March 19, 2012
Kleptocracy (‘rule by thieves’) is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service. This type of government corruption is often achieved by the embezzlement of state funds.
Kleptocracy is most common in third world countries where the economy (often as a legacy of colonialism) is dominated by resource extraction. Such incomes constitute a form of economic rent and are therefore easier to siphon off without causing the income itself to decrease (for example, due to capital flight as investors pull out to escape the high taxes levied by the kleptocrats).
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March 19, 2012
The Banana Wars were a series of occupations, police actions, and interventions involving the United States in Central America and the Caribbean. This period started with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent Treaty of Paris, which gave the United States control of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Between the time of the war with Spain and 1934, the US conducted military operations and occupations in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The series of conflicts ended with the withdrawal of troops from Haiti and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. Reasons for these conflicts were varied but were largely economic in nature.
The term ‘Banana Wars’ arises from the connections between these interventions and the preservation of American commercial interests in the region. Most prominently, the United Fruit Company had significant financial stakes in production of bananas, tobacco, sugar cane, and various other products throughout the Caribbean, Central America and Northern South America. The U.S. was also advancing its political interests, maintaining a sphere of influence and controlling the Panama Canal which it had recently built, critically important to global trade and naval power.
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March 19, 2012
Banana republic is a pejorative name for a country which has an unstable government, high corruption and which largely depends on agriculture, such as growing bananas. There are subject to frequent coups. The ‘original Banana republic is Honduras. In the early 20th century the United Fruit Company had much influence in the country, even deposing a president and installing a new one over taxes.
The first known use of the term was by American author O. Henry in his 1904 book of linked short stories, ‘Cabbages and Kings.’ The book is based on Henry’s 1896-97 stay in Honduras, while hiding from federal authorities for embezzlement in the United States. O.Henry used the term to refer to a ‘servile dictatorship’ which directly supported large-scale plantation agriculture in return for payments or gifts.
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March 19, 2012
Mike Daisey (b. 1976) is an American monologist, author, and actor best known for his full-length extemporaneous monologues, particularly ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.’ The story was subsequently retracted following allegations that many of the events were fabricated. ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ (2010) is a one-man show. It debuted at Portland’s TBA Festival in 2010
. It purports to examine globalization by exploring the exploitation of Chinese workers through the lens of ‘the rise and fall and rise of Apple, industrial design, and the human price we are willing to pay for our technology, woven together in a complex narrative.’ Excerpts from the show were presented as an exposé of conditions at a Foxconn factory in China on the Public Radio International show ‘This American Life’ in 2012. After it was retracted, Daisey apologized for presenting his work as journalism, saying it is actually theater, but refused to acknowledge that he had lied — even in the face of obvious discrepancies.
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March 19, 2012
A score bug (or, in an expanded form, a score banner or scorebar) is a digital on-screen graphic which is displayed at either the top or lower third bottom of a television screen during the broadcast of a sports game in order to display the current score and other statistics. The first television network in the United States to produce a score bug (digital on-screen graphic) was ABC, which used one on the telecast of the 1994 Purolator 500 NASCAR event. A transparent digit counted down the number of laps remaining in the race.
ABC also incorporated the Sports Bug for their 1994 World Cup coverage, providing the time and score on the game as well as enabling advertiser sponsorship to broadcast games without interruptions. Later that fall, Fox introduced a full-score bug for its NFL coverage, known as the ‘FoxBox,’ as did cable network ESPN. ABC expanded theirs to ‘Monday Night Football’ in 1997. CBS introduced theirs upon returning to the NFL in the fall of 1998, and NBC in 2001 during its coverage of the XFL.
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March 18, 2012
Sergio Leone [lee-oh-nee] (1929 – 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre. Leone’s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ ‘The Colossus of Rhodes,’ the Dollars Trilogy (‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ ‘For a Few Dollars More,’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), Once ‘Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘Duck, You Sucker!’, and ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’
Born in Rome, Leone was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone (known as director Roberto Roberti) and the silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi (Bice Waleran). During his schooldays, Leone was a classmate of his later musical collaborator Ennio Morricone for a time. After watching his father work on film sets, Leone began his own career in the film industry at the age of 18 after dropping out of law studies at the university.
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March 17, 2012
‘Boneless lean beef trimmings,’ occasionally referred to as pink slime, are made from meat trimmings passed through a centrifuge then squeezed through a tube the size of a pencil, during which time it is exposed to ammonia gas. The combination of the gas with water in the meat results in a reaction that increases the pH (lowering acidity) and killing any pathogens such as E. coli. At the end of the process, the beef is at least 90 percent lean.
The typical beef production process results in beef trimmings, consisting of fat and meat, that frequently had been cooked down to recover the oils from the trim because it was not profitable to otherwise separate the meat from the trimmings. However, today much of these beef trimmings are sent as USDA-approved cuts of meat to special separation plants, where centrifuges separate the beef from the fat. The production process was pioneered by Eldon Roth, who in the 1980s founded Beef Products Inc.
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March 16, 2012
The Black List is a survey published every year on the second Friday of December since 2004. The survey includes the top screenplays that went unproduced.
The website claims that it is not necessarily ‘the best,’ but rather ‘the most liked,’ since it is voted on by studio and production company executives. Some of the screenplays are then selected off of the Blacklist to be put into production such as ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Cedar Rapids.’
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March 16, 2012
Roku [roh-koo] is an American, privately-held, consumer electronics company that sells home digital media products. The company is based in California, and was founded in 2002, by ReplayTV founder Anthony Wood. ‘Roku’ means ‘six’ in Japanese, a reference to the six companies Wood has launched. Their current product is the ‘Roku 2’ series of digital video players (DVP).
Content on the Roku DVP is provided by Roku partners, and are identified using the ‘channel’ vernacular. Each channel supports content from one partner (though some content partners have more than one channel). Premium channels include Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, EPIX, and Amazon Instant Video. Users can add or remove different channels from the Roku Channel Store. Both on-demand content and live streaming are supported by the devices. For live TV streams, Roku supports Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) adaptive streaming technology.
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March 16, 2012
Vale tudo [val-ay / too-doe] (Portuguese: ‘anything goes’) are full-contact unarmed combat events, with a limited number of rules, that became popular in Brazil during the 20th century. While Vale Tudo uses techniques from many martial art styles, making it similar to modern mixed martial arts competitions, it is a distinct style in its own right. Fighting sideshows, termed ‘Vale Tudo,’ became popular in Brazilian circuses during the 1920s.
Examples of such bouts were described in the ‘Japanese-American Courier’ in 1928: ‘One report from São Paulo declares that Jiu Jitsu is truly an art and that in an interesting exhibition in the side tent to the big circus a Bahian of monstrous dimensions met his waterloo at the hands of a diminutive Japanese wrestler. The man was an expert at capoeira, an old South American style of fighting, but after putting the Japanese on his back and trying to kick his head … the little oriental by the use of a Jiu Jitsu hold threw the Bahian and after a short struggle he was found sitting on the silent frame of the massive opponent.
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March 16, 2012
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a full contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, including boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay Thai, kickboxing, taekwondo, karate, judo and other styles. The roots of modern mixed martial arts can be traced back to the ancient Olympics where one of the earliest well documented systems of codified full range unarmed combat was utilized in the sport of Pankration.
Various mixed style contests also took place throughout Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim during the early 1900s. The combat sport of Vale Tudo that had developed in Brazil from the 1920s was brought to the United States by the Gracie family in 1993 with the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which is currently the largest MMA promotion company worldwide. Prior to the UFC, professional MMA events had also been held in Japan by Shooto since 1989.
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March 16, 2012
Enzo Ferrari (1898 – 1988) was an Italian race car driver and entrepreneur, the founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team, and subsequently of the Ferrari car manufacturer.
He was often referred to as ‘il Commendatore.’ Ferrari’s management style was autocratic and he was known to pit driver against driver in the hope of improving performance. He did not often get close to his drivers. Enzo Ferrari spent a reserved life, and rarely granted interviews.
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