Report from Davos

First, news from the Congo:

Felix Tshisekedi, an opposition leader whose victory in presidential elections last month is widely considered to be illegitimate, took the oath of office on Thursday vowing to tackle the country's endemic corruption.

Then from the USA:

Bonnie Guitar, who had hit records as a country singer and guitarist, died on Jan.12 in Soap Lake, Washington. She was 95. In 1969 Ms. Guitar married Mario DePiano. The couple raised cattle and quarter horses together on an 80-acre ranch.

It's cold in Switzerland this time of year where there's public talk in Davos among Masters-of-the-Universe posing as corporate exec's that the upcoming 'inevitable' robotic workplace poses a real danger to their workers job security, and private glee among the same exec's about the possibilities of hiring robots instead of humans at a sub-minimum or, better yet, a zero-sum wage.

The race is on to be first to the new 5G network. South Korea is in the lead with China a close second, Japan and the USA are slightly, but only slightly, behind. China would like the contract to build the network in Germany (Europe), but the USA sees that possibility as a security threat as "grave as terrorism." Meantime the health risks posed by the building of 5G towers, which many believe will substantially increase exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic fields harmful to humans, animals, and the environment, are being studied.

A layman's working definition of economics in a time of climate change: the method of dealing with the consequences of a specific system--capitalism, communism, totalitarianism--not the system itself. 

Reading the cover story on Mitch McConnell in the Sunday New York Times (January 27, 2019) "Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted", it's entirely plausible to read McConnell as a classic Southerner in the tradition of John C. Calhoun, a politician who espoused the values of liberty and freedom while enslaving blacks. In the 1830s, Calhoun's heyday, slavery came under attack not only from abolitionists but also, in Calhoun's view, from a federal government overstepping its bounds. Rather than enslaving blacks McConnell's enslaving the Left, which of course includes many people of color, and in the name of less federal government not more, the bedrock Republican principle of hypocritial duplicity.

Yesterday I threw the first draft of a novel into the trash. Today more trash has covered it so that it can't be seen and, as such, is irretrivable. However it took very little imagination for me to follow the trash bin to the landfill on Thursday when the Recology truck picks up our trash, and watch my novel tumble out of truck on to a trash heap there and then be completely buried by one of the giant earthmovers. Extinction can be so exhilarating some times, as long as you back it up on some sort of hard-drive.

 

Mosaic, section of wall, Herculaneum, 79AD, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy, 2016. Photo by author.