what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, March 23, 2020

Links which appealed in Ploiesti

Another Monday! Doesn’t time go fast when you are enjoying yourself! 
I start not so much with a link as a complaint….

1. I was appalled last night to discover that one of the most popular Romanian television stations – ProTV – had chosen to show us at 10pm last night a gruesome film about a virus wiping out America (the rest of the world isn’t mentioned). The film stars Will Smith as a lone virologist still working in his home lab to find an antidote for testing on the zombies into which humans have (d)evolved. 
Totally inappropriate film at this moment - with the only uplifting element being the final scene's arrival at a barricaded  (Vermont) border of the vital antidote phial.
Needless to say, I watched it to the bitter end!!
The Politico website tells me that Holywood has in fact been churning out such films for quite some time – eg Outbreak (1995); and Contagion (2011). I’ve only seen one such film – Perfect Sense (2011) - which had an added poignancy for me, being filmed in Glasgow and starring my compatriot Ewan McGregor…..

2. It isn’t often we get freebies but, for the next month, the kind people at the UK Prospect magazine will let us have free access to the entire 25-year archives of the journal and have selected a few highlights to whet our appetite. 
I have occasionally bought “Prospect” and did include it in the list of journals I devised some three years ago – “rather too smooth” was my terse comment, by which I meant that it was a bit glossy and mainstream for my tastes…
But the taste I’ve had so far may change that view. It’s certainly very fine writing, starting with a brilliant Ivan Krastev essay from 2009 which looks back with Krastev’s usual insights at 20 years’ experience of countries like Bulgaria and Czechia; and continues with an essay from Fukuyama on Identity

3. A few weeks back, the Guardian started a very worthwhile initiative on strengthening its European coverage "This is Europe" which, so far, has given rich pickings

4. I’m always captivated by intellectual history – a curious topic I grant you but its attempt to explore how linguistic barriers allow distinctive ways of thinking and dialogue to develop seems to get to the heart of understanding a country. I’ve made the point here several times that Perry Anderson is one of the few people with the linguistic skills to be able to offer comparative thoughts on the matter in the English language.
An article in the New York Review of Books alerted me to the Reading the China Dream website which has been publishing English translations of key articles in a lively dialogue which the Chinese intelligentsia has been carrying out in recent times eg this one. For more on this see this post last year about the geography of thinking       

5. I listened this morning to the reassuring tones of Dr John Campbell in his most recent report - although this article indicated the scale of the opportunities which the British government has missed by its dithering. The economic historian Adam Tooze has an explanation for this odd policy -

Faced with all of this, the stupidity lies in not recognising promptly that we must act, that we must shut down, that even the most essential individual activity of the market age, public shopping, has mutated into a crime against society.
Economics is shaping the crisis. It is the relentless expansion of the Chinese economy and the resulting mix of modern urban life with traditional food customs that creates the viral incubators. It is globalised transportation systems that speed up transmission. It is calculations of cost that define the number of intensive-care beds and the stockpiles of ventilators. It is the commercial logic of drug development that defines the range of vaccines we have ready and waiting; obscure coronaviruses don’t get the same attention as erectile dysfunction.
And once the virus began to spread, it was the UK’s attachment to business as usual that induced fatal delay. Shutting down comes at a price. No one wants to do it. But then it turns out, in the face of the terrifying predictions of sickness and death, there really is no alternative.

Romania has this week technically been under emergency powers…...with the authorities particularly sensitive to the return of hundreds of thousands of Romanians from work in Italy (officially 1.2 million Romanians were working there – mainly casual and manual work). Only some 60,000 are officially quarantined since many chose to come via the Ukraine to conceal their status

On Friday I had a dawdle around the centre of Ploiesti – a city 60 km north of Bucharest which used to be Romania’s centre of oil production and which has been my home for the past 5 weeks. This a very short drone video of the city centre

The pedestrian and car flow were then not significantly reduced. All shops seemed open - the markets certainly. The only differences in the last few days are that the supermarket cashiers and shelf-packers are all wearing masks and gloves and that we wait at the cashdesk a metre and a half apart.
I might say that the supermarkets remain well-stocked - with no sign of the panic bulk-buying which has disfigured the UK. I visited Lidl late Saturday afternoon and it was quiet and well-stocked
My chemist does, however. have a limit of 3 customers only within the shop - with credit card only transactions. For the past few years Romania has had washable banknotes and I had that morning actually washed all the cash I had (a lot since for the past month I’ve been in for the long haul).
I'm one of these bolshie types who object strongly to the way we're being forced into a cashless system......In Romania such a policy, of course, would require the older generation to die off - which, of course, may happen faster than we all thought.

6. And I thought this was an important article to pinpoint the blame we must take for letting human civilisation encroach on the animal and natural world

Other eye-witness reports from those in lockdown
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/were-clearing-the-decks-a-gp-on-watching-the-coronavirus-pandemic-unfold

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