“Only Freedom Will Defeat Corruption”: Glittering Generality of the Day

Several organizations – including the World Bank, Transparency International (TI), and Pricewaterhouse Coopers Foundation – have attempted to develop corruption indicators; all of them depend on aggregate surveys of citizens, businesses or experts and therefore base their results on perceptions of the problem as opposed to more objective data. … these measurement approaches have acknowledged reliability and validity problems … “Second generation” governance indicators currently under development may resolve some of the measurement and methodological issues. –Chetwynd, Chetwynd and Spector, “Corruption and Poverty: A Review of Current Literature.” Management Systems International, January 2003.

Media coverage of published corruption rankings may influence people’s perception of corruption in the country. Also, perceived corruption may “overweight” well-publicised corruption scandals compared to more colloquial cases of bribery (“headline bias”). This is true even if the respondents have significant personal exposure to corruption. For instance, in constructing their Bribe Payers’ Index, Transparency International asked business leaders what their main sources of information on corruption, unfair competition and anticorruption treaties were. “The press media” was the preferred response, chosen by 79% of respondents. “Personal experience” was only third at 59%. –Erlend Berg, “How Should Corruption be Measured?” London School of Economics, May 2001

Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that they carry conviction without supporting information or reason.

Porfirio Cristaldo Ayala of Spain’s Libertad Digital — “ETA could too have done 11-M!” — comments on the problem of corruption and poverty.

“Only freedom will defeat corruption”

The logic employed is sophomoricallly tortured and all too familiar. It’s that standard Opinion Journal noise-achine editorial No. 1(b), based on the same old gambit that assumes that Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index is an actual “measure of corruption,” with all conclusions, based on fuzzy, meaningless numbers, proceeding from that premise.

Which is widely recognized as a bogus premise. Transparency International does not even make that claim. But then again, it does not write a lot of letters to the editor correcting this common assumption, either.

The same goes for the World Bank, whose survey along similar lines comes with a red herring warning you that these numbers are not meaningful enough for the World Bank to rely on them in its decision-making. Which makes you wonder why they spend money churning them out in the first place … unless they churn out supplementary numbers that allow you to check perception against realilty, that is. Gallup International has done some interesting studies in that regard, I have that here somewhere … I am collecting literature on the problem of defining, and measuring the actual incidence of, “corruption.”

The problem, argues Porfirio, is that government officials in poor countries tend to be more susceptible to bribery, as witnessed by a supposed correlation, he says, between the “poverty” of a nation and its position on the “corruption index.”

That, he tells us, is because poor countries tend to be “statist,” while rich countries tend to have open economies that do not burden the private sector with undue regulation.

The solution, therefore, is for poor countries to stop regulating the private sector.

No regulation, no regulators to bribe.

Spain: “ETA Did Not Do 11-M”

Noticias en Libertad 1ª Edición (Spain): “ETA Did Not Do 11-M” seems to the principal angle taken in reporting on today’s verdict in the March 11, 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid, in the highest-circulation metro dailies of Spain’s fractious print media: El País, El Mundo, and ABC.

Some sources point to the acquittal of “The Egyptian” — a man who has maintained, as I understand it, that he knew the bombers, knew  they were up to no good, but was not aware of or part of their plan — as a surprise.

ABC runs a section on international reporting of the case, where the angle of coverage varies from “7 acquitted” and “mastermind acquitted” (or “no masterminds convicted”) to “21 found guilty.”

Estadão: “Billions” Pilfered in the Thick Jungles of the South!

Daniel Piza of the Estado de São Paulo notes another case of alleged misappropriation of public funds through the use of outsourced publicity contracts.

In such schemes — the most famous of which is the so-called valerioduto — money is allegedly paid for services not actually rendered, then siphoned off into political slush funds known generically as caixa dois.

In the case currently pending, from Minas Gerais, the scheme allegedly pushed funds into the campaign coffers of 17 political parties. See, for example

• “Decent Brazilian Coalition-Leader Will Be Indicted”: Estadão

The teaser to the article on the front page of the Estadão Web site at this hour (I cut and paste):

MP aponta que Zeca desviou R$ 30 bilhões para mensalão de petistas em MS

That is to say, former governor “Zeca of the PT” is accused of misappropriating R$30 billion to feed the campaign coffers of the PT political party

This number, according to the actual news report, is off by three orders of (base-ten) magnitude.

The correct figure, as alleged by the state prosecutor, is R$30 million.

Which is roughly equivalent to the difference between an earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale (a “moderate” earthquake) and an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale (a “great” earthquake, which is one degree of apocalyptic disaster worse than a “major” earthquake, such as the recent temblor in Peru.).

Where’s the Beef? The Battle of the Boi Zebu

The cow is of the bovine ilk
One end is moo, the other, milk
–Ogden Nash

Zebu é boi, sim, diz pesquisador: The Estado de S. Paulo notes another of those international nomenclature disputes that dot the landscape of the global intellectual property crusades like gibbering absurdities from the right-hand panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The Irish, it claims, are questioning whether Brazilian herds of bos indicus, known locally as the (noble) boi zebu (above) — the preferred species of cattle for meat production here — are really bovine at all.

If not, the Irish are reportedly claiming, then its flesh cannot be marketed as “beef.”

In a previous note on the alleged dispute, the Estadão noted the hiring of a PR firm to combat the alleged campaign. It nows appears to be offering that PR campaign a monopoly on the gazillion-jigawatt megaphone on this subject.

The thing is that this all seems to be something of a secondary or tertiary issue, at best — if not wholly fictious. Something of a tempest in a teapot.

The serious ink on a proposed EU ban on Brazilian beef exports seems to be getting spilled on another issue entirely. As The Scotsman reported on October 11, 2007:

TWO years ago to this very day a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease was, after weeks of suspicion, confirmed in three provinces in Brazil, one of the world’s leading beef-producing countries, with a cattle population of more than 200 million — Scotland has just 1.9 million head.

Indeed, I have yet to be able to confirm that the Irish or anyone else are actually making the claim that the Estado de S. Paulo reports they are making.

Brazilian beef exports have been the subject of protests by Irish cattlemen, who claim Brazilian export beef fails to meet EU standards of food safety. But the genus and species question does not seem to be chief among them. I have not yet even found a mention of it, and the reporting in the Brazilian source does not cite any sources containing such statements.

The Irish Times:

The Brazilian government and the country’s farming industry deny the claims of use of illegal growth hormones and say Brazil is implementing the recommendations of EU animal health officials who visited the country in March.

Unless I am missing something, I suspect that “straw man” argumentation — “filibustering while changing the subject” — is going on here.

“Media And Violence: New Trends In the Coverage of Crime and Security In Brazil”

In some cases the sensationalist press wound up simply fabricating supposedly dangerous bandits to be duly pursued by police. Among innumerable examples, we can cite David Nasser of the program “Diary of a Reporter,” who called members of the death squad “… the missionaries of General Franca” (then state public security secretary), the “public-works contractors of God.” … Red Rosa, the PR representative of the Rio death squad, once phoned a newsroom in order to announce the weekly death toll and confessed as follows: “I get an almost sexual pleasure from watching the bullets pierce the bodies of the criminals and the blood flowing like a red rose flowering out of the earth.” –“A History of Death Squads in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo”

The articles analyzed in the study on which this book was based reveal coverage that focuses closely on specific incidents, very few of which represent initiative on the part of the press itself. Add to that the observations that analytic articles, which treat the issue of public security in Brazil more comprehensively, are still a minority in the print media. –Paulo Vannuchi

The Observatório de Favelas do Rio de Janeiro announces

Dia 29 de outubro será lançado, no CESeC, no Rio de Janeiro, o livro Mídia e Violência: Novas tendências na cobertura de criminalidade e segurança no Brasil. O livro é resultado de três anos de monitoramento de diversos jornais brasileiros, análise de mais de 5 mil textos e a realização de 90 entrevistas – 64 com jornalistas e 26 com especialistas da área de segurança pública.

On October 20, at CESeC in Rio, the book “Media And Violence: New Trends In the Coverage of Crime and Security In Brazil” will be launched. The book is the result of three years of monitoring a number of Brazilian newspapers, analysis of more than 5,000+ articles, and 90 interviews — 64 with journalists and 26 with specialists in the area of public security.

What, no readers or subjects of coverage? Police? Criminal defendants? Public defenders? Prosecutors? Victims of crimes that become hysterical causes célèbres? Residents of off-the-grid communities? Only Brazilian journalists are competent to debate whether the product they offer the public is actually useful to the public or not? The end user gets no say? The paternalistic elitism of these people really needs taking down a peg or two, I tend to think.

Apresentado pela cientista social Silvia Ramos e pela jornalista Anabela Paiva, o livro discute a cobertura jornalística da criminalidade e da segurança pública, apresentam soluções adotadas pela imprensa ao lidar com as dificuldades cotidianas e contam os bastidores de grandes reportagens.

Presented by social scientist Silvia Ramos and journalist Anabela Paiva, the books discusses journalistic coverage on crime and public safety, presents solutions adopted by the press to deal with day to day challenges, and provides “behind the scenes” accounts of major stories.

I personally have not noted much of a decrease, if any, in the tendency of the Brazilian press to refer to every alleged criminal suspect as a “bandit” or a “marginal.”

Caught in Audit of The Mexican Political Spot: Squat

Mexico’s IFE — the national elections commission — hired AC Nielsen — yes, the media audience measurement firm — to generate fear, uncertainty doubt over the charge that the PREP results published live on July 2 presented “systematic statistical anomalies”

Sólo 30% de emisoras de radio y tv han respondido al instituto: La Jornada (Mexico) reports that the federal elections commission (IFE) has only been able to account for 30 percent of 281,000 ads which political parties and coalitions failed to report.

Technically, IFE regulates TV advertising — in theory, political advertising cannot lie to the viewer, for example — but in practice it does not.

The question here is who pumped money into political advertising. One of the most astonishing cases was the post-election media blitz paid for, reportedly, by COPARMEX, through front groups, to defend IFE against charges that it had presided over a deeply flawed, likely fraudulent election.

That is to say, in a certain sense, IFE benefited from the kind of misconduct it was set up to regulate.

In the end, it did not help IFE president Ugalde, however. He was resoundingly borked.

To help count the spots before Mexican eyeballs, IFE hired Brazil’s IBOPE — much as it hired A.C. Nielsen to help defend it against the proposition that the PREP quick count numbers in the 2006 national election were as thoroughly cooked as a counterfeiter in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno.

IBOPE reportedly failed to find the eight things wrong with the second picture. See

• Mexico: Brazil’s IBOPE Copes With Spot-Counting Flap
• IBOPE: Mexican Media Monitoring Muffed?
• Nielsen: Alternate X-Ray of IFE’s Black Box

The election reform bill recently ratified simply out and out bans paid political advertising. See

• Mexico: The Boob Tube Bites Back
• Mexico: “Mexican Media Moguls Field Brook Bros. Riot Squad Against Elections Reform”
• Mexico: “Media Blitz Steals Milk From Children!”

A más de dos meses que el Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) remitiera los primeros oficios a consorcios de radio y televisión, solicitándoles información relacionada con 281 mil espots no reportados por partidos y coaliciones políticas, solamente se ha recibido 30 por ciento de la documentación. Por ello, la Comisión de Fiscalización enviará nuevos “oficios de insistencia”, como paso previo a una solicitud de apoyo al Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF) para que ordene a las empresas hacer entrega de los datos requeridos.

More than two months after IFE solicited information from radio and TV broadcasters about 281,000 advertisings spots that went unreported by parties and political coalitions, it has only received 30% of the requested documentation. For that reason, IFE’s oversight committee will issue new [orders] as a preliminary step before asking the federal elections tribunal [TEPJF, or "TRIFE"] to order the companies to hand over the data.

Durante una reunión de la citada comisión, también se dejó entrever la inviabilidad que por ahora tiene la solicitud de confronta pública de la información relacionada con los promocionales no reportados por la coalición Por el Bien de Todos, misma que fue solicitada por el Partido de la Revolución Democrática. El presidente de la comisión, Andrés Albo, comentó que esta imposibilidad obedece al procedimiento que se lleva en ese órgano electoral y a la etapa en que se encuentra.

During the meeting of said committee, it was also given to understand, between the lines, that it is not possible at the moment to honor the PRD’s request to publicly audit the information relating to the ad spending of the coalition promoting the candidacy of López Obrador. Committee chair Albo said this was due to IFE procedure and the stage that work is currently in.

La reunión de este lunes evidenció la tensiones existentes en el IFE, reflejadas en una intensa discusión entre el propio Albo y el consejero Marco Antonio Gómez Alcántar, quien le había reclamado al primero sus comparaciones recientes entre los casos Amigos de Fox y Pemexgate, con los espots no reportados y los montos presuntamente involucrados.

The Monday meeting laid bare the tensions within IFE, as reflected by an intense exchange between Albo and Commissioner Gómez Alcántar, who had complained of the former’s comparing the problem of the uncounted spots, and the sums of money presumably spent on them, with the “Friends of Fox” and “Pemexgate” scandals.

IstoÉ Dinheiro on the Risco Cisco: Apocalyptic Scenarios And Anonymous Buzz

“Nahas takes on the market.” This quacking biz weekly’s prognostications tend not to come true. See also Brazil: Attuch’s Book of Revelations and Brazil: Reviewing IstoÉ’s “The Spy Who Bugged Me”

When Ripper was arrested, one of his rivals, 3Com, sent an opportunistic message to its distributors, signed by country manager Antônio Gaudêncio. “Based on recent events in the market, we place ourselves at your service to help you conclude your projects,” it read.

Our policy on anonymous sources is a good one, and bears repeating. It begins: “We resist granting anonymity except as a last resort to obtain information that we believe to be newsworthy and reliable.” The information should be of compelling interest, and unobtainable by other means. We resist granting anonymity for opinion, speculation or personal attacks. –Bill Keller, New York Times, “Assuring Our Credibility”

The Ministry of Planning clips coverage of the Cisco affair from IstoÉ Dinheiro, that colorful and creative little glossy business weekly with the full-time state “business astrologer.”

The teaser on the article appears to state nonexistent facts, first of all. True to form.

Acusada de sonegar R$ 1,5 bilhão, a empresa perde clientes, fica impedida de participar de licitações e uma auditoria interna decidirá o futuro da filial brasileira

Accused of avoiding R$1.5 billion [in taxes and penalties], the company is losing clients, is prevented from participating in competitive contract bids, and an internal audit will decide the future of the Brazilian subsidiary.

(By the way, I think it is inaccurate to say that the company “evaded” that amount in fiscal renderings unto Caesar. The estimate, if Cisco is found liable for evasion of a certain amount, is that the amount owed, plus applicable penalties, if any, could reach that neighborhood.

It cannot have “evaded” the penalty portion of that lump sum if the penalties have not yet been assessed, after due process of law.)

The body of the article reports, however, that the head of the CGU — the federal controller, I guess you could call it, a GAO-like audit office attached to the executive branch of government — has “promised to study the case and take action, if appropriate, up to and including barring the firm from competing government contracts.”

Actually, the CGU sources cited say only that they will “pay close attention to” the case. The dire consequences are an imaginative add-on, unsourced.

The risk that it may be so prevented is a completely different proposition than that the firm fica impedida — “is being prevented” — from competitive bidding. The latter statement materially misrepresents the facts as reported.

I translate some excerpts.

As always with this publication, boil before consuming.

The article basically lays out a series of worst-case scenarios without providing a shred of solid information that would be useful in evaluating the actual extent of the risco Cisco.

Count for yourself the number of anonymously sourced instances of opinion and speculation here.

Because I happen to agree firmly with Bill Keller on this point: The more there are, the less credible the reporting is likely to be.

The little we do learn here, about steps being taken by corporate HQ to exert message control and clean house, are interesting enough, but are sketchy. I could have learned more just subscribing to the press release wire. I would pay a good magazine to inform me more fully on that subject.

As always with IED — as I like to call it — we begin with the narrative lede.

Anonymously sourced, of course.

“It was a dark and stormy night …”

A meia-noite do domingo 21, o executivo Pedro Ripper, presidente da Cisco no Brasil, deixou a cela da Polinter, no Rio de Janeiro, e entrou num Corolla prata de vidros escuros. Depois de passar cinco dias preso, Ripper pretendia falar. Estava indignado e pronto para fazer um desabafo. Aos amigos mais próximos, ele foi enfático. “Estou sendo apedrejado por coisas que não fiz e nem sabia que existiam”, disse a um deles. Ripper, que se considera injustiçado, também queria retomar a rotina normal de trabalho na Cisco, em São Paulo.

At midnight on Sunday, October 21, Pedro Ripper, president of Cisco in Brasil …

The company, incorporated in Brazil, is Cisco do Brasil, Ltda. “Cisco in Brazil” is a very loose way of describing it. Strunk & White: “Prefer the concrete over the abstract.”

… left his cell at the Polinter prison in Rio and got into a silver-colored Toyota Corolla with darkened window glass. After spending five days in prison, Ripper was ready to speak out. He was indignant and ready to get some things off his chest. To close personal friends*, he was emphatic. “I am being flagellated over things I did not do and never knew existed,” he told one of them*. Ripper, who considers himself to have suffered an injustice, also wanted to resume his normal work routine at Cisco in São Paulo.

Ele, porém, foi surpreendido pelas decisões da matriz. Contra a sua vontade, ficou impedido de conceder qualquer entrevista e surpreso com as notícias de que a Cisco americana mandou instaurar uma auditoria interna na filial brasileira. Além disso, a empresa enviou um interventor de fora. Era o brasileiro Rodrigo Abreu, que morava nos Estados Unidos e atuava como diretor da multinacional na América Latina, em Miami. Abreu chegou a ser treinado para atuar como porta-voz e assumir a gestão da crise, mas sua estréia foi adiada. Aparentemente desnorteada com a Operação Persona, da Polícia Federal, que a acusou de sonegar até R$ 1,5 bilhão, a Cisco comunicou-se apenas por meio de notas oficiais. Numa delas, a empresa informou que Ripper reassumiria o trabalho. No entanto, o executivo, que passou pela Promon e vinha tendo uma carreira brilhante, passou a última semana em casa. Abatido, chegou a emagrecer três quilos e, a pessoas próximas, teria dito que a filial brasileira foi “abandonada”

He was surprised, however, [WS?] to learn of decisions taken by the parent corporation. Against his will, he was prevented from giving any interviews, and was surprised by the news that Cisco in the U.S. had ordered an internal audit of its Brazilian affiliate [WS?]. What’s more, the firm sent in an outside overseer — the Brazilian Rodrigo Abreu, who was living in the U.S., working as Cisco’s top executive for Latin America out of Miami.

No sourcing statement for any of this.

The Artlessness of the Abominable Ad Hominem: “Squid is Mainardi’s Folkloric Tapirus Terrestris”

Mainardi and the jungle-dwelling distant cousin of the mighty elephant.

An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: “argument to the person”, “argument against the man”) consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. The process of proving or disproving the claims is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject.

It is closely related to our patented concept of the “banana-republican guilty plea,” defined in general terms as “filibustering while changing the subject.” (Really, the BRGP is just a time-proven traditional rhetorical concept dressed up with new branding and presented as an “innovation” in discourse analysis.)

Item:

• Lula é uma Anta?

Veja magazine columnist Diogo Mainardi’s “instant bestseller” — heavily promoted at all your better bookstores in São Paulo this week with acres and acres of promotional shelf space — Lula é minha anta (“Lula is my tapir, figuratively speaking”) is reviewed. The volume collects Mainardi columns from the last year or two.

A Brazilian best-seller might sell upwards of 10,000 copies, is the sense I have. FNAC indicated it was the No. 2 best seller at its stores last time we visited. Who maintains best-seller lists here, how do they compile them, and how reliable are they? You got me.

I will also translate some excerpts from Reinaldo Azevedo’s review of the book (Azevedo is a colleague of Mainardi’s at Veja, but jokes to the effect that “I am not being paid to praise this book”.) In the interests of equal time. When I get a chance.

On Azeredo and Mainardi and their tendency to confabulate sleazy untruths for a living, see also

• The Martyrdom of Mainardi: The Mountain and the Molehill

I mostly reproduce it as a reminder to myself to try to find a manifesto I wrote for a still-notional Portuguese-language online magazine project to be known as O Bicho-Preguiça.

The manifesto tried to play in a similar way on the use of beast-fables to model ideas about ethical virtues in action.

Kind of a long-term research topic of mine, that.

I even gave a scholarly paper once on the Indo-Arabic Kalila wa Dimna, one of the most entertaining and instructive works ever in this genre.

Gringo English majors looking for a more familiar hook by which to grasp the concept can strain their memories to recall Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, itself inspired by a similar work from the Persian, likewise transmitted through the Arabic.

You know the one: Faridu-d-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds.

Or you can just think of Aesop, of course. We all know Aesop, if only through the great “Aesop and Son” segment from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

It was called something like “Sloth is the mother of all virtues.” I was very impressed with myself at the time, and my wife liked it. But was it any good, really? I should look back and see. At the very least, it avoided any and all references to French postmodern literary theory. I have nothing against that stuff, mind you, but it tends to make readers nervous, and the same notions can often be explored using plainer language, I find.

The file is in a MySQL database located somewhere on one of these quarter- and half-terabyte data bricks I have acquired over the years. I need to index those with that gizmo that the Gnome project devised for such purposes.

The sense in which Mainardi means to say that the president of Brazil is an anta — tapirus terrestris — comes from a regional colloquialism, according to the Houaiss Dictionary:

3 indivíduo de inteligência limitada; burro, tolo
4 indivíduo aproveitador, interesseiro

3. An individual of limited intelligence; an ass, fool

4. A manipulative, advantage-taking, self-interested person

The crude ad hominem attack, repeated ad nauseam over the gazillion-jigawatt megaphone owned by the Grupo Abril, being the stock in trade of the Famiglia Civita.

Mainardi was interviewed early this month in Abril’s Playboy Brasil — whether in the issue in which we learn what is tattooed on Mônica Veloso’s ass or not, I am not sure. You think I actually read this dreck? Think again. The intensive, centrally planned cross-marketing behind its apparent diversity of titles, however, is another of Abril’s stocks in trade. See

• Monicagate: The Senator, The Globo Talking Head, the Palimony Lawyer, and Veja

Claro que é, pois deixa passar por seu corpo os fluxos das potências naturais intempestivos e incapturáveis. Mas apenas nessa relação de vizinhança. Mas não como imitação, nem relação entre dois termos de uma sentença, seja como metáfora ou como comparação; simplesmente numa relação de proximidade, numa zona de indiscernibilidade onde salta um ser anômalo: devir-anta. Quando o amestrado da Veja, Diogo Mainardi, escreve Lula é minha anta, antropomorfiza um e animaliza outro a partir de um abstracionismo fictício próprio daqueles que vivem na superstição e jamais conseguem chegar ao real. Mainardi conhece uma anta? A anta é considerada o maior mamífero brasileiro, é um animal que habita charcos, onde se banha para espantar insetos que tentam perturbá-la, é herbívora, vive constantemente solitária e tem três dedos nas patas anteriores e nas dianteiras um pequeno dedo a mais. Tudo a ver com Lula.

Yes, of course, Lula is an anta …

Brazil: If A Book Is Printed, And No One Stocks It, Has it Been Published?

“The stigmatization of traffickers by the media provides the actions of genocidal police with a free pass,” he writes. In the book, he says the ideas of an “army of marginals,” a “parallel State” is “as delusional as the idea that there were chemical weapons in Iraq.”

We need a communications policy and an ongoing dialogue with the mass media that will guarantee that the sense of risk is proportionate to the actual risk. –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, December 2006, from the “ex-blog”

Lula should be IMPEACHED for criminal association with a narco-guerrilla group, the FARC! Just look! El Tiempo reports that Brazil is offering to let Chávez and FARC negotiators meet on Brazilian soil! –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, September 20, 2007, op. cit.

NGOs dream of using the criminal power and the weapons of the traffic in favor of a social revolution they deem to be imminent and inevitable … It is needful for us not to heed their caveats, and to assume the risks and the collateral damage. It would be impossible to be more explicit than the words of Gov. Sergio Cabral about the narcotraffickers: “They are terrorists, they are evildoers.” – Col. Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former commander of BOPE, the “trooper elite” of the Rio military police — unofficial but highly publicized motto: “We kill to create a better world” – and currently in charge of strategic planning for the state Secretary of Public Security (SSP), Rio de Janeiro. See also BOPE Blogs: “Only the Hard Men Can Save the City”

A follow-up to

• Rio: “The Drug Traffic is a Straw Man”

For a week now, I have been looking to buy a copy of Orlando Zaccone’s Acionistas do Nada: Quem são os Traficantes de Drogas? Roughly translated:

The Shareholders of Nothing(ness): Who are the Drug Traffickers?

Livraria Saraiva did not have it in stock.

No one was available at that particular shop to tell me whether it could be ordered — or seemed to know how to run bibliographic queries on their computer terminal, really.

FNAC did not have it in stock and could not say whether it would, or could, be ordered.

They suggested I might be interested in Elite da Tropa instead — the fictionalized account of life inside BOPE on which the popular film was based.

Which is a bit like going to buy a car and being offered a bicyle instead. Not interested in fiction, I said. If I were, I would watch Globo Reporter.

The Livraria Cultura — which has moved to palatial new digs in the Conjunto Nacional, on the corner of Av. Paulista and R. Consolação — did not have it in stock, and could not say whether it would, or could, be ordered. Its “detective novel” section contained not a single work by Garcia-Roza. Which spot-check sort of tends to confirm the impression I have formed of the Barnes & Noble wannabe over the years: It is amazingly badly organized and reader-unfriendly.

I will have to consult with my friends in the sebo — secondhand book — district on the matter, I guess.

Submarino — “the Brazilian Amazon.com” — does not have it in stock.

One Laptop Per Miniature Peruvian: Garcia Procures The Negroponte Machine

The three candidate machines from the Brazilian testing and procurement process. Peru, it seems, dispensed with the competitive evaluation process and installed the Negroponte gizmo by presidential decree. Will the machines go to those districts where Garcia has suspended civil liberties, also by decree, by any chance?

40 mil computadoras portátiles para los estudiantes más pobres (La República, Lima).

El gobierno asegura que acortará la brecha digital entre el primer y el tercer mundo, y los críticos dicen que no tiene valor pedagógico.

The government says it will bridge the digital divide between the First and Third Worlds. Critics says it has no educational value.

El programa mundial “Una computadora, un niño” tiene por objetivo brindar a bajo precio computadoras personales con acceso a internet para los estudiantes más pobres. Para tal efecto la asociación One Laptop Per Children (OLPC), del gurú de las nuevas tecnologías Nicholas Negroponte, realiza convenios con los gobiernos de los diferentes países para que éstos adquieran los ordenadores portátiles y los distribuyan en las zonas más alejadas y pobres.

The global One Laptop Per Child Program has as its object to donate low-cost personal computers with Internet access to the poorest students. For that purpose, the NGO head by new technology guru Nicholas Negroponte is signing agreements with governments in various countries under which they will acquire the portable computers and distribute them in the poorest, least accessible regions.

But not India.

In Mexico, a similar project, Microsoft’s Enciclomedia e-learning program appears to be foundering, as auditors probe suspected waste, fraud and abuse.

The more the beancounters probe waste, fraud and abuse in the program, however, the more the evangelists of the program pump up the volume on the “rhetoric of the technological sublime”. See, for example:

• “Enciclomedia’s Shining Example”
• BBS: The Beeb 2.0 Touts Enciclomedia

Meanwhile, in Brazil, the gizmo is being subjected to a competitive, multiphase pilot program. See

• Brazil: “Field Tests for Utopian Learning Machines”

On which more in a bit.

I found it astonishing that a tech reporter (from the Estado de S. Paulo) after promising an empirical field-test of the machines, would wind up praising a feature of the $100 laptop — mesh networking — that, as he reports, still did not work in the model he was observing in the field.

That’s just dishonest.

Uno de esos gobiernos es el peruano. Y precisamente ayer el presidente Alan García promulgó un decreto que permite la creación de un fondo de 22 millones de soles para la compra de 40 mil ordenadores personales que serán destinados a las instituciones educativas rurales, las ubicadas en zona de frontera y las que cuentan con un solo profesor (unidocente).

One of those governments is ours here in Peru. Just yesterday, García issued a decree that creates a 22 million sol fund for the purchase of 40,000 PCs to be distribute in rural schools, schools located in border zones, and schools with a single instructor (‘one-room schoolhouses”).

Spain: “Did ETA Do 11-M?”

La conspiración de las togas: The Audiencia (Spain) is about to issue its findings in the case of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid.

Libertad Digital writes of “conspiracy of judges” to repress evidence favorable to the proposition that “ETA did 11-M”

A special section in El País reviews the case and shines a spotlight on a David “Fear and Misinformation Abound”-style fear, uncertainty and doubt campaign designed to lend credibility to an alternative theory of the case that President Aznar personally and quite vigorously promoted to the Spanish press in the days following the attack:

“ETA did 11-M.”

See also

• Spain: “Aznar Was Honestly Mistaken About ETA Role in 11-M”
• NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: Spain’s 11-M Media Wars

What is it about the Spanish, anyway? Recall that “Tania” Head, the 9/11 victim whose tale of heroic survival turned out — how did the Times put it? — to be impossible to confirm on any point, is a product of the same peculiar political culture. See

• Tania Head: Her Good (Pseudonym) Was Her (Phony) Bond

A quick excerpt. The article looks at the main items of evidence adduced for the “conspiracy” theory, but if you want to read more about them, you will have to learn Spanish. I am busy today

… tanto los abogados de la Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M y los de la Asociación de Víctimas del Terrorismo (AVT), excediendo claramente su papel procesal de acusación, se lanzaron con pasión de converso a intentar colarnos a todos los españoles y también al tribunal que los asesinos de ETA estaban detrás del atentado de los trenes de cercanías de Madrid, es decir, la tesis de la conspiración, auspiciada y defendida por los principales dirigentes del Partido Popular y algunos de sus corifeos mediáticos.

Attorneys for the Aid Association for 11-M victims and the Association of Terrorist Victims, clearly exceeding their prosecutorial role, dedicated themselves with the passion of a new convert to try to convince the Spanish people and the court that ETA assassins were behind the attacks on Madrid commuter trains — that is, the “conspiracy theory,” sponsored and defended by the principal leaders of the PP and some of their acolytes in the media.

Colombia: Did Navy Magazines Leak Marching Powder?

El Tiempo photomontage features the marching orders in question.

Most compromising for Adm. Arango is the discovery, on the computer that the Brazilian police seized from Juan Carlos “Chupeta” Ramírez Abadía, when they captured him in Brazil, of a file dated January 22, 2004 reporting the payment of $70,000, under the heading “… reposition frigate …”

The Brazilians are sharing the contents of personal computer belonging to the Colombian drug lord arrested in a deluxe São Paulo gated community in recent months. It is apparently starting to yield investigative results.

Contraalmirante Arango ordenó mover ‘fragata’ en enero de 2004 como se asegura en PC de ‘Chupeta’

Adm. Arango ordered a frigate moved in January 2004, just as [the Lollipop Kid's] personal computer indicates.

Another drug-related item recently: One-third of Colombian cocaine reportedly moves through Venezuela with the connivance of corrupt Venezuelan military. Who says? The Washington Post, EL TIEMPO notes.

But who at the Washington Post? Not Juan Forero, by any chance? On whom see also

• “Colombian Elites Are Shocked! Shocked!”

Yes, in fact, the story is by Juan Forero.

I guessed it on the first try. The Estado de S. Paulo ran a highly abbreviated translation of the story, which is principally based on statements by Mildred Camero.

Some editor has at least insisted that a paragraph of rebuttal be added, close to the top of the inverted pyramid.

In response to U.S. criticism that Venezuela has failed to make anti-drug operations a priority, Rodríguez said he has fired 23 prosecutors and 150 judges tainted by the trade, while overseeing stepped-up prosecutions leading to 3,670 convictions since 2000. He also said Camero’s replacement as drug czar, Luis Correa, was removed from office this year as rumors swirled — many of them provided by Colombian traffickers — that he cooperated with cocaine kingpins. Correa has denied the accusations.

No independent checking of those claims ensue. The body of the story is primarily made up of not particularly informative quote-giving from “U.S. and Colombian officials,” some named, some unnamed.

Al Giordano on Forero in 2001:

Three years ago, Juan Forero — a Colombian citizen who resided in the United States — wrote for something called the “Religion News Service,” churning out sophmoric ideological propaganda with titles like “Pope’s Visit Gives Cubans Hope for Freedom.”

Here in Brazil, meanwhile, Globo’s Época magazine this week features a portrait of Chávez in a field uniform and asks “Should Brazil be afraid of [a Venezuelan military build-up]?” This is a disingenous rhetorical question. The tenor of the “reporting” is actually “Everyone agrees that Brazil should be very, very afraid of a [putative] Venezuelan military build-up.”

The Post story does not mention why Camero left office. Here is what she told the AP (Source: DPNA.org):

She “told the AP she had submitted five reports on high-level drug corruption to the president and vice president, fingering police, military and National Guard officers, customs agents and even two state governors. She would not name names publicly, saying she fears revenge. Camero said she was told Chavez never saw her reports.”

Told by whom?

On reemergent Colombian paramilitaries thought to be trafficking drugs across the Venezuelan border, see also

• Colombia-Venezuela Border: “The Black Eagles Make Good on Threats”
• Colombia: “Return of the Narcoparamilitaries”
• Black Eagles: Colombian Paras in Hugoland?

EL TIEMPO today:

Así lo comprobó el fiscal 22 de la Unidad Nacional Antinarcóticos, que lleva el proceso por la venta de cartas de navegación al narcotráfico, en una inspección al Comando de San Andrés y Providencia.

That [the order to reposition a warship] is what Fiscal 22 of the National Antinarcotics unit, which is overseeing investigations of the sale of navigation permits to the narcotraffic, discovered during an inspection of the San Andrés and Providencia naval command.

NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNN(P)BS: Notes on Infotainment Piracy in The Federal Republic of Robert Marinho

The week in TupiTube:

1. a (one-source, reciting dubious industry numbers) report on piracy of infotainment products, including CDs and DVDs, in Brazil (where Windows Vista, Paraguayan Edition, beat the real thing to the stores by the better part of week);
2. Globo’s Profession: Reporter (Antonioni ought to sue them for plagiarism) stages a real-life production of La Dolce Vita, enthusing over the fascinating life and times of Brazilian paparazzi (and death squad-apologist radio announcers); and
3. some more background on the network TV wars, with a 1995 nuclear exchange between Globo and the rival Record.

The most astonishing thing to see here is Caco Barcellos restaging a scene from his 1993 work of investigative journalism, Rota 66: Policemen Who Kill, on summary executions by São Paulo “elite” police units.

Restaging that scene from his sobering indictment of murderous police misconduct as an infotainment farce.

The book makes it quite clear that Chico Plaza — himself employed by the police as a radio technician, which is how he gets access to equipment for the monitoring of police frequencies he uses to produce coverage of the caçã aos bandidos that remind you of that Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man — provides cover for and builds public support for this sort of conduct with his radio program, “Late Night (After Midnight) With God”

Which is (was) a bizarre mixture of prayer, religious music, ultrarightist vigilantist sermonizing, and live police journalism that actually bears a closer resemblance to sports announcing.

An academic paper by a semiotics professors at PUC São Paulo provides some background:

Sydney Herald “Advertorial” Scheme Gets New South Whaled On

Not the (faux) front page in question: “… the Iemma Government is accused of an addiction to funding services with gambling revenue, particularly from poker machines.” Televisa in Mexico has a green light to do the same, one reads, while Globo in Brazil has been fined for running illegal games of chances in the guise of advertising promotions. 

SMH editor takes blame for Airbus supplement: A “wraparound” causes a commotion, with Sydney Morning Herald staff arguing that a four-page “wraparound” violated “the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance code of ethics.“

No one covering the story bothers to define the technical term “wraparound” — which I gather is the grown-up cousin of a “bellyband.”

I guess you could define it as a entire broadsheet (a single folio with four printed areas, recto and verso, with a fold in the middle) that enfolds the actual newspaper,

Think of the newspaper as a book.

The wraparound is a dust jacket enfolding the book and concealing its actual cover. So if you expected to be able judge this book by its cover, apparently, you might have found yourself, as it were — to mix a metaphor — inadvertently confusing the clothes with the man.

The Metro free paper — there is even an edition of it in São Paulo now — has been using wraparound advertising for quite some time now — using it like it was going out of style. I personally never read it, partly for that reason.

The Herald welcomes its new content management overlords from the latifundios of the Outback.

The word “prostitution” gets thrown around rather freely in other Australian coverage of the flap.

Journalists at Fairfax’s The Sydney Morning Herald have protested over what they say is the newspaper’s use of the front page to promote Singapore Airlines. The broadsheet paper on Friday largely devoted a four-page wraparound to Thursday’s historic arrival of Singapore Airlines’ giant A380 airbus from Singapore.

The wraparound combined ads for the new big Airbus and coverage of its maiden flight to Oz. And also, according to another report, an unrelated, actual news story.

“The Accomplices”: The Mafia Goes Shopping For Journalists

The Brazilian journalist does not feel free to write. More than just having to follow the editorial line of the publications they work for, the complaints principally have to do with coercion by political or business groups. –“A Profile of the Brazilian Journalist”

Or combinations thereof. Or worse.

Narco-Mafie (Italy) writes this month:

Mentre chi scrive di mafia non ha vita facile, nuove intercettazioni rivelano che i boss sono alla ricerca di giornalisti disposti a farsi corrompere. Storia di un libro, I complici, e dei guai che ha procurato a chi lo ha scritto

While journalists who cover mafias do not have an easy time of it, new wiretaps show that the bosses are looking for journalists who are willing to be corrupted. The story of a book, The Accomplices, and the trouble that found the man who wrote it.

See also

• Mexico: Do Narcos Edit the Narc Non-News?
• A Globo Debacle Not Even the Soap Opera Scriptwriters Could Have Dreamed Up

There is an alleged case of such an “approach” here in Brazil, as I am always mentioning: José Messias Xavier of TV Globo, whose name was found on a spreadsheet containing the payroll of a mafia group running illegal gambling machines in Rio.

He was passing along information he gathered from law enforcement sources under the usual reporter-source confidentiality pledge.

To the mafia. A former chief of the state judicial police, recently elected to the state legislature, was also implicated in the case.

I know I mention the case a lot, but I think am going to keep on mentioning it until there is some resolution. For some reason, it is a story that O Globo cannot bring itself to cover, but you would think that some of its competitors might cheerfully dig into it.

I am, as they say, careca de saber what actually happened there. If you were the New York Times, as I always say — I am a Bill Keller admirer — there would be hand-wringing, ombudsman hiring, and other reputation-recuperating measures, some of them possibly even somewhat effective at preventing a recurrence of the reputational debacle.

At Globo, they simply expunged any reference to the man’s having ever worked there.

My Italian is not stellar, by the way.

Given the metaphysical moral relativism of the “innovation journalism” mob, I suppose this is not actually something we should get too excited about. What, after all, is truth? Maybe Bernardo Provenzano really is a kindly and community-minded fellow? Who’s to say, really? Me? You? So just take the money. Go along to get along. Just keep telling yourself you are a foot soldier for the revolution in new innovation paradigms if your conscience starts to bother you.

«Se Ferrara ci fa scrivere una volta alla settimana sul “Foglio” … e si scrivono le cose che si devono scrivere. Lui [Ferrara] è disponibile? … Vediamo come dobbiamo fare [se dobbiamo pagare gli articoli] li paghiamo». Questa intercettazione ambientale, riportata nel libro di Lirio Abbate e Peter Gomez I complici, racconta di un boss di Cosa nostra, il medico Giuseppe Guttadauro, capomandamento del quartiere Brancaccio, preoccupato della sorte degli uomini di mafia rinchiusi nelle carceri palermitane. Per aiutare i detenuti il boss vorrebbe imbastire una campagna mediatica per accendere strumentalmente i riflettori sulle penose condizioni dei galeotti, perciò valuta la possibilità di dare «delle imbeccate, degli spunti di riflessione» ad alcuni giornalisti. Arriva persino al punto di immaginare di organizzare per loro un tour nel carcere cittadino dell’Ucciardone.

“What if Ferrara started writing again for the weekly Foglio … and wrote the things he should write. Is he [Ferrara] available?” Whatever we need to do [whatever we have to pay him for the articles], we are going to pay him.” This conversation, captured by an ambient listening device, as reported in the book The Accomplices, by Lirio Abate and Peter Gomez, shows a Costa Nostra boss, Dr. Giuseepe Guttadauro, cap of the Brancaccio faction, worrying about the fate of mafia men doing time in a Palermo jail. To help his jailed men, the boss wants to fund a media campaign to shine a spotlight on the awful conditions in the jails, and so is exploring the possibility of providing some journalists with … “reasons to reflect” on the subject. He even gets to the point of imagining them organizing a tour of the city jail at Ucciardone.

Nassif on the Brazilian “Risco Cisco”: No Fun for SUN?

Luis Nassif (Brazil) hints that we should look at a firm called Cobra Equipment to understand how “permanent operators” influence government technology contracting in Brazil, regardless of who is currently occupying elected office.

Nassif, not generally given to hyperbole, makes some strong claims about the profundity of the maracuatias involved, so I figure I should try to dig up some background on the case he is referring to.

O relatório do TCU (Tribunal de Contas da União), mostrando favorecimento da Cisco pela Caixa Econômica Federal em 2002 (Blog do Josias) vai comprovando a perpetuidade dos operadores de governo.

The report from the Federal Accounting Tribunal (TCU), showing favoritism to Cisco by the Caixa Econômica Federal (federal credit bank) in 2002 is another proof of how government operators perpetuate their influence.

In the specific example Mr. Nassif cites, however, the equipment purchased was SUN enterprise servers, not Cisco stuff.

Mr. Nassif cites the Folha de S. Paulo Web-only column of Josias de Souza, who points to a 2004 TCU report that questions the lack of a competitive bidding process for equipping the federal financial institution with IT hardware and services, signed in 2002.

The CEF acquired lots of Cisco gear through the systems integration arms of IBM and Alcatel.

Oh, and non-Cisco gear as well. De Souza’s headline: “Government bought Cisco equipment under irregular circumstances under Cardoso.”

Which, now that I read the report myself, is true, but only part of the story.

The TCU questioned some procurement of Cisco equipment in the report Souza cites, resold by Alcaltel and IBM. But it also questioned the procurement of SUN boxes, through Cobra. And an emergency no-bid contract for IBM OS/390 systems management services.

This is why I normally do not pay much attention to de Souza.

Rather than going out and finding stories, the guy, like most Brazilian Bob Novaks, he mostly just seems to sit by the phone waiting for an anonymous Magalhães to feed him one (a common journalistic vice here).

I do understand Nassif’s general point, though.

Folks like Larry Rohter try to get you all interested in the notion that one government is viciously corrupt (and lumpen-Stalinist) and another virtuous (and Ayn-Randy capitalist-heroic).

But the more you look at it, the more you see the need to distinguish between the State (permanent bureaucracy) and Government (the elected officials who get to wear the ceremonial hard hats at the ribbon-cuttings.)

Wanderley dos Santos has written quite a few good books on the subject. I am in the process of poring over them.

These sorts of cases are of interest to gringos, of course, because government technology procurement contracts are under scrutiny back in the Homeland as well.

This after some tech Big Digs aparently collapsed into black holes under the event horizon of that hysterical state of exception declared for the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Which the GAO is now extremely busy trying to learn about.

In Brazil, meanwhile, it seems, the exception remains pretty much the rule. If the State objects to the Government’s policies, it pretty much just tells the Government to go fuck itself. You can observe this on many levels.

In a way, after the Bush years, this sort of puts us gringos in a similar position to the Brazilians: Trying to find our way out of this nightmare. Which is one of many reasons why Brazil is so interesting to watch.

Collapsed Big Digs — and Big Digs that do not collapse, and reflecting on what tends to make the difference between collapsing and non-collapsing big digs — have become something of a hobby of mine. So I will have to update my notes on such things, dig through some back issues of Government Computer News.

Not, mind you, that the Big Digs in question here necessarily collapsed. That is a separate, and equally interesting, technical issue.

But I have seen some really astonishing bad database-driven government Web sites here that make a real mockery of the “rhetoric of the technological sublime” used to promote transparent e-government as the gateway to a new era of global peace and prosperity. Generally Microsoft and Oracle-driven.

I cannot comment on the procurement procedures for these information systems (partly because in order to get such information you have to use the technology in question, which throws more database connectivity errors than the fiercest bull on the pro rodeo circuit throws cowboys). But I think I can make a pretty good case, as a frequent user of databases, that getting information out of these gizmos can be like getting blood from a stone.

Pelo relatório, se identifica desde o governo FHC o uso da Cobra Equipamentos para driblar licitações.

According to the report, Cobra has been used since the Cardoso administration to get around competitive bidding requirements.

Current Cultural Consumption Notes: “The Great Payroll Train Robbery”

Assalto ao Trem Pagador: We rent a 1962 Brazilian film you could translate as “the great payroll train robbery.”

Assalto ao Trem Pagador é um filme brasileiro de 1962, do gênero policial, dirigido por Roberto Farias. Baseado em um fato real, o assalto ao trem de pagamentos do Banco do Brasil ocorrido em 1960, no Rio de Janeiro. É um dos filmes mais importantes do cinema brasileiro.

This 1962 police procedural, direced by Roberto Farias, is based on a real event, the robbert of the Banco do Brasil payroll train in 1960, in Rio de Janeiro (Guanabara at the time, actually). It is one of the most important works of Brazilian cinema.

AVISO: Este artigo ou seção contém revelações sobre o enredo (spoilers).

This article or section contains spoilers.

It actually does not. This subtle story of a “falling out among thieves” — featuring a cameo by the comic actor O Grande Otelo which reminds me in a certain way of Buster Keaton’s one dramatic turn, in The Awakening (1954), even though Otelo plays to type in this story — has a subtle and devastating plot twist towards the end that would probably require more time and effort to describe than just stting down and watching the film.

Which we recommend that you do. I am not sure that it has English subtitles yet, though. Let me check. Honey, did you return that video yet?

Gangue de bandidos liderada pelo temível Tião Medonho organiza e executa um roubo a um trem (comboio) de pagamentos. Enquanto a polícia chega a suspeitar de uma quadrilha de bandidos internacionais pela ousadia do plano, os assaltantes se misturam à realidade da pobreza e da violência brasileiras.

A gang of bandits led by the fearsome Tião Medonho organizes and executes an armed robbery of a payroll train. While the police suspect a group of international thieves, because of the daring of the plan, the robbers blend into the reality of poverty and violence in Brazil.

Mexico City: Gen. López on Police Sociopathology

“Create the fatherland: Kill a Zeta”: Death-squad beheading video appeared briefly on YouTube before being removed for violating terms of service. Inscriptions on victim’s body reminiscent of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” Risk management takeaway: Methods of the Iraqi insurgency are now in use within easy driving distance — in shifts — of downtown Hollywood. By people selling themselves as “the good guys.” See also Mexico: “The Blue Cartel”

Writing in El Economista (Mexico), Rubén Torres interviews a senior public safety official from Mexico on how to recover the role of the “citizen-policeman.”

What with Tropa de Elite (“Elite Squad,” I think they want to call it) about to hit American movie screens, I am finding it interesting to clip news about similar problems throughout the region. Brazil is not entirely unique — nor are its problems in this area completely different in kind than the problem Colombia has with “parapolitics,” I think.

See also, for example,

• El Bonaernese: Argentina’s Trooper Not-So-Elite

La descomposición del “tejido social’’ en la ciudad de México y que arrastra a todo el país, no puede ser reconstruido con sólo implantar un “chip’’ a nuevos policías, sino se debe “tejer el binomio ciudadano-policía’’ que regenere células del núcleo familiar, colonia, barrio, capitales, municipios y estados, sólo así se “expulsarán’’ malhechores, delincuentes y narcotraficantes del entorno.

The unraveling of the social fabric in Mexico City, which is spreading throughout Mexico, cannot be halted simply by implanting a chip in new police officers. What needs to be done is to knit back together the policeman and the citizen, regenerating relations to family, block, neighborhood, city, county and state. Only in this way can misconduct, criminality and narcotrafficking be expunged from the police forces.

Brazil: Globo Talking Head Selects Her Fantasia!

It ain’t over until it’s over. –the late baseball great Yogi Berra

“This is a done deal. Why do you ask? Have you heard something?” Vice-President Alencar asked journalists. –Folha de S. Paulo on the Mangabeira Unger nomination process, June 15, 2007

egocasting pp. Reading, watching, and listening only to media that reflect one’s own tastes or opinions. —egocast n., v. —egocaster n. –The Word Spy

“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you
If you’re young at heart
For its hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind
If you’re young at heart
You can go to extremes with impossible schemes
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams
And life gets more exciting with each passing day
And love is either in your heart or on its way”
–The Chairman of the Board, “Young at Heart”

A gente trabalha o ano inteiro
Por um momento de sonho, pra fazer a fantasia
De rei ou de pirata ou jardineira
Pra tudo se acabar na quarta-feira
Tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim [bis]
–Vinicius and Baden Powell

Mônica Veloso gera polêmica na Portela (G1/Globo): “Mônica Veloso creates controversy at the Portela carnival society.”

After a promising start, Globo’s Internet news portal has grown noticeably heavier on infotainment gossip stories like this, and notably lighter and squishier on hard news.

Mônica Veloso is a TV Globo journalist and political marketing entrepreneur who (1) had an affair with the president of the Brazilian Senate, (2) wound up bearing him a daughter, and then (3) negotiated a child-support agreement that (4) became the subject of a media-driven political scandal.

In an (anonymously sourced) expośe in Veja magazine (Editora Abril), Monica’s palimony laywer accused the senator of using money provided from a public-works contractor to pay this child-support.

The senator admitted that a lobbyist for Mendes Junior, in his capacity as a personal friend, delivered the payments — ouch! — but denied that the public-works contractor provided the money.

The affair had two main aspects: (1) a gibbering sex scandal and (2) a very interesting beancounting story, in which the Senator provided documentation of transactions involving the vast herds of boi zebu he claims to own to show that he did have the resources on hand to meet those obligations himself.

(Reading about the sex Senator “liquidating his herds” tends to provoke in my wetware home theater a mental image of beefsteak in a blender — or the woodchipper scene in Fargo.)

Federal police beancounters, if I have this straight, found that those documents were all authentic, but insufficient, in the aggregate, as rigorous proof of the transactions claimed — the palimony lawyer negotiated with a sister publication of Veja, Playboy Brasil, over a “tasteful” nude photo spread.

TV Globo journalist and political marketer lays bare the bedrooms of power!

We can now know what Mônica has tattooed on her ass. I am not particularly interested myself. You can spend the weekend at Boissucanga or Ubatuba and learn the same thing about half the women in that sector of São Paulo society that can afford to beach it on the weekends.

Veloso, who owns a video-production facility specializing in political and private-sector marketing, recorded her pillow-talk with the Senator.

Her palimony attorney has been accused of perjuring himself to Congress over that fact, after a report attesting to the authenticity of the recordings, and ordered by the lawyer and his firm, was aired by TV Band news. Along with threatening phone calls to one of the parties to the controversy.

Calmon’s defense is that unauthorized versions of the recordings may be floating around and may have been digitally doctored. It is all, he says — or could well be, who really knows? [cue spooky theremin music] — an elaborate set-up.

He could well be the victim of a fiendishly clever scheme of political persecution. And other such commonplaces often correlated with what we like to call the “banana-republic guilty plea.”

As a field collector of the fleurs du mal that sprout up in the day to day of Brazilian journalism, I find myself harvesting a lot of cases with the same logic as this one:

1. A unilateral public announcement is made of a done deal.
2. The alleged counterparty to that deal denies that the deal is done.

See, just this week, for example:

• São Paulo: Cracolândia Makeover Fails a Fact-Check?

One of my favorite examples:

• O Globo: “Dantas Will, Yes He Will, Buy Editora Três”

One theory in progress I have to explain such moments is what I call the nam myoho renge kyo hypothesis.

According to which stating a desired end result as a done deal or fait accompli increases the probability of the deal getting done.

Another hypothesis I am working to explain the frequency of such moments has to do with catastrophic failures of organizational message control. Consuming Brazilian news media on a daily basis is an excellent way to observe some really extravagant and exotic species of that.

At any rate, to the newsflow:

Monica Veloso, a musa da vez e pivô do escândalo que envolveu o presidente licenciado do Senado Renan Calheiros, se envolveu em mais uma polêmica nesta sexta-feira (26). Dessa vez com o carnaval do Rio.

Mônica Veloso, the muse of the current moment and focal point of the Calheiros scandal found herself in the middle of another controversy this Friday. This time involving the carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro.

Veja as fotos de Mônica Veloso na Portela e das fantasias da escola para o Carnaval 2008

Skipping ahead a bit:

A assessoria da jornalista informou também que Mônica recebeu um convite do presidente da escola de samba Águia de Ouro, de São Paulo, para desfilar. A assessoria da Águia de Ouro, entretanto, negou o convite.

The journalist’s press office also reported that Mônica received an inivtation from the president of São Paulo carnival society Águia de Ouro to parade with the group. The carnival society’s press office, however, has denied this.

Águia de Ouro is perennially a seriously heavy-duty, awesome presence on the passarela.

Muito de respeito. Muito de tradição. Saravá to the mighty G.R.E.S. Águia de Ouro.

Photo caption: See photos of Mônica at Portela and the costumes selected for Carnaval 2008.

Mexico: Brad Will Case Transferred to “Crimes Against Journalists” Office On First Anniversary of His Murder

According to the Netroots, “Oaxaca paramilitaries were merely firing into the air” on the day Brad Will of Indymedia was killed. This guy looks to be firing right at YOU, blog monkey. Brad Will was a New Yorker. The NMMist is a New Yorker. New Yorkers are not hot on terrorists who kill other New Yorkers (whether we especially like the politics of those other New Yorkers or not). We also happen live in a part of the world that still has quite a bit of trouble with policemen who moonlight for death squads. And assassinate journalists. Our colleagues. We are not so very keen on that phenomenon, either.

On November 15, state prosecutor Lisbeth Cañas Cadeza threw the investigation for a loop when she reported that the bullets that killed will were fired by an APPO member at the barricade, as part of “a conspiracy to internationalize the conflict, and the product of a planned action.” This was the “point-blank bullet” hypothesis. … Expert testing showed that both bullets were fired from the same weapon.

Other evidence presented include photos and videos shot by journalists and taken from 30 meters away, approximately, which show images of men firing pistols at the demonstrators. Five of them have been identified: Carmona and Zárate, Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello, the local chief of police, and Juan Carlos Soriano and Juan Sumano, local police officers. All remain at large.

Justicia, no carpetazo, piden los familiares de Brad Will: La Jornada (Mexico) interviews the Mexican attorney representing the family of Indymedia photojournalist Brad Will.

Though the official position of the Mexican federal attorney is that investigations into the case “are nearly complete,” the attorney begs to differ, and explains why.

David Sasaki of Global Voices Online had reported that “fear and misinformation abound” in the case — in a post, like so much of the nonsense churned out by these people, that promoted the notion that all hypotheses were equally probable.

Global Voices Online, a project of the Berkman Center for the Internet Society, won the Knight-Ridder prize for “innovations in journalism” in 2006.

Sasaki’s “coverage” of the Oaxaca incident at the time — which provided equal time to what a minimal amount of fact-checking would have revealed as likely to be deliberate disinformation — suggests to me that the “innovation” for which GVO was feted consists mainly of pious, disingenuous logic-chopping nonsense.

“Journalism” that rejects, in principle, the possibility of clarifying the facts, is not journalism at all.

It is, at best, a form of mental masturbation and a waste of the reader’s time. If I want to be fed bullshit and kept in the dark, I will read what comes down the press release wire from our federal government.

At worst, it was an attempt to obfuscate the fact that which a genuine journalist, working to gather reliable information on the scene — rather than gisting Fox News, and press releases from the people who fund their little propaganda and marketing venture, in their Harvard dorm rooms, and calling themselves “innovation journalists” — was murdered.

This is a principal reason why I find the entire project there at Harvard Law so deeply fucking offensive.

Apenas el viernes 19 de octubre la averiguación fue atraída por la Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos contra Periodistas (FEADP), que tendrá que confrontar y agotar las dos hipótesis que se manejan en torno a esta muerte. Una, que el informador murió por los disparos hechos a 30 metros de distancia por policías y funcionarios municipales que trataban de hacer retroceder a balazos a los activistas apostados en la barricada. Dos, que alguno de los activistas situados al lado de Will le disparó a una distancia de dos metros. Esta última línea fue privilegiada por la Procuraduría General de Justicia de Oaxaca, mientras el caso estuvo en su ámbito.

Only on October 19, 2007 did the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists (FEADP) attrat the Bradley ill case. The FEADP will have to compare and exhaustively investigate two hypotheses in the case: (1) That Bradley Will died from gunshots fired from 30 meters’ distance by policemen and municipal employees who were trying to force activists to retreat from their barricaded positions with gunfire, and (2) that some of the activists situated alongside Will shot him from a distance of two meters. The latter line of investigation was privileged by the state prosecutor of Oaxaca when the case was still under its jurisdiction.

Brazil: “Globo Reporter” Airs a Fictional Natural Fact?

My wife really likes nature programming — as do I; it always reminds me of the ethical suicide parlor scene in Soylent Green (1973) — so we stayed up last night here in São Paulo to watch an edition of the program Globo Reporter, titled Coração da floresta: Flagrantes da vida selvagem.

Flagrante — cognate with its usage in the Latin legal term in flagrante delicto — “caught red-handed,” colloquially — means, among other things (the Houaiss Dictionary):

1 visto ou registrado no próprio momento da realização
2 que não pode ser contestado; evidente, manifesto, incontestável

1. Seen or recorded at the very moment it occurs
2. Incontrovertible; evident, manifest

So the title could be translated something like: “In the heart of the jungle: life in the wild, raw and uncut.” The real deal.

There were several segments in the program that fit this description perfectly, including a report on how a group of researchers used (Sony) high technology to capture the first-ever images of (1) the Sumatran tiger, and (2) an extraordinarily long-tongued moth — one that, as Darwin had posited a century before, must exist: a creature capable of pollinating a species of orchid characterized by an extraordinarily long tube that provides access to its nectar.

Those segments lived up to their billing: stories about how nature photographers used technology to capture real images of natural phenomena.

Other segments in the program, however, used an extraordinary amount of CGI effects.

It would be interesting to look at those scene by scene and debate the use of CGI there. (We stopped into FNAC today to look for a book — they did not have it, as usual — and they were advertising a lecture on “ethics in photojournalism.”)

In some cases, for example, the topic of the report was computer mapping of forest spaces. In that context, it made perfect sense to show some of the results of that mapping. Even I thought the results were really neat.

In other cases, however, it appeared to be used completely gratuitously, without the standard disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: “recreation,” or “simulation.”

In a segment on a parasitic tree — the “strangler fig” — that chokes the live out of the tree that produces the Brazil nut, the time -lapse photography could not possibly have been real, since the process depicted takes years and years to unfold.

One segment in the program, meanwhile, seemed to be completely fictional. While claiming that it was factual.

And oddly, that segment does not appear on the program’s Web site today, on the page listing the contents of the program aired yesterday.

São Paulo: Cracolândia Makeover Fails a Fact-Check?

On several occasions, local TV news programs have run hidden-camera and amateur video footage of the local police “contributing to the vitalization of the area.” In this incident, two troopers were suspended for (gratuitiously) assaulting subjects of a stop and search with brass knuckles. In one piece of footage we saw, police search two youths, beat the snot out of them, apparently find nothing, and then set the backpacks of the two young men on fire.

Demolição e polêmica na Nova Luz: The São Paulo city government’s urban renewal plan for the so-called Cracolândia district starts with the demolition of the first buildings over which it has announced it plans to exercise the right of eminent domain.

The accompanying public announcement from the mayor fails a reality-test.

And apparently fails it fairly badly. This seems to happen fairly often.

A Prefeitura demoliu ontem o primeiro imóvel para transformar a Cracolândia, no centro, em Nova Luz. No evento em que a administração pôs abaixo a loja de número 381 da Rua General de Couto Magalhães, o prefeito Gilberto Kassab anunciou o nome de 23 empresas, de tecnologia, call center, cultura e publicidade, que devem se instalar na região – entre elas o Instituto Moreira Salles e multinacionais como Microsoft e IBM. Mas algumas companhias afirmaram que nada está fechado e revelaram mal-estar com o anúncio.

The city administration demolished the first structure in its project to turn “Crack City São Paulo,” in the downtown area, into the New Light district.

“Crack City São Paulo” is not, of course, its official name. It applies to a certain portion of the Santa Ifigênia district known as an open-air marketplace for smokable rock cocaine and prostitution.

In a public ceremony held outside the shop at 381 General de Couto Magalhães Street, mayor Gilberto Kassab announced the name of 23 companies from the tech, call center, culture and advertising sectors that are scheduled to take up residence in the area — among them the Moreira Salles Institute and multinationals like Microsoft and IBM. But some companies say that nothing has been conclusively agreed to and expressed dismay over the mayor’s announcement.

Uribe: “The FARC Wants You To Vote Moreno!”

El Tiempo-Datexco research on the favorable and unfavorable public perception of the two leading candidates for mayor of Bogotá, published today.  The Peñalosa chart appears to contain a gross error, showing the “favorable” data point (48.3) as significantly lower than the “unfavorable” data point (35.6) on October 15. 

We need a communications policy and an ongoing dialogue with the mass media that will guarantee that the sense of risk is proportionate to the actual risk. –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, December 2006

Lula should be IMPEACHED for criminal association with a narco-guerrilla group, the FARC! Just look! El Tiempo reports that Brazil is offering to let Chávez and FARC negotiators meet on Brazilian soil! –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, September 20, 2007

Sin mencionarlo, el presidente Uribe pidió a los bogotanos no votar por Samuel Moreno: “Without mentioning the candidate by name, Uribe asks Bogotans not to vote for Moreno.”

A satirical graffito discovered in the ashes of ancient Pompeii attacked a local mayoral candidate more of less as follows:

The filthy drunks who sleep in the park urge you to vote Claudius for mayor! 

There is nothing new under the sun. Thus sayeth the Preacher.

EL TIEMPO (Bogotá) reports.

On the risk scenario for the upcoming in elections — a number of candidates have been assassinated,  in darks deeds attributed to the FARC, while the “parapolitical” risk is also very much in the news — see also

• Infographic of the Week: Colombia’s Elections Observer Mission

The candidate of the Democratic Pole (PDA) has a comfortable lead — some 17% –  in the poll over the rival candidate, Peñaloso, a former mayor of the Colombian capital, according to EL TIEMPO and its polling firm, Datexco.  Let me see if I can find some other polling figures, for comparison’s sake.

En su recorrido por Algarrobo (Magdalena) y Chiriguaná y El Paso (Cesar) dijo que el candidato del Polo tiene el apoyo de la guerrilla y compra votos. El Polo rechazó las afirmaciones.

In a swing through Albgarrobo, in Magdalena province, and Chiriguaná and El Paso, in Cesar province, the Colombian president said the PDA candidate supports the guerrilla and buys votes. The PDA rejected those statements.

“Hoy Algarrobo le habla a Bogotá”, dijo Uribe, tratando de no dejar duda sobre el destinatario de su mensaje. “Que no se equivoquen allá (…) eligiendo alcaldes respaldados por la guerrilla y que además compran votos”, dijo el Presidente ante una plaza colmada de seguidores que lo aplaudían a rabiar, bajo un sol que superaba los 34 grados.

“Today Algarrobo sends a message to Bogotá,” Uribe said, trying to leave no doubt about who the recipient of said message was. “Let them make no mistake there in Bogotá … electing mayors backed by the guerrillas and who furthermore buy votes,” said the President to a town square packed with supporters who applauded him wildly, beneath a hot sun of more than 93 degrees (F).

Pero a juzgar por la manera como Uribe insistió en lo de Moreno, sin mencionarlo, su interés por tratar de evitar que llegue a la Alcaldía de Bogotá, no es tan espontáneo. Más bien, es muy pensado.

Skipping ahead some.

But judging from the way Uribe insisted in referring to Moreno, without mentioning his name, his interest in preventing the PDA candidate from becoming mayor is not merely casual. Rather, it is very thoroughly thought through. 

Mino to Globo: “And the Kamel You Rode In On”

“Contributions to a dossier on the Brazilian media: Kamel, of Globo TV, protests, but has he listened to the recordings of the conversation between Capt. Bruno and the reporters? Strange, truly strange. It is confirmed, by the way, that Globo TV received the photos of the mountain of money before its competitors. In the case of the Veja cover story, on the supposed meeting between Freud (Godoy) and Gedimar (Pereira Passos), that the times and dates Veja reported are inconsistent with the official documents on which they are based. Among other things …”

Mino Carta (Brazil) notes recently:

Colocadas em 20º lugar na classificação das Empresas Mais Admiradas no Brasil, que a pesquisa TNS InterScience realiza e a CartaCapital publica, as Organizações Globo pretendiam inserir um anúncio na edição especial a ser lançada na segunda-feira 29. Rezava o anúncio: “De tanto nos investigar, a CartaCapital acabou descobrindo o que você já sabia”.

After finishing in 20th place in the ranking of Brazil’s most admired companies, which TNS InterScience compiles and our magazine, CartaCapital, publishes, the Globo Organizations decided to insert an ad in the special edition, which comes out on October 29. The ad copy reads: “After all that investigating of us, CartaCapital wound up discovering what you already knew.”

Where did Globo finish in last year’s survey?

Has it gained or lost ground in the esteem of the 1,300 Brazilian executives surveyed?

Não havia como aceitar a mensagem global, sutil como uma Panzer Divisionen da Wehrmacht. Ao recusar o anúncio, em carta dirigida ao diretor de propaganda da Central Globo de Comunicação, José Land, não deixamos de esclarecer as nossas razões. O texto pretendia demonstrar que CartaCapital investigou em vão certas situações a envolver as Organizações Globo. Tentativa obviamente mistificadora.

There was no way we could accept Globo’s advertisement, which was about as subtle as a Panzer division. In refusing the ad, in a letter addressed to Globo’s ad eirector, José Land, we made our reasons quite clear. The copy implies that CartaCapital investigated certain situations involving Globo, but in vain. An obvious attempt at mystification.

CC’s “Dossier on the Media” issue, and follow-ups thereto, chronicled Globo’s role in that astonishing election-eve “mountain of money” scandal last year. See

• Brazil: Mino’s Media Jihad
• The Folha de S. Paulo In Flagrante Delicto
• Brazil: The Ballad of Ali Kamel
• Brazil: “The Dossier of the Media,” Part III

I can testify that the magazine’s latest fact-check — targeting an op-ed by Ali Kamel on alleged “Communist indoctrination” in Brazilian textbooks — caught these people dead to rights.

You see a lot of astonishing dishonesty from the likes of Globo and Abril — and with great frequency and regularity, too — but this was a massive, throbbing tissue of out and out lies, lies by omission, fabrications and misrepresentations:

• “Globo Gabbles on Communist Indoctrination Textbook Plague!”

And see also

• Brazil: Ali Kamel on Opus Dei and Innovations in Postmodern Content Management

“FEMA Builds Potemkin Village For Wildfire Victims”

Potemkin villages were, purportedly [who purports?], fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. Conventional wisdom has it [whose?] that Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress’s eyes. –Wikipedia

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA: Al Kamen of the Washington Post notes the latest use of fake news by the gringo federal executive.

Did they think we had forgotten about Jeff “I am a victim of the politics of personal destruction” Gannon (not his real name)?

Or Judy “you are only as good as your anonymous sources” Miller and the “aluminum tubes” story?

Or Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged?

On the nondisclosure of the fictional nature of this “news conference” as a grossly dishonest ethical lapse — there are those who will tell you it is an “innovation in social communications,” of course, but they tend to be Moonies (and professional Bloggers for Dean) — see also:

• “Institutional Conflicts”: Why Do They Suck?
• “Stealth Marketing and Editorial Integrity”

Deputy FEMA director Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson calls a press conference. Reports Kamen:

Reporters were given only 15 minutes’ notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA’s Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a “listen only” line, the notice said — no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress Web site), MSNBC and other outlets.

Carried live on Fox News.

Which has a track record of running advertorial and other forms of fake news.

Does this mean that Fox and MSNBC had a camera crew on the scene?

And managed to get set up in 15 minutes?

But something didn’t seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA’s greatness.

The “reporters” were FEMA staffers “playing reporters.”

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We’re told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, and by “Mike” Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

El Financiero: Observations On Union Democracy and Political Machines

According to the Netroots, “Oaxacan paramilitaries were merely firing into the air” on the day Brad Will of Indymedia was killed. Brad Will was a New Yorker. The NMMist is a New Yorker. New Yorkers are not hot on terrorists who kill other New Yorkers (whether we especially like the politics of those other New Yorkers or not).

It is quite unfortunate that the axiom “labor protection kills the right to work” often prevails in regional political circles. Or, in other words, if the labor market is to be dynamic, labor protection must be strictly avoided. … In a ground-breaking report on labor’s role in an open economy published two years ago, the Bank recognized for the first time that those who work with trade unions representing workers are partners in the workplace’s collective bargaining process, and that they contribute substantially to improving and reinforcing the productivity and competitiveness of firms. –Fouad Benseddik, World Bank

Not to mention union democracy movements put down by machine-political death squads, as appears to be the case with Oaxaca’s SNTE Section 22, and as attested to by mass graves in the Colombian countryside. And see also

• Rio: BOPE Busts a Striker

El Financiero’s FT-style “intelligence unit” cites said World Bank report: “Authentic labor unions required for economic growth.”

Also in this special section: Despite promises to the contary, the Fox and Calderón (PAN) governments have maintained the machine politics based on these types of organizations. And indeed, PAN appears to rely on time-tested PRI machinery to consolidate its power and carry out its program of government. On which more later.

En el ámbito laboral abunda la simulación. El marco legal facilita que la democracia sindical y la negociación contractual sean asuntos desconocidos para el grueso de la clase trabajadora. Los contratos colectivos de protección patronal son una práctica que afecta la concreción de garantías consagradas por la ley. Para el sociólogo Jorge Robles, miembro de la coordinación nacional del Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), esa práctica no es nada novedosa; “es tan vieja como la Ley Federal del Trabajo (LFT), promulgada por el presidente Abelardo L. Rodríguez en 1931″.

On the labor scene, simulation abounds. The current legal framework tends to perpetuate the fact that union democracy and contract negotiations are something that most of the working class has never experienced. Collective agreements for the protection of business owners (CCPP) are a practice that affects the concrete realization of legal guarantees. In the view of Jorge Robles, member of national board of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), there is nothing new about this process; “It is as old as the Federal Labor Statute decreed by President Rodríguez in 1931.”

Not to mention civil service unions, where the “bosses” are the state and the unions get used as machine-political bloc votes. One of the most dramatic examples in modern times:

• Mexico: The Teacher Reaches for the Golden Apple
• Elba “The Teacher” Esther: The Rank and File Fester
• Mexico: The Teacher Is “President For Life”!

Los contratos colectivos de protección patronal (CCPP) pueden definirse como aquellos convenios que son pactados entre el secretario general de un sindicato sin vida real, en ocasiones inexistentes, pero dueño del registro que exige la autoridad laboral, y el propietario de la fuente de trabajo, con el propósito de eludir la verdadera negociación obrero-patronal, al definir las condiciones de trabajo. Además de también afectar salarios y prestaciones, impide a los trabajadores ser parte de una autentica vida gremial, pues menudean los casos donde éstos descubren ser parte de un sindicato justo en el momento en que pretenden organizarse.

CCPPs can be defined as agreements negotiated between leaders of a union with no real existence, on a fictional date, but have the membership list that the law requires, and the owner of the employing firm, for the purpose of evading any real worker-ownership negotiations over working conditions. Besides affecting wages and benefits, such arrangements prevent workers from genuinely participating in authentic union democracy, because they often find themselves assigned to [such an owner-controlled] union just at the moment in which they set out to organize themselves.

Knowledge Importation Through the Port of Santos: Final Results

Customs inspectors are the ones making the most easy money in this country, after politicians. To give you an example of how shameless they are, a friend of mine moved from Germany to Brazil and was obliged to pay a bribe of 500 euros for the Santos inspectors to release the container with his personal stuff. His family slept on the floor of their apartment on borrowed mattresses and blankets for two weeks. The strategies of these bums is to slow down the release of goods until the daily storage fees run so high that people pay the bribe in order to save money! And no one does a thing. –Anonymous comment on the Cisco case, estadao.com.br, October 16, 2007; see also “American Tech Firm Cheats Tax Man of Gazillions”

Bribe required to liberate our 27 boxes of books and clothing, shipped through the Port of Santos, which arrived today: R$200.

See also:

• Current Content Downloads: The Port of Santos Cooks My Books

This on top of storage fees on a shipment we had been assured would pass directly through customs without delay.

Paid to whom, for what, we are not quite sure, I hasten to add. The context of the conversation was conducive, let us just say, to requesting that information. All we know is that an unscheduled, ad hoc R$200 cash payment was suddenly necessary to complete the transaction.

The boxes arrived with all the books we put into them, but with about 75% of the clothing we put into them missing.

That is, plundered. Ripped off.

Including my classic black “my name is Vinnie from Bensonhurst, so don’t fuck with me” leather jacket, which I have worn through terrorist attacks, killer thunderstorms, countless perilous existential adventures in flyover country, and stellar evenings of idle conversations in the sidewalk cafés of Little Italy and New York City generally, and which I am (was) extremely attached to.

Costa Rican Free-Trade Beancounting: Preliminary Cases

“Workers required by employers to record themselves voting yes, despite ban on photographic equipment in voting booths,” says NO campaign. That is, “prove you voted yes, or lose your job.” Documented cases, but no investigation into exactly how frequent or common this practice might have been that I have found yet. In Brazil, this is known as the voto do cabresto. Nullification petitions in such cases, and TSE resolutions here. The TSE has now officially ratified the result. Studying.

TSE has virtually eliminated fraud with citizen identification cards that incorporate electronic images and biometric information. –Unisys customer case study for Costa Rica’s TSE

The political and black-propaganda aspects of the affair aside, the Costa Rican free trade referendum presents us with some beancounting lore that has some intrinsic interest, qua beancounting, I think.

The Costa Rican elections tribunal, the TSE, has now ruled on cases of alleged fraud and irregularities and certified the results of the referendum. All complaints were filed by election observers of the PAC, the party of Otton Sólis, a leading NO proponent.

NO proponents are saying that fraud, vote-buying, coercion, and other corruptions of the process were rampant, while oversight was nonexistent and the TSE intransigent in its refusal to properly investigate such allegations.

On which more later. The University of Costa Rica statistics department’s report on the 2006 election concluded — phrased more diplomatically, of course — that the nation’s elections system had failed once again to produce fully credible results. Although, weirdly, it seemed to want to praise it for making progress toward generating less implausible results.

The publication of widely disparate poll results prior to the voting — one or more of them indicating a “technical tie” — is often correlated with, and show be taken as one risk indicator for, election fraud, according to experts I have been reading. And that is exactly what happened in this case, throwing a flag for a more detailed audit of the process.

• Dueling Polls in Costa Rican Referendum

The poll that showed a technical tie was prepared by a firm that lists the presidency of Costa Rica — and Chiquita Brands — as market research clients. The poll that showed a 12% advantage for NO does not list its clientele, but says it is part of the Research International network.

So anyway, I am starting to read some of the cases published by the Costa Rican TSE to see if there is anything in there that might advance the the global state of knowledge on how to count things — such as cookies, ducks or votes — beyond the traditional “see and say” approach propounded by Count von Count.

Observers of the 2006 national elections in Mexico may experience a sense of deja vu, I think.

I wish we could convince UNAM’s John Ackerman, who authored some of the clearest analysis of the abject failure of beancounting controls in the Mexican election, and was a visible spokesman for the “vote by vote” movement there, to turn his attention to this case.

En escritos recibidos en la Secretaría de este Tribunal el 18 de octubre del 2007, el señor Edgar Ruiz Cordero, en su condición de fiscal del Partido Acción Ciudadana, interpuso demandas de nulidad de las Juntas Receptoras de Votos número 3815, 3945, 3999, 4000, 4034, 4040, 4077, 4136, 4378, 4543, 4545, 4548, 4558, 4559, 4691, 4733, 4803, 4886, 4890, 4904 y 4910, en cuyas actas de escrutinio se consignó que el Padrón-Registro aparecía en blanco, y contra las Juntas Receptoras de Votos número 2956, 3183, 3190, 3284, 3434, 3779, 3833, 3867, 3895, 3913, 3940, 4006, 4290, 4351, 4368, 4449, 4451, 4484, 4525, 4553, 4555, 4563, 4592, 4602, 4628, 4648, 4678, 4688, 4812, 4871, 4862 y 4920, en cuyas actas de escrutinio se consignó que el acta de cierre del Padrón-Registro aparecía en blanco.

In papers received by the clerk of this elections tribunal on October 18, 2007, Mr. Edgar Ruíz Cordero, in his capacity as elections monitor for the Citizen Action Party (PAC), demanded the nullification of Vote Reception Boards Nos. 3815, 3945, 3999, 4000, 4034, 4040, 4077, 4136, 4378, 4543, 4545, 4548, 4558, 4559, 4691, 4733, 4803, 4886, 4890, 4904 and 4910, in whose documentation it was observed that the voter-registration rolls were missing [or blank]; and against Vote Reception Boards Nos. 2956, 3183, 3190, 3284, 3434, 3779, 3833, 3867, 3895, 3913, 3940, 4006, 4290, 4351, 4368, 4449, 4451, 4484, 4525, 4553, 4555, 4563, 4592, 4602, 4628, 4648, 4678, 4688, 4812, 4871, 4862 and 4920, in whose documentation it was noted that the certification of the closure of the voter-registration rolls was missing or blank.

Alega que es imposible verificar que el número de votos escrutados corresponden al total de votantes que se presentaron, ya que ese aspecto se verifica en el Padrón-Registro lo que, en su criterio, provoca un vicio insubsanable, pues las papeletas escrutadas no pueden ser prueba de la manifestación de la voluntad del elector, en tanto no existe constancia documental de que los ciudadanos inscritos en el Padrón se presentaron a ejercer el voto, pues esa circunstancia se consigna en el Padrón Registro con la firma de cada ciudadano. Agrega que, una situación como la denunciada, provoca la nulidad de toda la junta, al no poder verificarse cual fue la manifestación de la voluntad popular del elector.

He alleges that it is impossible to verify that the number of votes counted corresponds to the total number of voters who presented themselves to vote, given that the voter-registration rolls are required in order to perform this check, and that in his judgement this creates an incurable defect in the process, because the ballots counted cannot be taken as reflecting the will of the voter unless it be documented that the citizens registered to vote actually presented themselves to vote, a fact that is reflected by the signature of each voter in the voter-registration rolls. He adds that a situation like the one charged must lead to the nullification of the entire results of that board, since it cannot be verified that the vote count corresponds the popular will.

Fotoagência NMM-Tabajara “In Violation” of Photobucket Terms of Service!

I have been wondering what changes might occur now that News Corp. has acquired the Photobucket photo hosting site, where I upload a lot of the imagery I present. I used to use Flickr, but they imposed a cap on uploads, and wanted money to “go professional.” Too much money.

Here’s the first change I have seen myself: an old photo of mine suddenly turns up as “violating our terms of service.”

I have to go through tons of old files to discover what exactly that photo was as photo of.

Never mind what term of service it might have violated. As far as I can tell, the terms of service are, bottom-line, that the site reserves the right to remove any content at any time for any reason, without prior notice or explanation.

The photo showed an advertising poster, displayed on the storefront of a big chain drugstore, which I snapped at the Conjunto Nacional (Av. Paulista and Consolação) here in São Paulo a year or so ago.

The poster, advertising some kind of diet remedy, depicted the naked flanks of a woman, shown in profile — the flesh of her thighs and hips bearing the kinds of buttons you see used in, for example, leather upholstery.

The idea being that you could use the diet remedy to reupholster your body to make it more attractive and comfortable to sit on.

Tribuna Democrática (Costa Rica): Black-Box Negotiations Were a Raid on Trade

The Casas-Sánchez memo to Arias: “Some urgent actions needed to reanimate the Yes on CAFTA campaign. First and foremost: A media blitz based on “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” Kevin Casas is under investigation for illegal use of public funds to benefit the “Yes” campaign, and lost his post over it. See Costa Rica: “FUD Mud Slung at Schwab Job”

Suddenly the U.S. Secretary of Foreign Trade [sic] will have equal standing with congressional deliberations in drafting the bill. As during the times of Mr. Chatfield, Her Majesty’s chargé d’affaires, who wanted to impose a sort of British protectorate on this little corner of the world.

The Tribuna Democrática (Costa Rica) on the CAFTA referendum there, the upcoming battle to pass the enabling legislation, and the prospects of a parallel deal with the European Union.

• De cal y de arena

“Of sand and quickline.”

I am quickly scanning the folklore and lingo forums and I gather that this is a metaphor that comes from brick-making.

If you mix a strong ingredient with a substandard one, the resulting brick is not going to be much good. Something like that.

La encarnizada polémica en torno al Tratado de Libre Comercio con Estados Unidos destapó los vicios de un proceso de negociación caracterizado por el secretismo y la ausencia de mecanismos eficaces para tomar el pulso a la sociedad civil a la hora de elaborar las posiciones del país. Tanto como que –infidencias del mismo Presidente de Costa Rica de entonces– ni siquiera a él se le consultó la última posición adoptada por los negociadores en temas cruciales como el de las telecomunicaciones y los seguros.

The heated dispute over the free trade agreement with the United States has uncovered the vices of a negotiation process characterized by secrecy and the lack of efficient mechanisms for taking the pulse of civil society when it comes time to elaborate Costa Rica’s positions in these negotiations. So much so that — the Costa Rican president at the time was not trusted on this question — not even he was consulted on the latest position adopted by negotiators on crucial topics such as telecommunications and insurance.

El cacareado “cuarto adjunto” sólo sirvió para llenar una formalidad protocolaria y simular vocación por la transparencia. Para escarnio de muchos de los que desfilaron por ahí, se les oyó pero no se les escuchó. Aún resuenan las airadas quejas de sectores afectados por el TLC porque a la hora de la hora, al Tratado se le incorporaba lo que la burocracia decidía. Y si no, véase en qué pararon las objeciones de los sectores de lácteos y carne de porcino.

The vaunted “Annex Four” was nothing more than a bureaucratic formality designed to simulate a commitment to transparency. To the great dissatisfaction of those paraded through the process, they found themselves being heard but not listened to. The angry complaints of sectors affected by the FTA can still be heard, however, because from one hour to the next, the Treaty incorporated terms that the bureaucracy dictated. Don’t believe me? Just look at what results the complaints of the milk and pork producers yielded.

De modo que la experiencia del proceso de negociación del TLC enseña lo nefasto que sería repetir los vicios en el caso del Acuerdo de Asociación con la Unión Europea. Es de temer que así suceda, vista la prominencia que se les ha cedido a los mismos que se habituaron a trabajar dentro de una cripta y la arrogancia con que algunos jerarcas de ciertos gremios empresariales apuran la marcha, como si se tratase de un tema para buhoneros y como si la controversia en torno al CAFTA no hubiese sido atizada en buena medida por el secretismo, el misterio, la apropiación indebida del destino nacional.

The experience of negotiating the FTA with the United States, therefore, shows us how disastrous it would be to perpetuate these vices in the case of the commercial accord with the European Union. There is reason to fear, given the prominent role played by people who have gotten used to working in a black box, and the arrogance of some business association leadership, that they will rush the process along, as if it were a deal among clandestine street vendors, and as though the controversy over CAFTA had not been characterized in great part by secrecy, mystery, and the misappropriation of the nation’s future.

Hay instancias de participación de la sociedad civil (así se les denomina) que levantan la mano y piden aportar en las negociaciones con la U.E. Se apegan al Protocolo de Tegucigalpa que creó el Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana (SICA) y que así lo dispone. Pero desde el gabinete alguien subestimó su representatividad. ¿Anticipo de la suerte de sus reclamos?

There are examples of participation by (self-styled) civil society in the process, who have raised their hands and asked to have a voice in the EU negotiations. They stick to the terms of the Tegucigalpa Protocol that created the ICC [Central American Integration plan] and want to keep things that way. But the government has not granted them much representation. Is this a preview of how their demands will prosper?

Algo así parece que le espera a los “Auxiliares de la Función Pública Aduanera” quienes dieron a conocer sus observaciones, críticas y sugerencias al expediente de la Unión Aduanera en razón de que lo planteado conduce a todo menos a la Unión Aduanera de Centroamérica, y piden –sin que se les de pelota– que se involucre a la sociedad civil. ¿Verá la Unión Europea estas cosas compatibles con el espíritu de participación de la sociedad civil en todo lo que atañe al Acuerdo de Asociación con el istmo?

A similar fate awaits the Customs union, who made their observations, criticisms and suggestions known to the Customs administration, noting that the proposals undermine the project for regional integration of customs, and they ask — but no one pays them any heed — that civil society be included in the process. Will the EU see such developments as reflecting the spirit of participatory democracy in its negotiations of its own trade deal with the Isthmus?

Y como para engrosar el estuche de las monerías de la política contemporánea, esta joya: el diputado jefe de la fracción del Movimiento Libertario solicitó el parecer del gobierno de Estados Unidos sobre un proyecto de ley que resume las principales normas de la legislación de implementación del TLC. Semejante expresión de malinchismo que no es sino una afrenta a la potestad soberana del Congreso, sólo se vio en los tiempos de los Contratos-Ley. De repente el Secretario de Comercio Exterior de los Estados Unidos equiparará la consulta a un encargo para que redacte el proyecto de ley. Como en los tiempos de Mr. Chatfield, Encargado de Negocios de Su Majestad, que quería imponer una especie de protectorado británico en este rincón.

And add this gem to the stockpile of absurdities from the contemporary political scene: The leader of the Libertarian Movement in Congress has asked the U.S. government for its opinion on an omnibus measure that would contain all the provisions required to implement the FTA. Such [kowtowing to a foreign power] is an affront to the sovereign power of Costa Rica’s legislature such as has not been seen since the times of the Contract-Laws.

La parola malinchismo è un termine popolare messicano che si usa per descrivere un condotta verso lo straniero.

“Contract-Laws” granted monopolies to the likes of Alcoa and your standard One Hundred Years of Solitude fruit cartels in, I think it was, the 1970s. I have to research that more, though, so don’t quote me.

Suddenly the U.S. Secretary of Foreign Trade [sic] will have equal standing with congressional deliberations in drafting the bill. As during the times of Mr. Chatfield, Her Majesty’s chargé d’affaires, who wanted to impose a sort of British protectorate on this little corner of the world.

I will have to look up the historical allusion there.

Colombia: How Broad Was My Broadband 2.0?

“The Promotion and Massification of Broadband Internet Services in Colombia, Version 2.0″

Bien en ‘banda ancha’, pero mal en banda ancha (Enter 2.0, Colombia): Good news, writes tech editor Javier Mendez, for the modern Colombian broadband industry!

And at the same time, not so good.

“Broadband” subscriptions are exploding in Colombia!

It is a veritable information-age revolution!

That, at least, is how EL TIEMPO covered the story today: “The Internet Explodes in Colombia!”

The problem being that “broadband” is only exploding if you redefine the notion of “breadth” in a (misleading) manner. See also

• Of Bailouts and Liquidity Improvements: “Functions of Language in the Era of Globalization”

La Comisión de Regulación de Telecomunicaciones (CRT) dio a conocer la semana pasada un informe que reveló cifras muy alentadoras sobre la evolución de Internet en Colombia. Este dice que el número de usuarios de Internet se duplicó entre junio del 2006 y junio del 2007 (llegó a 10,1 millones), que los suscriptores de ‘banda ancha’ ya son la gran mayoría (83 por ciento del total) y que la penetración de Internet en Colombia (23 por ciento) al fin logró superar el promedio mundial (19 por ciento) y el de América Latina (20,8 por ciento).

Colombia’s regulatory commission for telecommunications (the CRT) published a report last week with very encouraging numbers on the development of the Internet in Colobmia. It says that the numbe of Internet users doubled between June 2006 and June 2007 (to 10.1 mllion), that the great majority of Internet users subscribe to broadband services (83% of the total) and the Internet penetration in Colombia (23%) has finally surpassed the world average (19%) and the average for Latin America (20.8%).

A primera vista, los datos invitan a celebrar. Sin embargo, el mismo estudio tiene otras cifras que muestran que Colombia solo ha avanzado la mitad del camino, ya que aunque muchas personas tienen ‘banda ancha’ (cable y ADSL), estas conexiones son muy lentas, tanto que la mayoría no se puede considerar de banda ancha; por ello, en su informe por primera vez la CRT omite llamarlas así, y se refiere a ellas como conexiones ‘dedicadas’.

At first glance, these data are cause for celebration. However, the same study presents other numbers that show that Colombia has only completed half the journey, because, though many people have “broadband” connections (cable and aDSL), these connections are very, very slow — so much so that most of them cannot be considered “broadband” at all. For that reason, and for the very first time, the CRT now avoids calling them “broadband,” referring to them instead as “dedicated” connections.

Costa Rica: Schwab Rewrites History

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it” –G.W.F. Hegel

That aphorism has always struck as another version of the Liar Paradox, or “the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.”

Hegel is a person. Persons have never learned from history. Therefore, Hegel has never learned, from history, that no person has ever learned from history.

“This statement is false.”

Charles Krauthammer condemns another foreign-policy stunt by Pelosi: I really have no idea what this Armenian genocide resolution was about, in the context of this little flap in which Turkey decided to invade Iraqi Kurdistan.

I mean, gee, who could have predicted that little side effect?

But I was pretty astonished by the following j’accuse, thrown in as an aside, about the Costa Rican referendum.

Krauthammer refers to Pelosi’s

… letter to Costa Rica’s ambassador, just nine days before a national referendum, aiding and abetting opponents of a very important free-trade agreement with the United States.

Important to whom? Would somebody explain to me how I am going to die of malnutrition because the price of Chiquita bananas are going to go through the roof or something if Costa Rica and Guatemala are not annexed just like the Philippines a century ago? Or what? What are the apocalyptic consequences for me and mine?

Krauthammer trots out his standard “the Conressional opposition majority are unpatriotic defeatists,” “cheese-eating surrender monkey” rhetoric.

But the notion that the letter from Pelosi and Reid to the Costa Rican ambassador was an unpardonable foreign policy intervention, while a front-page op-ed by Susan Schwab during the 72-hour period, when proselytism is banned by Costa Rican law, was not — well, I find that pretty amazing.

Renascer Case: The Commedia Dell’arte of Journalistic Diligence

Potemkin villages were, purportedly [who purports?], fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. Conventional wisdom has it that Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress’s eyes. –Wikipedia

Renascer reforma creche denunciada pelo MP: Globo reports, or insinuates, that after being accused public this week of shennanigans in its charitable institutions, the Renascer in Cristo Church is mounting a “Potemkin village” operation to try to rebut the charges.

See also

• São Paulo: New (Oliver) Twists in Renascer Case?

My wife was just commenting on this last night: We were flipping through the channels, paused for a moment on the broadcaster run by the apocalyptic televangelicals, and we see a report designed to rebut charges that Renascer was using its charitable foundations as fronts to wangle donations out of the faithful as a cover for obscene accumulation of wealth by church leaders.

In the church’s video, we are shown the institutions in question, looking, as my wife comments, bem arrumadinho.

Spic and span. Neat and tidy.

My wife, who does not follow the story closely, is puzzled. “But I heard the place was a Dickensian hell,” she says, more or less in those terms.

Then again, who does follow this story closely, really?

Except for Globo?

Whose general thesis is that all Protestant evangelical denominations are insanely crooked?

It is quite successful at disseminating that point of view, too. Witness the hasty generalization in this article on the Renascer case in the International Herald Tribune.

Hernandes Filho, a former Xerox marketing executive, and his wife founded the Reborn in Christ Church in 1986 and rode the wave of popularity of evangelical churches in Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country. The churches have drawn millions in the country of 185 million with dynamic services that appeal to younger, working- and middle-class Brazilians. Critics say they exist to enrich their leaders, who demand big donations and offer vague promises that providence will reward the faithful with riches.

Hernandes may have “rode the wave,” but is he a typical Brazilian evangelical? That inference is left open, it seems to me.

But isn’t that a bit like me implying that Hernandes is a typical technology marketing professional? After all, “technology evangelism” is the revolutionary new wave of technology marketing, right? Herandes seems to have taken that metaphor at face value.

But no. I might insinuate that sometimes, for purposes of satirical exaggeration. And I certainly do have a very low opinion of some technology marketing practices, particularly those that use the “evangelism” metaphor.

But the fact is that — I would say — most technology marketers and PR people I have run across in my life and times have been perfectly capable professionals doing respectable, valuable work in an honest and straightforward manner. If I insist on writing about the gizmos mainly from a design and engineering perspective, they fax me over the spec sheet toute suite.

Likwise, critics do say that Renascer exists to enrich its leaders — and there are some credible signs that those critics may well be right. I would be interesting in learning more on the subject. I am as fascinating by Elmer Gantry narratives as anyone. (Recommended: Robert Duvall’s 1997 film The Apostle.)

But I bet you I could find you other evangelical churches here that cannot be credibly charged with such shennanigans. So just how prevalent are the Elmer Gantry types on the contemporary Tupi-Lusophone scene? That would certainly be a meaty question for investigative journalists to tackle. But you will not find much of that in Globo’s coverage of the issue.

Which is why, at a minimum, I would advise boiling that generalization before swallowing.

There is a lot of Aimee Semple McPherson-style televangelism here, it is quite true, but it should also be recalled that Globo’s principal rival is TV Record — which is also owned by the head of an evangelical religious organization. See

• Brazil: TV Globo, TV Record Exchange Nuclear Press Releases!

Just How “Disruptive” IS Money 2.0?

The buzz is that the Limeys still love Liz.

Money, its a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.

Cash still king for customers (Finextra): God save the (portrait of) the Queen (on British banknotes).

Because Eurotourists are money.

One for The Numbers Guy to follow up on.

The headline here seems to suggest, for a fact, that payment technologies are not gaining traction.

But the story it headlines actually has essentially to do with a dispute over that question.

In which case a better headline would have been

Is cash still king for customers?

Unless, of course, you are ready to conclude that one side in the dispute is right.

The survey:

Note and coin payments accounted for more than half (54%) of all transactions last year, with £32 of every £100 spent in shops being in cash, according to a BRC survey which includes results from 10,000 shops responsible for over a third of total UK retail sales.

That is, the British Retailers Consortium:

These results reportedly defy payment-industry numbers:

But the retailers’ organisation is accusing card companies of exaggerating the extent to which cards have replaced cash, while pushing cashless payment methods as a way of boosting their own revenue.

Why? What numbers do the payment providers put up?
It would have also been useful to know whether the figure cited — 54% — represents a [putative] retreat or an advance, or a holding of its own, for carbon-based meatspace cash money over previous periods.

After all, we are told that cash is “still” king.

How kingly was it before?

How kingly is it now?

How long can it reasonably expect to avoid the revolutionary guillotine of payment tech?

Globo for Bobos: “Hot, Steaming Death in the Brazilian Bathroom!”

Please wait for your infotainment to load …

We need a communications policy and an ongoing dialogue with the mass media that will guarantee that the sense of risk is proportionate to the actual risk. –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, December 2006

Lula should be IMPEACHED for criminal association with a narco-guerrilla group, the FARC! Just look! El Tiempo reports that Brazil is offering to let Chávez and FARC negotiators meet on Brazilian soil! –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia, September 20, 2007

Electric schock: effect of the passage of a current of electricity through the body. Fatality may result from shocks of from 1 to 2 amperes and 500 to 1,000 volts. However, the effect of electric shock on the body depends not only on the strength of the current, but on such factors as wetness of the skin, area of contact, duration of contact, constitution of the victim, and whether or not the victim is well grounded. –Columbia Encyclopedia

Two initial impressions from my very first treks through Brazil remain vivid in my memory.

The first was my very first encounter with what at first sight seems like a prime candidate for the Darwin Awards — a black-comic Web site dedicated to

… honoring those who improve the species … by accidentally removing themselves from it!

Namely, the electrical showerhead, a gizmo that heats water just before it emerges to splash down — as the elderly gentleman you see in the segment shown above charmingly says — on your bald spot.

In a nation of extreme neatness freaks — the Brazilian instinct to bathe often really is a notable and widespread cultural attribute — that still lacks the infrastructure to support hot water heated by piped-in natural gas on a universal basis, this gizmo is found everywhere, from Popular Homes and Shanties magazine to some of the best hotels.

The first time I saw one, every instinct in my gringo body shouted that this was an insane idea, and I ask my wife, “So, how many people does this freaking thing kill every year in Brazil, anyway?”

“Good question,” she replied. “I have no idea. But no one I have ever heard of.”

It is a question that would be interesting to know the answer to, is hard to find solid sources on, and is a question that this Globo report on the death-dealing electric showerhead does not even bother attempting to answer. It is good enough for Globo to parrot the statement that “your electric showerhead COULD kill you.”

Which I think tends to corroborate what I always says: The contrary-to-fact conditional is the first refuge of an intellectually lazy, useless journalist.

Because my instincts were apparently off. We just had our local electrician in yesterday, in fact, to inspect our electric showerhead, and he gave me a very good “for dummies” rundown on the thing.

The second first impression came from reading a declaration by journalist Mino Carta, to the effect that Brazilian journalism, and especially Brazilian TV journalism, was among the very worst in the world. Just quackingly and abusively stinking-rotten bad.

But surely the man was exaggerating? I thought. Shrill exaggeration for effect being something of a national sport, I could see that much right off the bat.

But now that I have been testing the latter proposition in the NMM fact-checking and signal-to-noise measurement labs for several years now, I have to say, the Carta Hypothesis is looking more and more likely to be dead-on accurate in many, many cases.

Because when I say that TV Globo is viciously slanted and viciously stupid, I mean that it is viciously slanted and viciously stupid as a general rule, to the point where it is hard not to conclude that its vicious, slanted stupidity is a praxis deriving from a systematic Weltaunschauung. A method in its madness. See, for example

• TV Globo: “Corruption is an Incurable Disease!”

I hasten to add, as always, that Globo employs many, many professionals who are without any doubt eminently capable of doing better, and who know the difference between competent public-affairs journalism and Globo journalism all too well.

The problem is that those people do not get to run things. On which see also

• Explosive Story: “Globo Dissident Scoops the Network That Ratfinked Him”

This TV Globo news report — plucked more or less randomly off of YouTube — on the famous Brazilian electrical showerhead is, I think, another case in point.