HodgBlog

We just returned from a two-week bike trip on the Oregon coast (which we'll be posting about on https://www.jenzach.us pretty soon), and during the trip, I took a vacation from email and Twitter. I've gone back to email, but I've decided that my life is better without Twitter, so I'm going to stop looking at other people's tweets, and also stop posting my own tweets at both my personal (@HodgBlog) and business (@poplarware) accounts. I am not going to close my Twitter accounts right now, in case I change my mind, but I may do that in the future.

I wrote several blog posts in 2007-2009 about immigration (mostly still relevant), but the recent news has me thinking about immigration again. Like many Americans, I've been horrified by much of what the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing under the Trump administration. So, I'm planning to write a new series of posts about immigration.

This is the third post in the "Call Your Rep" series... If you're reading this, and you have a US Senator or House Representative who is not voting the way you want them to vote, it's time to act: Call your representative!

This is the second post in the "Call Your Rep" series... If you're reading this, and you have a US Senator or House Representative who is not voting the way you want them to vote, it's time to act: Call your representative!

When I originally wrote this blog, between 2006-2010, I wrote all of the posts in English, and then translated them into Spanish... I'm happy to say that I have now put the Spanish posts up on the site!

So now, if you're reading a blog post on my web site that has a Spanish translation, you will see a link in the sidebar to read it in Spanish (there should be one on this page soon). Or, you can check out the entire Spanish series.

Enjoy (and please excuse my undoubtedly imperfect Spanish)!

This is my first post in the "Call Your Rep" series... If you're reading this, and you have a US Senator or House Representative who is not voting the way you want them to vote, it's time to act: Call your representative!

Over the past several months, I have been feeling everything from sad to angry, due to all the nastiness of the recent US Presidential election, its outcome, the people Trump has nominated for his cabinet and his advisors, the things Trump says and Tweets, and in the past few days since he actually took office, the executive orders he has already started issuing.

From 2006 to 2010, I wrote blog posts, collected under the name "HodgBlog". I just finished transferring the English versions of the posts over to this web site, and I plan to start blogging again.

The previous iteration of HodgBlog started out talking about the US so-called Foreign Aid program, and then ranged into various issues in the areas of environment and social justice. I also translated all the posts into Spanish, and plan to display the Spanish translations of those old posts on this site sometime soon too.

I heard an interesting report on NPR yesterday about the cotton trade. The story is basically that the US got sued by Brazil at the World Trade Organization (WTO) court over illegal (under WTO rules we have agreed to) cotton subsidies that the US government gives to US cotton farmers. Brazil won the case and its several appeals. However, in spite of the ruling, the US kept the subsidies in place, so Brazil threatened to retaliate with trade sanctions, which forced the US to negotiate a settlement with Brazil.

I recently saw a great documentary film at the Seattle International Film Festival called Waste Land. It's about an art project of Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz, which took place at the biggest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho, just outside of Rio de Janeiro.