#one good thing about the pandemic. as much as the business newspaper articles want to convince you..... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thessalian · 3 years ago

Text

Thess vs the UK PM’s Audacity

And now it’s time for another edition of Prime Minister’s Questions: Explained! Where an ex-pat Canadian stranded in this pile of shite they call a country (through the fault of the government; there are some lovely people here) explains what the fuck is going on with British politics at the moment through the medium of paraphrasing (though not by much) the nonsense that comes out of Johnson’s mouth during that time of week when Parliament’s allowed to ask him questions ... that he is then apparently allowed to not actually answer.

Johnson: First of all, I’d like to open by saying Happy Birthday to Her Majesty the Queen, since it’s her birthday tomorrow!

Most of the country: What, the lady in her late nineties that you insisted on trying to visit in person at the start of the pandemic at great risk to that lady’s life? The lady you lied to repeatedly? Spare us the platitudes, okay?

Johnson: Tomorrow I’m going to India to pretend at some relevance on the global stage!

Most of the country: Do you think you can forget to be a colonial-era-reject sonuvabitch for that long?

Also most of the country: Any chance they could keep you and we could have Narendra Modi?

Conservative MP: I can’t help but notice that we haven’t been allocated any bus funding. Mind explaining that one?

Johnson: The government wants to put more into buses!

Most of the country: Then why isn’t it?

Starmer: So Allegra Stanton - why’d she have to resign, again? (Note: it was because she joked about covering up parties that happened during lockdown.)

Johnson: Oh, it was such a pity when she resigned. She did such a good job; delivered just the right kind of meaningless, nonsensical but catchy slogan my government is known for!

Starmer: Not really an answer, and I suspect I won’t get one for asking about Neil Ferguson resigning for much teh same reason.

Johnson: He did the right thing!

Starmer: And did Hancock do the right thing when he resigned over really breaking the rules about close contact when not for work business by making out with his colleague-and-mistress?

Johnson: I made him do that! That right thing he did is thanks to me!

Starmer: They all resigned over either breaking lockdown rules or covering up breaches of lockdown rules. So why is it that the only person not facing consequences for this shit is you?

Johnson: You’re caught in a Doctor Who-style timewarp! (Yes, he actually said this.) I dealt with all of this yesterday! I burned a lot of energy being apologetic and I want you to ask me good questions! Like, about my energy plan, and how good I’m making myself look about Ukraine!

Starmer: Yeah, you were all humble yesterday and this is quite the turn-around since you clearly think that an apology is a rug to sweep your bullshit under. Do you acknowledge that you broke the law?

Johnson: I dealt with all this yesterday! (Note: he did not; mostly he sounded like he was sorry he got caught.) Your line of questioning indicates your entire party’s intellectual bankruptcy!

Most of the country: Says the man who spent five minutes rambling to the nation’s business leaders about Peppa Pig World, but never mind...

Starmer: So now you’re reduced to “five year old having a tantrum”. Man, that apologetic mien disappeared fast. So. About that shit you were saying about the Archbishop of Canterbury, accusing him of saying you’re worse than Putin because of that thing about wanting to ship refugees to Rwanda...

Johnson: I should not be being attacked over a policy that was someone else’s idea until they decided it couldn’t be done because of some soppy crap like ‘human rights’! You’re just a Corbynista in a sharp suit!

Most of the country: .............wut?!?

Starmer: Dude, Corbyn isn’t even in the Labour Party anymore. Oh, also you were talking shit about the BBC being hard on you over the “ship the bloody foreigners to Rwanda” plan; will you refuse to apologise to them too?

Johnson: Listen, I used to write newspaper articles from the comfort of a cushy ergonomic chair until they sacked me for lying; I know exactly what those brave reporters in Ukraine are going through! I never said anything bad about the BBC!

Starmer: An article in the Telegraph - the paper you used to write for, by the way - says different, mate.

Johnson: Look, you must be out of your tiny mind! We’re on the road to economic recovery thanks to me!

Most of the rest of the country, struggling for food and basic necessities: ..........I beg your fucking pardon?!?

SNP Leader at Westminster: So 82% of the people in my country - YES I SAID COUNTRY BECAUSE SCOTLAND’S GETTING OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE AS SOON AS WE POSSIBLY CAN - think you’re a lying toe-rag. Are they right?

Johnson: I went over all this yesterday!

SNP Leader: Hey, know what would make a great birthday gift for the Queen? YOUR RESIGNATION.

Johnson: If I were such a political liability, you wouldn’t want to be rid of me so badly!

Most of the country: ...............wut.

Plaid Cymru Leader at Westminster: In our “also wants to be its own country soon” neck of the woods, we’ve been calling for a bill that bans politicians for lying for, like, a decade and a half. Would you support such a bill?

Johnson: Commons demands that ministers tell the truth in Parliament.

Most of the country: First, not what she was asking, given the Brexit bus mess. Second, Commons clearly doesn’t demand anything of the sort, and certainly not from the Prime Minister.

Another Tory MP: Will you appoint a minister for men?

Johnson: We’re committed to tackling the health problems specific to men.

Most of the country: *ticks off non-answered question number eight on their scorecards*

Labour MP: So how many of you Tory jerk-socks have been involved in tax avoidance?

Johnson: We believe in reducing taxes!

Most of the country, looking at their increased tax burdens: For people like the Chancellor’s wife, sure!

(Two fluff questions that didn’t get answered at all)

Another Labour MP: So isn’t it wrong for people in government to benefit from tax havens?

Johnson: We have lowered taxes for everybody!

Press Recap Side Note: Taxes are actually rising by a LOT.

Most of the country: .........The Lion, the Witch, and the audacity of this bitch!

More Labour MPs: When are you resigning over blatantly breaking the law?!?

Johnson: WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS. I AM BUSY DELIVERING FOR THE BRITISH PEOPLE!

Most of the country: Delivering what; poverty and despair?

Johnson: ASK ME ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE!

Tory MP: Yes, sir! What will you do to ensure Putin’s brought to justice for the shit he’s pulling in Ukraine!

Johnson: ...............The savagery unleashed by the Russians knows no limits and is clearly authorised from the very top but we don’t say the P-name in relation to justice...

Labour MP: Are you still saying there was no Covid profiteering?

Johnson: Well ... I guess maybe a little ... I’ll just say we’re trying to get it back and mouth the right things about it being deplorable despite the fact that I personally enabled it, okay?

Another SNP MP: You’re basically Pinocchio!

Speaker of the House: Withdraw that, please. You’re not allowed to call him a liar.

This Brave SNP MP: I technically didn’t use the word ‘liar’, and I won’t withdraw it until Johnson packs his bags and goes!

MPs (mostly Tory): That wasn’t a real withdrawal!

Speaker of the House: ...Meh, good enough.

Tory MP: So your glorious Rwanda plan is going to be one of the benefits of Brexit because crackdown on people smuggling, right?

Johnson: Well, it’s an idea I stole from a man too moral to actually force it through, but yes ... unless those Corbynistas in suits over on the Labour benches get their way.

Tory MP: You said once back in 2011 in a Telegraph article that beyond a certain point, leaders are only concerned with staying in power. That ringing any bells for you, sir?

Johnson: Good for you for reading the Telegraph! Now finish reading the article instead of pulling out a quote that makes me look bad. No more questions!

Knighted Tory MP: Point of order: Tories believe in the BBC and Starmer misled the House by saying that thing about the Prime Minister being mean about them; I know because I was there! Starmer should be forced to withdraw the comment and get the same treatment as he wants for Johnson.

Speaker of the House: Dude, he was quoting a newspaper; shut up.

This is not entirely verbatim, but close enough. PMQs get weirder every week.

#Thess on politics

3 notes · View notes

femmesfollesnebraska · 3 years ago

Text

Artist Feature: Kara Dunne

Pleased to present this q-and-a with artist Kara Dunne. All words and images (c) Kara Dunne...

A Trailer is a Castle on Its Side

Where are you from? How did you get into creative work and what is your impetus for creating?

I like to say I’m from Vermont because that’s where I was born and most likely will end up someday. Currently I live in Massachusetts.

My observation skills got me into creative work. I was always good at drawing from observation growing up, and in general observing things that were odd or quirky in the world. Once I tapped into these heightened skills of seeing things in a new way, I think the gift of creativity followed suit. Once you are super-honed into the world around you, you naturally start making unusual connections that you’d like to share (secretly in hopes that you may be the first one to make them of course).

As a practicing artist over the years, my work accumulates around me in boxes and flat file drawers. And since I mostly create multiples of things, sometimes I feel like an unintentional hoarder. But the thing is, unlike a hoarder, I don’t want to hold on to the stuff I make. I have increasingly felt the “what is the point of producing all this stuff?” question that is not unique to the artist’s experience. I can relate to the: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, then it doesn’t make a sound” concept. If I make work that remains in my flat file, then it too, remains silent. So what is the point? I can only amuse myself for so long by producing for myself. One needs an audience. Coming from a performance background, audience interaction for me was always the most exciting part of the practice. I’ve recently made it my main goal as a printmaker to reach an audience with my work by finding new ways in which I can just give my prints away. I’ve never wanted to sit with my stuff at a table making puppy dog eyes in order for people to stop and buy something from me. No surprise that I was terrible at selling girl scout cookies.

Tell me about your latest project and why its important to you. What do you hope people get out of your work?

Just before the world shut down, which for me was a year before the pandemic because my time was happily consumed as a new mom, I had just finished a long term research project that connected the agrarian and urban versions of what it meant to be a shepherd and gather something. It compared the idea of a shopping cart attendant at the grocery store to that of a traditional shepherd gathering and caring for a flock of sheep. The final result from my years of research into this concept was a limited edition artists’ book, titled, Shopping Cart Shepherds. Printed on a letterpress, it combined drawings, screen-prints and interviews from my conceptual journey that began in 2012 when I spent time in a small town in Ireland (and yes, around sheep and people who raised sheep). I met a local man in his eighties named Tom Tarpey, who had been raising sheep for about thirty years at that point. Strangely enough and quite a rarity in Catholic history, he was the retired priest of the town. He had left the church in order to marry the love of his life. Once a shepherd of the people, he became a shepherd of sheep. What a rare find! I thoroughly enjoy my work when I can interact with the world more directly; when my artistic research connects me to people in places I have never been and with whom I remain in contact with. I have all these great big ideas, and usually I will be hesitant at first (shy?) to make connections with the community in order to see those ideas come into fruition, but ultimately things pan out in one way or another. For example, when I came home from Ireland and was blabbing about sheep, a friend gave me a newspaper article about traditional Basque shepherds still working in this country- in the mountains in Idaho. For a long time, the article was taped to my wall as a reminder to contact some guy I read about named Henry Etcheverry. In 2014 I was awarded a residency at a fabulous spot called Surel’s Place (thank you so much Surel Mitchell), and it gave me the opportunity to the make necessary connections out there for this book. Needless to say, it was an amazing experience and the Etcheverry family embraced me like one of their own; and I learned a lot about sheep. I now consider them my extended west coast family.

110 copies of the book, Shopping Cart Shepherds, exist (that’s all I could afford to get printed) and inside the back cover it asks the reader to pass the book along to someone else once they finish it. It is my hope that the ideas in this book will travel and reach more than 110 people. (More trees falling in more forests?) I have given away most of the copies at this point, both to people I know and don’t know. The books serve as messages in bottles- it’s honestly difficult to not to have control over where they go, but I guess an artist never really knows where their artwork will end up after it is purchased anyway. Perhaps my books are mostly buried in the sand dunes of someone’s office book pile, or they have actually reached new beaches far far away. I will never know.

Since completing this major work, all of my ideas for making prints have the underlying purpose of getting out into the world and reaching an audience.

I find certain design elements of architecture to be amusing, and often make work about the structures around us, as they are extensions of our culture and can change with popularity just like anything else. Cupolas, ultimately a very useful and functional architectural ventilation add-on to barns and other large buildings, have been on the rise where I live. Decorative cupolas mainly, seem to show up on top of garages overnight, like cherries atop sundaes. (Makes the sundae and the house look better). I made an edition of screen-prints based on this idea- a vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce and sprinkles in a fancy glass serving dish…with a cupola on top. To get them out to cupola-adorning people, I made up a survey of questions about cupolas. I printed the survey onto paper door hangers and distributed them. The survey could be cut out from the door hanger as a postcard and mailed to my special P.O. box in town. If the survey was sent back, that household would receive an original artist print. I had the post box and distributed the door hangers for a few months before I had to stop the project because of the emergence of covid. I had received at least a dozen responses at that point, and mailed out a portion of the edition. I’d like to start it up again at some point.

My next print- based community outreach project idea is in process now and will involve restaurant placemats. I just need to make some local restaurant connections. (Another pre-pandemic idea forced to simmer on the back burner). Here’s the basic idea. A table at a restaurant is the perfect gallery space. It is especially ideal because it is the location where a group of people will sit and wait for a long period of time together with nothing else to do but sit and chit-chat in one place. Not even in a gallery do you have the same group of people staying near each other and talking for longer than fifteen minutes in front of a single artwork.

A paper placemat at a restaurant is viewed for a longer period of time than a work of art on a gallery wall. It is hard not to look at a placemat- it is one of the few places to look while waiting for food. I will use the format of the dining placemat as a way to bring fine art into the everyday world. I believe an etching is the perfect kind of print for this project. An etching is considered the finest of fine art printmaking, mainly because the process of making an etching plate is just as time consuming as printing the edition itself. Also, it would be perfectly ironic if a plate made a placemat. And the thought of such a sacred piece of paper so carefully processed as an art work that should end up underneath someone’s sweaty beer glass and dinner plate is simply…exciting to me. Equally, the thought that a restaurant guest may decide to not get it messy because they want to take it home is the kind of leave-it-to-chance scenario that I gravitate to as an artist; it forces me to relinquish my control and challenges the idea of art as an artifact. For the viewer, the idea plays with the preciousness of “art” and the context in which we view a work of art (in a gallery vs. the real world). For the restaurant owner, it may also bring more business and create a new kind of hype attracting more customers. Let’s say I print a series of five placemats, and if people collect all five placemats they get a free limited edition non-placemat print worth X amount of dollars. Or maybe they collect all five and get ten dollars off their next meal. Something like that.

This project connects directly with the public and gets the fine art print into the hands of the everyday person. The imagery within the frame of the placemat will vary- from beautiful local scenery and landmarks (as everyone enjoys a pretty picture), to several different designs that will engage the table with non-phone related activities- like a dining room scavenger hunt or a list of dinner conversation starters, as well as other designs that are more cerebral and open to interpretation, serving as conversation starters themselves (with digestion friendly, witty imagery). It is also my intention to make one of the placemats at each table have a QR code with a link to a video of how the placemat was produced, essentially educating the public about what an etching is, and moreover- what printmaking is.

Considering the political climate, how do you think the temperature is for the arts right now, what/how do you hope it may change or make a difference?

The climate is quite volatile right now, to say the least, and I think artists have a responsibility now more than ever to connect people from both sides of a political issue in order to start a meaningful conversation. I think the temperature for artists right now is great- get in the pool! Art always impacts at least one person looking at it, so that’s something. Art is mainly a non-confrontational way to interpret something about the world that needs to change for others who may not understand why change needs to happen. The best example I can think of within the visual arts is installation and involves statistic- based information. For example, a person may come across a beautiful sculpture of a sea monster made from plastic cups. Then they read about the work and how two million cups were used to make the work and that two million cups end up in the ocean every day; that person now has the physical representation in front of them of what two million actually means and it is forever burned into their mind. That person can stand next to the giant sculpture of cups and can better understand what the number means in relation to how it impacts the environment. A real life artwork that is forever burned in my mind like this is a video piece by the ceramic artist Ehren Tool called the ‘1.5 Second War Memorial’. In it, every 1.5 seconds a cup is shot and breaks. Each cup represents a human life. You would have to watch the video for eight minutes to get to the number of people who died in the Gulf War (Tool is a veteran of that war) and watch the video for two years to get to the number of total casualties in WWII.

Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, examined the perspective of femininity and race in her work, and spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art; does feminism play a role in your work?

More often than not, feminism lies under the surface of my work. How can it not, as I am living as a woman in this world? Feminism is always going to be relevant. It does not end, it is forever in existence; Feminism should not be considered as waves of the past, but as the water itself. I hate that ‘feminism’ is still considered a ‘dirty’ word. Mostly I experience this as a high school teacher, when every so often I will have a male student who expresses their thoughts about what they think feminism is and after I cringe, mostly internally and sometimes externally, I sadly realize that this wrongly informed opinion comes from the belief system of the parents. I try my best to inform them of what is true and false without becoming pushy; it is my hope that these particular students gain more perspective in the world through life experiences once their bubble becomes bigger- and of course once their bubble of close-mindedness has popped.

Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of when to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.” What is your favorite advice you have received or given?

One of my first professors, Nick Tobier, had a five line mantra of sorts that he told us to write down during his first lecture.

“Public space is yours to take.

Reveal the things that are hidden.

What you see has been filtered for you.

Let private notions become public.

You can make icons”

https://www.karadunne.com/

Les Femmes Folles was a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world. Editor Sally Brown retired from active blogging after 10 years in 2021, but still accepts submissions. [email protected] https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing

Check out the 10th anniversary LFF exhibit, Feminist Connect, here:

https://www.les-femmes-folles-feminist-connect.com/

#contemporaryart #feministart

1 note · View note

seedfinance · 3 years ago

Text

Here’s what consumers what from financial offerings

Source: Pexels / Anete Lusina.

What is an expert Is it someone who understands the state of affairs sufficiently to remember facts about them, or is it someone who takes what others see and uses it to teach them what might be?

Experts everywhere are talking about the “banking revolution” in which fintechs such as BeforePay, Afterpay and YouPay are involved. There’s been a deluge of articles from economists, venture capitalists, financial journalists, and Tom next door who hit the digital press with just a handful of the same views.

Not unlike the “photographers” who created digital cameras on millions of people almost overnight, the fact that anyone can now publish an article on a subject for free has resulted in almost everyone doing so. But few of them seek their own truth.

Take, for example, buy-now-pay-later companies, whose value grew almost entirely due to the growing number of experts calling them “revolutionary”. Soon more piled up, until almost everyone said they were “the next big thing,” everyone was buying stocks and driving the price higher and higher. That doesn’t change the fundamentals of a company.

There are dozens of companies out there that help me spend my wages before I have it, when I may never have it, when I shouldn’t spend it, and when I couldn’t spend it before. The experts speak of them as if payday lenders, lay-buy, credit cards and consumer finance were new topics – they are not. Afterpay’s own goal, described in their June 2015 pitch, was to charge consumers up to 20% interest and 𝙩𝙤 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙛𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙚��𝙨𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙜𝙧𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙖𝙢𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙩 𝙚𝙭𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙨; and the experts are still talking about a revolution.

Why don’t the experts talk about companies that care about my pay?

Where are the thousands of experts who write about ordinary people sticking to their salary or raising their salary, increasing their salary, or learning how to use their salary to help them and others in new and empowering ways? That would be a revolution.

What about the companies that teach me that every time I spend it too early, if I spend it too early, I’ll get less of it?

What about the companies that tell me the things I don’t want to hear in a way that is open to me so that tomorrow I can be the only expert I need to keep improving my wages?

Change is coming

There are a small but growing number of companies aiming to change this industry for the better. They come from dark corners of the world, led by people who don’t come from the financial world, but from everyday life, who are fed up with an industry and a world that relies on it, that celebrates the dumbest ideas.

These are people who speak of “companies that make sense”; Companies that make money by helping people, not praying for them. The media are not yet raising their voices, but their voices are reaching the consumers – the customers – the common people who will bear the costs of this industry and force them to change.

It’s a movement that is increasing in pace and size. Google searches for “Inclusive Capitalism” have increased by 3,900% in the last 5 years alone. Check out other terms describing why capitalism is broken and why wealth inequality is growing, and you will get a sense of the swelling sense of millions of people that has all the makings of a generational movement in its infancy.

These companies will introduce a new way to make money in finance that is so ethical that it is so focused on the common people that it is almost inevitable that their ideas will flourish. They are building companies that are not just products for consumers, but platforms for a movement that is growing in a generation that is fed up with a system that takes more from them than there is.

In short, the biggest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen is coming to a generation currently being so punished by the system that they will use their wealth to demand a new one.

Young people hate capitalism; it’s not their system. It is a system that belonged to the generations before them and that they paid a heavy price for.

In 2007, young people experienced a “one-time recession” while forming their view of the world. Between 2011 and 2019, when these views solidified, their wages stayed the same, but their costs rose around them. As a result, they built 34% less wealth than the generation before them of the same age.

In 2020, they experienced another “one-time recession” and were imprisoned for a year, isolated from the experiences they learned to cherish in lieu of unreachable wealth.

At the start of the pandemic, there was 1 person worth $ 100 billion. Now there are 9.

Young people see it, they live it, they feel it every day, because they pay a higher tax rate on their small wages than billionaires on all their wealth.

Millennials currently hold 4.8% of wealth. There are now 40-year-old millennials. At the same age, the baby boomers held 21% of the wealth. Regardless of your opinion of the generation above or below you, this is undeniably important.

In 2018, 51% of 18 to 29-year-olds found socialism favorable, while only 30% found capitalism good (US YouGov survey 2018). Most revealing, however, is that the definition of socialism is changing in this age group. Only 22% believe that socialism involves state control; most just think that it means more equality.

What these 51% of people are actually saying is that they see ethics and fairness as much more important than profit. And all of this before we locked them in their rooms at high cost for a year to protect the generations from a virus. Now imagine the numbers …

A 2016 Gallup survey found that 90% of 18-29 year olds rate entrepreneurs positively. 98% of them rated small businesses positively because they were perceived as a lack of greed.

The support of a business model by 98% of a market is a metric that would blow any professional off the socks, and yet “Afterpay” is still their headline. They are too busy talking about the returns they can get by using that 98% to see the upside potential of a company that makes money by raising the same people to stand up for movement and own it, not just use it as a business to buy products they cannot afford.

A majority of young people support ethical and responsible business practices, an overwhelming majority support entrepreneurs, and almost all support companies with a perceived lack of greed.

Why don’t the experts say that entrepreneur-led companies build platforms with reasonable profit? Or platforms that offer ethical solutions to a generation with unparalleled social values? Where are the experts talking about the companies that are providing this generation with a way to build a system that will reduce wealth inequality rather than increase it?

Why aren’t the experts examining how the company that does this best could possibly be the next Google?

They don’t talk about afterpay anymore while the generation that will take over the controls supports systemic change to the point where you pay for a t-shirt for 8 weeks it’s like arguing about which coal the best is while we’re all driving past a wind farm.

The “real experts”

Right now there are a few people developing solutions in the shadows that will soon take this world by storm. VCs are not investing in them yet, newspapers are not reporting on them yet. They have nothing to do with crypto or blockchain, they are not against capitalism or against the government – these people don’t even have a single tin foil hat. They are the people who think that a small change in the way an industry makes money could change the whole world.

It’s people like you and me who are tired of living in a world that celebrates successes achieved through the exploitation of others. They are not idealists; They know what human nature is and they believe it can be used to educate people, not just to make money by keeping them small.

These people work on companies that not only improve products or services, but show the world how to build a financial system that benefits more than fewer people – companies that tell people not just how badly they are being treated, but offer products that clearly prove this.

Apple may make it clear to its customers that they don’t need banks, but the next super company is going to show the world how powerful groups of people can be when the financial system they belong to is built for them, not built on them.

The experts are all out there looking for the next Google – want to invest in it, to say they see it coming. I often wonder how they’re going to find it when they can’t even talk about where to look.

This article was first published on LinkedIn.

source https://seedfinance.net/2021/08/02/heres-what-consumers-what-from-financial-offerings/

0 notes

thesevillereport · 4 years ago

Text

In Focus: AT&T Value or Trap?

May 2009, Time Warner announces it will spin off America Online (AOL) as a separate company. The announcement would bring an unceremonious end to the eight year marriage of the two companies.

The merger of old Time Warner and new AOL was announced back in 2000 by AOL. AOL, the relatively new kid on the block was buying an old media company in what would be the largest merger in U.S. history at the time. The newly formed business was supposed to usher in a new type of media company, and lay a path for other new and old media companies to follow.

Unfortunately for investors the synergies that the two management teams had hoped for never materialized for the mega media company. From the day before the merger, up to the eventual split Time Warner's stock dropped 80%. The merger was a disaster. Ted Turner, Time Warner's largest shareholder at the time lost $8 billion of his worth, and other investors lost billions of dollars on what would be labeled the worst deal in history.

Time Warner would eventually recover from the failed AOL takeover just by having ownership of an extreme amount of content, which during the digital era became a very valuable commodity. The digital era made content king, and that made Time Warner a major target for any old company looking to make a place for itself in the digital era.

Old, Lost, and Confused

AT&T (T), a company which has found itself behind the curve for the last 20 years envisioned a play where it could make itself new and relevant again. The telephone giant would purchase Time Warner in 2019 for $85 billion making the old company, not quite so old.

But a new partner, with new content, new offerings, and the same old management, equates to an old, just not so old company.

In the world where AT&T was a titan, people paid for everything, all of their goods, and all of their services. People did very little for free outside of broadcast television. When AT&T was king, local calls cost a certain amount of money per minute, long distance calls cost two times as much as local calls did, and international calls were two times the cost or more of long distance calls. When the internet spread, and dial up was king, AT&T experienced another win, as homes across the U.S. added a second home line just for their internet, and AT&T got to charge consumers by the minute for the time they were connected to the internet.

AT&T would learn the hardware that the digital era and the era of the internet was about value and ecosystems. Companies like Google (GOOGL) copied Microsoft's top selling Office program and allowed customers to use it for free, giving Google search users more reason to stay in the Google ecosystem. Before that Yahoo (VZ) gave users access to free news, sports scores, and stock prices. What Yahoo provided for almost nothing, newspapers charged for. Giving consumers "free" products and services in hopes that they stay engaged with a website or an ecosystem was becoming the new way of doing business. Charging customers for every single thing a company produced was dying, AT&T and others never got the message, and still haven't.

Help Us... You're Our Only Hope

Jason Kilar, the fairly new CEO of Warner Media (the Time Warner division of the new AT&T) is the only member of AT&T's top five leaders with a background in new media. Kilar was the founding CEO of Hulu and co-founded an online video platform Vessel, which was later acquired by Verizon. The rest of AT&T's top five are people with a lot of experience in old media and old business.

What separates the winners from the losers in the digital era is value and distribution. Customers gravitate towards platforms, services, and ecosystems where there is a perceived sense of value (Amazon Prime, the Google ecosystem, and Netflix (NFLX)) and where the content is easily accessible. The assumption by me is that Jason Kilar understands this concept, but do the other leaders of the new AT&T understand it?

My initial answer is no. If value and distribution are truly the keys of success for a new age media company, then Apple got it right by offering a free year of Apple TV+ to every new iPhone, iPad, and Mac purchaser. AT&T wasn't so generous with it's HBO Max offering.

HBO and the ideal of HBO Max was the meat of the AT&T - Time Warner deal. If rolled out properly HBO Max would be a legitimate competitor to Netflix and add another subscription based revenue stream to AT&T's business.

HBO Max gained 4.1 million subscribers within the first month of its launch, a nice number, but still a long way off from Netflix's 72 million subscribers and Disney Plus' 60 million subscribers.

Bulls and Bears

Currently AT&T's stock trades at $28.04 per share, down 28% for 2020, but it is still attracting investors who are mesmerized by the 7% dividend ratio ($2.08 per share) and a forward P/E of 8.77x as of this writing.

A recent Forbes article suggested that the stock is oversold from a technical analysis point of view. Fundamentally, there aren't many believers on Wall Street. Most buy cases for the stock revolve around the high dividend yield, but with the caveat that the dividend ratio is high for a reason (because the share price is falling).

The AT&T bears point to the company's massive debt load, $175 billion. Pre-COVID-19 the plan for AT&T was to divest assets and pay down their debt. But when the coronavirus appeared the company had to tap the debt markets, and issued $3 billions in new debt in May 2020 to boost its liquidity.

Content in the Wrong Hands is Worthless

Investors should not be blinded by the AT&T dividend or the digital streaming aspect of the business at this point. It's still an old company trying to figure out how to be new.

The content is there for the company to be a real player in digital media, but good content in the wrong hands can be worthless, and to date AT&T has not proven they are the right hands for all that Time Warner/ Warner Media provides.

AT&T is still stuck in doing business the way it did business when it dominated the telephone industry. It still wants to charge every customer it can for every product and service leaving the building. For AT&T wireless customers, only those with an unlimited plan and 5 phone lines are eligible for a free HBO Max subscription. With over 150 million wireless customers, I expected AT&T to follow Apple's lead and give six months to a year of free HBO Max to any AT&T subscriber starting a new contract, a move that I felt would've provided value for its customers, and distribution for its content, but it dropped the ball.

The lesson for investors is to be weary of the old merging with the new, it rarely ever goes well. Old companies and old executives who reigned during the days where the consumer paid for everything upfront continue to have a hard time adapting to the new way of doing business in the digital era. Their failure to recognize and play by the new rules stunts growth for their companies and investor portfolios.

Side Note: Why is Quibi Failing?

Quibi, the struggling content company that launched in April 2020, has several well known giants of old media running the show and one former Netflix executive, Juan Bongiovanni. There is a lot of old thinking in the C-Suite at Quibi. This became very apparent when people for MrBeast reached out to Quibi for a content deal and Quibi passed. MrBeast is one of the most successful and relevant content creators on the YouTube platform, and currently has over 43 million YouTube subscribers.

Quibi is expected to end 2020 with 7 million subscribers, which is 30% below their target according to Variety. Quibi execs have blamed the pandemic for the app's struggles out the gate. But it's not the pandemic, it's their old way of thinking.

#stocks #investing #investements #ATT #Streaming Wars #HBOMax #InvestmentEducation #InvestmentResearch #FinancialEducation #Wall Street #Business #Netflix #Disney Plus #Dividend Stocks #Value Stocks #Quibi

0 notes

explanatoryessayformat565 · 4 years ago

Video

youtube

buy college papers

About me

Best Essay Writing Service

Best Essay Writing Service Moreover, I got here back right here to write down that I received B for it. I don’t have a broad experience in using online services but I’m far from being disappointed which is nice. She did everything very fast and was very meticulous. I guess the corporate doesn't have any significant distinction from all the opposite writing companies. The phrases and costs are kind of the identical everywhere. If there are some difficulties, you'll be able to always turn to our cash-again guarantee. Do not fear, we've a plagiarism-detection algorithm that ensures originality of your papers. You will get solely unique content on account of our cooperation. As an independent student newspaper and the paper of report for the city of Berkeley, the Daily Cal has been speaking necessary updates throughout this pandemic. APA is a publication manual broadly utilized by professionals, researchers and students in the social and behavioural sciences, including fields like education, psychology, and business. I’m glad there's a risk to alter writer if I’m not completely happy with the initial selection. Thank you to the support team for being so affected person and attentive to my requests. It was a pleasure to cooperate with such a gifted and well mannered author! Got my paper on time, didn't even need to ask for revisions. I have nothing to complain about, I got the paper on time, it was good. I received my paper sooner than the deadline and it seems great. An APA abstract is a one paragraph (± 250 words) summary of your paper. It introduces the target or downside assertion of the paper and includes information on the strategy, analysis outcomes, and conclusions of your analysis. In a separate article we explain in-depth how to write an abstract. We believe that any respected online group must function round the clock customer support for its clients to have fixed entry to assistance. In this regard, WriteMyEssayOnline offers its clients a certified shopper care team that will find the right solution to any problem they face. I should say the writing seems logical and structured. I haven’t seen so many insightful ideas in one paper for a really long time! I’m glad I can avoid al the stressful moments correlated with writing a paper beneath stress. It is not like you are going to cooperate with the best minds in the universe however all the writers I employed so far have been expert sufficient to ship what I needed. A good editing follow also includes spending additional time on the issues you may have had trouble with prior to now. You would possibly then make another cross, just trying to make sure your in-text citations are appropriate. You shouldn’t start editing till you feel assured in your revisions. Once you feel your content material is where you need it to be, it’s time to start a thorough editing course of. Editing is about making adjustments to your sentences and floor features in your analysis paper. Do you want a legal justice paper that may take a breath away and have unexpected twists and turns? The remuneration of our writers is excessive enough for them to remain loyal to our firm. That is why you can profit so much from getting a chunk of their wisdom and wonderful abilities. Simply problem us with the least thrilling subject and we'll style it in Blizzard, Marvel, or DC – your selection. All information about your papers, submitted to Ghost papers, is discarded once your order is complete. Custom written time period paper for each customer, never resold again. We are strictly against plagiarism hence; all time period papers are proof-read manually before delivery. Creative writing just isn't my forte so thank you for helping me out. The matter is too boring for me to even write an overview. Note that we reserve your money and wait for you to approve the work of our writers. If every little thing is great, the author receives the fee.

0 notes

thepandemicinterviews · 4 years ago

Text

Issy, August 9 2020, Sydney

When a housemate leaves, certain objects, sounds, and interactions disappear from your domestic landscape. Sometimes tears are shed. You say goodbye knowing that you will likely never occupy space together in the same way again.

In my two years of living in this house, I have seen eight people leave (not a reflection on this house or my presence in it, I promise). The most recent loss was Issy. When Issy moved in late January of this year, she immediately baked a cake for my housemate’s birthday. With scissors, she cut all of the overgrown grass in the backyard, then cleared out years worth of junk from the garage. She called for house dinners to become a regular occurrence. Issy, in all of her determination and readiness for life, seemed profoundly unrelatable to me at first. The adjective I used to describe her was “perfect,” meaning good at everything: running, talking, living, kind, intelligent… But the word perfect is too reductive, or cursed with a certain jealousy. It implies a cohesiveness that simply does not exist in the best of people.

Let’s just say then that I love her, and her multiplicity. I’ve loved her presence in this house. At her farewell, I gave her the unedited version of this interview printed on pages stuck to newspaper. Not so much an interview as a chat between two friends drinking red wine with a lot to say. At the risk of sounding too sentimental (no such thing), I’m so glad we got to have this little piece of recorded history together, Issy.

The best part about Issy’s cakes was that they were never too sweet. And she wasn’t either.

The first image included in the interview is an artwork Issy sent me. When I asked her about it, she told me it represented for her an idea of “stagnant motion, connectedness but disconnectedness.” What better captures the feeling of wrestling forward in a year that wants nothing but to hold you back? The artist Nancy Spero, I learnt, was a central figure in the feminist art movement of the mid-20th century. From the MoMA website: Spero described her works as “ephemeral monuments” to the full range of women’s experience: tragic and triumphant, degraded and powerful, victimized and liberated. Multiplicity as the underlying current defining womanhood. Everything is true and simultaneously, wrote Chris Kraus.

Me not being an art scholar, I will rely instead on Spero’s passionately written Wikipedia article: Although her collaged and painted scrolls were Homeric in both scope and depth, the artist shunned the grandiose in content as well as style, relying instead on intimacy and immediacy, while also revealing the continuum of shocking political realities underlying enduring myths. Paying attention to the immediate and the intimate, alongside an understanding of the myths that politics is built upon, seems to me a useful lens through which to study the pandemic today. What is the everyday texture of living through a historically and politically unprecedented time? How do we signal love? What are the myths propelling counterproductive human behaviour? This novel coronavirus laughs in the face of neoliberalism.

I will end this overwrought introduction with this fragment from Spero’s interview with artist Phong Bui:

Spero: You know, being with Leon and having my three beautiful sons, I am really blessed in a lot of ways. Otherwise, by living day-to-day, one realizes the firmness of cruelty, what people do to each other. But then one realizes that it’s always built with double meaning of the conflicted self. Whether it’s through language and gesture and thoughts, and so on…

Bui: That’s true. And that’s why we deal with that intense closeness of that duality through art, instead of hurting ourselves or others which I think is overrated.

However you can, in this dark unending year of 2020, make art instead.

C: This might be a strange question to start with, but what have been some of your favourite memories throughout Covid?

I: That is an interesting one because I definitely think there have been some really beautiful moments. I was looking through my phone camera the other day to see what has happened. I don’t take many photos, but a few things popped out. I definitely remember the night that we all spent together, you know the one that we had that group photo by the table? I think it was when Josh was in the house. It wasn’t my birthday dinner but it was one around that time. The house nights? I feel like we went through a period of having dinners which was super beautiful. Also around my birthday period, I went with Maya – you remember how on my birthday I went and drove to Collaroy? Which is a bit ridiculous. There was a moment when we’d gone to the beach and the sun was almost setting. There were still quite a few people around and Covid hadn’t fully hit the Beaches yet, so there were people around, and I hadn’t been in the ocean in months. And I remember us just finally setting our stuff down on the beach and getting into our swimmers and running into the ocean. And Maya’s very… How to describe her? You can’t. But she’s very beautiful and she was very much like, you know, this is a cleansing moment and experience, and a new year for you, and we need to jump into the ocean and make a wish. Which, when I’m with her, I definitely get on board with. So we jumped into the ocean and it just felt super cleansing and super beautiful and the sun was super warm. So that was a very nice moment. I think also, connecting with her in Australia as opposed to being in France, like last year on my birthday we were in Lyon. And we made a promise that every year, if it’s possible, that we’re going to be in a different country for our birthdays. So that was also hopeful and very nice.

C: So you have the same birthday?

I: No, her birthday’s a couple of months away from mine. But I think we’ll do something for both of them. We’re both birthday people [laughs]. But, yeah, I’m trying to think of other things. I mean, it’s tricky. Because I feel like there’s definitely moments that I’ve forgotten. It feels like it’s been the longest time but also the shortest time, and so much has happened but also nothing has. So I feel like almost just the nothingness has been nice in some moments I suppose.

C: Is that because you don’t feel like you have to be the busy, productive person you are in normal life?

I: I definitely feel like I still have that a little bit [laughs]. It’s funny, because I was kind of wondering what I’ve learnt over Covid. And I think, one thing that I’m still trying to learn is the idea that I need to not value my time and my self based on productivity. Especially when you can’t be that productive. I used to do quite a bit of volunteering, and obviously working a lot, and study and all of the little social events that I’ve been missing. And a lot of that’s been cut out, so it has just been like, trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not be doing things all the time. But it’s also hard because then you’re in your head more. Which is something that I think – I probably subconsciously try to keep busy so that I wasn’t doing that. So that’s been an interesting experience.

C: Can you elaborate on that? Like, how did it change throughout the months? Were there certain time markers for you?

I: Definitely the months have been quite distinct. But they also all merge into one when you think about it. I feel like I’ve had quite fragmented experiences. And I think the time markers are probably a lot to do with the people in my life as opposed to the things that I’ve been doing. Just because I have been doing less. But, I mean obviously having different housemates come into the house, and having different months where different friends are free. Seeing different people has been more of a time marker.

C: And that period when you weren’t working as well…

I: Yeah, I mean it’s tricky because that’s the first time I haven’t worked since I was 14, but at the same time I was so busy with Uni and study that it was probably really positive for my studies. But it did feel very consuming in that as well, in that I felt I had to totally immerse in that. It was fortunate I was doing interesting subjects.

C: What was it like finding out that Uni was online suddenly?

I: It was funny, I found out – I had been at Uni that day, and I went into work that night, and I was talking to some customers about how Covid was just hitting, and how everyone was going. And they were at UNSW, and I was like, Oh, I think UNSW’s shutting down, right? But UTS is probably not going to do that anytime soon. And they were like, Oh, no, UTS has shut down [laughs]. And I was like, what? I was there today! And they were like, Oh, my sister just sent me a screenshot of an email she received tonight. Your uni’s shut down! And so I found out that way, which was funny. But I mean honestly, as a law student, I felt quite lucky and quite privileged that a lot of what I do is totally capable of being online. And I felt really bad for students who are in more practical degrees. I have friends at the National Art School and friends doing med and science and whatnot, which is a lot more lab-based and necessary to be in a studio. Whereas, for law, it’s totally capable of being online. And I quite enjoy independent study. I am lucky to be self-motivated in that sense that I enjoy having my own space and being able to just do my readings. And Zoom has been interesting, watching how people adjust to an online format. And you definitely miss that human connection and having that more organic class discussion, I suppose. But at the same time, it’s very minimal negative compared to what other people are experiencing.

C: I felt like I really enjoyed my English classes on Zoom, and I felt much more willing to participate.

I: Oh really? Why’s that?

C: I think not having the awkward like, not having to signal that I was about to talk – just like, unmuting myself or raising my hand virtually was a lot easier for me than doing it in-person. And I’m always someone who does feel like I’m on the precipice of saying something but I just leave it half a second too long. Being invisible – sometimes I would drink wine, smoke during my classes and I would just be more confident as a result.

I: Yeah, I get that. That makes total sense. I’ve had the inverse experience, because I’m definitely less confident in a virtual setting. I think I’ve had a similar thing where I feel like I miss a second, I miss a beat, and people move on quite quickly in the virtual realm. And so I’ve had that experience this semester. Whereas, usually in class I’m just like, Me! And I just say things and it just flows more naturally for me there I think.

C: Did you have to have video on during your Zoom classes?

I: Yeah.

C: That would’ve changed things for me a lot I think.

I: Did you not?

C: No! No one had video on in either of my classes.

I: Oh, that’s so much nicer. That’s the thing, as soon as you start speaking your face is immediately in front of everybody.

C: Exactly, so I felt really good knowing that no one knew who I was, and I could say shit and no one would attribute it to me. They didn’t know me.

I: That’s interesting though, because you say no one knew who you were, but they knew your name and they knew your voice.

C: Yeah, but this was my last semester, like they would never see me.

I: But do you feel like that’s totally attributable to a visual thing, like to your face? Because, I mean, your name will be something…

C: Partly. I think, also, the class was really well-run, I loved my tutor, and it felt like a space where I could share ideas. And it felt really linked to Covid in a lot of ways, while we were talking about all these big ideas, reading Marx, reading Marcuse, and talking about free speech and universities and all of that. I guess this can lead me onto my next question. Did you feel like any of the things you were learning throughout your semester were linked to what was going on in the world around you? Because you were doing international law and stuff?

I: It’s funny, because that was the thing I was going to say from your comment. I think that’s one thing my studies lacked, was a link. Because it’s crazy we’re all going through this really immediate and collective and present thing in our lives, and then none of the content we were learning was really related to it. And none of the teachers really sought to relate it either. Which I was disappointed with. But also, it was a really tough time for them as well to have to adjust, in terms of entire learning materials, to the present situation. And I think international law always has relevance. Definitely it has become really relevant in the past month or so, with different relations between major players or whatnot. And that’s something I’ve really appreciated and I’ve found a deep interest in that from studying it. But they didn’t relate it to Covid throughout the semester. Maybe they’ll adjust. There’s time. Covid’s still going.

C: Yeah, how do you feel about the ongoingness of this pandemic? Like, we’re in August, we’ve lived through six months of it already. Where does it end?

I: Did you talk about this in your class at all?

C: No. I think we’ve only recently reached the point where we’ve come to terms with it and accepted it as part of daily life. And we don’t know when it’s going to end. But I think, before, everything that happened was so new and shocking and uncomfortable. I feel like we’ve gotten to a place where we’re starting to get comfortable with this new way of life.

I: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s going to be really interesting – I mean, I hope people take this as an opportunity to change a lot of really structural things. But it is going to be interesting how little things that we wouldn’t have considered normal have become normalised, and will just become part of our daily life. I don’t know when this is going to end. I mean, I feel like particularly in Australia, we’re super lucky that it is quite insular. And I mean it’s very easy to look at it at a larger scale and be really overwhelmed with what’s going on in the rest of the world. But in Australia it’s quite easy to feel like nothing has changed, but then obviously everything has. And there’s lots of things that have for a lot of people. If you look at my life, on a personal level, it probably hasn’t massively? But you think about the way that you’ve learnt things over the last few months, and the way that you have perceived things and changed things in your life to accommodate different things. And that’s definitely changed. I think it’s very easy to think that nothing has changed here? Or to minimise that. But it definitely will. And I hope people are aware of that. And I think one of the positive things that’s come out of this is this sense of collective experience. And obviously not everyone’s having the same experience; it might be like a super privileged view to be like, The Collective! But, you know, I think people are probably more willing to empathise in certain situations now.

C: It’s just such a rare event to happen. And it’s so rare for everyone to be affected by it. To be affected by anything singular. So I do think it’s a collective experience that we haven’t had previously, but obviously everyone’s going to have a different experience, but it is still a collective experience to go through.

I: Definitely. And I think in a time where everyone is so virtually connected as well. Like I don’t think the world has experienced a pandemic like this where everyone has been able to have a platform where they can voice their own experiences and feel a sense of community, worldwide even. Which is very interesting. I think the Internet is a slowly rising tide of panic, so it’s hard to… I think another thing that has really emerged in this time for me has been this idea of like – and I think you spoke to Zach a little bit about this – is this idea of like balancing your need or want or desire to be engaged, and then also needing to not feel overwhelmed as well. And it’s hard, because balance is so important, but where do you find that line.

C: But also we wouldn’t have reacted as strongly as we did – Australia – if it weren’t for what we saw play out through the news in Italy, in particular. I think, for me, when it hit that this was this big thing that was happening, was when I was reading about Italy and how terrible it was all of a sudden, late February. Like, this is going to happen here. But because we had that example, you know, we acted quickly and I’m very thankful that we are geographically distant from –

I: Like designed to deal with something like this?

C: Yeah.

I: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. And I think it’s quite impressive how we reacted quite quickly to that. And I mean, that’s a testament to our society and democracy and whatnot. But I mean, there’s definitely been miniscule crises that have reflected things that have happened in Italy, like the aged care crisis at the moment was also present in Italy and was something that we definitely should have foreshadowed, and been more able to react more quickly to. I mean, I think it’s quite lucky we have a healthcare system that is comparatively, particularly to the US, very well-designed and very accessible. It’s been one of our saving graces also. Like it’s such a crisis in the US. Having my sister in New York has been terrifying and eye-opening.

C: How do you feel about moving back to Gosford and being away from everyone?

I: I don’t know. I think it definitely comes in waves. Ultimately, I think I feel quite positive about it. I think it’s what I need for myself at the moment and for my research. But it’s going to be hard. Like, on a scale of things that are hard, probably not that hard compared to what other people have to do. Yeah, it’s going to be weird being away from the city. But I’m also really excited to be away, and to be in nature a little bit more, and be close to the beach, and just be in a really tranquil environment where I’m not stressed. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been going through a bit of a weird time. And I don’t know if that’s like a Covid effect catching up to me.

C: I think everyone in Sydney is feeling a bit anxious that it’s going to hit here because of what’s happened in Melbourne. And we’re just all in this high alert mode. I think it makes sense to go to somewhere a bit out of the city at the moment.

I: Yeah, I definitely think that’s true. I’m going to miss everyone a lot. But I think, being out of the city will be a positive for me. Everyone’s on such high alert, it’s like a really anxious environment. It’s also hard with work at the moment as well, it’s a pretty stressful space to be in. And I love them, but I feel like I’m working so I can live in the city, but I’m not doing anything here, essentially, other than writing my thesis. So I could take away the work and just write my thesis, which will be productive over the next couple of months at least. But I will be back. I definitely can’t see myself living on the coast long-term. Just having been away last year, spending a bit more time with my mum will be really nice. But I feel like there will definitely be a limit to that.

C: Hopefully it coincides with Covid…

I: Yeah, I’m feeling maybe everything will shut down and it will just make complete sense for me to be at home. I definitely get antsy and I like changing things and I make quite rash decisions sometimes. But ultimately, I think that they make sense. And it’s something that I have thought more about than I would let myself believe. But I think it all makes sense. But I hope Sydney doesn’t go into lockdown again, because I feel like that will affect a lot of people really deeply.

C: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think we will because we have Melbourne as an example and people are being fairly proactive. And it seems like we thought it might have happened already, but it hasn’t.

I: Yeah, I think that’s one of the worst things about this, right, is the anticipation or the waiting for something to change. And like, feeling like you’re in this weird limbo-y period. It just feels like a weird hiatus from how things would normally work. But then it’s like, maybe this is just how things are normally working.

C: It’s like a middle ground between like, you can’t hang out with more than one person, but we’re not in Melbourne lockdown, obviously, we can go out to restaurants, we can go out for drinks, everything’s like normal-ish.

I: It’s such a weird distinction between being capable of going out for drinks and not feeling like you should, and feeling guilty if you do, and that you’re not taking enough precautionary measures. Yeah, definitely heightening anxiety for a lot of people and feelings of guilt. How are you feeling about it?

C: I don’t know. I think we’ll be in this vague uncertainty for a few months. Like at the beginning of everything, I think everyone thought it would be over in six months. Like spring was when it would get back to normal. And I was like, hopefully by the time it’s my birthday, warehouse parties will be back and we can go out after hanging out here. But that’s obviously not the case, so. I’m okay with it, as long as we have what we have now. I don’t think our restrictions will get that much tighter, hopefully. I’m okay with it. It is sad, but it would be much worse to be in the US. Like to have a government that doesn’t care about you.

I: Yeah, I mean I definitely think there’s certain sects of our society that the Australian government doesn’t care about.

C: Absolutely.

I: But the US is definitely… I don’t know if we should be comparing ourselves to the US though, because it’s such a low threshold to be better than them. Like it’s definitely a crisis over there.

C: It’s just wild, because it just seems like they have no understanding of – like they haven’t experienced having the government put restrictions on them in the way that we have, which would just make so much sense, because it’s so much more widespread there. But it’s like, maybe you shouldn’t gather with more than 50 people.

I: I think neo-liberalism is just so much more entrenched in the US. I mean, it’s definitely very present in Australia and has very widespread impacts here. But very very entrenched in the US. I think the population size as well, and the way that the Trump administration has been running for the last – God, it’s like four years now? How insane is that. They were not prepared to deal with something like this. Like, can you imagine? They can’t even get rid of guns.

C: It’s the only country in the world that has had such a political response to, like, mask-wearing. It’s insane.

I: And then you think of countries that are super equipped to deal with it. That have done it very efficiently.

C: Yeah, like South Korea. They were one of the first countries to get it. I remember reading all my emails that were already loaded because I was on a flight back from Melbourne and this was late February. I was just reading all the New York Times daily briefing emails. And I was like, fuck, it’s really taking off in South Korea! This is wild, like it’s all been passed on through this cult. Like, South Korea, Iran, Italy – what random countries to have Covid. Like, this is wild. But then, South Korea quashed it immediately while it went rampant in Italy for a while. Every place that got hit hard immediately, at the beginning, is doing fairly well now. Like New York compared to the rest of the US is doing fairly well.

I: Yeah, that’s true. I feel like it’s just a process of people having to learn how to deal with it. The experience of going through it, I guess, would change people’s perceptions of it and how they’re going to react to it as well. My sister actually did a really – at the start of Covid, in New York – she did quite a beautiful storytelling that her friend back here – her best friend, she’s an illustrator – did an illustration to. I’ll show you sometime.

C: I can link it.

I: It’s a good thing to watch, and I think it kind of represents the start of Covid and people’s feelings at the start of Covid quite beautifully. It’s really tinged with this kind of sadness but also unknowing. This understanding that people are being quite kind to each other in a way that they previously wouldn’t have been, because of the collective experience. I’ll show you.

vimeo

C: Do you think this has changed the way people interact with each other in a way that will last?

I: Hmm. I don’t know if that’s super relevant for Australia, or if that has affected Australia as much. I don’t think so. I think here it’s become more of an individual protection thing. And because we haven’t been hit as hard, I don’t think the understanding of it has gone as deep.

C: I think in Melbourne, maybe.

I: Maybe in Melbourne. Yeah, I don’t know anyone in Melbourne really at the moment. I haven’t spoken to them.

C: I think they will come out of this feeling like they had a very different experience to the rest of Australia. Like for us, I do feel like people are wearing masks more and more in Sydney. But I don’t think it will ever be mandated. I don’t think we’ll reach that point, hopefully. But they will have had to go through like – not being able to leave your house after 8pm is a very intense thing to have to live through. Which we’ll probably never understand.

I: How do you think that would work in Sydney? Like do you think that if we got to that point, it would change people’s perceptions of Covid and each other?

C: Probably. I think we’ve had a fairly light quarantine lockdown experience compared to a lot of people in the world. Even my New Zealand friends, when they were going through their six-week lockdown, it was a lot more intense than what we went through. I think we never really had it that hard in Sydney, and got through it fairly quickly and easily.

I: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I feel like it was such a minimal scale here. And it’s tricky, because I remember talking to my friend Thomas who works at PIAC. He was doing social housing policy during that time at the start of Covid. And he was like, suddenly, you know, government funding has opened up, and suddenly anything’s possible. We’re housing a lot of homeless people. And he was trying to work on more long-lasting solutions to that. And the quarantine didn’t last long enough for them to implement real change in that sector, I don’t think. And suddenly people were back – they stopped their program, so people were back out on the streets. And that was a noticeable shift, as soon as Covid started lessening, you saw people back out on the streets again, and that was a really harsh reality of government priorities as well. But I feel like in Sydney because it was so light, it almost didn’t allow for that opportunity to implement sustainable change in areas that definitely need it. And that could’ve been a positive that came out of it, but… What would be your positives that have come out of Covid?

C: Like, any positives? I think I’ve had a fairly normal experience throughout Covid in that I still worked my normal job that I’ve had for the past four years, I did Uni, I had a lot of – probably more so than ever – interactions with housemates because of Covid. So I never felt like I had a lot taken away from me. But I think all the fun things we had as a house, especially me, you and Citi, sitting on my bed gossiping, playing Skribblio was really fun. And Josh was here throughout the peak of Covid, which was really fun. It was good to have people around. I didn’t think that I needed it. I thought that I could deal with it all on my own in Woy Woy if I wanted to. But I think at the end of it, I was really like, I’m really glad I had social interaction because so many people haven’t had that opportunity, and it was really nice.

I: Yeah, I think that was definitely a positive. I mean, I’m sure it was more intense for Josh. But like having come just into a house as Covid was hitting and suddenly, that’s your social interaction. I really loved that element of it because it meant that we all got to know each other quite well quite quickly. And I’m sure that was more intense for Josh, having come in literally the week we went into lockdown. But I almost feel like prior to that, living in the house, we obviously all liked each other and got along, but we’d see each other quite fleetingly because we were all so busy doing our own thing, and then suddenly we had freed up this space to spend with each other. I think we all got closer a lot quicker because of that.

C: It is really nice. I don’t think I’ve come to terms with the fact that you’re leaving.

I: Neither have I.

C: It’s like a week away right? I will be very sad.

I: I’m also going to be very sad.

C: I think this is the best house that could’ve happened during lockdown.

I: Yeah, we had such a perfect lockdown dynamic. It’s hard, because you don’t want to say this, like you’re minimising other people’s experiences…

C: Hey, this is exactly what comes up every interview, but you know, it’s all about your subjective experience.

I: Yeah. But I mean, we did have a lot of fun.

C: Yeah, and it’s okay to!

I: Yeah, I think that’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, is trying not to invalidate your own experiences by thinking about other people’s. It’s very important to be aware of other people’s experiences but ultimately, you’ve gone through your own thing.

0 notes

wendylewis-blog · 5 years ago

Text

06.25.2020

It’s been a month today since George Floyd was murdered beneath the unrelenting knee of a dead-eyed policeman who I will not name. His fellow officers did nothing to stop him. Our city, the nation, and then—the world—exploded with rage and into activism. Everyone came together inside the nefarious embrace of a pandemic, masked and united, to protest yet another atrocity hurled into the Black community.

A powerful wave rose after that horrible event and I won’t break down all the details because we all know what happened next, and continued for many weeks, or at least, our versions of it. What I know is that Black voices and bodies came surging to the surface of the streets, in videos, podcasts and social platforms, in articles and interviews. I live in the country, relying on news, mostly via the internet, and I have learned so fucking much in the last month from the Black voices I’ve been listening to. I am a sixty-three year old white woman and I have always considered myself an ally but I remain a functioning if resisting-the-label racist and I have more to learn every day. I am getting there. I am staying as humble as I can.

Just last night, my youngest daughter called me out for a few things I said in a certain way that she took issue with. I got defensive, because I think of myself as an advocate, but she was right. Thank you, Kitty. Don’t stop! I want to continue learning to understand every minute detail from behind the blinders of my white privilege and my age, having grown up with so much white brainwash.

This is what we need to be doing, white ppl—friends, allies. We need to remain extremely humble, even if we believe we’ve been lifelong advocates for racial equity. We have not done enough or known enough and we have to do it right now and learn and listen and seek out Black voices and continue doing it until change is not only visible but viable and put into working action. Write your representatives weekly, daily if you wanna. They need to know what their constituents demand or else they will lose their jobs.

= = = = =

One hidden historical event that many of my white friends agreed they had never heard about, is the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Eighteen hours of destruction rained down on a thriving Black neighborhood (May 31-June 1,1921)—eerily aligned with the murder of a Black man in Minneapolis ninety-nine years later almost to the date which spawned a worldwide revolution. In Tulsa, 300 people were killed, hundreds were hurt and thousands of buildings were destroyed. It is considered to be one of the worst incidences of racially motivated violence in the history of America. Do you wanna know what preceded this massacre? You should click on my link above, but just in case you can’t take the time, I’m gonna tell you, in brief—even though you might wanna tuck in and learn a longer version of it. Jus’sayin.

A shoeshiner, Dick Rowland, had to ride an elevator to the top floor of the Drexel building because Black people were denied access to more readily available restrooms on ground level. No one really knows what happened when he stepped into the elevator operated by 17-year-old white woman, Sarah Page, but the historical museum of Tulsa imagines he may have stepped on her foot and she screamed. I’m thinking, she probably freaked because he got onto the elevator at all! He was seen running from the elevator, I’m sure, fearing for his life because she was young, white and had screamed. He was subsequently accused of raping her.

C’mon. Let’s get real. What can happen during the course of a short elevator ride and srrsly, what Black man would EVER have taken the chance of raping a white woman, especially in 1921, when the outcome would have surely cost him his life.

Here’s the thing. The Greenwood area in 1921, was a thriving business community and was sometimes referred to as the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, serving its 10,000 Black residents. I immediately jump to the FACT that white ppl don’t wanna support Black ppl if they are doing more than surviving, when they are becoming successful and gaining access to our way of life.

The riot broke out after an article on the incident was published in the Tulsa Tribune afternoon newspaper, which also said on its editorial page that a lynching was imminent. Crowds, of both Black and white people, gathered outside the courthouse. Twice, a group of armed African American men, mostly veterans of World War I, arrived on the scene fearing a lynching and offered their assistance to the police to protect Rowland. As they were leaving the second time, a white man tried to disarm one of the Black veterans and a shot was fired, triggering the riot, with whites pouring into the all-black Greenwood district. USA Today

It took 80 years for Tulsa to acknowledge the massacre as a racial atrocity.

(pause—take that in—80 fkn years)

I had seen the Watchmen series (Hulu/HBO) months ago and thought the opening episode that set the stage for the series was fictionalized. It’s shocking and embarrassing as hell, believing myself an advocate, to not know about that horrific event. Of course, it wasn’t in the history books when I was in school and I’m gonna guess it STILL ISN’T. I really hope I’m wrong. I’ll investigate that over the weekend. Having discovered, over the last month, that the Tulsa massacre was historically documented, I revisited Watchmen and it was a totally different experience understanding the context intended. I highly recommend. I say again, I highly recommend.

Also, if you haven’t seen 13th I hope you’ll add that to your watch list.

+ + + + +

Meanwhile—addressing the White House cronies:

Reading this article in Medium was so difficult but I could not deny its truth. I posted a comment in protest, however, saying that there are so many of us in this country who are NOT subscribed to the darkness and confusion issuing from our nation’s capitol.

TEASER from linked article: I don’t use the term as an insult — the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, “idiot” carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots.

Consumer tip: T-shirts! Support Black clothing lines! I love T-shirts. I’ve linked only one option and there are many more. Scroll down the main page for a list of Black-owned grocery stores, book stores, coffee shops and brunch spots—and feel free to Google the same in your location. Let me know what you find.

I’ll leave you with this. My nephew is production manager for a tap dance crew out of NYC. Enjoy! Here’s Dorrance Dance.

Please leave notes here, subscribe to my page and talk to me. We need to be communicating right now, more than ever. Keep love alive.

1 note · View note

allanamayer · 5 years ago

Text

Surveying a community on the idea of a digital archive

The last thing I want to share from this Oakville Arts Council project is the survey data we collected near the end of the study. We opened this survey up to the wider community so not every respondent had been fully briefed or consulted about their own individual participation - and while some responses reflect this, the yes/no questions are still very much in favour of the project. I think these kinds of responses are fully replicable in other areas, whether or not you do as much extensive consultation as we did (we met with 50+ individuals representing 20+ community groups) or have other outreach and education components such as the webinars we did.

Here’s the text straight from the study report, and I’ll attach the survey instrument too so you can see what we asked. Here it is in a PDF.

***

Of our final dataset, 97.73% were supportive of the project, 100% felt the Oakville Arts Council was organizationally capable of project success, and more than 20 respondents gave us ideas about how they would contribute to the archive or use it once it was built.

97.73% would like to see more documentation of Oakville’s art history.

Responses include:

“I think we have a very vibrant and active artistic community and it definitely should be documented.”

“There is a rich history and also many newcomers to town who may not little of that history.”

“Many people have no idea of the wide variety of arts in which they can learn or participate even when they have lived here for several years. Newcomers of course have even less idea what is available.”

“Oakville has a rich history which will be lost if it is not properly documented.”

“No historical account of a community would be complete without the history of the arts in the community as the arts paint a rich picture of the culture and the soul of a community.”

“It is so important for new generations to connect with the history of their city, and how it relates to their community.”

“It is good to have a reliable site to research arts and artists - knowing more about both gives a better understanding of the work and can be encouraging to other artists to know more about an artist's successes and hardships overcome.”

“History is critical to helping current and future Oakville residents feel a greater connection to, and affiliation with, their own art, with Oakville, and with the community.”

97.73% would like to see an online archive of materials related to Oakville's art history.

Responses indicated an interest in both an online collection and a physical collection:

“It is good to have such an archive in one place - online research is not always easy and if there is a specific Oakville art site, then it makes research or just looking for information, more accessible.”

“Both online and in print should be promoted. Younger people are accustomed to finding about everything online and some older generations prefer finding information in print.”

“Accessible at all hours and to all. However, I also am concerned about the difficulty of keeping it up-to-date as digital technology evolves.”

“Not only should there be an online archive but original materials should be collected and properly stored for future researchers.”

100% think the Oakville Arts Council is the right organization to pursue this project.

Responses include:

“They are a trusted supporter of the arts locally.”

“Who better?”

“It is the one voice for the arts in Oakville.”

“They have the staff and facility to organize and amass the large amount of information which will need to be categorized and presented.”

“Experience and the personnel to complete it.”

“The OAC has access to and a relationship with a variety of artists and therefore is well placed to access the information.”

“I look to them for general information. They already demonstrate skill online and have a recognized presence for the arts.”

“Projects need a leader, but this needs to be a joint effort involving as many stakeholders as necessary to ensure the final product covers all the bases.”

95.45% agree that this project will help more people connect with culture, heritage, and the arts.

Responses include:

“Digital dispersal of information is practical and appealing to most of the population. It is an excellent method of publicizing upcoming arts events and also retaining the history of past performances of all kinds, usually only briefly covered in the local press. It will require great diligence to keep it going properly.”

“During physical distancing, residents can still engage with the arts.”

“If presented in a concise, exciting way I think it would be a wonderful interesting resource.”

“It would be an important reference source for future artistic projects to be aware of what has been done before, and the Oakville people who initiated and sustained artistic endeavours here in Oakville.”

“It will allow those interested in the various arts to find out who have gone before and the heritage of this town and its culture and be a link between the past, present and future.”

97.73% agree that this project will benefit artists and arts organizations; 97.73% agree that it will benefit the community of Oakville.

Responses include:

“It may give newcomers a point of connection not only with the community as a whole but also lead people to the arts organization they might be interested in exploring.”

“Could enhance collaborative efforts.”

“Information is vital for getting new members involved.”

“We learn valuable lessons from those who have a history in the arts.”

“Can provide inspiration and a forum for collaboration.”

“More involvement in community events, potentially more volunteers and donors. Possibility of children getting interested in the history of their particular arts form here in town.”

“It may help those who are thinking of moving to Oakville an insight of what we feel is important to us and the preservation of our cultural history.”

“There is such an influx of new residents, it is important for them to know and recognize the people who have helped to created a vibrant society in the past.”

“It will bring people together socially.”

“Curated materials add to content that can be posted online, used in the classroom, whether online or not, and add to our stories.”

95.45% agree that this project is needed now.

Responses point to the coronavirus pandemic as a specific timely reason:

“As time marches on resources that are hidden away in boxes and basements will disappear forever.”

“The arts are needed more than ever during Covid-19.”

“Pertinent documents may be lost if not gathered soon. I am over 80, and if I can no longer be active, my reference material will be discarded.”

“Much of the past is disappearing and needs to be archived before it is too late.”

“If we do not have something like this already, then why not now? The longer we wait the more gets lost as people of previous generations with valuable input and information may no longer be around.”

“This will take time and the sooner you start the better. There are many who would say we will need all our money and help to rebuild the economy for those who have lost work and businesses and this is true, but we also need to keep in mind those things that enrich our souls, our inner spirits and give us joy - the kind of joy we can get from a fine painting or a beautiful song or performance by someone who has been gifted and nurtured here in our own Town.”

“In terms of self isolation - provides more connection for the community (this would be a very immediate need).”

“This question couldn’t come at a better time - we’re housebound, and having curated materials posted online allow for learning experiences we can’t otherwise have.”

“You don’t want history to fall through the cracks.”

92.86% of eligible respondents would be willing to participate in some way.

Responses include organizations we have already met with, as well as individuals:

“I have much of the above material which needs to be saved.”

“Because I was born here and have been involved with the artists of Oakville for almost a century.”

“Yes, if it moves forward I would think that I/we would participate, as we participate in any opportunity that may give us some visibility, however small.”

“As I continue to make art, teach art and write about art, I hope to contribute what I have been privileged to learn. Being born here 91 years ago and I can still remember, there are stories that I can contribute.”

“I’m not sure how, but I’d love to.”

“I’m always available to help the arts.”

2 responses indicated they felt they were ineligible or had nothing to contribute, but as the project components are still undetermined, there may be broader or more strict eligibility in the future.

We asked people to tell us in their own words how they might be able to contribute:

“I would provide audio and video recordings, and historical documents, about the groups I work with.”

“[Our group] has existed in this town for almost 60 years and we have material that could be digitized covering most of those years.”

“I have items of historical importance for [a group].”

“Photographs, newspaper articles, audio and video recordings”

“I would submit paintings and animation, and reference my writing and books.”

“submit videos, student compositions.”

“I’d happily work/volunteer/promote the collection. I have memories of taking pottery courses in the little building at Coronation Park as a child and have the horrid creations still. The experience meant something to me.”

“I would like to contribute memories and stories. I was part of community theatre for many years.”

We then asked people to tell us in their own words how they would use the archive:

“As a history buff, I would consult it to find out about artists of the past.”

“Referring to it for information on past and present artists and their works and new ideas of what constitutes art.”

“Excellent resource for developing community projects and bonds.”

“To connect with other arts organizations.”

“I could refer new chorus and orchestra members and future concert goers to the material in the archive.”

“Share it with audience members”

“Promotion of Oakville”

“I would refer to it in marketing and correspondence, for artists I am involved with.”

“If allowed, to continue providing updated images.”

“I’d personally love to read others’ stories, use them for research when writing, and to teach.”

“It would be interesting to see the history of such things as the Joshua Creek Art Centre, and the OAC itself.”

“sharing it with new members of our various organizations, providing a link to it on our website and social media.”

“I would refer to it in our literature and on our web sites to draw people's attention to this resource.”

We asked respondents to rank various potential components of the project. In order of preference, 50% or more of respondents were interested in:

Profiles of Oakville-related artists and arts organizations (84.85%)

Virtual exhibits exploring aspects of Oakville's art history (81.82%)

Oral history interviews with Oakville artists and patrons (78.79%)

Video tours of Oakville cultural venues, landmarks, or studios (69.70%)

Success stories about Oakvillians (including students) that made it big (69.70%)

Educational resources for classroom use (60.61%)

Audience-submitted stories or memories in text, audio, or video formats (57.58%)

Audience-submitted materials, such as event or exhibit photographs (54.55%)

Interactive map of Oakville cultural locations over time (51.52%)

Historical magazines, periodicals, and newspaper articles (51.52%)

Finally, we asked people to share their thoughts on any of the topics we’d covered, or the project in general:

“I think this project is an excellent idea and please feel free to call on me at any time to participate.”

“It would be a good idea to emphasize newcomers and diversity - showing us to be a welcoming community.”

“The concept of arts organizations should be interpreted broadly to include educational organizations that deal with digital arts, for example, and not be restricted to graphic art such as painting. The administration of arts organizations should be included.”

“Would like to see profiles of Oakville based artists who are internationally recognized as I am not aware of many.”

“Your project is a great idea. Now, bring it to life.”

“Focus first on gathering the available information together before embarking on expensive or grandiose projects like documentaries and professional editing.”

#archives #digital archives #stuff I do #publications #survey #data-gathering #community archives #consultation

0 notes

sunshineweb · 5 years ago

Text

Is Value Investing Dead?

Newspaper headline reads – “Modi’s ₹20 trillion package: What does it mean for stock markets?” Reminds me of a Hindi idiom – गाँव ��सा नहीं लुटेरे पहले आ गए (Translation: The village is still not thriving, but the robbers have already come).

The first part of the article reads – “Indian equity markets rallied in early trade on Wednesday as the size of the economic stimulus package announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is significantly higher than the Street’s expectations.” Well, after everything ‘unexpected’ that has happened over the past few months with the economy, businesses, markets and in people’s livelihoods, we are still playing the expectations game? Ha!

Anyways, that article was not the best thing I read today. Instead, here they are –

“Nobody wants to read your sh*t.” That’s the first thing I read today morning as I sat down to write this post, and how demoralizing it was! It came from Steven Pressfield who wrote it in his post on the most important writing lesson he has ever learned. Pressfield pacified me a bit by writing, “It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.” Now I can appreciate this thought better than cursing my own writing or people who I think may be mean when then don’t read what I post, I mean the sh*t I write! I know you are busy, so I am highly grateful for you to be reading my work, if you are reading even now.

“We’re having the ‘Value Investing is Dead’ conversation again,” writes Josh Brown in his latest post, and then explains why, “Value investing is immortal. It cannot die. Perhaps the way it’s been traditionally practiced is dead.”

I read a post some time back wherein Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject. Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt – “Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.”

“…a previously unknown unknown has now become a known unknown, and consequently is now already factored into investor risk appetite and market positioning and so it ceases to have much impact on market prices,” writes the author of this nice post titled Coronavirus Update: From An Unknown Unknown to A Known Unknown. He concludes well – “When people look back at this sell off many years from now – particularly investors that did not live through it – they will say ‘this was a very obvious buying opportunity; if it were me, I would have been smart and rational enough to buy, because it was obvious the economic impact was only going to be temporary; next time there is a pandemic that tanks markets 40%, I’m going to buy by the truckload’. The problem is that the next event that causes a 40% market crash will not be a pandemic. The next time there is a pandemic (unless it’s materially more virulent and deadly), markets might only fall 10-15% because investors will know the playbook and so it won’t be as scary. It will be something else that cause investors to believe ‘life as we know it has changed’.”

The coronavirus pandemic has forced economists, financiers, executives, and policymakers to jettison or dramatically revise their forecasts for 2020. But what will the future look like on the other side of the crisis? Bloomberg asked a variety of leaders from around the world for their best guess on how our lives will be fundamentally changed.

Finally, even if value investing is dead, Calvin is immortal!

* * * That’s about it from me for today.

If you liked this post, please share with others on WhatsApp, Twitter, or just email them the link to this post.

Stay safe.

With respect, — Vishal

The post Is Value Investing Dead? appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Is Value Investing Dead? published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

0 notes

lodelcar · 5 years ago

Text

WHICH REGIONAL AND LOCAL ADJUSTMENTS COULD OR SHOULD BE PERMANENT AFTER THE COVID-19 CRISIS?

Picture: National Botanical Garden, Meise Belgium

There is a translation in Dutch of this article on https://earaernl.tumblr.com/post/618201465420480512/welke-regionale-en-lokale-aanpassingen-kunnen

The COVID-19 pandemic is still in full swing. Virologists are already announcing a second wave and are convinced that we will have to live with the virus for a whole year before a vaccine will be available by the middle of 2021 at the earliest. We hope that some parts of the world, such as Africa, will be spared of the virus as much as possible, given the situation of local health centers that cannot cope with such a pandemic. China, where everything has started, is bracing itself for a second wave of contamination; so does South Korea. In Europe, many countries are gradually easing quarantine but with very small steps and sometimes with a relapse. This decontainment approach is increasingly happening per region and involves regional and local administrations in enforcement as well as in access. The spread from continent to continent is less of an issue as most aircraft are grounded and so there is no longer massive travel between continents.

However, although we will return to a more normal life in Europe, and perhaps soon in North America, certain attitudes and customs will have to emerge that are aimed at preventing a new outbreak of the virus. On the other hand, we also notice that certain new attitudes may be beneficial to the population and can be permanently introduced into our society. We hereby remember Winston Churchill's cynical statement: "Never make a good crisis go to waste"[1]. In this article, we provide an overview of the changes we have identified and that may be desirable for perpetuation. We will address the following social aspects: economy & management, public administration & public finances, health care, society and expression & media.

1. Economy and management

The damage to the economy from the two-month lockdown is particularly considerable. The unemployment rate rose to unseen heights in many parts of the world. In Europe, with its well-developed social security, many can fall back on a system of temporary unemployment, in which the government takes over part of the wage burden. In the US, where this does not exist, workers were fired en masse (22 million) and fell back on alms and food stamps. A wage protection program was created by US Congress in March 2020 to support idle SMEs that employ their workers[2], but it has been over-surveyed. However, the lobby of big industry, which has not respected its workers before the crisis, is so powerful in the US that the risk of "business as usual" is very high afterwards. The fact that the meat processing industry that works exclusively with Latinos and illegal immigrants has lobbied itself to be declared an essential and vital industry is a first sign of what will follow[3].

However, there are winners and losers in the economic arena. The 5 largest shares of the Standard & Poors 500 (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet & Facebook) currently have the same weight, the 350 being lowest quoted in the same overview table. They are the absolute winners. The pharmaceutical, agro-industry and food distribution sectors have also created money. The losers are to be found in the services sector. In the US, but also in Europe, thousands of bars, restaurants & cafes, massage parlors, event and concert organizers, cleaning firms, football clubs etc will have a hard time in the coming months. If they already gasped for breath before the pandemic, they become sitting ducks afterwards.

But on the other hand, there are less visible winners: small farms that no longer offered their products to the wholesale distribution but developed their own farm shop or farm website[4] now reap the benefits of their efforts. Small self-employed persons, even bookstores, who have continued to serve their customers with great dedication, are now embraced. Small scale and quality are appreciated again, albeit by a limited group, but which is large enough to make a profit. Cities and regions are preparing to support this trend, because the nearby small-scale producer guarantees supply to cities. The Brussels Minister for the Environment Alain Maron recently decided to set up a support mechanism for the city farming sector: "The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated the resilience of short chains. This is exactly the model we want to develop in the Brussels Region, a food system that respects people, their health and the environment. I will therefore continue to pay due attention to this sector which will be one of the most important for the economic recovery at the end of this crisis. "[5]

A second phenomenon is that of reshoring or reindustrialisation. China, "the factory of the world", is at the root of the pandemic, partly due to the peculiar eating habits of the conservative part of the population, who buy live wild animals - infected by viruses - in markets in city centers and slaughter them on the spot for consumption.[6] The epidemic of COVID-19 started in one of the Chinese megacities and forced the government to organize a drastic lockdown, stopping industrial production. However, since China is responsible for most of the production of basic materials for pharmaceuticals, cars, medical equipment, etc., exports also came to a standstill and supplies to all other factories in the world, to hospitals, to labs, etc.[7] Many economists have warned for some time now for the consequences of this blown globalization in which one country holds the keys to production worldwide. But governments in the Western world felt powerless against the multinationals that controlled the economy. From one day to the next, governments suddenly became much stronger and started to take initiatives to invite smaller companies to produce the missing supplies locally. The masks - whether or not surgical - and the disinfectant gels were the pioneers. Basic ingredients for pharmaceuticals followed. Japan and the EU played a pioneering role in encouraging multinationals to diversify their production to other countries and preferably closer to the final - Western or Japanese - market. Agreements will be made with governments about 'strategic' products. In the EU, it is the European Commission that takes a pioneering role in this. Because it is believed in the rest of the world that eating habits of one and a half billion people will not be changed just like that and that the risk of new pandemics that arise in China cannot be excluded.[8]

There has been a major breakthrough in management, which will clearly have a lasting character: teleworking and distance meetings. Many business leaders did not have enough confidence in their staff to disseminate teleworking on a large scale. It has been enlightening to have been forced to introduce these into families where the quarantine required parents to stay at home, work and look after their children. As a result, apps such as Skype, Zoom, Webex Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. have been eagerly taken into use, enabling them to adapt to new circumstances at a rapid pace. Zoom, the largest provider, had to deal with ruthless hackers entering the meetings and flooding conferees with gross insults, pornography and even child pornography, which has led African countries to ban the use of the app.[9]

Due to the loss of air traffic, remote meetings and training have become the norm. They are picked up quickly: they also enable more efficient meetings. However, it ,prevents managers to quickly short-circuit with their staff on site: every consultation must take place via telephone, WhatsApp, Skype or apps, which is more laborious and requires a different attitude. But one thing is certain: distance meetings will become the norm. As a result, matrix management where there is a supervisor locally and a manager internationally will become the standard.

2. Public administration & public finances

In Europe, during the first corona outbreak, it was “Every man for himself”. This was due to the fact that health care was specifically enshrined as “national matter” by the Maastricht Treaty, with Europe not even having any advisory or support powers. As has been increasingly the case in the last 20 years, politicians in badly affected countries such as Italy and Spain have begun to fool their populations that the EU has not supported them and that nothing can be expected from the EU. But the “Every man for himself” principle also meant that borders were closed for passenger transport, but also for freight traffic, which prevented companies from exporting strategic products such as masks. Even worse, all EU countries started to do their sick and death counts differently and then looked pityingly at other European countries that "weren't doing as well as they did."

It took a month and many deaths later, before national governments began to see that a supranational level like the EU has much more soft power in the world than any EU on its own, even France or Germany; and that Europe is already too fused to install border barriers again. Internal freight traffic was immediately restored and countries were unable to block the sale of strategic goods to other countries within the EU.[10] Quality newspapers from seven Member States, including Berliner Morgenpost, Le Soir, Gazeta Wyborcza and Ouest-France, called not to jettison the achievements of Europe, but to strengthen them on the contrary in the corona crisis.[11] Today, EU border policy is coordinated, medical equipment flows within the internal market and patients are flown from one country to another in order to receive intensive care. In addition, Europeans within the union are starting to do what China cannot: helping each other navigate the serious socio-economic consequences of this historic crisis. In countries that have been less affected, such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries, it is realized that an attitude of “Every man for himself” and accusations that the more severely affected countries have been crickets and they themselves ants, is a wrong attitude because their own economies also depend on the export to the rest of Europe.[12]

A second important conclusion that can be made is that decisions at national level for the entire territory to respect the principle of equality do not demonstrate supreme efficiency and even discriminate certain regions. Too comprehensive decisions should be made with too few people without knowledge of the local framework. As a result, people often opt for large-scale where multiplicated small-scale leads to much better and less socially revolutionary results. Regional and local authorities also know their civil society and their companies. They have regular contacts and know the people with their heart in the right place as well as the profiteers. They will ignore the latter. The national government often allows itself to be fooled by the latter.

In Russia, President Putin has implemented the principle of governor-level decision-making for fear of being criticized of erroneous decisions. However, his governors are apparatchiks who have been chosen precisely because of their colorlessness and loyalty to the leader. In Germany, public health decisions are taken by the federal states (Länder). This has meant that they have been able to make quick decisions for their region, using the infrastructure and control labs at their disposal. This has paid off. In Belgium, health policy was fragmented between the federal states (deelstaten) and the federal state, so that the initiative was placed with the federal state, which indeed made the mistakes of the scale described above. For example, tests were initially concentrated in 1 hospital across the country and orders for mouth masks were placed on a large scale from 1 public tender to a company that was unable to control the Chinese supplier, delivering 3 million masks that did not meet the required quality standards answered.

However, national authorities learned quickly. During the decontainment, the rules in Spain and France were set by region, and their implementation and control were also decentralized. The principle of equality had to be abandoned, but the efficiency for the population has all the more improved.

States are drastically increasing their debts with economists thinking that an entire generation will be needed to get back to normal. Economists have also figured out that governments can fight the corona crisis without leading to additional savings. The debts they incur for this will gradually dilute over the years and eventually disappear. However, the halving of the public debt due to dilution will still take 30 to 35 years, and this will certainly not be the last economic crisis to be addressed by the government. It is also crucial to emphasize that the dilution principle only applies to an increase in debt due to one-off (temporary) government expenditure, and not through wage increases.[13]

The European Commission is expected to put forward proposals on a COVID-19 recovery fund soon, but there is already major controversy about whether countries should receive loans or subsidies.[14] The Commission is also preparing an emergency plan to avoid interruptions to farmers, businesses and organizations relying on EU funds when the long-term budget approval is delayed.

The European Central Bank itself has also made significant efforts to provide countries and companies with the opportunity to support their economies. This has again sparked controversy. For example, the German Constitutional Court has overruled the decisions of the European Central Bank. But the squabbling within Europe usually produces results anyway, because there is no country that thinks of leaving the EU after the repulsive manner in which Brexit has hindered all further efforts for three years. But someone will have to pay for this. Large fortunes are increasingly under pressure to contribute to and avoid taxes. In many European countries, attention is paid to the target group of multinationals and high net worth individuals that have so far made only a minimal contribution to public finances. The starting point is that in the past the profits always went to the individual and the losses had to be borne by society.

3. Healthcare

In the sector in which savings have been made in recent years, especially by neoliberal and populist governments, health care has suddenly become a theme that should no longer be touched, even more in which more money needs to be invested again. A discussion has arisen about large-scale and small-scale.

Every Brit swears by the NHS, the National Health Service. And while in tempore non suspecto there was a lot of criticism of this slow system that often left people dying before being treated, it proves robust when it comes to treating a pandemic. Especially since there is only 1 line of command, which on top of it has a direct ear from a minister who can quickly release budgets. In the US with its public and private hospitals, with hundreds of different owners, who are not organized, that line of command is diffuse and a stumbling block to a rapid response to a pandemic. The lack of empathy in most institutions run from a commercial point of view has become very clear. The focus is on the owner and not the customer / patient. Consultation with these institutions is also much more difficult, because the owners often reside in other states and even abroad.

On the other hand, a completely different starting point applies to non-profit organizations that have developed a network of healthcare institutions based on religious or social involvement. Although cost awareness is also a main focus there, the added value for the customer is contained in the mission and in the DNA of the institutions. These networks should be systematic partners of the authorities at both national and regional level. Party ideologies that detest religion should not be involved.

The principle that Germany and Switzerland have chosen to place health care management at the level of the federal states or cantons is inspired by the realization that small-scale leads to responding to local needs, stimulating human efforts and seeking solutions with local partners from civil society and business. Large scale on the other hand leads to uniformity in policy and a cost-effective purchasing policy. France, Italy and Belgium struggle with these two principles. They have academic hospitals that are nationally/regionally financed, public hospitals and nursing homes, which are locally financed, but also by strong religious orders that, although they no longer have many priests, monks and nuns, are still run by laics convinced by the spirit and mission of the order. These are governed by the order according to the principle of management of the good family man.

We do not express our opinion on the most optimal form, although we are always in favor of an approach close to the patient. However, we also realize that certain treatments are so costly that they can only be organized nationally and not even regionally. But we insist that everybody involved should organize themselves in such a way that they can consult with the government so that the efforts can benefit the patients and the population.

4. Mobility

During this COVID-19 period we feel a conflict between the principles of ecology and health. The principles of ecology are based on a society with less particulate matter and CO emissions. This particulate matter is initially emitted by cars propelled by fossil fuel. It has therefore been argued for years in Europe as well as in the megacities in the US, China and India to organize efficient public transport so that transport by individual cars can be avoided. It is mainly in urban areas where there are many office buildings, where people go to in the morning and leave from in the evening that the density of particulate matter is a health problem. Public transport, preferably with renewable energy, was advertised and expanded for this. The best example is the city of Los Angeles, where there was no public transport until the 90s of the last century, and where metro and tram lines are now being installed at a rapid pace that cross the city and try to eliminate polluting private transport.

Corona questions these principles again. In his TV speech of 5/11/2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made the surprising statement: "Avoid public transport where possible." Because indeed, this cannot be organized according to the rules of social distancing. In addition, the ventilation is often artificial, which means that the spread of a virus can continue at a rapid pace. Cars are therefore preferred on public transport that is less likely to be disinfected. This has, of course, unpleasant consequences for mobility and risks causing road congestion in the shortest possible time.

If we then have to reconcile ecology with health - and it is essential that we maintain the Green Deal objectives - the fleet should become fossil-free and there should be an accelerated ban on cars with non-renewable energy. Many urban planners and architects also advocate the promotion of the bicycle, especially in the city center. The capacity of safe cycling and sidewalks must be increased, missing links are removed and the bicycle highways are to be expanded with safe, separate bicycle networks within residential areas. Transfer points on the outskirts of the city are needed to accommodate traffic from outside the immediate periphery.[15]

A second sticking point is the transport by plane and the pleasure trip by cruise ship. Means of transport with natural ventilation systems that can be disinfected quickly and efficiently are given a public preference for means of transport that ventilate with compressed air and that must be able to return quickly nearly without new maintenance or disinfection during landing periods, with new travelers on board, who are hardly checked for symptoms of disease. Japanese research has shown that in such conditions where people share the same space for quite some time and live closely packed together for several hours, viruses can spread at lightning speed. It is therefore clear that investment in high-speed trains and lines and in electric or hydrogen-powered coaches will in the future be preferred over cruise ship or airplane travel. And that travelers will also have to be declared germ-free shortly before being boarded.

5. Society

First of all an important observation. The way in which citizens are involved in tackling the COVID-19 crisis varies from region to region. However, we generally note that organized civil society can play an important role, often with volunteers and know-how. The compelling stories of start-ups who used their 3-D printers to print spacers for improvised ventilators,[16] of hospitals where the COVID-19 pressure was not too high that nurses delegated to severely affected nursing homes, of citizens who committed themselves to food production and - dispensation for less fortunate fellow citizens demonstrates important resilience of the citizen. It has often been local politicians who have brought supply and demand together. There must therefore be regional and local opportunities to involve these willing and skilled citizens in policy and governance in a structural manner.[17] They should not be seen as snoopers, they should be encouraged to think positively about policy issues. In a world where many parties use polarization as a weapon of war, this will of course not be easy.

A second observation is that mass manifestations can no longer take place. Football matches in stages of 70,000 seats, festivals with 40,000 youngsters on a meadow, cycling races with 30,000 spectators along the way, will be avoided for some time to come. Sport will once again become a health product and no longer a mass product to earn an incredible amount of money. (Popular) Culture will once again become a relaxation product and no longer a herd spirit product to earn tons of money. Is this bad? Yes, for all the people who earn normal wages for it. And there are thousands. This proves once again that the Western economy has been diverted too much to the services sector. We therefore argue for more manufacturing industry, for more industry that is focused on reusing existing materials and for less bullshit jobs.[18] This will necessarily go hand in hand with more automation and the use of artificial intelligence. As a society, we must be vigilant about this evolution, but not throw the baby out with the bath water.

6. Opinion & media

The role of social media is now more questionable than before. FB & Google have failed to stop fake news. The EU has set up a special body to report and confirm fake news related to the Corona crisis. The hallucinatory stories of EUvsDISINFO[19] are proof that social media are increasingly being abused by countries, associations and criminals with malicious intentions and that the initiators of the apps are no match for this kind of disinformation. They have grown too large and should therefore be split up. Europe needs to develop its own FB and Google that takes more account of privacy and blocks as much as possible fake news from Russia and China, but also from the American alt right movement.

The press has played a very ambiguous role throughout the COVID-19 crisis. On the one hand, they will disseminate government's reports, but will also immediately undermine these by presenting all kinds of figures who have different opinions. In times of calamity, such as war or epidemic, unified behavior would be required to overcome a common enemy. This ingrained attitude of the press as such - including the public broadcasters - to insist on obtaining scoops must therefore be labeled as despicable.

Finally, I would like to give my opinion on increasing cybercrime. Sabotaging conference instruments and technical means such as contact detection by telephone is a behavior that is treated by the police in a far too lax way. People who do such things should be removed from society quickly and for a long time because they are thoroughly bad. If a citizen in a Western country receives up to 5 mails a day from various sources, which are only aimed at erasing their computer files or getting their bank account numbers or passwords and then literally take his money from him, then this is a plague that must be fought much more vigorously than the search for Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Because this is going to get much more on the nerves of individuals who want to work and live their lives, than the presence in the streets of Syrians who have fled their wrecked land and are trying to build a life again. But this unknown enemy is not sexy and therefore offers no possibility to oppose people politically. That is why this type of crime is either hushed up or treated with disdain.

Louis Delcart, Member of the Board of Directors of the European Academy of the Regions, www.ear-aer.eu

[1] Apparently he never said that, but it became one of those many quotes attributed to Winston Churchill. However there is “Never waste a good crisis” report. The report called on the industry to use the Great Recession as an opportunity to change its performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Waste_a_Good_Crisis, retrieved 14-05-2020

[2] Bas den Hond, Werkloosheid VS maakt enorme sprong, steunprogramma’s raken overbelast,( US unemployment is booming, support programs are overloaded) in Trouw, 5-05-2020, https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/werkloosheid-vs-maakt-enorme-sprong-steunprogramma-s-raken-overbelast~b57df230/?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.be%2F, retrieved 12-05-2020

[3] Daniel Arkin, Tyson Foods chairman warns 'the food supply chain is breaking', in NBCNews, April 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tyson-foods-chairman-warns-food-supply-chain-breaking-n1193256

[4] Ine Renson, Plots komt de lokale boer weer in beeld,( Suddenly the local farmer comes back into the picture) in De Standaard, 2 mei 2020

[5] Amaury Michaux, Stadslandbouw is belangrijk voor economisch herstel (Urban agriculture is important for economic recovery), in De Standaard, 11 mei 2020 https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20200510_04953363

Retrieved 11-05-2020

[6] MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR, Coronavirus an unlikely gift in Thailand's fight to save wildlife, China's Xi bans illicit trade as epidemic's link to smuggling becomes clear, Nikkei Asian Review, February 29, 2020, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Coronavirus-an-unlikely-gift-in-Thailand-s-fight-to-save-wildlife, retrieved 3-03-2020

[7] Robert Boute, Coronavirus legt de zwakheden bloot van de wereldwijde verstrengeling van bedrijven, (Coronavirus exposes the weaknesses of the global entanglement of companies), in VRTNews, 29 feb, https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2020/02/28/coronavirus-legt-de-zwakheden-bloot-van-de-wereldwijde-verstreng/ retrieved 29-04-2020

[8] KATSUJI NAKAZAWA, Xi fears Japan-led manufacturing exodus from China, The year of the metal rat returns every 60 years -- and brings calamity with it, in Nikkei Asian Review, April 16, 202, https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Xi-fears-Japan-led-manufacturing-exodus-from-China retrieved 17-04-2020

[9] Hugues Mugemana, Rwanda warns against the use of Zoom over security concerns, in The New Times, April 10, 2020, https://www.newtimes.co.rw/technology/rwanda-warns-against-use-zoom-over-security-concerns,

retrieved 11-4-2020 - Edwin Ashimwe, Rwanda: Zoom Clears the Air Over Security and Safety Issues, in The New Times, 4 April 2020, https://allafrica.com/stories/202004040152.html, retrieved 13-05-2020

[10] Nathalie Tocci, How coronavirus will upturn the global order, As the epidemic heightens tensions between Beijing and Washington, it’s up to Europe to step into the breach, in Politico 9-4-2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-upturns-global-order-china-united-states/ retrieved 13-05-2020

[11] Es ist Zeit für einen gemeinsamen Weckruf für Europa, Ein Appell europäischer Medien an die Regierungschefs, (It is time for a common wake-up call for Europe. An appeal by European media to the heads of government) in Berliner Morgenpost, 7-04-2020, https://www.e-pages.dk/bmberlinermorgenpost/540/article/1116302/1/1/render/?token=a2926138d4d53f0b266afa6a7ca41111 retrieved 09-04-2020

[12] Jens Südekum, Gabriel Felbermayr, Michael Hüther, Moritz Schularick, Christoph Trebesch, Peter Bofinger, Sebastan Dullien, Europa muss jetzt finanziell zusammenstehen,(Europe must now stand together financially) in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21-03-2020, https://zeitung.faz.net/faz/wirtschaft/2020-03-21/europa-muss-jetzt-finanziell-zusammenstehen/439713.html?GEPC=s5 retrieved 23-03-2020

[13] Gert Peersman, Alleen de coronaschulden verdwijnen vanzelf (Only the corona debt disappears after a while) in De Standaard 12-05-2020

[14] https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/recovery-fundFRnonpaper_copy.pdf retrieved 14-05-2020

[15] Annekatrien Verdickt, Gideon Boie & Jens Aerts, Naar de exit zonder auto, (Towards the exit without car), in De Standaard 12 mei 2020

[16] Ine Roox, Het verdriet van Italië, eenzaam in Europa,( The sorrow of Italy, lonely in Europe) in De Standaard, 18-04-2020

[17] Sven Tuytens: Brusselse is drijvende kracht achter burgerinitiatief in Spaans dorpje: "Geweldig om te zien hoe groot solidariteit is" (Brussels lady is driving force behind citizens' initiative in Spanish village: "Great to see how great solidarity is") – in VRTNews, 18 apr 2020 https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2020/04/17/sven-tuytens-brusselse-in-madrid/ retrieved 30-4-2020

[18] Louis Delcart, RE-INDUSTRIALIZATION: EUROPEAN REGIONS HAVE A LOT OF BENEFITS, in: blog Principles of regional approach, 4-07-2019 https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/186112943925/re-industrialization-european-regions-have-a-lot retrieved 14-05-2020

[19] https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ retrieved on 28-3-2020

#covid19 #coronavirus #regional approach #regional development #policies

0 notes

thechasefiles · 5 years ago

Text

The Chase Files Daily Newscap 22/4/2020

Good Morning #realdreamchasers! Here is your daily news cap for Wednesday 22nd April, 2020. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS), Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Midweek Nation Newspaper (MWN).

ABRAHAMS: PEOPLE NOT PAYING THEIR WATER BILLS – The COVID-19 pandemic is causing revenue at the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) to leak by as much as 25 per cent, primarily because more people are not paying their bills. This was revealed yesterday by Minister Water Resources Wilfred Abrahams, who was a guest on Starcom Network’s Down To Brass Tacks programme along with BWA general manager Keithroy Halliday. “Our financial position, as tenuous as it was, has become worse. The reality is that a lot of people are not paying their water bills at this point in time. The take for the Barbados Water Authority on the bill has dropped to, I think, about 25 per cent of what it is supposed to be,” the minister said. Abrahams said they had operated in good faith and assured people their service would not be disconnected amidst the coronavirus crisis, but he wanted Barbadians to use their conscience. (MWN)

PAY YOUR WATER BILL – As Barbados faces its worst drought in decades, Minister of Water Resources Wilfred Abraham revealed the state-owned water authority was battling its own lack of flowing funds. He warned that revenue at the Barbados Water Authority was fast drying up as Barbadians failed to pay their bills. Speaking on Voice of Barbados’ Down to Brass Tacks, Abrahams, addressing complaints about persistent water outages in rural parishes caught in the grip of an ongoing drought, said the state-owned utility has taken a double-digit knock to its already weak finances in recent weeks. “Our financial position as tenuous as it was has become worse,” he said. “The reality is that a lot of people are not paying their water bills at this time. So the take for the Barbados Water Authority on the bills has dropped to I think 25 per cent of what it is supposed to be.” He argued that just as the BWA determined not to disconnect people during the COVID crisis, consumers should not put their bill payments on the back burner. Abrahams told the programme: “I am just going to ask people to use their conscience a little bit. The fact that we are not going to disconnect you for health reasons does not absolve you from paying your water bill because at the end of the day you are not just going to continue racking up arrears against you but in the interim, you are starving the water authority, or the water authority is being starved of money it needs to do basic things to make the system work properly.” He warned that the problem went further than BWA, saying the Government was stretched because no money was “coming into the Government’s coffers”. He declared: “Land tax is not being paid, VAT [Value Added Tax] is not being paid, business has ground to halt in Barbados, so people are not able to pay their statutory obligations in Barbados. So the Ministry of Finance is catching itself to even find money to run the country so it just not a good situation for us to be in.” The Minister responsible for the BWA noted that the authority was almost at the point of getting to the bottom of what he termed “dangerous debt” levels discovered in 2018 but has now suffered a setback and as a result, a number of critical programmes would be on hold. He cited the proposed $14. 8 million Vineyard project that is expected to provide relief to the water-scarce parishes of St John and St Joseph through the redistribution of water from Vineyard, St Philip to the Golden Ridge/Bowmanston system. Abrahams: “We were scheduled to be starting all of these things… when the COVID issues descended upon us. We have the bulk of the pipes for Vineyard project so we had started the process, we have located where we are going to put the reservoir in Stewart Hill, we have specs for everything that needs to be done for it, we were sourcing the financing for it, we were investigating loans, we had people, that we were looking to get the financing from, but the reality now is that with the decreased revenues of the Barbados Water Authority, occasioned by people not paying their water bills we cannot speak to a financier and we cannot prove to them a guaranteed source of income for the next 12 months. Our income now is at its worse for I don’t even know how long.” Abrahams said the BWA would now have to turn back to the Government to find the money to complete the project, noting that Prime Minister Mia Mottley and Minister of Finance Ryan Straughn have been trying to source funding. (BT)

BRA TO OPEN TWO OFFICES –The Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA) will reopen the Weymouth Corporate Centre and Warrens Towers II locations in St Michael to facilitate limited transactions from Wednesday, April 22. A press release said this is to further enable payments in relation to PAYE, VAT and income tax during the period of the curfew. The offices will open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and will follow the recommended physical distancing protocols. Payments for licensing transactions remain suspended during the curfew period, according to the statement. (BGIS)

MINISTRY READY FOR E-LEARNING - Online teaching has started at all tertiary institutions and most private schools. A statement from the Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training (METVT) said this follows consultations last week with substantive Minister of Education Santia Bradshaw and ministry officials, principals of all public and private schools, and unions representing teachers and principals. From April 20 to 24, all public schools will be preparing to roll out online teaching using the Google G Suite for Education platform. The statement said this platform may be accessed from any PC, laptop, tablet or smart mobile device. The ministry emphasised the importance of education during the curfew period and is working with providers and suppliers to ensure every child has Internet access and devices to utilise the new elearning platform. Radio and television will be utilised in the interim to provide educational content to ensure that students are not disadvantaged. Further assistnce can be accessed by calling the ministry’s helpdesk at 535-0798, between 8:15 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Additional information may be found on the ministry’s website www.mes.gov.bb. The ministry advised those schools and teachers who are ready to engage with their students using the Google G Suite Classroom that they may do so, but no new concepts are to be taught. These new measures are being implemented after schools were closed last term to limit spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). (BGIS)

NOT YET IN THE CLEAR – It would be unwise of Government to ease the current restrictions despite Barbados not recording a positive test for coronavirus in the past six days, COVID-19 Czar Richard Carter has declared. He is adamant that as long as there are still live cases of the respiratory illness on the island it means we are still under threat. In an interview with Barbados TODAY, Carter said while the string of negative tests was a positive sign he was still very concerned that 45 people were still infected. Carter said: “I will say, however, that six days without cases, while it is encouraging it does not matter really as much as the fact that we currently still have over 40 live cases in Barbados that we are managing. As long as you have live cases in your country you have an epidemic that is going on.… One case is all it takes to spark a spike. “There can be no immediate contemplation or consideration of lifting restrictions right now. We have to continue to be on our guard and it will be far too early to be talking about the relaxation of the restrictions. One live case means that you have to be considering and dealing and trying to get to zero. Essentially that is our goal, to get to zero cases in Barbados. “We don’t know how many or whether there are other cases that have not been diagnosed within the community. We are trying our best through the contact tracing and through the surveillance that we are undertaking to detect and identify whether there are any cases but we can never be 100 per cent sure outside of testing every single person.” Carter stressed that over 2.5 million diagnosed cases of COVID-19 worldwide started with one case. But he pointed out that public health officials in Barbados would be the ones responsible for advising Government on whether those restrictions ought to be lifted. “So the public health officials will advise the Government when it is appropriate to lift any restrictions that have been put in place. “In all of this we have been following the advice of the public health officials in Barbados and they have advised the Government in relation to when it is necessary to impose restrictions and they will guide the Government as to when it is appropriate to lift them,” the Czar noted. Minister of Health Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic announced yesterday that having acquired 2,800 swabs and 27,000 testing kits, health authorities are moving to ramp up COVID-19 testing. He also warned that Barbados was not yet out in the clear. “I want to reiterate that although this is indeed very encouraging for all of us it is not a sign that we are out of the woods. We must not drop our guard. We must not drop the level of defense that we are putting up against this enemy,” Lt. Col. Bostic said. (BT)

DOC: CAUTIOUS CHANGES TO COME – Barbados is preparing to launch new protocols should the island continue to record no new COVID-19 infections, says Acting Chief Medical Officer Dr Kenneth George. However, although there have been no new infections for the sixth straight day, he advised caution. “We are not going to be rash, even with small incremental changes or with things like opening up businesses and allowing construction. We have been told to let the science guide us, so that’s what we’re doing. We have agreed two weeks – the full incubation period for this disease – with no new cases, will be the trigger for something new. “As we get more information and if things trend downwards, we will have a systematic approach, but countries should not rush to reverse a lot of the changes. It is going to be incremental. . ” (MWN)

PAHO GIVES MORE KITS FOR COVID FIGHT - The Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) has boosted Barbados’ COVID-19 testing capabilities with a donation of 11,000 testing kits. Accepting the kits and 782 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) packages from PAHO/WHO Representative for Barbados and Eastern Caribbean Dr Yitades Gebre, Minister of Health and Wellness Col Lt Jeffrey Bostic said the donation is timely for use in the country’s island-wide testing programme scheduled to begin soon. Speaking during the handing over ceremony at PAHO’s Dayrells Road, Christ Church headquarters this afternoon, Bostic revealed that health authorities were now in possession of 38 000 testing kits and noted that that number is expected to be increased soon. “We are on top of it in containing it and we need to really expand our testing. This is exactly what we are going to be doing in a day or two. We are going to be expanding the testing and establishing testing centres so that we can get back to as normal a state as early as possible without compromising public health,” Bostic said. Minister of Health and Wellness Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic receives the donation of kits and equipment from PAHO/WHO Representative to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean Dr Yitades Gebre during a handover at PAHO Headquarters today. (BGIS) Chief Medical Officer Dr Kenneth George who also attended the ceremony, stated that while recovered COVID-19 patients are being released and there has been no evidence of re-infection, the authorities are monitoring this particular aspect of the pandemic closely since it has been happening in other countries. “It is something that we will continue to monitor. As the Minister said we have been given a mandate from the Prime Minister [Mia Amor Mottley] to scale up our testing. Today is day six without any new cases and the Ministry of Health has always had the approach to be extremely transparent. “And we would like to make sure that there is no in-country transmission and the only way we are going to do that with some confidence is if we scale up our testing. “So what we have told general practitioners in Barbados is that persons even without a travel history presenting with respiratory illness we are willing to test. We have placed special emphasis on frontline workers and particularly the elderly,” Dr George said. Minister Bostic thanked PAHO for its assistance in the COVID-19 fight. He said Barbados has been following PAHO and WHO’s guidelines and protocols to contain the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, Dr Gebre praised Barbados’ handling of the pandemic and noted that many countries could benefit from copying the model. He said PAHO is pleased to continue to provide the country with technical and administrative support to ensure that lives are saved and the negative impact on society is kept at a minimum. Dr Gebre said it was encouraging to note that most countries in the region were managing the pandemic well, with there being no signs of community spread and some nations reporting no COVID-19 related deaths. “No country at this point has shown that they are overwhelmed with the number of cases. All of them are doing extremely well in terms of containing. There is no community transmission in the Caribbean,” Dr Gebre said. When asked whether the United States of America’s (USA) threat to halt its funding to the WHO over the organisation’s handling of COVID-19, Dr Gebre said that the US was committed to helping WHO’s work in developing countries in need of the assistance during the pandemic. “During this pandemic the United States government has provided resources to support other countries. In our region, USAID provided $100 000 for Barbados and then for each of those countries in the range of $60 000 to $70 000 for the next three months. So we have received half a million dollars from the United States government in our region to provide technical support. Continuously that kind of support is needed,” Dr Gebre said. (BT)

PAHO DIRECTOR: INCREASED VIRUS TESTING CRITICAL – The director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), Dr Carissa F. Etienne, on April 21 called for accelerated and expanded testing for the coronavirus (COVID-19) in countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. “We need a clearer view of where the virus is circulating and how many people have been infected in order to guide our actions,” said Etienne during a virtual press briefing. “The pandemic continues to impact our region, and it’s vital for all countries to actively embrace preventive measures, while preparing for more cases, hospitalisations and deaths,” she added. As of April 20, there have been 839 119 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 42 686 people have died in the Region of the Americas. The PAHO director said that countries have been prepared to test and detect cases of COVID-19 since before the pandemic was declared. Since February, PAHO said it had trained and equipped laboratories for PCR testing in more than 30 countries. But, as cases have increased, Etienne said countries have found it increasingly difficult to keep up. She highlighted PAHO’s recommendations for countries to expand their capacity and use all available national laboratories; to prioritise patients with symptoms, tracing contacts and following up with those that may be infected; and to ensure access for all so testing would be free of charge for patients. PAHO said it has provided more than 500 000 PCR tests to 34 countries and territories, “and we have worked with other countries to track and support their capacity”, said Etienne. An additional 1.5 million PCR tests are being dispatched throughout the region this week, “followed by another 3 million next week to strengthen laboratory surveillance networks in our member states”, she highlighted. “To address the market shortage, we are working with leading manufacturers to make these tests available through the PAHO Strategic Fund,” Etienne said. “Twelve countries are now using this mechanism to purchase quality commercial PCR-based tests. “As we negotiate other options, we are considering tests that run on both open and on so-called closed platforms, to maximise each country’s ability to test,” she added. To help ensure countries procure reliable products, Etienne said PAHO is providing guidance to regulatory and health authorities, and is calling on manufacturers “to work closely with us so that we can ensure equitable access to new quality tests, as they reach the market so all our countries can benefit from innovations”. Global access to medicines, vaccines, and medical equipment to respond to COVID 19 “should not be a privilege of certain countries or communities”, she said. “Our collective goal must be to ensure that access to the testing, treatment, vaccines and other technologies is available to all based on needs.” (CMC)

UN URGES ACTION TO AVOID “BIBLICAL FAMINE” – The world is at risk of widespread famines "of biblical proportions" caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the United Nations has warned. David Beasley, head of the World Food Programme (WFP), said urgent action was needed to avoid a catastrophe. A report estimates that the number suffering from hunger could go from 135 million to more than 250 million. Those most at risk are in ten countries affected by conflict, economic crisis and climate change, the WFP says. The fourth annual Global Report on Food Crises highlights Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and Haiti. In South Sudan, 61 per cent of the population was affected by food crisis last year, the report says. Even before the pandemic hit, parts of East Africa and South Asia were already facing severe food shortages caused by drought and the worst locust infestations for decades. Addressing the UN Security Council during a video conference, Beasley said the world had to "act wisely and act fast". "We could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months," he said. "The truth is we do not have time on our side." In a call to action, he added: "I do believe that with our expertise and our partnerships, we can bring together the teams and the programmes necessary to make certain the Covid-19 pandemic does not become a human and food crisis catastrophe." (BBC)

T&T STUDENTS AT CAVE HILL PLEAD FOR A RESPONSE FROM AUTHORITIES IN PORT OF SPAIN – More than a dozen Trinidad and Tobago nationals who are studying at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus are today expressing concern that their cries for help from authorities in their homeland are falling on deaf ears. Speaking on the behalf of her peers, final year law student Shantal Seecharan told Barbados TODAY that most of them, ranging from ages of 20 to 25, were “barely getting by” because they have already run out of funds and were now rationing food supplies. She said they missed the deadline for flying home before Trinidad and Tobago closed its borders towards the end of March, and repeated efforts to get help from authorities there have been unsuccessful. “The reason why most of us missed the deadline to go back home is because we didn’t have the funds to just purchase a ticket at that point and leave,” she said. “In terms of the supplies that we have they are currently running out. Some organisations and people in Trinidad are trying to help us but for the past week it has been very hard to get supplies to us so we have been trying to make arrangements so we would be able to get some groceries. Everything is limited right now so we all have to ration,” said Seecharan. She explained: “In terms of rent, I know some other students, right now their rents are paid for April, but they don’t know what will happen after April. We suppose the landlords will not kick them out because of the moratorium but we know that is not law.” Teaching will end this week, but the students still have a number of assignments due, and they are preparing for assessments, which are to take place between May 11 and June 12. However, speaking on behalf of the 13 students, Seecharan said faced with “extreme sadness” because they were unable to be with their loved ones at this time, the situation has been compounded by the stresses of preparing for assessments. She said she was not aware that any of the students wanted to withdraw from their studies or drop out, adding that they were doing their best to “power through” and stay positive. “Some students have told me that their mental health has taken a significant hit, that they are extremely demotivated to continue their studies and to finish their assignments on time. Some of them sleep all day and stay up all night or they are not sleeping and not eating,” she said. However, she added: “We are all supporting each other because some of us have bad days. Sometimes we want to give up, but we are there for each other and we are remaining strong. We plan to continue to power through and remain hopeful that our government will answer our call.” While the majority of them are final year law students, others are studying medicine and social sciences. She said the students were overly concerned about their families back home, adding that several of them had family members who were now out of a job. “Some parents are both essential workers. One student is very concerned that something could happen to one of her parents and she has a younger brother who she would need to be there for if that were to happen,” she said. “Then we have situations where both parents are non-essential workers and unfortunately, they have lost their jobs and have no income. We also have people from single-parent households . . . and they are living from pay cheque to pay cheque,” she said. Seecharan explained that most of the students have already received welfare assistance from the university in the past year. The last time they tried to contact officials in their homeland was on Sunday. “We have been sending in our applications for the special exemption to our minister of national security (Stuart Young). But those emails and calls have gone unanswered. However, on Sunday we decided to ban together and put all our information in one document, and we sent it Sunday,” she said. Seecharan said she was pleading with authorities in Trinidad. “Please, answer our calls, please give us a response and tell us you are beginning the process for us. Tell us what plans, what arrangements are being made for us. “So far we are not hearing anything and we just want some level of response, some level of reassurance. Something more than just being told ‘stay put’. We want our cries for help to be heard,” she cried. She told Barbados TODAY that the group has also been in touch with local authorities, seeking help to start the process for them to go back to Trinidad and Tobago. A part of that would include getting tested for the coronavirus in Bridgetown. She said local officials have been responding to their emails and things were looking positive. Seecharan explained that while the group of students was told by the group of 33 seniors that they could be accommodated on their flight that was scheduled to leave Bridgetown on Tuesday for Port of Spain, they were unable to make it because they did not get clearance from Trinidad officials and they have not yet been tested by local medical officials. Seecharan said the lawyers who acted on behalf of the seniors had agreed to help the students in their quest. (BT)

TRINIDADIAN’S FLYING HOME - THE 33 stranded Trinidadians should be back home today, despite a short delay. After a Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) donation of 11 000 testing kits and 782 pieces of personal protection equipment to the Ministry of Health, Minister Jeffrey Bostic spoke about the situation concerning the Trinidadians. The presentation of equipment was made at PAHO's office, Dayrells Road and Navy Gardens, Christ Church. “There are two chartered flights, I believe, which are scheduled to take them back to Trinidad today. We are doing the tests and we will send the results to Trinidad but that is not going to stop them from making the flights this afternoon. They will be tested, they will fly and we will pass the information to the authorities in Trinidad as soon as we have the results,” Bostic said. The Trinidadians were at Grantley Adams International Airport this morning with the first group waiting to board their flight, when they were informed of the delay. Nation News was told that the Trinidad Government had requested medical testing before the group left Barbados. The 33 were taken to Paragon to be tested. The Trinidadians had been quarantined at Sugarcane Club in St Peter and stayed there even after the quarantine period. Bernie Weatherhead, owner of Sugarcane Club, was at the airport to see them off. The Trinidadians had arrived on a flight from England last month after completing a cruise vacation that had started in Dubai. However, they were left here after Trinidad closed its borders as a response to novel coronavirus (COVID-19). (MWN)

TRUMP TO IMPOSE 60 DAY IMMIGRATION BAN – United States President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his new US immigration ban would last 60 days and apply to those seeking “green cards” for permanent residency in an effort to protect Americans seeking to regain jobs lost because of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Trump plans to institute the ban through an executive order, which he said he was likely to sign on April 22. He said it would not apply to individuals entering the United States on a temporary basis and would be re-evaluated once the 60-day period had passed. Trump said that pausing immigration would put “unemployed Americans first in line for jobs” as the country re-opened. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labour flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker,” he told reporters at the White House. Trump said there would be some exemptions in the order and he could renew it for another 60 days or longer. The president, a Republican, won the White House in 2016 in part on a promise to crack down on immigration. Critics saw his announcement as a move to take advantage of a crisis to implement a long-sought policy goal. The order could spark legal action. A senior administration official said the administration was looking at a separate action to cover others affected by US immigration policy, including those on so-called H-1B visas. Trump confirmed that a secondary order was under consideration. The first order would include exemptions for people involved in responding to the coronavirus outbreak, including farm workers and those helping to secure US food supplies, the official said. As the country begins to open up its economy, immigration flows were expected to increase, and the administration wanted to ensure that employers hire back fired workers rather than giving jobs to immigrants at lower wages. The US Department of State issued roughly 462 000 immigrant visas in fiscal year 2019, which began on October 1, 2018. The visas allow an immigrant to obtain lawful permanent resident status, informally known as a green card. The status allows a person to live and work in the United States and apply for citizenship after a five-year period. Critics viewed Trump’s new policy as an effort to distract from his response to the pandemic. “I think this is a malevolent distraction,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy institute in Washington. Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, said researchers generally agree that immigration into the United States has stimulated economic growth, increased the size of the economy, and created jobs. “The idea that immigration threatens American jobs is just not there in any data,” he said. (Reuters)

GUYANA TO RELAX MEASURES FOR CARICOM TEAM – The National COVID-19 Task Force (NCTF) says it has agreed to relax the stringent measures for people entering Guyana so as to allow officials of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) team to participate in the recount of ballots in the March 2 regional and general election. In a statement issued here on Monday night, the NCTF said that it had agreed for the CARICOM officials to undergo the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for coronavirus (COVID-19) instead of being subjected to 14 days of quarantine. The NCTF had earlier decided that people who arrived here during the lockdown period as a result of the country’s efforts to stem the spread of the coronavirus would have faced a 14-day quarantine. But the decision came in for criticism from some Commissioners of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) and some of the political parties that had contested the disputed elections. But following the intervention of President David Granger, the NCTF said the mandatory quarantine for 14 days will no longer be applicable. Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, who heads the COVID-19 Task Force, has written to the GECOM chairperson, retired justice Claudette Singh and the CARICOM Secretary-General, Irwin LaRocque informing them of the decisions of the NCTF. Nagamootoo had on Sunday indicated that the Task Force had decided that the recount must be conducted within the COVID-19 curfew hours, and that international observers coming to the country must submit themselves to a 14-day quarantine at a government-run institution. But these decisions were reversed on Monday. LaRocque had earlier written to Granger urging that medical examinations for members of the delegation to be done in their countries of origin before their arrival in Guyana. In the statement, NCTF said “the CARICOM officials identified to participate in the recount of ballots be permitted to undergo WHO-approved reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for COVID-19 in their respective home countries prior to arrival in Guyana, and they will be permitted entry on the basis that such test results are negative”. The Task Force said if any official is unable to have such a test conducted in their home country, that upon their arrival in Guyana, the Ministry of Public Health will facilitate the test here on condition that the official self-quarantines for a maximum of 48 hours while the test results are being ascertained. As such, quarantining of the incoming officials for the mandatory period of 14 days will not be applicable upon compliance with either of the established requirements. “Having been reviewed, and the interest of public health safety being considered, the NCTF accordingly varied the decision taken previously on this issue,” the statement added. (CMC)

INSURER GENERAL ACCIDENTS ENTERS BARBADOS MARKET – A Jamaica-based general insurance company with an operation in Trinidad is set to enter the Barbadian market following regulatory approval here, the firm said. General Accident Insurance Company (Barbados) Limited, a subsidiary of General Accident Insurance Company Jamaica Limited, which hold an 80 per cent stake, has been licensed by the Financial Services Commission to operate as a registered Class 2 insurer. A Barbadian consortium, BCDL Holdings Limited, whose shareholders include current and former executives of Williams Industries and Williams Caribbean Capital, owns the remaining 20 per cent of General Accident Barbados. The company’s Chairman P.B. Scott said: “The decision to enter the Barbados market reflects the long-term confidence we have in the economy and people of Barbados. It is also consistent with our strategy of expanding General Accident’s reach across the English-speaking Caribbean. “With the announcement, General Accident will now be present in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. We look forward to combining General Accident’s brand, expertise and financial strength with BCDL’s extensive local relationships in Barbados.” Sharon Donaldson, General Accident’s Managing Director said: “We will be providing more details about our official launch date and reaching out to brokers, policyholders and other stakeholders shortly.”(BT)

MAN SHOT IN PATIO – A St Philip man is in stable condition after being shot on April 21. Police public relations officer Acting Inspector Rodney Inniss said Wayne Harewood, 52, of Duncans, St Philip, was sitting in his patio when four men approached and a number of shots were discharged. He received an injury to the chest and two others to the left side of the head. Harewood was transported to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital by private car and was reported to be in stable condition after undergoing emergency surgery. Officers from District C Police Station responded to the incident which occurred about 8:15 p.m. Investigations are ongoing. (MWN)

THREE ON SERIOUS BODILY HARM CHARGE – Two tree trimmers and a soldier were today granted $9,000 bail each on a joint criminal charge. They are 48-year-old Rene Orlando Pilgrim and 24-year-old Raheem Akeem Grimes both, of 5th Avenue North Lowlands Drive, Friendship Terrace, St Michael and 25-year-old soldier Kyle Akeem Hutson, of Ruth Road, Ellerton, St George. They are accused of causing serious bodily harm to Ryan Gittens of April 17 with intent to maim, disfigure or disable him. They were not required to plead to the indictable charge when the matter was called before Magistrate Alison Burke this afternoon in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court. Grimes is charged separately with wounding Theirry Gittens on the same date. That charge is also indictable and he got an additional $8,000 bail on the charge. There was no objection to bail from Station Sergeant Glenda Carter-Nicholls and the three accused left the court after their sureties were accepted The tree trimmers – Grimes and Pilgrim are represented by attorney-at-law Dwight Moseley while Hutson, the soldier, has Angella Mitchell-Gittens was his legal counsel. They will next appear in court on September 14. (BT)

ALLEGED ARSONIST REMANDED – An alleged arsonist has been remanded to prison until May 19. Christopher Stephen Licorish, of no fixed place of abode, appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today accused of destroying the home of Eugene Licorish and that of Reginald Seifert by fire on April 14. The accused could not plead to the charges in the magistrates’ court as they are indictable. Magistrate Alison Burke , sitting at the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court explained the concept of indictable cases to Licorish who responded: “I sorry it happened ma’am”. The court then explained again why he could not plead to the offence at this time. Station Sergeant Glenda Carter-Nicholls objected to bail on the grounds that the accused has no fixed place of abode and it would be difficult for police to locate him if he absconds. The prosecutor also pointed to the seriousness of the offences and the likelihood that the accused could re-offend if granted bail. In his application Licorish asked to be granted bail so he could go to the Psychiatric Hospital “to get some work”. He continued: “I could save and pay the person for the house.” His application was denied. (BT)

THIEF PICKS PRISON STAY – Scaling the walls of another man’s residence twice in a bid to steal limes during the Covid-19 curfew has landed a 45-year-old man in jail for the next six months. Tony Ricardo Harris, of Lower Carters Gap, Enterprise, Christ Church pleaded guilty to loitering on Davison Hunte’s premises on April 19 in a bid to commit theft. He also admitted to being outdoors at No 16 Oleander Drive, Enterprise Christ Church, on the same day around 3:30 p.m. without a reasonable explanation when a national emergency directive had been given to people to remain indoors. According to Station Sergeant Glenda Carter-Nicholls the complainant was at home when he observed Harris who he knew from frequenting the area, in his backyard picking limes. He shouted at him and Harris ran and climbed over the wall. However, he did not stay away for long and returned a second time and he again rushed over the wall when the homeowner saw him. He was chased by neighbours but made his escape into the sea. Police later apprehended him. “I went and pick de man limes,” Harris, who is known to the court, told lawmen when he was detained. He appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today. When Magistrate Alison Burke asked him whether he had anything to say in his defence Harris replied: “No ma’am.” He however admitted that he knew what was taking place in the country. “Yes ma’am Covid-19,” he said. The magistrate queried his reason for being outside if he knew the situation, Harris responded: “I was trying to use two limes.” He then told the magistrate that he lived in an abandoned house. The magistrate sentenced him to six months in prison on each charge which will run concurrently. (BT)

JONES FLOORED BY FUNDING WOES –Long before the coronavirus pandemic brought sports around the world to a halt, elite boxer Ajayi Jones experienced a blow due to lack of funding. The 23-year-old 2015 Caribbean Boxing Championships gold medallist was hoping to attend the Olympic Qualifiers in Buenos Aires, Argentina originally set for March 26 to April 3. “I was preparing for the Olympic [Qualifiers] in Argentina but I was not selected to go because of lack of funding. I had the Olympic dream for about two years and when I heard I wasn’t going it shattered me. It almost made me not want to compete for the rest of the year,” he told MIDWEEK SPORT. (MWN)

MALONEY 2ND IN FIRST ESPORTS RACE – British F4 champion Zane Maloney got the better of a midfield battle and grabbed second place in the opening round of the Kokoro Performance iRacing series last Friday at the Circuit de Barcelona. Starting from grid position four, Maloney found himself in a midfield battle and defended second place in the race in which competitors used iRacing’s Dallara F3 cars with a fixed set-up provided by the organisers, and a reverse grid format for close competition throughout the field. The top four remained a closely knit bunch separated by a little more than a second separating winner Dion Gowda, Maloney, Kai Askey and James Pull as they raced over the finish line. (MWN)

PLAN TO HELP ARTISTES AS NIGHTLIFE VANISHES –The disappearance of the entertainment scene as Barbados fights the COVID-19 pandemic has left artistes singing the blues. With the island in curfew mode for almost a month, the closure of hotels and entertainment spots across the island, and the recent announcement that the 2020 Crop Over festival has been cancelled, the Barbados Association of Calypsonians and Artistes (BACA) is now working on a plan to help its members survive the slump. BACA President Sean Apache Carter said in a statement that the current events have presented the association with both a challenge and an opportunity to step up and show its worth through the proposition of revenue-earning initiatives, should the climate allow in the light of COVID-19 and the expected cancellations. Carter said: “These proposals will not only prove beneficial to our members but to the entire music fraternity. We have had cordial meetings with both the Minister Hon. John King and Chief Executive Officer of the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) Carol Roberts-Reifer, prior to the arrival of this pandemic and our position remains the same.” The BACA president noted that as the plans advance, the association eagerly anticipates working with both entities where possible for the benefit of all. He said BACA also looks forward to the stakeholders’ consultations announced by Cabinet to allow for viable solutions. With Crop Over’s cancellation, many soca and bashment artistes will be more significantly affected than calypsonians as they would normally perform at numerous fetes, limes and band launches, and tours normally scheduled for the summer have been cancelled, Carter said. He indicated that until there is a return to some sense of normalcy, or what may become the “new normal”, all entertainers who may have been anticipating the prospects of the Crop Over Festival being postponed in order to mediate the fallout mentioned above, now find themselves in a dire position. Carter further explained that the Soca Monarch and Pic-O-De-Crop competitions undoubtedly provide the biggest payday relative to an individual performance for many artistes. He said this will also have a severe impact on the many dancers from various dance troops who enhance overall performances and presentations in the competitions. He said he also believes that soca artistes will be significantly impacted by the lack of private events associated with Crop Over as generally, only the top three competitors ever walk away with a profit in any given competition. Carter told Barbados TODAY: “We represent a wide cross-section of artistes so our members are impacted at varying levels. One individual has found himself unemployed for the first time in 35 years and having paid NIS doesn’t help him at this time as there is no unemployment for self-employed persons. “A few others have communicated that they are not sure how they will pay their rent at the end of the month or even be able to buy food when the current stock runs out. These are indeed unprecedented times. The entertainment community has been hard hit by the impact of COVID-19. This is three or four weeks many have not worked and don’t know when or where the next job will be.” Carter noted that members who are part-time entertainers and have not been heavily affected by the pandemic are considering to record and release songs during this period of uncertainty. (BT)

The world is facing the rapid spread of the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic. As we continue to do our part in Barbados please remember to stay home but on the days you have to go out wear your masks, practice social distancing (stand 6-10 feet away from each other), practice good daily hygiene, eat healthy, exercise and keep your mind active. There are 254 days left in the year Shalom! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps #bajannewscaps #newsinanutshell #coronavirusinbarbados #nationalresponse #dailynews #thechasefilesblog

0 notes

abrahamjrijo · 5 years ago

Text

The Cure for Sanitized Hands

I sit here at my home in Kerala, where the weather could kill coronaviruses and, where I can barely make it to the end of the day. I read jittery WhatsApp messages and nonchalantly scroll down the bottomless Facebook feed. Lazy days actually, but feels like a gallows humour. I move from newspaper articles to scientific journals about the epidemic and then as a reprieve to a book and to memes, like an old man trying to get across the room clutching one furniture then the other. It is depressing—but this time, not the cosmic variety of depression to which I am often prone to.

I mean, the situation is grim— the reality of it.

From what I gather, an epidemic like this happened in 1918, when a less-racist Spanish flu swept the world. Death was more than the numbers of the two great wars put together-- between 50 and 100 million people.

“Think about that”, says the Guardian writer, implying that a pandemic is twice as deadly as a World War III, if it were to happen, and adds that it would reshape history like no war would. Did you know that Gandhi was affected by the flu in 1918? And the poet TS Elliot too?

The Coronavirus is deadly, because it is deceptive: many would show mild to no symptoms but would act as carriers. In fact, we are actually fighting an enemy we don’t fully see. The fatality rate for India with a feeble medical infrastructure will be quiet high. Even if a lock-down would bring down the rate of fatality, by taking the pressure off the healthcare system, we may have less intense ‘second-wave’ once the lock-down lifted.

The situation is unprecedented in the living memory.

Another Guardian article quotes 107-year-old Joe Newman of Florida, one of few remaining survivors the Spanish flu, telling NBC News, “There are those of us who say, well, this too shall go away. And it will. But at what cost, at what expense?”

His words are terse and sobering.

Those who survive the pandemic, the economy will kill. All major economies are going to a slump. With careers, and along with with-it people’s identities at stake, many will begin to ask existential questions. It would be a time many will increasingly turn to spirituality for succour, not necessarily of the established religions.

Amid all the cacophony, one thing wriggles out its head—the communal nature of this crisis, that it is not a matter of me “staying safe”, but a matter of we as a nation helping each other out.

I know, this sounds like a cheesy government PR campaign. But like all truths, it is simple and when I realized it made me say, “How could I have missed it.”

Washing hands with soap and avoiding crowded places are analogous to driving safe, it can only take you so much. When you obey the traffic rules you make the road safe, not just for yourself alone. And when you drive rashly, well you get it.

But what I want to get at is this: a person drives with a high beam on a single lane road and thinks that this would make him see better and consequently, helps him to be safer. But we know that this is not the case: the high beam blinds the driver of the oncoming vehicle and makes the road less safe. Similarly, much of our precautions often work against us.

Case point: panic buying.

In the nearby towns, people jostle each other in supermarkets to stockpile on what they think would make them comfortable during the doomsday, should it come. Police had to intervene and the queue stretched out into the pavement.

Fear is its fuel. For a moment imagine that the doomsday has arrived. And like we feared, there is scarcity. And then, people who don’t have enough to eat will resort to looting. How those of us who have hoarded, leaving nothing for others claim to have better behaved that the those who have looted? Can we say with honesty, “I brought the stuff with my money”, like in ordinary circumstances? All semblance of culture and civility will be stripped off at this point. In fact hoarding not only doesn’t work for anyone, but it works against everyone.

In another instance, at a live chicken shop, they grabbed whatever chicken they could, skinned it and handed it over to those who would first raise their hand into the crowded shop. It feels like a society in the throes of anarchy.

This frenzied buying would kill humanity in us before the disease could strike our body.

One thing is clear from this: people are more scared of an apocalyptic end like in the movies than actually contracting the disease. If they had feared the disease more, they would have avoided crowding the shops.

III

One of the first cases of corona in Kerala was detected in a small town called Ranni, some 30 odd kilometres from my home. A family had returned from Italy, the epicentre of the crisis, and didn’t report of their travel history. They were asymptomatic and went about their business as usual. They and a neighbor of theirs, were later confirmed to have the disease. All their secondary and tertiary contacts of around 800 people have been isolated and those who showed symptoms tested. However, others in the area who even didn’t have any contact with the infected people are being shooed away from shops, like dogs. These people, have no symptoms nor were in the primary or secondary contact, are starving.

We have returned from Bangalore in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. In the city there is no incidence of local transmission, yet we informed local authorities and have isolated ourselves till everyone can safely assume we haven’t smuggled the virus into the state. Our neighbours, when they came to know that we have arrived, on the sly informed the health officials about the “suspects” in the neighbourhood. The officials came and found that we are already in their records and have not stepped outside since we came.

Well, if you didn’t get it, this was an insult to us, who were too scrupulous to have taken the situation lightly.

One more story: in our neighbourhood, a person who has come from the middle east was in home isolation. He had asked his wife and children to move out and quarantined himself after informing the authorities. His neighbours informed the health officials that he was seen roaming around, when in fact security camera footage installed in his home proved otherwise.

Part fear, part malice, part ignorance—a crisis not always brings the best in people, especially if heroic acts cannot have an audience.

In the famous lecture delivered by Canadian author Sheila Heti in March 2006 at New York, (the title of which sound cruelly rhetorical at the moment) ‘Why Go Out?’, she talks about how you can quit people, like you would quit smoking.

During this time of “social distancing” many concede that friends are equally bad, sometimes even worse.

Except, people are not cigarettes; they are not what we use to get a false sense of satisfaction. Heti demonstrates this through a charade game her friend organised in London, as an alternative to concerts, bar and house parties. The aim of the game is not to get together and have “fun”, or learn the game, but to get “good” at it.

To be good at charades one needs to have a better sense of what the other person is trying to communicate for which empathy, interpersonal skills, creativity, being a good communicator and also requires you to be a good listener. These are not exclusive charade skills, but essential life skills. Essentially, what it says is that if you are not good at charades you are not a good person. By getting good at the game you naturally transform your psyche.

It demolishes what we intuitively think about friendship—as a way for us to unwind, a means to celebrate our miserable birthdays and anniversaries, a crutch when we lose our jobs and to have conversations that make us feel good.

We could stay at our homes, smelling of hand sanitizer. We would be healthy, we can watch TV eat our favourite food and think how nice we are unlike the people who went around spreading the disease. Hati says,

“We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short… because we want to learn how to be good at being people… and moreover, because we want to be people.

“Social distancing” does not mean we “quit people.” If we do, we do it at our risk. It is a pandemic and it should be viewed not just as a matter of personal hygiene. Personal hygiene is important primarily not because you don’t want to get the flu, but you don’t want others to get it. Unless we see the well being of other people as our well being we will not succeed in overcoming the crisis Think about the health workers who keep this monster from swallowing world all of a sudden. Just think.

When we deal with people there is the risk of getting the disease, being rejected, and most of all it confronts our own stubborn believes about our own goodness. But the risks we take far out-weighs the benefit we reap.

So, what can be done? Obey the official guidelines, trust your government when it says essential commodities will be made available—don’t fall for panic buying, don’t go out unless it is absolutely necessary, wash hands… should I go on?

Then, above all care for others. Call people who are in isolation, provide food or whatever you can provide, yet do it all in a safe way.

Here are a few more tips of getting yourself ready, I lifted from the website of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Create a household plan of action:

1. Talk with the people who need to be included in your plan. Meet with household members, other relatives, and friends to discuss what to do if a COVID-19 outbreak occurs in your community and what the needs of each person will be.

2. check icon

3. Plan ways to care for those who might be at greater risk for serious complications. There is limited information about who may be at risk for severe complications from COVID-19 illness. From the data that are available for COVID-19 patients, and from data for related coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, it is possible that older adults and persons who have underlying chronic medical conditions may be at risk for more serious complications. Early data suggest older people are more likely to have serious COVID-19 illness. If you or your household members are at increased risk for COVID-19 complications, please consult with your health care provider for more information about monitoring your health for symptoms suggestive of COVID-19. CDC will recommend actions to help keep people at high risk for complications healthy if a COVID-19 outbreak occurs in your community.

4. Get to know your neighbours. Talk with your neighbours about emergency planning. If your neighbourhood has a website or social media page, consider joining it to maintain access to neighbours, information, and resources.

5. Identify aid organizations in your community. Create a list of local organizations that you and your household can contact in the event you need access to information, health care services, support, and resources. Consider including organizations that provide mental health or counselling services, food, and other supplies.

6. Create an emergency contact list. Ensure your household has a current list of emergency contacts for family, friends, neighbours, carpool drivers, health care providers, teachers, employers, the local public health department, and other community resources.

#covid19 #coronavirus #breakthechain

0 notes

healthyworthyofficial · 5 years ago

Text

What Novel Coronavirus Is Like In Italy, From Yogi Martina Sergi

Martina Sergi, 29, is an Italian yogi and creator who teaches yoga online, at retreats, and at worldwide yoga festivals. Since March 9, Martina has been residing underneath lockdown in Milan. Italy was the primary European nation to impose a nationwide lockdown because of the COVID-19 disaster. Martina shared her expertise with Women’s Health, to offer us a way of what life is like underneath a lockdown. I stay close to town centre of Milan, the place as of March 15th, there have been 1,750 cases of COVID-19. Italy is among the epicentres of the pandemic, with over 20,000 cases throughout the nation. We have one of many highest COVID-19 death rates in the world not as a result of we now have poor healthcare, however as a result of there are too many instances for the hospitals to deal with. Consider that the general public who die are over 70, and in Italy, we now have a excessive share of aged residents. On March ninth, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered a nationwide lockdown, requiring individuals to remain residence and keep away from nonessential journey. When I return residence from the grocery retailer, I go away my sneakers exterior. I put on the identical pair of sneakers each time I'm going out. After opening the door to my condominium, I clear my fingers, keys, and cellphone with alcohol, then take away my plastic gloves and face masks. I throw the gloves away, however I take advantage of every masks greater than as soon as as a result of there’s a scarcity. Even although there was some dialogue about whether or not masks are obligatory, most Italians put on masks exterior. After I take off the gloves, I wash my fingers. If my canine, Dobby, and I are coming back from a stroll, I even clear his paws. Every time I'm going exterior or deliver one thing new into the condominium, I consider locations the place the novel coronavirus may very well be hiding. It’s like a job. We solely had about two days to organize for the lockdown, however we knew issues had been altering even earlier than it was introduced. Two weeks in the past, my boyfriend Danilo acquired a message from his firm instructing him to do business from home, like many different individuals in workplace jobs. On Saturday, March seventh, we began studying a couple of potential lockdown within the newspapers, after which the lockdown began that following Monday. The COVID-19 numbers had been growing so rapidly, it was the one factor the federal government may do to attempt to include the unfold.

Daily life has fully modified for the reason that lockdown went into impact.

Aside from grocery runs and canine walks, we haven’t left our condominium in over every week. I believe our cat, Lepi, is completely happy about it, as a result of he’s a really cuddly cat who likes to have us round. READ MORE: COVID-19 Update: What To Do If You Start Experiencing Symptoms Danilo and I nonetheless go exterior, however solely when we have to. Whenever you go exterior, it's good to carry a chunk of paper referred to as a “self-certification for travelling and commute,” so if the police cease you, you possibly can show you will have a cause for being exterior. You fill out the form on-line and print it out. That cause could be both shopping for meals or drugs, strolling your canine, or going to work, when you've got a job that requires your bodily presence. I'm not positive what occurs in case you don’t have the shape with you, however if you're exterior with no good cause, you could be fined as much as 206 euros , and go to jail for as much as three months.

Pharmacies and supermarkets are the one locations allowed to be open to the general public.

Some corporations are nonetheless open however they should take precautions, and a few eating places are nonetheless delivering meals. When you go to the grocery retailer, they solely permit a sure variety of individuals inside at a time, as a result of it's good to keep a minimum of one meter away from the opposite consumers always. I attempt to keep even additional away. So you go, you get in line exterior the shop, and you retain your distance whereas ready. I at all times put on a masks and gloves. Not everybody makes use of gloves, however since Danilo is diabetic, we’re very involved about him catching the coronavirus. I attempt to buy groceries as soon as every week, and purchase the whole lot we’ll want so I don’t want to return. Before the pandemic began, I'd buy groceries each two days and purchase much less, however to be an excellent citizen proper now, it’s necessary to go much less often. Danilo doesn’t go to the grocery retailer as a result of he’s at excessive threat for issues from COVID-19. Instead, he tries to go exterior a minimum of as soon as a day to stroll Dobby. Usually, they go later within the night, when there are even much less individuals exterior.

I’m not scared after I go exterior as a result of I do know I’m cautious.

I’m largely petrified of different issues, like when that is going to finish. It’s okay to do that for a month, however is that this going to final three months? How lengthy is it going to be? A couple of days in the past, the parks had been nonetheless open, however now the gates are closed as a result of individuals had been going there to hang around. I used to be studying that as a result of so many individuals aren’t following the foundations, the federal government is contemplating introducing much more restrictions, like a potential curfew. Because individuals aren’t following the foundations, I’ve been posting on my Instagram Stories to please keep residence and please respect the foundations. If not everyone seems to be doing what they’re alleged to do, that is going to last more. READ MORE: The New Coronavirus Is More Likely To Be Spread By Pre-Symptomatic People Than Experts Originally Thought None of my household or buddies have COVID-19, however I’m fearful for high-risk individuals like my boyfriend and my father, who's 75. One of my buddies is a nurse at one of many largest hospitals in Milan, the place they’re doing intensive care on the coronavirus sufferers. She’s the one individual I do know who works within the hospitals, so she tells me what she sees. She needs to be very cautious — well being care staff are uncovered to the virus essentially the most of anybody. Because of that, she took the precaution three weeks again to cease seeing all of her buddies in individual. So I’ve been seeing her on FaceTime. Under the lockdown, persons are connecting on-line greater than ever, and never in a faux manner. Instead of “making connections,” it’s extra like discovering connection, as a result of the web is the one manner you possibly can keep in contact proper now. It’s good to see how persons are serving to one another and supporting one another, which I hope will proceed after the coronavirus scenario quiets down.

In order to keep up a way of normalcy, I’m nonetheless figuring out and doing yoga day by day, besides I do it at residence.

I created a bit residence health club utilizing weights, resistance bands, a bar for pull-ups, TRX and my yoga mat. My private coach nonetheless tells me which workout routines to do over FaceTime, and typically I’ll ship him movies of me doing the workout routines so he can verify that I’m doing them appropriately. Usually, the exercises are circuit coaching or weight coaching for 45 minutes. Not everybody is aware of do yoga at residence with out an teacher, so my buddies and I are providing free yoga courses over YouTube Live. Last week, 1,000 individuals tuned in, and regardless that I can’t truly see everybody like in a studio, the connections are highly effective. I’m doing lots of stay chats on Instagram, and searching for new methods to have interaction my on-line neighborhood. Lots of people are sending me questions in regards to the lockdown, like asking whether or not we now have sufficient bathroom paper. We do! It’s a approach to maintain my thoughts busy. I can’t simply do nothing — it's going to make me loopy! Lots of persons are writing to me saying they're cleansing their homes, studying books they by no means learn earlier than, caring for their physique and cooking, issues like that. People are utilizing this free time to do one thing helpful, which is sweet. I do know different persons are providing free courses on-line, and a few locations are providing free book downloads, so there are many people who find themselves attempting to assist. READ MORE: Everything You Need to Know About The COVID-19 Coronavirus I believe Italians are superb at creating magnificence and staying related in these conditions. As you’ve most likely seen on-line, we’re doing lots of flash mobs from our residences. Yesterday, at midday, there was a message going round social media to open your window or exit in your balcony and clap for all the docs and nurses working for us, to say thanks. People did it throughout Italy. We clapped for one minute, all collectively. A couple of days in the past at 6 PM, we sang the National Anthem. On Sunday at 9 PM, everybody switched off their lights, and went to their home windows or terraces with a lighter or cellphone flashlight.

For a minute, all of those lights felt like an indication of hope.

I believe it’s necessary throughout instances of disaster that someway you are feeling related as a inhabitants, so I actually love that about my nation. We’re attempting to remain robust. This article was initially printed on www.womenshealthmag.com READ MORE ON: Coronavirus Health Health Advice !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=;t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '2162521310492989'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link Read the full article

0 notes

redlandsaikikai · 5 years ago

Text

Training Outside the Dojo

- or, Thoughts on how to practice during the pandemic: a letter to my students

The coronavirus pandemic has already made a severe dent in our ordinary lifestyles and in many aspects of our political economy. A newspaper article I read recently was entitled “Coronavirus Shuts Down Daily Life.” But I think it may have been better called: "Coronavirus Shuts Down Ordinary Attempts at Life.”

I think this, because most of us, in the pressure of daily living, working, rushing here and there with “nary a time to rest,” are not able to actually spend time in the inner recesses of our selves, feeling, allowing intuition to develop, discovering truths that otherwise are overwhelmed with the busy-ness of daily living. Those of us who have taken the time and given the commitment to study Aikido, or any of the meditative or martial arts, understand the importance of such self-reflective - and social - practice, and we have seen already many of the great benefits of such practice. We have seen each other grow as human beings, whether in terms of social skills, self-discipline, confidence or the ability to connect with others in a mutually beneficial - or just enjoyable! - way.

It is in this sense that I think that the pandemic can, should the individual so choose, be a great boon. It gives us time to reflect, to expand our personal practice and, in fact, to greatly increase our own Aikido skills. This last may sound odd, because it is clear that Aikido is practiced primarily in partner exercises. But I hope you will see from what I suggest below, that there is much that can be studied and refined on one’s own - and which will in turn bring greater benefits when we return to our partner practice.

Over the next two weeks, possibly more, we will not be congregating in the Dojo to practice our awesome art of Aikido. However, there are many things you can do to keep up your practice. And in fact this “downtime” may well bring your level up, if you are willing to continue a solo practice at home. Saving drive-time to the Dojo and other daily chores will make it easier for you to set aside time for your own practice.

In fact, I have frequently recommended home practice to everyone, as you know. It is something that was an integral part of my early years, when I was mostly in an Aikido “desert" (on long trips away as a higher kyu rank and as a new yudansha) and I have no doubt it benefitted my abilities in Aikido. However, I don’t see solo practice as being restricted to those at such rank levels or at sea as to where to train: everybody can benefit, even from the most basic practice of suburi, and even if they are otherwise training regularly at a Dojo. I urge you to consider keeping your home practice up even after we return to a normal schedule. You will find more to enjoyably discover on the mat, the more you remember your practice off the mat. And vice versa.

Suggestions for Home Practice: If it is difficult to isolate times for this, I suggest you just stick to the schedule you have had at the Dojo: given the extra time you now may have, I suggest you add another day.

There are five types of formal practice I suggest you do at home. There is much more I can say and recommend, but I am sticking to a minimal set that works for our Dojo’s system of practice, for now.

1. Conditioning:

(i) Do the regular warmups. Pick those warm-up movements that are most beneficial to you, but do enough of them to actually warm up.

(ii) Do all basic Aikido movements as done in class (or you may like to do Tohei Sensei’s Aiki Taiso).

(iii) Koho tento: Do basic back-to-front rolling on a carpet: sitting, kneeling, standing up. Avoid furniture or little childrens’ toys!

(iv) Make sure you stretch: do those most beneficial to you, but stretch long enough to make a difference. In class, beginning stretches are really more of a warm up, but at home you can hold each stretch for at least 30 seconds, up to 1 minute. Stretch again after your practice. Remember that stretching is allowing, not forcing: do not overstretch or bounce!

As an alternative to warmups and stretches, do the basic Systema work (including slow rolls), if you know it. The tension-release breathwork is also really good. For those with some experience, I recommend taking a look at this Systema warmup - but it’s a little more advanced than it seems, so I wouldn’t recommend it without some personal instruction. We will spend time on this when we return.

You can skip the warmups and stretches if you are already doing this as part of a regular exercise routine, to which you are adding the Aikido practice, But do the basic movements (including wrist stretches).

2. Suburi & Kata:

Saotome Sensei’s basic sword suburi can be found in his video: The Sword of Aikido. The suburi we usually do in class are also related to that in Saito Sensei’s Sword video. Please note that I would like you to generally not drop your sword tip as low, at the back of a cut and over your head, as in these videos - certainly not lower than horizontal. Also, please do not shake your sword at the end: keep it simple. In Saito Sensei’s #6 and #7, make the cut-and-thrust as close to one movement as possible. Perhaps the most important things to remember are:

Sword rises initiated by hip movement;

Cut initiated via the hips, with tip going forward, not chopping. Intention flows through the tip of the sword.

Power is that of gravity: only body power is in dropping of the hips with flexed knees; no arm power to speak of.

Squeeze-forwards from the hilt through the tip is what stops the sword movement, not trying to stop the fall.

The best way is to do 100-200 or more cuts at a time, occasionally checking one or the other principle above. Don’t obsess about these principles, however - let your body teach you by doing a few hundred cuts a day. Also, check that there’s no tension in your face and use a mirror, occasionally, to check your posture. If you have exhausted muscles that think they can’t go on, you're probably doing it right. But at any untoward pain other than muscle soreness, STOP and check with me.

You can mix in Jo suburi, for which I recommend Saito Sensei’s Jo suburi video. Alternatively, do bokken one day, jo another.

Learn Saito Sensei’s 31 Jo Kata (for a different, beautifully flowing version, check out Tohei Sensei’s Jo kata). More advanced students can search for and learn Saito Sensei’s 31 Kumijo. And then teach it to us!

3. Solo Waza and Kumi-tachi/Kumi-jo Practice:

(i) Take the techniques that you have learned, especially those required up to and including your next rank test, and practice them with an imaginary friend! (My friend is named Mulan and she’s really good.) Make sure you first be uke! This will really help you to understand the technique when next you practice with a partner. It will also help you on the way to understanding kaishi waza in our more advanced practice. When you move as nage the next four times, you’ll feel pretty accomplished! Do this slowly at first, developing your own Tai Chi... One of the best resources I have seen for flowing yet basic technique is in the video here: Saotome Sensei: Principles of Aikido, and in his second book by the same name. Over the next few days, we will be editing and releasing more videos on the Redlands Aikikai YouTube channel.

(ii) Take the kumitachi and kumijo in Saotome Sensei's: The Sword of Aikido and The Staff of Aikido and practice them with an imaginary friend, taking both sides. Skip the kumitachi variations and patrol kata for now, unless you’re more advanced.

4. Breathing & Meditation

End your practice with this, or do it separately. The simplest form is breath-awareness. Sit with spine erect but relaxed. Exhale from the lower abdomen upto 70-80% of capacity. Allow the breath to return, without force, again about 80% capacity. Whenever you recognize you’ve been carried away by a thought, let the thought go and return to awareness of your breath. You can keep that awareness in one place, e.g., the nose, or in the lower belly, or the whole body, or nowhere - your choice but stick to it for the duration. Do this for at least a few minutes or as long as you like. Don’t force anything and relax throughout without self-judgment.

When we return I will do a workshop on Tibetan Five Elements Breathing and other forms of breathing meditations.

5. Intellectual Practice:

Read books and articles on Aikido. If you don’t agree with something you see, say so and explain why. Write an appreciation of your experience of Fall Camp - and send it to Kristine or to me. Write about what Aikido means to you. Keep a journal reflecting on your discoveries.

If you’re brave enough, start a dialog, perhaps within the Dojo, on all those awful YouTube videos badmouthing Aikido. (I actually agree with many of their complaints, but not with their general gist.) What can the Aikido world do to remake its reputation?

You don’t have to share your writing with anybody, but if you are willing to, it could lead to some helpful and interesting exchanges. Reply to this blog, or start one of your own.

Finally...

There is actually a sixth way, a Way we have always had. It is called “Shugyo” and means that every moment is practice. Opening doors from our center rather than pushing with the upper body, sitting smoothly, leaning on a balcony but with weight under the feet, breathing and relaxing the shoulders upon hearing a siren on the road, greeting someone with the whole body-mind and not absent-mindedly… there are so many ways to keep the practice of Aikido principle alive, at every moment of our daily lives.

Please feel free to write to, or talk with, me about anything you like. If you are my student and want to send me a video of your practice, I will be glad to take a look and send you constructive comments.

As always, I wish you the best in your practices, Chetan Prakash, Head Instructor, Redlands Aikikai

0 notes