Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Holding Pattern
Specters, specters--there is also a specter haunting this little corner of the Web. Comrades, friends: please bear with us as things come together over a little more time. There are, indeed, "buildings to be built."
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Blimp over Caracas
Venezuela launches Zeppelin to tackle rampant climb.
1.
Around the hot-dog stalls of the run-down suburb where the airship took its first flight, most people felt the unmanned eye-in-the-sky could help counter routine hold-ups, shootings and carjackings.
"It is a necessity," said street vendor Pedro Marin when asked about the 15-meter helium-filled blimp that had been looming silently over his stall beside a busy highway.
2.
In the refined cafes of east Caracas, there was more cynicism, condemning the blimps as a waste of money that would not work in bad weather or at night, when Caracas is at its most risky, resembling a shuttered-up ghost town.
"It reminds me of 1984, of George Orwell. This is Big Brother. It is not going to solve crime," said Jose Luis, a lawyer who declined to give his family name.
Is this not the story of the American media's handling of Venezuela and Hugo Chávez? Many people--workers, mainly (and often more codedly embodied as the distasteful brown tide of humanity)--support Chávez, but there's always an articulate opposition mentioned very prominently in stories like these, an opposition coded in the US media as being the sterling conscience, the cautious allies of freedom, whose misgivings about government policy are to mirror our own. We must believe them, see, because they are educated people (like a lawyer who alludes to Orwell) who refuse to give a surname because the leftist government might harm them for their exercise of speech.
1.
Around the hot-dog stalls of the run-down suburb where the airship took its first flight, most people felt the unmanned eye-in-the-sky could help counter routine hold-ups, shootings and carjackings.
"It is a necessity," said street vendor Pedro Marin when asked about the 15-meter helium-filled blimp that had been looming silently over his stall beside a busy highway.
2.
In the refined cafes of east Caracas, there was more cynicism, condemning the blimps as a waste of money that would not work in bad weather or at night, when Caracas is at its most risky, resembling a shuttered-up ghost town.
"It reminds me of 1984, of George Orwell. This is Big Brother. It is not going to solve crime," said Jose Luis, a lawyer who declined to give his family name.
Is this not the story of the American media's handling of Venezuela and Hugo Chávez? Many people--workers, mainly (and often more codedly embodied as the distasteful brown tide of humanity)--support Chávez, but there's always an articulate opposition mentioned very prominently in stories like these, an opposition coded in the US media as being the sterling conscience, the cautious allies of freedom, whose misgivings about government policy are to mirror our own. We must believe them, see, because they are educated people (like a lawyer who alludes to Orwell) who refuse to give a surname because the leftist government might harm them for their exercise of speech.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
The Way Around Turkey
"On March 15 in Athens, the heads of state of Russia, Greece and Bulgaria signed an agreement of cooperation in the construction and exploitation of an oil pipeline from Burgas, Bulgaria to Alexandroupolis in Greece. Connecting the Bulgarian port on the Black Sea with the Greek port on the Aegean, it will provide for a transport route for Russian oil to the Mediterranean that would bypass Turkey and the Bosporus Straits, which Turkey controls."
... continue here.
... continue here.
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