Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for September 2016

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Mexico: Flat screen TVs for the needy

Case study in thinly-disguised opportunity for corruption (emphasis added): The Mexican government’s

a $1.3 billion program to hand out close to 10.5 million flat-screen television sets to the country’s poor.

The government touted the program, aimed at low-income mothers, senior citizens and other welfare recipients, as a model of social inclusion and the best way to push the country forward from analog signals into the digital age. The number of televisions given away was equal to twice the sets Mexicans normally buy in a single year.

The TVs were given out last December, in time for the government to act as Santa Claus.

Where government billions go, corruption follows: no-bid contracts, import-duty exceptions,  kickbacks, and loans from Mexico’s foreign trade development bank Bancomext.

Read the whole thing here.

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Obama pipes in on Venezuela’s Miss Machado

I’ve been preoccupied with more immediate concerns, but even then this has struck me as emblematic of the stupidity of the current political climate:
The big issue is that 20 years ago Donald Trump told Alicia Machado she needed to lose weight after she gained sixty pounds while she was still Miss Universe.

Clearly, Hillary is going for the overweight female vote.

She’s definitely not going for the Hispanic vote. More on that below.

Even Obama’s piped in (now that Congress overrode his veto of the 9/11 bill and he needs a distraction):

“You had somebody who basically insulted women and then doubled down,” Obama said in an interview on the “Steve Harvey Morning Show.”

The president added that the way Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, talks about women’s weight and looks “instead of the content of their character and their capabilities” means he “is not somebody that I want in the Oval Office.”

Let’s parse this:

somebody who basically insulted women

1. Why should women be insulted?

Alicia Machado does not represent me as an individual, much less as a woman.

The woman in question was under contractual obligation to remain in the same physical condition as she was when she got the job.

Alicia Machado went from 115 pounds to 170 pounds within a few months. At 5’7″ and 170lbs, she would be considered obese, and fighting obesity is a cause Michelle Obama has embraced.

2. You can argue that Trump “basically insulted” women but you can’t ignore the current rape allegations against Bill Clinton, and the Democrat presidential candidate’s role in suppressing and harassing the women who came forward.

talks about women’s weight and looks “instead of the content of their character and their capabilities”

So let’s look at the “content” of Alicia Machado’s character and capabilities:
Alicia Machado, after her term as Miss Universe,

By the way, what happened to the guy who first revealed the information on the christening party?  He was killed while having lunch at a cafe prior to when he was scheduled to testify on the Beltrán Leyva case.

HOW’S THAT FOR “CONTENT OF HER CHARACTER,” OBAMA?

Which brings me to why this won’t get Hillary any Hispanic votes (other than Machado’s, who was granted U.S. citizenship earlier this year – how’s that for vetting?):  A lot of Latinos follow celebrities, and Hillary couldn’t have found one more disreputable and generally disliked had she tried.

On the other hand, Alicia fits right in with the Clintons.

UPDATE
Linked to by Clarice Feldman. Thank you!

Linked to by Director Blue. Thank you!

Trump is stupid enough he’s still carping on the Machado woman. How did our great nation end up with the two most unsuitable candidates for POTUS out of a population of 320 million people?




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A personal update

My mom, Lydia, suffered a stroke on Tuesday afternoon. She immediately was taken to hospital, where she was provided with the best possible care.

She will not recover, and has now been moved to hospice.

We have been blessed with her 96 years of life, a life well lived. Please hold her in your prayers.

Blogging will be sporadic.

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Colombia: FARC signs the deal

Timochenko and Santos signed the peace deal yesterday afternoon.

Colombia, Rebels Sign Deal to End Half-Century Conflict. Peace accord will phase out FARC, whose battle with the government left more than 220,000 dead; president, insurgent leader use pen fashioned from bullet. The world’s largest narco-terrorist group now becomes a political organization:

Under the agreement, the group will be assured of 10 seats in congress in 2018.

The document I read last month (which is titled “final agreement”) did not show President Santos or Rodrigo Londoño/Timoleón Jiménez a.k.a. Timochenko (who will remain as FARC leader) as signatories, but they actually signed. If I find an official copy of the signed document I’ll add it to this post later today.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Secretary of State John Kerry, and dictators Raúl Castro and Nicolás Maduro attended the event.

EU suspends FARC from terror list, while US prefers more cautious approach

God help the people of Colombia.

Colombians still have to approve the pact in a plebiscite next Sunday.

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Colombia: The peace trap

Who wouldn’t want to be “for peace”? Anyone who has read the Colombian government capitulation agreement with the FARC, that’s who.

Mary O’Grady explains,
Santos Sets a Trap for Colombians. Even if voters approve the tainted bargain with narco-terrorists, it won’t bring peace. (emphasis added)

On Oct. 2, Colombia will hold a plebiscite to ask the nation to approve or reject an Obama-backed agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. The deal gives the FARC amnesty for its war crimes, which include the recruitment of thousands of child soldiers, massacres of villages, political executions, bombings and kidnappings.

Under the agreement, negotiated and signed in Havana, the FARC will also get unelected seats in Congress and special welfare benefits. It will be given dozens of radio stations—so that it can disseminate its propaganda, a privilege no other political party has.

The agreement does not require the FARC to pay any financial reparations to its victims, even though the narco-terrorist kingpins have wealth estimated in the billions. Reparations will be paid by law-abiding citizens via sharp tax increases. The FARC says it will not disarm until it’s good and ready to. Meanwhile it will be given weapons and training to enforce the agreement.

In other words, a peace clusterf***.

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And now, a few words on UnCommon Core

To say that I am a voracious reader is to understate my addiction. I read at least a whole novel (mostly thrillers/mysteries) every week, and I also study a number of books over periods of time.

Among the latter, I’m currently working my way through Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, and Huntington Cairns’s The Limits of Art: A Critic’s Anthology of Western Literature (the Best that Has Been Written and Said).

This is not light reading.

It is, however, the kind of reading I have enjoyed since very early in my life.

I am a firm believer on the benefits of a well-rounded, academically-rigorous education. You can imagine my dismay when a friend sent this article by Jane Robbins:
School Daze. Inferior Reading Standards Lead to Inferior Readers

According to Common Core, soft-core porn is preferable to Jane Austen.

Say what?

The Common Core structure not only diminishes the amount of literary study in ELA classrooms, its recommendations for what types of fiction should be read are weighted against the classics. The Common Core list of recommended texts for ELA classrooms eliminates (except for minimal Shakespeare) British literature. No Austen, no Dickens, no Stevenson. In place of great British novels it suggests soft-core pornography such as The Bluest Eye.

The Bluest Eye?

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

How about studying Pecola Breedlove side-by-side with Elizabeth Bennet? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that, without Jane Austen, Tony Morrison may not have happened?

Or is that too much work because it’s not as easy to fit into a narrative?

Of course, that assumes the people designing the curriculum have functioning brain cells, and are not this stupid:

Via WeaselZippers, science! has discovered that words, not just some words, but words in general, indeed, the very concept of “words”, are responsible for the oppression of women.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain, who claimed, among other things:

“Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West…Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.”

Teh stupid, it burns!

First off, hasn’t the idea of some sort of primeval feminist paradise, a matriarchal golden age of Goddess worship and universal peace shown to be a complete load of hooey? Second, if the literate word is so oppressive to women, then why do women dominate the writing and publishing industries? Schlain hedges his sweeping statement with the qualifier “…all but the very recent history of the West”, but if the oppression is so pervasive, there is no adequate explanation for why it should suddenly be different now. I think that Schlain has managed to get things precisely backwards: the truth is that literacy has actually *empowered* women and liberated them, because facility with words does not depend upon physical strength or agility, which favors males.

When my son (who is an avid reader) was growing up, I followed the guidelines in The Educated Child: A Parents Guide From Preschool Through Eighth Grade. I suggest you do, too; You can not leave your child’s education to the whims of the public school system.

_____________________________

Slightly off-topic, the Robbins article has a photo from this scene in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility:

That’s the late Alan Rickman reading

“For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”

from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.

Chew on that, Common Core.

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The pre-debate Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

Yes, there’s a presidential debate tonight. Meh.

ARGENTINA
Argentina plans eurobond

Probe into Nisman’s death will go to federal courts

Stiuso habló de una “guerra” entre espías tras la muerte de Nisman. La versión del ex director de la SIDE sobre su pelea con el espionaje K

En su testimonio, afirmó que se dio una orden ilegal a Migraciones para saber sus movimientos, reveló el dueño de un teléfono clave y vinculó a Aníbal Fernandéz.

Argentina Seeks To Export Its Human Rights Policy

BOLIVIA
“Narcos”. Artículo completo de Veja sobre Evo y Álvaro – Evo Morales and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera, investigated by the DEA.

Give it up, Evo: Bolivia’s Morales accuses Chile of restricting access to ports

BRAZIL
Brazil’s Supreme Court Gives OK to Open Probe of New President Temer

Judge approves preliminary investigation, which is based on plea-bargain testimony by a key witness that implicates President Michel Temer, other PMDB members

CHILE
CIA found ‘convincing evidence’ Chilean dictator was behind 1976 D.C. attack

The latest revelations about the Cold War-era case come on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of the Pinochet regime and onetime Chilean foreign minister, and his think-tank colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bomb on D.C.’s Embassy Row.

COLOMBIA
“The FARC’s abortionist confessed to [performing] 400+ abortions on abused girls. Is there pardon, justice, and reparation?”

CUBA
How Kim (DPRK) and Castro (Cuba) Blackmail Abe (Japan)

Nearly on a monthly basis, some senior North Korean is on a “working visit” to Cuba. Or some senior Cuban regime official is on a “working visit” to North Korea.

With the exception of China, there’s no other nation in the world that North Korean officials visit with such frequency.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Dominican Republic’s Former Anti-Drug Chief Sentenced to 20 Years

ECUADOR
Ecuadorian Police Oust Dozens of Cubans Demanding Visas from Quito Park

IMMIGRATION
HILLARY: THE THIRD WORLD HAS A “RIGHT” TO MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES. No, they don’t.

JAMAICA
American says he wants to protect Jamaica’s natural ganja

MEXICO
Priest Killings Highlight Mexico Govt’s Credibility Problem

NICARAGUA
Nicaragua rejects U.S. bill for loans with strings attached (emphasis added)
The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

Nicaragua on Thursday criticized a proposal by U.S. lawmakers that would require the Central American country, which will hold elections in November, to make political changes in order to receive international loans.
. . .
The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

The bill proposes blocking Nicaragua from obtaining loans from international financial institutions unless the country “is taking effective steps to hold free, fair, and transparent elections.”

On Nov. 6, Nicaraguans will vote for president and 90 members of the National Assembly.

President Daniel Ortega is the favorite as he seeks his third consecutive term.

PANAMA
Smithsonian opens climate change lab in Panama

PARAGUAY
Polka lessons

Budgets have been roughly in balance and public debt is low. The central bank aims for an inflation rate of 4.5% and usually gets close. Commercial banks are healthy (in part because they charge high interest rates and face little competition). Regulation, like the tax code, is business-friendly. Independent trade unions, suppressed under Stroessner, are weak.

PERU
Peru President Says Unasur Unable to Resolve Venezuela Crisis

PUERTO RICO
Where were you when the lights went out? The Puerto Rico blackout, from space

URUGUAY
More on Abu Wa’el Dhiab: Uruguay says ex-Gitmo detainee demands exceed government

“The Uruguayan government is doing everything possible,” Vazquez said. “But as I’ve said in the past: If the countries where the Syrian citizen wants to go don’t take him, we can’t do anything about it.”

VENEZUELA
Military and Police Corruption: Venezuela’s Growing Evil



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