January 27, 2006 [LINK]

"World Social Forum" opens

The 2006 "World Social Forum" has just commenced in Caracas, Venezuela. Hugo Chavez has allocated many millions of dollars (thanks in part to you, if you buy gasoline from CITGO) to support the protests against U.S. capitalist "imperialism." Cindy Sheehan, whose 15 minutes of fame already expired back home, declared that President Bush "is really waging a war of terrorism against the world." See CNN.com. That's not very nice; Cindy has just qualified for my List of Unmentionable Wackos! I learned from the folks at indymedia, however, that there are actually three separate "World Social Forums" this year, the other two being in Bamako, Mali and Karachi, Pakistan. This/these event/events is/are an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ironically, I share the lefty folks' belief that "Another World is Possible," but my imagined utopia is one of freedom from the soul-crushing bonds of statism.

"New" photos from Peru

Following up on my recent work in assembling photographic images from video clips taken during our trip to Costa Rica last year (see Jan. 24), I have done likewise with video clips from our trip to Peru, which was two years ago! As a result of my labors, there are two brand new pages:
Cuzco and countryside Part II and
Lima & Ventanilla Part II,
with a total of 19 images. As with the video freeze frames from Costa Rica, there are many dramatic scenes of the varied countryside -- ranging from lush and green to completely barren -- as well as some interesting photos of everyday life in Peru. To keep all that under some semblance of order, I created a new central page (Peru, 2004) to access any of the five photo gallery pages from our 2004 Peru vacation. It includes those two new thumbnail montages, plus a new one for the reorganized Peru wild birds page.

Photos from Mexico

But that's not all! While I was at it, I also reorganized the photo gallery pages from our trip to Mexico three years ago. That was before we had a digital camera, and I was inconsistent in the way I scanned all the photo prints. There are no new photos, but I have edited quite a number of them to enhance clarity. I have likewise put them in a more logical order among the three photo gallery pages, all of which can be accessed from the new Mexico, 2003 page.