Relevant Science

In Airport Run-In, Democrats See Help for Obama Among Hispanics - NYTimes.com

2012-01-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

In Airport Run-In, Democrats See Help for Obama Among Hispanics - NYTimes.com:

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Judge Orders Arizona Candidate Struck From Ballot - NYTimes.com

2012-01-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

Judge Orders Arizona Candidate Struck From Ballot - NYTimes.com:

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George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

2012-01-26T11:00:00.001-08:00

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

George Soros. , Photograph by Jake Chessum for Newsweek

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”

To many, the idea of Soros lecturing the world on “evil” is, well, rich. Here, after all, is an investor who proved—and profited hugely from—the now much-derided notion that the market, or in his case a single investor, is more powerful than sovereign governments. He broke the Bank of England, destroyed the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence, and reduced the value of the pound in British consumers’ pockets by one fifth in a single day. Soros the currency speculator has been condemned as “unnecessary, unproductive, immoral.” Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, once called him “criminal” and “a moron.”

In the U.S., where the right still has not forgiven him for agitating against President George W. Bush and the “war on terror” after 9/11, which he described as “pernicious,” his prediction of riots on the streets—“it’s already started,” he says—will likely spark fresh criticism that Soros is a “far-left, radical bomb thrower,” as Bill O’Reilly once put it. Critics already allege he is stoking the fires by funding the Occupy movement through Adbusters, the Canadian provocateurs who sparked the movement. Not so, says Soros.

Soros’s fragrant personal life will also prompt many to pooh-pooh his moralizing. Last year, Adriana Ferreyr, his 28-year-old companion for many years, sued him in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging he reneged on two separate promises to buy her an apartment, causing her extreme emotional distress. Ferreyr, a former soap-opera star in Brazil, said Soros had given the apartment he had promised her to another girlfriend. She also claimed he assaulted her. Soros has dismissed Ferreyr’s claims as “frivolous and entirely without merit” and “riddled with false charges and obviously an attempt to extract money.”

Despite his baggage, the man who now views himself as a statesman-philanthropist is undeterred. Having profited from unregulated markets, he now wants to deliver us from them. Take Europe. He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants.”

It is “now more likely than not” that Greece will formally default in 2012, Soros will tell leaders in Davos this week. He will castigate European leaders who seem to know only how to “do enough to calm the situation, not to solve the problem.” If Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy nurses any lingering hopes of finding their salvation outside the continent, they are mistaken. “I took a recent trip to China, and China won’t come to Europe’s rescue,” Soros says. Despite all its woes, he nevertheless thinks the euro will—just barely—survive.

While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. The main issue facing the electorate is whether the rich should be taxed more. It shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”

If there is a glimmer of hope for the world in 2012, Soros believes it lies in emerging markets. The democratic-reform movement that has spread across the Middle East, the rise of democracy and economic growth in Africa, even reform in Russia may yet drag the world out of the mire. “While the developed world is in a deep crisis, the future for the developing world is very positive. The aspiration of people for an open society is very inspiring. You have people in Africa lining up for many hours when they are given an opportunity to vote. Dictators have been overthrown. It is very encouraging for freedom and growth.”

Soros insists the key to avoiding cataclysm in 2012 is not to let the crises of 2011 go to waste. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.” Nor has he quite given up hope that the central bankers and prime ministers gathering in Davos this week have got what it takes to rally round and prove him wrong. This time, being wrong would make him happy indeed.

Newsweek

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War - The Daily Beast

2012-01-26T10:32:00.000-08:00

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War - The Daily Beast:

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We are in a crisis of the total system which must be faced: Bartlett Diaz

2012-01-26T06:20:00.000-08:00

2012-01-26 04:00:00

Manuel Bartlett Diaz in a lengthy interview
that made executives and reporters of this
publishing house

Manuel Bartlett Diaz (MBD) has returned to the state that ruled for nearly 20 years. It does so as a candidate to the Senate, but not the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-the political institution in which he fought all his life, but championed by the Workers' Party (PT) and supporting the cause Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leads.

Former federal interior minister paid a visit to the premises of La Jornada de Oriente (JO). In an extensive interview with executives and reporters made this publishing house, Bartlett talked about how he was always on the wing of the tricolor claimed social justice and revolutionary nationalism, of their struggle, since it occupied the Palace of Covián against the technocracy and how the PRI and the country eventually turn to the right when Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidency of the Republic.

He referred to the fruits that has given the marriage between the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN) with retrograde laws-some even sneak a fascist, that individual rights, the organization and repress social protest and have widened to levels never before seen the gap between rich and poor.

That brace of a PRI "derechizado" with National Action, he added, has had its replica in Puebla, where the PRI behave submissively, as comparsa Governor Rafael Moreno Valle Rosas, appearing as a "confused opposition."

In contrast, the former governor of Puebla, who already held a seat for two terms of six years, praised the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which he defines as "a genuine social force, strong and surprising." Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he is "the only truly popular leader in the country and the only real change is."

Bartlett finishes warning that, as a champion of the left, its mission is "to give a cleaned Puebla" and particularly "shake the PRI."

The talk is initiated by Bartlett Diaz with a diagnosis of the country, talking about a deep crisis that is not limited to economics, but has transferred to politics, social life, institutions and even moral. In sum, says, afflicts the country a "total crisis" and must confront.

"I think this election is crucial, I've never seen the country so badly as now. We have had financial crises, but this is a total crisis, a crisis of governance, is a crisis of state, a comprehensive crisis beyond an economic crisis. It is a moral crisis so. It has been decomposing in the management of the State, public affairs, corruption is widespread. I'm not trying to justify to anyone, it is generally awful, terrible, a country with a moral decline in the public sector in the governorate. Is an economic crisis, employment, social crisis is acute, not circumstantial, is not like the other crises we have had, because here you lost control, there was a financial imbalance, "he says.

He adds, "we see growing poverty, wealth and have more concentrated than we could have. What has led to this situation? ... No, not this crisis has brought us the current U.S. and Europe, which recently broke out, ours is much older than that, is more acute as presents additional challenges that Europe has no economic activity not buy, sell and America is the same, but the problem is that we have no domestic market, rather than an exporting country are an importing country, then it is dramatic because it assumes that globalization leads countries to market integration, but we are an importing country, we are exporting many things, but these exports, if we begin to analyze, they are much of multinationals that sell cars to the U.S.. Then it is a total system crisis. "

Bartlett Diaz then refers to the problem of violence and militarization of the country:

"The safety issue we generated several problems, we generated the militarization of the country. This country was not militarized, we assumed an army barracks, doing civil work, participating in civil defense programs, according to farmers (users) out there with Operation Condor, but was in the barracks, did not see the Army in the streets. "

To give an example of what is happening with the militia, Bartlett Diaz recalls the episode in which Gen. Alfonso Duarte complained in September last year, with Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, the behavior of Secretary of Government, Cuauhtemoc Cardona.

"Today the army is everywhere, has taken control of the police do not know if remember a scene that was terrible in Baja California after the report of the governor to enter the room, heard a scream and go into the general area, the governor, prying cameras are working, then yells General (Cardona) 'Come here you, you're a Bum!' and puts it in front of the governor. It is a scene, well, that placing military to civilian authority despised, is berating the authorities, that is very serious, that brings us another side to the disproportionate military spending since we do banana republic, as he spent all those South American resources on armies and weapons and had no schools, this is happening, it goes there. "

Then refers to the intrigue of Felipe Calderon Hinojosa by given contracts on natural resources like oil and mining.

Then goes on to talk about Enrique Peña Nieto, who says that "your party is Televisa." He criticizes the PRI presidential candidate statements about repealing the law that prevents the media propaganda space-charge during campaigns.

"Linking the PRI candidate pointer ferocious and insatiable these interests and bring others besides, it is certainly a danger, to use Spanish well, a danger to this country. Then the candidate pointer with all the strength back is the continuity of what is happening, is the Mexican drama.

JO - Is that why you agreed to join the left?

MBD-What we need is a change, calls for urgent change. There is a relationship years ago matches motivated by many years in government, in the Senate, marched up together! ...

JO-Con Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano ...

MBD-Yes, Cuauhtémoc, but I talked a lot with Senator (Alberto) Anaya (national leader of the Labour Party) and the invitation extended to me is to go to the Senate because they need people to give battle, like the one the Senate gave above (the force), six years ago.

JO - Why Left today is defined, or does it always been a leftist?

MBD-is the position I have ever had. Formally he was in a left-wing party when it was. The PRI gives rise to the left ...

JO-A few ...

MBD-An important part is of PRI, there is such as Cuauhtémoc (Cardenas) in Salinas, is the power of Lopez Obrador, is the Communist Party and those things are also important at the time. I hear many say "I am left," and what is that?, I answer what Bobbio says: "Left is a movement that stands for equality ', ie has a policy, strategy, an act of equality in society, that says Bobbio.

JO - That is the definition that pleases you?

MBD-Yes, there are leftist Trotskyites, Marxists, Maoists, finally, there were all these ranges, but with a common thread. The old PRI or former PRI had to democracy and social justice principles. The Constitution was ahead of social guarantees, so you could have qualified as a leftist party, which then has an open shift to the right.

JO - So you stayed in the same place, which were moved others?

MBD-so it proved.

JO - Holds his early 20 years ago?

MBD-Essentially I think so. Here I have things I have written, I have had positions, do not think that has changed radically, nor have I been invited to transform.

La Jornada de Oriente

Gingrich Says He’ll End Ad About Romney Immigration Stance - NYTimes.com

2012-01-25T19:33:00.000-08:00

Gingrich Says He’ll End Ad About Romney Immigration Stance - NYTimes.com:

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Demian Bichir Dedicates Oscar Nomination to Undocumented Immigrants | Fox News Latino

2012-01-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

Demian Bichir Dedicates Oscar Nomination to Undocumented Immigrants | Fox News Latino:

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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com:

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Megaupload Founder Faces Lengthy Extradition Battle - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

Megaupload Founder Faces Lengthy Extradition Battle - NYTimes.com:

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Obama State of the Union Address to Make Pitch for Economic Fairness - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T20:39:00.000-08:00

Obama State of the Union Address to Make Pitch for Economic Fairness - NYTimes.com:

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Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala Ex-Dictator, to Appear in Court - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala Ex-Dictator, to Appear in Court - NYTimes.com:

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Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico

2012-01-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

Me'phaa leader and Jody Williams

MEXICO CITY – Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams denounced in Mexico the impunity that prevails for crimes against women in this country and the lack of political will to seek solutions.

After meeting with a group of 50 women’s rights activists, Williams criticized the “pretty words” of the Mexican government and demanded real solutions to a problem that affects the entire population.

“There’s no more time for excuses. The families who are suffering in this country want to see action and the women who have been raped by police officers and soldiers want to see justice,” she said.

To reverse the situation, she said that joint action by civil society is necessary, and she demanded answers from the government, saying that “nobody can change society alone; it has to be a whole community that takes action.”

Therefore, she said that the unity that the victims’ associations had demonstrated in denouncing the cases of disappearances, rapes and murders has been a positive thing.

In addition, she said that one of the main obstacles in achieving justice and ending impunity in Mexico is the high number of people implicated in these crimes.

“This problem requires a continuous struggle if we want to see a society in which we can live without fear,” she said.

Williams’ visit comes within the framework of the investigation she is undertaking along with fellow Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu of the murders of women in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.

Williams is scheduled on Monday to visit the southern state of Guerrero to hold a meeting with women and on Tuesday she will meet with diplomatic representatives and women who hold high positions in political life and the Mexican judicial system.

The aims of the visit include making visible the role, contribution and actions that women have taken to eradicate violence and insecurity in the country, as well as urging the Mexican government to guarantee protection for human rights defenders.

During 2010, some 3,100 women were murdered in Mexico, while in Honduras some 1,500 were killed between 2008 and 2011 and in Guatemala more than 5,000 women died violently over the past 10 years.

U.S. activist Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her intense struggle to prohibit and remove landmines. EFE
Taken From Latin American Herald Tribune

Latin American Herald Tribune - Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico

2012-01-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

Latin American Herald Tribune - Nobel Laureate Denounces Impunity for Crimes Against Women in Mexico:

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Romney Sidesteps Tough Immigration Talk in Florida - NYTimes.com

2012-01-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

Romney Sidesteps Tough Immigration Talk in Florida - NYTimes.com:

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Julian Assange to host own TV show | Media | The Guardian

2012-01-24T11:59:00.000-08:00

Julian Assange to host own TV show | Media | The Guardian:

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The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance: Scientific American

2012-01-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance: Scientific American:

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The Scientist: Jim Hansen Risks Handcuffs to Make His Research Clear: Scientific American

2012-01-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Scientist: Jim Hansen Risks Handcuffs to Make His Research Clear: Scientific American:

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Solar Panel Boom Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor: Scientific American

2012-01-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

Solar Panel Boom Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor: Scientific American:

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15%, 26%, and 32%

2012-01-23T22:21:00.000-08:00

Taxes of Romney, Obama, and Gingrich.

Which one do you want for president?

After Hardship and Homelessness, National Science Fair Honors

2012-01-23T21:54:00.000-08:00

MUSSEL POWER Samantha Garvey with her teacher Rebecca Grella. Ms. Garvey, 18, a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, is newly homeless.

By KENNETH CHANG

Samantha Garvey, an 18-year-old senior at Brentwood High School on Long Island, flew cross-country last week to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show. Her face was on the cover of Newsday, her hometown newspaper. Her congressman, Steve Israel, invited her to work in his office in Washington this summer. She has hired an agent to juggle interview requests.

Ms. Garvey, a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, is exhilarated by the sudden celebrity, but said she would not mind when the attention passed and she could spend more time with her mussels. (Her work on them earned her the honor.)

The Intel contest is the premier science competition for high school students, so all semifinalists earn time in the spotlight. But Ms. Garvey has received far more than the 299 others this year: She and her family are newly homeless, living in a Suffolk County shelter.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “It’s a nice place.”

Her parents were injured in a car accident last year. Her father, a cabdriver, was able to keep driving. Her mother, a nurse’s assistant, could not work for more than half a year. The eldest of three children, Ms. Garvey tried to help with the family finances, applying for jobs at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. “Nobody called me back,” she said.

The Garveys were evicted from their home on Dec. 31.

Through the turmoil, Ms. Garvey continued working with her mussels, studying a dynamic that plays out in ecosystems around the world.

The mussel species, Geukensia demissa, or ribbed mussel, is native to Long Island Sound. The Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, is not. It is a predatory interloper that arrived in the waters near Cape May, N.J., in 1988, and has since spread from Maine to North Carolina.

The crabs like to eat mussels.

The scientific question was whether the ribbed mussels would just sit there and be eaten by the new predator, or had nature provided them with a means of defending themselves?

Ms. Garvey collected mussels from different parts of Flax Pond, a salt marsh on the North Shore of Long Island. She compared the shell length, width, weight and other measurements of those that lived where Asian shore crabs were prevalent with those that lived in areas with few crabs.

She found that the mussels that lived in areas where the crabs were prevalent had thicker shells. Was that because the Asian shore crabs ate the mussels they could pry open most easily, leaving thicker-shelled survivors, or were the mussels able to grow greater protection in response to the predators?

In a laboratory at Stony Brook University, Ms. Garvey put some young mussels in tanks with the crabs, although the crabs were in cages. In other tanks, mussels lived alone. After 65 days, she found that the mussels that shared their tank with the crabs had developed thicker shells than the ones that lived alone.

The finding suggests that chemicals released by the Asian shore crabs in the water set off a defense mechanism in the mussels: they produce thicker shells that fend off predators. When the crabs are not around, the mussels do not pad their shells.

During the school year, Ms. Garvey spent about a dozen hours a week on her mussel research, and much more during the summer. In all, she spent two and a half years on the work, as part of a research curriculum that Rebecca Grella, a Brentwood High School chemistry teacher, successfully pitched to administrators eight years ago.

More than 60 students now take part. Ms. Grella, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook, took advantage of her university connections to match Ms. Garvey with Dianna Padilla, a professor in the ecology and evolution department at Stony Brook, for the mussel research.

Brentwood is a melting-pot community with more of a reputation for gangs than for budding scientists, but last year, Ms. Grella’s efforts paid off when three of her students were named Intel semifinalists.

This year, two weeks after her family became homeless, Ms. Garvey found out she was among this year’s semifinalists.

She said she could not imagine what her life would be like if she had not had the opportunity to study mussels. “Maybe flunking out of school, honestly,” she said.

Instead, she hopes to attend Brown or Yale. Ms. DeGeneres’s show has already given her a $50,000 scholarship.

On Tuesday evening, Ms. Garvey will be in Washington, a guest of Mr. Israel, sitting in the House of Representatives gallery listening to President Obama deliver the State of the Union address. On Wednesday, she will find out if she is one of the 40 Intel finalists for a top prize of $100,000.

Life will soon resume an air of normalcy. A day after Intel announced its semifinalists, Suffolk County officials said they had found a home for the Garveys.

Then there will be time for mussels.

“The marsh — it smells and stuff,” Ms. Garvey said. “But I still love it. It’s home.”

NYT

After Homelessness, Honors From a National Science Fair - NYTimes.com

2012-01-23T21:46:00.000-08:00

After Homelessness, Honors From a National Science Fair - NYTimes.com:

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Solar Flare Causes Aurora Borealis

2012-01-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Aurora Time lapse from Kattfjorden from Helge Mortensen on Vimeo.

Mexicans Against SOPA

2012-01-23T20:31:00.001-08:00

solar flare - Wolfram|Alpha

2012-01-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

solar flare - Wolfram|Alpha:

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In SC Gingrich - Romney = Paul

2012-01-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

NYT

approximately!

Blueprint for an America Built to Last: President Obama's State of the Union Preview - YouTube

2012-01-21T18:39:00.000-08:00

Blueprint for an America Built to Last: President Obama's State of the Union Preview - YouTube:

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Earthquakes Mexico - Wolfram|Alpha

2012-01-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

Earthquakes Mexico - Wolfram|Alpha:

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Almost every month, mh.

Alejandra Guzman

2012-01-21T07:09:00.001-08:00

Gerardo Naranjo’s ‘Miss Bala’ Depicts Drug War - Review - NYTimes.com

2012-01-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

Gerardo Naranjo’s ‘Miss Bala’ Depicts Drug War - Review - NYTimes.com:

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Flight of the Conchords

2012-01-20T16:06:00.001-08:00

Dotcom is not a Member of Flight of the Conchords!

2012-01-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

Founder of Shuttered File-Sharing Site Sought Limelight

2012-01-20T15:58:00.001-08:00

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, in 1999. He was arrested on Friday in a raid, but while it was his most dramatic encounter with the law, it was not his first.

By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

BERLIN — The Auckland police arrived at Dotcom Mansion on Friday morning in two helicopters, looking to arrest the leader of an organization that the U.S. authorities charge was engaged in copyright infringement and money laundering “on a massive scale.”

Kim Dotcom, born Kim Schmitz, a 37-year-old with Finnish and German citizenship, ran inside and activated several electronic locks. When the police “neutralized” those, he barricaded himself in a safe room. Officers cut their way through to nab him, standing near a firearm that they said looked like a sawed-off shotgun.

“It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door,” said Grant Wormald, a detective inspector.

In what the U.S. authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. shut down the Web site Megaupload.com and instigated the arrest of Mr. Dotcom, the site’s founder, and three other people in New Zealand. In all, seven people connected with the site were charged with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.

While the raid Friday may have been Mr. Dotcom’s most dramatic encounter with the law, it was not his first.

In February 2001, Mr. Dotcom told Die Welt that he spent three months in a Munich jail in 1994 and served two years’ probation for breaking into Pentagon computers and observing real-time satellite photos of Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the first Gulf war. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Dotcom received a suspended two-year sentence for a scam that made use of stolen phone card numbers.

In 2001, at the height of the dot-com hysteria, Mr. Dotcom was accused in what was then the largest insider-trading case in German history. Prosecutors in Munich said he bought shares in a struggling online business, letsbuyit.com, then announced he planned to make a major investment in the company and rescue it from insolvency.

Mr. Dotcom allegedly made more than $1 million when the shares soared.

Around that time, Mr. Dotcom, then still going by the name Kim Schmitz, disputed the accusations mounting against him during an appearance on The Harald Schmidt Show, a popular late night talk show in Germany.

“It is true that I offer a lot of open flank to attack because of my lifestyle and the public way I live with my success,” a congenial Mr. Dotcom, with a crewcut and black clothing, said. “It’s clear that that’s why people are looking for things to hang on me.”

Mr. Dotcom eventually fled Germany to escape those charges but was captured in Thailand, extradited and convicted in 2002. He spent five months in jail awaiting trial but received a suspended sentence on the underlying charges.

Mr. Dotcom dropped from view until last year, when German newspapers started reporting rumors of his luxury compound in New Zealand and possible involvement in Megaupload.

In the German television interview, which is posted on YouTube, Mr. Dotcom attributed the rumors swirling around him to a German tendency to envy those who have more.

“If I were in the United States, I would be just one of many with my lifestyle and would not draw any attention to myself,” Mr. Dotcom said.

Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet, allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. Media companies have long accused it of abetting copyright infringement on a huge scale. In a grand jury indictment, Megaupload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.

The police in New Zealand said they were continuing to search the Dotcom Mansion property. In all, about 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and in eight other countries, including New Zealand.

About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites. The police said they seized 6 million New Zealand dollars, or $4.8 million, in luxury vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe and a pink 1959 Cadillac. They also seized art and electronic equipment and froze 11 million dollars in cash in various accounts.

Each of the seven people, who the indictment said were members of a criminal group it called Mega Conspiracy, is charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. The charges could result in more than 20 years in prison.

Mr. Dotcom and three others arrested in New Zealand appeared in court Friday afternoon and were denied bail. Extradition proceedings will continue Monday.

The police said the other three arrested in New Zealand were Finn Batato, 38, a German citizen and resident; Mathias Ortmann, 40, a German citizen who is a resident of Hong Kong; and Bram van der Kolk, 29, a Dutch citizen who is a resident of New Zealand.

Ira P. Rothken, a lawyer for Megaupload, said by telephone Thursday that “Megaupload believes the government is wrong on the facts, wrong on the law.”

The arrests were greeted almost immediately with digital Molotov cocktails. The hacker collective Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the U.S. Justice Department and several major entertainment companies and trade groups.

Anonymous, which has previously set its sights on PayPal, Sony and major media executives, was more blunt in its response. The group disabled the Justice Department’s site for a time, and it also claimed credit for shutting down sites for the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, two of the most powerful media lobbies in Washington, as well as those of Universal Music Group, the largest music label, and BMI, which represents music publishers.

The Megaupload case touches on many of the most controversial aspects of the anti-piracy debate in the United States, which this week saw lawmakers back off legislative efforts to crack down on foreign companies suspected to copyright infringement.

Megaupload and similar sites, like RapidShare and MediaFire, are often promoted as convenient ways to transfer large files legitimately; a recent promotional video had major stars like Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas singing Megaupload’s praises. But media companies say the legitimate uses are a veil concealing extensive theft.

Mr. Dotcom has made himself a visible target. He splits his time between Hong Kong and New Zealand and casts himself in flamboyant YouTube videos. His role as one of the most prominent Web locker operators has earned him a half-joking nickname in Hollywood: Dr. Evil.

According to the indictment, he took in $42 million from Megaupload’s operations in 2010.

The indictment against Megaupload, which stems from a U.S. inquiry that began two years ago, was handed down by a grand jury in Virginia two weeks ago but was not unsealed until Thursday.

It quotes extensively from correspondence among the defendants, who work for Megaupload and its related sites. The correspondence, the indictment says, shows that the operators knew the site contained unauthorized content.

The indictment cites an e-mail from last February, for example, in which three members of the group discussed an article about how to stop the government from seizing domain names.

The Megaupload case is unusual, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, in that U.S. prosecutors obtained the private e-mails of Megaupload’s operators in an effort to show they were operating in bad faith.

“The government hopes to use their private words against them,” Mr. Kerr said. “This should scare the owners and operators of similar sites.”

Jonathan Hutchison contributed reporting from Dunedin, New Zealand, Jack Ewing from Frankfurt, and Ben Sisario and Nicole Perlroth from New York.

NYT

Apple - Apple Events - Apple Special Event January 2012

2012-01-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

Apple - Apple Events - Apple Special Event January 2012:

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Science Contest Winners

2012-01-20T08:55:00.000-08:00

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: iBooks 2 and iTunes U: A Quick Review from a Teacher #edapp

2012-01-20T08:20:00.000-08:00

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: iBooks 2 and iTunes U: A Quick Review from a Teacher #edapp:

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Gingrich Gets Perry’s Endorsement - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T21:47:00.000-08:00

Gingrich Gets Perry’s Endorsement - NYTimes.com:

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Elite Media or Bad Habits?

Big Powers Wary as IMF Calls for More Funds - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T14:55:00.000-08:00

Big Powers Wary as IMF Calls for More Funds - NYTimes.com:

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Apple in Education

2012-01-19T14:34:00.000-08:00

Apple in Education:

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Apple Unveils App and Tools for Digital Textbooks - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

Apple Unveils App and Tools for Digital Textbooks - NYTimes.com:

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In Test of Deportation Policy, 1 in 6 Offered Reprieve - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

In Test of Deportation Policy, 1 in 6 Offered Reprieve - NYTimes.com:

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History vs. the Tea Party

2012-01-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

William Temple, a Tea Party supporter from Brunswick, Ga., heading home after the Iowa caucuses.

By SAM TANENHAUS

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington. And yet to judge from the results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, some of the most engaged Republican voters are inching closer to nominating Mitt Romney, the candidate they like least, a Harvard-educated technocrat who is in many ways a mirror image of the president the insurgents want to dislodge.

Even in South Carolina, a seat of conservative activism, the opposition to Mr. Romney appears to be fragmented and diffuse, as Matt Bai reports this weekend in The Times Magazine. Others have put the case more bluntly. “Where’s the Tea Party?” a headline on Politico asked last week.

This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.”

On its surface the Tea Party movement snugly fits this pattern. An organized grass-roots revolt, its influence was decisive in the 2010 elections, when an energized base propelled Republicans to enormous gains in the House, helped secure Senate victories for fresh faces like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and captured as many as 700 seats in state legislatures. The movement drove the Republican agenda to the right, making stars of legislators like Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Paul Ryan, and did much to shift the political debate from the jobless recovery to the growing national debt.

But even in those early, heady days there were signs of trouble.

In February 2010, while a conservative mandarin like William Kristol, the publisher and editor of The Weekly Standard, exulted that the Tea Party protest was “the best thing that has happened to the Republican Party in recent times,” Sarah Palin, the figure who has come closest to tapping directly into the movement’s animating passions, sent a very different message. Her keynote address to the Tea Party convention, held that month in Nashville, Tenn., and broadcast by both Fox News and MSNBC, was widely received (by, among others, David Broder, the consummate Beltway insider), as signaling a possible presidential run. But Ms. Palin’s remarks were essentially those of a supporter of the new insurgency, rather than its leader. Indeed, she explicitly rejected a leading role. “I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or politician,” she said. “The Tea Party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to caution that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful.” True to this sentiment, she chose to remain a media presence rather than a political one and eventually decided not to enter the presidential contest. Already there was a growing schism on the right, its fault lines precisely those Ms. Palin identified, between the elite — including Mr. Kristol and other journalists who had been among her first champions — and the base. This is a strikingly new development on the right.

It is hard to imagine a similar conflict happening during previous conservative insurgent cycles, mainly because they were centralized operations, often guided by insiders, in many cases Ivy League intellectuals who helped groom political figures for the national stage.

THE first successful insurgency, Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, was the brainchild of seasoned insiders in Washington and New York. Its strategic headquarters were on the East Coast — in fact a suite on Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Terminal. Its organizational genius, F. Clifton White, a political scientist who had taught at Cornell, teamed up with William Rusher, the publisher of National Review. Together they sewed up slates of delegates even as Goldwater fared poorly in a series of contested primaries against moderates like Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. Some of the ground troops for the Goldwater campaign were members of the Young Americans for Freedom, an organization created on the family estate of National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., in Sharon, Conn.

All the while, intellectuals were burnishing the Goldwater brand. One of National Review’s editors, L. Brent Bozell, wrote speeches for him and ghosted his manifesto, “Conscience of a Conservative.” Meanwhile, the journal became, in effect, a briefing book on a potential Goldwater presidency, weighing in with dozens of articles and policy proposals — on taxation, social security, labor law, foreign policy, military expenditures, race relations and more. One of National Review’s brightest young stars, Garry Wills, theorized that Goldwater might compensate for his controversial vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he set forth his own vision of racial justice, “encouraging private initiative where laws have not reached or cannot” — for instance by adopting a “policy of preferential hiring,” an idea that prefigured affirmative action.

In another essay, the literary scholar Hugh Kenner argued that since Beltway ideas originated within the universities, Goldwater might enrich “the tonality of the entire network” by “bringing to the academic ear Chicagoan rather than Keynesian economics.” One of those Chicagoans, Milton Friedman, an adviser to Goldwater, devised a model for a negative income tax. This idea later evolved into the current Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides a refund to many low- and moderate-income earners.

For these conservatives, the prospect of a Goldwater presidency offered more than protest against Democrats and liberals. It was an opportunity “to crystallize the conservative position in national affairs,” as Mr. Buckley explained after Goldwater’s devastating defeat in the general election. Crystallizing the position meant giving it more coherence and also making a case that skeptics and adversaries would have to take seriously. Goldwater intellectuals, including Mr. Wills and the novelist John Dos Passos, then joined a new organization, the American Conservative Union, which still is a powerful Beltway institution.

INTELLECTUALS were instrumental as well in the next great conservative insurgency, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. The campaign drew on arguments in books like Mr. Rusher’s “The Making of a New Majority Party,” Kevin Phillips’s “Mediacracy” and Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories.” Each posited that the blue-collar Democratic constituency rooted in the New Deal had grown increasingly conservative, alienated from “big government.” Parallel arguments could be found in The Public Interest, the policy quarterly that specialized in rigorous critiques of federal antipoverty initiatives and pension fund “socialism.”

Such debate had the effect of uniting intellectuals with politicians, and of bridging differences that might otherwise have separated “top-down” strategists from “bottom up” activists.

Of course, the Tea Party faithful also claim that theirs is a movement of ideas, in many cases the same ideas that Goldwater and Reagan espoused. But they tend to emphasize quixotic crusades — the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which established the election of United States senators by popular vote, or Representative Ron Paul’s mission to abolish the Federal Reserve. Beyond this, “candidates who claimed the mantle of fiscal conservatism had no real plans for reducing government expenditures beyond the conservative pursuit of politics-as-warfare,” Mr. Kabaservice writes. They favor “cutting programs that benefited Democratic constituencies while preserving programs that benefited Republican constituencies and avoiding any serious reform of defense spending or middle-class entitlement programs.”

Tea Party adherents are often “strategically ambiguous” on fundamental economic issues, the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson note in their new book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” They describe a conference last April, in which Jenny Beth Martin, one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots Inc., was asked about specific tax and health care measures. In the authors’ account, Ms. Martin said there was “no need to discuss the actual content of legislation because good proposals are always to be found at think tanks such as the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation.” In “Tea Party Patriots,” Ms. Martin’s own new book, written with Mark Meckler, the organization’s co-founder, there is some policy discussion along with familiar denunciations of government overreach. The book also proposes a “Forty-Year Plan for America’s Future.” It is weak on specifics. “What will the final plan look like?” Ms. Martin and Mr. Meckler ask. “One thing we can tell you from experience is that it will be far better, and wiser, than anything that any of us can imagine right now. When the creativity, ingenuity, and genius of the American people are unleashed, wonderful things happen.”

Perhaps, but it’s not a plan. It’s a preachment, aimed at the like-minded. The same is true of the Tea Party movement itself. Dick Armey, himself a Beltway insider before he became the chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the most powerful Tea Party organizations, acknowledged as much when he reportedly told the freshman Republicans shortly after the 2010 election: “You don’t owe your office to the majority. You owe your office to the people who put you there.” Those people, however, compose only a fraction of the electorate. And that fraction is divided. For now the beneficiary is Mitt Romney, who has emerged, paradoxically, as a kind of Goldwater in reverse, the lone moderate in a field of insurgents. Like Goldwater in 1964, he has swatted away each new rival, though in this instance they have been Tea Party favorites like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Ron Paul. Another target, Newt Gingrich, may be the most credentialed insurgent in the field, the mastermind of the 1994 Republican revolution, which gave the party its first majority in the House of Representatives since the 1952 election.

After National Review denounced Mr. Gingrich, when he briefly rose to challenge Mr. Romney in Iowa, an article in The American Spectator, a conservative magazine that has been sympathetic to the insurgents, suggested that “William Buckley’s defiantly against-the-wind conservative masterpiece has gone G.O.P. establishment.” A more accurate term might be conservative establishment. But then, as Sarah Palin, whose own rise to celebrity was partly the doing of editors at National Review and The Weekly Standard, knows all too well, that particular establishment prefers to direct its revolutions from above.

NYT

Patti Smith

2012-01-19T10:18:00.000-08:00

Dell

2012-01-18T19:22:00.001-08:00

Does it take a Genius to know in 2008 that you had to sell Dell Stock?

Not in hindsight. But some Bozos were caught with their pants down.

Read.

Louisiana Love Call

2012-01-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

Striking Mexico teachers see jobs as things to inherit, sell - Houston Chronicle

2012-01-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

Striking Mexico teachers see jobs as things to inherit, sell - Houston Chronicle:

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Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview | Politics News | Rolling Stone

2012-01-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview | Politics News | Rolling Stone:

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Amazon.com: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition (9780826412768): Paulo Freire, Myra Bergman Ramos, Donaldo Macedo: Books

2012-01-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition (9780826412768): Paulo Freire, Myra Bergman Ramos, Donaldo Macedo: Books:

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Crusading Spanish judge is back in court — as defendant - latimes.com

2012-01-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

Crusading Spanish judge is back in court — as defendant - latimes.com:

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Support for Internet Bill Wanes as Protests Spread - NYTimes.com

2012-01-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

Support for Internet Bill Wanes as Protests Spread - NYTimes.com:

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1,300-Year-Old Flask Holds Mayan Tobacco Remains: Scientific American Podcast

2012-01-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

1,300-Year-Old Flask Holds Mayan Tobacco Remains: Scientific American Podcast:

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Internet Service: 10 Companies SOPA Could Destroy and Why

2012-01-18T08:06:00.000-08:00

Internet Service: 10 Companies SOPA Could Destroy and Why:

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The Love We Make

2012-01-17T20:52:00.001-08:00

George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits

2012-01-17T18:29:00.000-08:00

Lucas with his girlfriend of about five years, Mellody Hobson, at the Chicago screening on Jan. 6.

By BRYAN CURTIS

This was a new feeling for George Lucas. He made a movie about a plucky band of freedom fighters who battle an evil empire — a movie loaded with special effects like no one had seen before. Then he showed it to executives from all the Hollywood studios. And every one of them said, “Nope.”

One studio’s executives didn’t even show up for the screening. “Isn’t this their job?” Lucas says, astonished. “Isn’t their job at least to see movies? It’s not like some Sundance kid coming in there and saying, ‘I’ve got this little movie — would you see it?’ If Steven (Spielberg) or I or Jim Cameron or Bob Zemeckis comes in there, and they say, ‘We don’t even want to bother to see it. . . .’ ”

Lucas sighs. It’s true that the movie, “Red Tails,” is a biopic about the Tuskegee Airmen rather than a space opera starring the Skywalker clan. But the snub implied that Lucas’s pop-culture collateral — six “Star Wars” movies, four “Indiana Jones” movies, the effects shop Industrial Light and Magic and toy licenses that were selling (at least) four different light sabers this Christmas — was basically worthless. When “Red Tails” opens in theaters on Jan. 20, it will be because Lucas paid for everything, including the prints.

Lucas, who is 67 and still in possession of the full pompadour, told me his story of rejection on a cold December morning at Skywalker Ranch, in Marin County, Calif. He was sitting on a maroon sofa in the animation studios, wearing his standard billionaire-casual outfit — a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans and Nikes — while Padmé Amidala, the heroine of the “Star Wars” prequels, peeked down from two paintings arranged on either side of his head.

“I’m retiring,” Lucas said. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”

He was careful to leave himself an out clause for a fifth “Indiana Jones” film. But otherwise, “Red Tails” will be the last blockbuster Lucas makes. “Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do,” says Rick McCallum, who has been producing Lucas’s films for more than 20 years. “He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.”

Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They’ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then “Star Wars” happened — and though Lucas often mused about it, he never committed himself to the uncommercial world until now.

Sitting in a sun-drenched office, his voice boyish, Lucas talked about himself as if he were a character in one of his movies. He’s at the end of an epic saga; he’s embracing a new destiny (“Make the art films, George”); he’s battling former acolytes who have become his sworn enemies; and George Lucas is — no kidding — in love. Before he takes his digital camera with him into obscurity, though, Lucas has one last mission. He wants to prove that with “Red Tails,” he can still make the kind of movie everyone in the world will want to see.

THE LAST BLOCKBUSTER

A little more than a week before our meeting at the ranch, Lucas stood in front of the screen in a packed theater in Times Square. An army of African-American power brokers looked down upon him from stadium seating. Richard Parsons was there. Spike Lee. David Dinkins. Al Sharpton. Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary. Lee Daniels, the director of “Precious.”

Lucas was sporting his traditional uniform of jeans and a button-down — but this time with a black cashmere sport coat, a flourish one Lucasite credited to Mellody Hobson, Lucas’s girlfriend of about five years, who is president of one of the largest African-American-owned assets-management firms in the country. She stood at his side as Lucas told the crowd about his plan to avenge the studios’ snub. (20th Century Fox finally agreed to distribute the movie domestically but will not be paying any of the costs.) Lucas, in a playful mood, said a huge opening weekend would persuade the studios to finance a second “Red Tails” movie — a prequel — “that Spike Lee’s gonna make!” From the crowd, Lee yelled, “When do we start?” Lucas continued, “And we can get somebody else — Lee Daniels — to do the sequel!”

All preview screenings are wildly optimistic celebrations of the possible. But this was different. This was a rally. “On Jan. 20,” an 89-year-old Tuskegee ace named Roscoe C. Brown Jr., told the crowd, “every African-American in this country ought to go see ‘Red Tails.’ ” Desirée Rogers, who is now C.E.O. of Johnson Publishing Company, said she was splashing “Red Tails” on the cover of Ebony. And Al Sharpton, sounding like a “Star Wars” fanboy in 1977, later insisted that “it’s probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen!”

Lucas first heard the story of the Tuskegee Airmen from a friend, the photographer George Hall, in 1988. It appealed on a visceral level — “I’m a fan of fast things” — and also because, despite criticism that “Star Wars” was too white, Lucas has always had an interest in civil rights. Back in the 1970s, Lucas almost cast an African-American as Han Solo (Glynn Turman, who played the first Baltimore mayor in “The Wire”).

Most important, though, the airmen, World War II pilots who won nearly 100 Distinguished Flying Crosses, fit perfectly in Lucas’s mythic-heroic view finder. If there’s a through line in the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies, it’s a childlike view of heroism. “Star Wars,” with its CliffsNotes Joseph Campbell formula, was a rejection of 1970s gloom; two decades later, the prequel movies were more innocent than “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Lucas’s films are relentlessly — and to some, maddeningly — old-fashioned and naïve. “If it’s a popcorn movie,” Lucas told me, “it needs a lot of corn.”

The first “Red Tails” scripts, which Lucas began commissioning in the early 1990s, suggested a three-part epic. Imagine the opening scenes in segregated Alabama, where one of the original Tuskegee instructors takes Eleanor Roosevelt for a spin; then picture the airborne dogfights over Europe, with slick visual effects from Industrial Light and Magic; and finally, in an irony worthy of Ralph Ellison, envision the war heroes returning home to find that the country they fought for is still in the clammy hands of Jim Crow. “You think ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ you think ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ ” Rick McCallum says. “Then you think, Oh, my God, ‘Red Tails.’ ”

“I can’t make that movie,” Lucas recalled thinking when he read the scripts. “I’m going to have make this kind of . . . entertainment movie.” So Lucas focused on the middle chapter: the dogfights and the Nazi-hunting black pilots who shout, “How you like that, Mr. Hitler!” (When I mention Lucas’s naïve style to Michael Bay, the director of the “Transformers” movies, he says sympathetically, “That’s what I get crap for from my critics.”)

For a model, Lucas studied flag-waving World War II films like Nicholas Ray’s “Flying Leathernecks,” which starred John Wayne. “We made movies like this during the war, and everybody just loved them,” he said. “I said, ‘There’s no reason why that idealism, that kind of naïveté, can’t still exist.’ ” But Lucas wanted naïveté on his own terms. He slipped into a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary studio head.

“They say, Now, who are you making this for?”

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”

“And you’re doing it as a throwback movie? You’re not going to do it as a hip, happening-now, music-video kind of movie?”

“No, that’s not a smart thing to do. There’s not really going to be a lot of swearing in it. There’s probably not going to be a huge amount of blood in it. Nobody’s head’s going to get blown off.”

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.”

The key then to understanding Lucas’s last blockbuster, like his first, is not how futuristic he’s making it but how retrograde.

REVENGE OF THE FANBOYS

Since 1997, the year Lucas released his special editions of the original “Star Wars” movies in theaters, he has been attacked by the very fans who once embraced his heroic style. They didn’t like how Lucas changed the old movies; they didn’t like the prequels, which seemed wooden and juvenile; and the Star Wars merchandising blitz they once gorged on had begun to drive them nuts. (All six “Star Wars” films will return to theaters in 3-D, beginning in February.)

“I think there are a lot more important things in the world” than feuds with fanboys, Lucas says with a kind of weary diffidence. But then he gets serious, even a little wounded. Lucas explains that his first major features — “THX 1138” and “American Graffiti” — were forcibly re-edited by the studios. Those were wrenching experiences he has compared to someone keying your car (he loves cars) or chopping a finger off one of your children (he has three and loves them too). Afterward, Lucas set out to gain financial independence so the final cut would forever be his. “If the movie doesn’t work,” he vowed, “it’s going to be my fault.”

In the last decade and a half, Lucas has given “Star Wars” several “final” cuts. For the 1997 special edition, he made Greedo, a green-skinned alien, fire his blaster at Han Solo because Han’s murdering Greedo in cold blood — as the 1977 version had it — struck him as a violation of his own naïve style. For the new Blu-ray version of “Return of the Jedi,” Lucas added Darth Vader shouting, “Nooo!” as he seizes the evil emperor in the movie’s climactic scene. Lucas made the Ewoks blink. And so forth.

When fanboys wailed, Lucas did not just hear the scream of young Jedis; he heard something like the voice of the studio. The dumb, uncomprehending voice in his Socratic dialogues — a voice telling him how to make a blockbuster. “On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie,” Lucas says, referring to fans who, like the dreaded studios, have done their own forcible re-edits. “I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ ”

Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

THE BLUE PEOPLE

After downing a few Grey Goose tonics at New York’s Royalton hotel, Cuba Gooding Jr., one of the stars of “Red Tails,” came up with a rejoinder to all the people who turned down the project. “I like to say James Cameron made a movie just like this,” he said excitedly. “Instead of black people, there were blue people being held down by white people. It was called ‘Avatar!’ And the studios said the same thing to him: ‘We can’t do a movie with blue people!’ ”

THE JOHN WAYNE TREATMENT

To execute his popcorn vision of “Red Tails,” Lucas turned to Anthony Hemingway, a 36-year-old director who made his name on TV shows like “The Wire.” Hemingway, who had never directed a feature film, comes from the church of David Simon, which values moral murkiness over naïveté, documentary detail about East Baltimore over an ethnography of the Ewok village. It was like hiring a “Hill Street Blues” veteran to direct “Return of the Jedi.”

But from the beginning, Lucas wanted “Red Tails” to have a black director. “I thought, This is the proper way to do this,” he said. Indeed, to scan the credits in “Red Tails” is to see Lucas’s fidelity to African-American filmmakers. There are two black writers and a black executive producer. Terence Blanchard, a Spike Lee collaborator (“Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X”), wrote the score, and Art Sims, another Lee veteran, designed the one-sheet.

Hemingway couldn’t believe he was working with Lucas. At the end of their first interview, the director turned to Lucas and said, “May the force be with you.” (Hemingway told me that afterward he was so embarrassed, he felt like jumping out of a window.) When Hemingway got the call telling him he’d been hired to direct the next George Lucas movie, he pulled over to the side of the road and began to cry.

Still, he wasn’t sure Lucas was taking this film in the right direction. “I always felt it was much more of a mature film,” Hemingway said. “I felt if you’re going after kids, you have to go through the back door.” But Lucas persuaded him that if they made “Red Tails” as a kids’ picture, at some primal, emotional level, they would connect with the adult fanboys.

“Red Tails” is dominated by plane-to-plane combat (“an hour’s worth of fighting,” Lucas says) that is as impressive as any put on screen. But the movie’s heart is in the relationship between two pilots, Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo). As their nicknames suggest, Easy respects army brass and plays by the rules; Lightning bristles at authority and blows up German warships when he chooses. Hemingway told Parker and Oyelowo to imagine they were portraying the famous cleavage in the civil rights movement. “The theme that consistently came up,” Oyelowo says, “was that I was Malcolm to his Martin.”

After Hemingway finished his shoot, “Red Tails” entered a two-year postproduction phase. Hemingway returned to TV; Lucas worked on additional scenes and effects. The movie still felt a tad reverent, so in early 2010, Lucas hired Aaron McGruder, the feisty creator of the Boondocks comic strip, as well as a famous “Star Wars” fan. It was an interesting decision, because McGruder was once a vocal opponent of Jar Jar Binks, the floppy-eared alien introduced in the first “Star Wars” prequel whose vocal squeaks (“Meesa your humble servant!”) reminded critics of Stepin Fetchit. One Boondocks strip showed Jar Jar with his fist in the air doing the black-power salute; another described Lucas being physically assaulted. “What do I call it when someone who ruins his own pop-culture icons is attacked by a psycho fan?” a McGruder character said. “I call it justice.”

So the man who accused Lucas of racial klutziness found himself supplying dialogue for Lucas’s Malcolm-and-Martin passion project. Lucas and McGruder spent mornings talking over scenes and dialogue. Then McGruder escaped to his Skywalker Ranch apartment, which was named for John Huston, to write new pages.

Did the subject of Jar Jar ever come up? “I can safely say it did not,” McGruder reported. “Not at all. Not even close.” In fact, the comic-book writer, like the “Wire” director, found himself smitten with Lucas’s popcorn vision of “Red Tails.” As McGruder put it, “One of the last things I said to George was: ‘This movie kind of represents the last barrier of equality for the black fighting man. We’ve never had the John Wayne treatment.’ ” Lucas had hit his retro-naïve bull’s-eye.

THE NUCLEAR DISASTER

There’s an episode late in Lucas’s popcorn period that nicely encapsulates the break between him and his fanboys. I speak, of course, of nuking the fridge.

In 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the fourth and least-liked of the Lucas/Spielberg collaborations, Indy steps into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear bomb. Like “jumping the shark,” “nuke the fridge” became shorthand for a creative nosedive and inspired a “South Park” episode in which Lucas and Spielberg rape their archaeologist hero. “Blame me,” Spielberg told Empire magazine last fall. “Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.”

What the blistering fan reaction illustrates is one downside of Lucas’s naïve style. By persuading us to drop our snarky defenses and embrace his fables, Lucas had forged a bond with fanboys like no filmmaker, outside of Spielberg, before or since. (Adjusted for inflation, the three original “Star Wars” movies and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” still rank among the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.) But naïveté is a fragile emotion. When Lucas goes back and futzes with his mythology — has Greedo shoot first or creates a goofball like Jar Jar Binks or makes Indy uncool by sticking him in a refrigerator — he isn’t just messing with beloved movies. He’s telling fanboys the naïve belief they gave to him was misplaced.

“What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?” Lucas once asked his biographer, Dale Pollock. Now imagine it being yanked away. If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood. He’d become their dad.

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”

In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

But now we’re talking about science rather than emotions, and the Lucas magic is lost.

SPIELBERG UNPLUGGED

I mentioned to Lucas that his pal Spielberg, who released “The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse” in December, was directing movies as if he were raging against the dying of the light. “Steven is a born director, which is why he’s such a genius,” Lucas said of the 65-year-old Spielberg. “He’s truly a cinematic genius. But he’s like a kid with a video game. It’s like: ‘C’mon, we’re going. We’re leaving now.’ Death comes. . . . And then Steven goes: ‘I got one more game! I got one more game!’ ”

“One day,” Lucas says, “they’re just going to unplug it and say, ‘You’ve got to go home now.’ ”

LUCAS IN LOVE

Love isn’t an emotion that gets much of a workout in the Lucas universe. But mention Lucas’s girlfriend, Mellody Hobson, and you get expressions of tender devotion that would make Han Solo blush. “They’re very much in love,” says the director and screenwriter Matthew Robbins, a pal of Lucas’s since U.S.C. “It’s the most semi-saccharine thing to be saying about your friend, but it happens to be true.”

“I’m just elated,” the Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler says, “that in his old, rich days he’s getting some enjoyment.”

Hobson, aside from being the president of the asset-management firm Ariel Investments, is a financial analyst on “Good Morning America” and a friend of the Obamas’ and Oprah Winfrey’s. She lives in Chicago and Lucas in Northern California, but they see each other nearly every weekend. Though Lucas is a lifelong liberal — “left of the middle,” he once said — before dating Hobson, he rarely left the editing room long enough to participate in politics. Now he does. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Lucas suggested to a reporter that Obama was a Jedi knight, the highest status in the Lucas worldview. In 2009, Hobson took Lucas — wearing a tuxedo — to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“When they started going together,” Al Sharpton told me, “it was like he had started going with black America’s business princess.” Sharpton was baffled by the match until he had lunch with Lucas last year and found him “outraged” and “totally beside himself” about the rejection of “Red Tails.” Hobson, Sharpton realized, had found someone whose passion and drive were equal to hers: “It was like the coming together of two volcanoes!”

When I asked about Hobson, Lucas said, “I’m a ’60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.” (He was referring to his upbringing rather than his reported $3.2 billion net worth.) “And she’s an East Coast, Princeton grad, Wall Street fund manager, knows all the big players, works in the big world. You would never think that we would get together, have anything in common. But when we did, we realized we had everything in common. It was the most unlikely coupling.”

The operative metaphor isn’t Han Solo’s sly courtship of Princess Leia. It’s Richard Dreyfuss staring slack-jawed at Suzanne Somers in “American Graffiti.” “I was attracted to her,” Lucas continues, “because she’s really, really smart. . . . If you’re more beautiful than I am and smarter than I am and you’ll put up with me, that’s all it takes. I’m there.”

THE WHITE PEOPLE

Last October, Lucas slipped incognito into the first “Red Tails” test screening in Atlanta. He and McCallum huddled together nervously among throngs of teenage boys. When the lights went down, Lucas muttered, “Let the games begin. . . .”

Lucas got one report from the early “Red Tails” test screenings that struck him. Three or four white kids had been spotted yelling, “I’m Easy!” “No, I’m Easy. You’re Lightning!” They’d become “Red Tails” heroes: Easy and Lightning, Malcolm and Martin. “The ultimate line was to have a bunch of 10-year-old white boys say, ‘I want to be like those guys,’ ” Lucas says. “Which is what you get with sports. Which is what you get with music. I wanted to do it just with being an American citizen. Again, that’s corny.”

Lucas was ecstatic. He had minted a new collection of heroes. “It plays,” he excitedly told his friends. “It plays.”

SEVENTIES FEVER

Making “Red Tails” was such a natural experience for Lucas — like Peter Jackson commanding hobbits or Mike Leigh directing an emotionally fraught dinner scene — that you wonder why he would leave for the obscurity of the experimental world.

Part of Lucas’s urge, it seems, is to reassert himself as a figure of the ’70s. Peter Biskind’s book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” split the ’70s Movie Brat generation into warring camps: Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, the protectors of Art, versus Lucas and Spielberg, the guys who turned movies into video games. (It seemed like a worse insult 10 years ago.) Among the many problems with this theory is that Lucas’s work on technical advances, like digital filmmaking and computer-generated imagery, has begun to help the very directors whose careers he supposedly vaporized. The year in which Martin Scorsese releases “Hugo” — a movie with 15 times the number of C.G.I. shots as “Jurassic Park” — is the year in which it’s no longer O.K. to call Lucas a villain.

Lucas has also looked longingly at the career of Francis Ford Coppola, his onetime mentor. After years of tussling with the studios (and making his own flops without their interference), Coppola began self-financing movies like “Twixt” that find tiny audiences and often get brutal reviews from critics. Coppola loves the idea of Lucas’s joining him in creating these kinds of films. “Now that he’s demonstrated his commercial moviemaking abilities,” Coppola wrote in an e-mail, “it’s time to show his other side.” He said Lucas’s personal films — a combination of light and music and crack editing — are his “real gift.”

But you wonder if this view — the commercial versus the personal, the blockbuster versus the experimental art film — is as reductive as the 1970s model. In fact, Lucas has always made personal films, just not in the traditional sense. The very first time Lucas showed “Star Wars” to friends, with World War II movie dogfights standing in for the unfinished effects, Spielberg is reported to have said, “That movie is going to make $100 million, and I’ll tell you why — it has a marvelous innocence and naїveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.”

That was without the Star Destroyers — it was just Lucas’s corny self up on the screen. Luke Skywalker’s battle with Darth Vader was given emotional heft by Lucas’s own relationship with his father, who owned a stationery shop and wanted George to join the family business. When Luke left his backwater planet for greater glory, he did so with the same resolve with which Lucas left his hometown of Modesto, Calif., a note Lucas struck perfectly in “American Graffiti.” (“Steve Bolander is an insurance agent in Modesto,” reads the “Graffiti” postscript — it sounds like Lucas’s nightmare.) Even 1984’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is a kind of personal film. “I was going through a divorce, and I was in a really bad mood,” Lucas told me. So he dreamed up a villain who reaches into men’s chests and pulls out their hearts. Did he really intend to create a metaphor that direct? “Yeah,” Lucas said glumly. The period is hard for him to think about.

Critics have said that Lucas’s personal flourishes are elemental and unsophisticated. But, as Spielberg put it, that is George. He ushered in what you might call the personal blockbuster. Amid the dead-eyed sequel-makers who haunt the multiplex, there are directors who have figured out how to insert themselves — their kinks, the fears, their passions — into $100 million crowd-pleasers. In the Batman movies and “Inception,” Christopher Nolan works out his obsession with privacy and the sanctity of our minds; David Fincher burrows into the heads of loners (Lisbeth Salander, the Zodiac Killer, Mark Zuckerberg) on society’s fringes. When Tim Burton makes a bad movie (like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), the problem is often that it’s too personal; we’re locked in Burton’s head when we could use some popcorn.

Lucas talks reverently of a certain category of megadirector — James Cameron (“Avatar”) and Peter Jackson (“The Lord of the Rings”) — who, like him, shepherd personal, seemingly ridiculous visions to the screen, only to watch them connect with a mass audience. “Those to me are some of the more interesting movies,” Lucas said. It’s because, under even the strictest 1970s definition, they’re personal films.

When Lucas talks about how excited he is to leave behind the rigors of blockbuster filmmaking — how he is “retiring, in a way, from my past” — he is, in the manner of a Lucas character, searching for his true self. A pesky “Star Wars” fanboy might suggest he already found him.

RIDE OFF, CUE SUNSET

Lucas doesn’t think the studios were being racist in rejecting his all-black action adventure. They were merely confused. Just as with “Star Wars,” they were being shown a movie that didn’t fit their marketing schema. “What’s it like?” Lucas asked, slipping again into a Socratic dialogue.

“Well,” he replied, “it’s kind of like ‘The Color Purple,’ only they’re in airplanes. It’s sort of like a Tyler Perry movie, only without jokes.”

And so, after shelling out nearly $100 million on the project, Lucas was sitting in his office in his flannel shirt dreaming of what his final blockbuster might rake in at the box office. “If we can get over $20 million in our first weekend,” Lucas said, “we’re kind of in the game. We’re in ‘The Help’ category.”

It was strange to hear the creator of “Star Wars” cap his aspirations at “The Help.” And sure enough, Lucas’s hypothetical grosses began to grow.

“If it gets $30 (million) in the first weekend,” he continued, “then those guys get to make their movies without even thinking about it.” Here Lucas meant Spike Lee or Lee Daniels or whoever else might direct the “Red Tails” prequel and sequel.

“If it does ‘Twilight’ business,” Lucas said. And here, to be clear, he was joking. But it’s a joke you get to make only when you’ve rewired a few generations’ worth of moviegoers’ brains. “If it does ‘Twilight’ business,” Lucas said, “then, gosh, all movies will be black.”

The sentiment is perfectly corny and naїve, and at the end of an amazing saga, it sounds like George Lucas’s preferred way of saying goodbye.

Bryan Curtis writes for Grantland, Slate, Newsweek and Texas Monthly.

NYT

Freedom

2012-01-17T15:30:00.001-08:00

Young U.S. Citizens in Mexico Brave Risks for American Schools

2012-01-17T14:05:00.001-08:00

In Tijuana, American students living in Mexico waited to cross the border to California schools.

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

TIJUANA, Mexico — Weekday mornings at 5, when the lights on distant hillsides across the border still twinkle in the blackness, Martha, a high school senior, begins her arduous three-hour commute to school. She groggily unlocks the security gate guarded by the family Doberman and waits in the glare of the Pemex filling station for the bus to the border. Her fellow passengers, grown men with their arms folded, jostle her in their sleep.

Martha’s destination, along with dozens of young friends — United States citizens all living in “TJ,” as they affectionately call their city — is a public high school eight miles away in Chula Vista, Calif., where they were born and where they still claim to live.

California teenagers start their mornings with crossing guards and school buses. Martha and her friends stand for hours in a human chain of 16,000 at the world’s busiest international land border. Cellphones in one hand and notebooks in the other, they wait again to cross on foot, fearing delays that could force them to miss a social studies final, oblivious to hawkers selling breakfast burritos or weary parents holding toddlers in pajamas.

In San Ysidro, the port of entry, they board a red trolley to another bus that takes them to school. They are sweating the clock — the bell rings at 8 a.m. sharp.

“Most of the time I am really, really tired,” said Martha, whose parents moved back to Tijuana because the cost of living was cheaper here than in southern California.

“I try to do my best,” she added. “But sometimes, I just can’t.”

In the raging debate over immigration, almost all sides have come to agree on tougher enforcement at the border. But nearly unnoticed, frustration is focusing locally on border-crossers who are not illegal immigrants but young American citizens, whose families have returned to Mexico yet want their children to attend American schools.

Called “transfronterizos,” these students migrate between two cultures, two languages and two nations every day, straining the resources of public school districts and sparking debate among educators and sociologists over whether it is in American interests that they be taught in the United States. Although some Mexican families pay the steep tuition required of out-of-district students, most do not, and many that pay taxes out of their paychecks do not pay the property taxes that support public services.

Some of the students’ parents are American citizens and some are Mexican.

Students like Martha fly under the radar in some school districts, while other districts assign truancy officers to find who they are. They live with the anxiety of potentially having to lie about their residency and the very real possibility that the prize they are after — a decent education — will be taken from them. Though their exact numbers are unknown, their presence reflects the daily complexities of border life — among them, economic and educational disparities between the United States and Mexico and families splintered by deportation and unemployment.

Transfronterizos can be found from Calexico, Calif., to El Paso, where violence in neighboring Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, has led to the creation of a designated lane for 800 to 1,400 students daily, including American citizens who attend El Paso schools.

In Tijuana, Martha and a half-dozen high school seniors let a reporter accompany them on their daily commute and discussed their identity conflicts and criticisms by their American counterparts. Students, their parents and some teachers spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their enrollment.

Martha’s mother, a seamstress, never got beyond ninth grade. Several days a week, she rises at 2 a.m. to claim a place for her daughter in line — a border mom, instead of a soccer or a tiger mom. Martha’s family pitches in on the mortgage for a Chula Vista house, where members of the extended family live, and pays utilities to establish residency.

Other Tijuana families rent apartments, “borrow” fake addresses from friends or create a post office box. Sometimes a relative in the district is appointed their child’s legal guardian.

“It’s stressful,” Martha says of the house that is not really her home. “You can get found out and kicked out of school. Sometimes I feel bad for lying. But I’m just going to school.”

In so many ways, they are simply teenagers, wearing sneakers and the ubiquitous white buds in their ears. In the border line, the chit-chat about hangovers and how strict their parents are could be that of young people anywhere waiting to get into a movie.

Except for the narcotic detector dogs, the Customs and Border Patrol officers and the sign that says, “Welcome to the United States.”

Luis, a wiry high school senior with gleaming braces, was born in Los Angeles and lived there as a freshman, spending the week in his uncle’s home and weekends visiting his family in Tijuana. Homesick, he finally moved to Mexico.

“I felt bad alone,” he said. “It’s tiring, but this way I can see my family all the days.”

Now he and his 16-year-old sister get up at 3 a.m. to drive to the border with their father, a landscaper who has a green card. The teens touch down for a shower at a studio apartment the family rents in the Chula Vista school district, and they walk two and a half miles to school. Luis’s younger sister cannot join them — she was born in Mexico. So were most of Luis’s friends.

“They say, ‘Oh man, it’s too hard to wake up at 3 in the morning,’ ” Luis said, sitting in his bedroom in Tijuana, which is decorated with posters of Piccadilly Circus, a place he has yet to visit. “On the other hand,” he said, “they are jealous that I can cross and they can’t.”

Although educational outcomes have greatly improved in Mexico, low high school graduation rates and high attrition rates in the northern industrial states of Baja California and Chihuahua “hinder development of a highly educated work force,” concluded a 1997 study by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

“The gap between the U.S. and Mexican sides is great enough that people have a strong incentive” to cross, said David Shirk, the institute’s director.

Ana Sánchez, a Tijuana resident who works for a nonprofit organization in San Diego and pays United States income tax (although not property tax), wanted her two children to be fluent in English and enrolled them in a public school close to her job. “I know that in the future it’s going to be a plus for them,” she said.

Initially, “trying to be honest,” Mrs. Sánchez told the district that her daughter lived in Tijuana. But when told she would have to pay $800 a month in tuition, “that’s when I got added to the electric bill at a friend’s address,” she explained.

For educators, determining whether a student meets residency requirements can be a thorny task, with rules varying from district to district and state to state. In San Ysidro, families must provide a mortgage or rental agreement and show utility bills in their name. Over the past two years the district has sent “letters of exclusion” to more than 20 families. In some cases, fraudulent documents were discovered. Manuel H. Paul, the superintendent, said educators were attuned to “red flags” like a phone call from a school nurse that reaches a disconnected number.

“The student will say, ‘We live in Tijuana,’ ” Mr. Paul said. “Children most of the time don’t lie.”

In 1982, the Supreme Court established that schools cannot inquire about a family’s immigration status. Ed Brand, superintendent of the Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista, says an American citizen living outside the county would pay tuition of $7,162.

“We’re not the I.N.S.,” he added, referring to the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Can one get by us? I imagine one can.”

In nearby Calexico, a truant officer was dispatched to photograph students crossing the border, but the practice was deemed “an exercise in futility” and discontinued, said Richard Fragale, the superintendent of schools. He estimates that between 100 and 200 students cross each day, most not paying tuition. Ultimately, there are painful decisions for the district. Recently, he said, two parents were deported, leaving two children, both American citizens, in limbo.

“What do we do with these youngsters?” he said. “Philosophically, as an educator, if a young person comes to the door, we should educate them.”

In Ajo, Ariz., the state education office fined the district $1.2 million in May 2010, for the cost of educating 105 students crossing over from Mexico. The district has since tightened its residency requirements.

The issue is fairness, whether a student lives in Mexico or just outside a preferred school district in the United States, argues Steven A. Camarota, the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors limits on immigration. The possibility that these individuals could “pay enough in taxes to cover the costs of consumption of public services is basically zero,” he said.

Martha and her friends view classmates who live in the district as coddled couch potatoes. They don’t have to deal with jeering workers at the border cursing them for cutting in line. Or say “wake me up” to the Tijuana taxi driver who drives them home after dark.

Jesús travels 20 miles from Tijuana, on a twisting road known for robberies. He plans to study gastronomy. “I am just trying to get ahead and become someone important in life,” he says. “It’s a big responsibility making sure you get to school.” Five tardys can mean four hours of Saturday school and an F in citizenship.

“You can kill their future,” says one of Jesús’s teachers, who does not mark him late when he knocks shyly on the classroom door 10 minutes into first period.

Martha has crossed the border on and off since she was 5. Her life has its own ebb and flow, as well as the occasional undertow. In Tijuana, “sometimes people think we’re higher than them,” she says, because she attends an American high school. But as a Mexican in San Diego, “they look you up and down.” Divulging the particulars of their lives can be tricky business. “You can’t really rely on most people,” Martha says.

Rising at 3 a.m., Luis will sometimes fall asleep in his sixth-period world history class. “The teacher gets super-angry,” he said. ‘”You don’t tell those kind of teachers you cross.”

He shares his story sparingly with a few trusted Latino teachers. “Some of them crossed, like you. They want things to be better for you. But,” he allows, “that is not true of everyone. Some think we’re wasting tax.”

One teacher in Chula Vista, whose name was withheld to protect students in his class, including Martha, said, “I can’t draw all I want from her. Her intelligence is hidden away by her tiredness.”

Yet teachers and guidance counselors say that despite the academic challenges, students who get up at 4 a.m. to be at school show signs of becoming resilient leaders. “They know who are they are and what they want,” the teacher observed. “They’re not going to be working at Jack in the Box. They’re go-getters.”

NYT

Yeast Reveals How Fast a Cell Can Form a Body - NYTimes.com

2012-01-16T14:45:00.000-08:00

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Mexico Hit by Rumors of Indian Famine, Suicides - NYTimes.com

2012-01-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

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‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration - NYTimes.com

2012-01-16T10:51:00.000-08:00

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I Have a Dream

2012-01-15T19:20:00.001-08:00

Ultrabooks Embraced by PC Makers at C.E.S. - NYTimes.com

2012-01-15T19:16:00.000-08:00

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2012-01-15T18:38:00.000-08:00

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Cecilia Balli

2012-01-15T17:42:00.001-08:00

Samsung Galaxy Note | The 12 Coolest Things We Saw at the Consumer Electronics Show | Techland | TIME.com

2012-01-15T16:42:00.000-08:00

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Good Immigration Policy, on Hold - NYTimes.com

2012-01-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

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2012-01-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

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The Left Declares Its Independence

2012-01-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

By TODD GITLIN

Published: October 8, 2011

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia and co-author of “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.”

IF some aspects of the Occupy Wall Street protest feel predictable — the drum circles, the signs, including “Tax Wall Street Transactions” and “End the FED” — so does the right-wing response. Is it any surprise that Fox News and its allied bloggers consider the protesters “deluded” and “dirty smelly hippies”?

Then again, maybe it is surprising. As more than a few observers have noted, the Occupy Wall Street chant, “We Are the 99 Percent” — a shot across the bow of the wealthiest 1 percent of the country, which includes the financial predators and confidence gamers who crashed the global economy with impunity — seems synonymous with the Tea Party’s “Take Back America” ethos.

Those similarities, though, mask profound differences. The two movements both loathe the elite, but their goals, and the passions that drive them forward, could not be more at odds.

The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order. Not for them the tents and untucked shirts, the tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks that are eye candy for lazy journalists. (“Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn’t interview me?” read one Occupy Wall Street demonstrator’s sign.)

In contrast, what should we make of Occupy Wall Street? The movement is, of course, nascent, and growing: on Oct. 5, it picked up thousands of marching supporters of all ages, many from unions, professions and universities, and crowded Foley Square. Its equivalents rallied in 50 cities. Deep anger at grotesque inequities extends far beyond this one encampment; after all, a few handfuls of young activists do not have a monopoly on the fight against plutocracy. Revulsion in the face of a perverse economy is felt by many respectable people: unemployed, not yet unemployed, shakily employed and plain disgusted. A month from now, this movement, still busy being born, could look quite different.

And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment — because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. Anarchism has been the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements for nearly the past half century, as it is in Zuccotti Park.

IN this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with the time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time — at least until the first frost.

The anarchist impulse is nothing new in America. There were strong anarchist streaks in the New Left of the 1960s — stronger than the socialist streak, in fact, despite all the work Marxists did to define proper class categories for the student movement. “Let the people decide,” one of the early rallying cries of Students for a Democratic Society (of which I was president from 1963 to 1964), meant, in practice, “Let’s have long meetings where everyone gets to talk.” De facto, this meant that politics was for people who, in a sense, talked for a living — in other words, college types.

It was a revolutionary idea, at least for its time and in certain places: in the Deep South, for civil rights workers and black farm workers just to meet and talk was a dangerously radical, and radically dangerous, proposition.

But the left’s distrust of outside authority reached, and still reaches, much further. The bumper sticker of the 1960s New Left could have been Bob Dylan’s lyric “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parkin’ meters,” cheekily pairing hierarchy with overregulation. By 1967, its membership soaring, the S.D.S. was so suspicious of leadership, so disdainful of the formal structures of its first five years, as to abolish its own presidential and vice-presidential offices.

As the S.D.S. discovered in 1969, when quarreling Maoist-Guevarist and Stalinist factions tore it apart, chaotic meetings and suspicion of formal procedures didn’t keep tiny hierarchies from exercising decisive control. Radical feminists came to similar conclusions. Nevertheless, hostility to elitism remained all the rage. From the early ’70s on, activists went into revolt against just about anybody’s authority, even their own. Vertical authority had a foul odor: it smacked of colonialism, patriarchy, bad white men lording themselves over voiceless minions. In left-wing activist circles, establishments of all sorts were the immoral equivalents of The Establishment.

Disgruntled by big-talking leaders, turned off by celebrity media, the left of the ’70s developed a horizontal style, according limited authority to their own leaders, who were frequently at pains to deny that they were leaders at all. “Affinity groups” and “working groups” replaced organized factions and parties. Even movements that seemed to require some level of verticality — those with concrete goals, like banning nuclear power and weapons, or opposing apartheid — were mostly leaderless.

That explains why, to the bafflement of their ideological opponents, such movements barely paused at the fall of Communism. When Leninist regimes collapsed, and their self-confident social democratic rivals crumpled as well, anarchism’s major competitors for a theory of organization imploded.

This new protest style is more Rousseau than Marx. What the Zuccotti Park encampment calls horizontal democracy is spunky, polymorphic, energetic, theatrical, scattered and droll. An early poster showed a ballerina poised gingerly on the back of Wall Street’s bull sculpture, bearing the words: “Occupy Wall Street. September 17th. Bring Tent.” It likes government more than corporations, but its own style is hardly governmental. It tends to care about process more than results.

And oh, how it loves to talk. It is no surprise that it makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated — perhaps prefigured — those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An “American Autumn” is their shot at an echo of the “Arab Spring.”

OCCUPY Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline.

So where do these romantics go from here? The Zuccotti Park core doesn’t seem to have a plan, or even to take kindly to the idea of consolidating a list of demands. And yet, by taking the initiative, they have aroused, as with the Oct. 5 march, less romantic and more conventionally organized allies who do not disdain political demands. Such is the cunning of political history. Having set out to be expressive, the anarchists have found themselves playing, willy-nilly, a most strategic role.

Such movements hope to remain forever under construction, fluid, unfixed. They slip laughingly through the nets of journalism, which prefers hard-and-fast answers to the question “What do you people want?”

But the interesting, difficult, even decisive moment in the career of such a movement comes when allies arrive, especially allies not so enamored of horizontal democracy and more taken by the idea of getting results. These forces showed up on Oct. 5. De facto, there is an alliance in the cards.

It makes sense. Here, finally, is what labor and the activist left have been waiting for. For two years, Barack Obama got the benefit of the doubt from fervent supporters — I’d bet that many of those in Lower Manhattan during these weeks went door-to-door for him in 2008 — and that support explains why no one occupied Wall Street in 2009. Now, as Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School, said of Zuccotti Park: “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration.”

By allying itself with the protest, the left at large is telling the president that a campaign slogan that essentially says “We’re better than Eric Cantor” won’t cut it in 2012. “We are the 99 percent” would be more like it. If President Obama takes this direction, the movement’s energy may be able to power a motor of significant reform.

That raises the question, though, of whether the inchoate quality of the Occupy Wall Street movement can continue. Probably not, since an evolving alliance demands concrete goals, strategies and compromises. But perhaps something of the initial free spirit can flourish. There is plenty of public sentiment to nourish it. It doesn’t take public opinion polls to detect American anger at the plutocracy and the impunity with which it lords it over the country.

The culture of anarchy is right about this: The corporate rich — those ostensible “job creators” who somehow haven’t gotten around to creating jobs — rule the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party as well, having artfully arranged a mutual back-scratching society to enrich themselves. A refusal to compromise with this system, defined by its hierarchies of power and money, would be the current moment of anarchy’s great, lasting contribution.

Until now, fury at the plutocracy and the political class had found no channel to run in but the antigovernment fantasies of the Tea Party. Now it has dug a new channel. Anger does not move countries, but it moves movements — and movements, in turn, can move countries. To do that, movements need leverage. Even Archimedes needed a lever and a place to stand to move the world. When Zuccotti Park meets an aroused liberalism, the odd couple may not live happily ever after. But they can make a serious run at American dreams of “liberty and justice for all.”

NYT

Nobel economist blasts Europe’s austerity plans

2012-01-15T08:29:00.001-08:00

By James Lamont in New Delhi

Amartya Sen, the Harvard university professor and Nobel laureate, has sharply criticised European governments for embracing austerity measures to cure their economic difficulties, describing fiscal tightening policies in the UK as premature and “oddly confused”.

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Speaking at the Indian finance ministry’s Delhi Economic Conclave, Mr Sen said the rush to impose austerity plans across Europe was a “spiralling catastrophe,” and was even threatening to drag the US in the same direction.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist said that Europe’s leaders were mistaking the need for greater financial responsibility and accountability in governmental expenditure for more radical, short-term measures that could worsen the current downturn. He warned that large-scale, indiscriminate cutting of government expenditure could “decimate” lives and nip economic recoveries in the bud.

“Many countries in the west seem to be doing their best to go straight into the mouth of a fairly hefty snake,” he warned.

“To move from that frying pan of mismanagement to the fire of indiscriminate cuts to satisfy the creditors and to placate the rating agencies has not been helping these countries to move into a responsible forward-looking recovery programme,” he said.

Mr Sen singled out the UK, describing Prime Minister David Cameron’s belt-tightening measures as “oddly confused” and “certainly mistimed”. Many economists have warned that the austerity measures have raised the risks of economic contraction and a double-dip recession.

Mr Sen implored policymakers to study the years after the second world war and during former US President Bill Clinton’s office, when economic growth played a significant role in reducing public debt.

Economists predict that the eurozone debt crisis and austerity measures could reverse the already modest third-quarter economic growth in Europe. Germany and the UK both posted growth of 0.5 per cent in the third quarter, France 0.4 per cent, and the US economy 0.6 per cent.

Mr Sen’s views reflect growing misgivings among Indian and, more widely, Asian economists and policymakers about the policy choices in the developed world in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. They fear that Europe, which has strong linkages to India, may suffer a decade or more of low growth.

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, said on Wednesday that the sovereign debt crisis was at “the heart” of a global economic downturn and was weighing down the fast-growing economies of India and China.

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said the world economy was a victim of “incompetent western economic management”.

Turmoil across Europe would force Asian countries to work more closely together and take leadership in the global economy, he said. “[It’s time] for China and India to work more closely together to pursue global economic growth.”

Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University and the London School of Economics said: “Emerging economies need to have disaster plans in case advanced economies go into depression.”

Taken From Financial Times

Nobel economist blasts Europe’s austerity plans - FT.com

2012-01-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Nobel economist blasts Europe’s austerity plans - FT.com:

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Land Carvings Attest to Amazon’s Lost World - NYTimes.com

2012-01-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

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Nice Girl

2012-01-14T17:29:00.001-08:00

Robert Fisk: The 'invented people' stand little chance

2012-01-14T06:02:00.001-08:00

His statement that the Palestinians were an "invented people" marked about the lowest point in the Republican-Christian Right-Likudist/Israel relationship. So deep has this pact now become that you can deny the existence of an entire people if you want to become US president. It's time, surely, to take a look at this extraordinary movement, to remind ourselves – since US "statesmen" cannot – just what its implications really are.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York on 23 September, few noticed a quite remarkable reference in his speech. In refusing Newt's "invented" people's request for statehood, he made an extremely unpleasant remark about "the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam". But far more disturbing was this: "In 1984, when I was appointed Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubovich. He said to me ... you'll be serving in a house of many lies ... remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide."

Did Obama and Clinton or anyone else pick up on this reverent memoir, indeed the only quotation from any of Netanyahu's meetings which he chose to mention at the UN? For this is the rabbi who viewed himself as a messiah and whose followers stood behind Netanyahu in his successful 1996 election campaign. Only Sefi Rachlevsky in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz appeared to spot the significance of Netanyahu's remark.

"The Lubavitcher Rebbe [sic] was famous for his vehement opposition to even the tiniest withdrawal from any territory ever held by the Israel Defence Forces, even in the framework of full peace," Rachlevsky wrote. "The most prominent emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – the great rabbi, as Netanyahu termed him at the United Nations – included Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre, and Yitzhak Ginsburg, the rabbi of Yitzhar, he of the radical book Baruch the Man (which celebrates the massacre)." The rabbi, Rachlevsky continued, believed that in the land of the messiah, there is no room for Arabs. Newt was right on track, it seems. "Thus racism entered Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations – not 'merely' against Islam, but also against Arabs."

And so the ghost of Goldstein slid into the UN, the doctor who put on his IDF uniform to enter the mosque of Abraham and slay 29 praying Arabs before being almost torn to pieces. His grave, in the neighbouring settlement of Kiryat Arba, is today treated by his admirers as a shrine. But, for the Prime Minister of Israel, the "crocodile" was militant Islam. Of course, Netanyahu can lavish praise on whatever oddball he wants – his predecessors, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, officially received a Lebanese militiaman called Etienne Saqr whose civil war "Guardians of the Cedars" routinely mutilated Palestinian prisoners before putting them to death, and whose motto was "it is the duty of each Lebanese to kill one Palestinian" – but something very dark was getting loose here. The Israel of socialist kibbutzim and phoenix-like power, of honour and renewal that the world believed in after the Second World War, had vanished.

What came in its place? The Arab Awakening has allowed us to avoid this all-consuming question. That Israel has "veered to the right" (as if it might soon "veer" back to the left) has long been a sop phrase for American journalists – though it's not long ago that one of them was instructed to refrain from referring to a Netanyahu cabinet as "right wing" on the grounds that this upset his paper's Jewish readers. The presence of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister – Nicolas Sarkozy has many times beseeched Netanyahu to get rid of him – is proof of that; it would be difficult to find a better Israeli "match" for the crackpot president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But something far more worrying is taking place.

In the United States, where Netanyahu received so many standing ovations from a Congress that apparently thought it was the Knesset – far more ovations than he would ever have received in the real Knesset in Jerusalem – Israel is increasingly relying on the support of Christian fundamentalists.

This support has now coalesced with the Republican Party against Obama – whose grovelling to Netanyahu has won him no new friends – so that over recent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is routinely used to attack the Democrats. Having once been sustained by the progressive left, Israel now draws its principal support from right-wing conservatism of a particularly unpleasant kind. Christian evangelicals believe that all Jews will die if they do not convert to Christianity on the coming of the Messiah. And right-wing racists in Europe – the most prominent of them being Dutch – are welcome in Israel, while the likes of Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are not.

Not a word about this from the would-be Republican candidates and their followers these past few days. Governor Rick Perry has long accused Obama of "appeasement" in the Middle East, and former New York mayor Ed Koch has never withdrawn his claim that Obama "threw Israel under the bus". Mitt Romney has said that he wants "to increase military and intelligence co-ordination with Israel" – as if the US hasn't been handing out aircraft and billions of dollars to Israel for decades. What chance do an "invented people" have against this?

The Independent