Jonathan Brun

Brazil, Corruption, and International Sports

As France eliminated the football super power Brazil, many people wondered how it could be. Though I am French, I did not know very much about football until this FIFA World Cup. Upon reading various documents about strategy and history, I have gained a newfound appreciation for the beautiful sport.

Many people wondered how it could be that France eliminated Brazil. I believe the explanation is rather simple; the Brazilian players, though superior in talent, lacked the motivation. Only seven of the twenty-two players play during the season in Brazil and the greatest player, Ronaldo, stated in 1998 that he would never return to play in Brazil, regardless of the price. Brazilian soccer industry is infected with the most potent form of corruption and incompetence. The stadiums where the great Pelé played, are falling apart, teams are not competitive and a meager 4 000 people typically show up to a league match. With a football industry in shambles, it is no wonder that the Brazilian players lack the motivation. Brazilian clubs are not poor; in the past twenty years, they have sold 700 million dollars worth of players to European clubs. Not to mention foreign investment which have injected millions of dollars, which were funneled to the club owner’s bank accounts in the Bahamas. When it comes to a national team, regardless of the sport, the reason they usually win or lose is because of their motivation. An Olympic athlete once told me, appropriately, that professional sports are 90% psychological and 10% physical.

That is not to discount France, which has leadership from Zidane and amazing talent in the form of Henry, Viera and recently, Ribery. I actually believe France will win the cup this year and bring to a close the era of Zidane.

On another note, professional sports are exactly like horse racing or F1. It is a game that rich men play against each other in the attempt to demonstrate their superiority. To develop players, then buy, sell, and trade them to pit against one another in competition. Much like other things in society, organized sports and their fans are a very interesting phenomenon worthy of further analysis.

Taegukgi, Film, Civil War and the Human Mind

Tae Guk Gi is an epic Korean War movie that I believe is one of the greatest war movies ever. It tells the story of two brothers who are sent off to the Korean War. The older brother takes the riskiest missions available in the vain hope that he will be able to send his younger brother home. The war destroys their family and their country. This film is one of the goriest war movies I have seen and a large portion of it is devoted to battle scenes. This begs the question, how much violence in a war movie is too much and how much is too little.

Nota Bene: If you want an in-depth review of the plot, the following site is pretty good: Click Here

A war movie is a war movie because it concerns war. Despite the obvious redundancy of that comment, there is little doubt that battle should be the main thrust of the film, but we must concern ourselves with two aspects of the depictions of battle scenes: 1. Their length vis-à-vis the film’s length and 2. Their depth, meaning the goriness and proximity to a true battle scene. I firmly believe that both elements must be adhered to to the point of the audience thinking it may be slightly too much. If there is any hope of conveying the horrors of war to a popcorn munching audience, the audience must at the very least be made to feel uncomfortable. If the battle scenes are too ‘light’ then the audience may come across with a sugar coated version of the front lines. At the same time, overly gruesome scenes can turn an audience off the more human aspects of war – broken minds, broken families and broken lives.

The next thing that this film does, which I believe is very important, is its presentation of the war for what it was: a terrible civil war backed by foreign powers. Fighting on home soil is something that all North Americans and some Europeans are out of touch with. I have always maintained that it is entirely different to send your armies off to a foreign land as opposed to having the mortars and bullets landing near your childhood home. In civil war, it is the civilians who suffer the most. Families are torn apart, homes are destroyed and friends turn on each other. This film is probably the first one that really shows a civil war.

After watching it for a second time, there is an important scene at the beginning, which foreshadows all that is to come. The soon-to-be wife of one of the brothers shows a bag of barley, which she obtained at a communist rally. She states that it is impossible to get good food and that “she would kill for food like this”. That’s what civil war is. Rarely is it about political ideology or great injustice, more often than not, people switch sides, turn on neighbors and commit unthinkable crimes for food and land. Ideologies and racial tension are the symptoms of resource shortages, not the other way around. A closer look at Rwanda, Sudan, and other conflicts often demonstrate how a few evil people take advantage of a weakened country to manipulate it to their ends.

Another main reason that this film remains so powerful is due to its two main characters. The film revolves around their love and hate for each other. The human mind cannot conceptualize large-scale events very well. We cannot imagine the size of the planet, the atmosphere, the universe, war or genocide. Of course, when we are told for the first time that six million Jews were gazed by the Nazis, we sit back and realize what evil humanity is capable of. However, try and imagine six million unique faces, their families, their fear and innocence and we simply draw a blank. Just as computers have technical limitations, so too does the human brain. We have a limited capacity to imagine and place unique items. Numerous studies confirm this truth; notably, the vast majority of the population can only place six musical tones in order, above six tones, we begin to mess them up and cannot properly arrange them.

This of course does not apply to the musically inclined, but it does apply to most people. On the same note, the majority of the population has difficulty seeing large events on their full scale. For that reason, a story that follows the plight of one person or a single family is much more powerful than a documentary about the entire conflict. On a personal level, I was much more deeply touched when I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam than when I visited the concentration camps in Germany. This film conveys to the full extent the sacrifices that one family member makes to the other in the context of a large conflict and the consequent destruction of his humanity.

One last point that is worthy to be retained from this film is how far we, and the Koreans, have come. In a little of fifty years, South Korea has become a top technological and economic power. The atrocities of this war are unthinkable to today’s youth and we should be thankful for our ignorance. War is perhaps the worst aspect of humanity’s power and must be avoided. Appeasement is not the solution, but education, communication and cooperation is. Communist China has become an international powerhouse out of its own will, full-blow war was not needed to destroy Soviet Russia, India slowly developed its own potential, South Korea is exactly the same geographic dimensions as before the war and the few African countries that are doing okay are the ones which were not privy to colonialism or foreign aid. Political change can only be brought about from the inside and foreign intervention has never worked. For that reason, the Iraq war cannot and will not be brought to a promising conclusion anytime soon. The people of the country are the ones with the keys to success and no foreign power, no matter their might, can overcome that.

This film remains very important because it demonstrates the particular atrocities of a civil war from the perspective of the people who lived it, not the foreign saviors or criminals.

Circle of Life

I just graduated from engineering and am looking into getting into sustainability. The best website and company I have ever seen in this regard is Interface’s, which is a leader in the field. Their website can be found here: http://www.interfacesustainability.com/

I also found a website that carries informaiton about many different people in the field ranging from peace groups to microbiologists: http://www.big-picture.tv/

There is no doubt in my mind that sustainablity and capitalism go hand-in-hand. Yes, you can make short-term gains by polluting. But it is in your interest to mimick nature by being efficient, versatile, recyclable and inclusive. You save money by not wasting resources, every piece of paper has value. All matter, ideas and time represents energy and energy is the purest form of wealth. I will build on this idea in my next article. I have to go watch the world cup.

Irak, News Media

Cool website which is in reality just a cartoon about media, irak and the usa. It is written by Anthony Lappé who started www.gnn.tv, a very cool news site that carries a lot of stuff you don’t see in mainstream media. Take if for what you will, but the articles often are very truthful and interesting.

The Comic strip is located at: http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/

The Tipping Point

I recently read the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. If was pretty cool and disciussed many things of interest. Most notably, this book seems to have fallen into a new category of non-fiction, which I like to call: Synthesization. Meaning, there are these non-fiction books which have been topping bestseller lists despite their serious content. They do not actually present much new “data”, but rather, they take many different studies and synthesize them into a coherent image that is applicable to real life. Such books, which I have recently read are: The Inginuity Gap, The Tipping Point, Collapse, The White Man’s Buden, and The Weather Makers.

They have very broad relevence to society and science. Below is a brief email I sent to the author of Malcolm Gladwell, if you are familiar with the topic. Tell me what you think.

Malcolm Gladwell,

I have just read your book The Tipping Point, and found it quite interesting. What came to mind when reading the section about the Salesmen, Maven and Connectors was the new website called Facebook.com. Much like mySpace and other personal sites it displays peoples lists of friends and shows the different networks that they are part of. But what is of most interest is that some people may have upwards of 300 people listed as friends but have few wallposts, which are comments that are posted by users but are visible to the entire community. It has been said that you judge your love by the amount of people that love you, not the amount of people you love.

This brings me back to the point that as you discussed in your book, Connectors have a knack at making connections with people, but more than that they have knack at making connections that people remember. So some of these people who list 300 friends, but have 50 comments are unlikly to be connectors despite their apparent popularity; whereas someone with 150 friends, but 150 comments may in fact be much more connected. In other words, these people have deeper connections because it is other people who feel a need to contact that one person and not that one person to continuously stay in contact with all his 150 friends.

Another side note that I would have liked to see some case studies about is poverty. As far as I know there have not been any places where a Tipping Point has been reached regarding poverty. Many IMF and World Bank economists claim to be able to start a poor economy on the road to growth by injected an initial supply of capital, framing some key laws and regulations and then letting the country take care of itself. This has never worked despite claims to the contrary. Post WWII Japan took off because of western technology, but the ideas and laws regarding industry were largely home-grown. This failed idea of applying western thought to poor contries is well outlined in the book The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly. So do you think it is possible to apply the theory of the Tipping Point on a large society wide scale, particularly in a society to which you are not native to? Meaning, can you make a third world society sustainable by identifying the Tipping Points of that society with the help of locals and research and then applying your findings to the country as a whole? Just a few thoughts.

Hope your work continues well and that there are more interesting books and articles to come.

Regards,

Jonathan Olivier BRUN