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Monday, April 13, 2020

How a Police State is Born


When you hear the words, "It could have been worse," you know it's one of the survivors talking.
 

This is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave. –Wendell Berry, “Rising” 

“Don’t be expecting any big flowery longwinded poetic picturesque horseshit passages in this book explaining the look of something.  If I have to go into that much detail I’ll take a photograph or draw a picture.  This is for people like myself who hate reading.”

“The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again. Such a different way of looking at time…a repetition in time and space…But with the folk song comes realism.”


“The ends of things are always present in their beginnings…Only a certain number of things can happen and whatever can happen will happen…Oedipus went to Thebes, Peter Rabbit into Mr. McGregor’s garden, but the story is essentially the same: life points only towards the terror. Beatrix Potter left it to John Gould to show us Peter dangling from the beak of Bubo bubo.” 
–Neaera H.

 Had a hard time watching this. Anyway, you all should. Truth will set you free, they say. Hope this will be the case for Stefano Cucchi and his family. Also, an amazing performance by Alessandro Borghi ... 
 On My Skin - Stefano Cucchi: His death in custody is now symbol of police abuse in Italy



Professor Murphy: The government’s misinformation on Covid-19 deaths is unforgivable
I am not going to accuse the UK government of lying to us about Covid-19 deaths, because that would be too kind to them. 
Read the full article…



One lesson from the coronavirus is that we need leaders who prevent crises more than we need managers who scramble to handle them 

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Covid-19 was a Leadership Test. It Came Back Negative., by Sam Walker (author, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams (2018)) 

Pandemic Stories, Part 3



America's dying malls weigh on retailers
Once the grand temples to American consumerism, malls are in a decline that seems to have accelerated in 2017....
Morningstar 


CFOs looking to make remote work, telecommuting more permanent following COVID-19 
ZDNet – Gartner Survey – The move to remote work may be a bit more permanent than many managers and employees realize. “The new normal telecommuting may be a bit more permanent than realized, as 74% of CFOs say they expect to move previously on-site employees remote post-COVID-19, according to a Gartner survey. The survey, which had 317 CFO respondents on March 30, highlighted how remote work may become more of the norm as companies look to cut commercial real estate costs. One of my working theories about the COVID-19 crisis was that the percentage of telecommuters would swell as enterprises realized they could be as effective and save money on commercial real estate. We’ve chronicled the remote work shift week to week during the COVID-19 pandemic…


REPOST:  For those of you who couldn’t download my “Stand Your Ground” dissent on SSRN a few days ago, I am reposting.  (For reasons that were never quite clear to me, SSRN took it down for a while.)





 MIE: “This Man Owns The World’s Most Advanced Private Air Force After Buying 46 F/A-18 Hornets.”
 

A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta Nature “Each user of the toilet is identified through their fingerprint and the distinctive features of their anoderm.” Cops are gonna need bigger inkpads, though.



  BREAKING THE CARDINAL RULE:  A disturbing miscarriage of justice is finally righted by the High Court of Australia.  But what does it say about Australia’s judicial system that it took the High Court’s intervention?


Government secrecy is growing during the coronavirus pandemic - The Conversation: “Students at the University of Florida who want to know how they are being protected from the COVID-19 pandemic can’t find out. The university is hiding its emergency response plan under a legal loophole intended to keep terrorists and enemy combatants – not viruses – from exploiting government weaknesses. Since the spread of coronavirus accelerated in recent weeks, local, state and federal officials throughout the United States have locked down information from the public. Examples include: 

  • The city of Palestine, Texas, banned a news reporter from a city council meeting on March 23, even though fewer than a maximum of 10 people would be in the room, and did not allow the public to listen in on the meeting through a toll-free phone number, as required by state law.
  • The Council of the District of Columbia decided on March 19 that district employees do not have to respond promptly to public records requests any more.
  • The FBI no longer accepts requests for information online or by email because of the virus. If anyone wants information they must mail their request, which ironically is more apt to pass along the virus…” 

 YES. SOME OF US HAVE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE:  How a Police State is Born.




RIVKA T. WITENBERG.-Panic buying is not hoarding:


Posted on 8 April 2020

Why are people emptying supermarket shelves? They grab not only toilet paper, milk, Panadol, paper towels, rice and spaghetti but also hand sanitisers, cans of all descriptions and more recently alcohol. Continue reading →

Spectre of police state is becoming as worrying as the virus


After a few days of meticulous social distancing at the grandparents' place, I caught my husband hovering over his phone, looking worried.


YOU COULD’VE JUST STOPPED AT “THE FBI CAN’T BE TRUSTED.” The FBI Can’t Be Trusted With the Surveillance of Americans: An inspector general report finds that the bureau has been systematically unscrupulous 


During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government. 
The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change.
Xi has another problem on his hands: His own overweening ambition. From the death of Mao until Xi himself, the CCP leadership functioned largely on consensus between the top men. Nobody wanted to see a return to one-man totalitarianism, when Mao was free to murder on a whim while the country barely subsisted. But the CCP was hardly willing to surrender any power, either. Consensus was a way to show the CCP as a whole enjoyed the Mandate: The economy began its long and unprecedented boom, guided by a ruling clique that agreed on all the big details. When trouble erupted, a head or two might roll, but the consensus continued unchanged except for a new head or two to replace the rollers.
But Xi has moved from consensus to one-man rule. No rival power centers remain within the CCP, so there’s no consensus committee to roll on if Xi’s head rolls off. If Xi stumbles badly, whether it’s due to coronavirus or some other crisis in the future, he’ll leave behind nothing but untrusted, untested yes-men.
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