ABC News

Furkan Dogan

``It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire.''

Read Roger Cohen today in the NYT.

If America does not recognize Furkan as an American.

Shame on you.

I taught Muslim boys at Glenbard East High School, I am ashamed with my dear American Muslim students there. I loved them as much as ANY other American boy.

Shuaizhang Feng, Alan B. Krueger, and Michael Oppenheimer

``Climate change is expected to cause mass human migration, including immigration across international borders. This study quantitatively examines the linkages among variations in climate, agricultural yields, and people’s migration responses by using an instrumental variables approach. Our method allows us to identify the relationship between crop yields and migration without explicitly controlling for all other confounding factors. Using state-level data from Mexico, we find a significant effect of climate-driven changes in crop yields on the rate of emigration to the United States. The estimated semielasticity of emigration with respect to crop yields is approximately −0.2, i.e., a 10% reduction in crop yields would lead an additional 2% of the population to emigrate.We then use the estimated semielasticity to explore the potential magnitude of future emigration. Depending on the warming scenarios used and adaptation levels assumed, with other factors held constant, by approximately the year 2080, climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15–65 y) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone. Although the results cannot be mechanically extrapolated to other areas and time periods, our findings are significant from a global perspective given that many regions, especially developing countries, are expected to experience significant declines in agricultural yields as a result of projected warming.''

``Discussion

To conclude, we have examined the link between climate-driven productivity changes in the agricultural sector and out-migration with Mexico used as an example. Our results are conservative in at least two respects. First, projected changes in crop yields are considerably larger than those observed in our data. If crop yield affects emigration in a nonlinear fashion, our linear specification would likely underestimate the full impact of climate on crop yields in the future. Second, as we focus on only crop yields, our estimate provides a lower bound for the overall impact of climate change on emigration through agriculture, which could also be affected by changes in the total acreage of land cultivated. Even so, the estimated elasticity of emigration with respect to crop yield changes is statistically significant and large in a practical sense. This suggests that crop yield–induced migration will be a significant issue in many areas of the world that are expected to experience a substantial reduction in yields as a result of climate change, including much of Africa, India, Bangladesh, Latin America, and Australia, among others. Because climate change may induce out-migration through channels not examined in this study, the overall effect may be larger, particularly if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration levels continue to increase sharply and countries fail to implement aggressive adaptation measures.

Given these projections, certain migrant-receiving countries, including the United States, are expected to face increased migration streams as a result of existing transnational networks with migrant-sending countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. However, some aspects of the Mexico/United States emigration situation are also unique, so extrapolation of our quantitative findings to the global level would be inappropriate. Nevertheless, application of our methods to other regions and other climate-related drivers of immigration, and to internal migration, would provide insights into potential future immigration and migration “hot spots,” as well as into the overall magnitude of the looming changes. Additional insights concerning the response of migration sensitivities to trends in climate variables (i.e., whether the semielasticity would decrease or increase in a different climate) may also be gained from study of regions with data sets extending over a longer period. Future research could also use different methods (e.g., ethnography) to complement our statistical approach to deepen our understanding of people’s motives to migrate when faced with climate change.''

Taken from PNAS

Two Princeton professors and one Chinese scientist foresee more Mexicans heading North. The document was released ten days ago. I just saw it today.

I believe them; therefore this week's Arizona Law has to be defeated by the Obama Administration, or by the year 2080, Arizonan children, some of them brown, will be asking their parents why were they so wrongheaded?

The boat is sinking people, let us face this rationally.

Will I? I Will

``This last finding is crucial. It indicates that those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. They were looking for a positive inspiration from within, rather than attempting to hold themselves to a rigid standard. Those asserting will lacked this internal inspiration, which explains in part their weak commitment to future change. Put in terms of addiction recovery and self-improvement in general, those who were asserting their willpower were in effect closing their minds and narrowing their view of their future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded—and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the days ahead.''

Taken from Scientific American

Andrés Manuel López Obrador aka AMLO

``comprometidas a no mentir, a no robar, a no traicionar''.

My people says amlo has ``sworn not to lie, not to steal, not to betray''

I buy that.

surfraw

I can get here with:

sr google -l Eduardo Cantoral

Neato!

Read about the Shell User's Revolutionary Front Against the WWW on Wikipedia.

Julian Assange: Hacker!

He is a physicist and mathematician, and most importantly a Hacker.

You can read the Wikipedia article on him.

Here I am kvetching  all the time, I never do anything.

Well done Julian!

I could be his father, he was born when I was 20.

We All Come from Pinnacle Point

This is a place in South Africa, that very likely had your great-great-...great mother and father.

Pinnacle Point

Facebook Family

I neglect the social sites where I register once in a while. After registering I never showed up on Orkut. Anyways, I finally finished my profile at Facebook. Now I put all my family there. Daughter (Leza), Son (Lev), and Wife (Mary).

I'll try to keep this social site better.

Julian Assange

Today I heard at the University of Guerrero Radio Station, XEUAG 840 kHz AM, on the firing of Dr. Tulio Estrada. The news item I linked is in Spanish, and by a newspaper I consider very biased towards authority.

On the contrary I trust my University Radio Station's integrity.

Dr. Estrada was fired for pursuing the letter and the spirit of the law, requesting Chilpancingo's Mayor to clean up, literally clean up his act. The Mayor was fined $10,000 for risking our lives here in the Capital City of Guerrero state, in Mexico. Mayor Astudillo does not want to dispose of all the city garbage responsibly. Instead the garbage is thrown into Huacapa's River, literally turning this one magnificent river into raw sewage.

The cancer rate along the river is anomalously high.

The only campaign promise I heard from, the now Mayor Astudillo, was to convert the river into a parking lot!, I kid you not, by putting tons of cement and send the water through sewage pipes, like what has happened in Mexico City for years.

Punish the messenger. That is the state of Environmental Policy in Guerrero.

Why do I name this note Julian Assange?

What he just did, is the only sensible thing to do if we want to survive.

He released, at the risk of being murdered by the US secret apparatus, the wrongdoing of the US Government, on the Iraqi, and Afghani people.

Keep on trucking Mr. Assange.

Julian Assange Press Conference

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

Paul Krugman on the Senate and House Climate Bills failure, in the NYT.

He goes on to identify the cowards:

``There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.''

Tehuacalco, Mexico: Where Yope Giants Once Walked

Today I went to Tehuacalco. If you ever go to Acapulco, Guerrero, make sure to go to Tierra Colorada, a picturesque town nearby. There are tours there. Tehuacalco is an old town, thousands of years old, from 1000, to 1519. Governor Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo inaugurated the archaeological site in 2008. There is a Juego de Pelota there, popular all over Mesoamerica before 1492. In fact that is how they found the place recently. During construction of a nearby highway to Acapulco they spotted the Juego de Pelota buildings. The land was bought from the owners and the Government started to work to make this paradisaical resort place. This time of year is beautiful. There are rivers where people were swimming! There are not many of those these days in Mexico, I'm sorry to say.

There is a little museum with maps of the region, and most importantly artifacts found at the site. You can see the actual stones that the Yope Indians carved in artistic ways. The orientation of the Juego de Pelota is crucial. Solstices are at the extremes of the structure, when looked at in specific places. Four big mountains surround the place in the four directions, North, South, West and East. The worry of these farmers was to lose the Sun every solstice, so they made sure to keep the needed Sun around, with ceremonies during solstices. 

Human sacrifices with the players, and war prisoners were an important part of these games. There are over two thousand of these sites in the State of Guerrero, which have not been developed yet. The reason there are so many archaeological sites, is that corn (maize) was domesticated in the State of Guerrero, along the Balsas River. These people are self sustained, they grow corn, squash, beans, chili peppers, and so many other foods, that it is hard to keep count. If all modern civilized life were to end today. These people could still feed themselves another 9000 years as they have done so far. This is a sacred place on Earth. I am glad that more and more Mexicans and foreigners understand this and come to worship the Sun still.

Long live the people of Tehuacalco!

We had a beautiful 15 year old girl from a town nearby as a guide. What a treat!

Messiah?

``Si no se pone en el centro de discusión del debate, señaló, no iremos al fondo del problema. Lo material es importante pero no basta. Hace falta fortalecer los valores morales, sólo así podremos enfrentar la mancha negra de individualismo, codicia y odio que se vive cada vez más y que ha llevado a la degradación progresiva como sociedad y como nación.''

Taken from La Jornada.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his intention to run for President of Mexico in 2012 in a big meeting today at the Mexico City Zocalo.

My translation:

If we do not put this issue in the center of discussion and debate, he said, we won't go to the root causes of the problem. Material well being is important, but is not enough. It is necessary to strengthen moral values, only so we'll be able to face the black stain of individualism, greed and hate we are living through more and more, and which have taken us to our progressive  degradation as a Society and as a Nation.

End of translation.

2012 is going to be an interesting year.

Let the Chips Fall Where They May

I am a progressive, as Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, and on, and on. If you follow this blog, you know already. I do get comments, not many, I am not popular, from people with different persuasion, I do invite that. I found out there is an anti-metric System lobby!

Nevertheless as Friedman reminds us today in We're Gonna Be Sorry, positive science, Positivism, as first defined by Auguste Comte, instructs us to follow three basic sciences:

1. Physics
2. Chemistry
3. Biology

Here in Mexico, thanks to the Zapotec Benito Juárez ,  President of Mexico, we have a positivist system of public education. The Pueblan Gabino Barreda, was given the task to start the first Escuela Preparatoria, under the principles of positivism. Leopoldo Zea was the foremost expert on Positivism in Mexico. If you read Spanish, you can read a work about it here.

I know one of the daughters of the late Prof. Zea.

By all means, I am progressive, and I am positivist. Relevant Science, not irrelevant ideology.

Preparatorianos (high school students) in Mexico, are taught to look at reality with the eyes of reason, not of dogmatic ideology.

I wish all young people of the world get the message before it is too late. It seems like the Young Turks around President Obama, do not know positive science. Rhetorical speeches, are not substitute for rational thinking.

Take this from a Progressive Positivist. That is the schpiel you'll get here.

Welcome!

Let the Chips Fall Where they May.

AMLO at the Zocalo: Mexico City

Today the next President of Mexico will address thousands of followers in Mexico City; the main plaza: Zócalo. Where the Aztecs had their center of power, then the Spanish, and now the Mestizos.

You can read in Spanish about it here.

Tom Friedman for Interior

Instead of Ken Salazar (why do Latinos have to disgrace us so much?) Obama should ask Friedman to be Secretary of the Interior.

Today he writes in the NYT.

``We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.''

Physics, Chemistry and Biology. In that order. Just look into where the Sun don't shine, and pray!

Send Son to Iowa :(

``Ms. Helmrichs said she saw a house topple off its foundation. “It just tumbled down, slow motion, into the river,” she said. “It was just so eerie.”''

From the NYT.

My son is going to school there!

Machete

Distress

``This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.''

From Frank Rich in the NYT.

When the fight comes, a lot of people are going to be at edge.