Category: The Dish

It’s likely to follow in the soccer tournament’s wake:

The host country has been producing 30% more TV sets than last year, according to the Asociação Nacional de Fabricantes de Produtos Eletrônicos (National Association of Electronics Producers)—which means that, by the end of this year, Brazil will have between 18-20 million more TVs than when it started. By May, over half of them had been sold to giddy Brazilians in anticipation of seeing their team, the big favorites, win the sixth World Cup of its history in high definition.

The paixão pelo futebol, as they say in Brazil of their passion for soccer, might have unexpected effects. For every new TV set that comes into a Brazilian home, an old one usually goes out. A study by the World Bank pointed out that Brazil currently produces 14 lbs. of electronic waste per person every year, which makes it the leader in this type of garbage in Latin America. And it is rising: the government expects the amount will go up to 17.5 lbs per person by 2015. Television sets account for the largest type of e-waste in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the strain on Brazil’s power grid is requiring it to burn more fossil fuels:

According to Ildo Luís Sauer, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the University of São Paulo, there’s “a chance” a blackout could occur in the country during the World Cup due to a “critical situation of excess demand” on the national electricity grid. “Usually, in Brazil, during World Cup hours — especially during evening games — you have a composition of huge demand because everyone is at home watching them,” he said.

But it is a risk that the sprawling country seems unwilling to take. Javier Diaz, a senior energy analyst at Bentek, said Brazil is attempting to preserve hydro inventory levels by importing and burning more liquefied natural gas, “especially with the [arrival of the] World Cup.” “Brazil’s monthly LNG imports broke new records in February and March, importing 95 percent and 76 percent more than in 2013,” he said in an email. In fact, the country is currently firing all of its thermal power plants — LNG, coal, diesel and fuel oil — said Sauer, who added that it’s “quite unusual.”

Finally, Thomas Brewster reports that Anonymous hackers are launching an all-out assault on FIFA, World Cup sponsors, and the Brazilian government:

Anonymous is irate at the Brazilian government for spending hundreds of millions on stadiums and infrastructure for the World Cup, rather than funnelling funds into the poorest parts of the country. It’s launching digital attacks to coincide with the street protests that erupted across the South American country this week, which have highlighted the abject poverty and governmental abuse of citizens in Brazilian cities and favelas.

A representative of the collective told Reuters they planned to launch attacks on other big-name sponsors, including Adidas, Budweiser, Coca-Cola and Sony, yet they seem to have had limited success with those large organisations so far. That’s likely because they’re used to DDoS attacks and have the resources to fend them off. DDoS threats can be dealt with by various techniques. One method is to use “scrubbing,” where massive influxes of data are split between data centres to ease the pain. Another is to use DDoS detection technology, which picks up on huge surges of traffic and allows the user to quickly block connections from offending IP addresses.

Previous Dish on Brazil’s World Cup woes here.

Dahlia Lithwick worries that retention elections for state supreme court justices are becoming more and more politicized, particularly with the help of outside money:

Knocking off a state supreme court justice is one of the cheapest political endeavors going. It costs a few measly million bucks to buy a judge’s robe, which is vastly cheaper than a Senate campaign. But when politicians target elected judges and justices with political claims using political tactics (big money and inaccurate accusations), judges are forced to either respond like politicians or judges. Opting to do the former destroys the notion of impartial justice. Opting for the latter ends judicial careers.

And now here we go again.

Three justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court are facing an election-year attack, not for any particular decision they have authored or even for any unpopular opinion they have espoused. No, in an ugly campaign in Tennessee that appears to be getting ever uglier, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor, is attempting to oust three state Supreme Court justices in their Aug. 7 retention elections, chiefly for the judicial outrage of having been appointed to the high court by a Democrat. Under Tennessee law, the governor appoints Supreme Court justices, and then they come up for retention elections every eight years thereafter. This is a pretty common set-up in states that elect their justices.

A new approach to combating the cocaine trade, embedded in peace talks between the Colombian government and FARC rebels, raises the hopes of Oliver Kaplan that “the drug war may soon be coming to an end”:

In early May, negotiators from the Colombian government and the rebel group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) reached an agreement on drug trafficking as part of their effort to end the country’s 50-year old conflict. Shifting away from old, controversial methods like crop fumigation, the new deal focuses on substituting crops, taking on organized crime and cartels, and treating drugs as a public health issue to treat addicts and reduce demand. It’s a historic move — and good news for President Juan Manuel Santos, who faces an increasingly popular opposition candidate in second-round elections on June 15.

Santos’ re-election yesterday bodes well for the peace process, which his opponent had threatened to halt:

Santos got 53 percent of the votes for candidates, against 47 percent for right-wing challenger Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, the hand-picked candidate of former two-term President Alvaro Uribe, who many considered the true challenger. More than 600,000 voters cast “blank” ballots, a protest vote for neither candidate. Zuluaga and Uribe accused Santos of selling Colombia out in slow-slogging Cuba-based negotiations, and said Zuluaga would halt the talks unless [FARC] ceased all hostilities and some of its leaders accepted jail time. Santos said the win affirmed his claim to be ably steering Colombia through a historic moment — out of a crippling conflict that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, mostly civilians.

But if coca cultivation in Colombia declines, Reid Standish suspects that Peruvians will increase theirs:

Drug researchers call this the “balloon effect” — where pressure from the authorities in one country or region pushes drug production elsewhere. Squeezing the balloon at one end causes drug producers to compensate and expand into another. Since the U.S.-led war on drugs began in the 1980s, the balloon effect has shaped the cocaine trade.

In 2013, fumigation and forced eradication of coca crops in Colombia finally hit a turning point and the South American nation bequeathed its crown as the world’s top coca producer to its neighbor, Peru. Both the United States and the U.N. declared it a milestone. Unsaid was that the Colombian government’s efforts to crack down on production — in part under the banner of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed effort to combat left-wing guerrillas and drug traffickers — simply shifted production to Peru.

Colombia and Peru have swapped the coca-producer champion crown for decades. In the mid-90s Peru launched an intense eradication campaign and Colombia was back on top. In 1990, Colombia was only responsible for 19 percent of the global coca market, behind top producers Bolivia and Peru. By 1997, it was the world’s top producer. See the pattern here?

Every June 16, fans of James Joyce celebrate his famously demanding Ulysses, which takes place on this day in 1904. Jonathan Goldman assures revelers that the point of celebrating Bloomsday “is to recognize the stature of a book without necessarily comprehending it. All you need to understand is its un-understandability.” Dan Chiasson explains why the date particulary appealed to Joyce:

By setting the novel on the day his first inklings of it formed, Joyce ensured that the book would always be, whatever else it would be, a book about its own conception and growth. He had dreamed of writing “Ulysses” since at least 1904, the year two things happened:

a Dublin Jew named Alfred Hunter dusted him off after a brawl and walked him all the way home; and a beautiful barmaid, Nora Barnacle, on their first date—the first Bloomsday—slid her hand “down down inside my trousers,” as Joyce reminded her, later, in a letter, “and pulled my shirt softly aside … and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and frigged me slowly till I came off through your fingers.”

Each of these courtesies was performed by a stranger for a stranger, though Nora would become Joyce’s lifelong companion and eventual wife. Neither one was an act of specific personal connection or love. Kindness, sexual willingness, patience, forbearance, and especially “equanimity”—that beautiful word that so comforts [character Leopold] Bloom in the end, and perhaps the most important word in the novel—all exist quite independent of personal bonds and the private economies of friendship, family, and marriage. That these lovely traits exist outside of the exchange market of human frailties—that they exist at all, in fact—would have been news to Henry James or, for that matter, to Jane Austen; it is almost hard to conceive of the novel as a genre without the idea that human virtues are always tactical, and spent with the expectation of handsome returns. It may sound sappy, but for me “Ulysses” is chiefly valuable as the most moving tribute in literature to kindness.

Jason Diamond offers tips on how to celebrate the occasion “without totally embarrassing yourself”:

The first, and most important thing, of course, is drinking. If you’re an American, then congratulations — this is one of those rare instances when you can accept a pint of beer in an Irish pub with a hearty “Cheers,” and not have it sound touristy and amateurish.

What do you order? Obviously, there’s always Guinness, but consider this delicious act of sacrilege: change things up this year and drink something like Left Hand’s wonderful Milk Stout. Your beer, of course, should also be accompanied by a whiskey, and this is where you can’t accept any substitutes. No Kentucky bourbon, no scotch from Scotland: Irish whiskey only. So if somebody says they’re getting a Jameson on the rocks, you had better order the same damn thing. To be honest, you could, in theory, get away with drinking anything today — but we’d suggest is you stay away from cider, since that stuff made Bloom gassy. The most important thing is to get at least a solid two drinks in your belly before you’ll be ready for a reading from the book itself.

But James S. Murphy considers such celebrations a “travesty”:

It would be nice to think that swelling readership of Ulysses drives the Bloomsday boom, but it’s more likely that Bloomsday provides an opportunity for cultural validation that’s about as substantial as sharing an author quote on Instagram. Reading Ulysses is a slow, immersive, and ultimately private experience; Bloomsday is a social-media-ready event, where like-minded people convene to celebrate their own taste.

And yet, the silliness might not have bothered Joyce so much. If anything, the aspect of Bloomsday that would have bothered him is its holiness.  Bloomsday celebrations treat Joyce too much like a saint and his book too much like a gospel to be revered first and read later, if at all. By placing Ulysses on a pedestal, we lose sight of both its vulgar origins and its power to tell us deep truths about our world and ourselves precisely by keeping the earthy and obscene aspects of ourselves in view.

Listen to Joyce fans around the world read from the book here. Recent Dish on the author here, here, and here.