“Black swans” are society-changing events whose frequency distribution follows power-law curves. Outliers—events that shake things up even more, on an unpredictable timeline, are called “dragon kings.”
Tired: black swans. Wired: MEdia dragon 🐉
Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?” Ferguson analyzes the structure and prospects of “Cyberia” as yet another round in the endless battle between hierarchy and networks that has wrought spasms of innovation and chaos throughout history. He examines those previous rounds (including all that was set in motion by the printing press) in light of the current paradoxes of radical networking enabled by digital technology being the engine of massive hierarchical companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and their equivalents in China) and exploited by populists and authoritarians around the world. He puts the fundamental question this way: “Is our age likely to repeat the experience of the period after 1500, when the printing revolution unleashed wave after wave of revolution? Will the new networks liberate us from the shackles of the administrative state as the revolutionary networks of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries freed our ancestors from the shackles of spiritual and temporal hierarchy? Or will the established hierarchies of our time succeed more quickly than their imperial predecessors in co-opting the networks, and enlist them in their ancient vice of waging war?”
Niall Ferguson: Networks and Power
Niall Ferguson is not the kind of historian who suffers from understatement. He writes big, muscular books with high-concept ideas that target current concerns through the prism of the past. They are pull-yourself-together warnings to the present by way of arresting historical precedent.
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson review – a restless tour through power
Is this pandemic a natural disaster? What if this pandemic is not a natural disaster. Very interesting and thoughtful analysis would have followed around this debate as warfare has many manifestations and space (Svit or Wuhan germ warfare 🦠 or MEdia Dragon misinformation cyber warfare )
NAUGHTY VLAD: UK and US say Russia fired a satellite weapon in space.
In this video and accompanying infographic, scientist Dominic Walliman of Domain of Science explains what viruses are, how they infect cells, how they replicate, and what can be done to mitigate their effects on the human body.
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DEFENCE INTERESTS: ‘Mighty Dragon’ enters mass production; Taiwan, missile defence and amphibious warfare; the link between logistics and literacy; and political commissars and decision-making in the PLA Navy. |
From Dr. Anna DeForest, a devastating article — a prose poem almost — in The New England Journal of Medicine: The New Stability.
This is the day you start to turn. What we suck up from your lungs turns frothy pink and then the frank red of blood. We don’t know if your heart is finally failing or if the virus has destroyed so much tissue that this is necrosis, hemorrhaged in your lungs. There are tests, but no one willing to run them — you are too sick, and you have never cleared the virus. No one would ever want to be what you are now: a hazard, a threat, a frightening object on the edge of death. We try not to touch you. We construct our plans for saving you around staying as far away from you as possible.
I tell your husband about the blood. It’s true that nothing else has changed: your struggling lungs, with help, still take in air, your heart, with help, still brags along. “But she is stable,” he asks, barely a question. Why do I lie? “Yes,” I say, “for now.”
DeForest wrote this in early May as Covid-19 cases peaked at her hospital in New Haven. The country and its leaders ignored this and now cases are spiking in many hospitals all around the country now. Just some sniffles, though, nothing to bother anyone about.
Flexible Work Should Be Liberating. So Why Isn’t It?
The abrupt restructuring of daily working life for tens of millions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has also dramatised just how different ‘flexible’ work is in different contexts: liberating for some, imprisoning for others. – Aeon
Director of Biggest UK Muslim Charity Branded Jews ‘Grandchildren of Monkeys and Pigs.’
For years, Japan's north coast had been the site of a macabre phenomena: fishing boats washing up on shore carrying the bodies of dead North Koreans, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from their homeland.
But the numbers in 2017 were unprecedented: More than 100 boats landed on the Japanese coast with 35 bodies on board. Only 66 boats had washed up the year prior.
No one was able to explain why so many of these so-called "ghost ships" ended up in Japan that year. One Japanese Coast Guard said it could be as simple as the weather. Others speculated that North Korea's aging fishing fleet was to blame.
More of these rickety boats have washed up on shore en masse since, though with fewer bodies. The mystery has puzzled authorities for years, but a study published Wednesday by international nonprofit Global Fishing Watch offers a new, compelling theory. It blames Chinese "dark fishing fleets."
The report's authors used various satellite technologies to analyze marine traffic in northeast Asia in 2017 and 2018 and found that hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels were sailing in waters off North Korea. The Chinese ships appeared to be fishing there illegally, pushing North Korea's own fleet, which is poorly equipped to travel long distances, further away from the North Korean coast and into Russian and Japanese waters.
Chinese Dark Fishing Fleet & Korean Ghost Ships
Alarm over discovery of hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels near Galápagos Islands: The fleet, found just outside a protected zone, raises the prospect of damage to the marine ecosystem. “This fleet’s size and aggressiveness against marine species is a big threat to the balance of species in the Galápagos.”
Maybe the Chinese anticipate food shortages. China Food Crisis? Rising Domestic Prices And Large Import Purchases Send A Signal.
US and China Are Both Raising the Military Stakes in the South China Sea
Is the US engaged in military escalation with China, or are recent moves just high stakes posturing?
Chinese hackers suspected of hitting Vatican computers before talks
China often suspect religious groups and worshippers of undermining the control of the Communist Party and the state.
- by David E. Sanger, Edward Wong and Jason Horowitz
MacKenzie Bezos became an overnight billionaire last April after finalising her divorce from her husband of 25 years, who has an estimated net worth of around $US180 billion, making him the world’s richest man.
The successful author pocketed $US38 billion in the settlement, instantly becoming the third richest woman on the planet.