[The Week] "For most of 2021, the world has been fighting off various COVID variants," Trevor Noah said on Monday's Daily Show. And just when we thought we were getting Delta under control, "last week scientists in South Africa announced that they discovered a new variant, and what they saw is freaking people out."
The big concern about the Omicron variant is the alarming number of mutations to its spike protein, Noah said, but "right now, basically all we know about this strain is that it's called Omicron," and "even the name of the virus has a complicated story." The World Health Organization skipped Nu and Xi to get to Omicron, he said, and passing over Xi in particular "really shows you the clout that China has. Because the World Health Organization is like, 'Uh, we don't want to offend one guy in China.' Meanwhile, Greece is over here, like, 'What?!? You stole our whole alphabet, malaka!'"
And even though it will be a week or two before we know how contagious and dangerous Omicron is, the U.S. and other countries wasted no time banning travel from South Africa and seven neighboring countries. "And as a South African — who does not have the variant! — I think this travel ban is total bulls--t," Noah said. We don't know where Omicron started, and "we don't know how long it's been around. It's everywhere, from Hong Kong to Israel to Spain, so why aren't you banning travel from all those countries, too?"
"Maybe America is buying itself a couple of weeks before it gets overrun with Omicron, but don't forget about the costs of this action," Noah said. "Because you do realize that other countries are paying attention, and they realize that if they're going to get punished for telling the world about new variants, they're gonna stop telling the world whenever their scientists discover new variants."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Andrey Martynov
[Regnum] It cannot be said that Major General Anatoly Nosovich (1878−1968), a member of the white movement, was not known to the Soviet reader. In a somewhat caricatured form, Alexei Tolstoy mentioned him in the novel "Bread", and the general's memoirs published under the pseudonym Chernomorets were quoted in the 1930s in the newspaper "Pravda" by the "first red officer" Klim Voroshilov.
Finally, already in the post-Soviet period, some of his memoir articles were published as a separate book.
What attracted the Bolsheviks to Nosovich? Indeed, in contrast to such open enemies of the Soviet regime as General Sergei Markov (the same Tolstoy wrote about him in "Walking through the Torments") or Admiral Alexander Kolchak (from Soviet writers, Nikolai Aseev spoke about him not without sympathy in "Semyon Proskakov" )
Nosovich, on the instructions of the Moscow anti-Bolshevik underground organization, was introduced into the ranks of the Red Army (RKKA). That is, there was no "honest" or "open" battle, but "deception" or "betrayal".
Nevertheless, there was interest in him. The fact is that in the essay "Red Tsaritsyn" the general described the future Soviet leader as follows:
“It is not in the rules (...) of a person like Stalin to get away from the business he just started. We must give him justice that his energy can be the envy of any of the old administrators, and the ability to apply to business and circumstances should be learned by many."
It is interesting that after the XX Party Congress this assessment of Stalin given by Nosovich was confirmed in a private conversation by Anastas Mikoyan. As a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in a conversation with the writer Yuri Trifonov, he confessed to the latter:
"Yes, he was a very good administrator. And very humble."
Note that at the congress itself, Mikoyan, even before Khrushchev's famous speech, used the expression "personality cult" to criticize Stalin.
The memoirs of Anatoly Nosovich and documents associated with him, collected by the historian Andrei Ganin in the book, depict the general's underground activities at the headquarters of the Red Army during the defense of Tsaritsyn (here he just met Stalin), as well as stories about other military and party leaders.
For example, the former colonel of the imperial army Joachim Vatsetis, who joined the Red Army (he was the commander-in-chief of the Red Army in 1918-1919), was perceived by the memoirist extremely negatively: “an evil Latvian: he will not be tormented by his conscience at the sight of destroyed Russia, which he hates with all his soul”
But about the former Colonel Sergei Kamenev who replaced him, on the contrary, he spoke with empathy: "probably his passionate nature was the reason that he was carried away by an adventure and fell into the mainstream of the Bolshevik stream."
Taken together, these testimonies create a more objective picture in which Stalin turns out to be not only a talented manager, but also a cruel politician who admitted that his party members were ready to "destroy out of ten - nine innocent out of a hundred - ninety-nine" for the sake of catching one enemy.
A separate question: is it possible to be a successful administrator with such arithmetic?
A separate article dealing with documents relating to Nosovich can be found here.
[Public Affairs] A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment—the definitive police state—and the global technology giants that made it possible
Blocked from facts and truth, under constant surveillance, surrounded by a hostile alien police force: Xinjiang’s Uyghur population has become cursed, oppressed, outcast. Most citizens cannot discern between enemy and friend. Social trust has been destroyed systematically. Friends betray each other, bosses snitch on employees, teachers expose their students, and children turn on their parents. Everyone is dependent on a government that nonetheless treats them with suspicion and contempt. Welcome to the Perfect Police State.
Using the haunting story of one young woman’s attempt to escape the vicious technological dystopia, his own reporting from Xinjiang, and extensive firsthand testimony from exiles, Geoffrey Cain reveals the extraordinary intrusiveness and power of the tech surveillance giants and the chilling implications for all our futures.
[Just The News] Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education approved a grant application for a summer research program whose "core feature" was introducing student fellows to "critical race theory."
The feds approved a five-year extension of the original grant for the Research Institute for Scholars of Equity (RISE) this year, with one notable and unexplained omission: the term "critical race theory."
The change suggests promoters of CRT are shying away from using the term as it becomes more politically charged. This summer, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to the budget reconciliation bill that would ban federal funding for the teaching of CRT in schools.
The 2016 version says students will use "critical race theory (as well as mixed-methods research techniques) as a means of studying issues such as teacher quality, education policy, and race and social justice in education." The 2021 version simply mentions "mixed-methods research techniques."
A new sentence may be intended to surreptitiously refer to CRT: "During this institute, fellows study the sociocultural contexts of American schooling and learn how to formulate culturally competent research questions."
[GEO.TV] Pakistain has an extremely high rate of rape cases, according to somewhat ’unreliable’ statistics gathered on the topic. The problem in putting together ’reliable’ statistics is based on the issue of what laws are in place in the country, how many rapes are reported, how many incidents of sexual assault are classified as rape, and other similar factors. However, there's more than one way to skin a cat... We do know that in Pakistain around 10 rape cases are reported daily, and out of these cases, only 77 percent of those accused are convicted.The PTI government had put forward a plan to deal with rape; with the PM calling for the chemical castration of rapists. The provision for legal chemical castration was, however, taken back by the government after the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) said that such punishment was un-Islamic. We do not know why the prime minister had not properly researched before putting out his frequently repeated opinions that chemical castration is the best way to deal with rapists. Chemical castration is a process which induces large amounts of a female hormone ’progesterone’ into the body, reducing a man’s ability to carry out any kind of physical sex. However, we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by... it does not prevent assault in other forms and can have extremely serious side effects, including the development of feminine features in the man and acute depression.
For this reason, it has been described as an unacceptable punishment by Amnesia Amnesty International and other groups, and as one which should never be carried out without being accompanied by therapy and counselling sessions by other experts. In Europe, chemical castration is used in some countries but not as a form of punishment, but as a course of treatment on the request of a person who is guilty of multiple sex crimes and may feel that he requires help to overcome whatever problems he faces which trigger his violent mostly peaceful behaviour towards those weaker than him.
In Pakistain, we need to understand that rape is not a sexual offence as such, but an exhibition of power over a weak person. This is perhaps the reason why even five-year-old girls are rape victims. The frequently given assertion that women’s clothes, for example more revealing clothes, ’tempt’ men in some way to rape them is ludicrous and is not backed out by scientific evidence anywhere in the world.
It is also true that rape cases are not limited to Pakistain. Botswana recorded the world’s second-highest number of rape cases in 2020. This figure also changes as it depends on how the crimes are counted.
Pakistain has to figure out a way to deal with the problem. Women and child’s rights activists, such as those who organise the Aurat March, condemn chemical castration and describe it as an inhumane form of punishment. The answer lies in teaching men about consent, the importance of moving ahead with any gesture or association only when there is full consent, and empowering women to report rape far more frequently. Women should also be encouraged to carry pepper spray, as has become more common in neighbouring India where New Delhi, the capital, faces the problem of rising rape cases.
Indeed, pepper spray cans and visits to cop shoppes to report rape — the two actions that ought to be carried out by women — cannot be the only answer to the problem. Instead, like Sweden, we need to ensure that perpetrators of rape are punished on a timely basis and sentenced to imprisonment — as prescribed in the Pakistain Penal Code (PPC) — and that such punishments are meted out regularly and without discrimination. Too often, women do not move ahead with rape cases because of how they are treated during the investigation process, making the crime even worse.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/01/2021 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11137 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
Talk all you want in Pakistan...
Frankly nothing will happen, based upon Pakistani culture/mores, this behavior is normal.
#3
If they don't like chemical castration, how about mechanical castration? Take off the testicles, and the urge goes way down. Take off the penis, and the ability to rape goes away. Problem solved.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
12/01/2021 10:20 Comments ||
Top||
"Our oversight identified many other issues and concerns with the vetting process. For example, if an Afghan evacuee did have identification, such as an Afghan National ID card or passport, the screening process did not include validation of the documents beyond a visual inspection. No follow up.
"The officials working at the military bases in Europe said they did not have any specific training or expertise in identifying a fraudulent Afghan ID card. So our folks went over to these foreign locations, the so-called lily pads and asked the people who are doing this screening process, 'When you get an Afghan ID card, what do you do?'
They said 'We don’t have the expertise to identify a fraudulent Afghan ID card, so we assume that it’s accurate ...'.
"The Afghan evacuees' identities are logged into ...a U.S. national security database -- in some cases, of course, based on what could be a fake ID. If the evacuees did not have any identification documents, which apparently was the case with a substantial number, no ID at all, federal officials simply logged them into our databases based on what they said was their name and their date of birth. So they created a national security database from what these individuals volunteered.
"We’re told it’s not unusual for Afghans not to know their actual birthday. It’s just not always part of the culture to record or have that information, that’s understood. But this has resulted in a number of the databases including information about birthdays as January 1 of a particular year, so they were simply logged, as say, January 1, 1990. ..."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. By Boris Rozhin
I watched the domestic military action movie "Sky" dedicated to the famous story of the downed Russian Su-24 bomber, which was attacked by an F-16 of the Turkish Air Force, as a result of which Major Peshkov died, as well as Marine Pozynich during a rescue operation.
Continued on Page 49
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Week] "For most of 2021, the world has been fighting off various COVID variants," Trevor Noah said on Monday's Daily Show. And just when we thought we were getting Delta under control, "last week scientists in South Africa announced that they discovered a new variant, and what they saw is freaking people out."
[Public Affairs] A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment—the definitive police state—and the global technology giants that made it possible
[Just The News] Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education approved a grant application for a summer research program whose "core feature" was introducing student fellows to "critical race theory."
