Pro Tip: Make it a mental habit, to remove the nation-state as primary power centre, when trying to make sense of geo-politics. All the relevant actors fully globalized decades ago, the rest is by and large just fun and games for the confused masses.
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The War of the Worlds - 1938 radio drama by Orson Welles
"The War of the Worlds" is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).The episode became famous for causing panic among its listening audience.
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"Victor Orbán desperately trying to catch up with cosmopolitan liberal elites who have all overtaken him in the authoritarianism league tables in recent weeks." - Dr.Tad Tietze on twitter
Hungarian Parliament passes bill that gives PM Orbán unlimited power & proclaims:
- State of emergency w/o time limit
- Rule by decree
- Parliament suspended
- No elections
- Spreading fake news + rumors: up to 5 yrs in prison
- Leaving quarantine: up to 8 yrs in prison
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S Korea unleashes all-out policy assault on virus - ‘Big Brother’ on steroids (Asiantimes)
The Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention is in charge of the new digital surveillance system. It combines information from 27 public and private organizations including the National Police Agency, the Credit Finance Association, three mobile carriers and 22 credit card firms. This vast collection of big data is amassed, trawled through and analyzed by AI. The system is a comprehensive upgrade to a previous program under which “data detectives” combined CCTV footage, GPS location information, credit card payments and other metrics to track down persons who may have been in contact with the infected person.
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CBS News Caught Using Footage from an Italian Hospital to Describe Conditions in New York
“It was an editing mistake. We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows,” a CBS spokesperson said. [...] Sky News’s segment shows the same hospital that CBS News aired just days later. CBS News aired the misleading footage as Cuomo was bashing FEMA for the apparent lack of ventilators, suggesting that the video was of a New York hospital.
Counting deaths involving the coronavirus (Office of National Statistics)
According to the ONS blog even cases where it was merely suspected that the deceased had Covid-19 will now be included in the Covid-19 death stats. Given Covid-19 has some generic symptoms, that will include people who don't even have it.
Covid19 yet to impact Europe’s overall mortality (off-guardian)
Year-to-date statistics show excess mortality lower than previous years
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The Open Food Network and the New Digital Order(s)
With Covid19, aka the coronavirus, come restrictions on people’s outdoor movements and gathering. This means that, while supermarkets are considered essential, it seems to be case by case for other food markets: instantly, farmers markets are shutting all over Europe with serious consequences for small producers. Digital food platforms have never been more urgent. In this new restricted mobility context, Open Food Network is perhaps the best example of a good food network that’s digitised, cooperative, open source, not for profit and ready for your community.
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Twitter removes tweets by Brazil, Venezuela presidents for violating COVID-19 content rules
#Comment: Earlier today, Twitter deleted Bolsonaro tweets.
Yesterday, Facebook deleted the Brazilian president’s video because it contained disinformation.
This is a defining moment: companies willing to shut down "disinfo" from world leaders if they have the World Health Organization to back them up on what counts as harmful. A highly comedic development, given the WHO is a deeply corrupt organisation under the control of few cryptocrats.
Ultimately, this is just yet another distraction from the main show: The collapse of the pax americana global petrodollar empire of mass consumer capitalism - which is desperately trying to save itself with ever more violent full spectrum dominance tactics against everybody (from psyops and economic warfare to assassination and nuclear escalation). The corona plandemic won't change the course of this collapse, likely even accelerate it.
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Eating Animals is the root cause of many of our current global challenge.
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Shadowrun Poster - #Art by David Auden Nash
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Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder–decoder framework (Nature)
Reading minds has just come a step closer to reality: scientists have developed artificial intelligence that can turn brain activity into text. “We are not there yet but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis,” said Dr Joseph Makin, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco.
Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience (unpaywalled), Makin and colleagues reveal how they developed their system by recruiting four participants who had electrode arrays implanted in their brain to monitor epileptic seizures. These participants were asked to read aloud from 50 set sentences multiple times, including “Tina Turner is a pop singer”, and “Those thieves stole 30 jewels”. The team tracked their neural activity while they were speaking. This data was then fed into a machine-learning algorithm, a type of artificial intelligence system that converted the brain activity data for each spoken sentence into a string of numbers.
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In Exactly A Year Our Knowledge Of The Cosmos Will Change Forever. This Is The $10 Billion Reason (Forbes)
In precisely one year—on Tuesday, March 30, 2021—the almost US$10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) will launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, “Webb” will study the solar system, directly image exoplanets, photograph the first galaxies, and explore the mysteries of the origins of the Universe.
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The great oil industry collapse of the 2020s has started
Oil Prices Could Fall Another 20% (oilprice.com)
Brent crude was down four percent Friday afternoon at $27.50 per barrel. US crude was five percent lower at $21.47 per barrel. Prices were on track for their fifth weekly drop in a row as coronavirus ravages economies around the world. The price war launched by Saudi Arabia almost three weeks ago after talks with Russia over price stabilisation broke down has sent prices to their lowest level in 17 years. The Brent crude price was around $65 per barrel at the start of January.
US crude oil price falls below $20 (FT)
US crude oil prices fell below $20 a barrel on Monday, close to their lowest level in 18 years, as traders bet production would have to shut to cope with the collapse in demand from the coronavirus pandemic. The global oil industry is facing its biggest demand drop in history, with traders and analysts forecasting crude consumption could fall as much as a quarter next month because of widespread lockdowns across the western world as the pandemic spreads.
Oil in Canada hit $3.80 per barrel this morning in Canada.
@MarinKatusa: A starbucks latte is now almost 2X more expensive than a barrel of oil in Canada today. A barrel of oil is cheaper than a donut and coffee from Tim Hortons.
Russia's Rosneft stops operations in Venezuela (TASS)
Russia's Rosneft stops operations in Venezuela, sells assets related to functioning in that country. A company owned by Russia has acquired Rosneft’s assets in Venezuela, the cabinet’s press office told TASS on Saturday. "The government of the Russian Federation has acquired assets in Venezuela from Rosneft. A company 100% owned by the Russian Federation has become the owner," the press service said.
Russian state gave up majority share of Rosneft in Venezuela deal (Yahoo News)
The Russian state has cut its holding in oil giant Rosneft to below a majority stake as part of its deal to buy the group's Venezuelan assets, announced over the weekend, a source familiar with the details told Reuters. Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer, said on Saturday it had sold all its assets in Venezuela to an unnamed company owned by the Russian government. The group said it would receive in return payment worth 9.6% of Rosneft's equity capital, which would be held by a subsidiary. It did not say who the seller of that stake was. Before the deal, Russia, via state holding company Rosneftegaz, owned slightly over 50% of Kremlin-controlled Rosneft's capital.
Russia’s Plan To Bankrupt U.S. Shale Could Send Oil To $60 (oilprice.com)
As soon as U.S. shale leaves the market, prices will rebound and could reach $60 a barrel, Rosneft’s Igor Sechin said recently. As fate would have it, in what many would have until recently considered an impossible scenario, a lot of U.S. shale might do just that. Breakeven prices for U.S. shale basins range between $39 and $48 a barrel, according to data compiled by Reuters. Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate (WIT) is trading below $25 a barrel and has been for over a week now.
The world's on the brink of running out of places to put oil (financial post)
With supply exceeding demand by 12.4 million barrels a day, producers will be forced to cut output by June
Collapse (documentary)
Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert briefly recounts his life including his parents' ties to U.S. intelligence agencies and Ruppert’s own career as an LAPD beat cop and detective. Ruppert then summarizes current energy and economic issues, focusing mainly around the core concepts of peak oil and sustainable development. He also criticizes fiat money, fractional reserve banking, compound interest, and leveraging, and discusses alleged CIA drug trafficking. The bulk of the film presents Ruppert making an array of predictions including social unrest, violence, population dislocation and governmental collapses in the United States and throughout the world. He draws on news reports and data available via the Internet, but he applies a unique interpretation which he calls “connecting the dots”.
USA im Irak: Letzter Akt einer Chaos-Politik? (heise)
90 Prozent der Einkünfte kommen vom Ölgeschäft. Bei dem derzeit niedrigen Ölpreis wird es für die irakische Regierung schwierig, dass sie überhaupt Gehälter bezahlen kann. 30 Prozent der Beschäftigten im Irak leben als Beamte oder Vertragspartner von Staatsgeldern. Das Gesundheitswesen ist vollkommen von den Staatseinnahmen abhängig.
EasyJet grounds 'entire fleet' over coronavirus (Techexplorer)
British airline easyJet on Monday said it had grounded its entire fleet because of the coronavirus pandemic but would still be available for rescue flights to repatriate stranded customers.
Coronavirus may cause global food shortages as panic buying and export curbs hit supply (SCMP)
UN Food and Agricultural Organisation says there could be global food shortages in April and May as a result of supply problems caused by the coronavirus. China is heavily dependent on imports for some crops like soybeans, which may be affected by disruptions to global logistics networks.
UN warns that COVID-19 pandemic could trigger global food shortage (World Socialist Web)
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned of the impact of the COVID-19 virus on the global food supply chain in a notice on their website writing: “We risk a looming food crisis unless measures are taken fast to protect the most vulnerable, keep global food supply chains alive and mitigate the pandemic’s impacts across the food system.”
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Upgraded Google Glass Helps Autistic Kids “See” Emotions (Spectrum IEEE)
A team at Stanford has been working for six years on this assistive technology for children with autism, which the kids themselves named Superpower Glass. The system provides behavioral therapy to the children in their homes, where social skills are first learned. It uses the glasses’ outward-facing camera to record the children’s interactions with family members; then the software detects the faces in those videos and interprets their expressions of emotion. Through an app, caregivers can review auto-curated videos of social interactions.
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Tiny Qoobo - The headless robot cat
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Late Capitalist Comedy: McDonald's and other brands are making 'social distancing' logos (CNN)
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Oil demand down 20% globally (Bloomberg)
Russell Hardy, CEO of Vitol Group, the world's largest independent oil trader, says global crude demand is down 15-20 million barrels a day (that's 20% of global)
