcoming FOX film “Turistas” — but the comments on a fictional travel warning on the film’s fictional “blog” — I guess it is supposed to be, like, the blog of the characters in the film — are a bit more, er, direct:

I am brazilian and these things doesn’t happen in brazil like that, i am sure that USA is more violent than brazil…
shut up
bulshit

Which is a fair comment.

Bad things happen here like crazy, but not “like that,” and generally not to gringos.

It is much, much harder to kill rich gringos and get away with it than it is to kill poor Brazilians and get away with it.

Which is embarrassing and also a bit of a relief. There is that card you can play, if need be.

But it’s not just that.

Brazilians of all kinds actually tend to like us.

They don’t necessarily want us Yankees to go home, I think, as Neuza says is shown in the film.

Some of them — a lot of them — would just like us to behave ourselves a little better while we’re here, that’s all.

And in my case, the feeling is mutual — the liking of them, I mean.

It’s not that the myth of Brazilian congeniality is utterly false — Alckmin cited Gilberto Freire’s famous theory during his concession speech on Oct. 29 — and that the capacity for ultraviolence and the holding cheap of human life is absolutely true, even if São Paulo rush hour traffic can give you that impression.

Brazilians are, as a culture, an incredibly friendly and loving and generous and hospitable people who are capable of  living with — or forced to live with — and sometimes engaging in, astonishing levels of savage ultraviolence.

What’s really astonishing to me, however, is the capacity for tolerating the savage ultraviolence committed on their behalf, and in their name, among the more “civilized” and “enlightened” sectors of the Brazilian population, in the name of the “democratic rule of law.”

By the way, to be fair, recently you are starting to see scattered incidents of the Rio “parallel power” — the Comando Vermelho and the Amigos de Amigos — singling out tourists as part of a strategy for globalizing its public relations message.

There’s a very funny and grim joke floating around here about a planned al-Qaeda attack on Rio gone wrong, in which, in the end, the terrorists decide to leave Brazil alone, and get Brazilian police & thieves to teach them how to really engage in random terroristic violence. 

‘A Swiss Mystery at Euro Disney’

Bad puns are the reusable code modules of the journalistic profession.

A Swiss Mystery at Euro Disney: I love DealBook, the NYT’s business blog, edited by this Sorkin fellow.

It’s a well thought-out approach to how a blog, which can be updated at any time during the publishing cycle — I actually produced PowerPoint for the bosses at my old job on this subject, believe it or not — can add to the paper’s own formal coverage to keep site visitors tuned in.

Acknowledge and link to the best work of your competition — the phrase “all the news fit to print” is an empty boast; other news operations invariably get to good stories that you don’t have resources to cover — while giving yourself a fair shot at keeping the reader on your Web site.

The selection of stories is right up my alley, too.

For example, today, the whole world is scratching its head about an investment group that was set to announce an $0.11 per share offer for Eurodisney, one of history’s greatest boondoggles, but then cancelled the press conference.

Just who is Center-Tainment? Disney said it has been unable to discover any information about its potential suitor, but Reuters quotes unnamed officials who said they repurposed a company named Orca as an acquisition vehicle to make a run at Euro Disney. A German company leads the group of 45 shareholders who together own 99 percent of Center-Tainment’s stock, according to an official. Few other details were provided about the shareholders, other than that some have experience with entertainment industries like indoor soccer.

‘Shift in Corporate Prosecution Ahead’

Source: the idiots at Right-Magazine.com

Shift in Corporate Prosecution Ahead (WaPo): What could possibly move those anti-American radicals at the ACLU — donate today — to join forces with the good people of K Street?

Compelling evidence of politically motivated criminal prosecution of businesses by the Gonzalez Justice Dept., maybe?

Justice Department officials are revising controversial guidelines for criminal prosecutions of companies in response to pressure from business groups, civil liberties lobbyists and an influential lawmaker who is expected to introduce legislation on the issue early next week. The changes, which could require local U.S. attorneys to obtain input from high-level Justice Department officials before seeking corporate indictments, could be unveiled by Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty next month, according to sources briefed on the issue who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not yet complete. The administrative revisions also may forbid government lawyers from forcing companies to stop paying attorney fees to employees ensnared in investigations, a move that was declared unconstitutional in June by a federal judge in New York.

The Constitution of the U.S. does not just protect hippies who do not like Wal-Mart or the current neocolonial military adventure very much, you know.

Even those sociopathic hornswogglers at Enron and those fascist propagandists and traitors to the American way of life at Google[=Goebbels] have 4th Amendment rights to due process of law and freedom from coercion.

Russia and Brighton Beach: Risks of Doing Business

There are wise observations for all you BRIC enthusiasts about the risks of doing business in Russia in this Google Video.

XBRL Gerbil Dies a Guinea Pig’s Death?

As Orwell might have said, some eXtensible markup standards are more eXtensible than others.

FSA ditches XBRL: Wow.

Told you so.

Coupled with the U.K. securities industry regulator’s recent negotiations of closer ties with the U.S. SEC — whose chair, Cox, was extremely enthusiastic about the XML-based business reporting markup language and its lobby-like-mad business ecosystem — this is quite an interesting story from a new market machines engineering and global open standards development point of view.

The UK’s Financial Services Authority has stated that it will not be introducing the eXtensible business reporting language (XBRL) format for filing of financial and regulatory returns.

This after Microsoft hard-coded XBRL publishing tools into the latest iteration of its Office productivity software suite, for example.

As actor Keanu Reeves is known for saying: Whoa.

Blog Mission Statement of the Week

From the Bicho Preguiça blogroll — one of these days I really am going to overcome my shame over my crappy Portuguese prose style and give equal blog-time to the fina flor de Lácio– the Tupiblogger at Breves Notas is part of my study of best practice in humorous blog mission statements. I plan to publish a 1,000-pp. monograph on the subject someday, using modern discourse analysis techniques.

BN wins the NMM Best Mission Statement Award for the Week.

Come collect your prize: All the Itaipava you can drink within a two-hour period at Pé pra fora. Guaraná Champanha from AmBev is the non-alcoholic alternative of choice for NMMers. All the fritas and linguiça dinamite you can eat with a toothpick.

O Breves Notas é uma obra organizada de um modo um tanto caótico e contém diversos trechos que foram incluídos simplesmente porque na hora o organizador achou que era uma boa idéia. Atualmente, temos cerca de uns 324 textos sobre os mais variados assuntos que, por fim, terminaram atraindo cerca de uns 32897 comentários, tudo confinado em meras 9 categorias. Qualquer que seja seu gosto, o Breves Notas tem o que você deseja. Eu não me orgulho disso.

Initiating Coverage: Confirmation Bias Pensamento Único Noise Machine Watch

Disney’s “Small World” attraction: Interchangeable robots dressed up in different stereotypical costumes. A metaphor for GVO’s pensamento único?

I get David Sasaki’s update from Global Voices Online every morning, but I hardly ever look at it.

Why not? After all, it offers an alluring proposition to the reader hungry for international news of a globalized world. Which I am, like, totally into, dude.

On Blogging Conflict Regions - As a subscriber to this newsletter, it can only be assumed that you have an interest in reading the thoughts and observations of writers whose voices and regions rarely catch the eye of mainstream media. Yet bandwidth and cost of access leave much of the world shadowed from the blogosphere as well. Joshua Goldstein laments this fact, but applauds the emerging bloggers describing the desperate situation in Northern Uganda and hopes they are only the beginning of a new movement.

He who assumes makes an ass of you and me.

Lamentations, applause and hope that someday everyone will get their news from blogs instead of the MSM: The usual salves to the conscience of the armchair liberal who wants to do good while doing well, with that self-congratulatory note worked in, to the effect that only the blog revolution — those corrupt, unionized rank-and-file journalists of the evil MSM are beyond redemption — can bring the truth to the masses.

I have explained my disdain for this brand of innovation journalism in a number of counterblasts from the point of view of traditional — I prefer the term “time-tested” — principles of public information quality assurance.

See “Fair & Balanced”: Harvard Law Bloggers Give Equal Weight to Disinformation, Brazilian Elections Post-Mortem: The Whole World is an Episode of “Crossfire”, GVO’s Innovation In Journalism: Edit the Ethics and Public Mission Out, and et etectera ad nauseam.

We really ought to get together and mount a formal, multilingual anti-GVO shadow government that tracks back to as many of their posts as we can stand to read, baixando o pau where they deserve it — which is often — and handing out grudging praise in the rare event that they earn it.

I submit to you that this is not a trivial exercise, or merely the product of a personal grudge on the part of this nasty little troll, yours truly.

Now that the U.S. State Dept. picks up GVO feed and channels it out to the huddled masses yearning to blog free as part of the Bush II approach to “democracy exportation” — Jack Abramoff … Now that it funds the iCommons and other “democratization of the media” projects … and given that so many of the key Berkman people have a background in government agencies like USAID, with long histories of questionable actions in the shadows that need clarifying …

Somewhere here on this quarter-terabyte metal box of data I brought with me I have the State “public diplomacy” plan that describes its plans for the increased use of “citizen media” and increased cooperation with NGOs for that purpose.

GVO does not exactly account for every dime it gets — did I read that Harvard may soon account more fully for the billions in government grants it gets? — but its activities do seem to fit the bill.

Not sufficient evidence for an indictment — one senses, but cannot confirm, the existence of funky confidentiality clauses in GVO’s contracts with the corporate and possibly government sponsors that it laments cannot be named — but definitely enough for a search warrant.

Take this item, which caught my eye today as a candidate for baixando o pau, for example: India: Cornershops in the era of big retail stores.

Wal-mart’s entry in India along with other big retail plans elicits quite a few reactions from those who feel it might threaten the traditional kirana stores (cornershops). The Indian Economy Blog on why that’s not likely. “A vast majority of middle class India still shops from one of the millions of tiny kirana stores for precisely these reasons. And there is no way Walmart or even the local big retailers like Foodworld, Big Bazaar or Reliance can lure away a chunk of the middle class big enough to make the kirana store go out of business for at least another few decades.”

Live from Oaxaca: Medical Residents Report Paramilitary Threats, Disappearances

Disparos en la Facultad de Medicina de la UABJO: Shots fired at the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez in idyllic Oaxaca, reports La Otra Tele, an online video service run by a senior editor of the La Jornada newspaper, published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

This man is not a blogger. He is a professional with a back file of reporting behind him that suggests he usually does a credible and complete job.

Which is why I tend to believe him. Especially what with the live on the scene pictures and interviews with the people involved and all.

Medical students and hold a press conference to report that paramilitaries have closed hospitals in the state, where hospital workers had joined the teachers’ strike.

More people “disappeared,” reports La OT.

A member of the UABJO faculty who participated in Radio Universidad, which supports the APPO movement, has been publicly threatened by a commercial radio station controlled by the state government and PRI, which is said to be broadcasting disinformation.

Charge!

“Unpopular social movements demonstrate in Brazilian capital.” Charge is the PT-Br term for “political cartoon.” The pickets read “I want the Banco Central,” “more political appointments,” “give me Petrobras,” “I want the postal service,” “[more] autonomous regulators,”we demand three ministries” …

News item is that the president of Brazil will veto pay raises for public employees in the judiciary.

NMM-TV: Cidade Pixada

This was actually produced with friends of the Bicho-Preguiça in mind, but it has significant Zeitgeist implications as well.

Just joking: it’s another Cinelerra vlogging exercise of mine in the tradition of le facteur Cheval.

Item: Euroclear to settle DIFX trades

Euroclear to settle DIFX trades (press release).

For some reason, the DTCC did not get the job of settling accounts in the redrawn map of the Middle East.

Ungrateful bastards.  After all we did for them.

Euroclear Bank and the Dubai International Financial Exchange DIFX jointly announced today an agreement whereby DIFX members will be able to settle cross-border DIFX securities transactions with Euroclear Bank clients. … This agreement signifies the first Euroclear Bank relationship with an exchange and central securities depository in the Middle East.

Patent Palaver: Did Corporate Do-Gooders Pull a Cheney?

… the chairman, SAP, exploited their position to make sure that reform-oriented comments were excluded and debate was silenced. Overall the report reflects the opinion of a very small but controlling minority - and certainly no SMEs - while claiming to be representative”

Speaking of doing good for the underprivileged while doing well for oneself, consider this dispatch from the open-source Bloomberg box — essentially, the OSBB is GMail + Google News Alerts, or comparable services from other providers, but I have to say I am kind of a Google fan in this regard, in case you were wondering — on an allegedly nasty little power play at a recent EU patent confab.

A power play by a big corporation saying it was doing what it was doing “on behalf of SMEs.”

The flash brief comes to us from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure and allied civil society network nodes.

Brussels, 29 November 2006 — A key report produced by a European Commission task force was written almost entirely by the patent industry and large firms, including SAP’s patent lawyers, US firms, and the European Patent Office, says the FFII.

The OSBB on Blogging and Flogging

Ethical Corporation magazine enjoys pride of place in the NMM “open-source Bloomberg box,” receiving the equivalent of USDA Prime because of its low bullshit content.

Take this recent column by Roger Cowe.

As every corporate executive worth his or her salt starts writing a blog, here is an opportunity for really engaging with company stakeholders and getting beyond tired corporate communications.

Yes, we are all familiar with that well-publicized proposition by now, including the exchange of views between Sun’s Schwartz and the SEC’s Cox, the GOP congressman from the land of the muni derivatives disaster of the century who now regulates the investment industry.

But here come the caveats: