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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 A

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.

This was an order that Antar Davidson could not follow. Davidson was -- until last week -- an employee of a privately-operated detention center in Tucson, where I lived from 1990 to 1994. As a trilingual person, he had a lot to offer children, and he did, until he no longer could. Please listen carefully to his story. In it, he explains how he noticed the shift in policy not from the news, but from the number and demeanor of the children in his care and the behavior of his supervisors. Please take five minutes to listen to his story; it is not easy, especially for any person who has been a parent or a sibling or a child. But it is important. The claims of "whataboutism" defenders of fascist and policies and tendencies fall away when exposed to the first-hand testimony of this young man, who put family values ahead of conformity. Read more about Davidson's experience in an LA Times article by journalist Molly Hennessy-Fiske . She posted the story from McAllen, Texas, whi

In this short conversation with TED Radio Hour host Guy Raz, writer Taiye Selasi offers listeners a lot of wisdom on the meaning of place, and the relationships among place, power, and identity. Some of the things that concern her are familiar, but two decades of thinking about them have led her to some very useful ideas about how to have better conversations about the places that have shaped us. People are more alike than different, but focusing on national identities needlessly accentuates difference. The Places We Call Home page includes links to  her biography and the full TED talk upon which this conversation was based. It also includes a link to another TED talk about which I have written recently, The Danger of a Single Story .

My favorite librarian used this short excerpt from novelist Chimamanda Adichie's very popular TED Talk as part of a presentation she was giving on religious literacy. In it, she describes the narrow lens of pity through which many -- including middle-class Africans -- view the continent and its people. We both recommend  Adichie's full talk : the medium is truly the message in this case, in that she has much more to teach us than the avoidance of stereotypes about Africa. Millions of viewers seem to agree. We also recommend her novel Americanah , especially the audio version. But her story about stereotypes of Africa is timely, as the  Washington Post  has recently published an essay on the topic by Salih Booker and Ari Rickman of the Center for International Policy. In  The future is African — and the United States is not prepared , they describe demographic and economic trends that will surprise many readers. Africa is often described as though it were a single country -- alt

Rook, aka Missionary Poker Image:  Wikipedia Once upon a time, a family of four (it might have been mine) was gathered around a table to play the card game  Rook , which uses a deck similar to standard playing cards, with primary colors in place of suits. While three family members were out of the room, one of them (it might have been my brother, or maybe me) dealt a round. When we returned, each player was holding all of the cards of a single color, in numerical order. The young dealer insisted that this highly unlikely outcome had occurred naturally. After all, every combination is equally likely, and since every player had an equal hand, there had been no motive for the "crime" of setting up a deal this way. No motive, perhaps, but enough opportunity to leave the other players skeptical. Skeptical indeed. This came to mind -- actually the mind of my wife and favorite librarian -- as we contemplated the "thousand-year flood" that  devastated the beautiful little t