freedom

The COVID-19 pandemic felt for many of us like it came out of the blue, but scientists have long been sounding the alarm about a potential pandemic from a coronavirus.

We already had warnings with the SARS and MERS outbreaks, both caused by coronaviruses, and both spilled over from animals into humans. Given the way people continue to encroach on animal habitats, trade wildlife and eat bushmeat, it is increasingly likely that zoonotic diseases that come from animals will cause future pandemics.

lander

Aswan, at approximately 24 degrees north latitude, lies very near the Tropic of Cancer (23°27′ N), and at this latitude, near the time of the summer solstice, the Sun is (roughly) 90 degrees above the horizon at noon...

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Around 245 BC, when Eratosthenes was in his 30s, he was working as a librarian in the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

He read about a water well in the city of Syene (modern-day Aswan in southern Egypt).

At midday every summer solstice, the sun would shine directly down into the well, illuminating the water at the bottom - but casting no shadow on the walls of the well.

exits...

The prime minister says "nearly 16,000 people" have been evacuated from Afghanistan in an operation that was "was planned and prepared for months".

Mr Johnson also said if the Taliban political figures wanted engagement with the West, they would have to prioritise safe passage for those that want to leave.

See more: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-58426588

tt

By challenging the official version of the 9/11 attacks, Thierry Meyssan opened a worldwide debate. But the essence of his book on the subject was a political science study predicting the evolution of the United States after these crimes. The problem is not how the attacks were committed, but why the US reacted that day by violating its own Constitution, why it implemented in the following days very deep reforms of its institutions that changed its nature. Thierry Meyssan had predicted the transformation of the American Empire that we are seeing with the planning of the fall of Kabul. Everything he predicted has been confirmed over the last twenty years.

20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS

politics

From 1898 to 1900, the six separate British colonies on the land known as Australia each held referendums on whether to federate. Most voters in each state voted “yes”. The result was the creation of the entity we now think of as Australia. It was a historic first. It was the first nation to vote itself into existence.

If those referenda were held today, would we get the same outcome? Would most voters in each state vote “yes” to unification as the Commonwealth of Australia?

With pandemic parochialism and political hucksterism running amok, it’s not too hard to imagine that federation referendums would fail.

Just now, the Australian federation is looking like a confederacy of dunces. Attempts at the intelligent management of the pandemic have devolved into a political trench war.

kidbush

Brown University - which for twenty years has been tracking the human and financial cost of the “war without end” or “war on terror” - has drawn up the following provisional results:

 The general human cost (excluding missing persons) is estimated to be between 897,000 and 929,000 fatal casualties. This figure only reflects human losses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. At least 120,000 people killed in Libya should be added.

 The financial cost incurred by the United States alone is in the vicinity of $ 8,049,000,000. To these 8 billion dollars, funded by US taxpayers, should be added several hundred billion siphoned off Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni taxpayers whose countries have mostly been left as just a pile in ruins.

us

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Keating argued that the Morrison government’s confrontational stance with China was absurd, given that Australia “is a continent sharing a border with no other state” and “has no territorial disputes with China.”

WAR

The chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan coincides with a debate in the Senate on a bill which would curtail the unrestrained power of the executive to take the country to war.

Both point to the pressing need to examine Australia’s habit of fighting in faraway places.

greens

Germany: Left-of-center parties call for lowering voting age to 16. 

Three of Germany’s main political parties have called for the federal voting age to be lowered from 18 to 16. According to a recent study out of Berlin, there are few arguments against the idea.

Fifty years after Germany lowered the voting age for federal elections from 21 to 18 years old, some politicians are calling for the age to be dropped once again. 

"I am convinced that young people at 16 are very capable of making a responsible choice," German Family Minister Franziska Giffey told news agency dpa in Berlin on Thursday. "We should give them this opportunity." 

thinktank

Washington, D.C., is the think tank world capital and home to the eternal seminar. There has always been at least one panel, forum, conference, luncheon, party, or something similar every day to discuss issues of great moment. It’s simply what think tanks do.

Bringing reputedly important thinkers together is supposed to promote discussion of the vital issues of the day. These gatherings help sell philosophies and policies to those who rule, mostly in the executive and legislative branches. Public events also justify donations, demonstrating activity to those who help pay the bills. And there are few better ways to suck up to power than to invite a noted politician or staffer to headline a discussion. The entire process is an enormous industry, with food and drink often the informal bribe to get people to fill a room.

romans

This is a fictitious interview between the last brass standing and an "intelligence” lamppost disguised a a journalist from the New York Washington Clarion, collected by Gus the Elder — on the post-mortem of a retreat gone apecrap. 

Journo: — Could the Taliban have been defeated?

Brass: — Of course…

— So, what happened?

— I guess our “forever war” on-going system was responsible for the “defeat”… See if you defeat your enemies completely, you have no need for a gigantic army with a million contractors manufacturing complex weapons systems and bombs… Eventually, one gets tired of “forever” routine on the same spot… We need a change of landscape and motivations… We’re changing location.

death of time

History offers so many examples of epic underestimations. These run from Goliath’s dismissal of David as “little more than a boy” to NATO’s misjudgement of the fighting prowess of the scrappy, dishevelled Taliban. We also find this pattern in today’s miscalculations about COVID-19.

We are subject to what Israeli psychologist Tali Sharot calls an “optimism bias”. In tough times, optimism enables us to carry on. But sometimes our need for good news woefully misleads, even as it coaxes us on. We not only underestimate what we’re up against, but we’re also overly impressed by our own prowess — especially when it comes to technology.

scomological

Scott Morrison has changed tack from ridiculing COVID-zero states to saying he “acknowledges” their worry about opening borders, with the Prime Minister telling the Coalition to start preparing for an election.

As the saying goes, a week is a long time in politics.

Just days ago, Mr Morrison was telling Queensland and Western Australia to get out of “the cave” of lockdowns, claiming they were ‘undermining’ the reopening plan and comparing them to children’s movie The Croods.

mvax

The US Government regulator for drugs, the Food and Drug Administration, has just announced that it has voted full approval for the mRNA genetic vaccine of Pfizer and BioNTech, or did they? This supposed new status is being used by the Biden Administration and many states and companies to impose mandatory vaccinations.

The notoriously conflicted Biden covid adviser, Tony Fauci of the NIAID, using that ruling, is calling for national mandatory vaccination for the country. What is not being revealed is the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest between the FDA and the major drug companies, including Pfizer, that stand behind the rushed approval. And it’s not full approval for Pfizer’s jab, only for BioNTech’s legally different vaccine.

freedom

The cruelty of god’s justice

The kindness of freedom

The music of morning peace

The prisons of a kingdom

The little merle sings every dawn at my window

To let me know that I am still alive

That’s what I believe though he does not know

That we are strangers awakening in the same hive 

He only sings to find his mate in his domain

Where he is free to be kind

Unless he’s just happy to trill for fun

Without any hint of god’s justice in his mind

The cruelty of god’s justice

The kindness of freedom

The music of morning peace

The delusions of my kingdom

                       — Robert Urbanoski