Guatemala // Current

Americans flee to Guatemala to escape bleak job market

GUATEMALA CITY -- John Wilson holds a PhD in physics and had worked in the aerospace... more

TheSkunk
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8 days ago
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The Hunt for White October

Colombian drug dealers sick of getting busted by law enforcement have come up with... more

bigredkev
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23 days ago
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State of Impunity

The Rosenberg Case Awakens Guatemala On Sunday morning, May 10, 2009, Rodrigo... more

ReporteVirtual
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1 month ago
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Guatemala Declares 'State Of Public Calamity' from Drought, Food Shortages

"Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared 'a state of public calamity' late Tuesday... more

jkw077
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2 months ago
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Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth, A Common Story

When 14 year-old Alfredo Lopez Sanchez arrived in Florida from Guatemala in 2001, he... more

Sahuaro
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3 months ago
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2 comments

Jury Rules for Hospital That Deported Patient

In a benchmark case dealing with the obligations of hospitals toward uninsured illegal... more

Sahuaro
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4 months ago
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The Christmas Tree Around the World

In various parts of the world Christmas is celebrated differently, but the Christmas... more

CHANLEEPENG
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4 months ago
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YouTube Video Sends Guatemala Into Crisis

Several have sent word that a YouTube video of recently assassinated lawyer Rodrigo... more

Tyrannous
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6 months ago
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1 comment

"...I have been assassinated by the Guatemala President"

"Good evening, my name is Rodrigo Rosemberg Marzano, and if you're are looking at this... more

elnawal
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7 months ago
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16 comments

Twitter gets man arrested in Guatemala

Twitter, which helped to spread panic about Swine Flu, has gotten a Guatamalan man (a... more

rebecca22
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6 months ago
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1 comment

Vibrant Market & Shaman Ritual in Chichicastenango, Guatemala

What's made this once obscure market more popular for adventurists is the preserved... more

reelscaper
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7 months ago
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War declared over the human brain

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."

See link above for rest of article.
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened... more

walesjames
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1 year ago
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Avoidable Apocalypse

PMT is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global... more

PostmodernTimes
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2 years ago
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28 comments

At least 22 people die in Guatemala landslide

"Dozens of people are feared to have died in a huge landslide in a northern area of... more

chicaalmodovar
added this
11 months ago
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1 comment

4 dead in market shootout in Guatemala

A shootout in Guantemala's largest market left four dead and two wounded. This is just... more

nazbags
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11 months ago
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Demand Investigation Over Guatemalan Attack on "Our Gay Beauty" HIV Prevention Event

Terrorist attack on Guatemalan event

queerunity
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1 year ago
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Biofuels forcing farmers off land

The drive to expand biofuels production is creating new pressures on land and food rights all over the world. This process is most advanced in Latin America, where national and international companies are increasing the production of sugarcane, palm oil, jatropha and other crops to take advantage of high prices and high expectations for markets in the United States and Europe. In many cases, smallholder farmers are being driven off their lands and fragile ecosystems are threatened.

In Guatemala, the area under cultivation for sugarcane increased more than 155 percent over the last five years. Land used for African palm for biodiesel production tripled in the same period. Guatemala, a small country with high rates of poverty, is becoming one of the world’s leading producers of ethanol for export.

Unfortunately, this shift to fuel crops makes life even harder for many local farmers. ActionAid Guatemala has documented how the push for biofuels has increased land concentration (when small-scale farmers are pressured to sell their lands, often because they don’t get the credit or other resources they need to grow crops), and re-concentration, (when plantation owners sell their lands and displace the farm workers who live there). These practices threaten rural livelihoods, food security and local environments.

Similar processes are unfolding in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and many other countries across the Americas. The expansion of biofuel production is driven by efforts to find alternative fuel sources at a time of rising oil prices. US and European renewable fuels standards mandate dramatic increases in the use of ethanol and biodiesel over the next few years. The expectation that the US and EU will increase biofuel imports to meet those targets is driving prices and investment up throughout South America.

ActionAid met with representatives of family-farm, environmental, development and policy organizations in Guatemala to share experiences and find ways to work together to confront these problems. The groups agree that small-scale production of biofuels crops for local use might have a place in a sustainable mix of crops for food and energy sovereignty. But the current push for large-scale production to meet export demand must be reined in because fuel production is displacing food.

ActionAid believes that the US and EU should reconsider their biofuels targets that are pushing food prices up and farmers off their lands. We will be working with our partners in the Americas, and in similar initiatives in other regions, to call on our governments to reconsider the rush to fuel crops.

Write to your Member of Congress to insist that they reconsider the impact of biofuels targets and subsidies on food security and rural livelihoods. The drive to expand biofuels production is creating new pressures on land and food... more