Citizens Climate Lobby Takes Campaign to Capitol Hill
June 28, 2010 | No Comments
Between June 21 and 25, Citizens Climate Lobby took its message to Capitol Hill, meeting with 52 different members of Congress, or their energy and climate staff, in both the House and the Senate. The first CCL national conference was fortuitously timed, as the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has brought into stark relief the nature of the carbon-fuel problem and the urgent need for action to achieve a civilization-wide overhaul of energy infrastructure, and the climate bill pending in the Senate may not have the votes to override a filibuster.
The “Lobby Day” experience was part of the first annual CCL National Conference, in the nation’s capital. The landmark event brought together climate scientists, oceanographers, environmental engineers, economists, activists, community leaders, small business owners and concerned citizens, to deliver the message to members of both parties that citizens from the community, their own constituents, will support them if they take meaningful, comprehensive action to combat climate destabilization.
Tags: Capitol Hill > carbon emissions > CCL > climate > environment
Clean Energy is not an Ideological Issue
June 16, 2010 | No Comments
There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting resources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.
Neither is there anything ideological about the allegiance of some to carbon-based fuels. The considerations are entirely practical on all sides, and we need to remember this as we try to find consensus on how to move forward, responsibly, as a civilization, in terms of our relationship to energy and the environment.
Tags: clean energy > climate > climate bill > energy bill > energy legislation > environmental politics > green economy > renewables
Arizona Immigrant ID Law Ignores Constitutional Protections
April 26, 2010 | No Comments
The governor of Arizona has signed into law a measure that would allow police to demand proof of legal residency in cases where they believe an individual might be an undocumented immigrant. The same law would also require people to carry proof of legal residency. It is unclear how the law would be enforced without racial profiling and whether or not US citizens would be subject to legal penalties if caught not carrying proof of citizenship.
The law ignores the Constitutional ban on “unreasonable search” and protecting personal documents. It also seeks to establish state-level control over an area of law that is the domain of the federal government. There is, for instance, no Arizona customs service or national border service. The border is a federal category, and immigration is controlled, by law, by various federal agencies and the jurisprudence of federal law. There is language in the law that is reportedly designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with state enforcement.
In Defense of the Book, in All its Forms
April 23, 2010 | No Comments
Today is the Day of the Book, in part spurred by the urge to recognize two of the great progenitors of modern literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who both died on 23 April 1616, at least according to the official history. Their work and the various arts that go into making books, as such, are celebrated around the world as staples of modern global civilization and the human element of culture. But the book is more than those sweeping historical energies; it is a concrete, observable register of intent and of meaning, which carries evidence of our humanity forward and informs and improves future worlds.
The book, bound pages imprinted with text in one form or another, is one of the oldest continuously used and still highly relevant technologies, and for good reason. Paper is both a simple and a complicated tool, requiring large amounts of industry and energy to produce, yet is produced in massive quantities and seems endlessly available. Staining it in a way that allows a visual rendering of a given code (a language and its preferred alphabet) allows us to create a record of ideas and thought patterns that holds up remarkably well against time and can be accessed with no technology aside from our own senses and knowledge of the code in question.
How to Beat, Reverse & Prevent Identity Theft
April 19, 2010 | No Comments
With the digital medium putting down roots and expanding its reach into more and more aspects of everyday life, the risk of identity theft is increasingly of concern and increasingly hard to keep pace with, prevent and reverse. There are deep worries —expressed by every expert from privacy advocates, to civil rights lawyers to Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates— that the use of biometric markers for real-world identification will lead to an irreversibility problem and radical incentivization for identity thieves and fraudsters.
Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).
Poesía en Villanova (antología del festival de poesía 2010)
March 18, 2010 | No Comments
Carlos Trujillo, Joseph Robertson (compiladores)
1ª edición: 25 marzo 2010
ISBN: 978-0877230861
En Villanova, cada noche de lunes, la palabra sencilla y poderosa emprende su vuelo sin encender motores y no para de revolotear, de elevarse y planear como gaviota luminosa sobre la noche siempre cálida de la hermandad poética reunida en la mesa del Taller Literario Pinzon 9. La idea de un día dedicado a la poesía se transformó en dos días de poesía, y en un par de semanas había comenzado a tomar forma un festival que ocuparía todo un fin de semana. Así nació este festival y la presente antología de colaboradores.
La antología incluye obras de los siguientes poetas: María Elena Arias Zelidón, David G. Barreto, Andrea Cote, Silvino Edward Díaz Burns, Rodolfo Figueroa, Andrés González, Cristiane Grando, Gladys Ilarregui, Carlos Jiménez, Víctor Martín Iglesias, Floridor Pérez, Magnolia Pérez Garrido, Salvatore Poeta, Joseph Robertson, Enrique Sacerio-Garí, Cristina Sánchez-Conejero, Róger Santiváñez y Carlos Trujillo. [Más información...]
Tags: antología > Carlos Trujillo > español > eventos > events > Festival de Poesía > libros > poesía
Palabras / Words (bilingual edition)
March 18, 2010 | No Comments
by Carlos Trujillo
Joseph Robertson, translator
1ª edición: 25 marzo 2010
ISBN: 978-0877230878
¿Dónde cae la hoja que cae de la hoja?
¿Dónde, la hoja que se suelta de sí misma
como mirando lejos y hacia adentro,
como mirándose desde lejos
igual que si fuera otra hoja la que cae
mientras ella la mira?
Where does the leaf fall that falls from the leaf?
Where, the leaf that lets go of itself
as if looking into the distance and also inward,
as if looking upon itself from afar,
as if it were some other leaf falling
while it is looking on?
The work of the poet is not easy to define. It involves imagination, observation, a musical ear and a kind of daring that allows words to forge new spaces for meaning. But none of these alone makes the poet, or the poem. In this bilingual edition of Carlos Trujillo’s Palabras, his first collection to be published in English, the award-winning Chilean poet offers the reader a hands-on experience of the creative work of the poet, and by his elegant, melodic approach, suggests a more intimate understanding of what poetry is and how it comes to draw breath. [Read more...]
Tags: bilingual edition > books > Carlos Trujillo > English > español > Palabras > Words
Jaguar y cascada (libro)
March 18, 2010 | No Comments
Joseph Robertson
1ª edición: 23 marzo 2010
ISBN: 978-0982649107
Este libro, la tercera colección de poesías en castellano por Joseph Robertson, junta poemas tanto filosóficos como de amor con ensayos cortos y un cuento lírico. Es a la vez la obra más ambiciosa y más íntima del poeta, y marca un momento de cambio de enfoque en su obra y en su visión poética. Aquí siguen unos extractos del texto:
La poesía es la frontera donde el lenguaje de uso común contacta con significados futuros, y en el proceso, cuando mejor logrado, invita a entrar en el presente una riqueza de verdades trascendentes. La poesía se involucra en todos los usos del lenguaje, aunque pueda haber tendencias populares sugerentes de que sólo las nuevas modas valen, de que la poesía es más clásica que actual : muchos artistas musicales ahora hacen el papel, incluso conscientemente, del historiador mítico o trobador vagabundo, pero la poesía no se limita a estos propósitos.
Gender Links Roundtable on Governance Calls for Resource-building
March 10, 2010 | No Comments
On the second morning of the 54th Commission on the Status of Women, Gender Links and the African Woman and Child Feature Service —through the Gender and Media Diversity Centre— hosted a roundtable dialogue involving Marren Akatsa-Bukachi of the Eastern African Sub-regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI), Francisco Cos-Montiel of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Revai Makanje of Hivos, Norah Matovu-Winyi of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network, and Jennifer Lewis of Gender Links as facilitator, with Mwendabai Yeta Mkhize and myself providing event support and reporting.
The discussion opened with comments on statistical analysis of proress toward the goal of achieving 50/50 parity. With a 7% improvement since Beijing, the discussion moved quickly toward the question of how to accelerate the rise of women in decision-making and leadership roles.
Tags: Africa > CSW > GenderLinks > governance > poverty > resource-building > UN > women's rights
Germinal Gender Narrative: Teaching the Media to Relay the Message
March 3, 2010 | No Comments
Article published in Issue 8 of the Gender & Media Diversity Centre’s Southern Africa Media Diversity Journal, March 2010
The FIFA World Cup is coming to South Africa this year, the first global event of its kind hosted by an African nation. That means 2010 will bring many aspects of life in South Africa into view for people around the world. There are competing theories about whom such grandiose event-stagings benefit: credible arguments can be made for the view that the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup infuse an established order with new money, media focus and influence, while others see such events as necessarily elevating civic virtues by forcing an established order to exhibit them. The 2010 World Cup can put all issues relating to women’s rights and possibilities in the forefront of global perceptions of South Africa.
South Africa has the legal framework, the people, the initiative, in short: the means, of making great strides forward for women, but also conditions that pose a constant threat to women’s health, physical safety and possibility for ascending through the established order to maximize their potential, in the workplace, the political sphere or even the realm of personal realisation. South Africa’s commitment to reaching the Millennium Development Goals [MDG] on gender issues should be moved forward as the world turns its gaze on the situation South African women face in living their daily lives.
Tags: English > gender equality > media diversity > narrative theory > prose > reporting > southern Africa
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