• 21 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 3Y ago
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Cake day: Oct 29, 2020

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This is why Lemmy exists – to grown community. If you check around, there are a lot of questions with excellent answers. Most people here are very supportive.



> Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, who has been detained since Dec. 28, was charged with two counts of “offensive communication” for his alleged efforts on Twitter to “disturb the peace” of President Yoweri Museveni and his son, Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who commands the East African country’s infantry forces.


> First, the lawsuit challenges USDA's unprecedented allowance of electronic or digital disclosure on packaging, also known as "QR code" or "smartphone" labeling, without requiring additional on-package labeling. Second, CFS is challenging USDA's labeling language restrictions. When on-package text is used, the rules limit it to only "bioengineered," despite the law allowing use of similar terms. But for 25 years, every aspect of the issue—science, policy, and marketplace—has used genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organism (GMO). Lastly, the USDA rules prohibit grocers from providing more and better labeling, in violation of their First Amendment rights.


> According to Alex Lewin, author of Real Food Fermentation and Kombucha, Kefir, and Beyond, fermenting is the opposite: ‘It’s unlike canning—with canning you kill all of the microbes and seal it hermetically. With fermentation you invite the microbes you want and don’t let in the ones you don’t. Fermentation is diplomacy and canning is a massacre. Canning is a high-tech food technology.’



> The border area has been the source of frequent clashes over the last two years. Reportedly, 700,000 acres of Sudanese agricultural land has been illegally appropriated by Ethiopian farmers since the 1960s.

Pomegranate and the Mediation of Balance in Early Medicine
> The pomegranate tree was also the source of life-giving waters in Mesopotamian religion (Muthmann 1982: 13–14), and Neoassyrian seals often depicted pomegranate, the “tree of life” (Avigad 1990: 165). Scholars have suggested that the Tree of Life from the book of Genesis was a pomegranate because of this symbolic history, though of course many fruit-bearing trees have auditioned for this role.



This is AMAZING. As someone whose history is a stateless society, I found this very relevant. Importantly, its focus on decentralized structure is even more powerful as a basis of challenging both former African empires that took from the peasants to sustain hereditary lineages + colonial invaders who forced states on stateless societies. Really liked this video.


cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/7986 > > “While the introduction of a cashless payment system is laudable in view of containment of the spread of Covid-19, KFS’ refusal to accept cash or any other cashless payment system save for M-Pesa is discriminative, oppressive, unfair and unjust,” Muhuri says in its petition. > >

> “While the introduction of a cashless payment system is laudable in view of containment of the spread of Covid-19, KFS’ refusal to accept cash or any other cashless payment system save for M-Pesa is discriminative, oppressive, unfair and unjust,” Muhuri says in its petition.

Chad President Idriss Deby dies on frontline, son to take over
> His campaign said on Monday he was joining troops on the frontline after rebels based across the northern frontier in Libya advanced hundreds of km (miles) south toward the capital N'Djamena. > > His death is a blow to France, which had based its Sahel counter-terrorism operations in the Chadian capital, N'Djamena.

Narok women’s elephant dung fortune
> “Elephants eat vast amounts of food each day, 200-250kg, from many different types of plants, so it is not surprising that people have found numerous uses for the stuff that comes out of the other end,” adds Ole Reyia.

Lots of talk of state-on-state warfare since last Fall brought this tune back to mind.
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> Thus, by possessing the most virulent strain of rinderpest, and which had been kept safely and alive in the Muguga laboratory, Kenya was sitting on two things: a biological warfare agent or the answer to rinderpest control. > > Scientists had designated this strain as “Kabete O”. It is still one of the oldest laboratory strains of any virus in existence.

I was reading this US-centric, China-fear paper which saw dependency as the major threat countries face. But in retrospect, centralization is in my opinion far greater a threat than dependency: Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.


There was effort initially to work with Tor project for IP obfuscation but it seems they went for a simplified anonymousID and verifying the accusations from their backend instead of depending on verifiableID for credibility.


Legends come in all types. Sam Mangwana is one living with us.

Ticket price as a direct contribution to (in)security capitalism – I had not thought about that. I also this topic of sports and surveillance will keep getting messier with health passports being used as sports venue admission requirements.


I like TD a lot. But the resource hog no matter how I tweak may perhaps mean I upgrade my hardware.


I found the article quite unique for covering a topis a lot of us associate with entertainment and not surveillance. A lot of focus outside of Canada too – Tokyo, Greece olympics etc.


> Analyses of the relationship between intelligence services and sport point to a deliberate omission from mainstream security and sports discourse. These nascent examinations suggest a fully developed relationship between the two that has become inseparable (and deliberately kept in the shadows) in the wake of 9/11, and a process by which civilian and securitized life have become intertwined
fedilink

Switching to Linux from OSX and it seems between Claws and Thunderbird, I might keep TB and see how it fares on RAM.



Thanks for the link.

Perhaps this is a Mac thing but Thunderbird on Mac was hitting ~45% on the CPU. Does it clog up on linux?




> Fernandez told the crowd that the electoral turmoil in Bolivia reminded all Latin Americans about the need for regional solidarity. “We are part of a large nation,” he said. “We don’t want countries for some, we want countries for all. It is the duty of all of us to stand up for threatened peoples.”

BIOMETRICS, RACE MAKING, AND WHITE EXCEPTIONALISM: THE CONTROVERSY OVER UNIVERSAL FINGERPRINTING IN KENYA
**Abstract** This article excavates the imperial origins behind the recent turn towards digital biometrics in Kenya. It also tells the story of an important moment of race-making in the years after the Second World War. Though Kenya may be considered a frontier market for today's biometrics industry, fingerprinting was first introduced in the early twentieth century. By 1920, the Kenyan colonial government had dictated that African men who left their reserves be fingerprinted and issued an identity card (known colloquially as a *kipande* . In the late 1940s, after decades of African protest, the colonial government replaced the *kipande* with a universal system of registration via fingerprinting. This legislative move was accompanied by protests from members of the white settler community. Ironically, the effort to deracialize Kenya's identification regime only further normalized the use of biometrics, but also failed to fully undermine associations between white male exceptionalism and exemption from fingerprinting.