I came across this new browser today, Flock. I haven’t heard much buzz about it yet, but it seems pretty cool. It uses the Mozilla rendering engine (same as Firefox) and adds features such as integration with Facebook, Flickr, de.licio.us, and a few other such sites, plus other features like an integrated clipboard and blog editor. And many Mozilla Add-ons will work with Flock too.

I tried to used the blog editor to post this item, and failed. Well, that may be because it doesn’t specifically support WordPress, which I use. Still, I am wondering what advantage it has, since many options are not available here that I would have by directly editing it in the web page, which I can open in any browser. But the integration with Flickr and Facebook seems more compelling as well-thought-out modules in the browser.

I’ll see how it goes from more use, but at first glance it seems like a good fruit from the Mozilla project being open source.

War and the suppression of basic liberties are never nice things. Today there are few people who believe that the invasion of Iraq wasn’t a big horrendous mistake. Even the greatest advocate of the war, the current president of the USA, is looking for a way out of the mess. And the US public is just beginning to get wise that suppression of basic laws of privacy and habeas corpus are also a bad thing. Still, in the faint hope that we don’t repeat these mistakes in the future, it helps to point out a parallel between current events and somewhat less current events.

I have been living in Argentina for three years now. I arrived a few days after that arrogant US president who invaded Iraq was reelected. It was embarrassing to be seen as a part of all that. (Fortunately there are intelligent people anywhere who see me for who I am, rather than as a generic representative of my government.) But at the same time, I could point out to any Yanqui-hater that Argentina has not so clean a history, with a recent military dictatorship which kidnapped and murdered 30,000 of its own citizens. Though the “Dirty War” here was largely enabled by US administrations of Ford, Carter, and Reagan, it was primarily a homegrown operation.

In my three years in Argentina I am still learning about this dark chapter in time, and part of the lesson is that this chapter has not been completely closed. And the way the military dictatorship came to power here was not of brute force; it was openly supported by the mainstream population as a way out of an economic and social mess, and as a way to protect the country from a perceived threat of terrorists, communists, and disorder. The majority of the public trusted what the regime said and tolerated its sacrifices on liberties as a way to rescue the country. Only when they began to realize that those rumors of torture and assassination were more than just rumors did their support wane, and eventually the dictatorship failed seven years later.

Iraq Today vs. 1980’s Argentina

Yesterday I visited an exhibit of photojournalism, the winners of the World Press Photo awards. Amongst photos of soccer players and wild animals, were numerous images of conflicts in Africa, Asia; and more specifically, Iraq.

In particular, I was impressed by a series of photos of US soldiers conducting night raids of homes of suspected insurgents. I could not help but compare what I was looking at to the stories I have heard in Argentina about the military coming to homes under the same pretext, and taking sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers away to never return. They would be taken to clandestine detention centers to be tortured and killed. Today, the US government openly admits that in Guantanamo Bay the prisoners do not receive due process, so I can imagine that “detainees” in Iraq continue to suffer in secret many things at least as bad as what has been exposed in Abu Ghraib.

One set of statistics I read at the exhibit struck me:
3,000: Number of US military dead by the end of 2006
300,000: Average estimate of Iraqi’s killed in war through 2006. (estimates range from 55,000 to 650,000)

And in the Dirty War:
30,000: Number of Argentine citizens killed in the Dirty War

One final parallel: I hear daily the current US president defending the invasion of privacy and restrictions on the rights of detainees within and outside the country in the name of national security. Better to give up a little now to combat the threat of global terrorism. Well, a similar reasoning has been made by many powers in history, more than just by the Argentina dictatorship and President Musharraf in Pakistan.

My favorite from the World Press exhibit: Street dancers in Paris

In a country where a steak is cheaper than a tomato, a new president was just elected who happens to be the wife of the current president. She is also a prominent senator in her own right. The centrist Christina Fernendez Kirchner won with 45% of the national vote. And the price of the tomato is finally settling back down to earth.

For the election, I was in El Bolsón, in the mountains of Patagonia. Nothing special for the election except it was raining that day so instead of hiking we went to a microbrewery there and couldn’t drink beer cause they don’t sell on election day. Guillermo, my boyfriend who is Argentine, went to the Police station there to get a certificate to prove he was more than 500 km from his voting place and was exempt from voting. Back in Buenos Aires he has to do one more errand here to get a stamp on his ID in place of his vote so he doesn’t have problems with the law in the future.

Everyone expected Christina and her collagen engorged lips to win (I found a torn-out piece of her campaign poster of just her lips placed on my wall, and also made this collage of Puti, the cat on the right.). Though that she avoided a runoff was the only question. Elisa Carrí­o who won Buenos Aires on the Socialist ticket is a fat woman (who used to be much fatter) who Guille describes as an opportunist who aligns herself with whoever. My friend Patricio says he always votes for her even though she loses. Roberto Lavagna, who was the minister of the economy during the financial crash here and obviously had a hand in selling off the assets of the country to foreign corporations, for some reason got many votes in 3rd place with 17%. And Pino Solana, a popular film director here, made a decent showing.

Everyone here is just as cynical of the elections as in the US, if not more so considering this history of murderous military dictatorships and other forms of extreme corruption, and there is even more “chamuyo” (bullshit) in the campaigns, but at least it is much shorter and with fewer TV commercials than in the US. This entire election commenced and finished in the same time that passed just a single stage of fund raising in the US presidential presidential campaign, and that election is still a year away.

I shot over 300 pics on my recent trip to Salta and Jujuy, and this is one perspective of the landscape there:
Click here

This was a technical exercise in using Adobe Lightroom to process raw digital images. The slideshow itself was generated straight from Lightroom and then I tweaked it to fit this site.

This is the current chief of the government of Buenos Aires, and he is running for re-election. At first these ads seemed a mistake, but now I see that they are a strategy. (Photo by Katarina.) See the entire photo gallery.