Not the newest, but nevertheless essential reading: “The Courage of the Present,” an op-ed piece by Alain Badiou, originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano.

Read it here and here.

Bidoun and Anthology Film Archives present an encore screening of Ben Hayeem’s unmissable, unfathomable wonder. Born and raised in Bombay, Hayeem (1933-2004) made a number of well-regarded films and was close with experimental film pioneers Maya Deren and Slavko Vorkapich. Early in his career he joined the Living Theater group in New York and became the only Indian Jew to play a Chinese Priest with a Yiddish accent in a Brecht play. This comedic, cross-cultural experience must have set him down the path to the rather incredible and risque happenings in The Black Banana.

The original promotional notes inform us that, “In this zany, ribald Middle Eastern comedy, young Jews, Arabs and Texans revolt against the parental and conventional authority, represented by old-fashioned Jews, Arabs and Texans…Despite its message of peace and good will between Jew and Arab, The Black Banana has the distinction of being the only film ever banned in Israel because its mixture of nudity and religious satire offended the Israeli censorship board.”

The Black Banana will be preceeded by Ben Hayeem short films:
Papillote (1964, 10.5 minutes, 16mm)
Flora (1965, 6 minutes, 16mm)

Tuesday, December 22 at 8:00 PM
Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003

(This movie absolutely blew my mind, I cannot recommend it enough. DO NOT MISS!)

The Golden Age/Edad de Oro is a film that documents a season of the Golden Age League, a soccer league in Corona Park, Queens, New York. Not just any soccer league, the highly competitive Golden Age League is made up of middle-aged former professional players from mostly Central and South America.

You are invited to attend:

CONTRA MUNDUM VI
Sunday, October 4, 2009
7PM

The Enemy of All Mankind

Matthew Taylor Raffety, professor of History,
University of Redlands discusses pirates, piracy,
and the autonomy of the high seas.

The talk will be followed by a DJ set of related music by Jon Pestoni.

Mandrake
2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034
(between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd)

www.mandrakebar.com
www.osloeditions.com

If it isn’t already, worth putting on your reading list.
No doubt the conversation-starter of the fall.

At MIT Press
Downloadable PDF

Van der Weijde’s photographic project documents over 220 houses built in Germany between 1933 and 1945 in order to eventually provide a house for every working-class NSDAP member. In turn this ‘Siedlungpolitiek’ was both a powerful Nazi propaganda tool and a way to provide living space to loyal members. Most of these houses still exist, however unless one knows their full history they retain an unassuming normalcy.

Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History Of Modern and Contemporary Art In The Arab World / Part I_volume 1_chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992-2005)

A Project By Walid Raad

On view at REDCAT
April 10 - June 14, 2009

by Martin Fackler

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate.

And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term.

Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island.

Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Some jokingly take the analogy a step further, comparing themselves to a much more repressive family-run regime in Japan’s geopolitical neighborhood.

“Hime Island is North Korea, just a livable version,” Naokazu Koiwa said with a laugh. Mr. Koiwa, 32, repairs fishing boats.

Unsurprisingly, the current mayor, Akio Fujimoto, flatly rejects the North Korean comparison. Rather, he and most other islanders call Hime a repository for traditional Japanese values, like economic egalitarianism and social harmony. They say the rest of the nation has lost these in an embrace of more competitive capitalism, especially under the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-6.

“Our thinking is, ‘let’s all share the economic pie and get along, instead of giving all of it to the rich,’ ” said Mr. Fujimoto, whose father, Kumao Fujimoto, devised the work-sharing system in the 1960s. “Avoiding competition is the traditional Japanese way.”

Now, with the current crisis causing a national questioning of American-style laissez-faire economics, and business leaders and unions seeking alternatives to widespread job cuts, Hime’s work-sharing scheme is suddenly being held up as a new model. Islanders call it ironic that the current crisis has made traditional values appear progressive, even utopian.

Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status.

Dismayed by the inconsistent television reception across this mountainous island about half the size of Key West, the current mayor installed a free cable TV system that now reaches 97 percent of homes.

Even by clannish Japan’s standards, the island seems a friendly, close-knit place. Islanders cheerfully greet passing strangers. Roads, parks and even public toilets are immaculate. Doors are left unlocked, and the island has only one policeman.

Mr. Fujimoto also cites traditional attitudes to explain his own political longevity, a claim most islanders seem to accept. He says islanders shun public elections because of a deep-rooted abhorrence of confrontation. He said the last time the village held a mayoral election, in 1955, it split the island, creating ill feelings that took a generation to heal.

To avoid a repeat of such trauma, he said, the island decided to choose mayors by consensus, finding someone on whom everyone could agree beforehand. Last year, Mr. Fujimoto won his seventh straight four-year term, once again by default in an uncontested election.

“My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,” said Mr. Fujimoto, 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant.

Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. “That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,” he said.

Many islanders say Mr. Fujimoto is able to stay in office partly because of the reverence still felt here for his father, who lifted Hime from postwar poverty by turning it into a loyal source of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, which rewarded the island with generous public works.

“We have our own little personality cult,” said Shokai Dozono, a Buddhist monk who runs one of the island’s two temples.

The island and its mayor also have outside critics. Keizo Nagai, the ombudsman for Oita prefecture, which includes Hime, calls the island the least transparent local government in the prefecture. He criticized it for refusing to make information like detailed budget records available to non-islanders, which he attributed to a closed local culture rather than to a cover-up of wrongdoing.

“Hime Island acts like an independent kingdom,” Mr. Nagai said.

Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another.

“Everyone is basically satisfied,” said Shusaku Akaishi, 29, who works at his family’s gas station. “This is a conservative place.”

That conservatism is strong enough at times to annoy even Mr. Fujimoto. His biggest complaint is that traditional attitudes prevent him from extending family control of the mayor’s office for another generation, because he has only a daughter.

“Hime Island can’t be run by a woman,” he sighed. “This place is too medieval for that.”

via South Willard

Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social critic, talks about society, materialism, relationships, government, religion, and happiness. Interviewed by Mike Wallace. 3 part video.

Found from the blog my friend Shane Lester keeps. (Happy Birthday!)

by Randy Kennedy

Irving, Texas — Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.

But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.

Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.

If the arrest had come earlier, it might have had little effect on his life. But two years ago, Irving made a decision, championed by its first-term mayor, Herbert A. Gears, to conduct immigration checks on everyone booked into the local jail. So Mr. Urbina was automatically referred to the federal authorities and now faces possible deportation, becoming one of more than 4,000 illegal immigrants here who have ended up in similar circumstances.

As battles over illegal immigration rage around the country, Irving’s crackdown is not unusual in itself. What makes it striking is that it happened with the blessing of a mayor like Mr. Gears, an immigrant-friendly Democrat with deep political ties to the city’s Hispanic leaders, a man who likes to preach that adapting to immigration — especially in a city like his, now almost half-Hispanic — is not a burden but an opportunity, or as he says, it’s “not a have-to, it’s a get-to.”

But as a wave of sentiment against illegal immigration built around Dallas and the nation, Mr. Gears came to realize that his city would be unable to remain on the sidelines — and that his own political future would depend on how he navigated newly treacherous terrain.

Irving is one of a growing number of cities across America where immigration control, a federal prerogative, is reshaping politics at the other end of the spectrum, the local level, in the absence of a national policy overhaul. To watch its experiment play out over the better part of the past year in City Hall and in its residents’ lives is to see how difficult political moderation has become in the debate over what to do with the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Irving’s jail program was started by the city’s police chief as an experiment with federal immigration officials. But Mr. Gears saw in it a kind of release valve for the political pressure building around him, which had been energized by much more aggressive measures to force out illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, a smaller suburb next door.

“I let my instincts rule the moment in that instance,” he said. “What weighed heavily in my thoughts is that if we didn’t do something, a lot more immigrants were going to be hurt.”

“And now,” Mr. Gears added ruefully, “I’m the hero of every redneck in America.”

Nationally, most of the attention in the immigration fight has centered on smaller cities that have taken a hard line on illegal immigration, like Farmers Branch and Hazleton, Pa., or on cities that have moved to protect illegal immigrants, like San Francisco and New Haven.

Irving is one of the places with a growing percentage of illegal immigrants that has tried to take — Mr. Gears’s critics say has stumbled upon — a much less explored middle road.

As a first-ring suburb whose non-Hispanic white population has slipped from the majority in the last few years, Irving describes itself as a multicultural community. Under Mr. Gears, it recently opened a hospital clinic that caters to low-income patients, many of them Hispanic, and gave $100,000 to support its fledgling Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

But even as it was doing so, its policy on immigration checks prompted the Mexican consul in Dallas to issue an unusual warning to Mexican immigrants to stay clear of Irving. And businesses both Hispanic-owned and not, including Wal-Mart, began howling to the mayor that fear was driving away Hispanic customers.

Mr. Gears, 46, is a big, gregarious, politically agile Texan who won re-election last May against an opponent whose campaign promised much tougher immigration measures. The mayor describes the rise of such sentiment around him as disturbing, a manifestation of “domestic extremism,” and he derides its adherents as “the crankies.”

“We defeated the crankies, and no one thought we could,” Mr. Gears said of his re-election. “We’ve defined what our responsibility is, and that’s only to allow the federal government to do its job. It’s not our responsibility to evaluate it or assess whether it’s good or not.”

Mr. Gears happened to be making these points in a booth at his favorite local bar, where he was being served by his favorite waitress, a friendly mother of five — in the country illegally — whom he has known for years and tips lavishly to help her make ends meet.

He acknowledges that Irving’s policy, whose chief goal is to get rid of dangerous criminals who are in the country illegally, has resulted in “casualties,” with many people deported as a result of lesser, nonviolent offenses like driving without a license or insurance.

The police chief, Larry Boyd, said he believed that the city’s enviable crime rate (last year was its lowest on record) is at least partly due to the deportation program. “You will never hear me blaming Irving’s crime problems on illegal immigration,” Chief Boyd said. But he added that the program “keeps some criminals off of Irving’s streets longer and potentially keeps them off of Irving’s streets for good.”

The city’s political straddle on immigration has angered and confounded Mr. Gears’s opponents. Critics to the right accuse him of opportunism and of shirking his duty to legal residents. Advocates for the immigrants accuse him essentially of undercutting them.

But Mr. Gears’s position is one he seems to struggle every day to defend, said Carlos Quintanilla, a vocal advocate who, like many other Hispanic leaders, initially supported the jail program but now deplores it.

“I call Herb the most tormented man in America,” Mr. Quintanilla said.

The Hard-liners

Lucia Rottenberg, an Irving resident for almost 40 years, was upset in June 2007 when she stood at a City Council meeting in the amphitheater-like chambers at City Hall. Citing fears of crime, disease and economic harm to her city, Ms. Rottenberg called for tougher measures against illegal immigrants and bragged that her husband used his vacation time to volunteer with the Texas Minutemen, a contentious civilian group that tries to keep people from crossing the border illegally.

As she turned to leave the lectern, Mr. Gears leaned into his microphone and stopped her.

“I need to clear something up, because I was told something that was disturbing,” he said. “Were you at a meeting, a club meeting, where applause was given to the comment that anyone who comes over the border should be shot?”

Ms. Rottenberg, who has contributed to one of Mr. Gears’s campaigns and whom Mr. Gears said he considers a friend, confirmed she was at the meeting. “I don’t remember if there was applause or not,” she said, taken aback.

“Did you make that remark?” Mr. Gears asked.

“Yes, I did,” she admitted, her voice rising. “And my frustration is this — ”

Mr. Gears cut her short: “You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand.”

It was at that Council session that the city adopted the federal cooperation program for residency checks inside the jail. It was also a public turning point in the political reorientation of Mr. Gears, who spoke volubly, sometimes irascibly, in defense of the checks while trying to shame those he saw as using immigration to divide the city further.

“I viewed it as something that would be painful to some, and so that was distasteful to me,” Mr. Gears said later about the jail policy. “But we were in a battle here on this issue.”

Like many Texas cities its size, Irving was mostly white a generation ago, a farming town turned sprawling suburb as middle-class families flocked to its affordable neighborhoods.

In 1970, when the city’s population hit 100,000, the Census estimated that less than 5 percent was Hispanic. By 1990 the percentage had tripled, during the next decade it doubled, and it is now thought to be 45 percent or higher. In the fall of 2008, the last time a count was taken, 70 percent of the students enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade in Irving’s schools were Hispanic.

While no one knows exactly how much of that increase was a result of illegal immigration, Irving was one of several Dallas suburbs that experienced a huge influx of illegal workers as part of the wave that has tripled the nation’s illegal population since 1996. Officials estimate that more than 20 percent of Irving’s 200,000 residents may be in the country illegally.

A drive down North Belt Line Road, one of the city’s commercial spines, takes a visitor past a big Kroger grocery store whose next-door neighbor is a La Michoacana Meat Market almost its equal in size. Both stores sit not far from dozens of Hispanic restaurants, laundries, stores, auto-repair garages and curanderas, or psychics’ shops, scattered throughout the city’s south side.

Some white, longtime Irving residents say illegal immigration has done much more to erode than bolster the city’s older shopping strips and neighborhoods, its image and its property values. They complain to Mr. Gears about white flight from the Irving Mall and about well-kept older residential blocks marred by “patrón houses,” overcrowded single-family homes, clustered with cars, used as bunkhouses for illegal workers.

Beth Van Duyne, a city councilwoman who advocates tougher immigration policies and has battled Mr. Gears, likes to show visitors a favorite exhibit in her case, a hulking big-box store that was once a Wal-Mart. It is now called Irving Bazaar, a battered flea-market-like assortment of merchants with handmade window advertisements in Spanish for wrestling matches and cheap jewelry.

“People hate it,” Ms. Van Duyne said. “It’s just not a good thing to have in your city.”

Such discontent had been rising for years, though as recently as 2005, when Mr. Gears was elected to his first term, it remained well below the political surface. Sue Richardson, the vice president of the Greater Irving Republican Club and probably Mr. Gears’s most persistent opponent, said she believed that it had finally risen into view because many people realized Irving was in the midst of a “silent invasion” from Mexico.

“The people who come here illegally across the border are not educated people,” Ms. Richardson said. “They don’t have any culture or any respect for ours.”

A Political Career

Arriving one fall morning at a regular kaffeeklatsch of longtime residents — a mostly white group that once held court in a diner but, since it closed, has moved to a Mexican restaurant — Mr. Gears made his way around the table shaking hands and telling jokes. “This is where I cut my teeth,” he said. “These are the people who really run the place.”

He looks and often plays the part of a good old boy, a flamboyant dresser with flashy gold-rimmed eyeglasses and rings and cufflinks embossed with pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, who reminds him of his mother when she was young. Mr. Gears’s stamina and self-confidence as a talker can evoke a combination of used-car salesman and Southern Baptist preacher, though his fondness for vodka, Marlboro reds and easygoing profanity might disqualify him from the pulpit.

“You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I was known as Bubba when I was young,” he said. “Now when I go back to the country they call me Mayor Bubba.”

Mr. Gears makes a comfortable living running a financial consulting firm with his wife. But he owes his political career to the poor and the working class, both Hispanic and not. A pivotal issue in his first City Council campaign (the contests are nonpartisan, though Mr. Gears describes himself as a conservative Democrat) was his support for beleaguered mobile home residents, and the “trailer-house vote,” as he likes to call it, made the difference.

He could readily identify with those voters. He was born in East Texas to a deeply troubled mother who raised him and his two sisters mostly by herself while wrestling with poverty and drug addiction; she committed suicide at 63.

Mr. Gears clearly relishes the political life and thrives in it. He raised almost $100,000 in contributions in last year’s mayoral race, a huge sum for such suburban contests. But he says he has no higher political aspirations than perhaps to serve another term or two as mayor. He jokes that “the Democrats wouldn’t have me — especially now — and I wouldn’t have the Republicans.” Still, he counts among his backers powerful and wealthy real-estate developers, and his political options remain open.

In public, Mr. Gears reveals few hints of the internal turmoil that friends describe. His oldest Hispanic friends say they understand why he supports the jail policy but add that the position has always sat uncomfortably on the shoulders of a man who has long worked for Hispanic causes, including serving as president of a local nonprofit group that helps immigrants.

“I think the world of Herb,” said Platon Lerma, who is considered the grandfather of Irving’s Hispanic activists. But Mr. Lerma, 82, said he believed that the immigration checks had betrayed the mayor’s ideals.

“To me the program itself is a crime, in human terms,” he said. “We’re breaking up families. We’re not doing right in the eyes of God.”

But in the next breath he added that Mr. Gears had simply chosen “the best of several evils.” Hispanic residents of Irving do not vote in large numbers, Mr. Lerma explained, and it had become apparent that too many other voters were clamoring for immigration change.

If the election last year had gone to Mr. Gears’s closest opponent, a lawyer, Roland Jeter — who had warned that Irving was becoming a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants — it would have almost certainly sent the city down a more stringent path.

In his campaign, Mr. Jeter advocated joining a federal program that deputizes police officers as immigration agents. The program has resulted in large numbers of deportations in other cities, and has sometimes led them to initiate other aggressive measures to round up illegal immigrants.

Still, even the more passive approach taken by Irving soon became unpopular among Hispanics. In 2006, before the systematic jail checks began, local police officers were handing about 300 people a year to the federal government for immigration reasons. By the summer of 2007, as many as 300 people a month were entering immigration proceedings, and Mr. Quintanilla, the Hispanic advocate who only three months earlier had spoken in support of the policy at the City Council hearing, helped organize protests against it.

Mr. Gears soon found himself defending the approach on national television while trying to deflect blame toward those he believes are responsible for the problem.

“The complaint that people have with this program,” he said on CNN, “should be directed at the federal government.”

Restive Allies

Now, nearly a year after his re-election, Mr. Gears is still vilified by his conservative opponents while also facing a simmering rebellion from Mr. Quintanilla and other Hispanic leaders, who say the jail policy has unnecessarily damaged the lives of people who have had no serious run-ins with the law.

As of early March, of the 4,074 people whose arrest led to their being handed over to immigration officials, 129 had been charged with violent crimes or illegal possession of weapons, and 714 with other types of serious felonies. In addition, 579 had been charged with driving while intoxicated. The other 2,625 had been arrested for lesser offenses; the largest categories were public intoxication and not having a driver’s license or insurance.

If he were in charge of changing federal policy, Mr. Gears said, he would find a way to allow many illegal immigrants to move toward citizenship. It is a goal that was sought by President George W. Bush and now, in a similar plan, by President Obama.

For now, Mr. Gears is still smiling, still talking and still trying to be the mayor of all of Irving’s inhabitants, even those he knows might soon be gone, like Mr. Urbina, the illegal immigrant who now awaits a deportation hearing.

Not long before Mr. Urbina’s arrest, the mayor tossed out the first pitch at the opening of a Pony Baseball World Series for 9- and 10-year-olds, who had come to town from places as far away as Puerto Rico and Mexico. The event felt like a United Nations game, with national flags and food and blaring music. “Isn’t this great?” Mr. Gears said. “This is what Irving’s all about.”

Using his scant Spanish to throw around the occasional greeting, the mayor took his place on the field in his French-cuffed shirt, sweating alongside players from one of Irving’s teams, their names spelled out on the backs of their jerseys: Gomez, Conaway, Aleman, Shastid, Riker, Flores, Herrin, Childress, Ehrke, Rodriguez.

As the strains of the Puerto Rican anthem faded from the loudspeakers, Mr. Gears took the mound and wound up. His pitch was low, but the catcher scooped it up from the dirt, and the mayor walked off to generous applause.

“Fighting him is kind of like fighting against your brother,” Mr. Quintanilla said of his friend the mayor. “But you put your guard down, and the first thing you know you’re being hit in the face.”

Photograph by Michael Wells

Municipal de Fútbol is distributed by D.A.P.

by Nicholas Dawidoff

Some have had particularly bad experiences. In 1993, when Clinton addressed Congress to promote his health-care plan, the wrong speech was fed into the teleprompter. It took his aides a nightmarish seven minutes to fix the problem while Clinton winged it. Some thought he did better without the script.

Four years later, it almost happened again. A last-minute change to the State of the Union in 1997, made during the motorcade to the Capitol, somehow caused the entire text to be formatted as a single endless paragraph. As Clinton mounted the lectern, aides rushed through the text trying to reinsert paragraph breaks, finishing just as he started.

Even when Clinton had the right speech in the teleprompter, though, he often drifted so far from the prepared text that the operator controlling the tempo of the scrolling struggled to figure out where the president might reconnect with the script.

“The guy was like a fighter pilot, with a bead of sweat on his head, trying to land on the carrier…”

Who knows what’s what anymore? I don’t pretend to, that’s for sure. Nonetheless, here’s an interesting contrarian view to one of many fraught-with-complication African issues.

If you wear vegan products, take note: My friend and ex-studiomate Rachel’s animal-friendly crop of men’s dress shoes got a mention in the latest issue of VMan. Honestly, the only person who has gotten a good-looking vegan shoe right. And I’ve looked around harder than anybody out there, I guarantee.

Fellow TheBlowUp alumnus Kate Sennert is a founding member of this [currently] web project. I hope they update frequently.

THIS LONG CENTURY is an evolving index of passing thoughts, recommendations and personal observations. Represented are individuals working across highly imaginative fields: art, design, literature, science, theory, etc. This project seeks to expand the notion of creative discipline and provoke verbal and aesthetic exchange.

The International Institute of Social History (Dutch: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, abbreviation: IISG) is a historical research institute in Amsterdam. It was founded in 1935 by Nicolaas Posthumus. The IISG is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Illicit Haul: Colombian soldiers guard a semi-submersible captured last month with 1.6 tons of cocaine

by Chris Kraul

Reporting from Tumaco, Colombia — Squat, bull-necked and sullen-looking, Enrique Portocarrero hardly seems a dashing character out of a Jules Verne science fiction novel.

But law enforcement officers here have dubbed him “Captain Nemo,” after the dark genius of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” They say the 45-year-old has designed and built as many as 20 fiberglass submarines, strange vessels with the look of sea creatures, for drug traffickers to haul cocaine from this area of southern Colombia to Central America and Mexico.

Capping a three-year investigation that involved U.S. and British counter-narcotics agents, Colombia’s FBI equivalent, the Department of Administrative Security, arrested Portocarrero last month in the violent port city of Buenaventura, where he allegedly led a double life as a shrimp fisherman. (continued)

Thank Michael Jonathan · 12/14/08

Laibach, Life is Life from Opus Dei — a higher quality DVD rip.