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Monday 20th of December 2021
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Tsunamis also start by receding @ELuttwak World Of Finance |
For years now Central Banks have been enabling governments unwilling to confront structural problems by flooding economies with money. But when we had deflation instead of inflation, the Krugmans told us not to worry ("different this time") Tsunamis also start by receding |
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The movie begins with the wrong guy getting kidnapped for interrogation because a bug fell into a typewriter. Everything is visibly falling apart and in constant need of maintenance @LumpyTheCook Misc. |
The movie begins with the wrong guy getting kidnapped for interrogation because a bug fell into a typewriter. Everything is visibly falling apart and in constant need of maintenance. There’s terror attacks all the time and all the (very dysfunctional) people just try to ignore it @LumpyTheCook
Brazil (1985 film)
https://j.mp/32aoWPkBrazil is a 1985 dystopian[9] science fiction black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard.
The film stars Jonathan Pryce and features Robert De Niro, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Bob Hoskins, and Ian Holm.
The film centres on Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living in a small apartment, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines.
Brazil's satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporatism and state capitalism is reminiscent of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and has been called Kafkaesque[14] and absurdist.[13]
Sarah Street's British National Cinema (1997) describes the film as a "fantasy/satire on bureaucratic society", and John Scalzi's Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies (2005) describes it as a "dystopian satire".
Jack Mathews, a film critic and the author of The Battle of Brazil (1987), described the film as "satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving Gilliam crazy all his life".
Despite its title, the film is not about the country Brazil nor does it take place there; it is named after the recurrent theme song, Ary Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil", known simply as "Brazil" to British audiences, as performed by Geoff Muldaur.
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Why the wildebeest is the unlikely king of the Serengeti @NatGeo Africa |
The line appeared on the horizon as a gray thread on a pale green quilt, but as the plane flew closer, it became a column of a few hundred animals, winding across the plain.
“Wildebeest,” Charlie shouted over the drone of the engine. “It’s a small group.”
We were north of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, and since it was March, we knew the wildebeests would soon be moving northwest, up through Serengeti National Park and into Kenya.
And there they were, in a perfectly straight, nose-to-tail convoy. I could make out their curved horns and long heads nodding up and down as they trudged through the morning sun. Several calves pressed against their mothers’ flanks.
For thousands of years, wildebeest herds have journeyed through the greater Serengeti ecosystem in a clockwise circuit—each animal meandering roughly 1,750 miles, the distance from Portland, Maine, to Key West, Florida—following the rains, grazing on the grasses, fertilizing the land, becoming food for the predators.
And here, treading the timeless trail of its ancestors, this herd was headed northwest.
But wait, they weren’t headed northwest.
“Why are they going south?” I shouted to Charlie.
“Who bloody knows?” he replied. “They’re looking for grass. Not much to eat here.”
But perhaps the most daunting test would be an age-old one: the Mara River, which the animals would have to cross to reach the best grazing in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve and then again when returning to Tanzania.
Charlie, who’s been filming and photographing in the Serengeti for more than two decades, has seen dozens of crossings and watched thousands of wildebeests blithely follow each other to their death.
“I was here for it last year, and hundreds of carcasses were piled up on the banks and floating in the river,” he told me. “It’s a bloody nightmare.”
Some 500,000 wildebeest calves are born over three weeks, roughly 24,000 a day. Seven minutes after emerging from the womb, a calf is standing, and within 24 hours it can run with its mother.
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A Moral No-Man’s Land: On David Diop’s “At Night All Blood Is Black” @LAReviewofBooks Misc. |
BEAUTIFULLY WROUGHT VIOLENCE makes for gripping novels and murky ethics.
David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black, originally published in French in 2018, was one of the most decorated novels of that year, winning the Prix Goncourt, and its English translation by Anna Moschovakis won the 2021 International Booker Prize.
A short, visceral book, it tells the story of an African soldier’s imbrication in World War I.
Like many novels about the Western Front, it puts the horror of trench warfare front and center.
The book’s incantatory gore makes it a critique of war along the lines of All Quiet on the Western Front, but in Diop’s hands something else is also going on.
Our hero is Alfa, a young Senegalese infantryman fighting in the French Army. His friend is badly wounded on the battlefield and, dying in Alfa’s arms, begs to be put out of his misery.
“God’s truth, I thought only of gutting the half-dead blue-eyed enemy. I thought only of disemboweling the enemy from the other side.”
Alfa begins to act strangely in battle. When his unit goes over the top in an attack, he holds back until the engagement is over, camouflages himself with mud, and lies in wait.
He seeks out a German soldier — one with blue eyes — whom he ambushes, drags into no-man’s-land, tortures, disembowels, and watches die. He then cuts off a hand to take back to his unit.
He does this seven more times, preserving the hands in salt in the trench kitchen to keep as talismans.
As he sees it, Alfa is committing to the pantomime of savagery the French officers expect of African soldiers, becoming the “butcher of human flesh” they want him to be.
After initially celebrating his bravery, his fellow soldiers begin to turn against him. The Africans fear that he has become a sorcerer or a cannibal, and the French officers believe he has lost his mind.
Alfa’s hand-cutting behavior “isn’t regulation,” as his commander tells him before sending him to the rear to recuperate.
It’s impossible to read this book without thinking about the ugly history of severed hands in Africa.
The cutting off of hands was a feature of colonial conquest, most famously in the Congo Free State, where the Belgians removed the hands of those who failed to collect their quota of rubber.
Baskets of hands were clear evidence of colonialism’s cruelty, both to critics at the time and in historical hindsight.
More recently, severed hands came to symbolize a different brutality — that of the civil wars of the 1990s, when neoconservatives used the practice to argue that African warfare was uniquely pitiless and atavistic.
Alfa’s collection of hands, which he keeps in his trunk until burying them one night, calls these histories to mind for the reader. But to what end?
Are we to conclude that Alfa has internalized the cruelty of colonialism? That Europeans didn’t have a monopoly on chopping off hands? Or is this just a grisly tale of personal revenge?
One of the blurbs on the back of the book comes from the French novelist Mathias Énard, who writes that Diop “erects a beautiful monument to the Senegalese riflemen, and seeks to restore their African dimension; to listen to them, to understand them.”
I suspect that this is how many people will read this book — as a vindication of the Africans who fought in World War I.
If this is Diop’s intention, he achieves it in a roundabout way.
The protagonist is a madman, albeit a bleakly heroic one. He does the very things that Europeans evoked to tar the honor of African soldiers — he breaks the rules of “civilized” warfare, and (maybe) kills a European woman.
At times, it is as if Diop has drawn his picture of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais from E. D. Morel’s 1920 racist screed, “Black Horror on the Rhine,” which indicted France for using colonial soldiers in its postwar occupation of Germany.
At other times, it seems more in the vein of Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye, which memorializes how France betrayed its African soldiers.
In the military sanitorium where Alfa is sent to recuperate, flashbacks to his youth provide hints at why he went berserk on the battlefield.
His relationship with the friend whose death sets off his killing spree is more complicated than we were initially told.
He relates his first sexual encounter over and over, blurring his lost virginity with his experiences in the trench, which he describes in grotesquely sexualized terms.
Diop’s book is morally inscrutable, and as a meditation on war, race, and colonialism, it cuts like a dull knife.
Are we to cheer on the protagonist as he obliterates German soldiers? If so, are we cheering for him because the Germans are the enemy, or because he is a subaltern taking a bloody, personal revenge on Europe?
Or are we to indict him for his cruelty? Diop gives us no landmarks to orient ourselves in the no-man’s-land where he sets his story — a brave decision at a time when many readers demand moral clarity from stories about the past.
The adventure his protagonist embarks on is an “ambiguous” one: the book begins, appropriately, with an epigraph from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s classic novel of colonialism L’Aventure ambiguë (1961). Any attempt to divvy up its characters into heroes and villains is bound to fail.
“Whoever tells a well-known story,” the narrator informs us toward the book’s cryptic and surprising end, “might always be hiding another story beneath it.”
What is the story beneath this story? There are several, but the one that shows through clearest is about how we taxonomize the violence of warfare.
Violent death levels all, as the book’s title suggests. But not all violence is alike. Diop’s book probes the difference between the “legitimate” violence of battle and the kind that is taboo or dishonorable.
In one particularly affecting scene, Alfa’s hand-cutting is juxtaposed with a gruesome execution of a group of soldiers for cowardice by their French commanders.
Why do the norms of war deem one of these things “civilized” and the other not?
The line between them, Diop shows, is drawn not by the nature of the killing, but by who is doing it.
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The Growth-Severity Confound @paulmromer Misc. |
Someone who tweets under the handle @enn_nafnlaus cautioned that it is easy to make a mistake when comparing trajectories with different exponential growth rates.
In fact, this mistake can bias down the measure of severity that is raising hopes that an omicron infection will be less serious.
The bias can be large, off by something closer to a factor of 10 than a factor of 2.
The underlying problem is that fast growth dramatically increases the ratio of any quantity that we measure today compared to its value only a few days ago.
Specific Values
Suppose that omicron is growing at an exponential rate of 20% per day and that we are comparing it to a previous wave where infections were growing half as fast, at the rate of 10% per day. Suppose also that death, if it comes, is on average 3 weeks after the initial infection.
Even if the fraction of infections that end in death is exactly the same for the variants behind the two waves, the ratio of deaths today to infections today will be only one-eighth as large for the omicron wave.
The orange lines are for the omicron wave; the blue for the previous wave. In a graph like this with a ratio (or logarithmic) scale on the vertical axis, exponential growth shows up as a straight line with a slope equal to the rate of growth.
For the value on day t, each solid line shows the number of infections on that day of a wave. The dashed line shows the number of infections three weeks before, on day on day t−21.
Each dashed line has the same slope as its solid line one but is shifted to the right by 21 days.
When the slope is steeper, the same horizontal distance implies a bigger vertical distance. The dotted vertical line between two orange curves shows that the number of infections on day t is 67 times larger than the number of cases on day t−21
The corresponding shorter dotted vertical line between the two blue curves shows that the number of cases on day t was about 8 times the number of cases on day t−21
If the same fraction of infections ends in death during these two waves, the number of deaths on day tis proportional to infections on day t− 21
So for omicron, deaths on day t divided by infections on day t will be smaller by a factor of 67/8≈ 8. It is smaller by this factor because omicron is growing faster.
Moreover, this 8−fold difference in the ratio of infections to deaths need not be something that goes away in a few days. It will persist for as long as the period of exponential growth of omicron lasts.
This ratio will start to increase only as growth declines to zero and will approach the true infection-fatality rate after the number of infections per day has stabilized at some roughly constant level.
So the ratio of deaths to infections becomes a reliable indicator of severity only after it is too late to use the information it reveals.
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.@TheLancet 18 Dec.21 To be clear, the lab leak theory was and remains a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry. Misc. |
01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19
What is clear is that the #COVID19 was bio-engineered The Science [and I am not a Scientist is irrefutable and in the public domain for those with a modicum of intellectual interest.
This information is being deliberately suppressed.
This took me to Thomas Pynchon
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
Now Why are we being led away from this irrefutable Truth
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A whistleblower leaked a 2018 Daszak funding proposal that details how he and Wuhan Institute of Virology would genetically engineer a human-specific furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses @HansMahncke Misc. |
A whistleblower leaked a 2018 Daszak funding proposal that details how he and Wuhan Institute of Virology would genetically engineer a “human-specific” furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses–exactly what we see in the bat coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan in 2019
04-JAN-2021 :: Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19.
Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists and WHO will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19.
It is remarkable that the Propaganda is still being propagated more than a year later.
Those who have chosen to propagate this narrative are above the radar and in plain sight and need to be called to account.
The Utter Failure to call these 5th columnists to Account is the clearest Signal that there is no external threat because it is already on the inside.
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Erdoğan vows to re-lower inflation to four percent, reiterates rates policy H/T @WashingtonPoint Emerging Markets |
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he had lowered Turkey's inflation to around four percent before and that he will be able to do so again as he reiterated his stance on low borrowing costs, HaberTürk reported on Sunday.
The Turkish president’s remarks during a meeting with African youth on the sidelines of the Turkey-Africa Partnership Summit in Istanbul, arrive as Turkey grapples with 21 percent inflation due to the Turkish leader’s aggressive monetary easing that has sparked a crash in the lira to record-breaking lows against the U.S. dollar and euro.
“Sooner or later, just as we lowered inflation all the way to 4 percent when I came to power, we will lower it again, we will make it fall again,” Erdoğan said. “God willing, inflation will begin falling soon.”
Erdoğan maintains the unorthodox view that lower interest rates will be very beneficial for his country's economy.
The central bank voted on Thursday to cut the country’s key interest rate for a fourth consecutive month to 14 percent from 15 percent, sending the lira to another new record low against the dollar.
“We are continuing on our path in a determined fashion,’’ Erdoğan said, defending his government’s economic programme,
“We will not let our nation become beat down by interest. God willing, the inflation will start to decrease in very soon. Because interest is a means and inflation is an end.’’
Turkey’s inflation jumped 3.5 percent in November to 21.3 percent annually, as compared to 4 percent in 2011, eight years after Erdoğan came to power.
The Turkish president on Thursday announced a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage, in a move that is expected to boost overall consumer price inflation by 3.5 to 10 percentage points.
Turkey’s leading business group on Saturday called on the government of Erdoğan to abandon a monetary policy based on low rates, which has sparked a record-breaking crash in the lira.
Ankara should return to “rules of economic science’’ following the failure of the goals under the current economic programme, the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), in a statement released on its official website.
Erdoğan during his meeting with African youth studying in Turkey on Saturday highlighted the continents’ history with European colonialists, Hürriyet newspaper reported.
"They come from European countries and take away all your natural resources like gold, precious stones and take them to their country and leave nothing to you," the newspaper cited the Turkish president as saying.
"When you return (to Africa), you will say that you came back to settle the account. This is your right, they robbed your assets,'' the Turkish president added.
Erdoğan also encouraged to students to say, "The world is bigger than the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council,'' repeating his call for council membership to be expanded.
"All my young brothers and sisters here should say when they return back to their countries, 'Now, we too want to become permanent members' and fight for this. If you do not fight, they will keep robbing the African states."
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While Abiy may control the plains, the TPLF are almost impossible to defeat in the mountains @NickWestcottRAS H/T @RAbdiAnalyst Africa |
In Ethiopia, military dominance has always been crucial to effective central control. This has not changed.
Haile Selassie’s reign was based on the military victory of Segale in 1916 against his deposed predecessor.
The Derg’s rule was based on their control of the army, until overthrown by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 1991.
But military control alone is never sufficient. The state still needs to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the people being ruled, or at least a sufficient majority of them.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) leadership both miscalculated from the outset, over-estimating their own political and military strength and under-estimating that of their opponent.
It is this mutual miscalculation that runs the risk, if prolonged, of leading to a stalemate that will see Ethiopia join South Sudan, Libya and the Yemen in interminable conflict, devastating to the economy and the people.
Is the Horn, like Syria or the Yemen, to be another victim of the new multipolar world?
The origins of conflict may be in Ethiopia’s own divisions, but its resolution now depends on international action.
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MADAGASCAR Economy under the weather @Africa_Conf Africa |
Drought and water mismanagement are pushing the country into famine. But with no serious opposition, Rajoelina reigns on
The rains are late in Madagascar – again. While over 750,000 people in the south of the island face severe hunger after three consecutive years of drought, the population of Antananarivo in the central highlands has access to water for only a few hours a day.
Night-time queues at standpipes are common. Regular power cuts, due in part to lack of water to drive the hydroelectric generators that provide half the country's electricity, are another common grievance.
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What was the funniest story of the year? @thecontinent_ Africa |
KR: “I am a victim of information distortion, voice cloning and sponsored spooking and political sabotage. Digital media, in their hybridity, have been used by my enemies to blackmail me, but my spirit will never die...”
Thus read former Zimbabwean vice-president Kembo Mohadi’s statement in response to being caught conducting not one, but two extramarital affairs while in office.
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