While suing a guy for illegal downloads, they also are trying to push that the CD’s he owns and ripped to MP3 for personal use are also illegal:
Mild santa ana winds
It is a little counterintuitive to open the windows in order to warm the house up, but strange are the ways of living in a 100 year old house with no heat. It was very cool last night (not far from freezing I’d guess), but gorgeous today. The sun is out and the canyon is green and perfumed with sage. I couldn’t ask for a nicer 23rd of December.
Pentecostals in Latin America
The CS Monitor has a great 3 part series on the explosive growth of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America. The first two parts, dealing mostly with Guatemala and Brazil are posted and have been quite interesting. I’m looking forward to the third.
As church lights dim across the US and Europe, Christian houses of worship are opening every day in Latin America. The majority of the new churches are Pentecostal, an expressive evangelical creed that emphasizes individual “gifts of the Holy Spirit.â€
“Renewalists,” a term that includes those belonging to Pentecostal denominations and “charismatics,” who have adopted the expressive worship services of Pentecostals but belong to Catholic or mainline Protestant churches, now make up an estimated one quarter of the world’s Christians, according to the World Christian Database. That number was just 6 percent 30 years ago….
Pentecostals across the region, most of whom considered themselves Catholics before, say they converted in order to tackle their problems, for a sense of community, or simply because Pentecostalism offered something that the rituals of the Catholic mass did not. Most Pentecostal services today are rollicking events that include 10-piece bands, movie screens, and emotional testimonials – a reflection of society’s preferences. It’s what Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, calls “bringing the fiesta spirit to church.”
Pentecostals have been particularly skilled at reaching out to the region’s poor, providing answers to the overwhelming problems their poverty provokes each day. The Catholic answer, in the 1960s, came in the form of “liberation theology,” a Marxist-tinged approach to addressing the needs of the oppressed. It had enthusiastic supporters across Latin America, but soon got wrapped up in cold war politics. Religious scholars often quip: “Liberation theology opted for the poor, and the poor opted for Pentecostalism.”
I’d guess the growth has also been strong in parts of the USA. Walking around my neighborhood on a Saturday or Sunday night one will hear plenty of spanish voices and the upbeat hymn-pop that accompanies the movement.
The city of my birth
(part of my notes from a few weeks ago)
For my flight out of Williams Lake there is the same number of airport security people as there are passengers. Bored out of their minds, they took the opportunity to test out all of their new tools – swabbing, testing, and probing my backpack and laptop for explosives and explosives residue. We sit in a little windowed area watching kids running around outside where we would soon be walking to the plane. Good thing security is tight.
I’m at this little airport because it was the easiest way to get to my grandmother. My mom and aunts have been there for a while taking care of her – she has had lung cancer for the last few years, and is nearing the end of her fight. Even while she lies in pain she possesses the ability to make a room erupt in laugher. I’ve never met someone so charming, it is little wonder she ran a busy cafe for decades. There are constant callers, in person, and on the phone. She handles them all with ease. I can only hope to have half the grace when it is my time.
With a population of about 11,000, the city doesn’t seem to have changed a huge amount. A lot of the town along the highway is the same, but the big box stores seem to have hit downtown hard. I suspect the walmart coming next year will finish it off. The old stampede sign is missing, but the event is still a big deal. The large number of keep your car secure signs suggest WL hasn’t dropped off the top spots for car theft in Canada – I’ve got a story about that I’ll have to type up some time. Economically the city seems to be a mixed bag, but I supposed that’s the way it has always been.
Forestry, lumber and pulp, still dominate the town. My family has been working in forestry related industry for at least three generations, probably even more than that when you expand out of the area. The wilderness is viewed in equal parts reverence and business – The forest is beautiful, but I can’t feed my kids with pine needles. Consolidation between multinationals has hurt quite a bit. Worker protections have evaporated, and it is not infrequent to hear of closures wiping out a town. Everyone is worried about the stronger Canadian dollar, or rather, a weaker US dollar.
The other concern is mountain pine beetle. You can see vast swaths of brown and red from this bug, turning valleys into tinder boxes. As my uncle says “It used to be that you looked for the red, now you look for the green”. The larvae kill the trees and bring a blue mold that will kill them if the bugs fail to do the job. The winters used to be cold enough to control the bug, but that isn’t happening these days, and probably will never again. Eventually a defense or a predator will emerge, but by that time it could be too late with moving climate zones. Trees here are very tall and slender, each trying to outgrow its neighbor to get the most of the limited sun. With growth taking decades, the idea of large swings is pretty scary – a lot of things won’t be able to keep up.
In some ways this place is a paradox to me. Everything seems to mirror my earliest memories, yet fundamental changes are underway.
Bailouts
This makes my blood boil: Bush to outline 5-year rate freeze plan
“…sources, who are familiar with details of the trade group’s pitch, said the plan envisions covering subprime loans taken out between January 1, 2005, through the end of this past July, with rates that are due to reset over the coming 2-1/2 years. An estimated 1.8 million U.S. homeowners who took out loans with low teaser rates face pricey loan resets next year alone, the Federal Reserve has said.”
A commenter on the story had this to say, and pretty much nailed my thoughts:
dear mr. president – i have been advised of a rent increase in my rental apartment – i can’t afford to pay the increase (and maintain my overextended lifestyle) but i wopuld like to stay anyway – do you think you could add a rider to your little mortgage rescue plan that saves my aprtment for me – thanks – oh and after that could you put a freeze on my cellphone bill – thats too high also.
I highly recommend reading Rich Toscano’s article at Voice of San Diego: The United States of Bailouts
The big news of late, however, is that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is putting together a plan in which some borrowers who took out adjustable-rate loans will have their rates frozen at the initial “teaser rate” so that they can continue to stay in the homes that, strictly speaking, they could never actually afford in the first place.
Will Paulson’s plan work? It might keep some people in their homes, but it doesn’t address the real long-term issue, which is that homes are still far too expensive in comparison to incomes. It also doesn’t address the real short-term issue, which is that there is a huge oversupply of houses for sale. For as long as homes are both unaffordable and in abundant supply, extending a teaser rate for five years won’t really have a big effect one way or the other. There is also a question of how many potentially defaulting borrowers will want to stay in their homes even if they can keep their teaser rates. They are still on the hook to pay the loan off eventually, after all — given that so many of them owe more than their homes are worth, it stands to reason that many borrowers will bail out of their loans whether they can scrape up the monthly payments or not.
…These policies punish the prudent, reward the reckless, and will in all likelihood cause more long-term problems than they solve. Similar efforts to fight off the effects of the stock market crash earlier in the decade were themselves a huge contributor to the housing bubble and, in turn, to the issues we now face. Policymakers have clearly not learned a single thing, and the most important thing they have not learned is that the systemic risk posed by a bubble can only be truly mitigated (rather than redirected somewhere else) before the bubble gets out of control, not after it has already burst.
Besides, most of these policies amount to an attempt to keep homes unaffordable. How exactly is that a good thing?