The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Billy Collins:
Two poems about what dogs think (probably)
TED2014 · Filmed Mar 2014
What must our dogs be thinking when they look at us? Poet Billy Collins imagines the inner lives of two very different companions. It’s a charming short talk, perfect for taking a break and dreaming …
Transcript:
I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs. Do they think, do they feel and, if so, how? So this afternoon, in my limited time, I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs, both of whom have taken the command "speak" quite literally.
The first dog is the first to go, and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner, and the title is "A Dog on His Master."
"As young as I look, I am growing older faster than he. Seven to one is the ratio, they tend to say. Whatever the number, I will pass him one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods, and if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass."
(Applause)
Thank you.
And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant, which means a spirit that comes back to visit you.
"I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you." (Laughter) "When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. When I watched you toweling yourself dry, I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap. I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace, the way you would sit in a chair to eat, a napkin on your lap, a knife in your hand. I would have run away but I was too weak, a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and, greatest of insults, shake hands without a hand. I admit the sight of the leash would excite me, but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched. You do not want to believe this, but I have no reason to lie: I hated the car, hated the rubber toys, disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives. The jingling of my tags drove me mad. You always scratched me in the wrong place." (Laughter) "All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls. While you slept, I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky. It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl. Now, I am free of the collar, free of the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater, the absurdity of your lawn, and that is all you need to know about this place, except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner, that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose."
Thank you.
(Applause)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
REL/GralInt-TED Talks-Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Kwame Anthony Appiah:
Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)
TEDSalon NY2014 · Filmed May 2014
Plenty of good things are done in the name of religion, and plenty of bad things too. But what is religion, exactly — is it good or bad, in and of itself? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a generous, surprising view.
Transcript:
People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion.
Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it.
What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with.
So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.
Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)
And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God.
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity.
Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way.
But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition."
So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity?
Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion.
This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play.
And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this.
And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure.
So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened.
Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not -- This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role.
So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true.
(Applause)
Kwame Anthony Appiah:
Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)
TEDSalon NY2014 · Filmed May 2014
Plenty of good things are done in the name of religion, and plenty of bad things too. But what is religion, exactly — is it good or bad, in and of itself? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a generous, surprising view.
Transcript:
People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion.
Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it.
What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with.
So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.
Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)
And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God.
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity.
Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way.
But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition."
So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity?
Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion.
This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play.
And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this.
And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure.
So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened.
Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not -- This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role.
So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true.
(Applause)
LANG/DICT/GralInt-TED Talks-Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Anne Curzan:
What makes a word "real"?
TEDxUofM · Filmed Mar 2014
One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.
Transcript:
I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is.
When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, "Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make." And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, "You are just the person I want to talk to." And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. (Laughter)
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook, and he said, "To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?"
I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb "defriend" means, so when does a new word like "defriend" become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? Those are the questions I want to talk about today.
I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?
Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. I do not write dictionaries. I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research." When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including "hangry," which -- (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and "adorkable," which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. (Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary?
With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okay, so that looks like most of you. Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okay, many fewer. At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers.
Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once.
Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who comes can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been "tweet" in 2009 and "hashtag" in 2012. "Chad" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and "WMD" in 2002.
Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included "recombobulation area," which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. (Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is "multi-slacking." (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. (Laughter) (Applause)
Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was "Plutoed," to mean demoted. (Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as "app" and "e" as a prefix, and "google" as a verb.
Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language?
The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that "desirability" is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word "colonize" as bad.
Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says "as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick." (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee.
These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable -- (Laughter) -- but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "LOL" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "defriend" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing concern about "invite" as a noun, "impact" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and "incentivize" is described as "boorish, bureaucratic misspeak."
Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note.
Think about the word "peruse" and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pour over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say "usage problem." (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at.
So here's the usage note: "Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly' ... But the word if often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.' ... Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011."
Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, "Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? And what should I do with their pronouncements?" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. As of 2005, the list includes me. (Applause)
Here's what we can do for you. We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. That is and should be the extent of our authority. We are not a language academy. About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable.
Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. I listen to what other people are saying and writing. I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. I will be honest with you: I do not like the word "impactful," but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether "impactful" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. Well, if you look for "impactful" in Google Books, here is what you find. Well, it sure looks like "impactful" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years.
Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. There are going to be changes where you think, "Really? Does the language have to change that way?" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word "nice" used to mean silly, and that the word "decimate" used to mean to kill one in every 10. (Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about "notice" as a verb. Well, you know what? We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about "impact" as a verb and "invite" as a noun. The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. Language just doesn't work that way. I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust.
So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, "But that lets all of us decide what words mean," I would say, "Yes it does, and it always has." Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Anne Curzan:
What makes a word "real"?
TEDxUofM · Filmed Mar 2014
One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.
Transcript:
I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is.
When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, "Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make." And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, "You are just the person I want to talk to." And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. (Laughter)
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook, and he said, "To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?"
I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb "defriend" means, so when does a new word like "defriend" become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? Those are the questions I want to talk about today.
I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?
Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. I do not write dictionaries. I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research." When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including "hangry," which -- (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and "adorkable," which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. (Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary?
With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okay, so that looks like most of you. Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okay, many fewer. At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers.
Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once.
Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who comes can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been "tweet" in 2009 and "hashtag" in 2012. "Chad" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and "WMD" in 2002.
Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included "recombobulation area," which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. (Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is "multi-slacking." (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. (Laughter) (Applause)
Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was "Plutoed," to mean demoted. (Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as "app" and "e" as a prefix, and "google" as a verb.
Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language?
The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that "desirability" is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word "colonize" as bad.
Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says "as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick." (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee.
These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable -- (Laughter) -- but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "LOL" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "defriend" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing concern about "invite" as a noun, "impact" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and "incentivize" is described as "boorish, bureaucratic misspeak."
Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note.
Think about the word "peruse" and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pour over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say "usage problem." (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at.
So here's the usage note: "Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly' ... But the word if often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.' ... Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011."
Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, "Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? And what should I do with their pronouncements?" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. As of 2005, the list includes me. (Applause)
Here's what we can do for you. We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. That is and should be the extent of our authority. We are not a language academy. About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable.
Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. I listen to what other people are saying and writing. I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. I will be honest with you: I do not like the word "impactful," but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether "impactful" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. Well, if you look for "impactful" in Google Books, here is what you find. Well, it sure looks like "impactful" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years.
Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. There are going to be changes where you think, "Really? Does the language have to change that way?" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word "nice" used to mean silly, and that the word "decimate" used to mean to kill one in every 10. (Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about "notice" as a verb. Well, you know what? We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about "impact" as a verb and "invite" as a noun. The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. Language just doesn't work that way. I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust.
So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, "But that lets all of us decide what words mean," I would say, "Yes it does, and it always has." Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real.
Thank you.
(Applause)
LANG/GralInt-TED Talks-Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Jamila Lyiscott:
3 ways to speak English
TEDSalon NY2014 · Filmed Feb 2014
Jamila Lyiscott is a “tri-tongued orator;” in her powerful spoken-word essay “Broken English,” she celebrates — and challenges — the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be “articulate.”
Transcript:
Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells
And announced that I'm "articulate"
Which means that when it comes to annunciation and diction
I don't even think of it
‘Cause I’m "articulate"
So when my professor asks a question
And my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion
There’s no misdirected intention
Pay attention
‘Cause I’m “articulate”
So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?”
My “articulate” answer never goes amiss
I say “father, this is the impending problem at hand”
And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I can
So when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?”
I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!”
And sometimes in class
I might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask
“Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples”
Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equals
Because I’m “articulate”
But who controls articulation?
Because the English language is a multifaceted oration
Subject to indefinite transformation
Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English
But I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British
So when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello”
I stop him and say “Noooo …
You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’”
Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not cool
But I’m here to tell you that even our language has rules
So when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store”
I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the law
Never does the word "madd" go before a present participle
That’s simply the principle of this English”
If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop,
From every suburbia, and every hood
‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis
Of this world saying “it is good"
So I may not always come before you with excellency of speech
But do not judge me by my language and assume
That I’m too ignorant to teach
‘Cause I speak three tongues
One for each:
Home, school and friends
I’m a tri-lingual orator
Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now
Then switch it up so I don’t bore later
Sometimes I fight back two tongues
While I use the other one in the classroom
And when I mistakenly mix them up
I feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroom
I know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen
But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is broken
These words are spoken
By someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season
And the reason I speak a composite version of your language
Is because mines was raped away along with my history
I speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind us
That our current state is not a mystery
I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad
So unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair bad
I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity
So don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charity
As much as has been raped away from our people
How can you expect me to treat their imprint on your language
As anything less than equal
Let there be no confusion
Let there be no hesitation
This is not a promotion of ignorance
This is a linguistic celebration
That’s why I put "tri-lingual" on my last job application
I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know
And when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show that
I can say:
“What’s good”
“Whatagwan”
And of course …“Hello”
Because I’m “articulate”
Thank you.
(Applause)
Jamila Lyiscott:
3 ways to speak English
TEDSalon NY2014 · Filmed Feb 2014
Jamila Lyiscott is a “tri-tongued orator;” in her powerful spoken-word essay “Broken English,” she celebrates — and challenges — the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be “articulate.”
Transcript:
Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells
And announced that I'm "articulate"
Which means that when it comes to annunciation and diction
I don't even think of it
‘Cause I’m "articulate"
So when my professor asks a question
And my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion
There’s no misdirected intention
Pay attention
‘Cause I’m “articulate”
So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?”
My “articulate” answer never goes amiss
I say “father, this is the impending problem at hand”
And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I can
So when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?”
I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!”
And sometimes in class
I might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask
“Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples”
Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equals
Because I’m “articulate”
But who controls articulation?
Because the English language is a multifaceted oration
Subject to indefinite transformation
Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English
But I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British
So when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello”
I stop him and say “Noooo …
You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’”
Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not cool
But I’m here to tell you that even our language has rules
So when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store”
I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the law
Never does the word "madd" go before a present participle
That’s simply the principle of this English”
If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop,
From every suburbia, and every hood
‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis
Of this world saying “it is good"
So I may not always come before you with excellency of speech
But do not judge me by my language and assume
That I’m too ignorant to teach
‘Cause I speak three tongues
One for each:
Home, school and friends
I’m a tri-lingual orator
Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now
Then switch it up so I don’t bore later
Sometimes I fight back two tongues
While I use the other one in the classroom
And when I mistakenly mix them up
I feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroom
I know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen
But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is broken
These words are spoken
By someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season
And the reason I speak a composite version of your language
Is because mines was raped away along with my history
I speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind us
That our current state is not a mystery
I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad
So unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair bad
I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity
So don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charity
As much as has been raped away from our people
How can you expect me to treat their imprint on your language
As anything less than equal
Let there be no confusion
Let there be no hesitation
This is not a promotion of ignorance
This is a linguistic celebration
That’s why I put "tri-lingual" on my last job application
I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know
And when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show that
I can say:
“What’s good”
“Whatagwan”
And of course …“Hello”
Because I’m “articulate”
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Ruth Chang: How to make hard choices
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ruth Chang:
How to make hard choices
TEDSalon NY2014 Filmed May 2014
Here's a talk that could literally change your life. Which career should I pursue? Should I break up — or get married?! Where should I live? Big decisions like these can be agonizingly difficult. But that's because we think about them the wrong way, says philosopher Ruth Chang. She offers a powerful new framework for shaping who we truly are.
Transcript:
Think of a hard choice you'll face in the near future. It might be between two careers, artist and accountant, or places to live, the city or the country, or even between two people to marry. You could marry Betty or you could marry Lolita. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, to have an ailing parent move in with you, to raise your child in a religion that your partner lives by but leaves you cold. Or whether to donate your life's savings to charity.
Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing, hand-wringing, the gnashing of teeth. But I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses.
What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In any easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. You agonize over whether to stay in your current job in the city or uproot your life for more challenging work in the country because staying is better in some ways, moving is better in others, and neither is better than the other overall. We shouldn't think that all hard choices are big. Let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast. You could have high fiber bran cereal or a chocolate donut. Suppose what matters in the choice is tastiness and healthfulness. The cereal is better for you, the donut tastes way better, but neither is better than the other overall, a hard choice. Realizing that small choices can also be hard may make big hard choices seem less intractable. After all, we manage to figure out what to have for breakfast, so maybe we can figure out whether to stay in the city or uproot for the new job in the country.
We also shouldn't think that hard choices are hard because we are stupid. When I graduated from college, I couldn't decide between two careers, philosophy and law. I really loved philosophy. There are amazing things you can learn as a philosopher, and all from the comfort of an armchair. But I came from a modest immigrant family where my idea of luxury was having a pork tongue and jelly sandwich in my school lunchbox, so the thought of spending my whole life sitting around in armchairs just thinking, well, that struck me as the height of extravagance and frivolity. So I got out my yellow pad, I drew a line down the middle, and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative. I remember thinking to myself, if only I knew what my life in each career would be like. If only God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers, I'd be set. I'd compare them side by side, I'd see that one was better, and the choice would be easy.
But I got no DVD, and because I couldn't figure out which was better, I did what many of us do in hard choices: I took the safest option. Fear of being an unemployed philosopher led me to become a lawyer, and as I discovered, lawyering didn't quite fit. It wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher, and I study hard choices, and I can tell you that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It's a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we're too stupid to know which, and since we don't know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option.
Now, if there's no best option, if the scales don't tip in favor of one alternative over another, then surely the alternatives must be equally good, so maybe the right thing to say in hard choices is that they're between equally good options. That can't be right. If alternatives are equally good, you should just flip a coin between them, and it seems a mistake to think, here's how you should decide between careers, places to live, people to marry: Flip a coin. There's another reason for thinking that hard choices aren't choices between equally good options.
Suppose you have a choice between two jobs: you could be an investment banker or a graphic artist. There are a variety of things that matter in such a choice, like the excitement of the work, achieving financial security, having time to raise a family, and so on. Maybe the artist's career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of pictorial expression. Maybe the banking career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of financial manipulation. Imagine the two jobs however you like so that neither is better than the other.
Now suppose we improve one of them a bit. Suppose the bank, wooing you, adds 500 dollars a month to your salary. Does the extra money now make the banking job better than the artist one? Not necessarily. A higher salary makes the banking job better than it was before, but it might not be enough to make being a banker better than being an artist. But if an improvement in one of the jobs doesn't make it better than the other, then the two original jobs could not have been equally good. If you start with two things that are equally good, and you improve one of them, it now must be better than the other. That's not the case with options in hard choices.
So now we've got a puzzle. We've got two jobs. Neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. So how are we supposed to choose? Something seems to have gone wrong here. Maybe the choice itself is problematic and comparison is impossible. But that can't be right. It's not like we're trying to choose between two things that can't be compared. We're weighing the merits of two jobs, after all, not the merits of the number nine and a plate of fried eggs. A comparison of the overall merits of two jobs is something we can make, and one we often do make.
I think the puzzle arises because of an unreflective assumption we make about value. We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight. Take any comparative question not involving value, such as which of two suitcases is heavier? There are only three possibilities. The weight of one is greater, lesser or equal to the weight of the other. Properties like weight can be represented by real numbers -- one, two, three and so on -- and there are only three possible comparisons between any two real numbers. One number is greater, lesser, or equal to the other. Not so with values. As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can't. We shouldn't assume that the world of is, of lengths and weights, has the same structure as the world of ought, of what we should do. So if what matters to us -- a child's delight, the love you have for your partner — can't be represented by real numbers, then there's no reason to believe that in choice, there are only three possibilities -- that one alternative is better, worse or equal to the other. We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what's going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are "on a par." When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard.
Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn't know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there's always a best alternative. If there's a best alternative, then that's the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. In such a world, we'd have most reason to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons. When you think about it, it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par, hard choices, and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life.
When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am. I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts. This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.
So when we face hard choices, we shouldn't beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be? You might decide to be a pink sock-wearing, cereal-loving, country-living banker, and I might decide to be a black sock-wearing, urban, donut-loving artist. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us.
Now, people who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn't put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn't for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment -- pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option — to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person. Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that's why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ruth Chang:
How to make hard choices
TEDSalon NY2014 Filmed May 2014
Here's a talk that could literally change your life. Which career should I pursue? Should I break up — or get married?! Where should I live? Big decisions like these can be agonizingly difficult. But that's because we think about them the wrong way, says philosopher Ruth Chang. She offers a powerful new framework for shaping who we truly are.
Transcript:
Think of a hard choice you'll face in the near future. It might be between two careers, artist and accountant, or places to live, the city or the country, or even between two people to marry. You could marry Betty or you could marry Lolita. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, to have an ailing parent move in with you, to raise your child in a religion that your partner lives by but leaves you cold. Or whether to donate your life's savings to charity.
Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing, hand-wringing, the gnashing of teeth. But I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses.
What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In any easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. You agonize over whether to stay in your current job in the city or uproot your life for more challenging work in the country because staying is better in some ways, moving is better in others, and neither is better than the other overall. We shouldn't think that all hard choices are big. Let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast. You could have high fiber bran cereal or a chocolate donut. Suppose what matters in the choice is tastiness and healthfulness. The cereal is better for you, the donut tastes way better, but neither is better than the other overall, a hard choice. Realizing that small choices can also be hard may make big hard choices seem less intractable. After all, we manage to figure out what to have for breakfast, so maybe we can figure out whether to stay in the city or uproot for the new job in the country.
We also shouldn't think that hard choices are hard because we are stupid. When I graduated from college, I couldn't decide between two careers, philosophy and law. I really loved philosophy. There are amazing things you can learn as a philosopher, and all from the comfort of an armchair. But I came from a modest immigrant family where my idea of luxury was having a pork tongue and jelly sandwich in my school lunchbox, so the thought of spending my whole life sitting around in armchairs just thinking, well, that struck me as the height of extravagance and frivolity. So I got out my yellow pad, I drew a line down the middle, and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative. I remember thinking to myself, if only I knew what my life in each career would be like. If only God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers, I'd be set. I'd compare them side by side, I'd see that one was better, and the choice would be easy.
But I got no DVD, and because I couldn't figure out which was better, I did what many of us do in hard choices: I took the safest option. Fear of being an unemployed philosopher led me to become a lawyer, and as I discovered, lawyering didn't quite fit. It wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher, and I study hard choices, and I can tell you that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It's a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we're too stupid to know which, and since we don't know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option.
Now, if there's no best option, if the scales don't tip in favor of one alternative over another, then surely the alternatives must be equally good, so maybe the right thing to say in hard choices is that they're between equally good options. That can't be right. If alternatives are equally good, you should just flip a coin between them, and it seems a mistake to think, here's how you should decide between careers, places to live, people to marry: Flip a coin. There's another reason for thinking that hard choices aren't choices between equally good options.
Suppose you have a choice between two jobs: you could be an investment banker or a graphic artist. There are a variety of things that matter in such a choice, like the excitement of the work, achieving financial security, having time to raise a family, and so on. Maybe the artist's career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of pictorial expression. Maybe the banking career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of financial manipulation. Imagine the two jobs however you like so that neither is better than the other.
Now suppose we improve one of them a bit. Suppose the bank, wooing you, adds 500 dollars a month to your salary. Does the extra money now make the banking job better than the artist one? Not necessarily. A higher salary makes the banking job better than it was before, but it might not be enough to make being a banker better than being an artist. But if an improvement in one of the jobs doesn't make it better than the other, then the two original jobs could not have been equally good. If you start with two things that are equally good, and you improve one of them, it now must be better than the other. That's not the case with options in hard choices.
So now we've got a puzzle. We've got two jobs. Neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. So how are we supposed to choose? Something seems to have gone wrong here. Maybe the choice itself is problematic and comparison is impossible. But that can't be right. It's not like we're trying to choose between two things that can't be compared. We're weighing the merits of two jobs, after all, not the merits of the number nine and a plate of fried eggs. A comparison of the overall merits of two jobs is something we can make, and one we often do make.
I think the puzzle arises because of an unreflective assumption we make about value. We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight. Take any comparative question not involving value, such as which of two suitcases is heavier? There are only three possibilities. The weight of one is greater, lesser or equal to the weight of the other. Properties like weight can be represented by real numbers -- one, two, three and so on -- and there are only three possible comparisons between any two real numbers. One number is greater, lesser, or equal to the other. Not so with values. As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can't. We shouldn't assume that the world of is, of lengths and weights, has the same structure as the world of ought, of what we should do. So if what matters to us -- a child's delight, the love you have for your partner — can't be represented by real numbers, then there's no reason to believe that in choice, there are only three possibilities -- that one alternative is better, worse or equal to the other. We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what's going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are "on a par." When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard.
Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn't know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there's always a best alternative. If there's a best alternative, then that's the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. In such a world, we'd have most reason to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons. When you think about it, it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par, hard choices, and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life.
When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am. I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts. This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.
So when we face hard choices, we shouldn't beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be? You might decide to be a pink sock-wearing, cereal-loving, country-living banker, and I might decide to be a black sock-wearing, urban, donut-loving artist. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us.
Now, people who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn't put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn't for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment -- pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option — to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person. Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that's why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.
Thank you.
(Applause)
LEARN/TEACH/GralInt-Virtual Makeover: 15+ Ideas for Engaging Elearning-60 slides
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Virtual Makeover: 15+ Ideas for Engaging Elearning
by Shelly Terrell, Teacher Trainer, Education Consultant, International Speaker, Author at American TESOL
Source: www.slideshare.net
Virtual Makeover: 15+ Ideas for Engaging Elearning
by Shelly Terrell, Teacher Trainer, Education Consultant, International Speaker, Author at American TESOL
Source: www.slideshare.net
MUS/GralInt-Lang Lang and some of his awesome piano performances
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ave Maria
Mozart Piano Sonata No. 13 - I. Allegro
Beethoven Concerto No.1
Source: www.youtube.com
Ave Maria
Mozart Piano Sonata No. 13 - I. Allegro
Beethoven Concerto No.1
Source: www.youtube.com
Saturday, June 21, 2014
POL/LEG/GralInt-Graves irregularidades en el juicio a Campagnoli/Campagnoli frente al pelotón de fusilamiento
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
La suspensión de Campagnoli
Sábado 21 de junio de 2014
Editorial I
Graves irregularidades en el juicio a Campagnoli
El fiscal que recogió pruebas contra el empresario kirchnerista Lázaro Báez sufre las consecuencias de haber obrado con independencia
Son numerosas las falencias y graves irregularidades del proceso que se sigue al fiscal de instrucción José María Campagnoli para removerlo de su cargo mediante la acusación de mal desempeño en sus funciones.
Salta a la vista cuál es la verdadera razón de la molestia y hasta el temor que la labor de Campagnoli generó en el Gobierno y en la procuradora general de la Nación, Alejandra Gils Carbó, y que puso en marcha la decisión de aplicarle al fiscal un castigo que al mismo tiempo sirviera de disuasivo para todos los colegas suyos que quieran investigar la corrupción del kirchnerismo.
Se le imputa que habría alterado el objeto procesal de una causa por extorsión al financista Federico Elaskar para la venta de la Financiera SGI. Según esta acusación, Campagnoli habría forzado la investigación para enfocarla en el empresario y socio de la familia Kirchner, Lázaro Báez, en un expediente en el que no tenía competencia y en el que produjo abundantes pruebas que complicaron a Báez.
Las enormes irregularidades que exhibe este absurdo proceso de enjuiciamiento generan una razonable desconfianza y permiten concluir, en efecto, que el acusado está siendo claro objeto de represalias. Cualquier denuncia contra una persona a determinar, por un delito indeterminado, queda sujeta a la investigación preliminar que realice el fiscal. Inicialmente no existía una supuesta "denuncia contra Elaskar por administración fraudulenta" como se aduce al acusar a Campagnoli de haberla modificado para convertirla en una denuncia contra Báez por extorsionar a Elaskar. Veamos las falaces acusaciones:
El principal argumento de la imputación es que, a partir de las investigaciones preliminares que realizó durante 22 días, Campagnoli modificó el objeto procesal del expediente que tenía ante sí al investigar a Báez por lavado de dinero, para lo cual se esgrime que no habría tenido competencia. Pero el dictamen de Gils Carbó omite una relevante circunstancia procesal. En las causas que son investigadas por un magistrado, es el fiscal quien debe circunscribir inicialmente el objeto procesal y éste se mantiene fijo excepto que se realice un nuevo escrito de delimitación que lo modifique. En cambio, cuando la causa es delegada en el fiscal, quien tiene a cargo la investigación, el objeto procesal se fija una vez concluida la investigación preparatoria. Sin embargo, a Campagnoli lo están juzgando por las averiguaciones preliminares que realizó durante 22 días sin que siquiera estén acabadamente descriptas en el dictamen de Gils Carbó.
Se lo acusa también de haber investigado un delito ajeno a su competencia material, como el lavado de dinero, cuando, en realidad, él investigó la extorsión a Elaskar, tal como validó la Cámara de Apelaciones, con pruebas compartidas con el supuesto lavado. La denuncia es un elemento que se debe tener en consideración pero, de ninguna manera, ha de fijar la línea que se debe seguir. Si un fiscal tiene que investigar una denuncia de lesiones, pero luego descubre que también se ha cometido un robo, no debe limitarse a las lesiones, sino que puede intervenir en los delitos vinculados.
En este caso, quienes eran propietarios, en determinado momento, de la firma SGI, manifestaron haber sido defraudados sin identificar a ningún responsable. Campagnoli adoptó medidas para recolectar pruebas de eventual administración fraudulenta y extorsión, ambos delitos diferentes al de lavado de dinero que se derivara a la justicia federal. Gils Carbó sostiene que las averiguaciones del fiscal no guardaban relación con esos delitos, pero comete el grosero error de no advertir que lo que la fiscalía intentaba sacar a la luz era una posible sustracción de acciones societarias. Resultaba imperioso para ello solicitar detalles de los movimientos entre empresas.
Aun antes de recibir las denuncias, argumentando razones de reestructuración en el sistema de subrogancias, Gils Carbó decidió remover a Campagnoli de la subrogancia que realizaba en la Fiscalía de Instrucción N° 10. Pocos días después, a través de sus colegas, Campagnoli tomó conocimiento de que la procuradora estaba ofreciéndoles a ellos ese mismo puesto que no contemplaba, obviamente, ningún nuevo procedimiento.
Como cabía esperar, y según está previsto por la misma ley que permite objetar la resolución de un superior, Campagnoli cuestionó seriamente a la procuradora general por apartarlo de los casos vinculados a Lázaro Báez. Lo hizo en un marco de respeto a la investidura, lejos de haber incurrido en supuestos exabruptos y ofensas institucionales que ahora quieren endilgarle.
Otra irregularidad del dictamen consiste en acusar a Campagnoli de haber propiciado las condiciones para que se filtrara a la prensa su dictamen conteniendo la adopción de diversas medidas de prueba. Los periodistas que declararon como testigos la corriente semana negaron haber recibido de la fiscalía el dictamen, que también se encontraba en poder de la oficina de prensa de la Procuración General y de un juzgado federal.
Entre las innumerables anomalías que tiñen el proceso, cabe mencionar que la designación del representante de la Procuración General, Daniel Adler, como juez titular en el juicio que se le sigue al fiscal, careció de la más mínima transparencia. El 19 de septiembre del año pasado, Gils Carbó anticipó que el nombre del juez surgiría de un sorteo por realizarse en acto público el 20 de septiembre a las 12, pero no difundió debida y anticipadamente su decisión, al punto de protocolizar la actuación sólo el mismo 20 de septiembre. Tanto Adler como Jorge Auat, quien fuera designado suplente, integran la asociación civil Justicia Legítima, de conocida tendencia kirchnerista, lo cual demuestra la total falta de independencia de algunos de quienes hoy lo juzgan.
La Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación, por acordada de 2008, estableció como parámetros para garantizar el acceso a la información en los casos judiciales de trascendencia pública que generan gran interés en la ciudadanía, que se debe permitir filmar los actos iniciales, los alegatos y la lectura del veredicto. No así las instancias de una indagatoria. Sin embargo, el tribunal que enjuicia a Campagnoli ha decretado expresamente que dicha norma no podrá aplicarse en este caso, en un nuevo intento de restar visibilidad y difusión al proceso oral que ya ha comenzado. Con este mismo espíritu, se asignó un pequeño salón con capacidad para 45 personas y, ante el justificado reclamo de los diputados Manuel Garrido y Laura Alonso, fundado en la gravedad y trascendencia del caso, se aceptó agregar 15 sillas más.
El pecado que cometió Campagnoli para la mentalidad mezquina del Gobierno fue investigar con independencia y demostrar que un fiscal, en 22 días, puede recoger más pruebas comprometedoras que la mayoría de sus colegas del fuero federal en años.
Resulta inusual, además de un claro abuso, destituir a un fiscal con 20 años de experiencia por un supuesto exceso en el objeto procesal y por la supuesta omisión de cuidar que no se filtre a la prensa un dictamen, filtración que no es cierta.
Cada vez resulta más evidente que nos encontramos ante una persecución manifiesta que se lleva adelante en un trámite irregular pocas veces visto en nuestro país. La víctima es un probo y honesto funcionario judicial, víctima de un hecho que reviste una gravedad inusitada. Durante esta década se han observado numerosos actos que afectaron directamente la independencia judicial en nuestro país, pero nunca se había visto algo tan extremadamente burdo.
Se encuentran peligrosamente en juego los principios rectores de la sana independencia judicial y todo parece indicar que la impunidad de la corrupción podría cobrarse una nueva víctima.
Campagnoli frente al pelotón de fusilamiento
Por Jorge Lanata
Ninguna descripción fue mejor que la de Nicolás Wiñazki: Campagnoli parece el coronel Aureliano Buendía frente al pelotón del fusilamiento, dijo.
Y exactamente eso parecía Campagnoli esta semana, frente al Jury diseñado por la procuradora Gils Carbó. El martes 17 declaré como testigo en esa causa, y entendí, al trasponer la puerta, la decisión del Gobierno de prohibir el ingreso de cámaras y grabadoras y, aún más, de sustanciar el juicio durante el Mundial:todo el proceso es una trampa.
Declaré más de una hora frente a los siete jueces y dos fiscales: sólo me preguntaron por Campagnoli durante los primeros diez minutos; el resto del tiempo sus preocupaciones estuvieron centradas en otro lado: demostrar que la investigación sobre Lázaro Báez difundida en Periodismo para Todos no tenía ninguna sustancia. Por eso estallé cuando el fiscal Adolfo Villate me preguntó, con sorna: “¿Usted chequeó y recontrachequeó esto?” . Se refería a una denuncia por extorsión hecha por Federico Elaskar, la misma que Campagnoli rescató del olvido de su archivo para comenzar la instrucción de la causa que le permitió, en veinte días, descubrir gran parte de la ruta del dinero K.
“Chequeo y recontrachequeo” es una marca registrada: son las palabras que usaron los “Cyber K” mil veces para desacreditarme. Me llamó la atención que Villate fuera tan obvio pero, a la vez, me enojó. Por eso hice un silencio y le dije, mirándolo a los ojos: –¿Qué se siente trabajar para Lázaro Báez?
Villate me interrumpió y le volví a preguntar: –¿Lázaro paga bien?
Esa misma tarde, en mi escritorio, entendería varias cosas con sólo revisar los antecedentes de los jueces y los fiscales. Pero, a los 53 años, había cometido un error de principiante: no haberlos conocido antes de ir a la audiencia. ¿Ingenuidad o falta de tiempo? No tiene sentido responder: las excusas no se televisan. Como siempre, la realidad superaba cualquier especulación: aunque suponía que todo aquello estaba armado para condenar a Campagnoli, nunca hubiera sospechado que algunos de los jueces fueran, en verdad, quienes deberían ir presos.
¿Quiénes dirán, en nombre del Estado, que Campagnoli es culpable? Lo que sigue está chequeado (y recontrachequeado): Daniel Adler es el representante de Gils Carbó, presidente del tribunal y miembro de Justicia Legítima. Fue denunciado por integrar una asociación ilícita formada por miembros de la Justicia Federal, del ministerio público fiscal, y por un abogado, todos reunidos para armar una causa penal por delitos de lesa humanidad contra Federico Hooft, juez federal de Mar del Plata. Hooft fue absuelto el 28 de abril pasado luego de un jury de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la provincia de Buenos Aires por ocho votos contra dos; los hechos fueron los mismos que conforman la causa penal federal: no haber investigado las desapariciones de abogados marplatenses en la denominada “Noche de las corbatas”, en julio de 1977. Declarada la inocencia de Hooft, éste pidió que se investiguen los presuntos delitos de estafa procesal, falsedad ideológica, incumplimiento de los deberes de funcionario público y prevaricato en los que habrían participado los fiscales de Mar del Plata Daniel Adler, Pablo Larriera y Claudio Kishimoto; los fiscales de la Procuración General de la Nación Jorge Aguat, Pablo Parenti y Eugenia Montero; el juez federal Martín Bava y el abogado César Silvo. La denuncia estuvo acompañada por la grabación de una extensa conversación mantenida por uno de los hijos de Hooft con el fiscal Kishimoto, en la que el funcionario reconoce que la causa “es un gran verso”, y recuerda que, en una entrevista con el fiscal Aguat en la que Kishimoto se quejaba de las cosas que Adler le obligaba a hacer en el expediente, Aguat le dijo: “Mire, Adler nos es funcional y nos sirve”.
Ernesto Kreplak es el representante del Ejecutivo en el tribunal. La testigo Silvia Martínez, ex funcionaria de la Inspección General de Justicia (IGJ), lo denunció como responsable de ordenar a Norberto Berner, ex titular de la IGJ, no entregar documentación de Ciccone a la oposición y a los medios.
Kreplak es un militante de La Cámpora que controla desde 2012 la Subsecretaría de Coordinación y Control Registral, donde aterrizó de la mano del secretario de Justicia Julián Alvarez.
Como buen camporista, ahorra en dólares, desoyendo los pedidos de la Presidenta: a fines de 2012 declaró 51.304 dólares en una cuenta y 24 mil en efectivo, con lo que su patrimonio aumentó un 50% en un año. Está inscripto en un concurso para ser fiscal federal, por lo que los defensores de Campagnoli pidieron que no fuera miembro del tribunal, pero no se hizo lugar a la medida.
Rodolfo María Ojea Quintana es el representante del Senado en el tribunal.
No tiene una gran práctica en manejo de explosivos: el 25 de septiembre de 1972 estalló su domicilio en Vicente López como consecuencia de la manipulación de una bomba en la cocina de la casa. Falleció Alicia Camps, mientras que Graciela Imaz, mujer de Ojea, y sus hijos Tomas y Celina, fueron heridos por la onda expansiva.
Marcelo García Berro, ex fiscal del Tribunal Oral Federal, hijo de un miembro de la Cámara del Crimen durante la dictadura de Videla, fue denunciado por Horacio Verbitsky en “Hacer la Corte” por facilitar la morgue judicial al Ejército para realizar autopsias de personas asesinadas en falsos enfrentamientos durante la dictadura. La denuncia fue ratificada por el CELS. El ahora fiscal que participa del jury a Campagnoli fue procesado por el juez Hooft junto a diez policías y cuatro civiles acusados de participar en una amplia red de prostitución, encubrimiento y falso testimonio, en el marco de los asesinatos que la prensa local llamó “El caso del loco de la ruta”, donde más de veinte prostitutas aparecieron muertas en Mar del Plata. Pedro Hooft inició la investigación de tres casos. El procurador General de la Corte Suprema bonaerense, Matías de la Cruz, afirmó: “el fiscal García Berro tenía una vinculación casi pública con una de las desaparecidas, Verónica Chávez, y más tarde se comprobó que en su declaración judicial no había dicho toda la verdad.
Se constató también que había omitido detalles, según pudo comprobarse de entrecruzamientos telefónicos durante esos años con la gente a la que se pidió la detención”. García Berro adjudicó la acusación a su rol como fiscal en el Juicio por la Verdad, aunque su nombre aparece en el expediente desde el comienzo de la investigación, como “Marcelo”, Chevrolet Corsa 5187 Poder Judicial, y se comprobó por sistema Excalibur que llamaba al prostíbulo de La Perla con frecuencia.
Alejandra Isabel (se reserva el apellido) testigo de la causa, declaró que salió con García Berro por ser fiscal, y que en esas salidas ponía música hitlerista en el auto, le hablaba de droga, y en una oportunidad la amenazó con que le pasaría algo a sus hijos si no accedía a sus requerimientos.
Otra declaración, la de Claudia María M., del 29 de octubre de 1997, señala a García Berro como quien le pide para una fiesta dos prostitutas y dos travestis.
“Concretado el requerimiento, a los pocos minutos escucha gritos de una de las prostitutas, y cuando entra al cuarto donde se desarrollaba la fiesta ve a García Berro sangrando del pene, y exigiéndoles a las prostitutas y a los travestis que siguieran con sus trabajos”. En la historia clínica 15845 del Hospital Privado de la Comunidad de Mar del Plata, Marcelo García Berro presentó en fecha coincidente un diagnóstico por una enfermedad contagiosa y venérea llamada Histopapiloma Virus, y agrega que había abandonado el tratamiento por propia voluntad y sin curarse.
María Cristina Martínez Córdoba es la representante de la Defensoría General de la Nación.
Tiene escasos antecedentes en materia de derechos del menor y la familia, y su mayor actividad académica se desarrolló como profesora de lengua, pero quiso la magia judicial que ascendiera en el orden de un concurso para ser defensora de menores luego de haber quedado en cuarto lugar.
Como se ve, el grupo de tareas de Gils Carbó parece estar más cerca de ser condenado que de ser jueces. Algo lógico en un país donde el vicepresidente, esta semana, fue citado en indagatoria a declarar por tener un auto importado con papeles truchos.
Investigación: JL/María Eugenia Duffard/ Amelia Cole
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar/www.clarin.com
La suspensión de Campagnoli
Sábado 21 de junio de 2014
Editorial I
Graves irregularidades en el juicio a Campagnoli
El fiscal que recogió pruebas contra el empresario kirchnerista Lázaro Báez sufre las consecuencias de haber obrado con independencia
Son numerosas las falencias y graves irregularidades del proceso que se sigue al fiscal de instrucción José María Campagnoli para removerlo de su cargo mediante la acusación de mal desempeño en sus funciones.
Salta a la vista cuál es la verdadera razón de la molestia y hasta el temor que la labor de Campagnoli generó en el Gobierno y en la procuradora general de la Nación, Alejandra Gils Carbó, y que puso en marcha la decisión de aplicarle al fiscal un castigo que al mismo tiempo sirviera de disuasivo para todos los colegas suyos que quieran investigar la corrupción del kirchnerismo.
Se le imputa que habría alterado el objeto procesal de una causa por extorsión al financista Federico Elaskar para la venta de la Financiera SGI. Según esta acusación, Campagnoli habría forzado la investigación para enfocarla en el empresario y socio de la familia Kirchner, Lázaro Báez, en un expediente en el que no tenía competencia y en el que produjo abundantes pruebas que complicaron a Báez.
Las enormes irregularidades que exhibe este absurdo proceso de enjuiciamiento generan una razonable desconfianza y permiten concluir, en efecto, que el acusado está siendo claro objeto de represalias. Cualquier denuncia contra una persona a determinar, por un delito indeterminado, queda sujeta a la investigación preliminar que realice el fiscal. Inicialmente no existía una supuesta "denuncia contra Elaskar por administración fraudulenta" como se aduce al acusar a Campagnoli de haberla modificado para convertirla en una denuncia contra Báez por extorsionar a Elaskar. Veamos las falaces acusaciones:
El principal argumento de la imputación es que, a partir de las investigaciones preliminares que realizó durante 22 días, Campagnoli modificó el objeto procesal del expediente que tenía ante sí al investigar a Báez por lavado de dinero, para lo cual se esgrime que no habría tenido competencia. Pero el dictamen de Gils Carbó omite una relevante circunstancia procesal. En las causas que son investigadas por un magistrado, es el fiscal quien debe circunscribir inicialmente el objeto procesal y éste se mantiene fijo excepto que se realice un nuevo escrito de delimitación que lo modifique. En cambio, cuando la causa es delegada en el fiscal, quien tiene a cargo la investigación, el objeto procesal se fija una vez concluida la investigación preparatoria. Sin embargo, a Campagnoli lo están juzgando por las averiguaciones preliminares que realizó durante 22 días sin que siquiera estén acabadamente descriptas en el dictamen de Gils Carbó.
Se lo acusa también de haber investigado un delito ajeno a su competencia material, como el lavado de dinero, cuando, en realidad, él investigó la extorsión a Elaskar, tal como validó la Cámara de Apelaciones, con pruebas compartidas con el supuesto lavado. La denuncia es un elemento que se debe tener en consideración pero, de ninguna manera, ha de fijar la línea que se debe seguir. Si un fiscal tiene que investigar una denuncia de lesiones, pero luego descubre que también se ha cometido un robo, no debe limitarse a las lesiones, sino que puede intervenir en los delitos vinculados.
En este caso, quienes eran propietarios, en determinado momento, de la firma SGI, manifestaron haber sido defraudados sin identificar a ningún responsable. Campagnoli adoptó medidas para recolectar pruebas de eventual administración fraudulenta y extorsión, ambos delitos diferentes al de lavado de dinero que se derivara a la justicia federal. Gils Carbó sostiene que las averiguaciones del fiscal no guardaban relación con esos delitos, pero comete el grosero error de no advertir que lo que la fiscalía intentaba sacar a la luz era una posible sustracción de acciones societarias. Resultaba imperioso para ello solicitar detalles de los movimientos entre empresas.
Aun antes de recibir las denuncias, argumentando razones de reestructuración en el sistema de subrogancias, Gils Carbó decidió remover a Campagnoli de la subrogancia que realizaba en la Fiscalía de Instrucción N° 10. Pocos días después, a través de sus colegas, Campagnoli tomó conocimiento de que la procuradora estaba ofreciéndoles a ellos ese mismo puesto que no contemplaba, obviamente, ningún nuevo procedimiento.
Como cabía esperar, y según está previsto por la misma ley que permite objetar la resolución de un superior, Campagnoli cuestionó seriamente a la procuradora general por apartarlo de los casos vinculados a Lázaro Báez. Lo hizo en un marco de respeto a la investidura, lejos de haber incurrido en supuestos exabruptos y ofensas institucionales que ahora quieren endilgarle.
Otra irregularidad del dictamen consiste en acusar a Campagnoli de haber propiciado las condiciones para que se filtrara a la prensa su dictamen conteniendo la adopción de diversas medidas de prueba. Los periodistas que declararon como testigos la corriente semana negaron haber recibido de la fiscalía el dictamen, que también se encontraba en poder de la oficina de prensa de la Procuración General y de un juzgado federal.
Entre las innumerables anomalías que tiñen el proceso, cabe mencionar que la designación del representante de la Procuración General, Daniel Adler, como juez titular en el juicio que se le sigue al fiscal, careció de la más mínima transparencia. El 19 de septiembre del año pasado, Gils Carbó anticipó que el nombre del juez surgiría de un sorteo por realizarse en acto público el 20 de septiembre a las 12, pero no difundió debida y anticipadamente su decisión, al punto de protocolizar la actuación sólo el mismo 20 de septiembre. Tanto Adler como Jorge Auat, quien fuera designado suplente, integran la asociación civil Justicia Legítima, de conocida tendencia kirchnerista, lo cual demuestra la total falta de independencia de algunos de quienes hoy lo juzgan.
La Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación, por acordada de 2008, estableció como parámetros para garantizar el acceso a la información en los casos judiciales de trascendencia pública que generan gran interés en la ciudadanía, que se debe permitir filmar los actos iniciales, los alegatos y la lectura del veredicto. No así las instancias de una indagatoria. Sin embargo, el tribunal que enjuicia a Campagnoli ha decretado expresamente que dicha norma no podrá aplicarse en este caso, en un nuevo intento de restar visibilidad y difusión al proceso oral que ya ha comenzado. Con este mismo espíritu, se asignó un pequeño salón con capacidad para 45 personas y, ante el justificado reclamo de los diputados Manuel Garrido y Laura Alonso, fundado en la gravedad y trascendencia del caso, se aceptó agregar 15 sillas más.
El pecado que cometió Campagnoli para la mentalidad mezquina del Gobierno fue investigar con independencia y demostrar que un fiscal, en 22 días, puede recoger más pruebas comprometedoras que la mayoría de sus colegas del fuero federal en años.
Resulta inusual, además de un claro abuso, destituir a un fiscal con 20 años de experiencia por un supuesto exceso en el objeto procesal y por la supuesta omisión de cuidar que no se filtre a la prensa un dictamen, filtración que no es cierta.
Cada vez resulta más evidente que nos encontramos ante una persecución manifiesta que se lleva adelante en un trámite irregular pocas veces visto en nuestro país. La víctima es un probo y honesto funcionario judicial, víctima de un hecho que reviste una gravedad inusitada. Durante esta década se han observado numerosos actos que afectaron directamente la independencia judicial en nuestro país, pero nunca se había visto algo tan extremadamente burdo.
Se encuentran peligrosamente en juego los principios rectores de la sana independencia judicial y todo parece indicar que la impunidad de la corrupción podría cobrarse una nueva víctima.
Campagnoli frente al pelotón de fusilamiento
Por Jorge Lanata
Ninguna descripción fue mejor que la de Nicolás Wiñazki: Campagnoli parece el coronel Aureliano Buendía frente al pelotón del fusilamiento, dijo.
Y exactamente eso parecía Campagnoli esta semana, frente al Jury diseñado por la procuradora Gils Carbó. El martes 17 declaré como testigo en esa causa, y entendí, al trasponer la puerta, la decisión del Gobierno de prohibir el ingreso de cámaras y grabadoras y, aún más, de sustanciar el juicio durante el Mundial:todo el proceso es una trampa.
Declaré más de una hora frente a los siete jueces y dos fiscales: sólo me preguntaron por Campagnoli durante los primeros diez minutos; el resto del tiempo sus preocupaciones estuvieron centradas en otro lado: demostrar que la investigación sobre Lázaro Báez difundida en Periodismo para Todos no tenía ninguna sustancia. Por eso estallé cuando el fiscal Adolfo Villate me preguntó, con sorna: “¿Usted chequeó y recontrachequeó esto?” . Se refería a una denuncia por extorsión hecha por Federico Elaskar, la misma que Campagnoli rescató del olvido de su archivo para comenzar la instrucción de la causa que le permitió, en veinte días, descubrir gran parte de la ruta del dinero K.
“Chequeo y recontrachequeo” es una marca registrada: son las palabras que usaron los “Cyber K” mil veces para desacreditarme. Me llamó la atención que Villate fuera tan obvio pero, a la vez, me enojó. Por eso hice un silencio y le dije, mirándolo a los ojos: –¿Qué se siente trabajar para Lázaro Báez?
Villate me interrumpió y le volví a preguntar: –¿Lázaro paga bien?
Esa misma tarde, en mi escritorio, entendería varias cosas con sólo revisar los antecedentes de los jueces y los fiscales. Pero, a los 53 años, había cometido un error de principiante: no haberlos conocido antes de ir a la audiencia. ¿Ingenuidad o falta de tiempo? No tiene sentido responder: las excusas no se televisan. Como siempre, la realidad superaba cualquier especulación: aunque suponía que todo aquello estaba armado para condenar a Campagnoli, nunca hubiera sospechado que algunos de los jueces fueran, en verdad, quienes deberían ir presos.
¿Quiénes dirán, en nombre del Estado, que Campagnoli es culpable? Lo que sigue está chequeado (y recontrachequeado): Daniel Adler es el representante de Gils Carbó, presidente del tribunal y miembro de Justicia Legítima. Fue denunciado por integrar una asociación ilícita formada por miembros de la Justicia Federal, del ministerio público fiscal, y por un abogado, todos reunidos para armar una causa penal por delitos de lesa humanidad contra Federico Hooft, juez federal de Mar del Plata. Hooft fue absuelto el 28 de abril pasado luego de un jury de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la provincia de Buenos Aires por ocho votos contra dos; los hechos fueron los mismos que conforman la causa penal federal: no haber investigado las desapariciones de abogados marplatenses en la denominada “Noche de las corbatas”, en julio de 1977. Declarada la inocencia de Hooft, éste pidió que se investiguen los presuntos delitos de estafa procesal, falsedad ideológica, incumplimiento de los deberes de funcionario público y prevaricato en los que habrían participado los fiscales de Mar del Plata Daniel Adler, Pablo Larriera y Claudio Kishimoto; los fiscales de la Procuración General de la Nación Jorge Aguat, Pablo Parenti y Eugenia Montero; el juez federal Martín Bava y el abogado César Silvo. La denuncia estuvo acompañada por la grabación de una extensa conversación mantenida por uno de los hijos de Hooft con el fiscal Kishimoto, en la que el funcionario reconoce que la causa “es un gran verso”, y recuerda que, en una entrevista con el fiscal Aguat en la que Kishimoto se quejaba de las cosas que Adler le obligaba a hacer en el expediente, Aguat le dijo: “Mire, Adler nos es funcional y nos sirve”.
Ernesto Kreplak es el representante del Ejecutivo en el tribunal. La testigo Silvia Martínez, ex funcionaria de la Inspección General de Justicia (IGJ), lo denunció como responsable de ordenar a Norberto Berner, ex titular de la IGJ, no entregar documentación de Ciccone a la oposición y a los medios.
Kreplak es un militante de La Cámpora que controla desde 2012 la Subsecretaría de Coordinación y Control Registral, donde aterrizó de la mano del secretario de Justicia Julián Alvarez.
Como buen camporista, ahorra en dólares, desoyendo los pedidos de la Presidenta: a fines de 2012 declaró 51.304 dólares en una cuenta y 24 mil en efectivo, con lo que su patrimonio aumentó un 50% en un año. Está inscripto en un concurso para ser fiscal federal, por lo que los defensores de Campagnoli pidieron que no fuera miembro del tribunal, pero no se hizo lugar a la medida.
Rodolfo María Ojea Quintana es el representante del Senado en el tribunal.
No tiene una gran práctica en manejo de explosivos: el 25 de septiembre de 1972 estalló su domicilio en Vicente López como consecuencia de la manipulación de una bomba en la cocina de la casa. Falleció Alicia Camps, mientras que Graciela Imaz, mujer de Ojea, y sus hijos Tomas y Celina, fueron heridos por la onda expansiva.
Marcelo García Berro, ex fiscal del Tribunal Oral Federal, hijo de un miembro de la Cámara del Crimen durante la dictadura de Videla, fue denunciado por Horacio Verbitsky en “Hacer la Corte” por facilitar la morgue judicial al Ejército para realizar autopsias de personas asesinadas en falsos enfrentamientos durante la dictadura. La denuncia fue ratificada por el CELS. El ahora fiscal que participa del jury a Campagnoli fue procesado por el juez Hooft junto a diez policías y cuatro civiles acusados de participar en una amplia red de prostitución, encubrimiento y falso testimonio, en el marco de los asesinatos que la prensa local llamó “El caso del loco de la ruta”, donde más de veinte prostitutas aparecieron muertas en Mar del Plata. Pedro Hooft inició la investigación de tres casos. El procurador General de la Corte Suprema bonaerense, Matías de la Cruz, afirmó: “el fiscal García Berro tenía una vinculación casi pública con una de las desaparecidas, Verónica Chávez, y más tarde se comprobó que en su declaración judicial no había dicho toda la verdad.
Se constató también que había omitido detalles, según pudo comprobarse de entrecruzamientos telefónicos durante esos años con la gente a la que se pidió la detención”. García Berro adjudicó la acusación a su rol como fiscal en el Juicio por la Verdad, aunque su nombre aparece en el expediente desde el comienzo de la investigación, como “Marcelo”, Chevrolet Corsa 5187 Poder Judicial, y se comprobó por sistema Excalibur que llamaba al prostíbulo de La Perla con frecuencia.
Alejandra Isabel (se reserva el apellido) testigo de la causa, declaró que salió con García Berro por ser fiscal, y que en esas salidas ponía música hitlerista en el auto, le hablaba de droga, y en una oportunidad la amenazó con que le pasaría algo a sus hijos si no accedía a sus requerimientos.
Otra declaración, la de Claudia María M., del 29 de octubre de 1997, señala a García Berro como quien le pide para una fiesta dos prostitutas y dos travestis.
“Concretado el requerimiento, a los pocos minutos escucha gritos de una de las prostitutas, y cuando entra al cuarto donde se desarrollaba la fiesta ve a García Berro sangrando del pene, y exigiéndoles a las prostitutas y a los travestis que siguieran con sus trabajos”. En la historia clínica 15845 del Hospital Privado de la Comunidad de Mar del Plata, Marcelo García Berro presentó en fecha coincidente un diagnóstico por una enfermedad contagiosa y venérea llamada Histopapiloma Virus, y agrega que había abandonado el tratamiento por propia voluntad y sin curarse.
María Cristina Martínez Córdoba es la representante de la Defensoría General de la Nación.
Tiene escasos antecedentes en materia de derechos del menor y la familia, y su mayor actividad académica se desarrolló como profesora de lengua, pero quiso la magia judicial que ascendiera en el orden de un concurso para ser defensora de menores luego de haber quedado en cuarto lugar.
Como se ve, el grupo de tareas de Gils Carbó parece estar más cerca de ser condenado que de ser jueces. Algo lógico en un país donde el vicepresidente, esta semana, fue citado en indagatoria a declarar por tener un auto importado con papeles truchos.
Investigación: JL/María Eugenia Duffard/ Amelia Cole
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar/www.clarin.com
Friday, June 20, 2014
20 de Junio-Día de la Bandera
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
20 de Junio-Día de la Bandera
Canción a la Bandera
(De la Ópera Aurora)
Alta en el cielo un águila guerrera,
audaz se eleva en vuelo triunfal,
azul un ala del color del cielo,
azul un ala del color del mar.
Así en la alta aurora irradial,
punta de flecha el áureo rostro imita
y forma estela al purpurado cuello,
el ala es paño, el águila es bandera.
Es la bandera de la patria mía
del sol nacida que me ha dado Dios;
es la bandera de la patria mia,
del sol nacida, que me ha dado Dios;
es la bandera de la patria mía,
del sol nacida que me ha dado Dios.
Letra: H.C.Quesada y L. Illica
Música: Héctor Panizza
Manuel Belgrano, el prócer que murió pobre
Un perfil del creador de la Bandera Nacional, al cumplirse hoy un nuevo aniversario de su fallecimiento
Por Daniel Balmaceda | Para LA NACION
Entre los muchos e interesantes sucesos que tuvieron lugar durante el virreinato de don Nicolás de Arredondo figuran el nacimiento de los primeros trillizos en el Río de la Plata, una complicada invasión de loros en Buenos Aires y la creación del Consulado, una especie de Secretaría de Comercio que debía encargarse de que los precios no se elevaran por las nubes y de que las transacciones comerciales fueran tan legales como lógicas.
A fines de 1793 el gobierno encomendó las responsabilidades del Consulado a un joven de 23 años, que acababa de recibirse de doctor en Leyes en España: Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano. Llegaba un poco enfermo, producto de una sífilis que contrajo en Madrid, y por ese motivo en más de una oportunidad tuvo que solicitar licencias y trasladarse a descansar a San Isidro o cruzar a Maldonado donde -es muy probable-, habrá caminado por las extensas playas de lo que es hoy Punta del Este.
Las medidas que tomó Belgrano favorecieron el comercio de Buenos Aires y es probable que a comienzos del siglo XIX, de haber existido las encuestas de opinión, hubiera obtenido altos porcentajes de imagen positiva. Sin dudas, el cargo le calzaba a la perfección. Sin embargo, las invasiones inglesas torcieron su destino. Belgrano fue nombrado capitán y participó al frente de sus hombres en la Defensa de 1807. Regresó luego a sus actividades de escritorio hasta que en 1810 participó activamente en la Semana de Mayo e integró el primer gobierno patrio. Sin perder tiempo, renunció a su sueldo como vocal de la Junta. Debió calzarse otra vez el uniforme y comandar una expedición para convencer (por las buenas o por la fuerza) a los vecinos paraguayos de que debían plegarse a la revolución porteña.
Belgrano tuvo que asumir de manera inesperada la acción militar. Fue nombrado de apuro capitán y fue a la defensa de Buenos Aires en la invasión ingelsa de 1807
Aquella expedición fue un fracaso desde el punto de vista militar, lo que confirma que aún debía acumular experiencia en tácticas y estrategias. Sin embargo, los resultados definitivos fueron satisfactorios: Asunción no se sumó, pero tampoco presentó la oposición tenaz a la Junta porteña como lo hacía Montevideo. A partir de la aventura del Paraguay se ponía en marcha la cuenta regresiva: los últimos diez años, gloriosos, de su vida.
El gran episodio, el más célebre de su existencia, tendría lugar en Rosario, a orillas del río Paraná donde se encontraba alistando la defensa contra las incursiones navales de los realistas. Belgrano armó dos baterías que debían cañonear a cualquier barco enemigo que osara cruzar por allí. Por aquel tiempo, las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata aún no habían declarado su independencia de la Metrópoli. Por lo tanto, los dos bandos pertenecían al Reino de España y utilizaban las mismas insignias. En un acto de gran osadía para el momento político, Belgrano solicitó autorización para que la tropa utilizara una escarapela diferente a la de las tropas realistas. El Primer Triunvirato aprobó la solicitud y pocos días después, el 27 de febrero de 1812, se despachó con un nuevo comunicado dirigido al gobierno central, en el que informaba que había mandado enarbolar una bandera con los colores de la escarapela en la batería que bautizó "Independencia".
Esta vez no consiguió la venia del Triunvirato. Al contrario, para el gobierno porteño, la creación de un emblema y la utilización de la palabra "Independencia" estaban muy lejos de ser aprobadas. Pero cuando la desautorización llegó a Rosario, junto con una bandera realista que enviaban para reemplazar a la celeste y blanca, Belgrano se hallaba en camino a Jujuy, donde se haría cargo del Ejército del Norte.
Llegó el tiempo del célebre y sacrificado Éxodo Jujeño, la histórica marcha defensiva y la posterior decisión de presentar batalla en las afueras de Tucumán, cuando los propios tucumanos apoyaron al comandante Belgrano para que no retrocediera un paso más. El 24 de septiembre de 1812 a las ocho de la mañana, minutos antes de que 1.800 patriotas se enfrentaran a 3.000 realistas, Belgrano montaba su caballo de pelaje rosillo. Con tanta mala suerte, que al sonar el estampido del primer cañonazo, el manso caballo se asustó y el general fue a parar al piso. Los soldados que observaron la escena, paisanos muy supersticiosos, sintieron que era un mal presagio.
La creación de la bandera de Manuel Belgrano, uno de sus legados, se hizo pese a que el gobierno porteño no estaba de acuerdo
Sin embargo, la fortuna estuvo del lado de los patriotas. Fue entonces que Belgrano alcanzó el mayor índice de popularidad de su vida y confirmó su estrella cuando repitió el triunfo en Salta, el 20 de febrero de 1813. Como reconocimiento por esta victoria se le concedió un premio de 40.000 pesos en terrenos fiscales que les hubiera permitido a él y a sus descendientes vivir sin mayores apremios económicos. Pero Belgrano pidió a cambio que se dotaran cuatro escuelas en Jujuy, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán y Tarija (hoy Bolivia). Además, propició la creación de escuelas industriales y fue uno de los primeros en sostener que había que brindar una educación más completa a las mujeres.
El ocaso militar de Belgrano comenzó con los reveses de Vilcapugio (1/10/1813) y Ayohuma (14/11/1813). Entregó la comandancia del ejército a José de San Martín y terminó arrestado en Luján, mientras en Buenos Aires lo juzgaban por esas derrotas. Fue absuelto. Viajó a Londres con Bernardino Rivadavia en misión diplomática, regresó en 1816 y pretendió transmitir su entusiasmo por el sistema monárquico a los diputados reunidos en Tucumán. Fracasó en el intento. Reasumió el mando del diezmado ejército del Alto Perú que ya ocupaba un lugar secundario, frente al despliegue del sanmartiniano de los Andes.
Según Bartolomé Mitre, "su fisonomía era bella y simpática. Su cabeza era grande y bien modelada. La nariz era prominente, fina y ligeramente aguileña. La boca, amable y discreta. Era escaso de barba, no usaba bigote y llevaba la patilla corta, a la inglesa. Belgrano era de una contextura delicada". El creador de la bandera era rubio, medía poco menos de 1.80 cm. y su piel era rosada. Para sus soldados era "el Alemán" (por ser rubio, vestirse "a la europea" y hablar perfecto inglés). También lo llamaron "Cotorrita" (por usar chaqueta verde, caminar con pasos apresurados y por su voz aflautada). Las enfermedades comenzaron a castigarlo sin tregua a partir de 1817.
De muchos próceres se dice que murieron pobres y no es cierto. Pero en el caso de Manuel Belgrano, él sí, él murió pobre.
Llegó a Buenos Aires a comienzos de junio de 1820, muy enfermo, muy dolorido y muy olvidado. Cargando con la sífilis de su juventud, una cirrosis torturante y un cáncer hepático. El general Belgrano murió el 20 de junio a las siete de la mañana. Ese día los porteños estaban enfrascados en cuestiones políticas: se alternaron tres gobiernos en aquel anárquico día de renuncias y asunciones.
Al funeral asistieron su familia y un par de amigos, entre ellos el doctor Joseph Redhead, a quien Belgrano le legó su reloj porque no tenía dinero para pagarle los honorarios. Ante la imposibilidad de pagar una lápida, uno de sus hermanos cedió el mármol de una cómoda.
De muchos próceres se dice que murieron pobres y no es cierto. Belgrano sí murió pobre.
Post publicado por el autor en su blog de LA NACION, "Historias Inesperadas" , sobre relatos, hallazgos y evocaciones.
Fuente:Google Images/www.youtube.com/www.lanacion.com.ar
20 de Junio-Día de la Bandera
Canción a la Bandera
(De la Ópera Aurora)
Alta en el cielo un águila guerrera,
audaz se eleva en vuelo triunfal,
azul un ala del color del cielo,
azul un ala del color del mar.
Así en la alta aurora irradial,
punta de flecha el áureo rostro imita
y forma estela al purpurado cuello,
el ala es paño, el águila es bandera.
Es la bandera de la patria mía
del sol nacida que me ha dado Dios;
es la bandera de la patria mia,
del sol nacida, que me ha dado Dios;
es la bandera de la patria mía,
del sol nacida que me ha dado Dios.
Letra: H.C.Quesada y L. Illica
Música: Héctor Panizza
Manuel Belgrano, el prócer que murió pobre
Un perfil del creador de la Bandera Nacional, al cumplirse hoy un nuevo aniversario de su fallecimiento
Por Daniel Balmaceda | Para LA NACION
Entre los muchos e interesantes sucesos que tuvieron lugar durante el virreinato de don Nicolás de Arredondo figuran el nacimiento de los primeros trillizos en el Río de la Plata, una complicada invasión de loros en Buenos Aires y la creación del Consulado, una especie de Secretaría de Comercio que debía encargarse de que los precios no se elevaran por las nubes y de que las transacciones comerciales fueran tan legales como lógicas.
A fines de 1793 el gobierno encomendó las responsabilidades del Consulado a un joven de 23 años, que acababa de recibirse de doctor en Leyes en España: Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano. Llegaba un poco enfermo, producto de una sífilis que contrajo en Madrid, y por ese motivo en más de una oportunidad tuvo que solicitar licencias y trasladarse a descansar a San Isidro o cruzar a Maldonado donde -es muy probable-, habrá caminado por las extensas playas de lo que es hoy Punta del Este.
Las medidas que tomó Belgrano favorecieron el comercio de Buenos Aires y es probable que a comienzos del siglo XIX, de haber existido las encuestas de opinión, hubiera obtenido altos porcentajes de imagen positiva. Sin dudas, el cargo le calzaba a la perfección. Sin embargo, las invasiones inglesas torcieron su destino. Belgrano fue nombrado capitán y participó al frente de sus hombres en la Defensa de 1807. Regresó luego a sus actividades de escritorio hasta que en 1810 participó activamente en la Semana de Mayo e integró el primer gobierno patrio. Sin perder tiempo, renunció a su sueldo como vocal de la Junta. Debió calzarse otra vez el uniforme y comandar una expedición para convencer (por las buenas o por la fuerza) a los vecinos paraguayos de que debían plegarse a la revolución porteña.
Belgrano tuvo que asumir de manera inesperada la acción militar. Fue nombrado de apuro capitán y fue a la defensa de Buenos Aires en la invasión ingelsa de 1807
Aquella expedición fue un fracaso desde el punto de vista militar, lo que confirma que aún debía acumular experiencia en tácticas y estrategias. Sin embargo, los resultados definitivos fueron satisfactorios: Asunción no se sumó, pero tampoco presentó la oposición tenaz a la Junta porteña como lo hacía Montevideo. A partir de la aventura del Paraguay se ponía en marcha la cuenta regresiva: los últimos diez años, gloriosos, de su vida.
El gran episodio, el más célebre de su existencia, tendría lugar en Rosario, a orillas del río Paraná donde se encontraba alistando la defensa contra las incursiones navales de los realistas. Belgrano armó dos baterías que debían cañonear a cualquier barco enemigo que osara cruzar por allí. Por aquel tiempo, las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata aún no habían declarado su independencia de la Metrópoli. Por lo tanto, los dos bandos pertenecían al Reino de España y utilizaban las mismas insignias. En un acto de gran osadía para el momento político, Belgrano solicitó autorización para que la tropa utilizara una escarapela diferente a la de las tropas realistas. El Primer Triunvirato aprobó la solicitud y pocos días después, el 27 de febrero de 1812, se despachó con un nuevo comunicado dirigido al gobierno central, en el que informaba que había mandado enarbolar una bandera con los colores de la escarapela en la batería que bautizó "Independencia".
Esta vez no consiguió la venia del Triunvirato. Al contrario, para el gobierno porteño, la creación de un emblema y la utilización de la palabra "Independencia" estaban muy lejos de ser aprobadas. Pero cuando la desautorización llegó a Rosario, junto con una bandera realista que enviaban para reemplazar a la celeste y blanca, Belgrano se hallaba en camino a Jujuy, donde se haría cargo del Ejército del Norte.
Llegó el tiempo del célebre y sacrificado Éxodo Jujeño, la histórica marcha defensiva y la posterior decisión de presentar batalla en las afueras de Tucumán, cuando los propios tucumanos apoyaron al comandante Belgrano para que no retrocediera un paso más. El 24 de septiembre de 1812 a las ocho de la mañana, minutos antes de que 1.800 patriotas se enfrentaran a 3.000 realistas, Belgrano montaba su caballo de pelaje rosillo. Con tanta mala suerte, que al sonar el estampido del primer cañonazo, el manso caballo se asustó y el general fue a parar al piso. Los soldados que observaron la escena, paisanos muy supersticiosos, sintieron que era un mal presagio.
La creación de la bandera de Manuel Belgrano, uno de sus legados, se hizo pese a que el gobierno porteño no estaba de acuerdo
Sin embargo, la fortuna estuvo del lado de los patriotas. Fue entonces que Belgrano alcanzó el mayor índice de popularidad de su vida y confirmó su estrella cuando repitió el triunfo en Salta, el 20 de febrero de 1813. Como reconocimiento por esta victoria se le concedió un premio de 40.000 pesos en terrenos fiscales que les hubiera permitido a él y a sus descendientes vivir sin mayores apremios económicos. Pero Belgrano pidió a cambio que se dotaran cuatro escuelas en Jujuy, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán y Tarija (hoy Bolivia). Además, propició la creación de escuelas industriales y fue uno de los primeros en sostener que había que brindar una educación más completa a las mujeres.
El ocaso militar de Belgrano comenzó con los reveses de Vilcapugio (1/10/1813) y Ayohuma (14/11/1813). Entregó la comandancia del ejército a José de San Martín y terminó arrestado en Luján, mientras en Buenos Aires lo juzgaban por esas derrotas. Fue absuelto. Viajó a Londres con Bernardino Rivadavia en misión diplomática, regresó en 1816 y pretendió transmitir su entusiasmo por el sistema monárquico a los diputados reunidos en Tucumán. Fracasó en el intento. Reasumió el mando del diezmado ejército del Alto Perú que ya ocupaba un lugar secundario, frente al despliegue del sanmartiniano de los Andes.
Según Bartolomé Mitre, "su fisonomía era bella y simpática. Su cabeza era grande y bien modelada. La nariz era prominente, fina y ligeramente aguileña. La boca, amable y discreta. Era escaso de barba, no usaba bigote y llevaba la patilla corta, a la inglesa. Belgrano era de una contextura delicada". El creador de la bandera era rubio, medía poco menos de 1.80 cm. y su piel era rosada. Para sus soldados era "el Alemán" (por ser rubio, vestirse "a la europea" y hablar perfecto inglés). También lo llamaron "Cotorrita" (por usar chaqueta verde, caminar con pasos apresurados y por su voz aflautada). Las enfermedades comenzaron a castigarlo sin tregua a partir de 1817.
De muchos próceres se dice que murieron pobres y no es cierto. Pero en el caso de Manuel Belgrano, él sí, él murió pobre.
Llegó a Buenos Aires a comienzos de junio de 1820, muy enfermo, muy dolorido y muy olvidado. Cargando con la sífilis de su juventud, una cirrosis torturante y un cáncer hepático. El general Belgrano murió el 20 de junio a las siete de la mañana. Ese día los porteños estaban enfrascados en cuestiones políticas: se alternaron tres gobiernos en aquel anárquico día de renuncias y asunciones.
Al funeral asistieron su familia y un par de amigos, entre ellos el doctor Joseph Redhead, a quien Belgrano le legó su reloj porque no tenía dinero para pagarle los honorarios. Ante la imposibilidad de pagar una lápida, uno de sus hermanos cedió el mármol de una cómoda.
De muchos próceres se dice que murieron pobres y no es cierto. Belgrano sí murió pobre.
Post publicado por el autor en su blog de LA NACION, "Historias Inesperadas" , sobre relatos, hallazgos y evocaciones.
Fuente:Google Images/www.youtube.com/www.lanacion.com.ar
Sunday, June 15, 2014
GralInt-Instrucciones para ser feliz
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Instrucciones para ser feliz
La búsqueda de la felicidad es una tarea algo más complicada que derramar alegría por la calle y convencerse de que la vida es hermosa.
Por Cecilia Absatz
Todo comenzó con Celia Cruz (1925-2003), la célebre cantante de salsa que a todo ritmo y con enorme respuesta popular declaró que la vida es un carnaval. Afirma en su canción, muy convencida, que la vida no es desigual ni mucho menos, y que si alguien se siente solo y mal es porque no se dio cuenta de que en realidad la vida es una hermosura. Ella sostiene que no hay que llorar, sólo hay que cantar y así las penas se van: cantando. Hacia el final dedica la canción como un aviso, primero, a los que se quejan y critican, pero luego, en un ataque de corrección política, levanta la mira hacia aquellos que usan las armas, aquellos que hacen la guerra, aquellos que nos maltratan, posiblemente la parte de la población universal menos propensa a llorar y sentirse sola.
Esta idea más o menos quimérica de la vida, donde el dolor y la tragedia no son más que malentendidos, parece haber inspirado todo un género de canciones bien intencionadas, digamos, que ponen en nuestras manos la responsabilidad de ser felices a través del canto, el baile y la capacidad personal de prodigar amor. Y perdonar, dice Axel. Este joven y exitoso cantante nos invita reiteradamente a celebrar la vida. Es fácil: hay que buscarse una estrella y dejarse guiar por ella. Mientras tanto, no herir a nadie y repartir alegría. Él cree en el amor para estar más cerca del cielo, pero al mismo tiempo (otra vez el colofón típico de un alma bella) invita a gritar contra el odio y contra la mentira porque la guerra es muerte y la paz es vida.
Para Ricardo Montaner también la vida es una fiesta, y él es feliz. Acá el secreto es dejar la queja porque la vida es corta. Para combatir la tristeza y el pesimismo, entonces, él propone ponerse a bailar en la calle y cantar: Soy feliz, soy feliz, vamos que la vida es una fiesta. Y una canción llamada Arriba la vida, bastante más extensa que las anteriores, firmada por Croni-k, desarrolla en detalle la técnica para vivir bien. En momentos de crisis, problemas y tristezas aconseja no echarse a morir y en cambio levantar la cabeza. Sea cual sea la situación, agrega, no hay que olvidar que la vida es muy linda. Y acá también la canción se pronuncia por la paz de este mundo, pueblos y tierra, y de hecho en algún momento cita a Celia Cruz. La idea es más o menos la misma: hay que disfrutar de lo bueno y desechar lo malo, vivir con alegría, no deprimirse y darle vida al mundo entregando amor. El eslogan, si bien no es muy lírico, resulta gráfico. Dice Tirá para arriba.
Es admirable la confianza que estos artistas tienen en su propia capacidad para transformar las asperezas de la vida en epifanías de felicidad. Parece un producto tergiversado de las búsquedas que viene cultivando desde hace unas décadas la new age, una filosofía que favorece la introspección y la búsqueda espiritual para alcanzar una forma de vida mejor. Pero esta es una corriente mucho más ambiciosa, que hechiza a millones de seguidores y lectores con una literatura llena de buenos deseos.
La búsqueda de la felicidad no sólo es lícita: está avalada por la Constitución Nacional y es bien vista por casi todas las religiones. Pero tal vez sea una tarea algo más complicada que derramar alegría por la calle y convencerse de que la vida es hermosa. Tal vez se trate de negociar con la vida, verla como es y ocuparse de vencer las dificultades. En el peor de los casos, convivir con ellas. Son formas de felicidad menos estridentes pero más sólidas, y sobre todo posibles.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Instrucciones para ser feliz
La búsqueda de la felicidad es una tarea algo más complicada que derramar alegría por la calle y convencerse de que la vida es hermosa.
Por Cecilia Absatz
Todo comenzó con Celia Cruz (1925-2003), la célebre cantante de salsa que a todo ritmo y con enorme respuesta popular declaró que la vida es un carnaval. Afirma en su canción, muy convencida, que la vida no es desigual ni mucho menos, y que si alguien se siente solo y mal es porque no se dio cuenta de que en realidad la vida es una hermosura. Ella sostiene que no hay que llorar, sólo hay que cantar y así las penas se van: cantando. Hacia el final dedica la canción como un aviso, primero, a los que se quejan y critican, pero luego, en un ataque de corrección política, levanta la mira hacia aquellos que usan las armas, aquellos que hacen la guerra, aquellos que nos maltratan, posiblemente la parte de la población universal menos propensa a llorar y sentirse sola.
Esta idea más o menos quimérica de la vida, donde el dolor y la tragedia no son más que malentendidos, parece haber inspirado todo un género de canciones bien intencionadas, digamos, que ponen en nuestras manos la responsabilidad de ser felices a través del canto, el baile y la capacidad personal de prodigar amor. Y perdonar, dice Axel. Este joven y exitoso cantante nos invita reiteradamente a celebrar la vida. Es fácil: hay que buscarse una estrella y dejarse guiar por ella. Mientras tanto, no herir a nadie y repartir alegría. Él cree en el amor para estar más cerca del cielo, pero al mismo tiempo (otra vez el colofón típico de un alma bella) invita a gritar contra el odio y contra la mentira porque la guerra es muerte y la paz es vida.
Para Ricardo Montaner también la vida es una fiesta, y él es feliz. Acá el secreto es dejar la queja porque la vida es corta. Para combatir la tristeza y el pesimismo, entonces, él propone ponerse a bailar en la calle y cantar: Soy feliz, soy feliz, vamos que la vida es una fiesta. Y una canción llamada Arriba la vida, bastante más extensa que las anteriores, firmada por Croni-k, desarrolla en detalle la técnica para vivir bien. En momentos de crisis, problemas y tristezas aconseja no echarse a morir y en cambio levantar la cabeza. Sea cual sea la situación, agrega, no hay que olvidar que la vida es muy linda. Y acá también la canción se pronuncia por la paz de este mundo, pueblos y tierra, y de hecho en algún momento cita a Celia Cruz. La idea es más o menos la misma: hay que disfrutar de lo bueno y desechar lo malo, vivir con alegría, no deprimirse y darle vida al mundo entregando amor. El eslogan, si bien no es muy lírico, resulta gráfico. Dice Tirá para arriba.
Es admirable la confianza que estos artistas tienen en su propia capacidad para transformar las asperezas de la vida en epifanías de felicidad. Parece un producto tergiversado de las búsquedas que viene cultivando desde hace unas décadas la new age, una filosofía que favorece la introspección y la búsqueda espiritual para alcanzar una forma de vida mejor. Pero esta es una corriente mucho más ambiciosa, que hechiza a millones de seguidores y lectores con una literatura llena de buenos deseos.
La búsqueda de la felicidad no sólo es lícita: está avalada por la Constitución Nacional y es bien vista por casi todas las religiones. Pero tal vez sea una tarea algo más complicada que derramar alegría por la calle y convencerse de que la vida es hermosa. Tal vez se trate de negociar con la vida, verla como es y ocuparse de vencer las dificultades. En el peor de los casos, convivir con ellas. Son formas de felicidad menos estridentes pero más sólidas, y sobre todo posibles.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
15 de Junio: Día del Padre- Happy Father´s Day!!!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
¡FELIZ DIA DEL PADRE!
Fuente/Source: Google Images
¡FELIZ DIA DEL PADRE!
Fuente/Source: Google Images
Friday, June 13, 2014
BUS/GralInt-Wharton’s Adam Grant on the key to professional success (Unedited version)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Interview Wharton’s Adam Grant on the key to professional success The author of Give and Take explains why generosity in the workplace continues to be more effective than selfishness and why it is critical for personal fulfillment. June 2014 The knowledge economy has not only spurred entirely new industries but also placed different demands on how people work effectively. In this video interview with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, Wharton School professor Adam Grant elaborates on his recent book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, which explores the evolving world of workplace dynamics, why selfishness fails, and how working with, for, and through others continues to be the recipe for personal and organizational success. An edited transcript of Grant’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Knowledge economy: Givers wanted We’ve all observed that there’s a rise in project-based work, which corresponds with the knowledge economy—fewer dedicated jobs and long, stable careers and much more, “How do I combine a skill set with a need that you have?” And I think that as we see these kinds of shifts in the workplace, we’re going to see “giving” skills become more important, because a lot of getting work done then becomes about working with, for, and through other people. All of these flattening structures, these ad hoc collaborations that require improvisation, are, at their core, about interdependence. And the data show that it’s in interdependent situations that givers thrive. So if you’re the kind of person who enjoys helping others, when you’re working in a team, you have the ability to make the team better and really multiply the team’s success in a way that, ideally, reverberates to benefit everyone in the team. When you’re in a service job, your ability to serve customers is all about, “Can you identify their needs, anticipate new solutions for them, and then contribute those in a way that your customers feel is generous?” It might have been easier for takers to succeed in the old world, where you had these stable reporting hierarchies. And if they managed up effectively, then they were able to rise. Today, in these structures, which are both flatter and more improvisational, I think that givers are going to find that their reputations start to take off, and that the people who are willing to support them, and champion them, are the people who respect them for their generosity. Screening out the takers The negative impact of a taker typically exceeds the positive impact of a giver by a multiple of two or three to one. You find that it’s pretty easy for one taker to be the bad apple that spoils the barrel. But when you put one giver in an organization, it’s not like one good egg will always make a dozen. I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past year working with organizations on mechanisms for screening out takers. And I think what’s powerful about that is, if you can eliminate takers from your organization, then you have givers and matchers. The givers will act more generously because they don’t have to be paranoid that takers are out to get them. And the beauty of matchers, which is most people, is that they tend to follow the norm and reciprocate the way that they’ve been treated. So matchers act like givers in the presence of givers. They’re also useful for dealing with—if you have clients, for example, who are takers—matchers will fight fire with fire when they have to. Then the question is, “How do you screen out takers?” And there are a couple ways to think about this. One way to screen out takers is to recognize that they follow a pattern of kissing up/kicking down. If you’re a taker, it’s quite important to be a good faker when you’re dealing with powerful people, because of course you want them to think well of you. But if you’ve never tried, it turns out to be a lot of work to pretend to care about every person you meet. And takers tend to let their guard down a little bit when dealing with peers and subordinates, which means that you should be really skeptical of references that come from bosses. Lateral references and references from below are actually quite valuable. There’s also evidence that takers, when they talk about success, tend to use two words more than the rest of us, which are “I” and “me.” And then, when they talk about failures, they tend to place blame externally. My favorite way of screening out takers is to present them with situational interviews. A lot of organizations do behavioral interviews, where they’re backward looking and asking about your history, what you’ve accomplished, what challenges you’ve overcome. And those don’t turn out to be very effective if you look at the evidence, because they suffer from an apples-and-oranges problem: it’s very hard to compare two people’s work histories. Instead, what you want to do is ask, “What would you do in a situation like this,” and give everybody the same situation. The problem is, no one wants to admit, “I would be a taker here.” But there’s an easy way around this, which is, instead of asking “What would you do?” you ask people to predict what other people would do. Most of us tend to project our own motivations onto other people. If you give me a scenario where it’s not clear whether the appropriate behavior is giving, taking, or matching, what I’ll tend to do when predicting others’ behavior is ask, “Well, what would I do in this situation?” And then you get their honest opinion. Integrity-test research, for example, shows that the higher my estimate that other people will be thieves, the greater the odds that I myself am a thief. Turning takers into givers For me, the biggest unanswered question from Give and Take is, “What are the steps for turning a taker into a giver?” We know a lot about how to get takers to give in a particular moment. No one wants to be seen as a taker. If you can make behavior visible, takers tend to either match or give a little bit more. We also know that takers tend to be more generous once they identify with an organization or a person. As they become attached to either you or to a group of people, then they start to blur the line between self-interest and concern for others, because, “If we’re identified with each other, then helping you or helping this organization is going to reflect positively on me.” The problem is, when the taker switches—to a different relationship, a different group, a different organization—it’s like a reset button has been hit, and that person might go back to his or her old ways. So one of the things I’d love to explore next is, what does it require to shift a taker’s more fundamental mind-set and values? It’s probably worth recognizing that there are different reasons that people fall into a taker pattern of behavior—and that we might need different strategies for influencing them, depending on whether they’re taking because they’re narcissists and they have very inflated but fragile egos, or if it’s a sense of scarcity and insecurity that leads them to feel they’ve got to claim everything for themselves. On the other hand, is it that they used to be a giver or a matcher and got burned one too many times and learned the hard way that it’s dangerous to not be selfish? I’d love to investigate that a little bit more. If you look at the data, what most employees are looking for in their jobs is a sense of meaning and purpose. And when you look at, in turn, what makes work meaningful, what enables people to feel that their daily lives in organizations are significant—more than anything else it’s the belief that “My work makes a difference.” That “What I do has some kind of benefit or lasting value to other people.” And I think this is something a lot of leaders overlook. I spent a couple years studying call centers and asked leaders, “What would you do to motivate people who are working in very stressful, difficult jobs?” And the most common answers were, of course, the opposite of what we actually found worked. A lot of employees were skeptical, especially in a call-center context, of “Does my work really do good? Or is my boss just trying to get me to work harder? There’s an ulterior motive there.” And what I found with a group of colleagues is that it’s effective to outsource inspiration—to find the customers, the clients, the end users who would benefit from your products and services, who can really speak firsthand to their impact. And we got staggering results in the call-center setting when doing this. We bring in one person who’s benefited from the work that you do—to talk for five minutes about its impact—and we get over a 400 percent caller-by-caller spike in weekly productivity. I think sometimes there is a tension between highlighting the mission and purpose behind work and measuring day-to-day performance. One of the challenges that we all face as leaders is also an opportunity to say, “What can we do to translate those day-to-day performance metrics into contributions toward the mission?” or into, “Here’s the way in which the purpose of this work is being fulfilled.” An interesting example of this that comes to mind is at Merck, where we’ve had a number of conversations about the idea that many of the jobs, particularly if you’re doing sales, are hard to connect to—“What’s the real impact on patients?” But if you could translate the value of a drug into life-years saved, or quality-of-life contributed, it really shifts the meaning of the work, and now the performance measurements are less mundane. It’s not easy to do, but I think in the next few years we’re going to see organizations start to innovate by coming up with mission-relevant metrics—as opposed to just standard performance evaluations. About the authors Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (Penguin Books, March 2014). For more from this author, visit giveandtake.com. This interview was conducted by Rik Kirkland, senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, who is based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
Interview Wharton’s Adam Grant on the key to professional success The author of Give and Take explains why generosity in the workplace continues to be more effective than selfishness and why it is critical for personal fulfillment. June 2014 The knowledge economy has not only spurred entirely new industries but also placed different demands on how people work effectively. In this video interview with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, Wharton School professor Adam Grant elaborates on his recent book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, which explores the evolving world of workplace dynamics, why selfishness fails, and how working with, for, and through others continues to be the recipe for personal and organizational success. An edited transcript of Grant’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Knowledge economy: Givers wanted We’ve all observed that there’s a rise in project-based work, which corresponds with the knowledge economy—fewer dedicated jobs and long, stable careers and much more, “How do I combine a skill set with a need that you have?” And I think that as we see these kinds of shifts in the workplace, we’re going to see “giving” skills become more important, because a lot of getting work done then becomes about working with, for, and through other people. All of these flattening structures, these ad hoc collaborations that require improvisation, are, at their core, about interdependence. And the data show that it’s in interdependent situations that givers thrive. So if you’re the kind of person who enjoys helping others, when you’re working in a team, you have the ability to make the team better and really multiply the team’s success in a way that, ideally, reverberates to benefit everyone in the team. When you’re in a service job, your ability to serve customers is all about, “Can you identify their needs, anticipate new solutions for them, and then contribute those in a way that your customers feel is generous?” It might have been easier for takers to succeed in the old world, where you had these stable reporting hierarchies. And if they managed up effectively, then they were able to rise. Today, in these structures, which are both flatter and more improvisational, I think that givers are going to find that their reputations start to take off, and that the people who are willing to support them, and champion them, are the people who respect them for their generosity. Screening out the takers The negative impact of a taker typically exceeds the positive impact of a giver by a multiple of two or three to one. You find that it’s pretty easy for one taker to be the bad apple that spoils the barrel. But when you put one giver in an organization, it’s not like one good egg will always make a dozen. I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past year working with organizations on mechanisms for screening out takers. And I think what’s powerful about that is, if you can eliminate takers from your organization, then you have givers and matchers. The givers will act more generously because they don’t have to be paranoid that takers are out to get them. And the beauty of matchers, which is most people, is that they tend to follow the norm and reciprocate the way that they’ve been treated. So matchers act like givers in the presence of givers. They’re also useful for dealing with—if you have clients, for example, who are takers—matchers will fight fire with fire when they have to. Then the question is, “How do you screen out takers?” And there are a couple ways to think about this. One way to screen out takers is to recognize that they follow a pattern of kissing up/kicking down. If you’re a taker, it’s quite important to be a good faker when you’re dealing with powerful people, because of course you want them to think well of you. But if you’ve never tried, it turns out to be a lot of work to pretend to care about every person you meet. And takers tend to let their guard down a little bit when dealing with peers and subordinates, which means that you should be really skeptical of references that come from bosses. Lateral references and references from below are actually quite valuable. There’s also evidence that takers, when they talk about success, tend to use two words more than the rest of us, which are “I” and “me.” And then, when they talk about failures, they tend to place blame externally. My favorite way of screening out takers is to present them with situational interviews. A lot of organizations do behavioral interviews, where they’re backward looking and asking about your history, what you’ve accomplished, what challenges you’ve overcome. And those don’t turn out to be very effective if you look at the evidence, because they suffer from an apples-and-oranges problem: it’s very hard to compare two people’s work histories. Instead, what you want to do is ask, “What would you do in a situation like this,” and give everybody the same situation. The problem is, no one wants to admit, “I would be a taker here.” But there’s an easy way around this, which is, instead of asking “What would you do?” you ask people to predict what other people would do. Most of us tend to project our own motivations onto other people. If you give me a scenario where it’s not clear whether the appropriate behavior is giving, taking, or matching, what I’ll tend to do when predicting others’ behavior is ask, “Well, what would I do in this situation?” And then you get their honest opinion. Integrity-test research, for example, shows that the higher my estimate that other people will be thieves, the greater the odds that I myself am a thief. Turning takers into givers For me, the biggest unanswered question from Give and Take is, “What are the steps for turning a taker into a giver?” We know a lot about how to get takers to give in a particular moment. No one wants to be seen as a taker. If you can make behavior visible, takers tend to either match or give a little bit more. We also know that takers tend to be more generous once they identify with an organization or a person. As they become attached to either you or to a group of people, then they start to blur the line between self-interest and concern for others, because, “If we’re identified with each other, then helping you or helping this organization is going to reflect positively on me.” The problem is, when the taker switches—to a different relationship, a different group, a different organization—it’s like a reset button has been hit, and that person might go back to his or her old ways. So one of the things I’d love to explore next is, what does it require to shift a taker’s more fundamental mind-set and values? It’s probably worth recognizing that there are different reasons that people fall into a taker pattern of behavior—and that we might need different strategies for influencing them, depending on whether they’re taking because they’re narcissists and they have very inflated but fragile egos, or if it’s a sense of scarcity and insecurity that leads them to feel they’ve got to claim everything for themselves. On the other hand, is it that they used to be a giver or a matcher and got burned one too many times and learned the hard way that it’s dangerous to not be selfish? I’d love to investigate that a little bit more. If you look at the data, what most employees are looking for in their jobs is a sense of meaning and purpose. And when you look at, in turn, what makes work meaningful, what enables people to feel that their daily lives in organizations are significant—more than anything else it’s the belief that “My work makes a difference.” That “What I do has some kind of benefit or lasting value to other people.” And I think this is something a lot of leaders overlook. I spent a couple years studying call centers and asked leaders, “What would you do to motivate people who are working in very stressful, difficult jobs?” And the most common answers were, of course, the opposite of what we actually found worked. A lot of employees were skeptical, especially in a call-center context, of “Does my work really do good? Or is my boss just trying to get me to work harder? There’s an ulterior motive there.” And what I found with a group of colleagues is that it’s effective to outsource inspiration—to find the customers, the clients, the end users who would benefit from your products and services, who can really speak firsthand to their impact. And we got staggering results in the call-center setting when doing this. We bring in one person who’s benefited from the work that you do—to talk for five minutes about its impact—and we get over a 400 percent caller-by-caller spike in weekly productivity. I think sometimes there is a tension between highlighting the mission and purpose behind work and measuring day-to-day performance. One of the challenges that we all face as leaders is also an opportunity to say, “What can we do to translate those day-to-day performance metrics into contributions toward the mission?” or into, “Here’s the way in which the purpose of this work is being fulfilled.” An interesting example of this that comes to mind is at Merck, where we’ve had a number of conversations about the idea that many of the jobs, particularly if you’re doing sales, are hard to connect to—“What’s the real impact on patients?” But if you could translate the value of a drug into life-years saved, or quality-of-life contributed, it really shifts the meaning of the work, and now the performance measurements are less mundane. It’s not easy to do, but I think in the next few years we’re going to see organizations start to innovate by coming up with mission-relevant metrics—as opposed to just standard performance evaluations. About the authors Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (Penguin Books, March 2014). For more from this author, visit giveandtake.com. This interview was conducted by Rik Kirkland, senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, who is based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
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