thanks for the kickstart Brian, and thanks for the reminder to keep hoping, Prem: I find regular inspiration from this canine cartoonist https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/14/lockdown-2-some-handy-dos-and-donts-to-help-get-through-the-extremely-dreary-sequel
The First Dog strip refers to the cluster of cases in social housing towers in Melbourne. The source here seems to be a) these shoddy buildings house poor populations in short-term employment notably in health, cleaning and security - the employees of the private security companies who guarded quarantine hotels without training or equipment. The lesson here as everywhere that a central cause of the second wave is poverty. Or to be more precise, wealth extracted from the poor. The source of the first wave is even more obviously fruit of the profit motive. Expansion of "wealth-creating" extraction and construction into habitats a) stresses the critters, rams them into denser communities, and proliferates viral mutation. and b) brings more humans in contact with this damaged environment It's clear that the ecological catastrophes adding to the pandemic misery, not to mention the vicious proxy wars often enough started by drought in Western Asia/North Africa and floods elsewhere, are directly caused and maintainedby the rise of the billionaire elite. As a rule I'm not in favour of euthanasia. But perhaps a cull of the wealthiest 30 people on the planet and 100% death duties would make a good start best sean Sean Cubitt | He/Him Professor of Screen Studies School of Culture and Communication W104 John Medley Building University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA scub...@unimelb.edu.au New Book: Anecdotal Evidence https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au# # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
