#endsars #endpolicebrutality

Dear Friends,

On a rather deeper look at things, Police brutality is the topmost of the agitation but the anger and fury is deeper, bottled up for many years. An oppression our fathers have endured and the children now say No More, Enough is Enough!

🔴🔴Syria's Kurds ready to get in bed with their worst

Last week, SDC's rep. Sihanouk Dibo stated that they would announce the signing of a new memorandum of understanding with a Syrian opposition party. Yesterday, Ilham Ahmed said that they are planning to hold a national conference for all Syrian opposition forces this year...

These rapprochements might be applauded by Western powers that advocate for regime change, but are disturbing for people in the region. After all, these are the same forces the Kurds have been fighting off for years, and that have taken large swats from the lands they held.

Areas such as Ras al-Ayn, Afrin, Tal Abyad and Suluk, which were previously under Kurdish control, have been violently taken and occupied by the same ‘Syrian opposition’ the SDC now wants to cooperate with.

Dozens – if not hundreds – of civilians and Kurdish fighters were killed in these clashes, and I can only imagine how the families of the victims of these radical groups will feel about the prospect of cooperation with their killers.

Chile is the poster child for extreme economic inequality in a developed country. I spent time there last year for my book (which has a chapter on Chile) and what I found hardest to understand is why there wasn't more political unrest. Now there

A few choice facts about Chile and inequality:

In Chile, the social security system is basically designed to redistribute wealth from the masses to the rich, because workers are required to put their savings into private investment funds that charge ridiculous fees.

The commitment to private industry runs deep. If the available water is sufficient either for drinking or growing avocados... well, you get the idea.

The result in Chile is two worlds, side by side.

And what is most remarkable is that, for the longest time, even the ostensibly left-wing parties were on board. Chile's socialists basically don't like socialism.

Why should we be careful when talking about a “jobs bounce-back” in South Africa? - A THREAD.

You don’t get better labour market economists in South Africa than the @NIDS_CRAM team, but the main finding of an “employment bounce-back” seems counterintuitive. What’s going on? 1/n

NIDS-CRAM does NOT show a rebound to pre-COVID employment levels. They report 700,000 job lost between Feb and Oct 2020, this is massive = 3.85% fall (broad definition). The authors of the employment paper say this could be as high as 5.3% or 960,000 jobs.

The authors @joshbudlender @ihsaanbassier (+ Rocco) also show that Oct employment is normally higher than Feb employment, super roughly Oct is plausibly around 102% of Feb. This means it’s plausible 360,000 jobs would have been gained between Feb-Oct *anyway*.

This would mean - within the study parameters - it’s possible COVID has caused up to (an outer outer limit) of 1.32 million job losses when comparing Oct 2020 with what we would have expected it to be in normal times. This is a total disaster in the context of the SA economy.

This is roughly what we should expect from the StatsSA QLFS. This showed 2.2 million jobs lost in first half of 2020, and 543,000 regained in Q3, meaning a loss of just under 1.7 million jobs in first 9 months. We’d definitely expect some more jobs regained in Oct-Dec.

BRITSH ARMY HEADCOUNT REDUCTION (Thread)
Looking back at personnel cuts made in 2010, a reduced Army of 82,000 didn’t help Britain regain its financial strength, it simply signified a hollowing-out of our ability to defend ourselves.
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It destroyed the credibility of David Cameron’s Coalition Government then and even more so in hindsight. It was military illiteracy on a grand scale. The problem wasn’t so much the reduction itself, but the fact that there was no real strategy behind it, no future plan.
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Back in 2010, the UK's involvement Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t really serve our national interests (See Ben Barry’s book). If these conflicts were sub-optimal uses of the Army, they raised the important question of what the Army’s underlying raison d’être should be.
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We hope the Integrated Review will provide a concrete response to this. In the meantime, the Integrated Operating Concept has been much talked about, but we have been left in the dark about what it signifies in terms of strategic priorities and a reconfigured force.
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The resulting strategy will obviously be threat-driven with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran representing near-peer threats and Islamic terror groups in Africa and the Middle East posing an asymmetric threat. This suggests a mix of high-end and light forces.
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