News blues…
Brazil is quickly climbing the charts. Third after Russia (317,555 cases) with 310,100 cases, you may recall Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro aping US President Trump’s denials, saying Covid-19 was “just a weak case of the flu.”On May 9, Brazil’s death toll from the coronavirus topped 10,000. Instead of marking the grim milestone with an address or a sign of respect for the victims, President Jair Bolsonaro took a spin on a jet ski. Video footage widely circulated on social media shows Brazil’s far-right leader grinning as he pulls up to a boat on Brasília’s Paranoá Lake where supporters are having a cookout. As he grips onto their boat, Bolsonaro jokes about the “neurosis” of Brazilians worried about the virus. “There’s nothing to be done [about it],” he shrugs. “It’s madness.”
Even by the standards of other right-wing populists who have sought to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s defiance of reality was shocking. From the favelas of densely packed cities like Rio de Janeiro to the remote indigenous communities of the Amazon rain forest, Brazil has emerged as the new global epicenter of the pandemic, with the world’s highest rate of transmission and a health system now teetering on the brink of collapse.
***
 |
| (c) Zapiro click to enlarge |
[At a recent] briefing … provincial police commissioner, General Khombinkosi Jula, said lack of compliance with lockdown regulations in the city had resulted in police escalating their operations in Pietermaritzburg. “We remain concerned about non-compliance and as such we will be stepping up visibility in Pietermaritzburg.”
More than 3,600 law enforcement officers, who include members of the South African Police Services, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and traffic department have been deployed to Pietermaritzburg.
Police operations since the start of the lockdown have so far resulted in the confiscation of more than 551,000 millilitres of alcohol and 5,400 loose cigarettes in the city. Major transgressions within the city include failure to adhere to social distancing rules, particularly at month-end.
Besides making arrests, police are also engaging business owners to address the problem of long queues outside supermarkets and other businesses.
While Pietermaritzburg and Isipingo in Durban are non-compliance hot spots, Jula said other areas of the province have also become a problem, resulting in arrest[s]….
Whackjobbery* …
While Germany braces for more protests against coronavirus policies, a minister urges people not to join rallies that include conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-Semites.Thousands of people are expected to gather in cities across Germany at the weekend to demonstrate against the government’s coronavirus policies.
Germany’s foreign minister has warned people to distance themselves from the growing movement, which includes radical extremists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and antisemites, after domestic intelligence agents warned that extremist groups were exploiting fears around the virus in order to gain support.
“If radical extremists and antisemites use demonstrations in order to stoke hatred and to divide, then everyone should keep a lot more than just a 1.5-metre distance from them,” Heiko Maas said in an interview on Thursday.
“Those who spread conspiracy theories throughout the world, without a mask, without keeping the minimum distance, without any concern for others, are confusing courage with blind anger, and freedom with pure egotism,” he added.Hmmm, a tinfoil ball? Symbolic, indeed.
Among the protesters are those who accuse the government of inventing the virus in order to impose dictatorship-like conditions. Their anger is focused on everyone from the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her health minister, Jens Spahn, to the virologists and epidemiologists who are advising them. The US billionaire Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who has committed to a fund to solve the crisis, is often depicted at the demonstrations as a satanic figure, accused of engineering the health emergency in order to achieve world dominance.
A celebrity vegan cook, a prominent R&B singer, and a former broadcast journalist turned YouTuber are among the movement’s figureheads. Some align themselves with an initiative called “Querdenken” or lateral thinking, whose symbol is a pendant fashioned out of a tinfoil ball. Another movement, called “Widerstand 2020” or resistance 2020, headed by a lawyer, a psychologist and an ear, nose and throat specialist, is also gaining support.
***
While Trump tries to be normal, shock jock radio celebrity, Howard Stern, “once friendly with the Donald Trump who was a regular guest on the radio show years ago”, has some advice for this former friend.Stern suggested he’d be happy to join Trump at Mar-a-Lago again ― under one condition.*Whackjob: term coined by Steve Schmidt of The Lincoln Project to denote virulent Trump supporters who’ve given up common sense in favor of Trumpism.
“I do think it would be extremely patriotic of Donald to say, ‘I’m in over my head, and I don’t want to be president anymore,’” Stern said. “It’d be so patriotic that I’d hug him, and then I’d go back to Mar-a-Lago and have a meal with him and feel good about him because it would be such an easy thing to do.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Cell phone purchased.The line outside the cell phone store consisted of two other women and our wait went slightly faster because we chatted, about the learning curve of cell phones for the elderly, the pandemic, and, yes, about inefficiency.
I took my place in line already irate from a frustrating adventure with, and at, the bank.
Banks offer an online feature called Send Instant Cash. One fills out and submits an online menu with cell phone details of the intended cash recipient. The submission auto-emails a One-Time-Passcode – OTP – to enter into a online submission menu. Voila! Theoretically, the money is released after the sender messages a password to the recipient, who picks up the cash at a nearby store.
I’ve been trying – unsuccessfully - to send money to our locked down gardener for three days.
The time delay between submission and the arrival of the OTP is faulty. By the time the OTP arrives – usually after about 15 minutes, the bank’s OTP window has expired. An infinite loop follows: the bank resends an OTP, I enter it, it is already expired….
I admit I’m impatient with systems in South Africa – from banking, communication (Telkom), medical (hospitals and meds), to infrastructure (Prasa, see below). My attitude – expecting frustrating delays - spurs spurts of anger before anger, under “normal” conditions, would be justified.
This go round, a bank customer services representative who “couldn’t help” as the topic was one only the Instant Cash team could resolve. The team was only available by phone.
I called from the bank and an Instant Cash team member told me the delay was the fault of my email system.
“I don’t believe that’s correct,” I told him. “I regularly pay bills etc., online and the only place I have this issue is with your Instant Cash feature.”
Naturally, we went back and forth assigning blame before the representative said he’d “escalate” my concerns up the chain – to wait a “few days, not more than a week”.
This issue has been “escalated” several times over the last months.
Perhaps my irritation would be less instantaneous if I had more confidence in systems here. Consider Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) purchasing locomotives that didn’t fit SA train tracks:
South African railways officials imported brand new locomotives from Europe worth hundreds of millions of rand despite explicit warnings that the trains are not suited for local rail lines.Small in comparison, my bank experiences are, nevertheless, colored by such blunders.
In what may be the country's largest and most expensive recent tender [contract] blunder the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa has to date received thirteen new diesel locomotives that are too high for the long distance routes they were intended for.
Senior railways engineers and sources with firsthand knowledge of the issue told Rapport Prasa had been warned that the new diesel locomotives it ordered from Spanish manufacturer Vossloh España are too tall for local use.
… A senior Transnet engineer said, “Prasa was warned the locomotives were too high even before they started arriving in the country. They carried on with the contract despite our warnings.”
No comments:
Post a Comment