Nicolás Maduro’s constituent assembly removes protection from Guaido, opening the door for arrest of man backed by dozens of countries as interim leader. Guardian
As Russia opens military center. The center was inaugurated Thursday, the same day that President Donald Trump warned that “Russia has to get out of” Venezuela and “all options are open” in ensuring it does.
What does proof have to do with it?
It may not be long until societies are componentized into well defined groupings separated by interfaces roughly defined by the Fourth, First and Second Amendments. But first they have to realize componentization is the thing to do. Just as developers can only build larger systems by shielding components behind standard protocols so that they can interact with dissimilars so too may politicians discover the key to rebuilding the global world is creating interfaces of the right kind against the emperors of chaos. The second decade of the 21st century is shaping up to be a battle between information and chaos. But it may be some time before the public realizes what is happening.
The Belmont Club
I’ll try again somewhere. New York too expensive for millionaires increasingly going elsewhere.
“The governor and mayor don’t want to talk much about highly paid people like bankers leaving New York,” said Alan Johnson, CEO of New York-based compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.
“There are many relocating — and if you see financial service firms expanding in future, it will be to Tampa, Fla., and Austin, Texas, and other places where it’s not as expensive to live as New York,” he added. “It’s showing up in the numbers.”
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, brought in Russian mercenaries in January to help shore up his rule against nationwide protests. And last spring, five sub-Saharan African countries — Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania — appealed to Moscow to help their overtaxed militaries and security services combat the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. …
“Moscow and its private military contractors are arming some of the region’s weakest governments and backing the continent’s autocratic rulers,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This engagement threatens to exacerbate current conflict zones.” New York Times
The globalized world cannot survive a bifurcation into functional and dysfunctional universes. But that may well be what is happening.
“President Trump said on Friday that there would be a ‘very good likelihood’ that he would seal off the United States border with Mexico next week, even as he moved to punish Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for migrant caravans by cutting off all foreign aid to the countries.”
“Another day, another blackout. Power went out across Venezuela on Sunday, just as it did on Saturday, and the day before that.”
Candles are now the norm. Maduro announces plans to put country in sleep mode. “Nicolas Maduro announced 30 days of electricity rationing on Sunday, after his government said it was reducing the length of the workday and keeping schools closed due to devastating blackouts plaguing the country.”
Dim the brightness, lower the volume of system sounds, shut down any unnecessary applications, close any process that has been inactive for more than one minute. Low batt.
In the end it’s only going to work if Maduro finds a charger.
Erdogan also said his party would appeal results wherever needed, and added that he would take the necessary measures at ministries and institutions to make the system of governance more dynamic. He said there would not be other elections for four and a half years.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-election-istanbul-idUSKCN1RC0X6
Someone suggested Donald Trump could identify as female and become the first woman president. This is of course absurd but under prevailing theories on what grounds could one actually object? What if Beto did it?
Open thread.
Ireland is where Brussels now begins.
“The Irish border issue has become an almost intractable problem. The EU’s proposed “backstop” arrangement, contained in the Brexit deal rejected three times by the British Parliament, is aimed at preventing the need for infrastructure and visible checks on the frontier by keeping the U.K. in a customs union with the bloc until a replacement solution is found.
But Ireland, which insists there can be no return to a hard border — a symbol of decades of violence which ended with a peace accord in 1998 — has been reluctant to spell out what would happen if the Brexit deal fails. The EU will oblige Ireland to check the flow of goods across the frontier because of Ireland’s place in the bloc’s customs union and single market, but officials are working on ways to ensure this can happen as much as possible away from the border, people familiar with the matter said.”
A survey argues that atheism aka “no religion” is rising. That’s only because they didn’t offer categories of belief systems that are effectively religions. When these are accounted for the number of believers may have increased.
The behavioral clues are everywhere. Celibacy is on the rise. Not for traditionally Christian reasons, but for reasons of intersectionality. “The analysis found that since 2008, the % of men under 30 reporting no sex had nearly tripled to 28 %, compared with an 8 % increase reported by women in the same age bracket. It found that 18 % of women between the ages of 18 and 30 reported no sex in the past year.”
Cultlike behavior is everywhere, especially on campuses. Ritual diets, virtual signaling, zealotry, laws against blasphemy tricked out as measures against hate speech. There’s an obsession with ‘mindfulness’ and ‘centering’. Yet withal a kind of terrible anomie has descended over everything.
How many people, for example, belong to the church of climate change? We are not living in an irreligious age. On the contrary there have never been so many cults.
The Kurds are transitioning from conventional war to nternal security to keep ISIS down. Their biggest internal challenges are containing Turkey, Russia.
https://thedefensepost.com/2019/03/29/syria-sdf-kurds-face-bigger-battles-isis/amp/
Are biologicals the future of naval war? Questions as the USN learns to command the fishes
Were the Portland Hate crimes hoaxes? When there’s an advantage to being a victim, should we expect more of what is incentivized?
https://nypost.com/2019/03/30/inside-the-suspicious-rise-of-gay-hate-crimes-in-portland/amp/
Do 100 Russian advisers signify a limited response?
The Twitter account for the anti-abortion movie Unplanned was briefly suspended on Saturday, but has been restored to Twitter.
After several users screenshotted notices of the suspension on the service and tagged Twitter and its co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, the account returned.
“As a decision-making aid in the construction of dykes and drainage channels the climate models are unsuitable. “Our computers do not even predict with certainty whether the glaciers in the Alps will increase or decrease,” explains Stevens.
The difficulties he and his fellow researchers face can be summed up in one word: clouds. The mountains of water vapor slowly moving across the sky are the bane of all climate researchers.”
And yet progressive politicians have already made the decision to start a trillion dollar Green New Deal.
Countries, unlike companies, are defined by the International system as “too big to fail”. What foreign assistance tries to accomplish would be called a bailout. Unfortunately some countries fail anyway.
Venezuela is a dramatic example. It failed largely because of mismanagement. No amount of foreign aid will fix it. Not even intervention may work. Nobody wants to see a country fail. But countries die, even Rome. And Venezuela ain’t no Rome.
Does the state spell technology ‘control ‘?
“It seems that politicians believe driver training or road maintenance won’t improve anytime soon, so instead they want to limit your car’s engine power to make sure you don’t break the speed limit while robots determine whether you’re fit to drive in the first place. At least that’s the proposed plan in Europe starting in May, 2022.
Backed by Members of the European Parliament, the European Transport and Safety Council says its new mandatory systems “will reduce collisions by 30 percent and save 25,000 lives within 15 years of being introduced.” And so just days after Volvo announced it will introduce driver-facing cameras and limit all its cars to 112 mph, the EU followed up with its own Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) system.”
