Just listen to a Rage Against the Machine album and consider yourself fully informed about the struggle of the Zapatistas..ya know, just like about 10000 enraged youths in the US. Your reading should probably start w/ a biography of Che Guevera, since he's on the most and the coolest posters.
please, i have already read all the good stuff about che, i even read a book about a white guy who re-enacted his famous motorcycle trip. plus i know every rage song backwards and forwards. that was latin american revolutionary studies for beginners. now i want in-depth analysis.
I cant read! Right now reading the classifeds looking for a cheaper place to live, and a landlord that will allow me to sign a month to month lease.
I really haven't done a lot of reading in this area, but "Modern Latin American Revolutions" by Selbin is a pretty good overview that I read a few years ago when trying to figure out the Grenada thing. I was curious about differences in island revolutions versus continental ones. If I really wanted to understand the subject, I'd probably go all the way back to the revolutions of Juarez, Bolivar, and Villa. Thats a lot of reading that I will likely never get to with enough books already on my wish list to last me for decades.
thanks red. the modern one should be all i need. history bores me, i cant get into it. what fascinates me now is the culture of kidnappings. i think if you are famous or rich at all in latin america, there is an ok chance somebody you know is getting kidnapped. i think it is because the revolutionary groups need money, but i am not sure. i also think that bad drug laws in america create alot of the problems with revolutionaries and violence down there. i dunno really. but i will.
The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels Thomas Gold im halfway through this book and its excellent. wondering if any of you have read it. guy backs everything up with sufficient evidence. he argues convincingly that oil is not biogenic (produced by previously living organisms) but that its abiotic (by nonliving) and found at much deeper depths. mainly that oil is a byproduct of hydrocarbons and that they are found at extreme depths, especially methane, which continue to replenish the supplies in the crust. theory seems more factual than the fossil fuel hypothesis that i never really thought was very clear. my brief explanation surely gives it no justice. i remember this topic being tossed about here before so i may have to begin it again once im done.
thats fascinating. it is a subject i know nothing about, so i have no clue if that dude is right. if that guy is right, does that mean oil is less finite than we think? i just got a couple books. one is word freak, the story about some sort of scrabble competition, possible the world championships. i hope it is similar to the movie spellbound. quirky super smart people saying odd things. also i picked up "eats, shoots and leaves", the british book written by a woman about punctuation. finally, i picked up the end of faith, which is right in my wheelhouse because it is about exactly what i preach all the time, that to some extent, religious tolerance is kinda dangerous. oh boy am i gonna be the preached-to choir on that one.
if true it will revolutionize the way we think of many things...from global warming to seismology to creationism. darwinism may be thrown for a loop. he uses examples such as when the Swedes drilled in granite where no hydrocarbons could exist anywhere in that area yet oil was discovered. he asserts that life originated deep below the earth's surface and not within tidepools of water on the surface and how it stems to microrganisms in the crust . argues that earthquakes are likely the result of sudden, vast releases of gasses and not the plate-tectonic theory. cites evidence that early earth was not so hot and actually argues the opposite that earth was formed by a collection of cold, solid materials and not hot gaseous ones. earth initially lacked an atmosphere til it grew large enough to create its own gravitational field which then allowed it to capture molecules that escaped from the subsurface. follows it up questioning how this relates to other planets and whether extra terrestrial life exists in their subsurface. like an early earth i suppose. but yeah, if true oil is self-renewing. all pretty revolutionary thoughts to me. surprised at how simple and plausible it seems as he explains it.
regarding the replenishing oil theory, i believe that that has been the prevailing thought in Russia for a long time. i find that topic fascinating and will get the book and devour it. (edit: im not sure that the theory in the book is the exact same one as the Russians. But i do know that the Russians determined that Oil was derived from non-living things and was very replenishable.
