/2017

Internalising Borders « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/10/31/richard-power-sayeed/internalising-borders

Refugees who can afford it currently pay thousands of dollars to escape war zones and make the uncertain journey to a place of greater safety in Europe. In the future, perhaps some of them will be able to travel by #drone: they will not then have to make extraordinarily dangerous trips across the desert and sea; they will not be raped, tortured or held hostage by traders; and they will not have to trek across hundreds of miles of sodden farmland, watching out for members of the civil guard of whichever country they are traipsing through, their utility belts laden with CS gas, extendable batons and handcuffs.

These drone-renting refugees will be able to fly wherever they choose – within geographical limits; they won’t be able to cross oceans – without going through hundred-page visa applications. They will go to places that are not crushed by war and poverty, where they know someone already, where a language is spoken that they speak, where they have some hope of receiving a warmer welcome, where they think they may get a job, a roof, a future. And on their way to this place of hope, they will pass silently over the seas, rivers, deserts, wire fences, passport check cabins, customs posts, earthworks and imaginary lines known as borders. How will states respond?

#migrants #réfugiés #frontières

El Diablo in Wine Country, by Mike Davis
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/10/14/mike-davis/el-diablo-in-wine-country

And we continue to send urban sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion, and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.
This is the deadly conceit behind mainstream environmental politics in California: you say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands. Land use patterns in California have long been insane but, with negligible opposition, they reproduce themselves like a flesh-eating virus.

#feu #climat #urbanisation #californie #géographie_critique

#Pakistan, #Polio and the #CIA « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/09/08/jonathan-kennedy/pakistan-polio-and-the-cia

https://cdn.lrb.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/drone-strikes-against-polio-cases.png

Between 2004 and 2012, the numbers of #drone strikes and polio cases corresponded closely. Until mid-2008, the US carried out a small number of drone strikes to assist Pakistani military operations and there were relatively few polio cases. From mid-2008, the number of drones strikes increased rapidly, peaking in 2010 at 128. The number of polio cases also rose markedly, reaching 198 cases the following year. Drone strikes were reduced after 2012 because of concerns they were destabilising Pakistan and generating anti-American sentiment. Polio also decreased rapidly between 2011 and 2012.

But it increased sharply from 2012, hitting 306 cases in 2014. Before the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the CIA organised a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign in Abbottabad in a failed attempt to obtain his relatives’ DNA. When the story broke a few months later, it seemed to vindicate people’s suspicions of the polio programmes in the FATA. ‘As long as drone strikes are not stopped in Waziristan,’ one militant leader declared, ‘there will be a ban on administering polio jabs’ because immunisation campaigns are ‘used to spy for America against the Mujahideen’. More than 3.5 million children went unvaccinated as a result of the boycott and associated disruption, in which several health workers were killed. Polio increased in Pakistan and further afield, as the virus spread to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The CIA have conducted only a handful of drone strikes in Pakistan in recent years and polio is now at an all-time low. But the plan to eradicate the disease may face further setbacks. ‘We can no longer be silent,’ President Trump said last month, ‘about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.’

#Poliomyélite #Etats-Unis

Sado-Austerity v. Moderate Social Democracy « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/06/07/glen-newey/sado-austerity-v-moderate-social-democracy

Some of the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] data makes interesting reading. Labour’s spending plans leave Britain in the lower-middle range of developed economies as regards the ratio of public spending to GDP, well below such collectivist dystopias as Iceland, France, Singapore, New Zealand and Germany. Labour would add £81 billion or 3.5 per cent of GDP to public spending by 2021-22. It aims to eliminate the deficit on non-capital spending within five years.

#Royaume_uni #désinformation #MSM