https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/12/05/african-countrie... Always a wordtwisting "struggle", always for "benefits"... always needless, always a lie to fuck you. You are here... https://www.bedug.com/pics/Fun5/lfdjvhib4gx21.jpg The first thing that visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg see is a wall of identity cards-- the pieces of paper that determined where people could live and work and whom they could love. From the outset, the apartheid regime's ability to discriminate against "nie-blankes" (non-whites) depended on having a robust system of identifying people. The opposite problem confronts most other countries in Africa today. Governments have little idea who their citizens are [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: African countries struggle for several reasons. One is racial discrimination. Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone explicitly withhold nationality from children of certain races and ethnicities. Other countries do so informally by refusing to issue papers. Another reason is a failure by governments to explain to their citizens how they might benefit. Consider birth registration, the most basic form of official identity. South Asia more than doubled its rate of birth registration to 71% between 2000 and 2014. In sub-Saharan Africa the rate dropped by one point, to 41%, over the same period. For poor villagers, going to a government office to register a birth is time-consuming and expensive, especially when officials demand bribes. Some countries charge a fee, which is a disincentive. Others penalize late registrations. One way to encourage people is to link birth registration to benefits such as child-support grants -- something South Africa did with great success. But that approach may also have the perverse consequence of denying payments to the very poorest. Money is another reason many African countries have fallen behind their peers. Extending the state's reach to remote areas can be expensive. So, too, is paying for skilled labour of the sort required to fill in forms accurately and to operate biometric machines. The technology itself is costly, especially for small countries that do not have much buying power. The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. There has been a concerted effort to erase what remains of the internet from 1992-2001. Nothing truly valuable or important can ever be safely entrusted to any Government. That's because Governments are abstract, psychopathic entities whose prime directive is to survive and to maximize itself. They are intrinsically incapable of caring about people, morality, religion or even their own "laws". domesticate n verb 1 tame (an animal) and keep it as a pet or for farm produce. Øhumorous accustom (someone) to home life and domestic tasks. 2 cultivate (a plant) for food. DERIVATIVES domesticable adjective domestication noun As Yuval Noah Harari points out in "Sapiens", “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens”. So, asks Harari, what did the wheat offer H Sapiens in return for being domesticated? Not better nutrition, nor security against violence, nor even safety from hunger and even starvation. Just the possibility of multiplying exponentially – the [perhaps rather foolish] definition of biological success. “With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. “Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions”. Every good harvest tempted people to have more children, but they failed to see the long-term implications. Eating grains weakened their immune systems while being crowded together with farm animals encouraged infectious diseases; and even when they had a surplus of food, that just attracted robbers and enemies so they had to build walls and lose workers to become soldiers. “The trap snapped shut”.