My housemates just left on a trip to Costa Rica, so I have the house to myself for 2 weeks. I'm pretty happy about that. Not that they annoy me that much, but it is nice to be totally undistracted by other humans shuffling around living their loud lives in the same space. I plan on getting a lot of things accomplished, including a lot of work done on my Juaurez documentary. In fact as soon as I post this I'm going to start transcribing a presentation by Ramona Morales, the mother of one of the murdered women in Juarez, Silvia Elena Rivera Morales.

webcam shot from The Urban Grind

I think I spend too much time blogging. Kind of silly that I posted this. Especially since I used to live in a house with 3 web cams. One in the kitchen, one in the living room and one in the hallway. I really should do something with all the archived shots at some point. Seems like so long ago. Like a dream. Even though it was only about.... 6-7 years ago. The dream of those heady days during the "digital revolution." hah. hah.

I've been thinking and researching the concept of impunity for my Juarez doc I came across a
recent article in the Nation by Naomi Klein about impunity in Iraq. She pulls no punches dissing John Kerry:

By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

She talks about a famous photo of a soldier in Iraq, smoking a cigarette, and decodes the image and its social context. It reminds me, very positively, of Barthes' Mythologies, especially the essay about the photo of the black French-Algerian soldier and what it really meant. Klein concludes with this scathing observation: "Genuine impunity breeds a kind of delusional decadence, and this is its face: a nation bickering about smoking while Iraq burns."

(coincidence #6938: as I write this I'm listening to Beck's album Odelay and the song "New Pollution" is playing, but it sounded to me for a moment like he was singing "New Fallujah"...)

So yesterday, as the previous entry shows, I found out about a site where you can see the collective life goals or desires of many web users. Now this morning, by odd synchronicity I discover almost the exact opposite in a new eBay feature called Want It Now. Users can post things they want to buy, and sellers can "reply" to these by offering to sell that item. How fascinating to compare these two sites. On one hand we have a place where people are obviously being rather philosophical and contemplative, where they post long term plans and hopes and dreams, anonymously, but collectively with others. And on the other hand we have very very specific, consumerist desires, very specific to each person, which can be specifically answered by someone else.

I blew a few hours yesterday surfing 43 Things and Del.icio.us and Flickr, convinced that some kind of clever conceptual net art project was just waiting to be hatched, by somehow relating or connecting those 3 sites. I didn't really come up with much. But all these sites, and now this new ebay thing, just fascinate me in their common characteristic that they are vast databases of people's lives and hopes and wants. I really feel like something profound and wise could be created by somehow cross-connecting these huge piles of personal information, somehow seeding one with the other.

So, I'm throwing out this idea and giving it up. Go ahead and do it, please, I don't have time. Some clever net artist just waiting for a new idea, here you go, run with it, baby.

I'm not sure exactly what this is, and maybe nobody does other than its creators. It's a list of goals for life. You can add to your list, and see what others have added to their lists, and how many have put a thing on their lists. Ok, cool, but, I don't understand what each page means. the list keeps changing whenever you click on one item. I don't know if it's randomly picking an assortment, or if there's some algorithmic thing going on.

Its fascinating. I'm conducting an experiment: the biggest text on the page indicates the item that is in most people's lists. I keep clicking the biggest one and seeing how it flows.

get laid
live simply
be happy
take more pictures
love
get rich
fall in love
stop wasting time
work because i like to not because i have to

and then it starts getting circular. And notice that maybe 9 out 10 of these big things are things I agree with, but every once in awhile i get one that i either have already done ("Drive across the USA") or I just disagree with ("take more pictures" - no, i want to take less, or "Start a company that survives longer than 2 years" - i have no desire to do that, really).

Very very interesting. So simple yet so damn fascinating. It's like the world zeitgeist, or at least the zeitgeist of privileged people who have access to the web. You can search for things, and I cannot find "become a U.S. citizen" (though I do find "become an Egyptian citizen"), I don't see "get my green card," or "feed my family," though I do see that 29 people want to "survive," but that was probably entered as a joke.

Anyway, if you want to see my list, go for it. I of course need to add some stuff to it still.

By the way, I found this by looking at a friend's bookmark list on Del.icio.us

Ok now I gotta get off the web and get something accomplished today.

Another email from Mexico Solidarity Network just now reports that a couple, tortured and wrongly accused of one of the Juarez murders, are free. This is one of the cases that was discussed at length with the president of the Supreme Court of the state of Chihuahua when our delegation met with him November 4. It's one of the cases that he made calls about to other judges while some of the victim's family sat in his office. Wow.

Here are the details:

Cynthia Kiecker and Ulises Perzabal have been found innocent and have been freed from prison!

U.S. citizen Cynthia Kieker and her husband, Ulises Perzebal, were arrested in May 2003, and charged with the murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas. The couple has been incarcerated ever since and tortured into making confessions, which they later retracted. The couple also claims that their lawyers have been threatened. One of their lawyers, Chihuahua resident Miguel Zapien, was recently attacked by an unknown assailant. The arrests of Kiecker and Perzebal are part of an alarming trend in which local authorities appear to be targeting "counter-culture types." This serves two purposes: first, it gives the appearance that authorities are actively investigating the crimes, and, second, officials are able to arrest relatively powerless people who are out of the mainstream and generate little public sympathy with claims of torture.

In June 2004, President Fox visited Kieker's home state of Minnesota, assuring US Senator Norm Coleman that Kieker would be released soon. However, months later Keiker and Perzebal had not been released and Fox?s office now claims he mis-spoke. The parents of the young victim, Viviana Rayas, believe that Kieker and Perzebal are innocent, and have publicly denounced the investigation, saying officials are using the couple as scapegoats.

I just got news from the Mexico Solidarity Network about some Zapatista indigenous villages that are being forced to move because they are in or near the Montes Azules bio-reserve in Chiapas. Apparently Conservation Internaional and other environmental groups are pressuring the Mexican government to get them out of there. The zapatistas moved there to avoid paramilitary violence.

I just wanted to take a minute to say what a shame it is that two progressive causes have to be at odds like this. The zapatistas are even, according to the MSN report, abiding by zapatista laws that include protection of the environment. I always thought Conservation International was better than this. The only mention of this on their site is a press release about the "illegal settlements" and a coalition of organizations that are working on the problem, including "17 indigenous communities and villages." The place is Mexico's first bio-reserve, ever. Of course, no mention of why the settlements are there, or the underlying context, or even of the Zapatistas. It's like these environmental problems are just floating in a political vaccuum, as far as CI is concerned.

What a shame. All these things are connected, and the environment is important, but this is why social justice issues are more important to me. I'm sorry, flowers and toucans are great, but people are just more important, and if you take care of people and do the right thing for them, the environment will naturally follow and be healthy too. (Pun intended.)

At a coding session (or what we call a "Toolshed Day") for work yesterday we discovered DocSynch, a tool for networked collaborative text editing. It's like SubEthaEdit, only better because it's cross-platform, as opposed to SubEthaEdit which only works on the Mac.

It's sort of a weird hack because it uses IRC as the network protocol, but it seems to work once it's installed. Of course when you're all in the same room it's debatable whether tools like that have a real reason to be used besides their "gee whiz" factor. We were joking about, for instance, downloading a whiteboard and a marker to use instead.

A year ago today was my first full day in Bolivia. I woke up in La Paz having just flown in from Sao Paulo the night before. I'm looking at my journal from that day and recollecting:

9:15am
...sure enough, Portuguese has effected my Spanish. I just asked for water and pronounced it "Agwa Meeneraow" like in Brazil.
...
9:10pm
I'm in a pe

• steev's blog

I just found a great site called Patagoniabolivia.net, a blog written by two young independent journalists from Vancouver, B.C. who have been travelling and reporting in Argentina, Chile, and now Bolivia, for many months. It's very good writing, too, or what I can read of it is. One of them seems to do most of his reporting in French. The other, Dawn Paley, writes mostly in English. Very well-designed site, too, using software called Mambo, which I haven't seen before.