People send me a friend request on LinkedIn; I give them a history lesson.
(This was also published on my Medium account, which is way more interesting than LinkedIn.)
Exactly three years ago, I had outlined the way to detect terror suspects. Without racial profiling (which is illegal and doesn’t work), without torture (illegal and doesn’t work), carpet bombing (costly and cannot be applied in North America and Europe).
In an article called “Geeks are killing us,” I had pointed out that most terrorists had a background in natural sciences, engineering, maths or medicine. Almost none of them had a background in social sciences, literature or art. This, not someone’s nationality or religion, seemed to me the best indicator of someone’s future as a terrorist.
Listening to my warning would have prevented countless terror attacks since and saved hundreds of lives. Unfortunately, the guys working for American, French, Belgium and Turkish security services prefer to waste their online time on Facebook or playing poker instead of reading my anti-terrorism blog.
And so on, and so on.
I had already suggested three years ago that people who enjoy cutting people open or, even worse, dissecting dead bodies, can’t be normal. The longer they carry out that work, the more they regard humans as machines. Engineers and computer scientists of course study such courses because they prefer machines over humans anyway. None of these professions are known for their empathy (just think of Dr Radovan Karadžić or Dr Ben Carson).
I had also suggested back then that people in the social sciences, who regard humans as humans and technology as secondary, are much nicer and harmless. This will be a bit generalizing, but I have since noticed that people with technological backgrounds tend to be rather cold when it comes to discussing political or social issues. They immediately focus on the technical aspects, leaving the questions of values and ethics aside.
These findings have now been confirmed in an article in “The New Yorker”:
Exactly what I had written three years ago. Maybe this time, somebody will listen.
(Hat-tip to my reader 中本哲史, who not only came across the story in “The New Yorker,” but who remembered my three-year old article. I bet he is a geek, too.)
The way this sign has been hand-painted, somewhat askew and oblique, may give an indication as to how the advertised color copies will be produced.
(Photographed in Calle Sucre in Cochabamba, Bolivia.)
As soon as I had announced that I would move to Latin America, the unsolicited advice began knocking on my door. From all four corners of the world, the recommendations arrived, yet they were so identical as if they were based on one and the same script: “Go to Cuba before the Americans are coming!”
That warning carries on the romanticization of the only dictatorship in the Western hemisphere, which despite censorship, oppression, imprisonment and travel bans continuously evokes nothing more than images of old road cruisers (US-American models, mind you), palm trees, cigars, decaying houses and dancing people. I am sick of these high-gloss magazine articles from Havana, portraying a paradise, while opponents of the regime and journalists are roasting in Cuban prisons. Reading newspapers or books or watching the news apparently are not activities that any traveler to the Caribbean can be bothered with. Travel broadens the mind? Not like this.
When I inquire with the prophets of doom what specifically they fear from an opening of Cuba, the answer comes almost in unison: “Then even Havana will have a McDonalds and a Starbucks.” – Oh what a terrible thought! Of course this weighs more heavily than freedom of speech, freedom to travel and separation of powers. As far as I know, in no country with McDonalds restaurants is anyone being forced to eat there.
The culinary pessimists ultimately accept the suffering of a foreign population to satisfy their own desire for a museum island caught in the past. With the same argument, we could have denied the path to democracy, freedom and prosperity to one of the communist countries in Eastern Europe. (Eastern Germany because of its iconic nude beaches? Romania because of its cute orphans?) Maybe the United States could re-convert one of the far too many states into an antebellum Southern slave-owning state for the benefit of tourists and history aficionados? I guess Mississippi would lend itself to that.
It cannot be the purpose of human beings to remain poor and unfree for the edification of occasional visitors and consumers of TV documentaries.
The fact that both the Cuban government and the Cuban population have welcomed the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States should be food for thought even for Cuba apologists. And you can have this food for thought before any American fast-food chain will open their first franchise. The people in Cuba celebrated when they heard President Obama’s message about the resumption of diplomatic ties.
A Cuba Libre has a substantial part of Coca Cola. It’s not to its disadvantage at all.
On the lower right hand side of this blog you see a flag counter which records the number of visitors from each country. As of today, this blog has had visitors from 227 different countries. The US, Germany and the UK are the top three countries. (The distribution on my German blog is of course different.) From some countries, like Chad, Guinea-Bissau and North Korea, I have only had one visit so far (hello, Kim Yong-Un!). The latest region to be added to the list was Mayotte on 7 December 2015.
Some smart-ass will say “But there are only 193 countries in the world”, probably referring to the number of UN member states. But of course you don’t need to be a member of the UN in order to be a state; just take the examples of Taiwan or Kosovo. And then there are a number of disputed territories.
In any case, just click on the flag counter on the right hand side to get the details. If you dispute the independence of Kosovo or believe that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina, you can take your fight to the company that made this flag counter – or discuss it in the comment section below.
More interestingly, the flag counter also lists 15 countries from where my blog has not yet had a single visit.
The countries or regions that are still missing are:
Thinking about how this list will be reduced over time, I have been wondering: “Which country will be the last one to remain on this list?” Where will people refuse to read my writings until the bitter end? Or: where are people so happy that they don’t even think of wasting their time on the internet? – And I decided to make the promise (or threat) that I will visit the country which will be the last remaining one to have ignored my blog and I will then write and report extensively about it.
And because I know you love maps and flags, here is the world map with all the flags of the countries and regions from where I have had readers. Let the geography lesson begin!
The big one is the Andean condor from the Bolivian coat of arms. The small bird is thinking: “You may be big and strong and famous, but I am free to fly wherever I want.”
(Photographed at Plaza 14 de Septiembre in Cochabamba, Bolivia.)
To add an element of crowdfunding to this blog, I promised a postcard from South America to every contributor. Only when the first donations came in, I realized how hard it has become in 2016 to find postcards.
Only 10 years ago, you could purchase postcards at every airport, every train station, many small kiosks and often at the Post Office. And not only in larger cities, but in the smallest villages too. Now it has become an ordeal to find postcards even in huge cities or at famous tourist destinations. In Bolivia, I couldn’t find any at the UNESCO World Heritage sites El Fuerte and at the Jesuit church in San José de Chiquitas. When I asked for them at the museum in San José, I received a pitiful smile, like someone who has been living a few decades beyond his expiry date.
I know that everyone takes their own photos now, but you cannot print those and you cannot write on them. Oh, you just post your photos on Facebook? But that doesn’t have the same romantic effect like something written by hand, washed out by the rain, and arriving weeks later. And the exotic stamps which always reveal an interesting titbit about the country of dispatch! You aren’t interested in any of that? What a boring new world.
So fears were raised that I had made promises which I couldn’t keep and that the contracts would need to be rescinded due to the impossibility of performance. I made a last attempt in Cochabamba in Bolivia. I bothered shop after shop, to no avail. Museums? Nothing. Churches and monasteries? Nothing. My last stop was the tourist information at Plaza Colón. No postcards either. But a gentleman there gave me some hope: “The stationery shop in the arcades of Plaza 14 de Septiembre still has postcards. I believe so, at least.”
I found the shop, but saw no postcards between all the writing blocks, maps and gift-wrapping paper. Already completely disillusioned, I dared to ask with my last energy: “Do you maybe have postcards with photos of Cochabamba?” “Yes,” was the reply of the shop-owner who was alone in his store, “but they are already a little bit older.” I wouldn’t mind that at all, I explained jubilantly.
He climbed onto a wooden ladder and pulled out a small, brown box behind an old TV set on a lopsided wooden shelf. It was obvious that nobody had asked for postcards in years. When he opened the box, I caught sight of a time which I myself had not witnessed. The postcards were more than “a little bit older”.
This for example is the postcard showing the airport in Cochabamba.
“That airline doesn’t exist anymore,” he explained with regret and asked me if I knew the type of aircraft. The backside of the card unfortunately reveals no information on this, nor on the year the photograph was taken. I don’t know much about planes and only later research turned out that this was probably a Lockheed L-188 Electra. It was last produced in 1961, but it may of course have been operating far beyond that.
The postcards were all from the same time, I estimate it to be the 1960s, definitely not later than the 1970s. The uncle of the shop-owner had taken the photos and his nephew couldn’t imagine how happy I was that he had held on to the unsaleable merchandise over the decades.
This is La Paz:
This is Copacabana at Lake Titicaca.
He had many more cards, mainly with details of Cochabamba. We sifted through the whole box and I recognized some of the churches or the Palacio Portales of the Patiño Foundation, when a young man entered the shop and asked if they sell tinta. “What kind of ink?” the shop-owner asked. “For a printer cartridge.” Almost insulted, the stationery dealer said dismissively: “No, we don’t have things like that. You need to go to La Cancha market.” The whole shop hasn’t let gone of the past yet, but it’s good to know where I can refill my inkwell.
Speaking of La Cancha, of course there is a postcard of the market too.
But I wouldn’t have recognized that anymore. Now there are buildings everywhere and due to Cochabamba’s southward expansion, the market is now in the center of the city. Only the kind of products and the style of the cholitas have hardly changed.
I guess I don’t even need to mention that these postcards are the last of their kind and that they will soon yield sky-high prices at auctions. Get yours now!
If you have been thinking about climbing a mountain higher than 6,000 meters, but you still need some push towards getting your ass off the couch, this might motivate you.
These eleven ladies, aged between 20 and 50, climbed Huayna Potosí (6,088 m) in December 2015.
They are the wives of mountain guides and have been working as carriers for food and climbing equipment up to the base camp at 5,130 m altitude and as cooks. When more and more mountaineers asked the ladies what it’s like at the top, they thought “well, guess we finally have to check that out,” convinced their husbands to take take them, and went in their regular dresses. I particularly love the simple, colorful backpacks which consist of a piece of cloth which is folded on one’s back and gets tied at a knot in front of the chest. This is how cholitas go shopping in the markets, how they carry the merchandise they sell and how they carry children. And what’s good enough for carrying a child is good enough to climb a snowy peak. No reason to buy any fancy equipment. Too bad they had to take off their traditional hats at the summit because of the strong wind.
And even if you don’t want to climb a mountain yourself, you can use this story as a response when some of your friends are showing off about having climbed the Matterhorn (4,478 m) or Kilimanjaro (5,895 m): “Yeah, I saw some chubby, old Bolivian women, they climbed much higher. They didn’t try to make a big deal out of it.”
Photographed near San José de Chiquitos in Bolivia.
The hotel at which I stayed in San José de Chiquitos (I didn’t find any Couchsurfing host there) banned not only the indoor use of dogs, cats and cigarettes, but also of coca leaves.
This prohibition surprised me because coca leaves enjoy a special status under the Bolivian Constitution, whose Articles 33, 34 and 380-392 not only protect the environment as a whole, but whose Art. 384 protects one plant in particular. (Actually, Art. 392 para. 2 also grants special protection to the rubber tree and to the chestnut tree, if I translated that correctly. Heck, I am a lawyer, not a botanist.)
It sounds strange how sentence 2 of that article tries to equip a scientific fact (of which I don’t know how undisputed it is) with unassailable constitutional backing. Sentence 3 lets the truth shine through: It’s not about protecting the plant, but the business and the jobs derived from growing and harvesting coca. Maybe the constitution was, like so many other things in Bolivia, sponsored by Coca Cola.
I am generally skeptical of overburdening a state’s founding or governing document with too many details. This is often an attempt by a large parliamentary majority (usually 2/3) to enshrine in the constitution what should really belong in regular laws to protect it from being changed once that side loses their super-majority. In other words, it’s an attempt to govern beyond one’s elected term.
Not only in constitutions, but regarding regular laws and contracts, I am very skeptical when it comes to verbose language that is hard to nail down. When my clients want to insert some lofty principles or ideas into contracts, I always ask them: “How do you want to enforce that?”
The Bolivian Constitution with its 411 articles is a bad example of such useless verbosity, which helps no one, except law students searching for the topic of an equally verbose and useless PhD thesis. Take Art. 8 para. 1 for example:
So I don’t have the right to be lazy? Or does this only concern the state itself? But then what happens if its highest representatives turn out to be liars? In reality, nothing happens. Good law-drafting is like good writing: if it doesn’t add anything useful, take it out.
Reading on, it seems that Bolivia is indeed opposed to laziness. I personally cherish laziness, so I am happy that Art. 108 no. 5 only applies to Bolivian citizens.
It’s tough enough that working is an obligation, but the phrase “according to one’s physical and intellectual capacity” is a huge burden to people with my range of talents and skills. “According to my physical ability,” does this mean I have to become a movie star? Or a special forces sniper? No, because Art. 108 no. 4 says that I have to “encourage a culture of peace”. But wait, Art. 108 no. 12 says that boys have to serve in the army, although Art. 10 para. 1 states that “Bolivia is a pacifist state”.
Wow, this constitution is a mess. Someone must have been on more than coca leaves when they wrote that. And we haven’t even started to discuss my “intellectual capacity,” which obviously would lie in constitutional law, among a million other things. What if I am qualified to work as a lawyer, but I prefer to write a weekly funny column for the newspaper? Or plant potatoes? Would I fall short of using my “intellectual capacity”? Who decides? What would be the consequences? How could anyone force me to be “productive”? Who determines what is “socially useful”?
This part of the constitution is made scarier yet because of its eerie resemblance to Art. 12 of the Soviet Union’s Constitution of 1936: “In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.’ ” Coincidence?
Art. 108 no. 6 which I have included above is also cute. An obligation to go to university and obtain a degree, well, that’s a perfect excuse for all these farming and mining children who are forced by their parents to contribute to the family income. “I am sorry, Dad, I know we need the bread, but it is my duty to study anthropology for four years.”
Anyway, now you see why I don’t have friends: We started talking about drugs, which caught your interest, but I ended up discussing political philosophy and constitutional law. Well, I better go to La Cancha market now and get a bag of coca leaves. – But we all know that I will end up at the library instead.
“Eat your vegetables!” (How could I forget to put this into the constitution? Another referendum, quick!)
The Happy Hermit 