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The once-thriving country of Venezuela has been suffering severe political and economic problems for close to two decades, under the presidencies of Hugo Chaves and Nicolás Madura. The distress is now so severe that at least 2 million Venezuelans are refugees , and many who remain in the country are suffering badly. President Maduro fails his country Because both presidents have been socialists, some opponents of socialism apply several logical fallacies to conclude that it proves socialism is disastrous. Writing for Yahoo! Finance , market journalist Dion Rabouin explains why socialism per se is not the cause of Venezuela's woes. This is especially important to me as I watch a different kind of political and humanitarian disaster unfold in Nicaragua . There the president continues to speak as a leftist while governing from the far right; this has created a dangerous kind of confusion among those few U.S. politicians who are paying attention . Lagniappe With the recent rise of de...

The PRI radio program The World  is -- as the name implies -- a font of geographic knowledge. Sometimes I am lucky enough to catch the entire program. Yesterday I heard only a few short bits during the broadcast and the rebroadcast. It turns out that what I heard was the last minute and later the first minute of a two-minute story. Entitled The History of Latin America in One Song . PRI has recently improved the online archive of the show, so that the segment can be found by that title at the end of the list of segments comprising the entire episode. The story is about Mexican-Canadian musician Boogát's upbeat homage to Latin America. The song includes a bit of slang and a lot of proper nouns, so people who only somewhat speak Spanish -- like me -- might want to consult the printed lyrics and translation on Musixmatch. Boogát - Aquí The song indeed celebrates history and biography, but I notice a lot of geography in these few words. The song might just push aside Santana's ...

We not only survived the 2012 Zombie Apocalypse in Livermore Falls; we got the zombies to wash our van.  GQ  is a font of wisdom on all kinds of subjects, so it should not be surprising that writer Cam Wolf has written about a serious matter of disaster preparedness: what about coffee ? He interviews a number of survivalists who make some interesting arguments about the value of coffee in an emergency, not only for its direct benefits in terms of energy and comfort, but also for its potential value as a tradable commodity. As cigarettes are to the prison yard, so coffee would be to extended off-grid survival. Sudden Coffee cupping lab. ostensibly. As someone who was marketing combat and humanitarian rations in the period leading up to the Y2K scare, I know that long-term shelf stability is a key to such preparations. Otherwise, "preppers" (as Wolf calls them) would need to replenish their supply kits as often as they go to the grocery store. For this reason, they focus on f...

The April 2018 issue of  National Geographic focuses on race, and  begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them." From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider  shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue. The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology. Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media . On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege , an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts. Together, I believe these items are good starting point...

It is sad -- an inexplicable, really -- that the fisherfolk of Louisiana were counting on the current administration to protect fisheries from the ravages of the petroleum industry. One reason we have Federal environmental laws is that state and local politicians so often pursue a regulatory race to the bottom, and few places have found a lower bottom than Louisiana. Those who depend on the Atchafalaya for their livelihood also depend upon the Federal government for protection from polluters. Image: Photojournalist Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News That leaves the Federal government -- through its Environmental Protection Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, and other branches -- as the best hope for the protection of fisheries against polluters. As I wrote in Eagle and Condor in 2016, politicians of both major parties have been overly friendly to the developers of pipelines. It should come as no surprise that a deeply anti-environment and anti-science administration would offer even less resi...

Our geologic age, that is. Geologists who define ages and epochs according to the rise and fall of organisms have come to realize that one particular species has dramatically altered the earth in ways that will be detectable well into the future. That species is us: Homo sapiens sapiens . As the name implies, higher-order thinking distinguishes us from the rest of our genus, and indeed from the rest of all life. It may be both our doing and our undoing. A lot of that thinking has been directed at the extraction of resources that could be used both for energy and for useful products. Those resources, especially coal, petroleum, and natural gas, provided both concentrated energy and material -- plastic -- that could be used to manufacture almost literally anything. The Anthropocene (human age) is so called because that process of extraction has fundamentally changed the Earth in ways that some humans have difficulty believing. The earth is indeed so vast -- comprising billions of cubic m...

The image below is a snapshot of a tri-fold poster I created for use in promoting a proposal to establish the Ben Linder Café at Bridgewater State University . The purpose of this post is to share the slide set that comprises the individual sheets that are included on the poster. BSU community members: please contact me to arrange for use of the poster at an event. I can lend it to BSU students who have been closely involved in the project, send the poster to an event with one of those students, or bring it myself if my schedule permits. The center panel describes the main features of the café and its relation to the legacy of Ben Linder. The left panel 
describes the problematic coffee options currently available at BSU.
The right panel describes the MANY ways in which BSU is a coffee
leader, except on the campus itself. (Please note: using "Ben Linder" as a search term on this blog will point to many of the ways in which his legacy has inspired Bridgewater State students....