The second of chapter three in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctor focused on the coups in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Kline explains that as with Chile these were all hostile takeovers. Kline first examines the Argentinean coup. Starting with the massive human rights violations, torturing, and disappearances; Kline paints a very morbid picture. She reports that upwards of 30,000 people may have been killed and 100,000-150,000 tortured. As with the Chilean coup, the Argentina coup followed a policy of fear and Chicago style economics. Shortly after this policy adoption wages declined by as much as 40% while unemployment rose from 4% to 9%. Kline believes that Argentina justified their killings by saying they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. Kline also believes that the majority of victims were nonviolent activists working in factories, farms, and universities.

            First and foremost I think that killing, torture and human rights violations are completely wrong and unjustifiable. I think that the fear tactics and violence in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil is atrocious, terrible, and evil!

            When reading this chapter I felt compelled to check which countries are currently the most productive and wealthiest in Latin America; to Kline’s great would-be dislike it turned out first Argentina, second Chile, third Uruguay, and forth Brazil. Although I don’t support any of the aggression or hostile tactics AT ALL, I do feel that credit needs to be given where credit is due, the economics. Seldom do politicians implement economic policy that will produce long term benefits at the expense of short term hardship. This is because US politician’s terms are short requiring reelection. If US politicians supported policy that created short term hardship their career would be over. Thus because of our political system we continually forgo the long term benefits of short term hardship. However, in these 4 counties it is plausible that long term benefits were achieved from short term economic hardships; and that the method of achieving those long term benefits was neoliberalism and Chicago style economics.

            These 4 countries have emerged as leaders because of their economic policy, but at what cost? That is the real question. Did their benefit exceed their cost?

The 55 year-old, Carlos Rozanski of Argentina’s federal court, judge explained that the killings were part of a system, planned far in advance, duplicated in identical fashion across the country, and committed with clear intent not of attacking individual persons but of destroying the parts of society that those people represented. Genocide is an attempt to murder a group, not a collection of individual persons; therefore; it was genocide.

“It is necessary to destroy the sources which feed, form and indoctrinate the subversive delinquent” at the press conference.

Who was Killed-and why: the majority of the people swept up in the raids were not “terrorists”, as the rhetoric claimed, but rather the people whom the juntas had identified as posing the most serious barriers to their economic program (pg.106). In high schools, they banned group presentations-a sign of a latent collective spirit, that considered to be dangerous to “individual freedom”. One example that mentioned was a group of students who protested for a lower bus fee. They were captured and treated like prisoners.

Nunca Mas (never again). Workers were beaten, kicked, and in two cases, electroshocked. They were then taken to outside prisons where the torture continued for weeks, and in some cases, months. (pg.109). It can go far as applying electric shocks to gums, nipples, genitals, abdomen and ears(110). In Argentina, 81% of the 30,000 people who disappeared were between the ages of 16 and 30 (110). Government believed that torturing was a way of curing the “disease”.

“The enemy was Marxism. Marxism in the church”. They believe that Marxism is the danger to a new nation. Therefore, most of the victims are young because young people are the “future”. The captured prisoners were known as the dirty or diseased ones. This is the same intellectual construct that allowed the Nazis to argue that by killing “diseased” members of society they were healing the “national body”. The Khmer Rouge used the same language to justify their slaughter in Cambodia: “What is infected must be cut out” (pg.114).

One of the operation to reengineer society would be create a new breed of model citizens. An estimated five hundred babies were born inside Argentina’s torture centers, these infants were immediately enlisted in the plan and after a brief nursing period hundreds of babies were sold or given to couples, most of them directly linked to the dictatorship. These Children were raised according to the values of capitalism and Christianity deemed “normal” and healthy by the junta and never told of their heritage (pg.114) What happened to the babies’ parents? Since the parents were considered as disease, they were almost always killed in the camps (pg.114).

The Most Dangerous Man in the Music Biz is… Shawn Fanning. Shawn Fanning is the creator of Napster, the once infamous site that allowed for massive distribution of music for free. Fanning’s website ruffled the feathers of the industries and many bands, such as Metallica and Creed.

However, Fanning says that Napster was intended to share music, aimed toward the obscure artists who could use the site to get their music out there and make a name for themselves.

Fanning lives with his friend and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. The two live the lives of bachelor with the usual bachelor interests. Parker is tuning up his RX-7 with the whole stereo deal, and Parker plays the guitar.

This short article basically serves to introduce who this founder of Napster is.  Fanning is basically a nineteen years old bachelor burdened with the chaos of running a massive organization. Napster has changed quite a bit since the massive free exchange of music, it is now a pay for service music site that is riddled with regulations. So to me, Fanning is a youth trying to enjoy his life with holding down his Napster responsibilities.

The Battle For Facebook

The second article is all about Facebook’s creator Zuckerberg and the controversied creation of the extremely popular social networking site. The twenty four year old says he created the website in his Harvard dormitory, a product of his love of technology and a result of a rejection by a girl. His revenge on the girl was his website Facesmash which he planned to compare his enemies with animals and have his fellow classmate rate who was more attractive.

The controversy regarding the site comes from the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra. They claim that they had the idea for the social networking site at Harvard and called upon Zuckerberg to do the programming. They had heard of him from his Facesmash incident where his “renegade programmer” title was made when he hacked into student files. The claims go so far as to say that Zuckerberg intentionally delayed his role in creating their social site Harvard Connection and eventually blowing them off so that he may launch the code for himself.

The timing is ambigious. When Zuckerberg backed out of helping Narendra and the twins, he also launched Facebook. Was he just stealing his classmates’ ideas to benefit himself? The name of Facebook was given to the code he made when he discussed his code with Aaron Greenspan. Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard student, had created a website similar to what Facebook is now where people could post their address and information. Greenspan’s project was taken down after the school newspaper thought it was an invasion of privacy.

Despite its dubious beginnings, Facebook has made Zuckerberg a 24 year old worth 1.5 billion. Facebook is worth so much that only Microsoft could buy it out.

Zuckerberg had the luck of time on his side. Timing is so critical to whether or not something hits it off or not. I found it quite interesting how Parker, co-founder of Napster, lives so close to Zuckerberg. My impression of Zuckerberg is he comes off as a bit of a lier. I would not take his word for much, and he seems to have a history of screwing people over that get in his way. But then again, what uber successful person has gotten to his or her place without screwing someone over? Gates basically robbed the guy who created the OS code.

Regardless of what I think, Facebook is immensely popular. It has helped build and maintain social relationships. The college students can definitely appreciate its offerings to keep in touch with their friends who are all over the map as they attend their respective universities. Facebook is like a tool to globalization. It is a massive social network with its tendrils reaching many nations. Each Facebook page is like a window to the individual and his or her culture perhaps.  At the same time, this massive networking tool can also spread culture as well as ideas to other nations.

The first piracy of intellectual property comes in the form of the poem “The True-Born Englishman” by Daniel Defoe. “Pirates” made illegal copies of his poem, allowing people to buy the poem at much cheaper prices than the official publishers offered. Thus, while it enraged the publisher and denied Defoe the money of the copies sold, it made Defoe famous.

The film industry owes its prevalence to pirates who took their cameras to Southern California to escape Edison and his patent lawyers. It worked, it was either too expensive or time consuming or too much of both for the industry to pursue these Hollywood pirates. This event allowed for the industry to blossom, with directors able to produce without the outrageous royalties needed for using the equipment. When VCRs came the movie industry cringed, but their fears were unfounded. The VCR allowed for wide spread distribution of movies to households, and the tape created the movie rental industry.

The movie industry could have done much more with their money than combat piracy. Instead of pushing for HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays, the money could have been put into making an infrastructure for online movies. With bandwidth today, downloading movies is possible within an hour. The internet has also provided the music industry with a boon. Yes, there is a lot of music pirating on the internet, but besides depriving those money-hungry labeling companies, the artists are gaining more publicity. This pirating has, whether or not there is a correlation, has improved artists’ concert sales and digital downloads. And it brought about iTunes and other music distribution services.

Microsoft has tried to combat piracy of their OS, but actually sometimes these pirated copies lead to the people obtaining genuine copies later through upgrading. The distribution of Adobe Photoshop through pirating allows young users experience with the software, and if they pursue the field in the future, the industry uses Adobe Photoshop. They will trust Adobe since they are so used to it.

Thus piracy is not all bad. It allows for quick, cheap products to consumers. While it does take away money from the developers, artists, and publishers, piracy does do a good job of publicizing. In addition, it opens up new technologies, like it had done with VCRs, bittorrents, and cable television which the industries have capitalized on. Lastly, products like Photoshop gain a sort of user trust in the product and developer.

I see the potential of piracy to help spark innovation of new technology. I also think that the industries that fight pirating so avidly are simply a step behind or stuck with tunnel vision. Their industry will still be there, be it will just be undergoing a little bit of change for the better (like music from the cassette to the cd to mp3 (or whatever digital format/encoding is used now)). The internet has the capability to act like a library, or bookstore of downloadable content. Just imagine how many trees would be saved by having books electronically, the costs saved from manufacturing and shipping music and movie discs. Lastly pirated products have the ability to inspire. A pirated version of Photoshop for example could make a great animator one day from a person that would not have had the opportunity to be exposed to the software if it still had the $700 price tag. So don’t fear the pirates… they can bring about progress.

To begin, Hunt argues that the fight against piracy may be a lost cause. “Time after time, these [‘pirate’] technologies have been opposed by the status quo and embraced by consumers. In each case the consumers have won…” (pg. 1). Ken Hunt seems to suggest that the movie and music industries should be more optimistic about the piracy of their movies and songs. He argues that the availability of files on the internet is much more convenient than “taking digital information, burning it onto a piece of plastic, wrapping that in several more layers of plastic, shipping it across the country to suburban malls, which customers are then expected to drive to…” (pg. 2). After all, by having movies and music more available to them, consumers are then more likely to become fans and spend their money on other things related to their favorite artists, like their concert tickets. Many are unable to afford new CDs, so without the availability of the internet and programs such as LimeWire, Morpheus, and Blubster, these consumers wouldn’t have any exposure to music; and it seems the music industry would suffer even more. Hunt claims that the industry is better off with this ever increasing trend of piracy. He states, “the more efficient and convenient distribution of media [illegal downloading] has been a financial boom to the industry as a whole,” (pg. 1).

Furthermore, Companies such as Microsoft and the makers of Adobe Reader have benefited from piracy by taking advantage of the benefits that come from piracy of their products. For example, Microsoft had millions of illegitimate users but they were “converted to legitimate users as they upgraded,” (pg. 2). So, those who began as illegal users liked the program enough that they willingingly purchased the new, improved version. Hunt quotes Jeff Raikes, the president of Microsoft’s business group: “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” (pg. 2). The more your product is pirated, the more likely the consumer will go out and buy the real thing in the future.

Recently, we’ve seen Apple embrace this inevitable piracy by creating the iTunes store which offers songs for $.99 and albums for about the same price you’d pay at, say, Target. What is different, however, is the convenience of this downloading. And it isn’t illegal! Sure, you pay for it. But true fans who want to support the careers of their favorite artists are willing to spend a few bucks to hear the new songs. Also, Apple has done a great job marketing their iTunes store through iTunes gift cards and great advertisement on t.v. American Idol puts recordings of their contestants’ performances each week, which fans can then purchase because they can’t get them elsewhere. Also, another benefit of iTunes is the vast library which enables you to find music that’s more difficult to come across on programs like LimeWire. Also, it is often difficult to find entire albums on LimeWire and Blubster; but iTunes offers albums in their complete form.

Apple’s creation of iTunes represents the acceptance of the internet as a new source for people to fulfill their cultural needs, which Hunt suggested we do. With each creation of new technologies in recent decades- from tape cassettes to video cassettes to BitTorrent programs- the music and movies industries have panicked at the thought of losing control of their products “once information becomes digital,” (pg. 2). Finding ways to make piracy work for your company or industry is the key; embrace it, don’t fear it.

Evidently, pirates were very often rescued from the gallows by crowds of supporters. You see, pirates were the original pioneers of equality. They rebelled against their oppressive captains, took in escaped slaves and included them in the share when splitting their bounty, elected their captains democratically, and made all decisions as a collective rather than bestowing all power to a single individual. So you see the British would have a reason to try to dissuade their citizens from supporting these brigands (‘lest they go all Versailles on them).

Hari is trying to make the case that the modern day Somali pirates are fighting for a reason. They’re not just aimlessly mucking about stealing ships just because they feel like it. The truth is that many nations dump their nuclear and toxic waste off the coast of Somalia due to their lack of a government. As there is really no government to express their anger at the United Nations, there are really no repercussions for the countries that dump this waste. In addition, many Western nations trawl the coasts of Somalia, essentially stealing any fish that haven’t been killed by the aforementioned toxic and nuclear waste. In short: it really sucks to be Somalia.

What Hari is trying to do is relate the modern day Somali pirates to the pirates of old. But not the pirates you see in movies that go around killing, just because they can. No, he likens the Somali pirates to those pirates of equality in Britain during the 1600’s or the pirates that the United States itself hired during the Revolutionary War to act as an impromptu navy. The Somali pirates, according to Hari, are simply acting to defend their territorial coastline from foreign incursions using whatever means they have. And though a small part of the Somali pirates are indeed nothing more than glorified gangsters, the vast majority are nothing more than farmers with guns. And like the true British pirates of old these Somali pirates, or the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia as they are known, have the overwhelming support of the Somali people.

Though Johann Hari makes it clear that the hostage-taking is in no way justifiable, their cause is otherwise fully justifiable. I myself however do not agree with the tactic of hostage-taking. Using this tactic almost completely invalidates their cause and antagonizes them in a way that is detrimental to their original cause. And perhaps if the Somali people wanted to stop these territorial encroachments, the weapons they’ve bought to attack these civilian ships and oil tankers would be better pointed at the Somali warlords and in support of the Provisional Government of Somalia.

1.    The episode opens with McNulty and company listening to a bit of audio that they tapped from some dealers earlier.  It seems that only 2 people in the room can actually understand what the drug dealers are saying.  Freamon finally tells the other officers what is the gibberish on the pay phone actually means.
2.    Major Rawls tells Santangelo either solve a murder case, bring him something that can ruin McNulty, or he will be fired.
3.    Freamon, Greggs, and Hauk go over the plan to make an arrest.  They don’t want to arrest Stringer because that would end the wire tapping rights that they had.
4.    McNulty and Lovejoy try to convince Judge Daniels that the Barxdale case is still worth pursuing. Judge Daniels goes into some lecture about how unprofessional McNulty is in his documents using adverbs instead of verbs and uses then instead of than.
5.    Judge Daniels hits on Lovejoy, makes for a super awkward scene.
6.    The next scene is a chase scene.  It starts with a car chase and changes to a foot chase.  They get their man and let stringer walk.  They also confiscate quite an amount of drugs.
7.    Stringer makes a mistake and calls a higher up to inform them that he lost the drugs.
8.    Landsman to convince Santangelo to talk to madam larue, psychic or something of that nature.
9.    Bubbles and Greggs get bubble’s white druggy friend no jail time and only parole.
10.    I can’t remember the one eyed guys name, so he will be referred to as the pirate since he has an eye patch. Lt. Daniels tries to offer the pirate candy and a better life or something of that nature.
11.    There is a big party, Lt. Daniels talks to some people, learns there is a senator there.
12.    There is some kind of stay clean drug meeting, Whalen, an ex druggie, talks about how anybody can talk to him if they want to be clean, and how he struggles with it everyday.
13.    The meeting offers key chains to those who have been clean for a certain amount of time.  The meeting asks starts with clean for 9 months, no one goes up, then 6 months, nobody, then 3 months, finally one person. Then 1 month, 2 people finally go up. Then 24 hours or sincere desire to live. A few people go up including Bubbles even though his friend said they smoked that morning.
14.    Mcnulty and Moreland get drunk again, big surprise there.  McNulty says he respects Moreland, not because he’s good police, because “fuck that”, but when it came time to fuck him, he was gentle.  New it was his first time, wanted to make it special.
15.    The Barxdale crew is trying to find who is snitching
16.    Bubbles and friend do more drugs
17.    Dee gets offer to deal drugs without Avons stash, says he will think it over
18.    Cops arrest a killer referred to as “the bird”
19.    Drug dealers get smart and rip out the close payphones, change protocol on how to contact each other.
20.    Interrogation of “the bird.”  Even for The Wire’s standards, some of this language is pretty vulgar.
21.    Moreland and his informant who helped catch the bird realize they went to the same high school.  They connect and make for a special scene.
22.    “The Bird” gets beat to a pulp.
23.    The other detectives solve a case for Santangelo, thus he does not have to backstab McNulty or lose his job
24.    Santangelo tells McNulty about Rawls trying to get his badge

Thus ends another thrilling episode of the wire.  In a nutshell, this episode somebody gets arrested,  McNulty learns Rawls wants him fired,he Barxdale family learns that something is wierd in lala land, the guy who gets arrested gets beaten, and we are again left at a cliffhanger as to what will happen to McNulty and Company.

There are so many slums (approximately more than 200,000 slums on Earth) that there are actually different types of it. “The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize the housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety” (27). Many of the poor have to deal with all these aspects when they look for housing. I never knew that you have to consider so many things when picking a home, besides the usual location and price of the shelter. According to housing expert Ahmed Soliman, there are mainly four basic shelter strategies that the poor use (in Cairo). The first one is to consider renting an apartment but it is too expensive. The benefits are that if offers centrality and security of tenure. The second option is to live in an informal shelter, which is a “small room or rooftop with a location with a poor quality environment and a cheap rent” (29). The benefit is that there is a good access to job opportunities but no secure possession. The third housing solution is squatting on publicly owned land. The benefit is that you basically don’t have to pay rent since there hasn’t been any intervention from the local authority. However, the bad the thing about it is that there’s high elevated pollution and commuting is costly. The fourth option is to buy a house site in semi-informal developments such as villages. The poor will be able to have legal tenure but no official building authorization (29). Even though the house may be far from work, but it offers security and basic municipal services. It seems to be that whichever option that the poor have choose, there are always costs for their choice. The poor seems to never be able to win because if it isn’t for the expensive rent or the fact that the house is too far from work. It is quite sad that many poor people have to result to these housing options.

Davis mentions that there is an “archetypal distinction” between American cities and European cities. The American cities are the ones who have the poor people concentrated within the cities and they are therefore “donut”-shaped. On the other hand, European cities have immigrants and unemployed populations on the outskirts of the city and they are called “saucer” cities. I thought this distinction was interesting because the “donut”-shaped cities are present in The Wire. While the “saucer” cities are present in many parts of the Third World.

The hand-me-downs consist largely of abandoned housing once held by the upper class. In South America there are the old colonial estates, while in Asia there are the old open courtyard mansions. While it sounds nice at first read, these buildings are quite aged, and often lack plumbing. Their age also makes them unstable and likely to collapse, making it a danger to whoever lives in them. Worst, it appears many people compact themselves into this deteriorating homes. Otherwise, hand-me-down housing is the poor taking over abandoned middle class housing where the former inhabitants have left the city, either for other cities or to the “edge cities”.

The tenements were built for the poor. These housing arrangements are essentially massive apartment complexes with compact living spaces. In the countries that have them, they are ridiculously overcrowded. One country had an average living space of 18 square feet per person. Usually several families share one bathroom and water tap. In some places like Egypt, some poor people have made their shanty homes on the roofs of tenements, where while cooler than inside the tenement, are exposed to air pollution and fumes from cement plants.

Improvised is the most interesting of the four types. Some squatters have made living spaces out of tombs. They make use of everything, like using gravestone markers as desks or tables. An interesting one was where one family made use of a mausoleum and made the columbarian a place for their color television.

Lastly is the one perhaps Americans see more: the home that the homeless have made on the street. What I didn’t realize is how in other countries some people take advatage of the poor living on the streets. Some people rent out wheelbarrows as makeshift beds for the poor, and others like gangs or corrupt police “tax” those living on the streets.

Inner-city poverty seems to cover the different attempts of the poor to carve out a home in the city place. This is only one kind of slum typology that Davis offers. I guess this goes to show human creativity in cases of desperation. The living in a tomb city I did not expect.

Right off the bat the message he tries to convey gets shrouded when he uses the jargonny “epistemological fog” (45). Simply enough, when Mike Davis writes “epistemological”, he just means a theory of knowledge. So When Mike Davis says, that this fog gets thicker as you move out from the center of a Third World city (45), he’s just trying to say that things get a bit hard to discern and our knowledge of the terrain gets mired in a lack of “accurate, current data on land conversion patterns, number of housing units”, etc (45).

This pariah edge is the points at which the urbanized city collides with the rural countryside, creating massive poor suburbs such as Dakar’s Pikine (46). These “societal impact zones” (46) as Davis calls them usually manifest in the form of shantytowns. This can lead to strange situations like those seen in Latin America where you can find downtrodden shantytowns filled with slum-dwellers and whatnot living next to the walled-off suburban communities of the middle-class.

A similar phenomenon occurs in Asia except their fringe shantytowns are havens for illegal industries that thrive in the relative obscurity from the law that these impact zones provide. Not to say that other shantytowns don’t have illegal activities, far from it as the outskirts of Cali are relative recruiting grounds for gangs, but not nearly on such a widespread economic scale. Rather than saying that the outskirts of Asian cities are filled with just gangs, they house a relative forest of sweatshops, piracy, corrupt politicians, and poor, desperate peasants that are essentially begging to be exploited.

However, a difference can be seen between the workings of Latin America and Asia. In Asia the majority of the cheap labor is hired on the outskirts, in this pariah edge that Mike Davis talks about, to work in the urban factories. In Latin America, however, contractors usually hire the denizens of the shantytowns to work in the countryside. This occurrence makes sense since Latin America’s economy would be more seasonally and agricultural inclined, whereas Asia’s economy would be based around manufacturing of goods.

Nonetheless, no matter where the Third World urban edge is, it is still a steaming cesspool of urban waste and unwanted immigrants. They are not in so much as shantytowns, as more so “garbage slums” (47). Not to say that the people living in these places are all bad people, rather the vast majority are probably victims of displacement due to urban construction or war.