| |
Wednesday 24th of June 2020
|
Interessante é que em Kinshasa, a estátua do Leopoldo II segue de pé. @iumtres Law & Politics |
I went to Westminster School and Parliament Square is in fact a place I know well and the scenes that have unfolded of late around the Winston Churchill Statue therefore were telescoped close and somehow personal and immediate.
And because we know exist in a stream of consciousness World which is constantly accelerating at a dizzying speed, My Mind back flipped to another toppling that of a Statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003.
McCoy turned to Remy Ourdan, a reporter for Le Monde. "Where is this damn Palestine Hotel?" he asked. Ourdan indicated the road to take.
Not far away, Captain Bryan Lewis, the leader of McCoy's tank company, spotted a car with "TV" scrawled on its side and shouted from his turret, "Is this the way to the Palestine?"
A few minutes after the toppling, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters,
''The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain''
Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development.
It expresses a media theory developed by, among others, Walter Lippmann, who after the First World War identified the components of wartime mythmaking as "the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality."
As he put it, "Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond."
In the 1960s, Daniel J. Boorstin identified a new category of media spectacle that he called "pseudo-events," which were created to be reported on.
However, it was later learned that the scene was closely managed by a US Colonel and PSYOP (Psychological Operations) team who cordoned off the square, allowed a relatively small group of Iraqi émigrés to gather around the statue, and then used armored vehicles and steel cables to pull the statue down for the cheering Iraqi group (Fahmy, 2007; Griffin, 2008)
Paul Virilio in his Book City of Panic wrote
The Pentagon is eager to exploit the audiovisual impact of real-time mass communication (remember Saddam's statue being toppled?) City of Panic by Paul Virilio
Our minds are literally besieged by these Weapons of Mass Communication (as he calls them), creating a "panic-driven tele-reality" and resulting in an odd kind of "emotional synchronisation ... in which terror must be instantaneously felt by all ... on the scale of a global terrorism"
Virilio maintains that the global village has created hyperterrorism as its "integral accident" (just as derailment is the integral accident of a train).
The Pentagon is (remember Saddam's statue being toppled?), but unfortunately so are the terrorists.
The same impulse drives contemporary art, says Virilio, and he often returns to Stockhausen's incendiary remark that 9/11 was "the greatest work of art ever".
|
| read more |
|
The Bamiyan Statues @ramonpradosan Law & Politics |
‘’You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?" Thomas Pynchon
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what." "The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fuxxing market." [Thomas Pynchon]
And it all left me wondering Who exactly is controlling the Console?
Is this Statue toppling business a Gladwellian and metastatic type Event?
I thought to myself This all has the Imprimatur of the "political technologist of all of Rus." And non linear War Specialist Vladislav Surkov.
Putin's system was also ripe for export, Mr Surkov added. Foreign governments were already paying close attention, since the Russian "political algorithm" had long predicted the volatility now seen in western democracies.
With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. @TheAtlantic
"It was the first non-linear war," writes Surkov in a new short story, "Without Sky," published under his pseudonym and set in a dystopian future after the "fifth world war":
"My portfolio at the @KremlinRussia_E and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ..." - here he pauses and smiles - "modern art."
A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is undefinable Adam Curtis
The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilised perception, in order to manage and control
a decade of "semiotic arousal" when everything, it seemed, was a sign, a harbinger of some future radical disjuncture or cataclysmic upheaval.
SolarEclipse2020 was the exact alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun and was visible for only 38 seconds arrived on the longest day of the year - the summer solstice
It certainly feels like the Virus has accelerated The World and that the Centre cannot hold.
President Trump does not have the mental bandwidth – His is a narrow, transactional Game.
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
If You were a betting Man You might well agree with
“Wolf Warrior painter” Wuheqilin |
| read more |
|
US is back reporting more that 30,000 daily cases @TetotRemi Misc. |
The Battlespace was not the Battlefield IT WAS THE INFORMATION BATTLESPACE
US army war college quarterly 1997. The US officer assigned to the deputy chief of staff (Intelligence), charged with defining the future of warfare, wrote
“One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.”
This information warfare will not be couched in the rationale of geopolitics, the author suggests, but will be “spawned” - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw emotions. “Hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions, rather than strategy - will set the terms of [information warfare] struggles”.
Ambassador John Bolton was always a Hard Power Specialist and last week gave us some deep insights
“He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”
|
| read more |
|
05-MAR-2018 :: China has unveiled a Digital Panopticon in Xinjiang Law & Politics |
In one May 2019 phone call, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, part of what Bolton terms a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” to shore up support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Putin’s claims, Bolton writes, “largely persuaded Trump.” |
| read more |
|
#COVID19 and the Spillover Moment Misc. |
―They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
―In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.
A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.
|
| read more |
|
COVID-19 Air Traffic Visualization COVID-19 Cases in China Were Likely 37 Times Higher Than Reported in January 2020 @RANDCorporation Misc. |
We use our COVID-19 Air Traffic Visualization (CAT-V) tool to estimate the likely number of infections in China in early 2020.
The tool combines COVID-19 case data from Johns Hopkins University with detailed air travel data from the International Air Transport Association.
From December 31, 2019, to January 22, 2020, China reported a daily average of 172 cases of COVID-19 among its residents. This number of confirmed cases was equivalent to just one per 8.2 million residents in the country per day.
Using the detailed flight data over that same period of time, we determined that the five countries most at risk of importing COVID-19 from China were, in descending order of risk, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, and Taiwan.
But far fewer than 8.2 million passengers flew from China to the five countries over that 23-day period.
Just more than 1 million passengers flew from China to Japan and Thailand each, while slightly more than 750,000 flew to South Korea, 500,000 flew to the United States, and fewer than 400,000 flew to Taiwan (as illustrated in the map below).
Thus, all of these passengers from China totaled fewer than 3.7 million, for an expected COVID-19 exportation rate of less than one case to all five of these countries combined.
However, COVID-19 cases were already being reported in all five countries during this time.
This trend would be exceedingly unlikely given the low reported case count in China.
If there were an average of 172 total cases per day in China through January 22, 2020, the odds of Japan and Taiwan importing even one case by that date would be 9 percent each.
The odds of Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, and Taiwan all reporting cases would be only one in 1.3 million.
For even odds of COVID-19 cases appearing in all five countries by January 22, 2020, the average odds of a case appearing in each of these countries would have needed to be roughly 87 percent.
To reach those odds, the actual case rate in China would have needed to be about 37 times higher than what was officially reported on that date—that is, 18,700 total infectious cases, as opposed to just the 503 total cases that China reported having on January 22, 2020.
|
| read more |
|
Coronavirus: China had ten times more ‘flu’ cases than usual in December @thetimes Misc. |
China recorded a tenfold surge in infections classed as flu at the end of last year, a study has found, suggesting that the coronavirus may have already spread to thousands of people and was being misdiagnosed.
The health authorities reported 1.2 million cases of influenza in December, compared with 130,442 recorded in the same month in 2018.
The figure was also nearly twice that of the previous year’s peak month for flu in January, when 608,511 cases were registered.
The figures published by China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention were highlighted by SindoInsider, a Taiwanese consultancy group, which said that the huge increase suggested that the virus was being diagnosed as flu in the weeks before China notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31 of a new disease.
“We estimate that tens of thousands of people could have been infected with Covid-19 by the end of December.”
“Seafood involves water, frozen products, low temperature [and] high humidity, which are suitable for viruses to survive,” Professor Wu Zunyou, an epidemiologist, said.
“But further analysis is needed to determine if such places have become the hotbed of transmissions.”
|
| read more |
|
Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military Is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare’ @defenseone China |
Under Beijing's civil-military fusion strategy, the PLA is sponsoring research on gene editing, human performance enhancement, and more.
We may be on the verge of a brave new world indeed. Today’s advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering have exciting applications in medicine — yet also alarming implications, including for military affairs.
China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion (军民融合) has highlighted biology as a priority, and the People’s Liberation Army could be at the forefront of expanding and exploiting this knowledge.
The PLA’s keen interest is reflected in strategic writings and research that argue that advances in biology are contributing to changing the form or character (形态) of conflict. For example:
In 2010’s War for Biological Dominance (制生权战争), Guo Jiwei (郭继卫), a professor with the Third Military Medical University, emphasizes the impact of biology on future warfare.
In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu (贺福初) argued that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense, from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons.
Maj. Gen. He has since become the vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which leads China’s military science enterprise.
Biology is among seven “new domains of warfare” discussed in a 2017 book by Zhang Shibo (张仕波), a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, who concludes:
“Modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the possibility that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” (特定种族基因攻击) could be employed.
The 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy (战略学), a textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University that is considered to be relatively authoritative, debuted a section about biology as a domain of military struggle, similarly mentioning the potential for new kinds of biological warfare to include “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” Indeed, the PLA’s medical institutions have emerged as major centers for research in gene editing and other new frontiers of military medicine and biotechnology.
In 2016, the potential strategic value of genetic information led the Chinese government to launch the National Genebank (国家基因库), which intends to become the world’s largest repository of such data.
It aims to “develop and utilize China’s valuable genetic resources, safeguard national security in bioinformatics (生物信息学), and enhance China’s capability to seize the strategic commanding heights” in the domain of biotechnology.
BGI’s research and partnerships in Xinjiang also raise questions about its linkage to human rights abuses, including the forced collection of genetic information from Uighurs in Xinjiang.
There also appear to be links between BGI’s research and military research activities, particularly with the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology. BGI’s bioinformatics research has used Tianhe supercomputers to process genetic information for biomedical applications, while BGI and NUDT researchers have collaborated on several publications, including the design of tools for the use of CRISPR.
|
| read more |
|
GLOBAL SURVEY OF RESEARCH AND CAPABILITIES IN GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS THAT COULD BE USED IN BIOLOGICAL WARFARE OR BIOTERRORISM Misc. |
We discuss that genetically engineered organisms are characterized as follows: assembled from DNA pieces purchased from DNA foundries without ever needing access to virulent agents
The analysis includes technology to engineer novel organisms previously unknown in nature, to synthesize organisms de novo, or to modify naturally pre-existing organisms.
Molecules known as nucleic acids encode the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms.
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic material in bacteria, plants, animals, and man. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is the genetic material of many viruses.
Specifically, DNA and RNA serve as long-term "storage" for the information needed to carry out biological processes and construct other biomolecules, such as messenger RNA and proteins.
Bacteria and viruses display natural mechanisms for gene transfer and DNA (or RNA) replication.
Recombinant DNA is a technology (summarized in Figure 1) that allows portions of genetic material from another organism (generally small segments of DNA such as bacterial plasmids) to be introduced into a living organism (the host).
Several steps in standard rDNA methodology can be either simplified or eliminated altogether by copying DNA through a process of enzymatic amplification such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which does not require living organisms.
The current state of the art in PCR allows for amplification of either DNA or RNA fragments as long as 40,000 bases (Reisinger et al., 2006), a size which is substantially longer than the genome of many infectious Viruses (e.g., the genome of Ebola is approximately 19,000 bases long [Volchkov et al., 2001].
Then, the PCR can be used to generate complete viral genomes from a template that can be modified to result in virus progeny with different properties.
In addition to standard rDNA technology, there are other approaches to produce engineered organisms.
Modified bacterial chromosomes amplified by PCR can efficiently recombine (a method known as "recombineering" [Thomason et al., 2007]), allowing DNA sequences to be either inserted or deleted as desired.
DNA shuffling [Stemmer, 1994] or molecular breeding [Soong et al., 2000] mimic natural processes of recombination that lead to new mutations or phenotypes; but, these artificial processes produce genetic changes at a vastly accelerated pace.
Reverse genetics can produce infectious viruses from full-length cloned DNA by cellular polymerase synthesis (Chang-Wong Lee et al., 2008].
Synthesis de novo allows chemically synthesizing of new viruses (or resuscitating old ones, and eventually also bacteria) by simply keying either a natural or modified genome sequence into an automatic synthesizer.
Once the rDNA, new gene, or whole novel genome has been generated and introduced into either one or a few host organisms by any available approach, the novel DNA can be "amplified" by several methods.
The most common are either through cultivation and growth of the host organism containing the recombinant insert, or through a process of enzymatic amplification such as PCR (as indicated above).
In our analysis, the term "genetically modified organism (GMO)" (also referred to as transgenic organism) denotes an organism whose genes have been altered by deliberate (human versus naturally) insertion, modification, or deletion of genetic material. Bioinformatics is a critical developing field comprised of state-of-the-art and entirely new information processing capabilities, which are required to make effective use of the vast volume of data produced by biomedical research. Examples include the Influenza virus, Ebola virus, or any of the South American hemorrhagic viruses, as well as emerging antibiotic-resistant bacteria (like antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis) or novel bacteria [like the ones responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003]. This potential access to virulent organisms, produced by de novo chemical synthesis instead of from natural sources, has crucial implications for the potential risk of biological agents.
The implication of this is that, although direct human-to-human infection poses the greatest threat and is a likely objective of genetic engineering, the possibility of modification of a naturally occurring virus to enhance its transmission from a natural reservoir to the human population cannot be discounted. |
| read more |
|
Coronavirus only a blip for China’s belt and road plan, says former central bank chief @SCMPNews Misc. |
Global monetary easing and low interest rates could benefit the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s former central bank governor said on Monday.“The current environment is good for its development as global capital is ample and the cost is relatively low. It’s a good opportunity to raise funds or optimise existing financing arrangements,” Zhou.
Criticism over the debt sustainability of some projects was made by people with “an ulterior motive”, the former central bank governor said, adding there was no effective international mechanism to address high debt problems.
The Chinese currency’s share of international payments dropped to sixth position, or 1.79 per cent of the global share in May, far behind the US dollar on 40.88 per cent, the Euro on 32.9 per cent and the Japanese yen on 3.53 per cent, according to SWIFT data.
Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong special administrative region, said at the same event that Hong Kong’s economic future will be linked to the belt and road plan.
“Belt and road strategy will allow Hong Kong enterprises and professional services to better counter the change of international trade environment,” she told the summit on Monday morning.
“We’ll grasp the opportunities of Asian growth, belt and road and Greater Bay strategies, to recover Hong Kong and elevate it to a new level.”
|
| read more |
|
Pandemic Exposes Plight of Portugal’s African Migrants Africa |
A property boom turned Lisbon into one of Western Europe’s hottest markets, while a rise in short-term rentals catering to tourists exacerbated Lisbon’s housing crisis by reducing the supply of affordable homes.
Social housing accounts for just 2% of the stock of rental units in Portugal, compared with 14% in France and 4% in Spain.
“There has been a historical failure of the state in Portugal to guarantee citizens the right to decent housing,” Pinho said.
The unspoken reality is that it’s minority communities that are being hit hardest in a country that’s drawn generations of immigrants from former colonies.
Portugal doesn’t gather data on the race and ethnicity of its 10 million inhabitants.
What’s known is that there are more than the 81,000 residents from former African colonies registered with the Immigration and Borders Service.
While Costa has defended the arrival of more migrants, the country still has a long way to go to end racial discrimination, says Cristina Roldão, a sociologist in Lisbon.
She says Black minorities struggle to get on the housing ladder and are denied access to better paid jobs.
The United Nations has called out Portugal in the past for its unequal treatment of minorities, most recently in a 2017 report by the special rapporteur on adequate housing.
“A big part of the racism that exists in Portugal is directed at Black people who are Portuguese nationals,” said Roldão.
“This is a problem that isn’t openly debated and has to do with Portugal’s colonial past.”
Indeed, the U.S. protests that spread to Europe have morphed into a backlash against the inglorious chapters in the continent’s past.
A statue of a former slave trader was toppled in the English city of Bristol.
In Belgium, activists removed a monument of King Leopold II, who brutally ruled over what was then Congo in the late 19th century.
In Lisbon, António Vieira, a 17th century preacher who lived in Brazil when Portugal was shipping slaves from Africa across the Atlantic, was the target. His statue was vandalized earlier this month, and the word “de-colonize” was daubed in red.
Before the pandemic, Portugal was enjoying one of its highest growth rates in decades.
“People sometimes look at you as if you’re from another planet when you tell them you’re from Jamaica,” says Manuela Pedro, a 33-year-old pregnant woman who lives in one of the unfinished buildings.
|
| read more |
|
Tanzanian Police Arrest Opposition Leaders as Tensions Rise @bpolitics Law & Politics |
Zitto Kabwe, a prominent critic of Magufuli and leader of the ACT-Wazalendo party was among those taken from an internal meeting in the southern region of Lindi, the group’s Secretary-General Ado Shaibu told reporters.
Video clips on local media showed Kabwe surrounded by armed officers on the back of a police truck, with his supporters along the road chanting: “We won’t allow ourselves to be oppressed.”
Kilwa District Commissioner Christopher Ngubiagai said the leaders were arrested for alleged illegal assembly.
Separately, the government announced Tuesday it revoked the license of privately-owned Tanzania Daima newspaper, citing breach of the nation’s laws and journalism ethics.
|
| read more |
|
I have been reading Yuval Noah Harari and in his best-seller he says this about money World Of Finance |
“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.”
|
| read more |
|
R_5_14 (#Africa): #COVID19 @oli3be Africa |
#Morocco 7.1
#Mauritius 7
#Benin 4.1
#Liberia 2.9
#SouthAfrica 2.3
#Congo 2
#Nigeria 1.9
#Mauritania 1.8
#Tunisia 1.7
#Angola 1.5
#Senegal 1.5
#Kenya 1.5
#Ethiopia 1.5
#Egypt 1.5
#Libya 1.4
#CAR 1.4
#Niger 1.3
#Malawi 1.3
#Sudan 1.1
#COVID19
|
| read more |
|
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!
|
| read more |
|
|
|
|
