Category Archives: Burkina Faso

Full circle: A new generation of Bernardo Vega’s about to take the Coamo to New York…

S&P cut a slew of Puerto Rico bonds to junk territory ahead of a press conference by Gov. Padilla today after the market closes, according to the rating agency’s website. via Reorg Research Intelligence Alert

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One Day in Bereba: Contemporary Life in Burkina Faso – World Affairs Council San Francisco opening Feb 5 6-7:30

  David Pace has been teaching photography in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 20 years. As resident director of Santa Clara University’s study abroad program in West Africa, Pace spends up to ten weeks each year in … Continue reading

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El Salvador and tariffs and CAFTA

I am teaching Econ 3, our introduction to international economics and development here at Santa Clara University.  I had a student in office hours today. She had spent last quarter in El Salvador on Santa Clara’s Casa de la Solidaridad … Continue reading

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So much for Lant Pritchett’s starfish metaphor…

A mysterious plague has manifested in the world’s starfish population, quickly spreading to several regions in which starfish (also called “sea stars”) are found. Starfish afflicted with the disease tear themselves to pieces, the arms crawling in opposite directions until … Continue reading

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SCU student Jasmine Blaine (’11) experiences even more rural hospitality in Peru (I think that is where she is!)

In the morning Thursday, we woke up and the wife of the house made us an “aguatia.” Ok, this does not mean a small glass of juice, tea, or water; this means an entire huge meal. So we ate first … Continue reading

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Alan Moore goes on… and on… and on… but really interesting, if unfortunate that as he himself notes the issues are rather trivial and obvious and surprising how much Internet time devoted to them

The subject of comic-related-films or film-related-comics had understandably arisen and, when asked, I had ventured my honest opinion that I found something worrying about the fact that the superhero film audience was now almost entirely composed of adults, men and … Continue reading

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Binyavanga Wainaina: We Must Free Our Imaginations

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Shorting housing prices

We were talking about this at dinner last night, so I just went online to do 5 minutes of research.  My position was confirmed: for the typical non-finance person (like an ordinary university professor), there is no low-information cost product … Continue reading

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Hunger in Silicon Valley, Leslie Gray oped in San Jose Mercury News

Santa Clara County, once known as Valley of Heart\’s delight due to its abundant fruit and vegetable production, has lost almost half of its farmland, much of it to sprawling urban development with little access to healthy foods.This pattern of … Continue reading

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Does reading make you more empathetic? Introspective evidence

Read “A Mistake” by Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker.  After the last sentence (of a 30 minute read), take a test on generalized empathy for strangers, neighbors, co-ethnics, misanthropes, bullies and snarks.  You’ll be more empathetic than your “self … Continue reading

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Martin Luther King, Jr. in Ghana, 1957

In March 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King traveled to West Africa to attend Ghana’s independence ceremony. King’s voyage was symbolic of a growing global alliance of oppressed peoples and was strategically well timed; his … Continue reading

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The Cruelest Pregnancy

It’s not at all clear, for starters, that the fetus has a good chance of surviving inside the womb or of flourishing outside of it. In a study of a few dozen cases of continued pregnancies inside brain-dead women, only … Continue reading

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Excellent talk-show on Norbert Zongo!

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Wow I am pretty surprised by this… the ballgame is really different now. CDP : Le Larlé Naaba Tigré démissionne de la FEDAP/BC, du CDP et de l’Assemblée nationale – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso

La rumeur avait annoncé le Larlé Naaba Tigré, Victor Tiendrébéogo à l’état civil, démissionnaire du CDP. Il a avait été le seul des 70 députés du groupe parlementaire CDP a n’avoir pas signé la déclaration de soutien au Président du … Continue reading

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Salva Kiir’s attack on Riek Machar Dec 15 in SPLM party conference speech

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Heat was on and it was a warm day in San Jose….

So my classroom was very warm… and I mentioned David Johansen….

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The Concubine by Elechi Amadi

OMFG this novel is so friggin great!  As a set, The Concubine, The Slave and The Great Ponds should have gotten Amadi the Nobel Prize for literature.  These are perfect novels.  The dialogue is amazing.  The Concubine starts off with … Continue reading

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One of the first songs I ever listened to 100 times… haven’t actually heard it in 30 years…. wow… still good.

What happened was, I started singing “slip away” to myself, and I couldn’t place it, and I knew it was one of the saddest things I had ever heard sung and then of course I remembered it was Lou Reed. … Continue reading

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Photography of David Pace: One Day in Bereba

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International Education Statistics: A very depressing sentence

In Burkina Faso, men and women 25 years and older completed on average less than one year of schooling via International Education Statistics.

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