continent:america

Robotics and AI, Your Place in This World
▻https://hackernoon.com/robotics-and-ai-your-place-in-this-world-5bcb5aa1151?source=rss----3a814

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Looks Like An Alien Robot.You should see the Avengers 2019 spoiler, Tony Stark’s suit is human now! You got to believe and its replacing captain America just as how artificial general intelligence is going to replace humans.Let’s be honest with ourselves, we clamoured for a means to do things better and faster, admittedly, we are lazy and we needed something or someone to perform those hectic tasks for us―both in our workplace and our daily lives.However, the solution to this problem is right here and right now, and the average human seems to now identify it as a threat. Efficient means of production, accurate data analysis, automation and many more is what we perceive a threat ― fascinating. We are being delusional and carried away by the buzzword of how #robots and AI will be the end of (...)

#technology #agi #artificial-intelligence

For U.S. Jewry, Kahanist caper casts Netanyahu as prince of darkness and Trump on steroids
Even AIPAC broke its usual silence after Netanyahu legitimized followers of the infamous Rabbi Kahane, who was a household name in America before setting foot in Israel
Chemi Shalev
Feb 23, 2019 7:53 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-for-u-s-jewry-kahanist-caper-casts-netanyahu-as-prince-of-darkness

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6960505.1550944583!/image/4239540304.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/4239540304.jpg

The stench from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foul deal with admirers of Meir Kahane’s rancid racism was so strong that it crossed the oceans and compelled even the normally obedient and circumspect organization AIPAC to break their silence. The extraordinary condemnation issued by AIPAC, flimsy as it was, is a symptom of the nausea that swept through American Jewry in the wake of Netanyahu’s unabashed efforts to legitimize the Kahane-inspired Otzma Yehudit party in order to ensure his re-election.

The AIPAC statement could also confound Netanyahu’s plan to use his scheduled appearance next month at the group’s annual conference and turn it from a sure-fire platform for political propaganda to a risky gamble that could do him more harm than good. The thousands of delegates who will come to Washington on March 24 will undoubtedly try to maintain a semblance of business as usual and will likely accord Netanyahu the standing ovations he’s used to, but what was supposed to be a victory march on Netanyahu’s triumphant way to the White House has now turned into a tense arena with hidden dangers lurking in every corner.
(...)

It’s Climate Change That’s Scary - Not Transforming the Economy
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/its-climate-change-thats-scary-not-transforming-the-economy

Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, the man who led the drive to pull America out of the Paris climate accords, said the other day that the Green New Deal was a...

Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s guest says the country is ‘in a civil war’ — and people should ‘buy guns’ – Alternet.org
▻https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-host-laura-ingrahams-guest-says-the-country-is-in-a-civil-war-and

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Georges Washington, réveille-toi, ils sont devenus fous...

On a disturbing episode of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s “The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast” Thursday, guest Joe diGenova echoed the calls of some of the darkest parts of the far-right movement in the United States.

“We are in a civil war in this country,” diGenova, as first pointed out by Media Matters for America. “There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left — they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things — I vote and I buy guns.”

#Politique_USA

Twelve Empty Supertankers Reveal Truths About Today’s Oil Market - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/twelve-empty-supertankers-reveal-truths-about-today-s-oil-market

They are slowly plowing their way across thousands of miles of ocean toward America’s Gulf of Mexico coastline. As they do, twelve empty supertankers are also revealing a few truths about today’s global oil market.

In normal times, the vessels would be filled with heavy, high sulfur Middle East oil for delivery to refineries in places like Houston or New Orleans. Not now though. They are sailing cargo-less, a practice that vessel owners normally try to avoid because ships earn money by making deliveries.

The 12 vessels are making voyages of as much as 21,000 miles direct from Asia, all the way around South Africa, holding nothing but seawater for stability because Middle East producers are restricting supplies. Still, America’s booming volumes of light crude must still be exported, and there aren’t enough supertankers in the Atlantic Ocean for the job. So they’re coming empty.

“What’s driving this is a U.S. oil market that’s looking relatively bearish with domestic production estimates trending higher, and persistent crude oil builds we have seen for the last few weeks,” said Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING Bank NV in Amsterdam. “At the same time, OPEC cuts are supporting international grades like Brent, creating an export incentive.”

The U.S. both exports and imports large amounts of crude because the variety it pumps — especially newer supplies from shale formations — is very different from the type that’s found in the Middle East. OPEC members are likely cutting heavier grades while American exports are predominantly lighter, Patterson said.

#Ghost_Towns | Buildings | Architectural Review

▻https://www.architectural-review.com/today/ghost-towns/8634793.article

Though criticised by many, China’s unoccupied new settlements could have a viable future

Earlier this year a historic landmark was reached, but with little fanfare. The fact that the people of China are now predominantly urban, was largely ignored by the Western media. By contrast, considerable attention focused on China’s new ‘ghost towns’ or kong cheng − cities such as Ordos in the Gobi desert and Zhengzhou New District in Henan Province which are still being built but are largely unoccupied.

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By some estimates, the number of vacant homes in Chinese cities is currently around 64 million: space to accommodate, perhaps, two thirds of the current US population. However, unlike the abandoned cities of rust-belt America or the shrinking cities of Europe, China’s ghost cities seem never to have been occupied in the first place. So to what extent are these deserted places symbolic of the problems of rapid Chinese urbanisation? And what is revealed by the Western discourse about them?

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Characterised by its gargantuan central Genghis Khan Plaza and vast boulevards creating open vistas to the hills of Inner Mongolia, Ordos New Town is a modern frontier city. It is located within a mineral rich region that until recently enjoyed an estimated annual economic growth rate of 40 per cent, and boasts the second highest per-capita income in China, behind only the financial capital, Shanghai.

Having decided that the existing urban centre of 1.5 million people was too crowded, it was anticipated that the planned cultural districts and satellite developments of Ordos New Town would by now accommodate half a million people rather than the 30,000 that reputedly live there.

Reports suggest that high profile architectural interventions such as the Ai Weiwei masterplan for 100 villas by 100 architects from 27 different countries have been shelved, although a few of the commissions struggle on.

It seems that expectations of raising both the region’s profile (at least in ways intended) and the aesthetic esteem of its new residents have failed to materialise. Instead, attention is focused on the vacant buildings and empty concrete shells within a cityscape devoid of traffic and largely empty of people.

Estimates suggest there’s another dozen Chinese cities with similar ghost town annexes. In the southern city of Kunming, for example, the 40-square-mile area of Chenggong is characterised by similar deserted roads, high-rises and government offices. Even in the rapidly growing metropolitan region of Shanghai, themed model towns such as Anting German Town and Thames Town have few inhabitants. In the Pearl River Delta, the New South China Mall is the world’s largest. Twice the size of the Mall of America in Minneapolis, it is another infamous example of a gui gouwu zhongxin or ‘ghost mall’.

Located within a dynamic populated region (40 million people live within 60 miles of the new Mall), it has been used in the American documentary Utopia, Part 3 to depict a modern wasteland. With only around 10 of the 2,300 retail spaces occupied, there is an unsettling emptiness here. The sense that this is a building detached from economic and social reality is accentuated by broken display dummies, slowly gliding empty escalators, and gondolas navigating sewage-infested canals. The message is that in this ‘empty temple to consumerism’ − as described by some critics − we find an inherent truth about China’s vapid future.

Anting German Town Shanghai

The main square of Anting German Town outside Shanghai. One of the nine satellite European cities built around the city, it has failed to establish any sense of community. The Volkswagen factory is down the road

Pursued through the imagery of the ghost town, the commentary on stalled elements of Chinese modernity recalls the recent fascination with what has been termed ‘ruin porn’ − apocalyptic photographs of decayed industrial structures in cities such as Detroit, as in the collection The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffe. These too dramatise the urban landscapes but seldom seem interested in enquiring about the origins and processes underlying them.

In his popular work Collapse, Jared Diamond fantasised that one day in the future, tourists would stare at the ‘rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers’ explaining that human arrogance − overreaching ourselves − is at the root of why societies fail. In Requiem for Detroit, filmmaker Julian Temple too argues that to avoid the fate of the lost cities of the Maya, we must recognise the ‘man-made contagion’ in the ‘rusting hulks of abandoned car plants’. (It seems that even using a different metaphor is deemed to be too hubristic.)

In terms of the discussion about Chinese ghost cities, many impugn these places as a commentary on the folly of China’s development and its speed of modernisation. Take the Guardian’s former Asia correspondent, Jonathan Watts, who has argued that individuals and civilisations bring about their own annihilation by ‘losing touch with their roots or over-consuming’. Initial signs of success often prove to be the origin of later failures, he argues. In his view, strength is nothing more than potential weakness, and the moral of the tale is that by hitting a tipping point, civilisations will fall much more quickly than they rise.

In fact, China’s headlong rush to development means that its cities embody many extremes. For example, the city of Changsha in Hunan Province recently announced that in the space of just seven months it would build an 838 metre skyscraper creating the world’s tallest tower. Understandably, doubts exist over whether this can be achieved − the current tallest, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, took six years to build. Yet such is the outlook of a country with so much dynamic ambition, that even the seemingly impossible is not to be considered off-limits. At the other end of the scale, it was recently revealed that 30 million Chinese continue to live in caves − a reflection of under-development (not an energy efficient lifestyle choice).

In the West, a risk averse outlook means that caution is the watchword. Not only is the idea of building new cities a distant memory, but data from the US and UK betrays that geographical mobility is reducing as people elect to stay in declining towns rather than seek new opportunities elsewhere. By contrast, China is a country on the move − quite literally. In fact the landmark 50 per cent urbanisation rate was achieved some years ago, driven by a ‘floating population’ of perhaps 200 million people, whose legal status as villagers disguises the fact they have already moved to live and work in cities.

If cramming five to a room in the existing Anting town means easy access to jobs then why move to Anting German Town, accessible via only a single road, and surrounded by industrial districts and wasteland? But it is also clear that China is building for expansion. The notion of ‘predict and provide’ is so alien to Western planners these days, that they are appalled when particular Chinese authorities announce that they will build a new town with three-lane highways before people move there. How absurd, we say. Look, the roads are empty and unused. But in this debate, it is we who have lost our sense of the audacious.

When assessing the ghost cities phenomenon, it seems likely that in a country growing at the breakneck speed of China, some mistakes will be made. When bureaucratic targets and technical plans inscribed in protocols and legislation are to the fore, then not all outcomes of investment programmes such as a recent $200 billion infrastructure project will work out. And yes, ghost cities do reflect some worrying economic trends, with rising house prices and the speculative stockpiling of units so that many apartments are owned but not occupied.

But these problems need to be kept firmly in perspective. The reality is that meaningful development requires risk-taking. The ghost cities today may well prove to be viable in the longer term, as ongoing urbanisation leads to better integration with existing regions, and because by the very virtue of their creation, such areas create new opportunities that alter the existing dynamics.

#chine #urban_matter #villes_fantômes #architecture

Les #Etats-Unis, première #menace d’une #Europe divisée - Le Temps
▻https://www.letemps.ch/monde/etatsunis-premiere-menace-dune-europe-divisee

US poses bigger threat than Putin or Xi, say voters | World | The Times
▻https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trump-a-greater-threat-to-peace-than-xi-or-putin-polls-suggest-ds8qrr5s6

The US under President Trump is perceived as a greater threat to Europe’s security than China or Russia, according to an international opinion poll.

Mr Trump’s standing has fallen so low among America’s allies that people in France and Germany are now significantly more likely to say they trust President Putin or President Xi to “do the right thing” on the global stage. A clear majority of people in eastern European countries including Poland fear that war will break out with Russia as the US-backed liberal order threatens to dissolve into an era of renewed conflict.

▻https://www.arch2o.com/david-cardelus-photographs-antoni-gaudi-el-capricho
David Cardelús is a Spanish architectural photographer who specialized in representing contemporary architecture for architectural firms and national and international publishing companies, has takes a series of photographs of El Capricho, that in 1883, Máximo Díaz de Quijano, an “Indiano” enriched in America, commissioned to Antoni Gaudí with what would be a summer villa near the palace of Sobrellano del Marqués in Comillas, Cantabria. Gaudi has several other works in Barcelona that one cannot miss if they happen to visit the Catalonian city.

#antoni_gaudí

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Criminal Shocked When Congresswoman Says His Crimes Out Loud
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/criminal-shocked-when-congresswoman-says-his-crimes-out-loud.html

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America loves a feel-good story. How else to explain our government’s appetite for redemption arcs? Elliott Abrams was once convicted of lying to Congress and on Wednesday, he got to testify before Congress again, this time in his capacity as our special envoy to Venezuela. But not everyone was happy to see him. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, questioned the former Assistant Secretary of State about his old misdeeds. “In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” Omar began, before asking Abrams why the committee should believe anything he had to say.

A spluttering Abrams complained that Omar did not give him a chance to respond, but the congresswoman continued. “You dismissed as ‘communist propaganda’ reports about the massacre of El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops,” she said. “You later said the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a ‘fabulous achievement.’ … Do you think that massacre was a ‘fabulous achievement?”

Ilhan Omar has sparked panic in AIPAC

Rep. Ilhan Omar has apologized for her inexcusably insensitive tweet. But the core issue behind her comment - whether the U.S. should continue to reflexively embrace the views of the Israeli government - won’t go away
David Rothkopf
Feb 13, 2019 2:37 PM

▻https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-ilhan-omar-has-sparked-panic-in-aipac-1.6935041

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U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota has apologized for her offensive tweet that suggested Israeli influence in the U.S. Congress was “all about the Benjamins.” But that does not mean that the core issue underlying the controversy surrounding the tweet, Representative Ilhan and new voices critical of Israel in U.S. politics, is likely to fade away.

I’m not going to defend Omar.Her own apology was unequivocal and the tweet itself was, at best, inexcusably insensitive. But it is vitally important we distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. And, as importantly, we also must recognize the massive response against Rep. Omar for what it is - a spasm of fear about our changing times.

>> Aaron David Miller: No, Israel and America Aren’t Breaking Up. Don’t Believe the Hype

The entire infrastructure that has been built over the years to advance the interests of Israel in the U.S. is quaking in its boots - not because of the badly developed arguments of a rookie Congresswoman - but because of the coming generational change in U.S. views of Israel and because support for the Israeli government has been damaged among Democrats by the choice of the Netanyahu administration to so closely tie itself to Donald Trump and the Republican right wing in America.
Supporters of US President Donald Trump cheer during a rally in El Paso, Texas on February 11, 2019
Supporters of US President Donald Trump cheer during a rally in El Paso, Texas on February 11, 2019.AFP

Rep. Omar damaged her own credibility by embracing an old anti-Semitic trope. There is no place for that in American politics. But even as she should be condemned, her views of Israel need to be heard. There is no reason all American views on a foreign government should be in lockstep.

Quite the contrary, Americans who seek to protect and advance our interests should no more reflexively embrace the views of the Israeli government than they do those of a pro-Brexit UK government or an anti-refugee Italian government.

Israel’s defenders would like the relationship to be deemed so important that it must not be criticized. This echoes the position, say, of the Saudis in the wake of the Khashoggi murder. And it is just as indefensible.

A growing number of Americans realize that. Further, a growing number of American Jews feel the positions of the Netanyahu government are contrary to both U.S. interests and the values of Judaism, and thus the rationale for a Jewish state. In other words, they see Netanyahu’s actions as undermining the reasons Israel might have a special claim on their support.

Indeed, no one, in fact, has done more to damage the standing of Israel than a Netanyahu government that has actively waged war on the Palestinian people, denied them their rights, responded disproportionately to threats and refused to acknowledge its own wrong-doing.

Anti-Semites, with their stale and discredited attacks, can never do the kind of damage to the U.S.-Israel relationship that rampant Israeli wrong-doing can (especially when the Israeli government weakens the arguments against anti-Semites by embracing them, as in the case of Victor Orban in Hungary, or hugging those like Donald Trump who promote anti-Semites and anti-Semitic ideas about “globalists” or George Soros.)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban share a light moment during the reception ceremony in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary, July 18, 2017.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary, July 18, 2017Balazs Mohai/AP

None of this is to diminish the real and ever-present threat of anti-Semitism. Which is why, of course, it is essential that we are careful to distinguish between it and legitimate criticism of the government of Israel.

In fact, if we in the U.S. stand for what is best about America and hope for the best for Israel, then we must welcome those who would criticize Israel’s government not as our enemies but as the true defenders of the idea of Israel, and of America’s deep investment in the promise of that country.

With that in mind, we must be careful that we do not allow the justifiable aspects of the critique against Rep. Omar to lead to a reflexive position where we silence active criticism of the Israeli government, or the worst actions of the State of Israel.

Judging from comments in the media about her that pre-dated these statements, and comments about Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and comments about the “left” becoming anti-Israel, in my view we are in the midst of a pre-emptive push to combat the coming rethinking of the U.S.- Israel relationship.
Feb. 5, 2019, photo, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined at right by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., listens to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, at the Capitol in Washington
Feb. 5, 2019, photo, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined at right by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., listens to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, at the Capitol in Washington.J. Scott Applewhite,AP

It will seize upon the fact that some elements who offer the critique of Israel are in fact anti-Semitic or tap into anti-Semitic rhetoric and traditions, in order to tar with the same brush those who legitimately disapprove of the behavior of the Israeli government.

That would be a mistake. Because it would not only silence a debate we need to and deserve to have, but it would undermine the ability of the U.S. to be a force for positive change in Israeli policies - change that is necessary to the future of Israel and to U.S. interests in that region.

We must combat anti-Semitism. But we should also combat those who have no tolerance for democratic processes, or who would seek a political purity test for politicians based on narrowly-defined, traditionalist, outdated guidelines.

The future of the U.S.- Israel relationship - and the future of Israel, the Palestinian people and peace in the region - depends on our willingness to look past biases of all sorts to the facts on the ground, to the justice that is required and to our interests going forward.

David Rothkopf is a foreign policy expert and author, host of the Deep State Radio podcast and CEO of The Rothkopf Group, LLC a media and advisory firm. His next book, on the national security threat posed by the Trump administration, is due out later this year. Twitter: @djrothkopf

Why Germany has no gilet jaunes protesters - Happy Helmuts
▻https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/02/09/why-germany-has-no-gilet-jaunes-protesters

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Germany should not consider itself immune to such problems, argues Marcel Fratzscher of the German Institute for Economic Research. Beneath its glowing jobs numbers lurk growing inequality and a vast low-pay sector, nurtured by a long period of wage suppression. Germany has gained more from globalisation than it has lost; you can see that in Big Dutchman’s logistics yard, full of packages destined for Senegal and Chile. But regions that specialised in low-end products like ceramics or textiles, such as upper Franconia or parts of the Palatinate, were walloped by cheap imports in the 1990s. Policy can hurt places, too: the government may have to spend €40bn to compensate regions affected by its recent decision to scrap lignite mining.

Yet there is no obvious parallel in Germany to the insecure, “peripheral” France of the gilets jaunes. Hidden champions create jobs and opportunities far from cities, limiting the brain drain. Local politicians are more responsive to voters’ demands than Jupiterian presidents in distant capitals. In troubled areas, Germany’s constitutionally mandated system of fiscal transfers across states can smooth globalisation’s rougher edges. Jens Südekum, an economist at Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University, calculates that in 2010 such payments amounted to fully 12.4% of Germany’s aggregate tax revenue. Cities like Duisburg and Essen, in the post-industrial Ruhr valley, have been spared the ravages that deindustrialisation brought to parts of America’s Midwest or the Pas-de-Calais region in northern France, now a stronghold of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Comparable parts of Germany have not made a comparable populist turn. Indeed, researchers find no clear correlation between AfD support and economic hardship.

The big caveat is the former East Germany. Despite success in isolated areas like optics, only a fraction of Mr Simon’s hidden champions are found in the east. After reunification the mass sell-off of industry, largely to western investors, left easterners with what Mr Südekum calls a “deep perception that they were ripped off”, which lingers today. Extremist parties do best in the five eastern states. Dresden and Chemnitz have spawned thuggish protests.

Moreover, the trends that mark Germany out from its industrialised peers are not immutable. Automation will cut into manufacturing’s share of the workforce, and Germany’s mighty carmakers seem ill-prepared for the disruption of self-driving and electric vehicles. Despite the hidden champions’ success, urbanisation continues apace, as rocketing house prices in large cities indicate. Vechta is keeping its natives, but attracting new talent is hard when the competition is Berlin.

#Allemagne #gilets_jaunes

Imperial Exceptionalism | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books
▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/07/imperial-exceptionalism

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It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions. According to the exceptionalist creed embraced by both political parties and most of the press, imperialism was a European venture that involved seizing territories, extracting their resources, and dominating their (invariably dark-skinned) populations. Americans, we have been told, do things differently: they bestow self-determination on backward peoples who yearn for it. The refusal to acknowledge that Americans have pursued their own version of empire—with the same self-deceiving hubris as Europeans—makes it hard to see that the US empire might (like the others) have a limited lifespan. All empires eventually end, but maybe an exceptional force for global good could last forever—or so its champions seem to believe.

#impérialisme #etats-unis #déni

Cuban, Hezbollah and Iranian cells drawn to embattled Venezuela : Mike Pompeo | Fox Business
▻https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/cuban-hezbollah-and-iranian-cells-drawn-to-embattled-venezuela-mike-pom

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“People don’t recognize that Hezbollah has active cells – the Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout South America,” he said Wednesday. “We have an obligation to take down that risk for America.”

Plus c’est gros !... Je me demande si Hitler n’est pas réfugié dans le palais de Maduro...

#venezuela

#El_Paso to Trump: Stop Telling Lies About Us

The president is holding a rally in the city on Monday. El Paso leaders are not pleased.

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President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to repeat the made-up claim that border barriers “immediately” saved El Paso from being one of America’s most dangerous cities. On Wednesday, Trump’s reelection campaign announced that he will double down on the lie by holding a rally on Monday at the El Paso County Coliseum.

Local officials have not been pleased with Trump’s interest in their city. “What he’s saying and doing is extremely insulting,” says Peter Svarzbein, one of El Paso’s eight district representatives. He adds that Trump’s message is also damaging to El Paso’s economy at a time when the city is trying to attract professionals and students.

Alexsandra Annello, another district representative, says it was disappointing to hear Trump continuing to mislead Americans. “El Paso has been a diverse, binational, bilingual community,” she says. “And it has been safe long before the fence was put up.”

Trump’s claim that El Paso went from being one of America’s most dangerous cities to one of its safest because of a border fence is entirely false. El Paso’s violent crime rate peaked in 1993 and fell by more than a third by 2006. The El Paso Times reported in January, “From 2006 to 2011—two years before the fence was built to two years after—the violent crime rate in El Paso increased by 17 percent.” El Paso is now one of the safest cities in America.

After Trump’s speech, El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, a Democrat, said in a statement, “It is sad to hear President Trump state falsehoods about El Paso, Texas in an attempt to justify the building of a 2,000-mile wall…El Paso was a safe city long before any wall was built.” Rep. Veronica Escobar, the Democrat who replaced Beto O’Rourke in Congress, called Trump’s El Paso reference a “sucker punch” in an interview with the El Paso Times.

El Paso’s Republican mayor Dee Margo tweeted that “El Paso was NEVER one of the MOST dangerous cities in the US” but called Trump’s upcoming visit “a positive” on Wednesday.

Svarzbein lamented that if Trump actually came to El Paso with an open mind, he would see the benefits of a free exchange of people and ideas across the border, between El Paso and the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. “You constantly have people from outside of this city and this region that don’t understand those dynamics,” Svarzbein says. “They don’t understand that the border is a blessing.”

He says, “I really wish this president would come here to see how these two cities thrive with each other, not in spite of but because of our relationships.”

▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/el-paso-to-trump-stop-telling-lies-about-us
#mensonges #fake_news #USA #Trump #sécurité #murs #frontières #barrières_frontalières #tur_tur

Why Decent’s serving freelancers first
▻https://hackernoon.com/why-decents-serving-freelancers-first-ff6682f56b30?source=rss----3a8144e

The future of work deserves the future of health #insurance.Before starting Decent, I spent six months working as a freelancer. I did paid growth projects from a hot desk at a coworking space in San Francisco, and got to know the other freelancers there — gifted developers, creatives, and business professionals with the courage and skill to bet on themselves. And I learned what every working freelancer already knows: this profession is exhilarating, but it’s not easy. It’s often lonely. The work is feast or famine. And the lack of affordable health insurance hurts.Freelancing in America survey, 2018My family of four was paying more for health insurance than for anything else in our budget — including rent in the Bay Area. It felt wrong, and it is.My familyHealth insurance premiums and out of (...)

#startup #healthcare #freelance-health #insurance-for-freelancers

The Evolution of #coffee #culture
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-evolution-of-coffee-culture-2f412b555313?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*48j-ep4sB5bGkpceV9LyEg.png

Whether sprinkled with sugar and cream, flavored with caramel or hazelnut, or just a plan black cup of Joe, coffee is one of the most popular beverages all over the world. It is so beloved, in fact, that many cultures claim responsibility for the first brew. But there’s more to it than just being smooth liquid gold — the culture of coffee is just as permeating as the drink itself.In the 17th century, brought on by the East India Trading Company, the first known coffee shop was opened in the Netherlands sparking the beginning of European coffee culture. Though the first recorded instance of drinkable coffee was found in 15th century Yemen, early global trade quickly made coffee not only a powerful commodity, but a powerful political statement as well. Surrounding the events of America’s (...)

#coffee-culture-evolution #infographics #coffee-culture

America #colonisation ‘cooled Earth’s climate’ - BBC News
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47063973

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024x576/p06zjwpc.jpg

That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other #vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (#CO₂) from the #atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.

It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age” - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.

#climat #Amérique #carbone #agriculture #arbres

The Washington Post’s ‘three Pinocchios’ for AOC shows how incoherent mainstream ‘fact-checking’ really is – Alternet.org
▻https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/the-washington-posts-three-pinocchios-for-aoc-shows-how-incoherent-mainstr

https://www.alternet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ocasio-Cortes.jpg

But there’s something more complex happening here too, that’s probably best understood in terms of press scholar Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of how the media functions, from his 1986 book The Uncensored War. At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists’ attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” The shoddy fact-checking directed at Ocasio-Cortez reflects a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.

To understand how shoddy it is — and the unspoken agenda involved — we need to take a closer look at the totality of what went down. Kessler was quoting from a snippet of AOC’s response to a question by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an MLK Day interview. The context is important, because context is everything in political discourse: What’s radical in one context is mom-and-apple-pie material in another.

King, paradoxically, is both. The question asked and the answer given were both in King’s spirit — but not the mom-and-apple-pie version of him the media (and much of America) loves to celebrate. It more reflected the actual, radical Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,” and said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

So, read in context, everything AOC said was true, even if we accept Kessler’s factual counterclaims! The entire fact-checking ritual was a charade. As I suggested earlier, it was really a boundary-policing episode, meant to keep her “radical” ideas outside the sphere of legitimate debate by portraying her as untrustworthy. Further, it was meant to deter others from similar infractions while trying to break through the barriers excluding them from legitimacy. (See AOC’s related Twitter thread on “gravitas” here.)

But the problem is that Kessler’s implied boundaries are not worth policing, or even recognizing. The whole system is in crisis, and the mainstream media’s assessment of what is deviant, what reflects normative consensus and what represents legitimate debate bears little or no relationship to reality. Take two other examples AOC has been associated with — raising top marginal tax rates to 70 percent and a Green New Deal. The first idea drew immediate majority support — 59 percent in a poll for the Hill, including 56 percent of rural voters and 45 percent of Republicans—and scorn from the 1 percent at Davos.

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell laughed at the idea (video here), and said he thought it would be bad for economic growth. “Name a country where that’s worked,” he responded. “Ever.” Sitting there with him was MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who supplied the example: the United States, throughout most of its post-World War II expansion. It was a rare, Marshall McLuhan-in-“Annie Hall” moment. Usually, when the super-rich or their sycophants spout off like that, truth does not intrude. Certainly not from the fact-checking media.

But the media’s failure is even more striking when it comes to climate change and the Green New Deal. It’s still a rarity for the media to treat climate science as firmly within the sphere of consensus, where all reputable researchers say it belongs.

#Fact_checking #Médias

Elliott Abrams Isn’t Going to Bring “Democracy” to Venezuela
▻https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup

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On December 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.

This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Abrams as America’s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams “will have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in the oil-rich nation.

The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency.

Certain Affinity sets up Toronto studio
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-30-certain-affinity-sets-up-toronto-studio

Trump’s America, non-stop flights, and distressed students helped decide where the Halo co-developer opened its new office.

Waiting with Immigrants

To be an immigrant in America is to wait. This goes double for the millions of immigrants who have found themselves at the sour end of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaucracy—and triple in the age of Trump. If you are an immigrant in the process of deportation proceedings, you must wait for your Master Calendar, on which a bureaucrat will assign you to a check-in date several months into the future. At this check-in, you may win several more months of anxious waiting—or disappear into a detention center, where you will wait for a one-way plane ride to a country you may no longer know. And if, for instance, your paperwork is straight but, twenty years ago, you jumped a turnstile or got into a barfight, then ICE has a mandate to hunt you down. Once snatched, you, too, will wait in a detention center, losing your job, your apartment, and possibly your health, while the months pass until a judge grants you a bond hearing. Then, you will appear in court—in chains or via video link—and learn how many thousands of dollars your family must pay for you to have the privilege of waiting outside a cage.

https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Molly4.jpg

Why a #high-tech border wall is as silly as a physical one

Opinion: Technology is an attractive answer, but it’s no panacea for economic and geopolitical problems at the border.

There’s a loud and growing chorus of opposition to a physical border wall. That view is shared by leaders of border cities like McAllen, Texas, by every congressman representing a district along our 2000-mile-long southern border, and by the majority of Americans (to say nothing of a long list of bygone societies stretching from the Ming Dynasty to East Germany). Tying a partial government shutdown to funding for the wall has also been deeply unpopular, and the president’s historically low approval ratings were slumping further during the shutdown.

Out of the political jockeying during the longest partial government shutdown in American history, there’s one idea everyone seems eager to agree on: Technology can help redress serious problems at the border. It’s an attractive, almost magic-sounding solution, lending a Silicon Valley ring to a stale debate. In the rhetorical shoving match over a physical wall, it’s become the rallying cry for those seeking sensible alternatives.

Unfortunately, border technology is not the panacea many people think. And in many of its applications it runs counter to our core values.

Increasing border security with a force field of sensing and response technology, what many are calling a digital or virtual wall, isn’t a new idea — in fact, it’s about 50 years old and grew out of strategies and technologies first developed during the Vietnam War. And it hasn’t worked.

Technology already in place

There are currently about 12,000 motion and seismic sensors along the U.S. border with Mexico, along with a vast electronic perimeter of radar and high definition cameras. Predator B drones have extended the radar net in places and can pick out a snake slithering through brush a mile away. Miniature facial recognition drones, 3D mapping technology, tethered blimps first developed to guard forward operating bases in Afghanistan, tunnel-navigating ground robots used in Iraq, invisible dyes dropped from the air to mark migrants, and acoustic deterrents of various types have all been tested or deployed along the border. (Here’s an excellent article on the history of this technology buildup by Lauren Etter and Karen Weise.)

Meanwhile, electronic fingerprinting has been in use by immigration enforcement officials since the 1990s to track the massive flow of people, legal and illegal, across U.S. borders. Border security agents currently have access to military-grade technology like nightscopes, suppressors, infrared and holographic sights, and a thick catalog of tactical weapons and gear.

We’re not talking about small-scale pilot programs or testbeds, either — far from it. In the mid-2000s, the America’s Shield Initiative and Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System cost taxpayers billions. The objective was “to use the right technology at the right places for the right terrain to … have the rapid response capability to get to the points of intrusions to increase our overall apprehension rate,” CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security in 2006.

Soon after, George W. Bush kicked off the #Secure_Border_Initiative, what he called “the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American History.” And just this past March, the latest government spending bill allocated $400 million for border technology. During what’s become a perennial state of frenzy over illegal immigration, it’s safe to say there’s been a decades-old gold rush to bring tech to the border. Rather than promoting new technology development, battle tested technology has migrated over from the defense sector. Contractors are reaping the benefits.

And what are the results of all this technology on immigration? Well, here’s how President Trump feels: “We can’t have people pouring into our country like they have over the last 10 years.”

Scrutinizing that assertion through the lens of reality is an exercise in confronting just how bellicose and misinformed the immigration debate has become, but the important takeaway is that a lot of people believe there’s still a big problem at the border despite the massive investment in technology. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate our faith in a digital fix. Maybe it’s also time to reevaluate the problem.

▻https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-a-high-tech-border-wall-is-as-silly-as-a-physical-one
#technologie #murs #barrières_frontalières #frontières #migrations

John Bolton t’explique ça « at the business level »: Venezuela regime change big business opportunity: John Bolton
▻https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/venezuela-regime-change-big-business-opportunity

White House national security adviser John Bolton said it’s in America’s best interest to declare Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro illegitimate.

“We want to be sure that everyone on the political level around the world and at the business level, anybody who has interest in the Western Hemisphere, this is a potential major step forward to a lot of progress in our part of the world,” Bolton told FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on Thursday.

DAVOS-Big Oil is more talk than action on renewables - Iberdrola | Reuters
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/davos-meeting-iberdrola-idUKL3N1ZO3ZT

The world’s largest wind-power producer, Iberdrola SA, has brushed off Big Oil’s embrace of renewable energy as “more noise” than action.

Major oil and gas firms have been venturing into renewable power under pressure from climate-change policy, collectively spending around 1 percent of their 2018 budgets on clean energy, according to a recent study by research firm CDP.

However, Iberdrola Chief Executive Ignacio Galan, who has led the Spanish utility for 17 years, shrugged when asked in a Reuters interview if Big Oil represented a competitive threat.

“It’s good that they have moved in this direction but they make more noise than the reality,” he said on Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Galan said returns on oil investment still far exceeded those typical of wind and solar projects and he doubted major oil companies would make a meaningful shift until that changed.

“They like to be enthusiastic but if they had to make a choice between a wonderful oil well and a good wind farm, I feel their heart will move in the traditional direction.”
[…]
He said U.S. states were more influential than Washington in terms of energy investment, and that several were looking to develop America’s first offshore wind farms, from Massachusetts down to North Carolina and New York across to California.

“The states are more and more committed to moving to renewables and the same is true of the cities and towns,” he said, adding that falling generation costs of renewable energy was a big driver of the U.S. adoption of wind and solar power.

New York white supremacist sword attacker pleads guilty - BBC News
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46979201

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/17E74/production/_95280979_timothy.jpg

“White nationalism will not be normalised in New York,” said District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr in a statement following Jackson’s conviction.

"This resolution won’t bring back Timothy Caughman, a beloved New Yorker who was executed for being black on a midtown street corner.

"It won’t reverse the alarming rise of white nationalism in America.

“It is, however, the loudest message that a civil society can send to would-be terrorists.”

#racisme #états-unis #suprémacistes #meurtre