Sarkozy: “Not Getting the Internet” in The Language of Molière

Anglo-Normans find a common gestural language in this rough equivalent to the Italo-Brazilian figa.

Nicolas Sarkozy gets eyeballed by an uncomprehending Heiko Hebig: at a Dec. 12 event, the Chirac minister of State Nicolas Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa says things that Heiko, with his excellent Finnish English and German but no Romance languages, does not understand.

Nicolas Sarkozy said a lot of smart things – or so I was told. My French sucks and I have to believe my sources. Too bad though he didn’t even try to address the audience (coming from 30+ countries) in English, not even a greeting. And he didn’t answer any quesions from the audience either.

The French can be obnoxious that way. In fact, a lot of people in the world can be obnoxious about insisting that “If you want to do business on my turf, show a little willingness to talk my talk.”

Related: LePolitics3

I have no idea what that is supposed to be, a banner satirizing some kind of WEF-tied blogging industry junket, called LeWeb3.

Informs the Parisist,

The blogosphere is still buzzing about Tuesday’s surprising and controversial change of program… the appearance of presidential candidates François Bayrou and (organizer Loïc Le Meur’s choice) Nicolas Sarkozy at leWeb3 (pictured). It seems that attendees spent 300-500 euros for an international Web conference that turned into a French political rally, and according to their blogs, they’re not happy.

Blog entrepreneur LeMeur is one of the Six Apart mob and a World Economic Forum starfucker buddy of McKinnon’s, of course, who in turn hangs out, it seems, with Howard Dean’s chief blogging officer and a bunch of ex-USAID types. …

The very idea of LeWeb is bound to piss off the linguistic purists among the rowdy Quebec Livre blogging crowd, who will arm-wrestle you to the death over le blogue vs. carnet, on the principle of

If we have a perfectly good word for it ourselves, why use somebody else’s?

A debate that, as I have said, has far more serious implications for the intellectual property wars than you might first think.

But it certainly does slap you right in the face with the issue of linguistic difference, does it not? We can say that with confidence.

On which topic one of the most witty and winning works I know of is by Shoshana Felman, which I remember reading, back in the late 1980s, as The Literary Speech-Act (or, La Scandale du Corps Parlant).

Update: David Weinberger (who is on stage presenting right now) says:

But which NMM’s favorite kinder, gentler devotee of Martin Heidegger — whose “The Origins of the Work of Art” is one of the deepest pieces of willful nonsense I have ever read — David Weinberg of the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society, claims not to have liked, scowling,

I feel like i’ve been lectured by a guy who has no actual understanding of the Internet.

Whenever a Berkmanite starts complaining that people working at cross-purposes to Jim Moore’s Second Superpower “just don’t get it,” I am immediately curious as to what that person might have said.

Because given how little sense those people make — on purpose, most of the time, it seems — it might well be interesting.

Or — given that we are, after all, dealing with a slimy politician with a track record of urban chaos to his credit — not interesting, to an interesting degree and in interesting ways.

Which is why I would have liked it if Heiko linked to the Sarkozy text.

But let’s see.

Dueling noise machines can be useful in the subtle art of writing wetware bullshit detection algorithms, as an acoustic engineer friend of mine was telling me recently.

Shameless cheat sheet to French words I have forgotten in the meantime kindly provided by WordReference.com.

I Told You So: Rohter Simplifies the Plot Pra Inglês Ver

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, may be gone, but the Grey Lady’s man in Rio is the King of Comic-Book Infotainment.

19 Are Killed as Drug Gangs Conduct Attacks in Brazil (Larry Rohter, New York Times).

Not a single hint, in the base of the inverted pyramid, at (1) the potentially multilateral nature of the current conflict, (2) the potential and even likely post hoc ergo propter hoc factor, in view of recent highly public developments, or (3) the question marks that still hover over who exactly is fighting who here, or why.

Yes, I know, I know: (1) and (3) are basically ways of saying the same thing. One has the instinct to round out a Folkloric Three, but it sometimes does not work out right.

For one possible antecedent to the current situation, see my lazy little roundup of The Bobo-Globo Journalistic Messiah Sells Out to the One-Armed Bandit King Gangbusters incident.

No, no. In Mr. Rohter’s neighborhood, this is strictly Star Wars: The Evil Drug Empire Strikes Back.

Which sucks even harder than the recently released film Casino Royale, which at least does not pretend not to be a work of fiction.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec. 28 — Heavily armed drug gangs unleashed a wave of attacks on police stations and public roads here early on Thursday, and at least 19 people were killed in the confrontations.

If the CIA had invaded Afghanistan with the stupid idea that every evil bearded motherfucker with a couple of tanks and about a gazillion AK-47s must be on the same side, they would have never have been able to broker the 10th Mountain Division to within striking distance of Osama as efficiently as they did.

Only to fail on fourth and goal.

Seven died in a single incident, a predawn assault on an interstate bus bound for São Paulo. Survivors said that about eight armed men stopped and boarded the bus, robbed those aboard and then set fire to it before the 28 passengers could get off.

Which according to Maia was clearly not part of the plan, which must be viewed with lenses that correct for the usual fog of war, including stoned low-level employees and copycat attacks.

I am not saying Maia’s is the correct analysis, but to start with, the guy is mayor of the freaking city, and has given ample evidence in the past that he actually does show up to work every day.

Besides, Maia does actually show his work, as to how he arrived at the conclusion.

Which means you could do your job, as a “reporter,” Larry, and go check it out, at least.

As it is, all you get have here is the view from an outgoing state government that very likely fears that its sleazier dealings are going to be laid out for the public in the near future, and pointedly not from a city government whose leader has made plain that it is a bitter political enemy of the Garotinho Tag-Team State.

At least eight police stations and street posts were also reported to have been attacked by gangs with grenades and machine guns. The dead included not only criminals and police officers involved in the shootouts, but also street vendors, pedestrians and people filing complaints at police stations.

Again: What about the theory that this is actually a matter of the anti-Traffic protection rackets muscling in on the official protection rackets, i.e., the police? Does it hold water, or not?

Confrontations between the military police and gangs [how are we telling the difference again? In this game, which moves as you play it, please understand this, the color of the uniform does not tell you what side the players are on --Ed.] continued throughout the day. Police units sent [by whom? Or did they send themselves, as some reports are suggesting?] into at least a dozen of the squatter slums in the hills overlooking the city were met with armed resistance, and a shootout that disrupted car traffic on a main street in a working-class neighborhood was also reported.

And a lot of other troop movements shown on TV that I could not keep track of, but was hoping that the professional press would keep track of for me.

Like BOPE on foot in the Zona Sul tunnels, armed like LERP patrols on the Alien vs. Predator planet.

That is all I have time for at the moment, but this time I am really going to write a serious, detailed letter of complaint to the Times Public Editor — as I have in the past, with little effect.

Becaus here is where the Associated Press Stylebook states very clearly you have to give a reporter a red card for failure to commun’cate.

Brazilian news organizations said the wave of violence was meant as a warning to the new governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio Cabral. Elected in October after a hard-hitting campaign in which crime, drugs and public insecurity were the principal issues, Mr. Cabral takes office on Monday.

Which Brazilian “news organizations”?

Apparently, only the “news organizations” that attended the same press conference as Rohter and did nothing else to follow up other potential angles on the story.  The Novo Lacerdas, in other words.

And as a warning from whom? To whom?

One of Mr. Cabral’s other platform planks, after all, was to get the freaking Military Police, elements of which are world-famous for their human rights abuses, corruption and extrajudicial executions of innocent people, under control.

So who is sending the warning here?

If you are merely going to crib from local coverage rather than go out and cover what is happening, after all, in your own back yard — Rohter has an apartment in Copacabana — you must at least say what those local press sources were.

Because some local press sources are more reliable than others.

But see also Flexibilizing Infodensity, on the Times Public Editor’s recent arguments in favor of “a more realistic” policy on sourcing of factual reporting.

Still, surely, if you merely read these analyses in publications available on your local newsstand, this is not an exceptional case in which you arguably have to grant those sources anonymity, is it?

I note that Rohter interviews almost the exact same set of sources as Reuters, by the way.

What, is he sleeping with that Reuters stringer now? Are they freaking Siamese twins?

My reading still has not given me enough information as to what teams are playing, and for what.

But the credible sources I read all seem to be betting that this is emphatically not The Plan Colombia New Year’s Day Rose Bowl.

With teams selected by committee rather than through single-elimination tournament play.

The more apt metaphor might well be that we are in a kind of Sweet Sixteen as a new political order gets ready to come down.

Speaking of which, the neighborhood lesbian soccer team is coming over shortly for our traditional holiday match.

I am volunteering to serve as the crooked Italian soccer ref.

OCAS on the Hollow Men: An Anti-Popcorn Manifesto

A scene from Sergio Bianchi’s searing Quanto vale ou é por quilo (How much for that one, or do they sell it by pound?)

Despite what these people preach, there is no such thing as a corporate citizen. Citizenship is an exclusive right and responsibility of human individuals. For this reason, responsible individual action is required to guarantee what some call “corporate social responsibility.” If the employees and managers of a firm do not behave ethically, and if other citizens do not assume a disciplinary role, “corporate social responsibility” remains a mere rhetorical flourish.

Quite a direct challenge to the whole premise of The Business Civil Liberties Union, is it not?

Not that I would reflexively argue that businesses lack civil liberties, mind you.

The idea here is to decide, in detail, the points at which the rights and responsibilities of “legal-fictional persons” and “physical persons” can and do overlap, and to what extent they cannot and do not.

(I always thought, myself, naively, perhaps, for example, that a well-run class-action torts system did a pretty decent job of maintaining that balance.

But apparently the margin of the Bush victory in Florida in 2000 means that the vast majority of my fellow citizens disagree with me. )

A question which, given that human rights are fundamental and cannot merely be reduced to economic rights — not that economic rights are not fundamental as well, and worthy of protection — I simply cannot understand how the law and economics school can offer any meaningful insight to intellectually honest protagonists of this debate.

I bought a copy of OCAS magazine the other day because I always do — I checked into their stated business model quite a bit, though not rigorously, and found no violations of the USDA bullshit content standard — because I think it is quite an interesting and informative example of another approach to responsible advocacy journalism.

In this issue, for example, Cristina Sales of the blog Communication and Citizenship, who works as a consultant to NGOs and “social movements,” takes a remarkably clear-eyed view of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Brazil, and its discontents.

Note that unlike Mr. Murilo of GVO and the MinC, Ms. Sales’ disclosure of her academic affiliations, business relationships, and outside activities appears to provide relatively complete information.

I am not finding from a random Googling — with the proper caveats attached as to the limits of that method of investigation — that Ms. Sales has omitted anything important from her accounting. I mean, I guess I can dispense with the knowledge that she bowls in a Friday night league — unless, of course, Zé Dirceu is on the same team.

And who knows but that, as on any well-run bowling team, they do not adhere to the strict prohibition on talking business?

And I bet you I can get a formal resume out of her about ten times as fast as I can from Murilo, for instance, although I am waiting to try it until after the holiday.

And I could, of course, be mistaken.

As always and ever, that being the freaking human condition in the Gospel According to That Supreme Brooklyn Bitch-Goddess, The Zeitgeist.

I translate, as fast as I can type, as usual, in an unauthorized and totally irresponsible manner, from the paper edition propped up here beside my morning coffee.

A lot of Brazilians hope and expect that private enterprise will get directly involved in the solution of such social problems as criminality, poverty and low levels of basic education. This expectation was declared by 88% of Brazilians interviewed for a study titled “Corporate Social Responsibility: Brazilian Consumer Perceptions, 2005,” published recently by the Ethos Institute, Akatu and the polling firm Market Analysis. …

The Naked Maia Vs. Reuters In the Land of the Vigilante Consumer of Public Security Services

I have now read fairly deeply into three accounts of what is happening in Rio de Janeiro right now, as heavily armed employees of the bazaar of violence focus like a laser beam on public security insfrastructure, right before the vast New Year’s Celebration on the Green Zone beaches of Copacabana and (to a lesser extent) Ipanema.

Hundreds of thousands to millions ready to float out their offerings out to Iêmanjá in a Guanabara Bay in which Bill Gates’ yacht, Octopus, lies anchored. The photo op of the year. Don’t miss it.

[Neuza lately has been saying that she thinks I may be as much a son of Iansã (Santa Barbara, goddess of fresh water and lightning storms) as I am of the Enigmatic Mermaid.]

Three versions, from

1. Reuters, from
2. Mayor Maia on his ex-blog, and from
3. Wálter Fanganiello Maierovitch — yes, that is his name; the great gaúcho writer Moacyr Scliar can explain to you, beautifully, how that sort of “kosher pizzeria, with bocce court, in the shtetl” thing works here in Brazil  — the “spies and mafia” columnist for Carta Capital magazine,

WFM, whose boss, Mino Carta, a transplanted Italian — as a man who frequents a traditional barbershop with a huge shrine in it to Adoniran Barbosa, let me school you someday on transplanted Italians; though I am not, of course, the compleat expert on the subject, I do sleep with one every night, after all, and dine around a Felliniesque table with hordes of them — who founded a number of the country’s most important newsweeklies over the last several decades, was named Brazilian journalist of the year recently by the foreign correspondent’s association here.

To which freelancers need not apply, by the way.

Or so I understand. Let me check that.
One assumes that the Grey Lady and the WaPo voted otherwise, or annuled their vote.

The key question to start with, it seems to me — though we may have to refine the question as the facts emerge, is this: Is this (1) a war between the forces of ordem e progresso and the Forum of São Paulo — which, as Sen. Bornhausen insisted during the elections, conspired with the drug lords of the PCC during the last elections to undermine Geraldo “Master of Journalism” Alckmin — or (2) a war between the Comando Vermelho and the Comando Azul, which is what the folks in Rio call the crooked cops who run death squads and serve as cover for various flavors of Mafiadom.

Or is it (3) something else entirely?

Which I tend to think of as the “freakonomics” hypothesis.

And it is gaining mindshare in the NMMDEX by the hour.

One very interesting suggestion in the air is that what we are actually seeing, behind the facades of the Potemkin Village, is a war of mafias with modern business principles, as it were, against a drug traffic whose business model they do not consider sustainable in the long term.

Related factoid: The PCC buys heavily into the gasoline station market in the Zona Leste of São Paulo — and even, one hears, promises to put an end to the fuel adulteration mafias, who water down gas and gasohol stocks to skim money off the top.

Texas Hold-em Style Animal Fable Illustration of the Principle at Work

Have you ever heard the joke about the old bull and the young bull, standing at the top of the hill looking and down on a herd of sexy young cows?

“Let’s run down there and get us one of them cows!” says the young bull.

“Son,” drawls, the old bull, “let’s stroll down there all casual-like and get all of them cows.”

That is what we are talking about here.

Downmarket Demand for Security & Stability: A Wal-Mart Emerges from the Shadows?

The most interesting assertion in Mayor Maia’s analysis being that corrupt elements of the military and civil police, and their political backers, may be at war with a vigilante protection racket — Mr. Maierovitch points out its similarities to the pizzo rackets of the ‘Ndrangheta — that has arisen to compete with the traffickers in the shantytowns, and maybe even have aligned itself strategically, in the short term, with police elements looking to weed the ranks of Comando Azul elements.

Mr. Maia suggests that such an alliance would be “natural,” in fact.

The Reuters account, I think, we can almost immediately discard as a useless confabulation, trying to convince us that what we have here is some kind of old-fashioned Plan Colombia scenario.

As far as I can see, Reuters relies almost entirely on sources aligned with and covering for the current governmor, Mrs. Garotinho, who spin a Manichaean fairy tale about what the situation means, pra inglês ver.

The account from Mr. Maia, a heartfelt political enemy of the Garotinhos, who is not very shy about telling you that, tells a very different story.

And Maierovitch at least begins to articulate a third point of view, staking out a perspective, he wants us to believe, outside of that bitter political rivalry. With some credibility, too, because although Mr. WFM is not infallible as a reporter, he is generally not too full of shit, either, or even very often. If at all.

According to the spot checks we have run so far. Continuing to test and backtest.

Let me gist this for you.

On Rio Rabble Roused, Reuters Rounds Up the Usual Suspects

Unlike the Confucian yin and the yang, in the Manichaean fairy tales spun by Reuters, the Dark Side of the Force does not interpenetrate with the Bright Side. It merely infiltrates it. 

Global Guerrillas | When will Brazil’s Gangs Make the Jump? looks at the recent violence in Rio — but only through the lense of Reuters reporters here.

Whom I would not trust to give me directions to the nearest public restroom.

Sorry. But there it is.

Because they are likely to send me to a mobbed-up public-private initiative from which they themselves get a cut for every customer referred.

Reuters seems to have fallen into the nasty habit of employing local flacks with personal agendas and, um, complex extracurricular “social change agency” commitments, shall we say, as “foreign correspondents.”

Stated reasons for these Rio attacks include the election of Sergio Cabral to the governorship of the state on a security platform and pressure from rival vigilante militias that are now in a contest with the drug gangs for control of the street and the economic (these militias charge residents and businesses for protection) power that confers: “It’s a fight for economic power… The militias exist, they are the fourth major gang in the state,” (Asterio) Pereira (Rio state penitentiary chief) said (Reuters).

Orkut, Excel and the Antichrist: A Coin-Operated Tábua

How to get a driver’s license, how to get on Orkut, how to work with MP3s, how to work with Microsoft Excel, how to lose that hick accent and join the human race, Nietzche’s The Antichrist: All $R5 (US$2.34) titles in the book vending machines in the São Paulo subway system. Beyond Good & Evil is also on offer. Each title is shrinkwrapped with a coin visible. As, what, a kind of cashback incentive? Umbanda? Candomblé? Pajé-lança? Tabuleiro da Baiana? I never quite have understood that. Though priced to move, these items generally don’t, I observe.

We took a stroll near the Galeria de Rock in downtown São Paulo today. This is an amazing culture marketplace: a high-rise shopping mall with one musical genre per floor, and occasional low-intensity warfare among adherents of the genres.

Neuza always gets very nervous and will not let me film down there, or else I would have snapped some of the folks selling packaged music for MP3 players. And other wild stuff. Saturdays, the periferia — the manos and the minas — occupies the centro, and there is not a cop in sight.

A personal experience translated into one of her short stories explains why Neuza gets nervous, though I find the place utterly fascinating from a freakonomics point of view.

007 카지노로얄

Augusto Paixão, “hunky movie star and prophet of the sertões,” part of an exhibition of Olinda-style big fat carnival heads in the São Paulo Metrô at the moment. I will explain big fat carnival heads to you sometime. Pretty interesting, actually. Augusto’s shades are made from Chevy hubcaps. The NMMist likes to wander around and snap street art. São Paulo is a fabulous city for this purpose.

007 카지노로얄: We went to see Casino Royale at the PlayArte, a cineplex in a shopping center on the Av. Paulista across from the headquarters of Banco Itaú.

At R$15 (US$7) a ticket, it cost us about 4.3% of a monthly minimum salary here in Brazil — 8.6% for the both of us, and 17.2% for the average family of four that the minimum salary is designed to support in decent shape.

The outrageous $10.50 we pay in New York City, as we rapidly mentally calculate, is a little over 1% of the equivalent income in the States. And given that a vast number of Brazilian workers make half a minimum salary …

The print and the projection were about the same quality as those educational films your teacher showed you in elementary school. I am not sure, but I think they stretched the image slightly to fit the non-standard dimensions of the screen.

The mono sound — and this is an auditorium that looked to be ostentatiously rigged up for HyperDolby SuperSurround — was so tubby and booming that I actually had to read the Portuguese subtitles to make out the dialogue. Not that I need to have bothered.

The film itself is basically a feature-length commercial for (1) Sony consumer electronics, most especially Sony Vaio laptops, Sony Ericcson cell phones and some kind of Blackberry-like handheld device with an iPod lookand feel to it, and (2) the latest in military-grade assault weapons.

‘Another Baby Saved From The BBQ Pits of the MST!’

The Xmas cover of Veja magazine tends to fit my theory about the underlying theme of the scabrous propaganda organ in 2006: “The MST Wants to Eat Your Babies!” See also Lula II is Roberto Mugabe!

I arrived at what I think is a really important insight about myself this year: I realized that my whole life trajectory has been deeply influenced by two fundamental reforms that were crucial to the pre-Turner Thesis development of my great country, which I love with all my heart: The land-grant university and the Great Oklahoma Land Rush (which echoes in Kafka’s Amerika, lit geeks will remember, as The Great Oklahoma Nature Circus).

That, in turn, has helped me better understand a point that I often allude to but have yet to explain fully: The Landless People’s Movement here in Brazil — a law was proposed recently to declare its various manifestations and allied movements as terrorist organizations — may not want to eat our babies after all.

Specimen Global Exchange: China, History, Marx, The Chico Meme

“Seizing of the Nanking Palace.” See also “Spontaneous Joy as the Free Iraqi Forces Seize Firdaus Square.”

Morning in São Paulo, Brazil, and the bem-te-vi is mocking, mocking whilst the sabiá sings “cheap! cheap! cheap!”

PostGlobal, another one of those Washington Post 2.0 blogs with commodity content served straight from the mystery-meat vat of Think Tank Alley, wants to know, [Is] China Colonizing Africa?

Which is a legitimate and important question to answer, seriously and honestly, as Latin Americans — ingrates that they are, after having benefited so much over the past century from “good neighbor” measures taken in the name of the Monroe-Kissinger Doctrine — will tend to tell you.

One common take on the situation here, I would say — translating the gist into Brooklynese — is that if the Chinese are here in search of ways to help put their own house in order by serving as business competitors to the Microsofts of the world, to take a notorious example, then great.

This might help to start to driving prices down.

Fewer chaos-driven arbitrage opportunities, maybe, but the trade-off would be sustainable development, a better international balance of trade, that sort of thing.

Or that is the idea, at least. The idea swept back into office by Reagan-Mondale margins recently in parts of Latin America, and suppressed with surgical brutality and a great deal of neo-mapacheria by this year’s Coup d’Etat 2.0 in Mexico.

Naturally, if the Chinese are here as just another wave of vandals who want to take the handle so the pump don’t work, then that would be bad.

So no, we surely cannot have that.

I bet even Red Hugo would agree with that premise.

No one in their right mind down here, “left” or “right” — as one of my favorite essayists down here pointed out once, all Brazilian political parties identify themselves, absurdly, as “center-left” these days, even if, according to Marta Suplicy, our Mr. Serra here in São Paulo is really just a kind of New (non-neo) Conservative 1.0 — which is a good thing, you should understand — wants to be the new Czechoslovakia.

Or Haiti 0.1.0.1RC47.

Or Iraq 2.0.

Or the New Cuba 1.0 — see also Classic Coke — as envisioned by the Miami Mafia.

The information warriors of the militarized blogging-industrial complex, meanwhile, seem to be making careful preparations for a Cold War II with the Maoist Hordes these days in any case, even as Western companies fall all over themselves, vying for the privilege of cutting off a slice of the domestic market in the biggest of the BRIC sleeping giants.

Witness the meatheaded hypocrisy of attacks on Google for aiding and abetting baby-eating Chinese Communist supermen.

Which the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society ceased and desisted from once they got one of their guys in the door as Google’s chief lobbyist, one notes. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? We shall see …

Which is why, as a Nabokovian amateur butterfly collector of contemporary rhetorical fleurs du mal, I got kind of interested in this exchange in the comments thread to this meatheaded post.

It provides, I submit to you, a succinct illustration of some basic engineering principles of noise machinery, just as InfomediaTV was writing about them the other day.

The Naked Maia on Naked Violence in the Naked Cidade Maravilha

Ipanema and Copacabana — the Green Zone — still reportedly unaffected, with massive troop buildups in the tunnel approaches shown on TV. But not, I bet you, for lack of trying. And an attack on the B. de Tijuca is hitting pretty close to home. Source: Folha de S. Paulo.

Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia (PFL) has a lot to say on his “ex-blog” today about the wave of violence in Rio de Janeiro, and a lot of nasty things to say about the outgoing governor, Mrs. Garotinho, who of course succeeded her husband, Fat Tony — and whose adherence to the Alckmin campaign during the last elections caused no end of stir, shall we say, as you may recall.

GOVERNOS GAROTINHOS: 49.603 ASSASSINATOS!
E faltam três meses ainda. Mantida a média serão 55.800!

49,603 murdered during the Garotinho governorships! And there are still three months to go. At the current rate, that could go up to 55,800!

I am not up on this story at all, really, though I saw Maia and governor-elect Cabral — who has promised to rein in the Military Police in Rio state, which was recently hit by a huge corruption sweep by the feds — on TV last night.

None of this is new at all, of course.

I seem to remember that in 2003 a coordinated attack, well-supplied, apparently, with tactical intelligence, on a power substation, and designed to black out the Sambodrómo Marques de Sapucaí during the prime-time nationally televised competitive Carnaval parades, only failed because a backup system cut in.

And the day of our last visit to Rio, we passed by the scene of a standoff between one lone drug gangbanger with a grenade and dozens of PMs at a key tunnel leading to the Zona Sul.

The brains had been swabbed up by the time we got there, after hearing about it on the cab’s FM radio, tuned to the news. It would just not do to upset the tourists with that kind of thing.

Last night’s broadcast showed intense military activity in the same chokepoint tunnels, with scenes of PMs firing heavy weapons in residential neighborhoods that could have come straight out of that film I showed you earlier this year.

The one you cannot see in Brazil, lionizing BOPE.

A former PM and Rio police commander, recently elected to the legislature, named Lins — no relations to Paulo Lins that I know of — was among the trash taken out recently in that racketeering sweep that also allegedly netted a Globo TV reporter.

The problem here, you need to understand, in general terms, is knowing whether, or when — because not all cops are crooked, mind you, but it is not easy — this is a war between the Comando Vermelho and friends, on the one hand, and the “forces of law and order,” if any, or whether it is a war between criminal factions, many of them belonging to the Comando Azul … as cariocas refer to crooked cops that have long since stopped working for the community and gone over to working for the Traffic.

Chaos.

Let us just say, as if it were not obvious, that Rio de Janeiro is experiencing another outbreak of the social chaos that normally lies dormant, but which, like a case of herpes, always seems to flare up just as you think you are about to get laid.

To the words of the ex-blogging Mayor, then, who is not one to pull his punches or, let us grant him this, fail to use his brain. He thinks Cabral (PMDB) will do better.

We hope so. Rio could be a great city again if it would only stop trying to pretend that it already is.

CNN Commits Act of Massive Stupidity Brief No. 101(c)

It looks squiggly and weird, but properly translated, the message is far from incomprehensible or alien.

I was flipping past CNN International last evening when I happened to catch this happy talk backgrounder they did on mixed-religion couples, focused mainly on a Muslim gentleman married to a Christian woman.

The voiceover contained yet another egregious case of abject nonsense that made my ears get red.

I will have to paraphrase because I cannot seem to find the transcript on the Yahoo-powered Web site search engine.

It was to the effect, said of a mixed couple, that “each of them continue to worship their own God.”

Lookit here: Muslims and Christians are not in fundamental disagreement about there being One God, or even that that God is the God of Moses and Abraham who occasionally drops in to register His displeasure at how we are treating His Creation and fellow creatures.

The proper English translation of Allah, by non-Muslims, is “God.”

Muslims insist on “Allah” — The [One] God — because they believe that God insisted to the Prophet that they speak His name in the Messenger’s own language, which He was giving the dignity of a scriptural language.

Which gift of God, historically speaking, had the happy effect, whatever else you might say, of producing a really superb neo-Aristetolian tradition in linguistic, human and natural sciences.

Where some disagreement comes in is as to just who God has been talking to, and what he has been saying.

But to insist that that disagreement is a fundamental one is to engage in false dichotomy.

There are many areas of general agreement on that score. Enough so that, if we Christians can merge and hyphenate with our honored Jewish friends — that Talmud and Midrash were quite the amazing technologies and, as Weber pointed out, have a lot of secular applications as well — into the Judeo-Christian tradition, it should not be hard to admit what is essentially the case, what with a billion not unsatisfied customers of the competing, GFDL-licensed User’s Guide to Life in the Islamic world:

Our common tradition could just as easily be called Judaeo-Christian-Islamic.

Muslims of all persuasions will quite unreservedly grant you that God talked to Jesus, who comported himself as a faithful Messenger of the highest order.

On the other hand — apparently having had it up to here with Byzantine trinitiarianism at they time they started up their faith, which you might just as easily lay at the feet of failed Byzantine evangelists as blame the vigilante consumer for — will just as politely affirm that God la yalidu wa lam yulad (neither begets nor was he begotten).

So that Son of God stuff they tend to think is over the top.

And the Qur’an?

Just God — who has the admirable and divine quality of both “intending good” and “doing good” at the same time — having the kindness and courtesy to talk to the Arabs of the day clearly (mubin, al-Bayan, “the clear and unambiguous message, expression”) in their own language.

The message, on the other hand, carefully translated with the proper caveats, is not really all that different from what He said to other people in their languages:

You should try hard to love everybody, even your enemies, because you are all My children.

But that does not mean you have to take an outrageous amount of guff from the evil people who abuse My children.

At which point we can start to argue about whether or not we should wait around for God to smite the wicked or whether we are authorized to do that on our own account. And by what means. And to what extent. Fully bearing in mind the “first stone” caveat.

Now, to me, a lot of the fundamental theological differences in this historic debate fall into the realm of stuff I am not just qualified to have an opinion on.

Being as how only God could possibly know.

Reasonable minds can differ, because reason can only take you so far, as we all admit.

But all of this is terribly important to note, I will argue — and CNN really ought to freaking be able to find someone to articulate this point — precisely because of the growing volume of ugly “clash of civilizations” disinformation out there.

Business Blogs of the Year!

Back in Brooklyn, a key content-download batch process this year. I soon sold my handful of GOOG shares, which had entitled me to that prospectus you see there. Which is why you should not count on NMM in any way for stock advice. I am an idiot.

Look, to be honest, NMM(-TV)SNBC, the New Market Machines (Not an LLC), is not really a vast publishing and analysis empire.

It is just some guy mouthing off on a free WordPress blog.

Well, not just some guy: I have work that I do, and went to school and have diplomas and stuff, and all that. But for the purposes of blog identify management, just like Mr. Murilo, I am just some guy.

I am, I can tell you, however, not a public employee or government agent — or contractor or off-the-books, plausibly deniable proxy or shill– of any kind.

If you want to know more, CVs and resumés and references are available upon request to serious inquiries.

So given all that, I really do not have any business claiming to have read all the new business blogs of the year and selected the best, by any rigorous criteria.

For one thing, there were a lot of new business blogs this year, ranging from the technically whizbang and acceptably noise-free to the potentially deeply putrid.

Still, a good pundit never lets his or her own intellectual laziness stop him or her from pumping up his or her own sense of self-importance.

I therefore nominate

1. Jonathan’s Blog, by SUNW head honcho J. Schwartz, and
2. Hybrid Talk, a blog by this fellow from NYSE PR that was designed to chronicle the technical and regulatory transition from the pits to the “everybody upstairs” mainly and most likely entirely electronic market that is such a big part of NYSE’s big, big strategy.

The criteria I applied really had less to do with “strategic communications” and all that than it did with my own stupid ideas, as a vigilante consumer of information services, of what I happen to like about the blogs I happen to like to read.

Take Schwartz, for example. This whole idea of a chief executive bypassing his flack department — or appearing to at least — to speak propria persona to his installed user base and supply chain still makes me very, very queasy.

It tends to activate that “different hats” detector of mine, which operates on the biased assumption that the only way to wear different hats without getting your tit caught in a wringer is to make sure you only wear one at a time.

As to whether that alarm is a false alarm or not, I intend to keep reading and thinking about. It is a fascinating case study. And I attended a SUN event a while back in which I thought I saw some signs that a lot of people thought it was silly and weird.

But then again, Nealy was subsequently out and Schwartz was in. So the guy must be doing something right. And as an alternative to “traditional” business-leader autohagiography by proxy, I much prefer it.

I like to read about how people do their jobs.

And I can discount for a certain amount of natural self-importance and self-promotion if they will just stick to the level of “I had this problem so I thought and then I talked to Bob and Mary and we thought maybe if we fiddled with the carburetor but that was going to be expensive and then Jimmy said and it worked pretty good …” Which is the kind of talk I find inherently interesting.

In the meantime, all I mean to say about the Jon “SUNW c’est moi” blog is that I really kind of dig it as a blog.

Shocked! Shocked! The InfomediaTV Lecture On Sincerity & Authenticity

Local reaction: iCommons was a palhaçada — a farce

[UPDATE: an executive summary of the thoughts developed in a digressive manner here is now available. See  Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt: An Essential Bibliography]

In case you still think my theories on Humpty Dumptyism in postmodern government, enterprise and consumer technology public relations are merely speculative, how many cases must I add to the casebook before you agree to call it a heap?

Consider this Dica de leitura (‘tip for readers’) from InfomediaTV — the Porto-Alegre based “media sponsor” for the Free Software meetings in Brazil that tried to engineer a sleazy media coup there this year on behalf of its client, Microsoft.

Not the only sleazy media coup Microsoft engineered in Brazil this year, by the way: See this report from local sources on the iCommons Rio Summit.

From November, Fabiana Iglesias of the prize-winning, innovative hybrid journalism-and-publicity agency that Microsoft Brasil hired to promote its message at FISL, reviews Olavo de Carvalho’s recently published translation — and rebranding — of a Schopenhauer treatise on “informal fallacies.”

If there is one thing that I think I was right about this year — and I was wrong about many things, but fortunately did not bet the farm on any of them — is that Carvalho is a key man in the noise machine industry.

If you are a regular reader, you might remember that I first spotted Carvalho writing for an “NGO” for retired public employees of the military dictatorship called TERNUMA, for Terrorismo Nunca Mais, or “Terrorism Never More.”

We later find the man living in suburban Virginia on a journalist visa — who sponsored that, by the way? — begging readers for donations to support his evangelical work among the neoconservative think-tankers, writing columns for various editorial pages around Brazil — including the Jornal do Comercio, which is no Wall St. Journal that I am willing to pay for the news while skipping the editorial pages, mind you — getting a two-page interview spread in the Folha de S. Paulo, and generally making an amazing amount of noise considering the wilfull stupidity of what he has to say.

The InfomediaTV editorialist makes an elaborate point of declaring all these sorts of things awful, just awful. Tsk tsk tsk.

Um dos sofismas preferidos nos meios virtuais os chamados “rótulos detestáveis”. Em vez de argumentar intelectualmente, procurando o que há de verdade e mentira no discurso alheio, eu posso simplesmente rotular o meu adversário, tirando-lhe o direito de falar: os esquerdistas, ou direitistas, ou comerciantes, ou arrogantes, ou dogmáticos, ou ateus, ou qualquer outro adjetivo-rótulo. E geralmente o rotulado começa a querer explicar-se e definir-se, o que apenas reforça o rótulo e desvia a atenção do que realmente interessava.

One of most common forms of specious argumentation found in online forums is so-called “hateful labeling.” Instead of arguing intellectually, I simply label my adversary, and take away his right to respond: Lefty, right-winger, businessman, arrogant, dogmatic, atheist, or whatever other adjective-label you like. The person labelled generally has to start to explain and define themselves, which only reinforces attention to the label and distracts attention from what is really at issue.

*SE VOCÊ NÃO PODE ARGUMENTAR, ENTÃO CONFUNDA* -

If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

Analogue Content-Downloading and Facilities Management Audit Memorandum No. 47b

The sung newspaper: Tom Zé turned 70 this year.

Neuza and I live in this weird little house built by a Dutch artist who was a veteran of the Amsterdam squatting movement, intended to serve as a sort of sleep-in sculpture atelier.

So it is kind of the old Soho loft model appeal: Spacious but minimalist, is the nice way to put it. Potentially risky, in theory. Definitely not your standard suite at the airport Marriott. Urban homesteading. The living room floor has a drain and gutters. That sort of thing.

It is really not that short of being a barraco, is another, more realistic way of putting it.

But Neuza loves this place, so we bought it, lot, laughingstock and caixadagua. Back when the $ was nearly R$4, too, which makes us feel smart.

And now Neuza has found yet another interesting way to make it more habitable:

Projeto Mantas insulation as installed by the famous, omnicompetent Flying By the Seat of the Pants Marcão. Painting by Geraldo “Junior” Paranhos, from a Steiner-Rothkoesque academic phase that he is moving out of at the moment back into still life, one hears. I personally would like to see him get back to his early-1990s figurative surrealism in some way — with a twist, perhaps — but who am I to say?

Long story short, a bunch of Unicamp students devised a way to insulate “popular housing” cheaply, using a material made out of discarded milk containers.

They did up a nice study on the insulating properties of the packaging, based on lab testing, and then worked on different solutions for turning it into a sheet insulation layer and making it commercially available.

They designed a supply chain and production process that involves homeless catadores de lixo and carroceiros to locate and collect the raw materials, unskilled workers to clean the material, semi-skilled workers (skilled seamstresses, mainly, working below their potential but for regular pay) to assemble the sheets. Guys to handle the packing and shipping. People with master’s degrees who prefer not to go work for Marco Valério of Belo Horizonte — go figure — doing the marketing.

A little work for everybody here and there.

Equity shares in an EWOC kind of cooperative scheme, I think it is. You can read all about the pricing models and all in the literature they send you.

And it is quite cheap: $R2 (US$0.90?) per square meter.

We did our whole house, which is pretty huge by favela standards, for about $75 in raw materials, or about two week’s minimum salary in Brazil.

And it works like a charm. I keep saying that if we want to prettify it eventually, we can do some kind of easy on, easy off University of Laverne fabric-architecture layer over the functional layer.

What’s Next for Text?

Overpriced offline blogging accessory with latter-day Umbanda saint.

In the short term, I promised you two things: A response to Murilo and (2) an transcript-translation and explanation of why Ricardo Rocha is the NMM(-TV)SNBC “Enemy of Journalism” of the year.

But the guy is here, as we say in Brooklyn, doing the thing — adjusting the rebimboca da parafuseta, but more on that later — so I think I might actually get off my lazy butt and get out and about this afternoon.

But Murilo, Rocha, do not worry. I have not forgotten about you.

In the near term, I am going to try to do two big things:

(1) go down to Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum.

You meet the most interesting people at the WSF-FSM — some of them quite mad, some of them quite sane, like most tea parties attended by a representative sample of human beings.

And you learn the most interesting things.

I will never forget my first chance to see Cuban revolutionary youth vanguards in person.

My first impression, which may not be all that wrong, looking back: They dressed like dirty hippies, but they had all the smugness of yuppy legacy admissions.

But the smartest guys in the room? Those young, rather square-looking Indians with those plummy Anglo-Indian accents. Man. Be sure to take along a tape recorder and a notebook full of hard questions. Those guys can really bat for the century or whatever the cricket terminology is.

I figure I will do what I did in 2002: Volunteer for some kind of Indymedia-type copyleft project and do them up some nice, straightforward event coverage — bem caprichada, viu? — in return for some “solidarity housing” and a chance to closely inspect some random human beings in the process.

I will never forgt that churrasco that Glauber and his wife threw the houseguests that last time — or remember all the details, either.

The guy, who was quite the local fixer, even tried to rustle me up a girlfriend, But I already had one. Married her, in fact.

My friend, meanwhile, another one of those foreign correspondents from one of those Latin American nations that, ahem, do not fully appreciate the superiority of Camões to Quevedo and Góngora — I am neutral but lean toward Quevedo, obviously — says he or she will share his or her impressions the World Economic Forum for me, for the sake of inside dope and a stab at completeness under the rubric of “public cases and controversies.”

Because for some reason, he or she always gets invited, but I cannot seem to wangle it.

Question of the Day

When is Orkut.com going to be sold for the $(umpteen gazillion) that Rupert paid for MySpace? And to whom?

A Globo Debacle Not Even the Soap Opera Scriptwriters Could Have Dreamed Up

[Globo TV reporter] Xavier is accused of selling information he obtained as a journalist to the gang of numbers racketeer de Miranda, head of the “one-armed bandit” mafia of Rio de Janeiro.

Inspector Tostes has also been linked by investigators to that gambling mafia — and more.

The Gazeta de Ribeirão is one of those local papers that, according to this year’s winner of the NMM-Tabajara anti-punditry prize, Brazil division, we ought to pay way more attention to.

Why? Because the combined circulation of all these minor papers just dwarfs that of the national newsweeklies and metropolitan dailies.

And those newspapers, or at least the ones not owned, or burned to the ground by thugs hired by, crooked local politicians, do seem to be converging up in terms of their standards & practices.

Which I suppose is why Scripps-Howard is so eager to fly these kinds of Twain-like cracker-barrel newspaper editors to D.C. to have this idiot convince them that the newspaper as we know it is dead.

Forgetting NMM Cross-Cultural Marketing Heuristic Presupposition No. 1 in the process:

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.

So here is the wire-copy omnibus rewrite-up from Ribeirão Preto (SP) — think Buffalo in relation to New York City, sort of — on that stunning story I was mentioning the other day: The TV Globo (Rio) reporter accused of using his status as a journalist to obtain confidential information, then selling that information to the gambling and numbers rackets in Rio de Janeiro.

The fellow’s name is José Messias Xavier.

Colorfully enough. Cordels will be composed and sung for decades about this jackass.

I might even try my hand at one.

Let’s see: What if we rhymed “Xavier” with “laissez faire” … ?

At the same time, new details are emerging on the general theme of “funky maneuvering by the Globo financial wizards,” which pops up in fragmentary form now and again if you pay attention to the right investigative journos.

One notes, of course, that the source of those accusations is, after all, a Garotinho — which might or might not give the story some interesting parallels with Gordillo’s threats, in Mexico, to out a crooked digital-divide bridge-building technology deal.

The most striking fact about this case, however, is o seguinte.

A specific account number gets mentioned.

And a bank: CSFB.

Whoa.

As usual, I translate, badly & in haste, but leave the original Portuguese in place so you can all judge what a complete idiot I am.

Later we can parse some Globo disaster-response PR on the subject.

A Rede Globo de televisão, uma das maiores emissoras de TV do mundo, foi destaque na imprensa nacional nos últimos dias em três casos que colocaram a direção da empresa em posição delicada e abalaram a credibilidade de seu departamento de jornalismo.

The Globo TV Network, one of the largest television networks in the world, made national headlines in recent days in three cases that put the company’s directors in a delicate position and undermined the credibility of its journalism department.

Standards & Practices for Dictatorial Rhetoric: A Second Case in Point

He was a brutal dictator, yes, but he was our brutal dictator.

Informed Comment lives up to its branding. While it does not pretend to be the one and only source of information and comment on the situation — “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — it has, in spades, that prime indicator of value-add in information services, as identified by our test labs:

Infodensity

Professor Juan Cole, who writes the well-known blog, is an academic Middle East historian and frequent TV talking head, fluent in Arabic and Persian and with a lot of “outside the Green Zone” contacts on the ground amid the ongoing triumph of the L. Paul Bremer Iraqi Economic Miracle.

His blog has been filling an urgent need by monitoring coverage, not just by the usual media suspects, but from a good range of Arabic-language and European and other global news sources as well.

That makes him a very important counterweight to such Arabic-language media monitoring projects as MEMRI, which are run by information warriors and generally pretty scabrous in their selective presentation of “Arab Street.”

An “The MST Wants to Eat Your Babies!” kind of operation, in other words.

When I was working mainly as a technical and journalistic translator, and keeping a professional commonplace book on the subject called Blogalization, I sketched out a similar project myself.

I read and understand Arabic — well, fusha mostly — quite well and had a decent blogroll going of the journalists and bloggers that I thought were worth listening to.

As opposed to those taking sides in the information war, the one that Rumsfeld has waged as much ferocity against on the American public as he has against the enemy — going far, far beyond the boundaries of legitimate military “operational information security.”

But I soon realized that Prof. Cole was serving that niche beautifully, so my services were probably best used elsewhere

When I want a reasonably complete picture of regional public opinion, Juan offers one, with all the proper caveats, and shows me where to drill down if I am not satisified.

So, having an interest myself in religious rhetoric by dying dictators, I was especially interested in this little note today.

Saddam Hussein, condemned to death and with all appeals exhausted, is trying to turn his death into a “sacrifice” for the Iraqi nation. In April 2003 Saddam was universally reviled but the country is now in such a horrible state that some Sunni Arabs do see Saddam as a symbol of the united Iraqi nation. Saddam, however, spoke in his typical racist way of the need to fight the “raiders and the Persians”, according to al-Hayat in Arabic (i.e. the Americans and the Shiites). Sadr Movement spokesmen demanded that he be executed on the eve of the Day of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha)–i.e. this weekend.

Did Saddam get a chance to read about the Testament of Pinochet?

Because interestingly predictably enough, Pinochet’s last great symbolic act emerged on Xmas Eve this year, and was replete with “Family, Church and Fatherland” symbolism of exactly the same kind.

Mutatis mutandis, of course: “changing those things that need to be changed” — and leaving the rest well enough alone.

Reuters: Churn in the Top Journo Spot

Reuters Appoints New Top Editor: I missed this item first time around, while cavorting in the surf last week, but caught up to while checking the NMMDEX today on Google Finance.

It is a very interesting “human capital” development.

As a writer for the Observatŕio da Imprensa here wrote not long ago,

Never before has a world-class news agency pursued in such a brutal fashion the idea that journalism is mutating into an assembly line for news.

Some very funky things have gone on, I think, under this outgoing fellow, and minions of his like that Ms. Wong in New York (I, II, III).

And the outgoing guy doubled, nota bene, as Chairman of the Reuters Foundation — and so presumably had a hand in its, ahem, governance arbitrage strategies, some examples of which we try to fight through the fog to follow on this blog from time to time.

I thought the most interesting note in the press release was the emphasis on Mr. Schlesinger’s good relations with the journalism rank and file.

Reuters has been through some bitter labor disputes of late, though you never read about it.

See this isolated but intriguing item about Mr. Schlesinger’s approach to labor relations, however, from 2005:

Reuters is in turmoil.

Murilo on Miscegenaçao 2.0

YouTube | Brazil Supports Remix Culture: Mr. Murilo Jr., the culture hero of a thousand hats, evangelizes Brazilian Miscegenação 2.0 to a session of the IGF while identifying himself “as an official representative of Gilberto Gil.”

(The rumor is that Roseana Sarney may be in the running to replace Gil at the Ministry of Culture, by the way.

Only a rumor at this point, which I am blindly passing along like an idiot through a blogger that my wife says “seems to know what is going on Brasilia.” So take it with several grains of salt after sucking a lime, like a shot of tequila.

But yes, that Roseana Sarney, whose Senate candidacy was once cancelled for vote-buying. Whose family owns all those Globo retransmitters in, where is it? Maranhão? Which technically speaking elected officials are not allowed to do? “Be the media,” as it were?

One of the more interesting sequelae to the end of the ACM era in Bahia has been a number of state legislative inquiries there into crooked cultural subsidies, run through state-owned enteprises, that may have been used to launder caixa dois money for the PFL powers that were, as I read recently in Carta Capital. But I will have to summarize that for you later.)

Which, again, is not the kind of thing that Web site managers (administrar is verb used on man’s Wikipedia user profile, which is a Portuguese translation of his GVO profile, basically; he says he “manages Web sites”) generally do, is it?

I really need to see a copy of this fellow’s official job title and employment contract. An official resume or CV would be nice, too.

Those must be public documents, right?

Because I still cannot get my head around what looks like an egregious conflict of interest here, or the man’s use of incomplete disclosure in what looks an awful lot like an attempt to preventing a casual inspection from discovering them.

SEC and FinCEN Sign Information Sharing Agreement

Dow Jones and Reuters’ Factiva advertises: Outsourced identification of the politically undesirable under USA PATRIOT Section 312.

SEC and FinCEN Sign Information Sharing Agreement: I am on the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network mailing list, which seems to have gotten over its propensity for being hacked by some flavor of other of “the Iraqi insurgency.”

This is an item that deserves serious study.

Let’s see who else has taken note lately when we get a chance.

I am going through my e-mail finally, at the moment, after my week away.

Of course, if I really wanted to talk to you, I would have given you my private contact info.

So if you have not heard back from me, I am either neglecting you shamelessly or you have just not tumbled to the fact that if I really wanted to be in close daily contact with you, I would not have moved to the vast, echoing jungles of South America.

The Securities and Exchange Commission SEC and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network FinCEN today announced that they have reached an agreement for the routine exchange of examination and enforcement information relating to SEC-regulated firms’ compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act BSA. The goal of the agreement is to assist in the identification, deterrence, and interdiction of terrorist financing and money laundering. The agreement will better ensure that SEC-regulated firms have robust anti-money laundering programs and assist the agencies’ efforts to identify financial institutions with significant BSA violations or deficiencies and take enforcement and other action when appropriate. The BSA was designed to protect the U.S. financial system from money laundering and other financial crime through a system of regulatory controls and reporting aimed at increasing transparency in the U.S. financial system. SEC-regulated firms include, among others, broker-dealers in securities and investment companies.

NM(M-TV)SNBC 2006 Blog Year in Review

Some New Market Machines are solutions engineered to address the specific problem at hand. Other New Market Machines seek to reengineer the problem to fit the solution on offer. The trick is learning to sort the signal from the noise, then selling that know-how to people who do not have time to do the due diligence themselves.

Tá rebocado meu compadre
Como os donos do mundo piraram
Eles já são carrascos e vítimas
Do próprio mecanismo que criaram
– “As Aventuras de Raul Seixas Na Cidade De Thor”

“It is plain to see, my friend, that the masters of the world have gone completely insane, and have become both the operators and the victims of the killing machines that they themselves created.”

That, from Brazilian hroquenró legend Raul Seixas, is as good a gloss on what I all The Kafka Gambit in contemporary postmodern technology public relations — one of the main freelance professional focuses of this blog over the past year — as any.

This was also quite a year for Neuza and me personally, as we started seriously implementing our bihemispheric housing market arbitrage operation — whereby market rent on our Brooklyn apartment provides a decent buffer against the uncertainties here at our house in São Paulo.

If the dollar does not go too far south.

But no matter: We have Plans C and D as well.

Anecdote I: Smiling Faces Sometimes

What started us down that road — we had thought of moving to Brazil sooner, but I had some job opportunities and Neuza was really enjoying living in Brooklyn — was the day I had the great pleasure and luxury of summarily quitting my job as the editor who managed assignments & production at a weekly trade newspaper.

“At-will” employment contracts have their downside, but they sometimes have their upside as well.

A gentleman professional, of course, does not tell tales out of school about the details of his private, closed-door contract talks with HR and management, but here are a couple of anecdotes to suggest, at least, why I found that necessary & desirable — and how that experience shaped NMM blogplay in 2006.

See, I became interim editor in chief of this kind of neat little nerdy, weekly niche trade newspaper on capital markets operations & technology when the guy who hired me buggered off to answer the siren song of a hot new hedge fund publisher — one that, as I read, is now going down the tubes.

Which I am sorry to hear. I did kind of try to warn him, after all.

Even though the guy stuck me with a freaking logistical and administrative nightmare, I can sort of sympathize with why he did it.

A decent human being, this guy, but he really played me dirty in the doing of the deal. I would still drink with him, but he would have to buy his own Laphroaig.

Anyway, in the process, I inherited a crew of mainly freelancers who wrote the thing — freelancers without formal contracts, which was one of the first things I set out to rectify, as a way of managing supply-side risk in our content pipeline, as it were.

As in “Hey, publication X does not pay me on time, but publication Y does, so screw Colin and the publication X he rode in on!”

(Freelancers without contract being a problem, you see, because the publication had already successfully been sued under Tasini v. New York Times. We were not getting it, somehow, that that was an incredibly bad and costly thing that we should try not to repeat in the future.)

Which is exactly, to be honest, the main thing that I failed miserably to get done.

That is a long, long story in itself, but maybe dedicated blog readers — hi, Mom! — can see the tie-in between that experience — and my wife’s experience as a freelancer with Abril here in Brazil — with my general interest in formal and informal economic relationships.
Now, one of these freelancers was a charming, polished and thoroughly professional woman who reported on market data management and things like that. A fascinating topic.

Her work was a bit on the lite side, I thought, but then I am a heavy and insufferable techie myself — just ask my poor wife — and I did not really know enough about our readership profile at the time.

So I just assumed my predecessor had a good grasp on the proper tone and level of the product from the target audience’s point of view.

What mattered most at the time was that the copy came in on time, and in clean condition, as we editors say. The word count was always just what I had asked for, and the reporting always passed fact-checking in short order.

However, as I began to see more clearly than ever — and citizen journalists, take note:

checking the facts as presented is absolutely not the same thing as checking whether any relevant facts in evidence were omitted.

But at the time, under the circumstances, I was happy to have her.

Because frankly, the biggest job was getting the paper closed on deadline.

Before I arrived, the thing was closing 6, 7, 8 hours late every single week.

Which, as you may or may not know, you bloggers who can publish with the push of a button, not only wastes an incredible amount of money but also sends vast ripples of bad karma and murderous resentment through a huge back-office team of good, honest blue-collar post-production people and unionized print-shop workers.

Okay, so now the year’s big market data conference comes around and I finally have a chance to meet the woman; I unshackle myself from my desk for a hour or two to go down to the Waldorf-Astoria and check it out for myself — even though my copy-desk guy, the voice of reason, says it is insane, given our workload, to do so.

But I tend to think that eyeballing the scene is Job One.

He who never leaves the Green Zone is unlikely to know what the hell he is talking about.

So it is when we are at this conference, standing out on the sidewalk outside the hotel famous for its fruit salad, smoking cigarettes and engaging in some light conversation, that the woman suddenly, casually, after all this time, lets drop that she also freelances writing press releases for the Market Data division at Reuters and maybe she could “get me some inside scoops.”

Zebu Cavaco na Terra de Papo Furado

Nossa banda de technobrega, que alias só existe na minha cabeça.

Eu tenho outra musiquinha minha que ando compondo e desenvolvendo ultimamente, é vai assim.

Começa com aquele “riff” do “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” dos Rolling Stones, e depois se lança numa onda meio Carlos Santana, na chave de E menor, sem letras, eu acho. So guitarrista fanfarrão improvisando, como nem naquela “Cantor de Mambo” dos Mutantes …

Vou botar aqui depois, o como tocá-la.

Enquanto isso, as coristas devem cantar “Vamo samba-rock together ….”

Eu imagino Ilé Ayê fornecendo o batuque e as cordas do New York Philharmonic acompanhando.

No refrão, eu — o chamado Zebu Cavaco, astro de hroque — canto assim:

Mick Maus ouviu falar
Agora quer me processar
Só porque eu quis cantar:
Vamo samba-rock together

Felizmente, no entanto:

Logo Keith [Richards] apareceu
E disse pro Mick “porra, meu,
Eu não acho mal.
Que tal:
Vamo samba-rock together”

Que sonho mais lindo? Né?

Lobo of Globo Shows Lula the Open-Source Bloomberg Box

“Why the hell are these tech vendors always trying to show me new gizmos? That’s more Luizinho’s line.” Do the bystanders look embarassed or am I reading too much into it?

Amanpour-lite political correspondent Cristiana Lobo gives G1, Globo’s newish online news portal — it has been online for a while now but is brand new, for the purposes of the ad blitz that is currently underway for the New Year — a little plug from the Planalto on her new blog.

I had a very good impression of G1’s election coverage, and its new infotainment interface is slick and groovy and — sucking up to Chavez and the PT? — fire engine red, but is not, like a lot of overengineered Brazilian Web sites, turgidly unusable (Submarino).

And does not seem to throw exceptions on my OSBB, either. All in all, it reminds me of some of the things I have been liking about IstoÉ magazine lately as well.

An online analogue to that multiple-entry point info architecture that the WSJ in print should get some credit for pioneering.

Yes, I know I constantly rail against the infotainment state, but I admit it: I actually care what Keith Richards has to say about the death of James Brown, and am happy to hear about groovy new restaurants in São Paulo.

I do have a wife to relate to, remember.

And remember, a G1 blogger won the NMM(TV)SNBC-Tabajara political analysis prize this year.

Among the things that the fellow said was that, although no one wants to admit it, Juscelino Kubitchek’s dream for Brasília — that airplane-shaped city slapped down in the middle of beautiful but heretofore rather remote Goiás — is actually coming true.

The Brazilian heartland now matters as much as, or more than, the coastal powerhouses of the past. And watching the country-western music jamboree on the All-Zebu Channel tends to reinforce that impression.

So it is extremely interesting to see Globo management apparently putting their money where their blogger’s mouth is.

And learning to do Journalism 1.0, to boot.

Sort of a lite version of Journalism 1.0, in parts, but it seems to be reasonably reality-based, according to our spot check.

Which is all one can really ask. Not everyone is a hardass tech freak like me. And the mass media has to figure out how to offer a little something for everyone.

We will continue to monitor.

I tease Ms. Lobo — and she deserves it, too; just look how embarrassed everybody else looks in that photo, above — but I have also seen her in roundtables and stuff, and she does seem capable of some halfway decent Realpolitik 1.0-style political analysis: Who has to twist whose arm to get what done, that sort of thing.

Analysis that focuses on the notion that politics is all about hard-headed negotiation rather than empty symbolism, in other words.

Which I tend to think is a more useful message to send the grand public that is still educating itself about the new way of doing politics around here.

And which has actually also been a big, big Lula talking point — the “Lula the negotiator” meme, which has quite a bit of truth to it, I think — for years.

To put it in a larger context:

After the PR Hindenburg disaster that follow the arrest of a Globo Rio reporter who was allegedly selling information from law enforcement sources to numbers and gambling racketeers — information he received “off the record” in his capacity as a journalist …

… no, no, I am not making this incredibly bizarre shit up, those are the facts as we know them so far in the case of a certain Mr. Xavier, a TV correspondent for Globo Rio …

– I think it is becoming rather likely that the insurrection of the “other Globos” that has been brewing for some time now is now advancing on the airport and getting ready to hold a barn-burner of a changing of the guard ceremony in the Firdaws Square of corporate HQ.

JN journalism director Ali Kemal is toast, I would bet.

I mean, who was supposed to be managing this Mr. Xavier, anyway?

And good riddance to bad management.

And one also notices that while the anchor of the now thoroughly demoralized Jornal Nacional, William “Homer Simpson is my target viewer” Bonner, does not have a blog or column, the anchor of the Jornal do Globo, Mr., er, Waack, does.

I will have to start reading that.

I also doubt that a degree from the Master’s Program — that Opus Dei-run “innovation journalism” project here in São Paulo, from which Geraldo Alckmin reportedly graduated and whose director is Mr. Alckmin’s OD “spiritual adviser” — is going to be the same fast ticket to promotion that it once was, either.

Which is perhaps why these days, in the Brazilian media, all those kinds of folks seem to be moving out of the “secular humanist elitist” MSM and “onto the blogs,” as it were — spouting some really arcane bullshit about the Roman Empire and the good old days before the Acta Diurna in the process.

Yes, Junior is a Man of Many Cangaceiro Hats

Joseph Campbell wrote about the hero with a thousand faces, but this is ridiculous. But then you know the NMM bias on this issue: One can honestly wear many hats, in our experience, only so long as one wears them one at a time. Absent compliance with that simple condition — a basic principle that public officials who are also private business actors, like Trent “How Blind Was My Trust?” Lott, Dick “How Blind Was My Trust?” Cheney and Michael “My Trust is Blind, I Swear!” Bloomberg know all about — things can get awfully muddy. As in mar de lama.

According to “the journalist Altino Machado,” who interviewed the young blogging czar — who is, after all, as Machado properly discloses, also a “collaborator” of his — we can answer own our question without waiting for a reply for the various José Murilo Juniors that we wrote to yesterday.

Yes, Global Voices Online’s Junior is that Junior, who is also

ainda, gerente de Informações Estratégicas do Ministério da Cultura e colaborador permanente deste blog.

Oddly, as I mentioned, this is not a fact mentioned on Junior’s author bio on GVO, at least the last time I read it, which was today:

I see myself as a researcher and explorer into the possibilities of the digital and human web. I work on the Internet, managing websites of Brazilian federal agencies in the cultural sector. I’ve been living in a Santo Daime community in Brasilia for 12 years, acting as the webmaster for the worldwide online daimist network. In the middle of all this, I like to write about what I see and what I think. In Portuguese: Ecologia Digital – In English: Eco-Rama.

Director (gerente) of “strategic affairs” or “intelligence”?

Is that the fancy title they are handing out to government Webmasters these days in Brazil?

And is the MinC really in the habit of having its Webmasters brief the press on the progress of the Athens Internet governance talks?

As I read in Carta Maior recently?

We need to get an official job description for this guy — it out to be public information — and compare it to the various “hero with a thousand faces” identity management legends this guy puts out.
Orwell said that partial truths are the biggest lies of all.

Which is why I do begin to think maybe this little weasel is lying to me.

Comments Neuza, when I give her the 20-second executive summary of these findings: Isso cheira de maracutaia.

On the other hand, most of the biographies that I read on Junior by persons reporting on his official activities fail to mention the point emphasized with pride there: That he is the worldwide Webmaster of the Santo Daime community, which recently won legal status from the Brazilian Supreme Court for the use of psychoactive substances in religious rituals.

A pitch the U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to go for.

Establishment Clause and all that.

Or did it? I need to study this Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal more.

And what was that I read in the Folha earlier this year about the wave of U.S.-sponsored “training” junkets for Brazilian judges?

Who represented the neo-ayahuasqueiros in that case, by the way? Not that same intrepid team that worked on the Gore side of Florida recount and defended in the Microsoft antitrust case, by any chance?

Processing at FindLaw …

That includes, I think, the União Do Vegetal — I have to check this, but I can say for certain that they belong to the same digital ecosystem, at least — whose motto is:

Want to be happy? Become a vegetable!

The last article I read, by the way, said that Junior was director of Strategic Affairs (assuntos), and not Strategic Intelligence (or Information), for Brazil’s Ministry of Culture.

Which is led — more or less actively or merely symbolically, according to who you ask, and one of these days I am going to have to try to make an independent assessment of this question — by Gilberto Gil.

Who, though a lifelong vegetarian himself, often seems to belie the old saying according to which “you are what you eat.”

The Rocha Indictment: Why The TV Azteca ‘Reporter’ is The NMM Specimen Scumbag of the Year

An Oaxaca “citizen journalist” cited by a number of “authoritative” sources claimed that “paramilitaries were only firing into the air” on the day that an Indymedia reporter was killed and a number of other journalists were fired upon while going about their work.

Ricardo Rocha, a television reporter for Mexico’s TV Azteca, filed a report from Oaxaca on the day that Indymedia journalist Brad Will was killed.

In that report, I have a copy here but am still having a hard time converting it to a usable format for subtitling, sorry, to do — Rocha stated quite clearly and unequivocally on the air that members of the APPO — a coalition of labor unions and civil society groups seeking, in King-Gandhi fashion, they credibly claim, to unseat governor Ulises Ruiz after he used death-squads in an attempt to quell a strike by state education employees — were “exchanging gunfire with police.”

No, I take that back: What he does, in precise, technical terms, is to refer repeatedly and insistently to “a balaceo involving APPO and ‘the police’.”

The noun balaceo — ‘gunfight,’ although arguably not exactly equivalent to ‘tiroteo’ — constantly appears in the screen crawl,

As in “Gunfight in Oaxaca,” although the report does not, in my viewing of it, show a single person carrying or using a firearm.

Balacear being one of those impersonal verbs — French il y a is the most frequently cited case — that does not identify an agent or indicate the direction of agency.

Leaving the implication quite clearly in the air — I am thinking of that scene in which one of Rocha’s interview subjects, in a report that never leaves the courtyard of the five-star hotel where the two PAN and PRI deputies are holed up, declaring themselves “besieged,” pants to the camera that “APPO is coming! We must get out of here! — that the exchange of deadly violence was at the very least mutual.

Which is, of course, very similar to the way that the Washington Post has consistently presented the conflict: “There was (il y avait) more violence in Oaxaca.”

“The PFP have gone into Oaxaca to put an end to violence that has claimed the lives of nine persons.”

No, no, no, you motherfuckers.

Death squads claimed the lives of nine people.

Death squads in ski masks and civilian clothing but dressed in police-issue bulletproof vests, in at least some of the documented cases.

Death squads that work for a PRI governor whose political pals in PAN and PRI and the SNTE continue to work as hard as they can to prevent him from having to answer for his use of death squads to put an end to a legitimate labor dispute.

Political cronies to whom Calderón de la Farça owes huge political favors, which he is quite openly cashing in at the moment.

Both the AP and the Washington Post 2.0 subsequently published elements of that and other elements of the Ruiz-Gordillo-PRI-PAN infowar cover story without fact-checking or proper attribution.

Fire that desk editor.

Rocha’s Role: “What Is Truth 2.0?”

Confronted with the charge that he had deliberately given cover to death-squad activity against protesters who say, credibly, that they were only using nonlethal force in legitimate self-defense — in this video, you will hear Mr. Rocha addressing the allegation that agents provocateurs were involved in violence on the APPO side — Mr. Rocha gave the following interview to Julio Hernandez of La Otra Tele, attempting to justify himself.

I will translate, gist, apply the NMM open-source bullshit detection software, and then conclude with some thoughts on the theme “Bill Moyers Was Right.”

RESOLVED: There really is a war on journalism going on.

And it is not merely a war of words. Just ask the family and colleagues of the late Paul Klebnikov.

Or former students of the investigative journalist Anya Politkovskaya at the NYU center for continuing professional education in publishing.

I, personally, am wearing black for those two, and so many others, until every single one of these motherfuckers is safely installed in Circle 9 of Dante’s Inferno.

But I digress.

Author of the Year; Scumbag of the Year

Traditionally, New Year’s is a time for editors all around the world to cannibalize their work over the previous year while the rank and file takes a well-earned rest from actually finding things out to go home and try to remember the names of their children.

We call it the “year in review” or some such thing.

It is a fun and also a useful exercise.

In NMM’s case, of course — because please remember, this is not journalism, this is a journalist’s, and translator’s, and copywriter’s, and talentless wannabe C&W composer’s, online commonplace book — every day is New Year’s.

Still, I did manage to jot down some notes for some potential feature stories along those lines in my Moleskin while sitting on that beach last week.

One cockamamie idea: How about we use the Book of the Year column to explain our choice — from among a crowded field — for the “NMM Enemies of Journalism” Scumbag of the Year award?

(1) Who has written the best practical field manual on bullshit detection this, or any other, year?

And

(2) who was the worst willful perpetrator of egregious bullshit that we caught in the honey trap of our GFDL-licensed NMM(SNBC-TV) open-source bullshit detector this year?

With all due to respect to the prodigious feats in this area by Mainardi, Christofoletti, MacKinnon, Edelman, et al. — though perhaps we should be focusing less on the foot soldiers and more on the generalissimos and colonels, such as Lawrence Summers and Jim “Second Superpower” Moore — the scumbag of the year is Ricardo Rocha of TV Azteca.

How so, Colin?

Let me first describe the mental software I used, then show you how I applied it to the case.

Richard Lanham Wrote the Book

In many ways, New Market Machines 2006 can be summed up as a battle of the books.

In one corner, the only time-tested hacker’s guide to the human mind that you will likely ever need (below).

And in the other, Olavo de Carvalho’s “How to Win an Argument Without Being Right” — a Portuguese translation and rebranding of a Schopenhauer treatise, from the public domain, on informal fallacies, published this year in Brazil.

Richard Lanham is better known for his fat treatises on trendy topics, but it is all ZIPped up there in a handy condensed format, I think you will find, in his excellent practical handbooks … which have the added advantage of being widely and cheaply available in both used and abused conditions.

The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, for example, has been the subject of a lot of creative willful misreading among the strategic communications crowd this year.

As I noted before, however, it also poses, in plain English, the absolutely essential question that drives NMM’s own running commentary on what we call “The Rhetoric of the Technological Sublime”:

What’s new about the digital expressive space, and what’s not? … What’s next for text?

Which is just another way of asking,

Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

Of course, NMM-Tabajara’s own pseudo-terminological phrase, the RTS, is just a fancy way of referring to a basic decision that tech editors and corporate purchasing agents, for example, have to make each and every day:

Is that tech vendor- or flack-produced sales pitch bullshit or not?

Should I round-file it or can it go into the “follow up?” pile for further processing?

How much work will I have to do to make sure that my precious time and attention is not being wasted and abused?

Because NMM Maxim No. 7 applies:

Time is money, honey, because life is short.

As someone who sits around and reads every PR that comes down the pipeline, for fun and profit, and also as someone with an elaborate and not totally wasted education in the techniques of discourse analysis, I am telling you: the New Tech Evangelism Bible and Innovation Journalism Sermon on the Mount as Dictated to Richard Edelman by Old Scratch Himself?

You can basically understand it as a willful misreading of the vast literature on informal fallacies — what we rhetoricians call, more or less metaphorically, the “vices” of reasoning — as a HOWTO manual on that technique the information warriors like to call mindfuck.

Zé Takes A Bico?

Is the José Murilo Junior, identified last summer in a story by the Agência Carta Maior on Internet governance as the Strategic Planning director for Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, the same José Murilo Junior who provides the Brazil “expertise” for Global Voices Online?

The author of a blog called “Digital Ecology“?

Which sounds an awful lot like Portuguese for “business ecosystem,” Jim Moore’s master meme?

If he were, you would think that GVO’s “innovation journalist” would have mentioned it in his author bio.

Because not to do so would be, well, slimy at the very least.

And if he were, you would think that maybe his boss might want to have a little talk with him about conflicts of interest and the conditions of public-service employment.

Because having deputy negotiators that might seem to be playing for the other team might well screw up your game plan.

A bico is what we call moonlighting here in the U.S., by the way.

I am currently writing to the various blog-identifies linked with that name in an attempt to confirm or disconfirm.

But as I look at these tiny little photos of the guy in various places, I think, hey, that might just be him.

Swaption Between Misnomers

Malone: Champion of Liberty?

News Corp. Reaches Deal with Liberty Media:This story actually has quite a bit of importance for the local media scene here in Brazil, since DirecTV Latin America is right in the middle of that Globo-Abril complex that everyone is always complaining about down here, and which Carlos Slim seems determined to horn even further in on.

Liberty Media owns an amazing amount of stuff, including 67% of MacNeill-Lehrer productions — which maybe explains how so many dual-purpose think-tank shills have gotten onto “we are not your Daddy’s public broadcasting” NewsHour guest list in the last couple of years — and the Discovery Channel, which, dubbed badly into Portuguese — what, you cannot locally produce nature programming on the cheap in Brazil, the “biodiversity per unemployed journalist” world champion? — seems like sort of an anchor tenant of the DTVLA lineup.

News Corporation said Friday it has agreed to swap its controlling interest in DirecTV Group, other assets and cash for Liberty Media’s $11 billion stake in News Corporation. The deal ends two years of negotiations between long-time associates Rupert Murdoch and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone, who once helped rescue Mr. Murdoch from near bankruptcy.

Generalissimos or Constitutional Democracy: ‘A Partisan Issue’

That is my personal freaking shadow at lower left, dude. I used to work in that building. So if you want to actually try to know something, try asking a number of different people who were actually there. I think you will find this much more productive than consulting a bunch of State-Dept. and Intel-funded noise-machine bloggers from around the world who basically just rewrite Fox News from their Harvard dorm room in their pyjamas.

Speaking of Xmas messages from hell: Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Chilean Christmas Consumer Behavior.

Partisan politics hits Christian consumerism this year as t-shirts with the images of Pinochet and Allende are stuffed in Chilean Christmas stockings.

You are kidding me, right?

I have already noted this pronounced pattern — the “partisan polarization” meme, I call it, though it really is just a variation on false dichotomy and the Manichean allegory, as students of specious reasoning will recognize  — in GVO’s coverage of Latin American affairs, in the case of Peru, for example, and Brazil, and on and on.

See especially The Whole World is an Episode of Crossfire.

The noise machine just cranks out the same old mystery meat every day.

(I am still searching the Doris the Lunch Lady File for the brief scene from The Simpons that I am thinking of, in which various “international cuisine” stands at a fair or mall are fed from the same vat of “mystery meat.”)

I have also noted its eerie similarity to a fundamental meatheaded talking point, repeated ad nauseam — one shared by Neil Cavuto at FOX News and the nice folks at the Washington Times — according to which all fundamental disagreements can be referred back to the myth of “polarized” partisan politics.

Pop historical quiz: Who else was it that thought that no legitimate political action was possible outside the framework of the vanguardist party? Hint:

Today’s selected bit of tripe from GVO — so non-”reality based” that it is hard to believe that these people are not intentionally trying to parody themselves — is not even a very interesting take on the humoristic meme of “the Che Guevara T-Shirt”

Cartoonists in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere this year have spilt Exxon Valdezes full of ink on this topic in the last couple of years.

It would be interesting, I think, to collect a good sample and count the number of very clever ways that humorists of all political persuasions and nonpersuasions have found to work that basic premise down here do lado embaixo.

That striking set of images alone, I think, besides giving you a good laugh no matter what your take on the current scene, would also give you a good indication of how nuanced and complex the political scene down here really is.

And the superior risk manager is ever attuned to nuance.

The Truthiness & Travesty Server Throws an Exception

Odd, this: A lot of the Brazilian haute bourgeoisie that I drink with are varying rich shades of brown in terms of their physical persons. And Toto, too? Provisional translation: “Lula II is Roberto Mugabe of Zimbabwe na Terra do Sol, and the PT is his Crypto-Fidelista Bolivarian Interahamwe!” Another variation on the basic Veja magazine message, which can be boiled down to: “The MST Wants to Eat Your Babies!” The touch of truthiness in this meatheaded “analysis” fails to account for the modest but potentially accelerating erosion of political support for the PSDB in Classes B and C, as is emerging from the elections results that continue to trickle out from what is allegedly the world’s most advanced electronic voting and election governance system.

Another countervailing data point on a key canary in the economic coal mine: It appears that Casas Bahia — a prime purveyor of My Cafofo 2.0 domestic gadgets, gizmos, and labor-saving devices — had a banner year, as I read.

Seriously, if were a stock-picker, and those guys were public, I would pick those guys, and national retailers in the same market slice, and their suppliers, like Gradiente and Positivo and others.

Because I really think they are going to be prime beneficiaries of the coming wave of Cheap Computers 1.0, among other things.

I sincerely mean that, and I should add that I say that as the non-disgruntled owner — so far — of a priced-to-move and very serviceable Gradiente flat-screen TV.

CJ4Ever

The King of All Post-Apocalyptic Media 2.0. Convicted tax-evader and money launderer.

Masimba Biriwasha: On Being a Citizen Journalist as seeded on Newsvine — how about that Newsvine, huh? –by Aine MacDermott, who helped found that nifty The Citizen Journalist community there.

Aine has performed an interesting feat of content pipeline hacking here, note: taking an editorial from OhMyNews — a project designed to help Koreans overcome the fact that the Moonies run a good part of the media — and using it to infect the herd at a competing content ranch.

Ask me sometimes why I have such a bug in my ear about Moonies. I have a book-length answer for you, albeit still in draft form.

Being a citizen journalist has taught me to be responsible with the power that I have over information. I have a powerful understanding of the importance of information in shaping people’s decisions and destinies.

I contributed a long-winded thank-you to Aine and the CJ Riders over there that you can read. Since I am not trying to drive traffic to my own AdSense account — this blog is ad-free — I can generously send you over there to those ex-Disney, ex-ESPN content wranglers instead, who do live and die by the commercial advertisement.

And what is wrong with that?

In principle, absolutely nothing, of course, until advertisers start gaming the traditional Chinese wall.

My Cangaceiro Hat is Bigger Than David Byrne’s Cangaceiro Hat

DAVID BYRNE W FORRO IN THE DARK | NUBLU RECORDS: Sent in by the Mina de Letras and reproduced without comment:

Merry Xmas from Hell

Conducting investor relations from beyond the grave: It would seem absurd if Dickens had not already imagined it. For another striking instance of the “sadly necessary” pseudo-justification, see State Masturbates. 

Justifica Pinochet dictadura en carta póstuma: Billionaire Chilean generalissimo Augusto Pinochet justifies himself with a letter from beyond the grave in which he conveniently fails to mention the “billionaire” part, at least according to the gist published by the Mexico City daily.

Augusto writes that if he had it to do all over again, he would be a kinder, gentler extrajudicial death-squad running motherfucker and mafia chieftain.

El ex dictador chileno Augusto Pinochet justificó en una carta póstuma el cruento golpe militar que lo llevó al poder en 1973, pero lamentó los dolores que provocó, por lo cual, si se repitiesen las circunstancias de entonces, volvería a hacerlo, pero “con mayor sabiduría”.

I was talking last week with the foreign correspondent from a major, I would say somewhat middle of the road and predominantly “reality-based,” Argentine metro daily who lives here in São Paulo.

Interesting factoid: This very fine professional tells me that the dead-tree newspaper is alive and well and living it up in Argentina.

She & I tended to agree, I think, that this kind of thing is an ugly and perturbing sign, given parallel developments in Peru and Mexico, and Thailand, for that matter.

We seem to differ, however, as to whether all of this is just the last gasp of a dying dinosaur being run by a rather Keystone Kops-like U.S. Government 2.0 — that is my general impression — or still a doable foreign policy option for that semi-autonomous gang of bureaucratic vandals in the U.S. Dept. of State and DoD going forward.

But I think my colleague has a point: An idiot with a gun is exponentially more dangerous than an intelligent person with a gun.

Even if that intelligent person with a gun is not someone you trust, like, or agree with, or even if they have orders to use (non-excessive, one hopes) force to suppress your political rights, you can at least count on them to behave rationally.

At least that way you can still plan your daily commute.

So splitting the difference, I would say that my Portunhol conversation with this veteran Brasília correspondent does permit one conclusion:

Sane people all over the world perceive our government, or self-styled “key influential” elements therein, as incapable of learning from history, and therefore plausibly capable of all manner of sinister and futile imbecility in the future.

And who can freaking blame them?

I tend to think that Bush II, at least, has pretty much euthanized the idea, in the minds of the thinking beings of all ideological camps and stripes, that applying Cold War doctrine to the world of today can accomplish anything of value to anyone — except Halliburton and possibly Intel– anymore.

But will Hillary or Obama do any different?

I think that is a dangerous assumption to take on faith, even if Hillary has behaved reasonably impeccably so far, IMHO, as my U.S. Senator from New York.

Better than Chuck Schumer at times, even, if the public record can be trusted. There were a couple of cases there in which I thought Chuck came out looking a little bit like a crooked Italian soccer ref in cases involving financial services community players.

Which is why it is best we do not forget that New York has long been, and at times still is, a machine-politics state, either.

Has been a machine-politics state? Hell, New Yorkers are the inventors and past grandmasters of that game, the same way we invented three-card monte.

What? Italian immigrants invented that, you say?

Ah, the Italian diaspora: With due respect to we Celtic soul cats, so many of the very best things in life, and not a few of some of the worst, can be laid to your account.

So much will depend now on Spitzer and Bloomberg and Corzine — global finance, governance and policy supernerds all — and suchlike people being as committed to the old school of Sound Public Policy 1.0 as they say they are — an able to deliver on that commitment.

That goes for Good Neighbor 1.0 foreign policy, too, if NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg’s statements on Mexican immigration are any indication.

As I hope they are.

I am watching you guys.

And so far, the BS-detector is not pinging into the amber warning levels at which respiratory impairment occurs.

If and when it does, of course, Gary Weiss will make a goode canary in the coal mine.

So please: carry on, but, as Bob Dylan says, “know you’re not alone.”

Rating the Generalissimos

Me and Neuza came to a startling conclusion together the other day: that Gens. Geisel and Golbery here in Brazil may have actually been relatively decent guys compared to Augusto Pinochet — who, if I recall properly, did not attend Geisel’s inauguration. Though Pat Nixon did.

Not much of a standard that, but at least they arguably cleared some minimal bar of salvageable humanity.

NMM-Tabajara 2006 Xmas Circular No. 2

Thanks to the late Prof. Phillip Damon, author of the slender but indispensable “Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse,” this is a personal ur-Text of the NMMist.

I have been goofing around with this little melody — it is sort of a mixture of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine” — for a while now.

And, in honor of my lifelong friend Christifer’s obsession with Scotland

– much as I married the bastard daughter of Raul Seixas and Adoniran Barbosa, Kansas City Skinny Bones Jones of Halsted Street there wound up hooking up with a fellow descendant of those skirt-wearing, underwear-eschewing, Roman legion-disappearing blue-painted Hadrian’s Wall-necessitating Picts of dreaded memory, of whose great tradition, IMHO, Mel Gibson has yet to prove himself worthy.

– you can even hear a little bit of “The Minstrel Boy” on the gaita de fole in there, as played by the Black Irish of the New York City Fire Dept every freaking chance they get.

The minstrel boy to war has gone
In the ranks of death you will find him
His father’s sword he has girded on
His wild harp slung behind him
Land of song, said the warrior bold
Though all the world betray thee
One sword at least thy rights shall guard
One loyal harp shall praise thee.

Get a few Laphroaigs in me and I am capable of really, really embarrassing myself in a public place with that little ditty. And in the bargain buying every NYPD and NYFD guy in the joint another one just like it.

Because under Brooklyn Rules those dude(tte)s are my brothers and sisters. And other lachrymose excesses of the Celtic diaspora inna Babylon, which of course and of necessity includes all those heavy-duty lynx-eyed Rastamen with curiously un-African names like MacKenzie and Shakespeare …

Sober, I am more likely to bore you to death with my Northrop Frye Memorial lecture on the long and convoluted history of the “Debate of Arms and Letters” topos.

Hey, KC, I bet you did not know that they actually still play the bagpipes in Portugal, did you? Well, knowing you, you probably did.

Because those stonefaced, pigtail-sucking, bean-boiling moonshine-making hillbillies were Celtic to the core way before the Visigoths got their sorry asses kicked by the Almoravids.

No, wait, as Osama writes in from Waziristan, it was the Ommayads who got their asses kicked by the Almoravids.

(Why is that airplane-crashing into my freaking neighborhood Osama still living large on goat stew and yogurt sauce up there in the Himalayan foothills, again, by the way? I’m talking to you, Little Donny Rumsfeld.)

And amazingly they are still up there, ficando na sua.

Which although I already knew that in my head, I really learned from this kick-ass The Chieftains show I went to while still at that little private liberal-arts college on the model of Chaucer’s Oxford Clerke that we both went to.

Anyway, I filmed myself playing the chords on my PowerShot 4000 Digital Elph — four years old and still going strong — and will post those shortly.

Could not be simpler. I think there is even an open-source program now for writing tablature and notes on the staff. I have been meaning to give that a try.

Here Come the Words

Finally, after a pleasant evening of listening to a Paraguayan copy of Bob Dylan’s Modern Times with the proprietors of the pousada where I was staying — that, along with the latest from this fantastic young Nova Bossa Nova diva named Céu, and also that record that Ben Harper made with The Blind Boys from Alabama — were the top three records on the Casa Milà hit parade this Xmas — I got a little inspired.

Baixei o santo, as they (we?) say here.

And I came up with the lyrics, starting from Rafael’s “You know Jimi Hendrix always said Bob Dylan was his Miglior Fabbro and Primieval Forest of Poetic Inspiration, right?”

I did know that!

Poor Joe’s Blues, or Saint Anselm of Canterbury Gets “Hey Joe” Mixed Up With “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, Alive as You Or Me” To the Tune of “Silent Night” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”: An Xmas Carol for Lou Reed to Vocalize in That Adenoidal Way of His, Which, To His Credit, He Never Even Tried to Pretend Was Actual Singing in the Neo-Classical Tradition.

“And join me in the chorus” ….

Bethlehem can be Bedlam when
It’s time to render unto Caesar
At night the ravers burn the Casbah down
‘Cause the comet gives them seizures