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johnsonle1

Donald Trump's Fictional America - POLITICO Magazine - 1 views

www.politico.com/...ica-post-fact-venezuela-214973

donald trump social media bias

shared by johnsonle1 on 03 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • johnsonle1 on 03 Apr 17
     
    But take it from someone who grew up in Venezuela, surrounded by a fictional universe of Chávez's making: These interpretations are all wrong. For one, they assume that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route-the obvious one, the longstanding one-when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization.
Javier E

Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ape-to-venezuelan-fantasy.html

beauty latin america Venezuela surgery sexism culture fantasy

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.
  • So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style
  • Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “You see a woman like this and you say, ‘Wow, I want to look like her,’ ” said Reina Parada, as she sanded a mannequin torso in the workshop. Although she cannot afford it, she said, she would like to get implant surgery someday. “It gives you better self-esteem.”
  • Cosmetic procedures are so fashionable here that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as “an operated woman.” Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being “operated” as well.
  • The embrace of plastic surgery clashes with the government’s socialist ideology and frequent talk of creating a society free of the taint of commercialism.
  • the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.
  • “Venezuela is known for its oil, and it’s known for its beauty,”
  • Beauty took on a particularly important role in the late 1970s and ’80s when the country’s beauty queens, already a national obsession, were crowned Miss Universe three times.
  • And the beauty queens’ fame helped fuel a fascination with cosmetic surgery and procedures like breast implants, tummy tucks, nose jobs and injections to firm the buttocks.
  • For Mr. Sousa, beauty really is skin deep: “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”
Javier E

Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ape-to-venezuelan-fantasy.html

fantasy sexism latin america Venezuela beauty surgery culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
smnasha liked it
  • “I have lots of clients that come here and say, ‘I want to look like that mannequin,’ ” Ms. Molina said. “I tell them, ‘O.K., then get an operation.’ ”
  • Ms. Corro, the co-owner, explained the changes in the mannequins over just a few years: bigger breasts, bigger buttocks, svelte waists. Until recently, “the mannequins were natural, just like the women were natural,” she said. “The transformation has been both of the woman and of the mannequin.”
  • While Ms. Corro’s mannequins took a quantum leap in body shape several years ago, Ms. Mieles said that the busts and buttocks of her family’s mannequins had grown gradually to keep up with the trends in plastic surgery.
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  • “Beauty is perfection, to try to perfect yourself more and more every day,” Ms. Mieles said. “That’s how people see it here.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>
maxwellokolo

Venezuela protests: Maduro hikes minimum wage by 60% - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-latin-america-39768671

shared by maxwellokolo on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 01 May 17
     
    Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has ordered a 60% increase in the country's minimum wage, effective from Monday. Including food subsidies, the worst-paid workers will now take home about 200,000 bolivars a month - less than $50 (£38) at the black market rate.
Javier E

What Is Wrong with the West's Economies? by Edmund S. Phelps | The New York Review of B... - 1 views

www.nybooks.com/...what-wrong-wests-economies

economics theory science

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?
  • With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.
  • The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • This failing in the West’s economies is also a failing of economics
  • many people have long felt the desire to do something with their lives besides consuming goods and having leisure. They desire to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop.
  • Our prevailing political economy is blind to the very concept of inclusion; it does not map out any remedy for the deficiency
  • injustice of another sort. Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder
  • “Money is like blood. You need it to live but it isn’t the point of life.”4
  • justice is not everything that people need from their economy. They need an economy that is good as well as just. And for some decades, the Western economies have fallen short of any conception of a “good economy”—an economy offering a “good life,” or a life of “richness,” as some humanists call it
  • The good life as it is popularly conceived typically involves acquiring mastery in one’s work, thus gaining for oneself better terms—or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial—an experience we may call “prospering.”
  • As humanists and philosophers have conceived it, the good life involves using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world—an experience I call “flourishing.”
  • prospering and flourishing became prevalent in the nineteenth century when, in Europe and America, economies emerged with the dynamism to generate their own innovation.
  • What is the mechanism of the slowdown in productivity
  • prospering
  • In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period.
  • What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up.
  • High-enough wages, low-enough unemployment, and wide-enough access to engaging work are necessary for a “good-enough” economy—though far from sufficient. The material possibilities of the economy must be adequate for the nonmaterial possibilities to be widespread—the satisfactions of prospering and of flourishing through adventurous, creative, and even imaginative work.
  • today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.”
  • ince around 1970, or earlier in some cases, most of the continental Western European economies have come to resemble more completely the mechanical model of standard economics. Most companies are highly efficient. Households, apart from the very low-paid or unemployed, have gone on saving
  • In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent
  • The bleak levels of both unemployment and job satisfaction in Europe are testimony to its dreary economies.
  • a recent survey of household attitudes found that, in “happiness,” the median scores in Spain (54), France (51), Italy (48), and Greece (37) are all below those in the upper half of the nations labeled “emerging”—Mexico (79), Venezuela (74), Brazil (73), Argentina (66), Vietnam (64), Colombia (64), China (59), Indonesia (58), Chile (58), and Malaysia (56)
  • The US economy is not much better. Two economists, Stanley Fischer and Assar Lindbeck, wrote of a “Great Productivity Slowdown,” which they saw as beginning in the late 1960s.11 The slowdown in the growth of capital and labor combined—what is called “total factor productivity”—is star
  • though the injustices in the West’s economies are egregious, they ought not to be seen as a major cause of the productivity slowdowns and globalization. (For one thing, a slowdown of productivity started in the US in the mid-1960s and the sharp loss of manufacturing jobs to poorer countries occurred much later—from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.) Deeper causes must be at work.
  • The plausible explanation of the syndrome in America—the productivity slowdown and the decline of job satisfaction, among other things—is a critical loss of indigenous innovation in the established industries like traditional manufacturing and services that was not nearly offset by the innovation that flowered in a few new industries
  • hat then caused this narrowing of innovation? No single explanation is persuasive. Yet two classes of explanations have the ring of truth. One points to suppression of innovation by vested interests
  • some professions, such as those in education and medicine, have instituted regulation and licensing to curb experimentation and change, thus dampening innovation
  • established corporations—their owners and stakeholders—and entire industries, using their lobbyists, have obtained regulations and patents that make it harder for new firms to gain entry into the market and to compete with incumbents.
  • The second explanation points to a new repression of potential innovators by families and schools. As the corporatist values of control, solidarity, and protection are invoked to prohibit innovation, traditional values of conservatism and materialism are often invoked to inhibit a young person from undertaking an innovation.
  • ow might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency.
  • Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.
  • a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand
  • The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.
  • It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations
  • This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.
cvanderloo

The U.S. wants Costa Rica to host refugees before they cross the border. Here's why - 0 views

theconversation.com/oss-the-border-heres-why-63989

Costa Rica refugee immigration border

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.
  • The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.
  • The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • While the plan offers a short-term solution for protecting those most vulnerable to violence, it does not address the magnitude of the migration. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.
  • Costa Rica is a major destination for migrants and refugees in the region, and immigrants account for 9 percent of the country’s population of 4.8 million. Like the United States, Costa Rica has seen a dramatic increase in arrivals of refugees from Northern Triangle countries, particularly El Salvador, since 2012
  • Central Americans moving to Costa Rica today often already have established social networks in Costa Rica –
  • Immigration officials expect to continue to see around 500 Colombian refugees arriving each year, despite the newly signed peace accord. Costa Rica has also seen a large increase in Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis.
  • Costa Rica has become a popular destination and transit country because of its relatively open borders and policies, its reputation as a champion of human rights and its relatively low levels of crime, violence and poverty. I
  • Over the past 10 years, the country has increased restrictions on immigration, hoping to discourage low-income economic migrants from Nicaragua from entering. These restrictions echo the national security logic of U.S. policies.
  • It neither addresses the underlying conditions of violence that refugees seek to escape nor strengthens regional governments’ abilities to deal with the arrival of these vulnerable populations.
Javier E

Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dna-caribbean-islands.html

caribbean dna research language origins human origins American Indian native americans

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens of crops.
  • Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons.
  • “We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200 now,”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America.
  • Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old
  • The other problem is that ancient DNA is still scarce on the Caribbean coast of the mainland.
  • About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age.
  • The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.
  • We don’t know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.
  • The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups.
  • These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.
  • the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate.
  • Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.
  • Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.
  • “The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from,” Dr. Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”
  • Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,”
  • The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions
  • The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.
  • now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491.
  • Dr. Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient Caribbean genomes to a genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists, people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.
huffem4

Trump Demands CNN Apologize For Poll - 1 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-poll-unskewing-2020-elections

politics social media bias election

shared by huffem4 on 11 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • “To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40 year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” he wrote. “To the extent that we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.”
  • The idea, recycled by Republicans in every election cycle since at least 2012, is that Republicans are being under-sampled in the polls, artificially inflating the results in favor of the Democratic candidate.
  • The movement’s founding father, Dean Chambers, trumpeted the theory during the 2012 campaign, when former President Barack Obama was consistently leading Mitt Romney. Chambers decided that polls should be weighted by party identification — disregarding arguments that it’s a fungible metric, and that many voters change their identification from one election to the next — so he “unskewed” some national polls. And all of a sudden, Romney started winning.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Besides the fact that it isn’t pollsters’ job to time their polls according to positive news for the President, the CNN poll was actually still in the field during the day Friday. CNN is standing by its poll, which shows Trump lagging behind Biden at 41 percent to 55.
tongoscar

As Protests in South America Surged, So Did Russian Trolls on Twitter, U.S. Finds - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-america-russian-twitter.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • In Chile, nearly 10 percent of all tweets supporting protests in late October originated with Twitter accounts that had a high certainty of being linked to Russia.In Bolivia, immediately after President Evo Morales resigned on Nov. 10, the number of tweets associated with those type of accounts spiked to more than 1,000 a day, up from fewer than five.And in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Chile over one 30-day period, Russia-linked accounts posted strikingly similar messages within 90 minutes of one another.
  • The department routinely monitors Twitter traffic worldwide with an eye toward malign activities, like the proliferation of fake pages and user accounts or content that targets the public with divisive messages.
  • “We are noting a thumb on the scales,” said Kevin O’Reilly, the deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing issues in the Western Hemisphere. “It has made the normal dispute resolutions of a democratic society more contentious and more difficult.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Russian effort in South America — the details of which have not been previously reported — appears aimed at stirring dissent in states that have demanded the resignation of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, senior diplomats say.
  • The unrest in Latin America this fall cannot be attributed to any single factor, and it is unclear how effective the Russia-linked influence campaign on Twitter was.
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