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anonymous

Hawaii gets tourism surge as coronavirus rules loosen up - 0 views

apnews.com/...306b102a3c6e5871bf8c2fc9c3f8de

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Tourists are traveling to Hawaii in larger numbers than officials anticipated, and many are wandering around Waikiki without masks, despite a statewide mandate to wear them in public.
  • Hawaii’s “Safe Travels” program reported that about 28,000 people flew into and throughout the islands on Saturday, the highest number of travelers in a single day since the pandemic began, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Monday.
  • In October, state officials launched a pre-travel testing program that allowed visitors to sidestep quarantine rules. But travel remained sluggish until the second week in March, when spring break tourists started arriving in the islands.
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  • “We haven’t seen travel demand for Hawaii this strong for over a year,” Richards said. “I thought we would have a U-shaped recovery; it’s V-shaped. January and February were terrible, but we’ve gone from zero to 150 mph in two weeks.”
  • Visitors said rules in their home states are different than those in place in Hawaii.“We carry our masks around and if we walk into an establishment we’ll wear one, and if people look like they’re uncomfortable with us around, we’ll put one on. But otherwise, like I said where we come from, people are really not required to wear them,” Wisconsin visitor Larry Dopke said.
  • Some lawmakers expressed concern about a possible backlash from residents.“I think we’re all going to have to be prepared for a potential surge in tourism,” said Hawaii state Rep. Scott Saiki, a Democrat. “I think we have to be prepared because the public may have a response to a sudden surge.”
  • “Pushing back against tourism is the same thing as telling your neighbor they shouldn’t have a job,” said Carl Bonham, executive director of the University of Hawaii’s Economic Research Organization.
  • The island of Kauai has additional measures that will be in place until April 5. All visitors to Kauai must either spend three days on another island or quarantine at a county-approved resort for three days and then get second, post-arrival tests.
  • Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, said in an email that the city recently put up banners throughout Waikiki reminding people to wear masks and remain socially distanced. “These banners provide a tool to help Honolulu Police officers do their jobs in gaining compliance with COVID-19 rules,” Sakahara said. “The majority of residents and visitors are compliant with the rule or are cooperative when informed of it.”
Javier E

Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618711

myth Lost Cause confederacy history memory

shared by Javier E on 10 May 21 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
  • For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
  • “I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
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  • She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”
  • I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.
  • Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.
  • Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”
  • Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.
  • That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
  • It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
  • The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.
  • “I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.
  • The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
  • “Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.
  • But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
  • Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?
  • I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
  • Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
  • I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.
  • I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.
  • The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”
  • But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.
  • Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.
  • I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.
  • The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
  • Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.
  • Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.
  • Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”
  • “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
  • But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
  • So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.
  • Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?
Javier E

China's Latest Problem: People Don't Want to Go There - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...dont-want-to-go-there-7d17a83a

china tourism

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.
  • The dearth of visitors could also be contributing to less investment in China. Foreign direct investment into the country fell to $20 billion in the first quarter, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter,
  • A shortage of available flights to China is partly to blame for the low arrival numbers, with carriers not yet restoring the same level of service they offered pre-Covid. But Chinese and overseas tourism experts say foreign visitors are also staying away because of deteriorating relations between China and the West, which has made them more wary of visiting. 
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  • Central China’s Zhangjiajie National Park, a region of striking rock formations where the “floating mountains” in the movie Avatar were filmed, recorded only 25,600 overseas visitors through mid-May, compared with 500,000 in the first five months of 2019. 
  • Another group that is steering clear of China is expatriates, who in previous years acted as bridges between Chinese society and their respective home countries. Many invited family and friends to visit
  • Investment consultant Alexander Sirakov, 37, moved back to his home country Bulgaria from Shanghai last August. He said that most people in his wider circle of expatriate friends also departed, including eight out of the 10 expat families living in his compound.“People now perceive China as very distant and somewhat alienated,” he said. “It was exactly the opposite four years ago, when China was really open and vibrant, a must-go place.”
peterconnelly

Ukraine Tells Story of War in Museum Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-war-museum.html

new york times ukraine

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • KYIV, Ukraine — Just days after Russian troops retreated from the suburbs surrounding Kyiv, Yuriy Savchuk, director of a World War II museum in the city, joined the police and prosecutors who were investigating the full extent of the suffering inflicted there by enemy soldiers.
  • Over the next month, Mr. Savchuk and his colleagues meticulously documented what they saw, taking more than 3,000 photographs.
  • The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.
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  • The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.
  • And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.
  • “It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”
  • “The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.
  • Those discoveries and many others have become items in an exhibition called “Crucified Ukraine” that opened on May 8 at Mr. Savchuk’s museum, an unusual effort to chronicle the war even as battles continue to rage in Ukraine’s east and south.
  • The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.
  • “We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.
  • The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.
  • Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”
  • Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.
  • “This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”
Javier E

I'm with the banned: International visitors are already turning their back on Trump-era... - 1 views

www.economist.com/...i-m-banned

international visitors us tourism crisis economic trump effects

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency. It found that these searches had declined by 17%.
  • The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia
  • it is “hard to see any other short-term significant events that could be related,” other than Mr Trump’s assumption of the presidency and his travel ban.
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  • Another study, this time looking specifically at business travel, backs up these findings. The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), which represents corporate travel managers, found that business travel transactions in America declined by 3.4% over the course of one week following the president’s order.
  • If a 3.4% decline sounds small, consider the group’s assertion that a 1% drop in business travel over the course of a year correlates with a loss of 71,000 American jobs and close to $5bn in gross domestic product
  • a net $185m in business travel bookings was lost
  • as Mr Trump is broadly unpopular in much of the world, some people were probably already thinking twice about coming to America before the executive order was announced.
  • Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, a consultancy, told Forbes that the furore will probably “severely damage the US travel sector this year”
  • He cites the $246bn that international visitors spent in America last year, a figure that vastly exceeds the value of other major American exports such as cars ($152bn), agricultural products ($137bn) and petroleum products ($97bn)
  • Those high stakes explain why travel firms, normally reluctant to annoy customers by taking a political stance, have gone out of their way to condemn Mr Trump. 
katyshannon

Lowering Water Levels in This Magical Mexican Reservoir Reveal a Colonial Church - 0 views

mic.com/...rvoir-reveal-a-colonial-church

lowering water levels mexican reservoir colonial church reveal

shared by katyshannon on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In Chiapas, Mexico, a recent drought has partially dried up the Grijalva river, only to reveal a hidden wonder.  The Nezahualcoyotl reservoir water levels have dropped by nearly 100 feet, exposing the Temple of Santiago, a 16th century church also known as the Temple of Quechula.
  • Nezahualcoyotl reservoir was created with the construction of a dam in 1966, which resulted in the submersion of the church. The temple has been exposed only once since then, in 2002, when water levels dropped so dramatically, visitors were able to walk around inside the church.
  • Both then and now, local fishermen have taken visitors on tours of the colonial architectural jewel, catching and cooking local fish for the curious visitors.
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  • The structure was built in the mid-16th century by monks led by Friar Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish missionary who exposed the existence and advocated for the end of colonial slavery. 
  • A few hundred years later, the Temple of Santiago was deserted.  "The church was abandoned due [to] the big plagues of 1773-1776," Carlos Navarete, an architect who worked with the government on an assessment of the church, told the Associated Press.
  • katyshannon on 20 Oct 15
     
    Low water levels in Mexico reveal a colonial church built by Bartolome de las Casas
Javier E

Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-M... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-political-media-machine.html

facebook politics crisis culture media

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.
  • we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.
  • Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics.
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  • Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic.
  • these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.
  • In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.
  • While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms.
  • Rafael Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost’s who, with his twin brother, Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three million followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular: “Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,
  • Now that the nomination contest is over, Rivero has turned to making anti-Trump content. A post from earlier this month got straight to the point: “Donald Trump is unqualified, unstable and unfit to lead. Share if you agree!” More than 40,000 people did.“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”
  • truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.
  • The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.
  • For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.
  • All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.
  • It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.
  • Each day, according to Facebook’s analytics, posts from the Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people. In July, articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers, were shared, commented on or liked more than four million times, edging out, for example, the Facebook page of USA Today
  • Nicoloff’s business model is not dissimilar from the way most publishers use Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on an outside website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your favor. For many, it doesn’t: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers.
  • In July, visitors arriving to Nicoloff’s website produced a little more than $30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total around $8,000, partly split between website hosting fees and advertising buys on Facebook itself.
  • of course, there’s the content, which, at a few dozen posts a day, Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. “I have two people in the Philippines who post for me,” Nicoloff said, “a husband-and-wife combo.” From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the contractors scour the internet for viral political stories, many explicitly pro-Trump. If something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to their site and promoted with an urgent headline.
  • In the end, Nicoloff takes home what he jokingly described as a “doctor’s salary” — in a good month, more than $20,000.
  • In their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America Great’s followers express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy
  • A dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts from the company’s small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You bring the name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab site, furnish it with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut of the revenue. Coca told me the company brought in $12 million in revenue last year.
  • Because the pages are run independently, the editorial product is varied. But it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles that seem to work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to conservative Facebook media’s big narratives, which, in turn, track with the Trump campaign’s messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement; Donald Trump alone can save us; the system — all of it — is rigged.
  • It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly formed, into the national discourse.
  • How much of what happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our politics?
  • for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd — they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is where it’s all happening.”
Javier E

Now That Grandma Has Been Vaccinated, May I Visit Her? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-nursinghomes-vaccine.html

pandemic vaccine recommendation

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Some medical experts have said that those guidelines are too lax and that visits should be severely restricted, even banned. However, some of these experts are now saying that the vaccine changes the equation, somewhat.
  • “Once all residents are vaccinated, it opens the door for loosening of restrictions,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, the immediate past president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, a geriatrician and former executive at nursing home chains.
  • To allow visits, Dr. Wasserman recommends all residents of a nursing home should be vaccinated (unless they have some condition or allergy that would discourage vaccination on medical grounds); all staff members should be vaccinated; and the nursing home should have the ability to ensure that visitors test negative for the coronavirus and have been disciplined about wearing a mask in public settings.
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  • If restrictions are eased, should I visit right away?
  • Dr. von Preyss-Friedman recommends waiting at least two weeks after the second shot to have a visit.
  • ideally, the visitor would also be vaccinated as well. Since shots won’t be widely available for a few months, it may be best to wait until you get your vaccine. Until then, she believes nursing homes should consider visits on a case-by-case basis.
  • Would visitors still need to wear a mask?Absolutely, medical experts said. This is particularly true if they are not vaccinated, but even after they are vaccinated “until rates in the community go down,”
Javier E

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.
  • What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew
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  • well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates
  • These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.
  • These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ
  • the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity
  • I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.
  • The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting
  • the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”
  • I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.
  • The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur
  • I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.
  • the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?
  • My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature
  • Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
  • “Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
  • The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
  • the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum
  • The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t
  • Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.
  • the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum
  • Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.
  • When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.
  • First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i
  • Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock
  • She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.
  • Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?
  • Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips
  • it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.
  • Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,
  • In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.
  • I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience
  • Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.
  • I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution
  • Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation
  • I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever
  • Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.
  • As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”
  • t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.
  • Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)
  • It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.
  • I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.
  • the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?
  • weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?
  • The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”
  • Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”
  • Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened
  • I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.
  • In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.
  • The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design
  • the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.
  • The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?
  • by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?
  • Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”
  • (Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.
  • One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.
  • This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past
  • When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.
  • If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow
  • One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same
  • One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society
  • To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist
  • To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.
  • one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”
  • There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”
  • “We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”
  • Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 
  • Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.
  • providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.
  • Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust
  • Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings
  • In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”
  • These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?
  • One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.
  • The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism
  • “many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews
  • This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.
  • Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.
  • One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?
  • Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.
  • One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”
  • The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing
  • it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
  • “It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’
  • Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
  • I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”
  • Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.
  • “The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.
  • Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.
  • These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week
  • the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.
  • In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”
  • The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.
  • Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.
  • Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”
  • “It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”
  • Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?
  • In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i
  • We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”
  • These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.
  • In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism
  • To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.
  • Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?
  • “People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”
  • “People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”
  • The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
  • But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?
  • I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”
  • Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
  • “Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
  • “Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”
  • perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish
  • The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”
  • American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering
  • But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i
  • That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.
  • It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.
  • How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?
  • Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.
  • “If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
  • She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”
  • “Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said
  • I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
  • I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
  • “The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
  • This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
  • Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism
  • “Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”
  • Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”
  • then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.
  • Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”
  • Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.
  • this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.
  • The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.
  • a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?
  • I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”
  • I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe
  • There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor
criscimagnael

An Irish National Treasure Gets Set for a Long-Needed Restoration - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inity-library-restoration.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Long Room, with its imposing oak ceiling and two levels of bookshelves laden with some of Ireland’s most ancient and valuable volumes, is the oldest part of the library in Trinity College Dublin, in constant use since 1732.
  • But that remarkable record is about to be disrupted, as engineers, architects and conservation experts embark on a 90 million euro, or $95 million, program to restore and upgrade the college’s Old Library building, of which the Long Room is the main part.
  • “We already knew that the Old Library needed work because of problems with the building,” said Prof. Veronica Campbell, who initiated the project. “When we saw Notre Dame burning, we realized, ‘Oh, my God, we need to do something now!’”
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  • Faced with the example of Notre Dame, and the realization that something similar could happen to an Irish national treasure, the government pledged €25 million, with the college and private donors adding €65 million more.
  • In the meantime, visitors are still coming in droves to the library, Dublin’s second most popular attraction for overseas tourists (the Guinness brewery is first). Among the treasures on view is the Book of Kells — an exquisitely crafted ninth-century gospel that is the greatest surviving relic of Ireland’s early Christian golden age.
  • Ms. Shenton said she had twice hosted Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the library, the first time when he was vice president (“he came in 20 big black cars with Secret Service people”) and a second when he was a private citizen again (“he just walked down here by himself”).
  • “Back in the 18th century, Trinity was the university of the Irish Enlightenment,” he said, an alma mater to writers and thinkers like Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Jonathan Swift.
  • When the books are all gone, specialists will go to work on the Long Room, upgrading visitor facilities, repairing damage and shoring up defenses against four age-old enemies: time, damp, pollution and, most pressing, fire.
  • A contractor is being sought to build a “burn room” — an exact model of the Long Room and its contents — to be ignited so specialists can study the best way to hold back the flames.
  • To slow the inevitable long decay of the books, and to protect them from dust and acidic particles seeping in from city traffic, new microthin clear covers, or “slip cases,” are being designed for each volume.
  • “I’m a conservator. Librarians are our enemy. We say, ‘Don’t touch that old book!’ and they want to let people open it and read it!”
  • To preserve the tourist experience for as long as possible — a key source of college income — the shelves most visible to visitors will be the last to be cleared. The Book of Kells and other precious artifacts will be temporarily displayed in the college’s 18th-century Printing House until an enhanced exhibition space is ready under the upgraded Long Room.
Javier E

London Is Losing Its Crown as a Luxury Shopping Destination - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-shopping-destination-ab3cadca

luxury shopping london

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • London is missing out on a spending boom by wealthy American and Middle Eastern tourists that began last summer and has benefited big cities on the European continent, mainly Paris and Milan. In January, VAT receipts from Middle Eastern visitors to continental Europe, a good proxy for luxury spending, were up 224% compared with the same month of 2019, based on data from tax refund company Global Blue
  • American spending was even heavier, with receipts up 297% over the period. The strong dollar means the discount available on luxury goods in Europe has been historically wide recently and U.S. tourists outspent all other nationalities in every month of 2022.
  • Britons are spending heavily on tax-free goods in the European Union. 
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  • London’s luxury retailers are lobbying the U.K. government to reinstate VAT-free shopping for visitors. Big department stores like Harrods, owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Selfridges, which was sold for £4 billion in 2021 to Thai and Australian investors, relied heavily on tourist spending before the pandemic.
  • If overseas visitors continue to shop in Europe instead of Britain, landlords on the U.K. capital’s poshest streets could suffer. In 2022, London’s New Bond Street slipped out of the top-three ranking of the world’s most expensive retail streets, according to real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. It was overtaken by Via Montenapoleone in Milan, where rents are now 9% above 2019 levels.
Javier E

Europe Has a New Economic Engine: American Tourists - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...omy-american-tourists-f6112f78

europe tourism portugal greece

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.
  • Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth. 
  • While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism
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  • In Greece, an unlikely economic star since the pandemic, as many as 44% of all jobs are connected to tourism. 
  • Can Europe’s emerging “museum economy” support sustained wealth creation and the expansive welfare systems Europeans have become accustomed to since the end of World War II? And what happens if the dollar falls and the tourists leave?
  • Rent and other living expenses are rising in hot spots, making it harder for many locals to make ends meet. A heightened focus on tourism, which turns a quick profit but remains a low-productivity activity, tethers these economies to a highly cyclical industry
  • It also risks keeping workers and capital from more profitable areas, like tech and high-end manufacturing. 
  • some economists, residents and politicians are concerned about the boom’s long-term implications.
  • “It is literally, for Americans right now, the place to go,”
  • The strong dollar—and a powerful post-Covid recovery—has empowered millions of Americans who would have vacationed in the U.S. before the pandemic. They are now finding they can afford a lavish European holiday.
  • One reason is the brutal sovereign debt crisis that hit the continent’s south especially hard just over a decade ago. Unable to stimulate demand with public spending or to energize exports by devaluing their currency—the euro, which is shared by 20 states—those countries could only boost their competitiveness by lowering wages.
  • “Your dollar goes a lot further,” Cross said over coffee in the lobby of her five-star hotel. “You don’t feel you’re scrounging as much.”
  • Tourism now generates one-fifth of economic output in Lisbon and supports one in four jobs. That boom has reverberated far beyond the capital.
  • Portugal’s gross domestic product grew nearly 8% between 2019 and 2024, compared with less than 1% for Germany,
  • The government recorded a rare 1.2% of GDP budget surplus last year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to fall to 95% this year, the lowest since 2009
  • Portugal’s population is growing again after years of decline, thanks in part to an influx of migrant workers and to various tax incentives and investor visas that have attracted high-income workers. 
  • Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor, says there’s room for further growth. For a city that doubles in size to around one million every day, including commuters, only around 35,000 are tourists, he said. “We are very far from a situation of so-called overtourism.”
  • The trend is part of a global readjustment following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Spending on travel and hospitality worldwide grew roughly seven times faster than the global economy over the past two years, according to Oxford Economics. That pattern is expected to continue for the next decade, though to a lesser degree.
  • Europe, especially southern Europe, has benefited more than many other regions. Though it is home to just 5% of the world’s population, the European Union received around one-third of all international tourist dollars—more than half a trillion dollars—last year. This is up roughly threefold over two decades, and compares with about $150 billion for the U.S., where tourism has been slower to rebound.
  • In Portugal, a country of 10 million that juts out into the North Atlantic from Spain, Americans recently surpassed Spaniards as the biggest group of foreign tourists. 
  • This and a real estate collapse that left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly available made the region’s tourist industry ultracompetitive, much cheaper than Caribbean beach destinations and on a par with Latin American destinations like Mexico. 
  • Once an owner of TAP, Neeleman increased the number of direct flights to the U.S. eightfold between 2015 and 2020, adding major hubs such as JFK and Boston Logan, betting that would open up an untapped market. As bookings soared, other U.S. airlines followed. 
  • “It was actually comical, because I went from knowing no one who had been to Portugal to everyone telling me they were going to Portugal,”
  • For Gonçalo Hall, a 36-year-old tech worker, the influx of foreign cash that has transformed Lisbon has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the city. When he lived in the capital 15 years ago, he wouldn’t walk in the historic downtown after 8 p.m. It was “full of homeless people, not safe. Lots of empty and abandoned buildings,” he said. 
  • “The quality of life in Lisbon doesn’t match the prices. Even expats are leaving,” said Hall, who moved to the Atlantic island of Madeira during the pandemic and continues to work remotely.  
  • The average Portuguese employee earns around €1,000 a month after tax, or around $1,100 a month, and only 2% earn more than €2,000. A one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon can easily cost more than €500,000 to buy, or over €1,200 a month to rent. Rents in nearby cities are also climbing as people leave the capital, squeezed out as lucrative short-term rentals transform the housing market. 
  • Jessica Ribeiro, a 35-year-old sociologist, pays around €490 a month for an apartment that she shares with her ex-husband in a town close to Lisbon. Neither can afford to leave. Both make a little more than the minimum wage of €820 a month, and soaring rents mean it is impossible to find an apartment in the neighborhood for less than €700, Ribeiro said. 
  • “The harm that tourism has brought is infinitely bigger than the benefits,” Ribeiro said. “It sends people away from their place of work, making their lives much harder.” 
  • A frequent complaint from residents and housing advocates is that some of the boom’s biggest winners are American companies, from Airbnb to Uber, which often pay little tax in the places where they do most of their business.
  • Lisbon is cracking down on Airbnbs and increasing taxes on tourists, doubling the nightly city tax from €2 to €4, which should raise €80 million a year. Airbnb has paid Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, more than €63 million after entering into voluntary tax collection agreements with local officials. Moedas said he is considering “a bit more regulation” of the city’s many Ubers, whose drivers he said don’t always respect traffic rules. 
  • Around nine in 10 Airbnb hosts in Portugal rent their family home and almost half say the extra income helps them afford to stay in their homes, according to a spokesperson for the company. “Guests using our platform account for just 10% of total nights booked in Portugal, and we follow the rules and only allow listings that are registered with local authorities,”
  • Higher rents are forcing many businesses and cultural and social spaces catering to locals to close, according to Silva. “This is not an economy that is serving the needs of the majority of people,” she said.
  • Signs of discontent are bubbling up across the region. Tens of thousands of local residents marched in Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands in recent months to protest mass tourism and overcrowding. On Mallorca, activists have put up fake signs at some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of falling rocks or dangerous jellyfish to deter tourists, according to social-media posts.
  • Serving foreigners is difficult to scale up and is more exposed to economic headwinds. Like the discovery of oil, southern Europe’s new focus on tourism can crowd out higher-value activities by hogging capital and workers, a phenomenon some economists have dubbed the “beach disease.”
  • “Portugal isn’t an industrialized country. It’s just the playground of the EU,” said Priscila Valadão, a 43-year-old administrative assistant in Lisbon. She makes €905 a month and rents a room from a friend for €250 a month. “The type of jobs being offered…are restricted to a type of activity that really doesn’t enrich the country,”
  • For Europe’s policymakers, having people open hotels or restaurants is easier than incentivizing them to build up advanced manufacturing, which is capital intensive and takes a long time to pay off, said Marcos Carias, an economist with French insurer Coface. 
  • “Tourism is the easy way out,” Carias said. “What is the incentive to look for ingenuity and go through the pain of creating new economic value if tourism works as a short-term solution?”
  • Proponents say tourism attracts capital to poor regions, and can serve as a base to build a more diversified economy. Lisbon’s Moedas said he is trying to leverage the influx of foreign visitors to build up sectors such as culture and technology, including by developing conferences and cultural events. 
  • “Some extreme left parties basically say we need to reduce tourism,” Moedas said, but that is the wrong approach. “What we have to do is to increase other sectors like innovation, technology…. We should still invest in tourism, but we should go up the ladder.”
  • While Dias, the hotel owner, is diversifying into nightlife, he refuses to envisage a future where the sector would have to rely heavily on visitors from elsewhere.
  • More than one-third of highly qualified Portuguese students leave the country after graduating,
  • Even higher-paid technology workers have started decamping to cheaper places. 
  • Tiago Araújo, chief executive of tourism tech startup HiJiffy, has held on to his employees but says many of them have been moving out of Lisbon. The trend, which started during Covid, is now being primarily driven by the housing crisis.
  • In Athens, Mayor Haris Doukas says he is working on extending the tourist season, increasing the average length of stay and promoting specific types of tourism, such as organizing conferences and business meetings, to attract visitors with higher purchasing power. He’s also called for new taxes to help the city accommodate the millions of additional tourists thronging to the ancient capital.
  • If Americans stop coming to Lisbon, he said, “I don’t think we can charge this kind of [price] because we will have to go to Europeans, and the Europeans, they don’t have money.”
grayton downing

In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ess-but-just-for-visitors.html

north korea internet culture

shared by grayton downing on 23 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • only foreigners will get this privilege.
  • to give foreigners access to 3G mobile
  • to give foreigners access to 3G mobil
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  • Only the most elite North Koreans have been allowed access to the Internet, and even they are watched
  • d becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth
  • “As the world becomes inc
  • “As the worl
Conner Armstrong

Olympics Security Worries U.S. Officials - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ecurity-at-sochi-olympics.html

olympics security u s nytimes putin

shared by Conner Armstrong on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The separate remarks, made on Sunday morning news programs, came before a video was released online showing two young men who said they were behind suicide bombings in the central Russian city Volgograd last month that claimed 34 lives. In the video, the men threaten to carry out more attacks. In a statement posted with the video on its website, the militant group Vilayat Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, The Associated Press reported.
  • “They’re not giving us the full story about, what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups — the terrorist groups who have had some success — are they still plotting?”
  • “If necessary, all those tools will be activated.” He added that if foreign athletes wanted to provide their own additional security, “there is nothing wrong with that,” as long as they coordinated with the Russian authorities.
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  • Meanwhile, amid complaints from foreign athletes and officials about Russia’s nationwide ban last year on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” which makes it a crime to mention homosexuality around minors, Mr. Putin said visitors had nothing to fear.
  • In this country, everybody is absolutely equal to anybody else, irrespective of one’s religion, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” he said. “Everybody is equal. So no concerns exist for people who intend to come as athletes or visitors to the Olympics.”
Javier E

Where Americans Turned the Tide in World War I - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-tide-in-world-war-i.html

WWI US battle war france

shared by Javier E on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In a way, what one division of American soldiers and marines did there in June of 1918 is responsible for the carnage that took place to the east throughout the summer and fall that followed: Had they not attacked and taken those woods from the Germans, many historians believe, Germany would have won the war that month.
  • Plenty of others believe it, too. “If the Americans don’t stop the Germans at Belleau Wood, the Germans take Paris — the war is finished,” Jacques Krabal told me. Mr. Krabal is the mayor of Château-Thierry; every day, as he walks about the city, he can see, looming over it from the heights above town, the massive American monument built a decade later to commemorate Belleau Wood and the battles that followed it that summer.
  • In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched a series of offensives in France designed to win the war before too many more American troops could get there. The first two were exceedingly successful; the third was, too, until a fledgling American force pushed back at Château-Thierry. The Germans instead took up positions behind formidable defenses in nearby Belleau Wood — only about 40 miles from Paris, the closest they’d gotten since 1914. The French were panicked: As their roads clogged with terrified refugees, Allied commanders confided to one another that the war was lost, and drew up plans to abandon the French capital. Their only hope was to drive the Germans out of Belleau Wood somehow, but French commanders dreaded the prospect of such an assault. So they asked General John J. Pershing to do it.
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  • America’s first great victory in the war was a costly one. The Marines alone took more casualties in those three weeks than they had in the entirety of their existence. Private Lee was shot through the wrist on June 12; Captain Williams was killed that same day. There are 2,288 men buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, just behind the woods. Almost four times as many are buried in the much smaller German cemetery nearby.
  • Belleau Wood looks today much as it did in 1918, and presents visitors to this part of the country with their best opportunity to get a sense of what it was like during the war. It is filled with trenches, shell holes and fox holes, so many that no one ever bothered to put up signs pointing them out. The cemetery staff has in recent years blazed a walking trail through the forest and has printed a self-guided tour. It starts at a visitors’ area with a statue and lots of retired big guns, then moves into the woods. Trenches meander right alongside the path; it’s easy to envision it all — the shooting, the shelling, the hunkering and praying and dying.
Javier E

South Korea's war against tiny cameras - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9b0d-749fb254bc3d_story.html

surveillance spying camera privacy

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • the activity was dubbed “molka” years ago — the problem appears to be growing. The number of suspected perpetrators identified by police rose from 1,354 in 2011 to 5,363 in 2017; more than 95 percent were men
  • Police say that the wider availability of smartphones, as well as the rise of social media, contributed to this increase. Indeed, despite the focus on hidden cameras, 90 percent of the crimes involved filming with regular smartphones, statistics show
  • Police identified more than 26,000 victims of illicit filming between 2012 and 2016, over 80 percent of them female. But many never find out they are victims: The real number “would be 10 times higher than the police figure” if the full extent were know
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  • A lot of the work is educational, Chae said. At a police-run facility, visitors are shown objects that contain a hidden camera: a baseball hat, a belt, a watch, a lighter, a USB stick, a necktie, a set of car keys. A sign warns that a man could install a camera in his shoe. There are even two hidden cameras in the room. Visitors are asked: Can you spot them?
  • Violators currently face up to five years in prison or a fine of up to about $9,000. Police statistics from the past five years showed that only 5.3 percent of those indicted on illegal filming charges went to prison, Kim said
Javier E

Crowds of Tourists Are Ruining Popular Destinations - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...590767

tourism culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • 30 million visitors a year to Barcelona, population 1.6 million; 20 million visitors to Venice, population 50,000. La Rambla and the Piazza San Marco fit only so many people, and the summertime now seems like a test to find out just how many that is.
  • China is responsible for much of this growth, with the number of overseas trips made by its citizens rising from 10.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 156 million last year.
  • International-tourist arrivals around the world have gone from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today
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  • Cruise vacations are vastly more popular than they once were, with the diesel-belching vessels disgorging thousands of passengers at a time onto port towns. Supercheap airlines using satellite airports have dramatically cut the cost of hopscotching around Europe, the Americas, and Asia, encouraging travelers to take 1 billion flights on budget airlines every year
  • platforms such as Airbnb have increased the supply of rentable rooms in cities from Rio to Delhi, reducing search friction for travelers, boosting cities’ carrying capacity, and bumping up rents for existing residents—an estimated 4 percent in Barcelona, for instance.
Javier E

'Life Has to Go On': How Sweden Has Faced the Coronavirus Without a Lockdown - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-herd-immunity.html

Sweden pandemic

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • From the first signs of the pandemic, the Swedish Public Health Authority decided that a lockdown would be pointless. “Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,” the country’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “How do you reopen? When?”
  • When responses are assessed after the crisis, Mr. Tegnell acknowledges, Sweden will have to face its broad failing with people over the age of 70, who have accounted for a staggering 86 percent of the country’s 2,194 fatalities to date.
  • While there was some early talk in Sweden of achieving “herd immunity,” which would mean infecting at least 60 percent of the population, Mr. Tegnell denies that was ever the government’s policy.
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  • “Basically we are trying to do the same thing that most countries are doing — slow down the spread as much as possible,” he said. “It’s just that we use slightly different tools than many other countries.”
  • Political leaders rarely attend news conferences about the virus, and the Swedish Constitution prevents the government from meddling in the affairs of independent administrative authorities, such as the Public Health Authority.
  • “They tell people, stay home, but they also keep the restaurants open,” said Lena Einhorn, a virologist and one of the signatories of the letter. “They are advising people working in elderly homes only to wear masks when a patient is sick. Their policies are both ambiguous and rigid.”
  • In the absence of recommendations from the Public Health Authority, a Jewish care home near Stockholm unilaterally decided to ban visitors, said Aviva Kraitsik, the head of operations, who asked that the facility’s name be withheld because of previous threats it has received.
  • The health authority even went so far as to order the “no visitors” signs removed. Ms. Kraitsik refused. “I said they could put me behind bars,” she said. “I was prepared to take my punishment to protect our residents.”But it was too late. The virus had already crept inside, and eventually killed 11 of the 76 inhabitants.
  • It was only after the home required employees to wear face shields and masks when working with all the residents, even those displaying no symptoms, that it managed to halt the spread of the infection, Ms. Kraitsik said.
anonymous

Official Confirmation Or No, Roswell, N.M., Believes In UFOs : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ufo-capital-roswell-new-mexico

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Sci-fi enthusiasts, ufologists and conspiracy theorists have been eagerly awaiting a government report, due this month, detailing a Department of Defense investigation into Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.
  • Any hopes that the report would confirm alien visitors to our atmosphere have been dashed, according to reporting by The New York Times and confirmed by NPR through a U.S. senior official. Even so, ET-centric businesses in Roswell hope interest in the new report will lead to a boost in tourism.
  • At the International UFO Museum and Research Center, visits are already up 20% from 2019. Some of that is because of last year's closures due to COVID-19, but belief in UFOs has skyrocketed in recent years.
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  • Museum visitor and UFO enthusiast Ethan Anderson first got interested in aliens after attending Roswell's annual UFO Festival, and would love to know more about our cosmic neighbors.
  • "If you really have technology that's so great, you shouldn't hide it from people," he says, convinced of a government cover-up of alien tech.
  • "The government can't admit that there are extraterrestrials, because if they do, that'll open up a whole keg of worms," says Dennis Balthaser, a longtime Roswell UFO tour guide who has spent 35 years researching UFOs.
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