White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Monday that the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok poses a threat to privacy and national security, telling the Axios Re:Cap podcast, "Let's not downplay the threat here: the mothers of America have to worry about whether the Chinese Communist Party knows where their children are."I dunno: if someone from the CCP could give the mothers a call and let them know, most of them would probably think it's a useful service.
While the Covid-19 pandemic rages, more than 100 low- and middle-income countries will still have to pay a combined $130bn in debt service this year – around half of which is owed to private creditors. With much economic activity suspended and fiscal revenues in free fall, many countries will be forced to default. Others will cobble together scarce resources to pay creditors, cutting back on much-needed health and social expenditures. Still others will resort to additional borrowing, kicking the proverbial can down the road, seemingly easier now because of the flood of liquidity from central banks around the world.No doubt I have copied more than I should, but go to the article to read about his proposed response.
From Latin America’s lost decade in the 1980s to the more recent Greek crisis, there are plenty of painful reminders of what happens when countries cannot service their debts. A global debt crisis today will push millions of people into unemployment and fuel instability and violence around the world. Many will seek jobs abroad, potentially overwhelming border-control and immigration systems in Europe and North America. Another costly migration crisis will divert attention away from the urgent need to address climate change. Such humanitarian emergencies are becoming the new norm.
This nightmare scenario is avoidable if we act now. The origins of today’s looming debt crisis are easy to understand. Owing to quantitative easing, the public debt (mostly sovereign bonds) of low- and middle-income countries has more than tripled since the 2008 global financial crisis. Sovereign bonds are riskier than “official” debt from multilateral institutions and developed-country aid agencies because creditors can dump them on a whim, triggering a sharp currency depreciation and other far-reaching economic disruptions.
Back in June 2013, we worried that “shortsighted financial markets, working with shortsighted governments,” were “laying the groundwork for the world’s next debt crisis.” Now, the day of reckoning has come. This past March, the United Nations called for debt relief for the world’s least-developed countries. Several G20 countries and the International Monetary Fund have suspended debt service for the year, and have called upon private creditors to follow suit.
Unsurprisingly, these calls have fallen on deaf ears. The newly formed Africa Private Creditor Working Group, for example, has already rejected the idea of modest but broad-based debt relief for poor countries. As a result, much, if not most, of the benefits of debt relief from official creditors will accrue to the private creditors who are unwilling to provide any debt relief.
The upshot is that taxpayers in creditor countries will once again end up bailing out excessive risk taking and imprudent lending by private actors. The only way to avoid this is to have a comprehensive debt standstill that includes private creditors. But without strong action from the countries in which debt contracts are written, private creditors are unlikely to accept such an arrangement. These governments therefore must invoke the doctrines of necessity and force majeure to enforce comprehensive standstills on debt service.
In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote. Later, she added that “there are no new ideas … only new ways of making them felt.”
Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.
“Hello, you don’t need a mask. There is a cure,” Immanuel said.Update: I've now watched the video of his editorial - he knows she said masks don't matter; he knows she believes demon seed causes some illnesses. He just shrugs and says on HCQ, she may be right, she may be wrong. (Exactly the same open minded attitude he brings to climate science - Ha!) But he's sure the motive for taking her video off social media is because she supports Trump. Just another grand Bolt conspiracy theory, in other words.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the official residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday and thronged the streets of central Jerusalem, as weeks of protests against the Israeli leader appeared to be gaining steam.
The demonstration in central Jerusalem, along with smaller gatherings in Tel Aviv, near Netanyahu's beach house in central Israel and at dozens of busy intersections nationwide, was one of the largest turnouts in weeks of protests.
Throughout the summer, thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets, calling for Netanyahu to resign, protesting his handling of the country's coronavirus crisis and saying he should not remain in office while on trial for corruption charges. Though Netanyahu has tried to play down the protests, the twice-a-week gatherings show no signs of slowing.
Israeli media estimated at least 10,000 people demonstrated near the official residence in central Jerusalem. Late Saturday, thousands marched through the streets in a noisy but orderly rally. Demonstrators hoisted Israeli flags and blew loud horns as they marched. Many held posters that said “Crime Minister" and “Bibi Go Home” or accused Netanyahu of being out of touch with the public.
“Everybody talks about a binary situation, you either get it mild and recover quickly, or you get really sick and wind up in the ICU,” says Akrami, who falls into neither category. Thousands echo her story in online COVID-19 support groups. Outpatient clinics for survivors are springing up, and some are already overburdened. Akrami has been waiting more than 4 weeks to be seen at one of them, despite a referral from her general practitioner.In one respect, the article reports something that's not as bad as it could be: it seems that COVID 19 causes less lung lesions than SARS did. Seems like the range of other effects outweigh that, though.
The list of lingering maladies from COVID-19 is longer and more varied than most doctors could have imagined. Ongoing problems include fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain.
The likelihood of a patient developing persistent symptoms is hard to pin down because different studies track different outcomes and follow survivors for different lengths of time. One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. Data from the COVID Symptom Study, which uses an app into which millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden have tapped their symptoms, suggest 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. But with the crisis just months old, no one knows how far into the future symptoms will endure, and whether COVID-19 will prompt the onset of chronic diseases....
For Götz Martin Richter, a radiologist at the Klinikum Stuttgart in Germany, what’s especially striking is that just as the illness’ acute symptoms vary unpredictably, so, too, do those that linger. Richter thinks of two patients he has treated: a middle-aged man who experienced mild pneumonia from COVID-19, and an elderly woman already suffering from chronic leukemia and arterial disease, who almost died from the virus and had to be resuscitated. Three months later, the man with the mild case “falls asleep all day long and cannot work,” Richter says. The woman has minimal lung damage and feels fine.
Yes: the failure of a power supply in heat like that is surely an invitation to death.
I actually laughed out loud when I read:
There is no sense of community, no looking after others.Like, no shit Sherlock.
No sense of community? What? Not in the most left-wing state of Australia under the most left-wing government in Australia? After decades of lefties telling us that we’re all racists, and bigots, and there are haves and have-nots, and insiders and outsiders, and rich and poor, there is no such thing as a uniquely Australian culture, and definitely no such thing as western civilisation, and whatever other bullshit story they are capable of pulling out of their backsides, what do you really expect?
Jack – I left my sense of community at the Tax Office.I don't even know what the last line means. It seems too stupid to take it at face value. (He also fits in at the end of the post a "all taxation is theft" jibe.) So does he really think that higher taxing, European style social democrat countries have less social cohesion than the tax minimising, gun toting, "we don't let government tell us to wear masks", conspiracy-rattled USA is displaying at the moment?
California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record on Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America have collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself....
It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back-and-forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House...
Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message, while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days...
In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.In Los Angeles — which has seen the most cases in California, and where hospitals are filling up — parts of the city feel under siege and in other areas, there is little palpable sense of the severity of the situation. Unlike in New York City during the height of the outbreak, most Angelenos have not had to absorb the piercing wail of ambulance sirens at all hours, a sound that came to define the pandemic there.
Here's an abstract from a 2004 study in Archives of Sexual Behaviour (sounds a fun journal) about this weird fetish/interest:Police went to the West End flat of electrician Ryan Andrew King, 27, in inner city Brisbane while investigating a bizarre mutilation last weekend.Police and paramedics were called to a city backpacker hostel last Saturday night where they allegedly found a 26-year-old Sydney man with his genitals partly removed.It is alleged the man had arranged to be partially castrated by Mr King in one of the rooms, after meeting online.Mr King, who works as an electrician at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and has volunteered in the SES, is not believed to be medically qualified but allegedly taught himself castration from online research.It is alleged he may have used a Cryopen, a device for removing lesions such as warts and benign skin spots with nitrous oxide under high pressure.After finding the allegedly mutilated man at the hostel, police searched Mr King’s West End apartment and allegedly found a human penis and set of testicles in his freezer.
We used a survey posted on the Internet to explore the motivation of men who are interested in being castrated. Out of 134 respondents, 23 (17%) reported already having been castrated. The 104 (78%) individuals who said they had not been castrated were asked why they wanted to be castrated and why they had not actualized that desire. They were given multiple-choice answers to select from. The major reason (selected by 40% of respondents) for desiring castration was to achieve a “eunuch calm” and freedom from sexual urges; however, a large proportion (∼30%) of respondents found fantasies about being castrated sexually exciting and a similar percentage desired castration for the “cosmetic” appearance it achieved (which we interpret to mean scrotal removal along with an orchiectomy). This high interest in castration as either a sexual stimulus (a fetish) or a cosmetic enhancement was unexpected and contrasted with the more classically stated motivation for voluntary castration in the psychiatric literature, i.e., libido control and transsexualism. Internet discussion groups that serve these men may encourage them to act out their castration fantasies. Alternately, Internet discussions may give them a displacement outlet for their fantasies and decrease the risk of castration by nonmedically qualified “street-cutters” or by self-mutilation. Forty percent of our respondents claimed that they would have an orchiectomy, if it were cheap, safe, and simple. A quarter wanted to try chemical castration first, but 40% were embarrassed to talk to their doctors about their interest in castration. Information now available on the Internet provides these men with increasingly easy access to street-cutters and directions on how to perform surgical castrations, putting them at risk of permanent injury and disability. Physicians need to be aware of these risks.
Spot fines of 200 euros ($233) have been tested in several French cities in recent weeks and will now be applied nationwide, Castex said, ruling out a decriminalisation of cannabis.
A French law dating back to 1970 allows for illicit drug use to be punished with up to a year in prison and fined with up to 3,750 euros, but few users actually do jail time.
French people are Europe's leading consumers of cannabis and hold the number three spot for cocaine use.
The new measure would simplify police procedures by "inflicting punishment without delay", Castex said during a visit to the southern port city of Nice, and would be an efficient tool against sale points run by drug dealers "which are eating away at neighbourhoods".
If paid within two weeks the fine will be reduced to 150 euros, but will rise to 450 euros unless settled within 45 days.
The move honours an election campaign pledge by President Emmanuel Macron, who said spot fines should be used to deter petty crimes that often end up unpunished in overloaded courts.
