Yes, I’ve found a connection between the Serengeti and right-wing propaganda. Didn’t expect it would be so easy, but the take-home is that somebody out there – governments or dictators or god incarnate – needs to control social media. The wild west of information dissemination is destroying truth and I worry it may never be restored.
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Category: Corruption
Big & Little Fires
You’ve probably heard that some 2×4’s are selling for $100 for ten-foot planks. According to Popular Mechanics this alone increases new buildings’ costs by 8%. This in turn increases old home valuations and rents. Trusted sources like Forbes say it’s temporary, due only to the supply/demand pop following the pandemic. They’re nuts.
Read moreHeady Aches
Excited about the increasing depth of the Trump criminal investigations?
Don’t put too much faith in the law. A good portion, but not too much. And while you’re at it take a quick look at what’s happening with Africa’s Trump, more than four years after he slid from power.
Read moreNonemployment
Is “unemployment” an important metric? Very similar controversies in the United States and South Africa throw this goldmark standard for economic planning into question.
Both countries currently suffer from chronic waves of refugees exacerbated by a wry mixture of politics with pandemic. Both countries’ fairly liberal policies towards refugees are at contentious odds with large parts of their citizenry. Both deal with growing social unrest that many argue impedes difficult struggles with institutionalized racism.
Read moreSuluhu under Virus
The world’s most mutated Covid-19 variant has been found in travelers from Tanzania. The discovery was announced three days ago by the Krisp Institute, which first discovered the South African variant.
Krisp is growing the virus to determine any effects of the mutations. There may be none but there is concern that several mutations involve the critical “spikes” that bind the virus to its prey. Several other of its specific mutations have been confirmed in many different virus samples from around the world, reflecting the natural selections that give the virus advantage.
Read moreSerious Suluhu
The former president, John Magufuli, will be laid to rest tomorrow in a Tanzanian state funeral. The chief mourner is the new president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who recently told the BBC, “It’s possible that some people take my soft-spoken nature as a sign of weakness, but to make them understand you doesn’t mean you have to shout.”
A respected African think-tank said today that Magufuli’s death in the face of Suluhu’s modest demeanor “has thrown the East African nation into a period of political uncertainty.” Here’s why:
Read moreMIA Control
We may be witnessing one of the most successful attempts at social control by mass brainwashing in human history. Tanzania’s President John Magufuli may, in fact, be pulling a ‘Donald Trump’ recovering from covid, but his government is using this to brain control its citizens.
The 61-year old may, in fact, be getting better in an undisclosed hospital in India. But the myth that he has never been sick and has not left the country is being embraced and disseminated by millions of Tanzanians. This is more than a “Trump.” It’s social control the likes of which the world has rarely seen.
Read moreDeath Reveals
President Magufuli of Tanzania who has made it a crime to even speak about coronavirus is on a ventilator in one of Nairobi Hospital’s ten presidential suites after attempts to transfer him quickly to India were aborted.
Like Trump, like Johnson, like Bolsonaro, the Head-of-State covid-denier is near death. Trump and Johnson were saved by medicine unavailable in East Africa. Bolsonaro had a mild case.
Read moreCovid Limits
“Pneumonia is our code word.” Reports from Tanzania this weekend suggest the country is spiraling into a terrible covid situation, a “second spike” not yet seen in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Because speaking about covid is against the law, doctors, activists and the patients themselves are referring to the situation as a “pneumonia epidemic.”
Read moreCovid Sage
Truth is growing! Even in the covid-denial island known as Tanzania a courageous voice has sounded: “The chief medical officer and the rest of officialdom [in Tanzania] have been hiding Covid-19 related deaths, [but] now the funerals are exposing us.”
Jenerali Ulimwengu has been a thorn in the side of established Tanzanian governments for years. He survives the brutality and imprisonment of most other local critics because he hunkers down when he needs to, constantly extols as his guiding star the father and founder of the Tanzanian country Julius Nyerere, and … because he’s very popular on YouTube.
Read moreDeath & Denial
We are in the pandemic nadir: Yesterday the CDC listed 118 of the 197 countries in the world as virulent, out-of-control hotspots, and a handful including South Africa received the dreaded U.S. travel bans.
But of all the countries of the world there is only one that has an aggressive policy prohibiting any vaccination whatever: Tanzania.
Read moreT & Z
I wanna stand up and shout through a megaphone! Listen, idiot Americans! South Africa shows us exactly what’s going to happen here now that Donald is gone!
But I’m torn, too, between just shutting up and letting the little birdie in my ear prove me remarkably prescient.
Read moreAfrican Aspect
Particularly for my African friends, suddenly bombarded with their media exhalations of joy with the Georgia race, puncturing with nuclear force the silences that I had attributed to a sagacious long-view of history. Regain the patience you are so notable for. This tiny moment in history does not an epoch make. Trump is alive and well.
Recognize a stark and striking difference between America and all the rest of the “free world.” Our democracy is not. Our aged system is designed to inhibit change, because the change that gave us our revolution from Britain was so fragile that once secured it had to be stopped for fear of reversing itself.
Read moreAss Song
A prematurely old man limped onto on his bench in a cold, damp courtroom this weekend listening to an equally enervated prosecutor behind him whose grotesque mole finally shown as his pandemic mask slid too far down his cheek.
The social and cultural debauchery of the last four years in America has revealed all its moles. The UK judge rejected the old prosecutors’ appeal to extradite Julian Assange to the United States, because America’s prison system is “oppressive.”
Read moreStarlight
It had been a dismal reign for the Mwene, Nkanga a Mvika, ruler of the Great Kingdom of The Kongo. He lived day-in and day-out with the shame his father had brought on his people by making peace with the Portuguese. His father had even been forced to accept a European name, Pedro.
The unimaginable wealth flaunted by his subjects who now wore European clothing and enjoyed great new herds of cattle because of Portuguese guns had forgotten that the slaves they always enjoyed were no longer treated well when slammed into the bosom of the Portuguese naus at the burgeoning port of Moçâmedes. Their great families of elephant were many fewer than before. Yes, they were rich, but few knew as The Mwene did of the debauchery behind this mischief.
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