#congo stamps

[pillarboxstudio]

[xumoonhao]

assorted Congo web graphics 🇨🇩

POSTS WITH DONATION LINKS :: 1 / 2

[graphix1025]

Free Palestine/congo/sudan/haiti/Hawaii Stamps

[postcard-from-the-past]

Elephant from Congo

French vintage postcard with A.E.F stamps

[littlestampcollection]

[postcards-and-postcrossing]

Sunday Stamps: Southern Hemisphere

….is the theme for today’s Sunday Stamps French Polynesia – 1958 The White Horse by Paul Gaugin New Zealand – 1970 Puriri Moth Indonesia – 1951 Rice and Cotton Mauritius – 1994 Protection of the Environment – Submarine View Mozambique – 1964 Customs Barge Tanzania – 1985 Pottery Rwanda – 1967 Expo ’67 Montreal – Spears, Shields, and Bow Congo – 1979 Communication reduces distance Zaire –…

[witekspicsoldpostcards]

Postcards with stamps from: Russia, Brazil, Uruguay, Iran, Congo.

[gravalicious]

[tchouameninga]

Lube in the arse una

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #72 – Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is not exactly one of my favourite working authors, but at this point he’s probably quite close. Certainly I haven’t yet regretted giving anything new of his I could get my hands on a try – and this is no exception (even if it’s not really that new, given I waited for my library system to get a copy). It doesn’t completely succeed at everything it goes for, but privileging themes over speculative xeno-biology is really a pretty fair choice, and as narratives go it was both fun and compelling.

The story follows Anton Daghdev – dissident, academic, and dissident academic who, for crimes against the Mandate of Humanity, has been sentenced to transportation to an extrasolar penal colony and a lifetime of hard labour furthering the Mandate’s understanding of the alien ecosystem which has flourished there. It’s a life sentence, make no mistake – but the fecund, symbiosis-obsessed ecology of ‘Kiln’ is far beyond anything he imagined when he was put into cryosleep for the 30 year voyage , and that’s before he is introduced to the real prize: Ruins. Real, artificial structures, with ornamentation, power generation, and writing – all signs of an intelligent creator which has entirely vanished from the ecosystem. Anton is caught between a camp that is itself is a horror show, ruled throgh brutality and fear by a commandant who devotion to the Mandate’s doctrines makes any actual understanding of Kiln impossible, and the ever-growing ecosystem beyond the compound’s walls that is forever seeking the right combination of proteins and molecules to form a bridge between species and worlds, ten thousand species of parasites and symbiotes forever seeking promising new hosts.

The book is concerned with several things, but the most obvious and the aesthetically dominant is the whole trope of the ‘death world’ – specifically the verdant and overgrowing jungle variety, where everything is green and beautiful and constantly looking for a way to kill you. A trope that’s always been more-or-less obviously inspired by 19th century European explorers and colonizers experience in the Amazon and Congo, and 20th century Americans in South East Asia – and the book is very interested in the colonial imagery, here. Everyone’s utter horror at the idea of contamination by the environment and its use as threat and punishment to keep the labourers in line is a central organizing principle of camp life. The fact that that the efforts to understand the nature of kilnish life and intelligence has been futile from the word go because of doctrines and assumptions the human scientists are labouring under and their studies has only ever been destructive and useless stamp-collecting is also just a theme running through the whole book.

From a slightly different perspective, this would be a fairly classic sci fi horror story, honestly – a moral atrocity of a scientific mission, destroyed in a fit of destructive karma as its prisoner/slave labour is infected and comes to know the alien life surrounding them in a way no human science could ever hope to. Very gothic, very Lovecraft. The lead archaeologist even gives a more-or-less sympathetic protagonist to tell it through.

As it is, on the level of genre this is basically an anti-cosmic horror story. The alien really is Alien, the world is vast and strange and you can’t really know anyone or anything – which is the trap. It’s not the alien infection that drives you mad, it’s the isolation and solitude of having felt the connection and ability to truly communicate without lies or deception it offers and then losing it beneath airlocks and thick plastic walls. It’s only be true trust and embrace of the most shockingly alien life ever seen – let alone any other humans – that the species can actually be liberated.

It rather reminds me of Last Exit by Max Gladstone that way – basically entirely different genres, but in both manage to make the alien seem truly terrifying and uncanny, and in both cases it’s the obsession with remaining pure and human and trying a sharp border between Us and Them that’s the real source of horror.

The thematic counterpoint here is the Mandate. It’s a totalitarian state in a very old-school, 20th century modernist way. Government through police spies and regular purges, legitimized by a grand historical project which is mostly just keeping everything neat and legible for the benefit of the top of the pyramid. It’s not that there aren’t true believers to the cause of Scientific Philanthropy, but it really doesn’t need that many of them. It rules through self-interest and fear – the tiny impossible hope of actually changing anything, or the absolute certainty of being sold out and swept up by the time your conspiracy has enough people in it to actually change anything. The Mandate makes it impossible to trust or rely upon anyone else, and by atomizing humanity makes it possible to bind them more tightly to the ruling state than ever before. It’s only be really radical – inhuman, really – levels of trust and cooperation and openness among people trying to resist that it can be fought, with its snitches and its tear gas and its automatic weaponry.

So yes, not the most subtle book in the world. But it definitely worked for me, on balance. It’s surprisingly rare to have a protagonist whose a committed political revolutionary on page 1 and never stops being one in damn near any story I come across, so maybe I just enjoyed the rare treat.

Though it does suffer some in the third act. An opinion I increasingly think I have about everything, but still. Kilnish xenobiology and -ecology is for the first two acts o the book is both aesthetically amazing and actually plausibly alien-seeming, but as Anton really understands it does become a bit credulity-stretchingly benevolent and purely symbiotic (not to mention structurally stable and only changing in the particulars across aeons), a few offhand lines about ‘red in two and claw’ aside. The narration also really doth protest too much about how the connection between the Kiln-infected humans totally isn’t telepathy. It wasn’t really a long book (certainly not by genre standards) but the whole final act also did just feel a bit bloated and meandering.

All of which is really just me being incapable of enjoying something without complaining though. If you like old-school feeling sci fi about alien worlds, Big Themes and improbably physically fit scientists, would recommend.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

China’s largest automaker, BYD, is selling its Dolphin hatchback EV for a low-low $15,000, complete with a 13-inch rotating screen, ventilated front seats, and a 260-mile range. Here in the U.S., you have to pay more than twice that price for the Tesla Model 3 EV ($39,000) with lower tech and only 10 more miles of driving range. In case $15K beats your budget, the Dolphin has a plug-in hybrid version with an industry-leading 74-mile range on a single charge for only $11,000 and an upgrade with an unbeatable combined gas-electric range of 1,300 miles. Not surprisingly, EVs surged to 52% of all auto sales in China last year. And with such a strong domestic springboard into the world market, Chinese companies accounted for more than 70% of global EV sales.

It’s time to face reality in the world of cars and light trucks. Let’s admit it, China’s visionary industrial policy is the source of its growing dominance over global EV production. Back in 2009-2010, three years before Elon Musk sold his first mass-production Tesla, Beijing decided to accelerate the growth of its domestic auto industry, including cheap, all-electric vehicles with short ranges for its city drivers. Realizing that an EV is just a steel box with a battery, and battery quality determines car quality, Beijing set about systematically creating a vertical monopoly for those batteries — from raw materials like lithium and cobalt from the Congo all the way to cutting-edge factories for the final product. With its chokehold on refining all the essential raw materials for EV batteries (cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel), by 2023-2024 China accounted for well over 80% of global sales of battery components and nearly two-thirds of all finished EV batteries.

Clearly, new technology is driving our automotive future, and it’s increasingly clear that China is in the driver’s seat, ready to run over the auto industries of the U.S. and the European Union like so much roadkill. Indeed, Beijing switched to the export of autos, particularly EVs, to kick-start its slumbering economy in the aftermath of the Covid lockdown.

Given that it was already the world’s industrial powerhouse, China’s auto industry was more than ready for the challenge. After robotic factories there assemble complete cars, hands-free, from metal stamping to spray painting for less than the cost of a top-end refrigerator in the U.S., Chinese companies pop in their low-cost batteries and head to one of the country’s fully automated shipping ports. There, instead of relying on commercial carriers, leading automaker BYD cut costs to the bone by launching its own fleet of eight enormous ocean-going freighters. It started in January 2024 with the BYD Explorer No. 1, capable of carrying 7,000 vehicles anywhere in the world, custom-designed for speedy drive-on, drive-off delivery. That same month, another major Chinese company you’ve undoubtedly never heard of, SAIC Motor, launched an even larger freighter, which regularly transports 7,600 cars to global markets.

Those cars are already heading for Europe, where BYD’s Dolphin has won a “5-Star Euro Safety Rating” and its dealerships are popping up like mushrooms in a mine shaft. In a matter of months, Chinese cars had captured 11% of the European market. Last year, BYD began planning its first factory in Mexico as an “export hub” for the American market and is already building billion-dollar factories in Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia. Realizing that “20% to 30%” of his company’s revenue is at risk, Ford CEO Jim Farley says his plants are switching to low-cost EVs to keep up. After the looming competition led GM to bring back its low-cost Chevy Bolt EV, company Vice President Kurt Kelty said that GM will “drive the cost of E.V.s to lower than internal combustion engine vehicles.”

So, what does all this mean for America? In the past four years, the Biden administration made real strides in protecting the future of the country’s auto industry, which is headed toward ensuring that American motorists will be driving $10,000 EVs with a 1,000-mile range, a 10-year warranty, a running cost of 10 cents a mile, and 0 (yes zero!) climate-killing carbon emissions.

Not only did President Biden extend the critical $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of an American-made EV, but his 2021 Infrastructure Act helped raise the number of public-charging ports to a reasonable 192,000, with 1,000 more still being added weekly, reducing the range anxiety that troubles half of all American car owners. To cut the cost of the electricity needed to drive those car chargers, his 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion to accelerate the transition to low-cost green energy. With such support, U.S. EV sales jumped 7% to a record 1.3 million units in 2024.

Most important of all, that funding stimulated research for a next-generation solid-state battery that could break China’s present stranglehold over most of the components needed to produce the current lithium-ion EV batteries. The solution: a blindingly simple bit of all-American innovation — don’t use any of those made-in-China components. With investment help from Volkswagen, the U.S. firm QuantumScape has recently developed a prototype for a solid-state battery that can reach “80% state of charge in less than 15 minutes,” while ensuring “improved safety,” extended battery life, and a driving range of 500 miles. Already, investment advisors are touting the company as the next Nvidia.

But wait a grim moment! If we take President Donald Trump at his word, his policies will slam the brakes on any such gains for the next four years — just long enough to potentially send the Detroit auto industry into a death spiral. On the campaign trail last year, Trump asked oil industry executives for a billion dollars in “campaign cash,” and told the Republican convention that he would “end the electrical vehicle mandate on day one” and thereby save “the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration.” And in his victory speech last November, he celebrated the country’s oil reserves, saying, “We have more liquid gold than anyone else in the world.”

[follow-up-news]

Some health officials say mpox cases in Congo appear to be “stabilizing” — a possible sign that the main epidemic for which the World Health Organization made a global emergency declaration in August might be on the decline. In recent weeks, Congo has reported about 200 to 300 lab-confirmed mpox cases every week, according to WHO. That’s down from nearly 400 cases a week in July. The decline is also apparent in Kamituga, the mining city in the eastern part of Congo where the new, more infectious variant of mpox first emerged. But the U.N. health agency acknowledged Friday that only 40% to 50% of suspected infections in Congo were being tested — and that the virus is continuing to spread in some parts of the country and elsewhere, including Uganda. While doctors are encouraged by the drop in infections in some parts of Congo, it’s still not clear what kinds of physical contact is driving the outbreak. Health experts are also frustrated by the low number of vaccine doses the central African nation has received — 265,000 — and say that delivering the vaccine to where it’s needed in the sprawling country is proving difficult. WHO estimates 50,000 people have been immunized in Congo, which has a population of 110 million.

[rincewindsapprentice]

Not to do a 'hot take' but the idea that the Soviet Union was uniquely awful in the 20th century just doesn't really make sense.

Important for reading comprehension: the Soviet Union was an imperialist power that did stamp down on mass movements and did kill millions of people, overthrow peacefully elected regimes, and repressed much of its population. This post is about how it is characterized as uniquely evil and awful and terrible

The important point is that so many other nations in the 20th century did terrible shit on the order of the atrocities committed by and in the Soviet Union. For example, Britain perpetuated the Bengal Famine (0.8-3.8 million deaths), the US overthrew peacefully elected governments across Latin America (eg Peru), Africa (eg Congo), and Asia (eg Iran), the Belgians committed atrocities in the Congo and instigated genocide and instability in the region (eg Rwanda/Burundi genocides), etc etc etc. The constant need to disavow the Soviet Union is just anticommunism and is pro-capitalist and is not well informed by history. It is a relic of the Cold War.

You literally cannot say a single positive thing about what people in the Soviet Union did, or even what the Communist Party did, without someone chiming in to say "well actually, it was evil, remember?" So is the US, so is the UK, etc. etc. But we (generally) don't feel a need to add that same kind of disclaimer if a US citizen did something good in the 20th century or if the French government did a good thing after WWII.

[jasperthehatchet]

🌟🌿welcome🌿🌟

🦎 My name is Hatchet

🌞 I'm passionate about disability rights, inclusivity, queer trans nonbinary and intersex rights, indigenous rights, environmentalism, prison abolition and restorative justice and all those wonderful things. As well as fighting against/completely dismantling racism, antisemitism (especially leftist antisemitism), dehumanization, police brutality, fascism, capitalism, colonialism, queerphobia, intersexism and oppression/bigotry of all kinds

*** Minors: This is not really an NSFW blog but be aware I do reblog stuff about sex/kink positivity as well as pro-sex work things ***

*** Tags with resources and donation links include: #palestine, #sudan, #armenia, #congo ***

🌵 Hobbies: sewing, mending, upcycling, painting, embroidery, bookbinding, dream-journaling, thrifting, cooking, jewelry making, chainmaille, basket weaving, and various other punk crafts as well <3 basically my purpose in life is to Make Stuff. I'm also a collector of shinies and trinkets like dice, coins, shells, rocks, crystals, rings, keys, thimbles, bells, etc. Any shiny trinket you can think of I probably collect it (recent collections include soda tabs and occlupanids aka those plastic bread clips)

Hobbies I'm looking into starting: paper making, paint/ink making, stone/wood carving, leather working, terrarium building, gardening and lino printing/stamp making :)

🌻 I am very active on Pinterest for art inspiration, if you'd like you can follow me here (or search @juno_monsoon)

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

• IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE •

1. I block radfems, swerfs/terfs, antisemites, leftist antisemites, islamophobes, queerphobes, imtersexists, fatphobes/bodyshamers, anti-kink/puritanical weirdos, anti men/masculinity weirdos, anyone who's weird about indigenous people, eco fascists, blogs that romanticize eating disorders, AI "artists" and blogs, empty blogs, elitists of any kind, etc.

2. Minors: I have no authority over you but please beware. This is not really an NSFW blog but I do reblog stuff about sex/kink positivity as well as pro-sex work things. I'm not looking to know anyone's age but please be careful if you're a minor

3. You can dm me or send me asks whenever, i encourage you to reach out if you want to talk about hobbies, politics (in good faith), crafting, art, music, fandoms, or whatever! Just don't be a jackass

4. I don't respond to being tagged in chain posts or tagging games. I also really hate reblog bait and guilt-trippy posts I do not care what they're about

5. DO NOT repost ANY of my art or creations please and thank you

6. I tag critical role spoilers with #critical role, #critical role spoilers, #cr spoilers and #critrole spoilers

7. Spam liking/reblogging is perfectly fine I don't mind it at all. Go nuts

8. Things I've made/mended are tagged with #hatchet mends things and #hatchet makes stuff

[littlestampcollection]

[postcards-and-postcrossing]

Sunday Stamps: Indigenous African Stamps

Tanzania – 1985 Water and cooking pots. Mtungi is a settlement in Kenya’s Coast Province. Lesotho – 1980 Beer Brewing Pot. Moritsoana Congo Republic – 1979 Vessels of the Earth – Stamp Exhibition Ohilexafrique 2 Libreville Zaire – 1979 Dancer The Zaire River Expedition Togo – 1941 Women Pounding Grain Linked to Sunday Stamps