Dilip Simeon's blog

In  Germany , there were signs that the exponential upwards curve in new coronavirus infections is levelling off for the first time due to the strict social distancing measures in force, the head of the country’s public health institute said on Monday.  However, Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, urged caution, saying many health authorities had not yet submitted their data from the weekend. “I will only be able to confirm this trend definitively on Wednesday,” he said. But he said he remained optimistic.  Germany has closed all its schools, and on Sunday ruled that no more than two people can gather at once, except for families or people sharing a household. Wieler said that current data on Germany´s Covid 19 cases indicates that the average age of those infected is 45, the average age of those who have died is 82. Fifty-seven per cent of those with confirmed infections have so far been men, 43% are women. Of the symptoms people have exp...

1.    We are a group of retired civil servants belonging to the All-India and Central Services from all over India. As a group, we do not subscribe to any particular political ideology but rather, focus upon issues that have a bearing upon the Indian Constitution. We have been holding Conclaves and writing Open Letters on matters of concern since we came together as the Constitutional Conduct Group in May 2017. 2. We write this letter to bring to the notice of the general public how the Solicitor General (SG) of India has sought to mislead the Honorable Supreme Court (SC) in the matter of Harsh Mander’s speech at Jamia Millia Islamia on December 16, 2019. (Disclosure: Harsh Mander is a member of the group but has played no part in issue of this letter.) The background is that Harsh Mander, as a public-spirited citizen of India, had filed a petition before the Honourable Supreme Court in connection with the registering of F.I.R.s against certain political leaders for using ...

Amidst all the terrible news about the spreading coronavirus epidemic, a scintillating fact has emerged that can energize the environmental movement: The global slowdown in human activity has given Mother Nature some time to take a much-needed breath of fresh air. Between travel restrictions, reductions in public transport and overall economic activity that generates emissions—such as coal burning, refining oil and producing steel—the climate is getting the kind of rest from destructive human activity it hasn’t gotten since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The lockdown in China (the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases), for example, has cut the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 100 million metric tons in just two weeks, according to an  analysis  by Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate policy watchdog. That’s down a quarter from the same two-week period in 2019. Observations made by NASA and European Space Agency pollution monitoring satellites appear t...

A football kicked over a wall, a lightbulb thrown out of a window, a suspiciously unkempt lawn: for East Germany’s secret police, even the most mundane event was recorded as potential proof of the capitalist enemy trying to sabotage life in the socialist republic. Thirty years after the  fall of the Berlin Wall , researchers at the Stasi Records Agency have for the first time systematically analysed the vast photographic archive the surveillance state amassed as a result of its untrammelled paranoia. The result is a new coffee table book,  Der Blick der Staatssicherheit  (The Gaze of State Security), with previously unseen photographs that cast a melancholy eye on the absurdity of life behind the Iron Curtain. They tell the story of three children who caused an incident when they kicked a football over the  Berlin Wall  on to Soviet soil in May 1978. The children, two girls and a boy from West Berlin, eventually managed to get their ball back, but no...

NB : A humble beginning to environmental protection: could 'western civilisation' please learn to wash its ass? Bidets are not required, a mug of water and your hands will do.  DS No Toilet Paper? A Bidet Might Transform Your Bathroom Break   On average,  Americans use 36 billion rolls of toilet paper every year . This staggering number alone results in the loss of 15 million trees, 437 billion gallons of water and 253,000 tons of bleach... In fact, the  U.S. spends more than $6 billion a year on toilet tissue  - more than any other nation in the world....  David Cox - The planet's prodigious poo problem Wiped out: America's love of luxury toilet paper is destroying Canadian forests We Are Flushing Away Our Forests: Researchers warn that toilet paper is unsustainable Restoring forests could capture 2/3rd of the carbon humans have added to the atmosphere Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance) How the Co...

NB:  Suddenly government intervention in the economy is crucial to human survival. All the budget cuts and dismissive attitude to health care and medical work are coming back to haunt "free-market" fundamentalists - but poor and underprivileged people have to pay for it. 'Socialism' was a bad word for mainstream opinion - we have time now to reflect on our social responsibilities.  It may be too much to ask of our communally fixated political leaders and their apologists, but I will still try: please think, ladies and gents - is there Hindu Corona vs Muslim Corona? Indian Corona vs Pakistani Corona? Dalit Corona vs OBC Corona? Will a quick swig of cow urine fix this one? A communal riot or two? A new law on citizenship? Similar partisan rhetoric across the globe will need to be rethought. Rhetoric about brave soldiers at the front has to be replaced by 'brave medical workers in the hospitals' - but will anyone think about how much they are paid, and why fo...

We’re living through a time of national, and international, crisis. Our systems are falling apart, we’re being separated from friends and loved ones, frightened and unsure as to how life may be about to unfold. “Reality” seems to lurch from one worrying scenario to another. Information and advice keep changing — nothing holds fast, except the idea that something, everything, is going desperately awry. As a psychotherapist who is used to working with clients who suffer from climate anxiety, I’ve become familiar with people’s fantasies and fears about the breakdown of life as we know it. Many of us have been hearing, and speaking, for years about the risks of societal collapse due to  extreme weather , and the resulting disintegration of the systems that hold society in place — not to mention the devastating effects on nature.  However, few of us suspected that so many of our gloomiest predictions would be so suddenly realised, albeit for another reason (although pandemics ...