Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Uruguay: The Coffee Shop sign diplomatic flap

The what?

URUGUAY COFFEE SHOP SIGN QUOTING TARANTINO’S THE HATEFUL EIGHT SPARKS DIPLOMATIC ROW WITH MEXICO. The coffee shop’s name is Coffee Shop, and the owner obviously believes there’s no such thing as bad publicity,

The sign, which read “No dogs or Mexicans allowed”, was first spotted on April 8 at the Coffee Shop in Uruguay’s capital and sparked controversy on social media, with several users expressing their outrage on the cafe’s Facebook page.

Coffee Shop addressed its critics in a post written in English and Spanish the same day: “The furror [sic] over Coffee Shop’s last street sign tag is a big misunderstanding.”

The Mexican ambassador got involved and complained to the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry,

The message and an ensuing interview with Coffee Shop’s American owner Jim Delalla in a local publication did little to diminish the controversy. The Mexican Embassy said in a statement published on social media on Monday that they contacted the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry condemning the “lamentable and deplorable racist, discriminatory and xenophobic attitude of the Coffee Shop.”

And – wait for it – OF COURSE, Trump’s to blame, even when he hasn’t been to Uruguay in lord-knows-how-long,

Here’s the sign,
“Unacceptable: cafe sign “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” It’s not the USA, it’s in Pocitos. American owner: pure discrimination.”

Which shows you can be a business owner and an idiot simultaneously.

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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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Puerto Rico: Governor wants to do business with Cuba

Puerto Rico is $72+billion in debt, and defaulted last month on a $422 million debt payment for the third time. Governor Alejandro García Padilla calls it “a humanitarian crisis,” continues to spend like crazy, wants Washington to bail him out, and won’t act to reduce the size of government, the cost of energy, or the cost of doing business in the island.

Instead, he goes to Cuba to praise Raúl Castro and intends to open a commercial trade office in Havana. Of murderous Raúl, AGaPito said,

“He’s very affable, very courteous, a pleasure to meet.  He not only took the time to converse with me, but even showed deference by taking me aside so he could speak to me alone.”

Nice going, Skippy!

Historically, Cuba has defaulted on all its debts. I hope Carlos Eire doesn’t mind, but I must steal his photo:

Expect this much from our Havana trade office…but, remember, zero is a magical number.

Not all imbeciles are communists. Going by the evidence, I’d say AGaPito is a communist imbecile.

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This girl wants you to pay for her tampons so she can afford the Columbia lifestyle

while she majors in political science at Barnard College – she aims to be the next Sandra Fluke:
Columbia should pay for my period

While this may seem like a peculiar addition to the average student council meeting, that these requests needed to be made indicates the University’s utter lack of support for people who menstruate—a group that includes a significant portion of the student body. Sure, I can easily find a free condom on Barnard and Columbia’s campuses, but why can’t I find a free tampon in the bathrooms in Hamilton or Milbank? Why does the administration care about my sexual protective rights, but not how I handle my monthly menstrual cycle?

Why should it care at all, cupcake?

[The cost of attendance at Columbia U is $65,860; at Barnard College it’s $46,040. Maybe you should have learned to budget in a couple of hundred bucks for incidentals, like tampons and antiperspirant back when you were in high school.]

UPDATE:
Linked to by the Daily Gator. Thank you!

Linked to by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!

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I’ll take “poor choice of corporate icon” for $500, Alex!

Luke Mullen tweeted,

Which brings us to this,

Because nothing says “state of the art fintech API ecosystem” like the image of the racist scumbag depraved mass murdering Communist founder of Cuba’s firing squads and labor camps.

Not that Xignite is alone in their choice . . .

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Madrid’s City Hall and the man on the Moon: Tales from a socialist mindset

Taking time out from Latin American news stories to look at a news item that illustrates one more instance of government overreach:

Edificio España is a 25-floor, 384′ high building that took 5 years to build, and at the time of its inauguration in 1953 was Europe’s tallest hotel, office and apartment building. If you are in Madrid, you can’t miss it.

It has been vacant since 2007.

Last year the Chinese real estate conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group bought it for €265 million from Banco Santander, who had paid constructor Metrovacesa €389 million. Under the deal,

the city allowed the proprietor to tear down part of the 25-story structure but stipulated that the façade and side wings should remain intact.

Dalian Wanda proposes tearing down the whole thing, and rebuilding

the façade to make it look exactly the same again, using similar materials that comply with modern building standards.

But noooo! (emphasis added)

The request was not well received in Madrid City Hall, now in thehands of a leftist bloc named Ahora Madrid after a quarter century of conservative rule by the Popular Party.
. . .

Local government sources have told EL PAÍS that the department of city planning will instruct Dalian Wanda to maintain as much of the main body of the building as necessary to prop up the façade, which may not be demolished in any case.

The company, which is chaired by Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, says that “the consolidation of the façade is not viable under safe conditions. There are no prior references or similar experiences relating to maintaining a structure of similar height and dimensions, which additionally lacks bearing capacity.”

To which City Hall found a former head of the Madrid Professional Association of Architects and a university professor who teaches structure calculus, who compared tearing down the building while preserving the façade with putting a man on the Moon,

But if we’ve been to the Moon, there’s almost nothing that is technically impossible.

Last time I looked, Spain didn’t send anyone to the Moon, but you can be sure any foreign investors thinking of doing business in Madrid (with an unemployment rate of 17.53 % in 2014) will be looking elsewhere.

In the meantime, Dalian Wanda is left holding the bag.

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