Categoría: cultura
Raro y Maravilloso Pasatiempo Siberiano (Documental RT)
China’s approach to eradicating poverty
Poverty is a global issue and poverty eradication must be a common task for those wishing to improve global governance. In Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN says: “We recognize that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.”
Guan Tzu, an ancient Chinese economist said: “When the granaries are full, they will know propriety and moderation; when their clothing and food are adequate, they will know the distinction between honour and shame.”
Poverty eradication will help reduce inequality and facilitate inclusive growth. If people living in poverty can shake off their plight, it can expand market capacity, enhance the specialized division of labour and facilitate a more efficient and unified large market. Moreover, the resulting strengthening of marginal propensity to consume (MPC) will inject new vigour and energy into economic growth.
As an ancient Chinese proverb goes: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” All sustainable and effective poverty alleviation measures ultimately rely on industrial development. Industrial development in poverty-stricken areas in China is hindered by many restrictions. We must raise the low level of industrial development in these regions and break away from the vicious circle of low-level industrial development, an unattractive investment environment and degrading industrial development.
To encourage self-driven growth and the development of a local market and businesses, it is imperative to introduce external market forces. Regional industrial funds can guide and integrate resources, such as funds, technologies and talent, for investment in market entities in specific regions. Industrial investment funds, which combine the industrial capital and resources of these areas, can improve employment opportunities for people in poverty and financial input in these areas, realizing poverty eradication in a fundamental way.
Efforts can be made to build capital strength for local enterprises and improve their corporate governance structures and management. For industrial development, steps can be taken to: advance the transformation and upgrading of traditional agriculture; cultivate new business sectors in rural areas; promote the integration of primary, secondary and tertiary industries; and bolster competition in rural industries. When it comes to society, endeavors can be made to optimize the investment environment and improve financing for small and medium businesses.
![](http://blog.pucp.edu.pe/blog/nortenciogua/wp-content/uploads/sites/404/2017/03/yCPHHLaSpSHWh9U8-krnHh3evei2g-8wVj60bYBBkoA-300x201.jpg)
Newly-built residential buildings are seen next to the partially-frozen Songhua River and a bridge in Jilin, Jilin province February 3, 2015. Image: REUTERS/Stringer
To help remove the restrictions hindering the industrial development of poverty-stricken areas, the Chinese government has established two industrial poverty-alleviation funds. With the current total strength of 15 billion Renminbi yuan and the duration of 15 years, the two funds are expected to operate at a larger scale in the future. Both funds, operated and managed by State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC), will follow market-oriented methods.
It is necessary to go off the beaten track and find innovative investment approaches for fund investment in impoverished areas. These might include integrating upper-stream industry chains with region-specific resources by cooperation with selected leading local enterprises, so that industries with local characteristics can move from disorderly competition towards benign development.
Investing in new business sectors, such as rural tourism, eco-agriculture and rural e-commerce, is also important. Furthermore, employing diverse investment methods, like sub-fund, debt investment and optimized direct investment, can attract more social investment for poverty alleviation and solve the problem of difficult and expensive financing for small and medium enterprises. If funds take advantage of their lengthy duration and low costs; work to support the talent, technological and managing advantages of leading enterprises; and invest in the resources and industries that demonstrate the local characteristics of the area, they can promote the ability of poverty-stricken areas to self-develop.
Poverty eradication is a common cause for all of society. China has developed a unique approach to this challenge by perpetually eliminating poverty through industrial development – a method of great significance for developing countries. Socially responsible enterprises must work together to declare a war on poverty and realize the great goal of “eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions” in the world.
Written by: Wang Huisheng, Chairman, State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC)
In: webforum
Russia seeks to declare Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist group
https://youtu.be/YbAZ8owvD2Y
Russia’s justice ministry has filed a lawsuit with its supreme court to declare the national headquarters of the country’s Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist organization.
The legal filing is noted on the court’s website with no date given for legal action. The group’s administrative center in Russia is located about 25 miles northwest of St. Petersburg.
The press office for the Russian branch of the religion says on its website that such a declaration, if successful, would “entail disastrous consequences for freedom of religion in Russia” and directly affect about 175,000 followers at more than 2,000 congregations in the country.
“Extremism is deeply alien to the Bible-based beliefs and morality of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” the statement said. “Persecution of the faithful for peaceful anti-extremism legislation is built on frank fraud, incompetent individual ‘experts’ and, as a result, a miscarriage of justice.”
The Jehovah’s Witnesses first legally registered as a religious group in Russia in 1991 and re-registered in 1999, according to the organization’s international website.
For almost two decades, however, Russian prosecutors in various localities have periodically sought to outlaw or curb the group, charging it is a cult that destroys families, fosters hatred and threatens lives.
In response to the latest pressure, Vasily Kalin, chairman of the religious group’s steering committee, said members simply want to “peacefully worship their God,” according to the press office.
“Unfortunately, after more than 100 years in power, Russia violates its own legislation that guarantees us that right,” he said. “In Stalin’s time, when I was a child, the whole family was deported to Siberia only because we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s a shame and sad that my children and grandchildren will be faced with something like that. ”
Jehovah’s Witnesses have come under growing pressure from Russian authorities in recent years, including a ban on distribution of church literature that authorities say violates anti-extremism laws.
In February, investigators inspected the headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in St. Petersburg, the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported. More than 70,000 pages of documents were confiscated for the General Prosecutor’s Office, according to Russia’s Sova Center of Information and Analysis, which monitors hate crimes and the enforcement of anti-extremist laws.
The religious group’s press service said its religious programs do not include banned materials and that officials have notified authorities whenever anyone brings such literature into their building.
In 2009, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld a lower court ruling that declared 34 pieces of Jehovah’s Witness literature as “extremist,” including their magazine The Watchtower in Russian.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have been officially banned from the port city of Taganrog since 2009, after a local court ruled the organization guilty of inciting religious hatred by “propagating the exclusivity and supremacy” of their religion, according to the British newspaper The Independent.
In 2015, a court in Rostov convicted 16 Jehovah’s Witnesses of practicing extremism in Taganrog, handing out jail sentences — later suspended — of more than 5 years for five of the defendants and stiff fines for the others.
That same year, the supreme court of Russia banned the religion’s international website as “extremist.”
In: usatoday
In The Heights – Lin Manuel Miranda
What Biracial People Know
Moises Velasquez-Manoff / March 4, 2017
After the nation’s first black president, we now have a white president with the whitest and malest cabinet since Ronald Reagan’s. His administration immediately made it a priority to deport undocumented immigrants and to deny people from certain Muslim-majority nations entry into the United States, decisions that caused tremendous blowback.
What President Trump doesn’t seem to have considered is that diversity doesn’t just sound nice, it has tangible value. Social scientists find that homogeneous groups like his cabinet can be less creative and insightful than diverse ones. They are more prone to groupthink and less likely to question faulty assumptions.
What’s true of groups is also true for individuals. A small but growing body of research suggests that multiracial people are more open-minded and creative. Here, it’s worth remembering that Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, wasn’t only the nation’s first black president, he was also its first biracial president. His multitudinous self was, I like to think, part of what made him great — part of what inspired him when he proclaimed that there wasn’t a red or blue America, but a United States of America.
As a multiethnic person myself — the son of a Jewish dad of Eastern European descent and a Puerto Rican mom — I can attest that being mixed makes it harder to fall back on the tribal identities that have guided so much of human history, and that are now resurgent. Your background pushes you to construct a worldview that transcends the tribal.
You’re also accustomed to the idea of having several selves, and of trying to forge them into something whole. That task of self-creation isn’t unique to biracial people; it’s a defining experience of modernity. Once the old stories about God and tribe — the framing that historically gave our lives context — become inadequate, on what do we base our identities? How do we give our lives meaning and purpose?
President Trump has answered this challenge by reaching backward — vowing to wall off America and invoking a whiter, more homogeneous country. This approach is likely to fail for the simple reason that much of the strength and creativity of America, and modernity generally, stems from diversity. And the answers to a host of problems we face may lie in more mixing, not less.
Consider this: By 3 months of age, biracial infants recognize faces more quickly than their monoracial peers, suggesting that their facial perception abilities are more developed. Kristin Pauker, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the researchers who performed this study, likens this flexibility to bilingualism.
Early on, infants who hear only Japanese, say, will lose the ability to distinguish L’s from R’s. But if they also hear English, they’ll continue to hear the sounds as separate. So it is with recognizing faces, Dr. Pauker says. Kids naturally learn to recognize kin from non-kin, in-group from out-group. But because they’re exposed to more human variation, the in-group for multiracial children seems to be larger.
This may pay off in important ways later. In a 2015 study, Sarah Gaither, an assistant professor at Duke, found that when she reminded multiracial participants of their mixed heritage, they scored higher in a series of word association games and other tests that measure creative problem solving. When she reminded monoracial people about their heritage, however, their performance didn’t improve. Somehow, having multiple selves enhanced mental flexibility.
But here’s where it gets interesting: When Dr. Gaither reminded participants of a single racial background that they, too, had multiple selves, by asking about their various identities in life, their scores also improved. “For biracial people, these racial identities are very salient,” she told me. “That said, we all have multiple social identities.” And focusing on these identities seems to impart mental flexibility irrespective of race.
It may be possible to deliberately cultivate this kind of limber mind-set by, for example, living abroad. Various studies find that business people who live in other countries are more successful than those who stay put; that artists who’ve lived abroad create more valuable art; that scientists working abroad produce studies that are more highly cited. Living in another culture exercises the mind, researchers reason, forcing one to think more deeply about the world.
Another path to intellectual rigor is to gather a diverse group of people together and have them attack problems, which is arguably exactly what the American experiment is. In mock trials, the Tufts University researcher Samuel Sommers has found, racially diverse juries appraise evidence more accurately than all-white juries, which translates to more lenient treatment of minority defendants. That’s not because minority jurors are biased in favor of minority defendants, but because whites on mixed juries more carefully consider the evidence.
The point is that diversity — of one’s own makeup, one’s experience, of groups of people solving problems, of cities and nations — is linked to economic prosperity, greater scientific prowess and a fairer judicial process. If human groups represent a series of brains networked together, the more dissimilar these brains are in terms of life experience, the better the “hivemind” may be at thinking around any given problem.
The opposite is true of those who employ essentialist thinking — in particular, it seems, people who espouse stereotypes about racial groups. Harvard and Tel Aviv University scientists ran experiments on white Americans, Israelis and Asian-Americans in which they had some subjects read essays that made an essentialist argument about race, and then asked them to solve word-association games and other puzzles. Those who were primed with racial stereotypes performed worse than those who weren’t. “An essentialist mind-set is indeed hazardous for creativity,” the authors note.
None of which bodes well for Mr. Trump’s mostly white, mostly male, extremely wealthy cabinet. Indeed, it’s tempting to speculate that the administration’s problems so far, including its clumsy rollout of a travel ban that was mostly blocked by the courts, stem in part from its homogeneity and insularity. Better decisions might emerge from a more diverse set of minds.
And yet, if multiculturalism is so grand, why was Mr. Trump so successful in running on a platform that rejected it? What explains the current “whitelash,” as the commentator Van Jones called it? Sure, many Trump supporters have legitimate economic concerns separate from worries about race or immigration. But what of the white nationalism that his campaign seems to have unleashed? Eight years of a black president didn’t assuage those minds, but instead inflamed them. Diversity didn’t make its own case very well.
One answer to this conundrum comes from Dr. Sommers and his Tufts colleague Michael Norton. In a 2011 survey, they found that as whites reported decreases in perceived anti-black bias, they also reported increasing anti-white bias, which they described as a bigger problem. Dr. Sommers and Dr. Norton concluded that whites saw race relations as a zero-sum game. Minorities’ gain was their loss.
In reality, cities and countries that are more diverse are more prosperous than homogeneous ones, and that often means higher wages for native-born citizens. Yet the perception that out-groups gain at in-groups’ expense persists. And that view seems to be reflexive. Merely reminding whites that the Census Bureau has said the United States will be a “majority minority” country by 2042, as one Northwestern University experiment showed, increased their anti-minority bias and their preference for being around other whites. In another experiment, the reminder made whites more politically conservative as well.
It’s hard to know what to do about this except to acknowledge that diversity isn’t easy. It’s uncomfortable. It can make people feel threatened. “We promote diversity. We believe in diversity. But diversity is hard,” Sophie Trawalter, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me.
That very difficulty, though, may be why diversity is so good for us. “The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise,” Katherine Phillips, a senior vice dean at Columbia Business School, writes. “You have to push yourself to grow your muscles.”
Closer, more meaningful contact with those of other races may help assuage the underlying anxiety. Some years back, Dr. Gaither of Duke ran an intriguing study in which incoming white college students were paired with either same-race or different-race roommates. After four months, roommates who lived with different races had a more diverse group of friends and considered diversity more important, compared with those with same-race roommates. After six months, they were less anxious and more pleasant in interracial interactions. (It was the Republican-Democrat pairings that proved problematic, Dr. Gaither told me. Apparently they couldn’t stand each other.)
Some corners of the world seem to naturally foster this mellower view of race — particularly Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s home state. Dr. Pauker has found that by age 7, children in Massachusetts begin to stereotype about racial out-groups, whereas children in Hawaii do not. She’s not sure why, but she suspects that the state’s unique racial makeup is important. Whites are a minority in Hawaii, and the state has the largest share of multiracial people in the country, at almost a quarter of its population.
Constant exposure to people who see race as a fluid concept — who define themselves as Asian, Hawaiian, black or white interchangeably — makes rigid thinking about race harder to maintain, she speculates. And that flexibility rubs off. In a forthcoming study, Dr. Pauker finds that white college students who move from the mainland to Hawaii begin to think differently about race. Faced daily with evidence of a complex reality, their ideas about who’s in and who’s out, and what belonging to any group really means, relax.
Clearly, people can cling to racist views even when exposed to mountains of evidence contradicting those views. But an optimistic interpretation of Dr. Pauker’s research is that when a society’s racial makeup moves beyond a certain threshold — when whites stop being the majority, for example, and a large percentage of the population is mixed — racial stereotyping becomes harder to do.
Whitelash notwithstanding, we’re moving in that direction. More nonwhite babies are already born than white. And if multiracial people work like a vaccine against the tribalist tendencies roused by Mr. Trump, the country may be gaining immunity. Multiracials make up an estimated 7 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, and they’re predicted to grow to 20 percent by 2050.
President Trump campaigned on a narrow vision of America as a nation-state, not as a state of people from many nations. His response to the modern question — How do we form our identities? — is to grasp for a semi-mythical past that excludes large segments of modern America. If we believe the science on diversity, his approach to problem solving is likely suboptimal.
Many see his election as apocalyptic. And sure, President Trump could break our democracy, wreck the country and ruin the planet. But his presidency also has the feel of a last stand — grim, fearful and obsessed with imminent decline. In retrospect, we may view Mr. Trump as part of the agony of metamorphosis.
And we’ll see Mr. Obama as the first president of the thriving multiracial nation that’s emerging.
—————-
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Disease,” is a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 5, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Biracial People Know.
In: nytimes
Feliz Cumpleaños para Mijail Gorbachov
![](http://blog.pucp.edu.pe/blog/nortenciogua/wp-content/uploads/sites/404/2017/03/Gorbachev_and_Reagan_630px_465px-300x221.jpg)
Image: http://www.thereaganvision.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gorbachev_and_Reagan_630px_465px.jpg
Un homenaje a Mijail Gorbachov, último gobernante de la desintegrada Unión Soviética. Durante su gobierno, él impulsó una profundas reformas políticas y socioeconómicas pro-capitalistas conocidas como “Perestroika” y “Glasnot”, cuyo objetivo era la apertura, reconciliación y adaptación de Rusia con el capitalismo. El logro de ese objetivo significó la caída de la Unión Soviética y “la cortina de acero”, y el nacimiento de una era unipolar con los Estados Unidos a la cabeza.
Como es su cumpleaños, lo celebramos a ritmo de “Gorbachov” por el grupo Locomia. La canción es un mix de ritmo soviético-latino, cantado por españoles vestidos de toreros con un estilo ultrabarroco quienes, además, son todo unos capos con los abanicos.
Y bueno, a pedido de algunos, el video del grupo:
Muy gracioso: SNL – Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos de Trump!
El controversial corto del Super Bowl: 84 Lumber Super Bowl Commercial – The Entire Journey
Si pudiste ver el Super Bowl el ultimo domingo, seguramente habras notado un comercial que ha tocado al tema de la inmigracion desde Mexico a los Estados Unidos producido por la empresa maderera “Lumber 84”, la cual, al finalizar, le pedia a los espectadores ir a su website para “completar el viaje”. El tema es que mucha gente penso para que ir al website para terminar un comercial? Transmitanlo completamente! No me hagan trabajar por una companhia de la que nunca he oido hablar!
Lo que paso es que “Lumber 84” habia planeado transmitir todo el comercial pero la cadena televisiva Fox puso el grito en el cielo. El broadcaster considero el comercial como muy “controversial” como para ser transmitido durante el evento televisivo mas visto del pais y por ello “Lumber 84” fue forzado a cortar el comercial y remover parte de la cinta considerada ofensiva.
El comercial es la historia simbolica de una madre y su pequenha hija ralizando un arduo y largo viaje a los Estados Unidos de Norteamerica. En el video que no se pudo ver en el Super Bowl, ellas llegan a la frontera solo para ser recibidas por una gran muralla de concreto. Pero ahi no acaba la cosa.
Esta es un gran corto con un mensaje poderoso y claro: Las oportunidades estan siendo vapuleadas (algo contradictorio en el “pais de las oprtunidades”).
Fox es una empresa con fines de lucro, por lo que tienen el derecho de elegir lo que hacen y no hacen con sus ondas, pero se ve ridículo que la misma red que no dice nada respecto de las gráficas torturas de “24” encuentren la imagen de una pared fronteriza demasiado “polémica”.
Traducido al espanhol de: collider.com
Tildes omitidas intencionalmente.
Aerolínea Emirates adapta tripulaciones en vuelos a EE.UU. tras decreto de Trump
La compañía subrayó que “sigue realizando, como previsto, sus vuelos regulares a Estados Unidos” y que “ninguno de sus tripulantes se ha visto, hasta ahora, afectado” por la nueva reglamentación.
Dubái (AFP).- La compañía aérea Emirates de Dubái afirmó este lunes haber modificado las tripulaciones de sus vuelos con destino a Estados Unidos para adaptarse al decreto antiinmigración del presidente Donald Trump.
“La reciente modificación de las condiciones de entrada en Estados Unidos para los ciudadanos de siete países se aplica a todos los viajeros y miembros de la tripulación” en los vuelos hacia aeropuertos estadounidenses, afirmó la aerolínea en un comunicado.
“Hemos realizado los cambios necesarios en nuestras tripulaciones para adaptarnos a las (nuevas) exigencias” de la administración Trump, agregó Emirates, cuyos empleados son originarios de varios países, incluidos los afectados por el decreto de Trump.
La compañía subrayó que “sigue realizando, como previsto, sus vuelos regulares a Estados Unidos” y que “ninguno de sus tripulantes se ha visto, hasta ahora, afectado” por la nueva reglamentación.
Trump firmó el viernes un decreto que prohíbe durante tres meses la entrada en Estados Unidos de ciudadanos de siete países de mayoría musulmana: Irak, Irán, Libia, Somalia, Sudán, Siria y Yemen. Se exceptúan las personas en poder de visas diplomáticas y oficiales y aquellas que trabajen para organismos internacionales.
En: gestion