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Just weeks after the stock market crashed in 1929, President Herbert Hoover assured the country that things were already “back to normal,” Liaquat Ahamed writes in Lords of Finance World Of Finance |
Five months later, in March 1930, Hoover said the worst would be over “during the next 60 days.”
When that period ended, he said, “We have passed the worst.”
Eventually, Ahamed writes, “when the facts refused to obey Hoover’s forecasts, he started to make them up.”
Government agencies were pressed to issue false data. Officials resigned rather than do so, including the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And we all know how that turned out: The Great Depression.
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Mysterious cosmic object swallowed by black hole baffles astronomers @NatGeo Misc. |
About 800 million light-years away, a black hole devoured an unidentified object, and the resulting cosmic merger released enough energy to wrinkle the fabric of spacetime.
These wrinkles, called gravitational waves, traveled through the universe and eventually washed over Earth on August 14, 2019.
For millions or perhaps billions of years, the two objects orbited one another, spiraling closer and closer until they finally collided.
Astronomers determined that one of those objects was a black hole with as much mass as 23 suns. The other, gobbled up whole, was roughly 2.6 solar masses—and it’s a mystery object that defies definition.
The mysterious object sits right at the tipping point between having a surface, like a star, and becoming a pit of bottomless space-time, aka a black hole.
Its mass places it in a murky zone between the heaviest known neutron stars—stellar corpses that are left over after stars explode in supernovae—and the lightest black holes, which form when a stellar remnant is compact enough to collapse into a point of infinite density.
Scientists are trying to work out where neutron stars end and black holes begin, since that boundary can reveal how matter behaves in the universe's most extreme conditions.
“If it’s a neutron star, it’s an exciting mass for a neutron star. If it’s a black hole, it’s an exciting mass for a black hole,” Kalogera says. “Either way, it perked up our antennas the moment we saw it.”
Traveling at the speed of light, gravitational waves wash over everything in their path. But they warp spacetime so minutely that they’re incredibly tough to detect.
Any small changes to the normal travel time would be the result of contracting and expanding spacetime.
Since then, most detections have pointed to pairs of crashing black holes. Astronomers have also detected wrinkles in spacetime from colliding neutron stars.
Unlike those earlier mergers, though, scientists have struggled to identify the true nature of the objects involved in GW190814.
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''The specialist is monitoring data on his mission console when a voice breaks in, “a voice that carried with it a strange and unspecifiable poignancy”. Misc. |
The specialist is monitoring data on his mission console when a voice breaks in, “a voice that carried with it a strange and unspecifiable poignancy”.
He checks in with his flight-dynamics and conceptual- paradigm officers at Colorado Command:
“We have a deviate, Tomahawk.”
“We copy. There’s a voice.”
“We have gross oscillation here.”
“There’s some interference. I have gone redundant but I’m not sure it’s helping.”
“We are clearing an outframe to locate source.”
“Thank you, Colorado.”
“It is probably just selective noise. You are negative red on the step-function quad.”
“It was a voice,” I told them.
“We have just received an affirm on selective noise... We will correct, Tomahawk. In the meantime, advise you to stay redundant.”
The voice, in contrast to Colorado’s metallic pidgin, is a melange of repartee, laughter, and song, with a “quality of purest, sweetest sadness”.
“Somehow we are picking up signals from radio programmes of 40, 50, 60 years ago.”
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THE SECRET ECONOMICS OF A VIP PARTY @1843mag Misc. |
The nightclub pulsed in the Miami heat. Dancers waved glow sticks on which glowed the words “F*** me I’m famous,” in neon lettering. The millionaire was dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans, and would have been easy to miss if he hadn’t been surrounded by a dozen tall, thin, beautiful women and waving a pink bottle of Cristal champagne.
A man standing next to me looked blasé at the unfolding scene and offered me a swig from his own champagne bottle: a 2004 Cristal rosé.
“How much does this cost?” I asked him, gesturing at the bottle.
He told me it was $1,700. I watched as the millionaire shoved his bottle towards the face of a nearby model, causing the expensive liquid to foam wastefully over the neck.
A small cohort of oligarchs, New York hedge-fund managers and Silicon Valley investors now patronise a network of nightclubs that span the globe. Whether they’re in Miami or St Tropez these clubs tend to have similar decor and the same clientele. The visual tropes of this world are familiar even to non-vips: angular cheekbones, Louboutin heels, sprays of champagne.
It takes a carefully hidden, intricate economy, based on a complex brokering of beauty and status, to create an atmosphere in which people will spend $100,000 on alcohol in a single night.
This economy’s currency is young women. The leggy blondes who surrounded the millionaire that night in Miami were not there by chance.
Women in this world were living props in a carefully scripted theatre that created real financial value for men – the promoters who set up the scene, the nightclub-owners who raked in the bar bills, the wannabe billionaires who used the environment to network. “I know how to talk to girls,” Dre often said. “They like me.”Dre’s ultimate client was the club-owner, who transformed that ambience into profit by inflating the price of the alcohol they bought by up to 1,000%. |
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India's wishful thinking an illusion as PLA is prepared on all fronts @globaltimesnews Law & Politics |
As senior Indian military officers are expecting a prolonged standoff in the China-India border region with the US reportedly voicing support for India, the Chinese military is demonstrating high military readiness on all fronts, as the intensive, simultaneous military exercises in the South China Sea, near Taiwan island and near the China-India border show India's wishful thinking of taking advantage of US support is merely an illusion, Chinese analysts said Sunday.
Claiming China has deployed Su-30 fighter jets and H-6 bombers near the border region, India on Saturday deployed the Akash air defense system in Ladakh, Indian media reported.
The recent Indian moves came after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday that the US is reducing troop numbers in Germany and deploying them to other places to "face the Chinese threat to India and Southeast Asian nations," Indian news agency PTI reported on Friday.
However, on their part, it is wishful thinking that the US is coming to their aid and will help pin down the Chinese forces in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits to provide chances for India in the border dispute, they said.This "strategic surrounding" on China is very weak, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times on Sunday.
Military exercises will be held in waters off the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea from Wednesday to July 5, according to a notice released by China's Maritime Safety Administration.
A PLA Southern Theater Command naval flotilla featuring destroyers and frigates also executed maritime operations in the South China Sea on June 18, China Military Online reported on Friday.
In the direction of Taiwan, PLA military aircraft reportedly approached the island at least eight times in June, with many missions speculatively aimed at intercepting US warplanes flying near the island.
Understanding the PLA's capabilities in the Asia-Pacific, the US is not going to have a hot war with China, so what gave India the courage to think about doing so, Chinese military observers asked. |
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THE FIRST EXCERPT FROM PROOF OF CORRUPTION @SethAbramson Law & Politics |
Between January and August 2019, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Alex Azar, runs a simulation—code-named Crimson Contagion—in which a “respiratory virus [that] began in China . . . [is] quickly spread around the world by air travelers . . . [with] high fevers.”1
Upon its conclusion in August 2019, the Crimson Contagion simulation registers 110 million infected Americans, 7.7 million hospitalizations, and 586,000 fatalities.2
The Crimson Contagion report and the economists’ paper are follow-ups on the Pandemic Influenza Plan, developed and released by the White House in December 2017; by mid-April 2020, Politico will report Trump has “failed” to abide by the plan, missing “nearly all” of the pandemic-response goals established by the document.4
In addition to ignoring the lessons of the Crimson Contagion report and the work product of economists contracted by the White House,
Trump also, per Politico, “ignore[s]” a sixty-nine-page 2016 National Security Council document, “Playbook for High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” that “provide[s] a step by step list of priorities” in a pandemic.8
In April 2018, the president had fired homeland security adviser Tom Bossert, who according to the Washington Post “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics”; weeks later, the administration “eliminat[ed]” the job of Trump’s global health security team director, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and disbanded Ziemer’s entire team.9On November 16, 2019, in the United States—November 17 in China—a fifty-five-year-old resident of China’s Hubei province is put “under medical surveillance” for an unexplained ailment, according to The Guardian.10 Per The Guardian, while Beijing will report to the World Health Organization (WHO) that its “first confirmed [COVID-19] case . . . [was] diagnosed on December 8,” there is evidence to suggest that U.S. intelligence was aware of the approximately two dozen cases of the novel coronavirus recorded in Hubei province in November 2019, including that of the man in Hubei who may or may not have become the pandemic’s “patient zero” on November 16/17.13The Times of Israel will confirm the CNN report, revealing that “the U.S. intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of [November 2019]” and immediately “drew up a classified document” on the potential threat—a fact the Israeli media outlet learned on the basis of the document having been shared by at least one U.S. intelligence agency with both NATO and the Israel Defense Forces after the Trump White House indicated, per the Times of Israel, that for unexplained reasons it was “not interested” in the information |
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22-JUN-2020 :: It certainly feels like the Virus has accelerated The World and that the Centre cannot hold. Misc. |
The Pandemic and Political Order @ForeignAffairs @FukuyamaFrancis
Another reason for pessimism is that the positive scenarios assume some sort of rational public discourse and social learning. Yet the link between technocratic expertise and public policy is weaker today than in the past, when elites held more power.
The democratization of authority spurred by the digital revolution has flattened cognitive hierarchies along with other hierarchies, and political decision-making is now driven by often weaponized babble.
That is hardly an ideal environment for constructive, collective self-examination, and some polities may remain irrational longer than they can remain solvent
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Why are the lab escape denialists telling such brazen lies? @GMWatch Misc. |
The mainstream media have challenged very few, if any, of Daszak’s assertions.
And judging by the deletion from The Guardian website of virologist Dr Jonathan Latham’s brief comment[1] on Daszak’s recent article, they don’t want anyone else to challenge his narrative either.
Far from facing critical scrutiny, Daszak has been presented as a hero – a brave virus hunter on a quest to locate and understand dangerous pathogens and alert the world to their dangers.
One of them is the American biologist and evolutionary theorist Prof Bret Weinstein, who recently commented, “In looking at all of the sources that claim to put the idea of a lab leak to rest, I find the name Peter Daszak… shows up all over the place. He’s everywhere the idea is mocked.”
But the information Daszak presents invariably does not check out, Weinstein says, and as a result, “I have begun to regard him as Patient Zero for misinformation.”
Another staunch critic is Rutgers University microbiologist Prof Richard Ebright, who has publicly accused Daszak of lying brazenly and “on a Trumpian scale”.
Back in mid-February, when the world was still counting COVID-19 deaths in the hundreds and almost all the deaths were still in China, a letter signed by Daszak and 26 co-signatories was published in The Lancet, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”.
When Daszak similarly told the Washington Post, “I have no conflicts of interest,” Richard Ebright pointed out that Daszak was Project Leader on a $3.7 million “grant supporting bat coronavirus surveillance at Wuhan Institute of Virology and … bat coronavirus gain-of-function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that is not a material conflict of interest,” Ebright tweeted, “then nothing is.”
And he’s right. If it emerged that this type of research created a global pandemic it could be immensely damaging for Daszak and his organisation, both reputationally and financially.
And the financial impact would almost certainly go wider than just the Wuhan grant that was recently suspended.
Commenting on an attempt to compile a fuller picture of the funding EcoHealth Alliance has received from US government agencies, Ebright noted that it totalled $99.8 million “for federal contract awards, contract subawards, grant awards, and grant subawards to EcoHealth”.
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Malawi's new president, a former evangelical preacher @AFP Law & Politics |
Blantyre (Malawi) (AFP) - Malawi's new President Lazarus Chakwera is a former evangelical preacher who says he ventured into politics in answer to God's call.
"One day God spoke to my heart, and God was not saying I'm pulling you out of ministry, God was saying I'm extending your ministry so that you are able to pastor a whole nation," he said in a recent video clip released during the electoral campaign.
The MCP had lost all five presidential elections since 1994 but Chakwera made great efforts to rebrand the party, breaking away from Banda's iron-fisted rule and re-energising its base.
After he lost to Mutharika by a narrow margin in last year's vote, he launched what was to become a historic legal challenge.
That election was overturned by Malawi's top court which found widespread irregularities, including the use of correction fluid to tamper with result sheets.
"The people want change. They're demanding change and they see us as the face of change," he told AFP.
For the re-run, Chakwera obtained the high-profile support of Vice President Saulos Chilima, former president Joyce Banda and several other small political parties.
Chakwera was born in Lilongwe to a subsistence farmer whose two elder sons died in infancy.
He was named Lazarus after the biblical character who was raised from the dead.
"I love to sing even when I am by myself, in the shower," he said, adding "I used to sing gospel".
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As Zimbabwe’s Economy Crumbles, Mugabe’s Successor Courts Unrest World Of Finance |
Among them, “there was the thinking that the Mnangagwa regime would bring about some stability while Mugabe was seen as basically running a Ponzi scheme,” Chikohomero said. “The opportunities for patronage did not materialize.”
Now, inflation has surged to 786%, foreign currency and fuel are short and while the government has announced about $30 billion of investment in ventures from platinum mines to abattoirs there is little tangible to show for it.
A teacher earning the equivalent of $400 a month two years ago now earns a 10th of that due to a series of effective devaluations of the local currency.
eemingly stuck, the president and his political allies have taken to blaming everyone from exiles linked to Grace Mugabe to evangelist preachers for the country’s plight.
There is “a relentless attack on our currency and the economy in general through exorbitant pricing models by the private sector,” Mnangagwa said June 10 at a meeting of the ruling party’s politburo.
“We are fully cognizant that this is a battle being fueled by our political detractors, elite opportunists and malcontents who are bent on pushing a nefarious agenda which they will never win.”
imbabweans celebrated in their tens of thousands when the military ousted Robert Mugabe and installed Emmerson Mnangagwa as president. Two-and-a-half years later, the party is over.
Mnangagwa, 77, came to power promising political reform and a wave of foreign investment, but there’s been little of either.
Instead, outside funds are being withheld and painful economic measures have been imposed, with the army deployed to violently quell protests.
Such is the public disquiet that many ruling party leaders, including some with military links, are losing patience with Mnangagwa, four people familiar with the situation said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the situation.
“The Mnangagwa regime likes to point to enemies, but it only has itself to blame,” Alex Magaisa, a Zimbabwean law lecturer who helped design the southern African nation’s 2013 constitution, said in his blog.
“It had so much goodwill when it started, but it spurned all the opportunities. Now it is living in fear of a coup, real or perceived.”
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21-JAN-2019 :: The Mind Game that ZANU-PF played on its citizens has evaporated in a puff of smoke Law & Politics |
I have been reading Yuval Noah Harari and in his best-seller he says this about money;
“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
“Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.”
The Point I am seeking to make is that There is a correlation between high Inflation and revolutionary conditions,
Zimbabwe is a classic example where there are $9.3 billion of Zollars in banks compared to $200 million in reserves, official data showed.
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02-MAR-2020 :: The #COVID19 and SSA and the R Word Africa |
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world. Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ... then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!
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Africa's tourism industry is preparing for a post-coronavirus era @CNN @CNNTravel Africa |
The United World Tourism Organization, or UNWTO, estimated a 3 to 5% increase in international arrivals to the continent as a result of demand for air travel and easier visa processes.
The tourism industry -- consisting of entertainment, accommodation, food and beverage and operating tours -- employs more than 1 million people each in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, according to the United Nations.
It also accounts for more than 20% of employment in Seychelles, Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and Principe and Mauritius.
In Kenya, some hotels and guesthouses on the Kenyan coast reported occupancy rates of less than 7% in March, according to local media.According to Osakwe, the restaurant's sales dropped by 95% during a mandatory lockdown set by President Buhari, forcing her to cut the salaries of her employees.
International travel has always been a huge factor for tourism and in 2018, it generated $38 billion for Africa, according to the UNWTO.Canceling and rescheduling trips could potentially translate into a loss of $30 billion to $50 billion in revenue for the continent's tourism industry this year, according to the United Nations.
"Travel itself is going to start slowly. It will be people mostly traveling within their own cities first, exploring and enjoying the freedom of movement. It will take a while before we receive tourists from outside the continent," he told CNN.
According to Ntshona, African countries need to make their holiday destinations more attractive in a post-coronavirus era as a lot of countries will be competing to get tourists to come to them.
"It's about understanding the behavioral patterns of the new modern tourists and be able to fulfill those needs. It's no longer about going to places and taking fancy pictures, people want to immerse themselves in the culture, food, flavors, and fashion...
"I'm very optimistic. We beat a HIV pandemic, we beat Ebola. We can also beat coronavirus."
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.@StateHouseKenya now out of bounds in bid to curb virus transmission @dailynation Law & Politics |
Mr Kenyatta has reportedly not set foot in the House on the Hill for some time now and is instead running the country from his home and Harambee House offices.
At the same time, he has suspended physical engagements as his handlers also implement a restricted access policy with most briefings being done via Skype with only critical ones like intelligence briefs happening physically but under a controlled environment.
“Movement in and out of State House has been restricted,” Mr Kenyatta’s spokesperson Kanze Dena said Saturday.
RANDOM CALLS
“He has been making random calls when he wants to consult on an issue or catch up with friends,” a close friend of the Head of State said.
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