ah-froh-zan-der

Henry D’Arthenay is a graduate of the University of Navarro in Media Studies and the lead singer/guitarist of Venezuelan rock group La Vida Boheme. He and his bandmates live in the country’s capital of Caracas where lots of political turmoil continues since the presidential elections on Sunday April 14th.

I spoke with D’Arthenay in his home in Caracas via Skype about the unrest. He also explained the voting process in Venezuela, the role the country’s media plays, and much more.

An excerpt from PT. 1 of the interview:

When you vote here, fuck, we have such a complicated way. It’s not like you go to a place, put a vote and put it in a basket which, in my opinion, should be enough. No! You go to your Centro Electoral, the place where you vote. First, they take your fingerprint into a data system, then you step into this tiny box and there’s a screen. It’s an automated electoral system. You push the button on the candidate you want and that machine prints a tiny paper with the name of the guy you voted for. You fold it, you put it in a box. Then, before stepping out, you have to sign a book with your signature and you put your fingerprint.

Is that why there are all those pictures of people with their pinkie fingers dipped in ink?

Yes! After they put your finger, they moist it in this ink and, well maybe you can’t see it from here but I still have some because it’s indelible ink. That way they don’t have people voting two times. It’s made up to be fail-proof but it actually isn’t.

An excerpt from PT. 2 of the interview:

Inside the Chavismo, it’s very diverse, as diverse as it always was in every country of the world. With the opposition, it’s the same. What was the only thing that was tying them up? The left being with Chavez and the others being against Chavez. That was it! Their moral compass was set by being with Chavez or being against Chavez.

So what’s happening here is like losing the best character. It’s like when Friends was over and Joey started and people started watching Joey and they said “this sucks.” It’s like having Seinfeld without [Jerry] Seinfeld. We’ve been living a Chavez-centric policy for almost 15 years. Now that he’s gone, the institutions and how trustworthy they are, it’s all coming afloat because Chavismo now has a challenge. They have to try to gather their forces around an idea that’s not a person. They lost a lot of people during these elections and it was because a lot of the people, they weren’t voting for the socialist project as much as they were voting for Chavez.

thesmithian:

I was made aware of the odd mix of gain and loss when I went back to Atlanta to see my beloved grandmother. She told me not to hold change between my lips while groping for a pocket to put it in—“That might have been in a nigger’s mouth.” Once, when she took me to Mass, she walked out of the church when a black priest came out to celebrate. I wondered why, since she would sit and eat with a black woman who helped her with housework. “It is the dignity—I would not let him take the Lord in his hands.” Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity. This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

more.

thinkmexican:

Márquez: ‘This Win Is for the New President of Mexico’

Juan Manuel Márquez knocks out Pacquiao in the sixth round, dedicates fight to EPN; firestorm of criticism is unleashed

Juan Manuel Márquez delivered a devastating right hand in the last second of the sixth round to knock out his arch-rival, Filipino Manny Pacquiao.

Márquez avenges the two losses and a draw from their three previous fights, which many in the boxing world considered an inaccurate record of this matchup.

Pacquiao attributed his loss to being “overconfident,” but at the end, it was the experience and savviness of Márquez and his trainer, Nacho Beristáin, that finally gave Márquez a definitive win.

Although a great fight, it’s what happened after that had many talking.

In what seemed to be a follow up to the controversial PRI patch worn on his boxing trunks during his last matchup with Pacquiao, Márquez dedicated his win to Enrique Peña Nieto.

“This win is for my family, all of Mexico … and this win is for the new president of Mexico. It’s dedicated to him,” said Márquez, referring to the highly polarizing and newly inaugurated Peña Nieto.

The post-fight interview was aired on TV Azteca’s national broadcast of the fight, which meant that millions saw it live.

Soon after, the hashtag #ChingaTuMadreMarquez, (#FuckYourMotherMarquez), quickly became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. On Facebook, the posts and comments criticizing Márquez blew up as well.

Some defended Márquez, saying it’s a matter of free speech; others suggested athletes should stay out of politics.

Regardless, the issue is problematic considering past PRI presidents have used athletes, specifically boxers to promote them and their party, as was the case with Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Julio César Chávez.

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Image Credit: Ring Magazine

Blegh…

paxamericana:

theheritagefoundation:

Yeah, it matters.

What? BJ Upton signed to the Braves for $75 million over the next five years. His signing bonus was $3 million. Why should anyone give a shit about multi-millionaires paying 4% more in taxes? This is weak, even for y’all.  

I guess there’s something beyond the bottom of the barrel after all.

lareviewofbooks:

Andrew Gumbel in “How America Didn’t Win the Cold War:”

Reagan himself traveled back to Berlin in late 1990 and gave a speech congratulating himself on engineering the end of the Cold War. His signal achievement, he said, had been the decision to station nuclear cruise missiles in West Germany and his pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile shield program also known as Star Wars. But this, as Berliners knew better than anybody, was a convenient and self-serving rewrite of history. It was not true, as Reagan and other conservatives liked to argue, that aggressive increases in military spending had caused the Soviet empire to bankrupt itself as it scrambled for a response; the Soviet economy was already in tatters when Reagan took over, and there was no evidence of significant change in Soviet military spending in the 1980s. Reagan’s 1987 visit to Berlin had been a diplomatic near-disaster, marked by rioting young westerners angry about the cruise missile deployment, and about US policy in central America. The president’s call to tear down the Wall seemed generic at the time — every western political leader who passed through said much the same thing — and had no discernible effect on either the East Germans or the Soviet leadership.

Far from giving Reagan a hero’s welcome on his return, Berliners ignored him; he spoke to row upon row of empty seats. If any foreign leader deserved credit, they felt, it was Gorbachev, who had promised to keep his tanks and troops out of Eastern Europe and issued a striking warning to Honecker on that anniversary visit, that “life punishes those who drag their feet.” Still, it was not Gorbachev who ordered the Wall to be opened. He was in no position to, because it happened largely by accident.

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