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Celerity

Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
March 21, 2020

An Olympic Showdown: The Rising Clamor to Postpone the Tokyo Summer Games

Athletes and sports organizations are pushing back against the I.O.C.’s insistence that the Games go on this summer despite the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics-coronavirus-cancel.html



On July 24, as far as the organizers of the Olympics are still concerned, thousands of athletes will march as scheduled into the national stadium in Tokyo for the opening ceremony of the biggest sporting event on the planet. The Summer Olympics. Is this a vision of reality or just a mirage?

While the international sports calendar has been wiped almost clean by the spread of the coronavirus, the organizers of the 2020 Olympics — seemingly unwilling to meddle just yet with years of planning and billions of dollars in television rights and other anticipated revenue — insist the Games can go on. Yet now, in a showdown over public safety, the organizers are facing a remarkable groundswell of criticism and pushback from their own athletes, fans and national Olympic officials, who are increasingly and unusually vocal in calling for a postponement.

One of the biggest cracks in the usual solidarity behind the Games came Friday when U.S.A. Swimming, which governs the sport in the United States and regularly produces stars at the Games like Katie Ledecky and Simone Manuel, called for a postponement because of the growing obstacles to training amid practical restrictions imposed by the virus. The following day, U.S.A. Track & Field, which along with swimming has produced the most medals for the United States, also requested a delay.

Norway’s national Olympic committee, in a statement on Friday, became the first to clearly state a preference for the Olympics to be delayed until the global pandemic can be brought under control. The Brazilian Olympic committee on Saturday also endorsed postponing the Games until 2021. There were signs of pressure within Japan, with a member of its Olympic committee coming out in favor of postponing the Games.

snip

https://twitter.com/USASwimming/status/1241075841347366912

https://twitter.com/usatf/status/1241349991488262153
March 21, 2020

From 2017 - Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus -- and suggests new outbreak could occur

Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun. In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.

The killer strain could easily have arisen from such a bat population, the researchers report in PLoS Pathogens on 30 November. They warn that the ingredients are in place for a similar disease to emerge again. In late 2002, cases of a mystery pneumonia-like illness began occurring in Guangdong province, southeastern China. The disease, dubbed severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), triggered a global emergency as it spread around the world in 2003, infecting thousands of people.

Scientists identified the culprit as a strain of coronavirus and found genetically similar viruses in masked palm civets (Paguma larvata) sold in Guangdong’s animal markets. Later surveys revealed large numbers of SARS-related coronaviruses circulating in China’s horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus) — suggesting that the deadly strain probably originated in the bats, and later passed through civets before reaching humans. But crucial genes — for a protein that allows the virus to latch onto and infect cells — were different in the human and known bat versions of the virus, leaving room for doubt about this hypothesis.

Bat hunt

To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs.

snip
March 21, 2020

Treehouse

Project name: Bert Treehouse | Completed: 2019 | Architect: Studio Precht

https://www.opumo.com/magazine/bert-treehouse/

Studio Precht presents a collaboration project with Baumbau, a start-up that specialises in small homes, treehouses and buildings for alternative tourism. The Bert Treehouse stands in opposition to the ‘international style’ buildings that populate our cities which are easy to construct and very profitable but a copy of a copy of a copy.



“We architects find reference for our projects in art, philosophy, literature or nature. For this project, we also looked at art for reference but not at Michelangelo or Dali. Rather we looked at the cartoon characters of Sesame Street or Minions. We took a playful look at this project and wanted to create a unique character instead of a conventional building.”

Chris Precht



Bert Treehouse is a way of Studio Precht and Baumbau urging other architects to dare more, to experiment more with designs in the hope of a more diverse future for our cities. The modular system of Bert means that the structure can be altered to a client’s brief in real time. The client simply informs the architects about the desired program – how many bedrooms and bathrooms are needed, for example – and different variations of the tubular treehouse can be constructed.

Dark interiors create a cosy, cave-like atmosphere and ensure that the main focus is shifted towards the outdoors through the large glass openings. From the exterior, leaf-like wooden shingles in differing shades of brown work to camouflage the Bert treehouse against the backdrop of the forest. The smallest Bert Treehouse structures begin pricing at €120,000 and can be upgraded and extended by add-ons and extra modules. We can expect the first structures to appear in spring 2020, so keep an eye out.















March 21, 2020

Short, sharp, brutal.

Most people are carrying far too much normalcy bias to understand how bad it is going to get in the US,

Trump is in full and irrevocable possession of an unsound mind, a broken, rancid character, and is profoundly incapable of telling the truth on anything of import, thus he cannot, in any fashion, handle the task that is before him,

The Twenty-fifth Amendment will, and simply MUST, come into play, because if it does not, death levels beyond comprehension shall ensue.


If there is scattered rebellion after this occurs, it must be crushed and dispatched with ruthless rapidity, and extreme prejudice.

March 20, 2020

Gabriel Zucman: tackling inequality



Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, discusses with Henning Meyer, Social Europe editor-in-chief, the implications of his new book with Emmanuel Saez: The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.



The Triumph of Injustice review – how to wrest control from multinationals

This bracing treatise by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman advocates a radical approach to reducing inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/the-triumph-injustice-emmanuel-saez-gabriel-zucman-review

The global economy crashed more than a decade ago and the world’s progressives are still grasping for an answer. Thinkers from the political left should have been at the forefront of the debate about reforming the world’s financial system, but instead have spent much of the last 10 years struggling to tame the more vigorous response to the crisis from the right. There have been imaginative initiatives, particularly with regard to the exchange of financial information between countries, but these have hardly set the public imagination alight. Too much of the answer to this global system failure has come from policy rather than politics.

And this has allowed frauds, fools and fanatics to dominate the debate, claiming to speak for globalisation’s victims, but acting instead in the interests of its biggest winners. Whatever the question, their answers are the same: fewer taxes, fewer regulations and smaller budgets. In this, the left is partly a victim of its own previous successes. The era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton promised downside-free government: economic growth for the good of everyone; intense relaxation about the filthy rich; light touch regulation of the banks and social spending with the proceeds. The apparent success of this approach ensured both the Labour party and the Democrats lacked new ideas once the economy collapsed, there was no money left and it became apparent that their political houses had been built on sand.

Since then, a small group of economists has been analysing the structure of the globalised economy to build the foundations for a new approach to organising our societies; doing for our world what John Maynard Keynes did 80 years ago. Foremost among them is Thomas Piketty, whose monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a sensation when published in 2014. But his fellow travellers have been doing equally valuable work (and in mercifully shorter books), such as this latest study, The Triumph of Injustice.

Written by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who, like Piketty, are French but who work at the University of California, it analyses how the super-rich dodge taxes, what this means and what to do about it. In an age when the primary instinct of many left-leaning people is to yearn for a time machine, it is a bracing and brave formulation of a radical new approach to public funding. They not only argue that the wealthy should pay higher taxes, but dismiss the whole logic of the third way. Theirs is a cogent, reasoned and practical argument against the “tax competition” that has sent so many corporate profits to Ireland or Bermuda and they give clear and compelling policy solutions to change the direction of society itself.

snip


The Triumph of Injustice : How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

https://www.bookdepository.com/Triumph-Injustice-Emmanuel-Saez/9781324002727?ref=grid-view&qid=1584734216481&sr=1-1
March 20, 2020

Truth is being disemboweled right before world's eyes with these daily Trump gaslighting pressers

It is so immediate, so sweeping, so comprehensive, that well over 250 million (and billions of humans in terms of global impacts that will soon come calling when all externalities, exogenous shocks, and negatively correlated interlocks are factored in) citizens do not even comprehend what is happening, what foul darkness is emergent and in ascendancy.

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Gender: Female
Hometown: London
Home country: US/UK/Sweden
Current location: Stockholm, Sweden
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2018, 07:25 PM
Number of posts: 43,317

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