People From London

"Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral and a lack of to a . The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster — not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes. One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public s across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 15–20 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of "flattening the curve" in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity."

"As with all so-called humanitarian crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the . Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the world’s wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. Since the mid-1980s, repeated bouts of — often accompanied by Western military action, debilitating sanctions regimes, or support for authoritarian rulers — have systematically destroyed the social and economic capacities of poorer states, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with major crises such as COVID-19."

"He was introducing a set of documents and not rewriting the history of parliament."

"Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis — as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates — but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world. In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders."

"Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognize that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds per 100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1,100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds per 100,000 people). In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability. [...] Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g., clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19."

"Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States have illustrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labor, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick — or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns — are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online, or those in the service sector who work in or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognizing the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis. It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be, and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognize that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the world's population. In countries where the majority of the is engaged in or depends upon unpredictable daily wages — much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia — there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate. This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the "" as a direct result of the crisis."

"Without the mitigation effects offered through and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the United States. Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labor often live in slums and housing — ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus."

"One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by , poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere."

"Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself."

"Why does it matter whether a country is defined as developing or not? Because it means that policymakers here can distract voters into thinking that crises are constantly diplomatic, military or trade based when actually the problems that America needs to fix most urgently are right here – they’re the crises of health and education. Had those problems been better addressed, the nation would not be struggling as desperately as it is right now."

"When Susan Finley developed flu-like symptoms, she didn’t go to the doctor because she was frightened about the cost. Finley’s grandparents later found her dead in her apartment. She was 53. Finley did not die as a result of Covid-19. She died in 2016 as a result of America’s healthcare system – a system that led her to avoid treatment for the common flu in order to avoid debt. It is that same system that is currently creaking under the pressure of a pandemic that experts warned was coming but governments failed to prepare for. It is a system that does not qualify for the term “developed”. The United States of America, we are told by everyone from the president to the United Nations, is a . That term, “developed economy”, sounds like an endpoint, like the man standing upright after a series of hunched and hairy iterations. It’s the contrast that makes the definition – developed economies can only really exist if they are compared to their poorer “developing” counterparts. Covid-19 has merely shown the cracks in a very successful marketing campaign about which category the US falls into."

"There are 2.9 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the United States. That’s fewer than Turkmenistan (7.4 beds per 1,000), Mongolia (7.0), Argentina (5.0) and Libya (3.7). In fact, the US ranks 69th out of 182 countries analyzed by the World Health Organization. This lack of hospital beds is forcing doctors across the country to ration care under Covid-19, pushing up the number of preventable deaths. America’s numbers are similarly unimpressive when it comes to medical doctors. The United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people, placing it behind Trinidad & Tobago (2.7), and Russia (4.0 doctors per 1,000, for a country that is described as being “in transition”). Life expectancies at birth are lower in the US than they are in Chile or China. The US has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran or Saudi Arabia."

"It’s not just health. Access to the internet is better in Bahrain and Brunei (two countries the UN does not consider developed economies) than it is in the US. Inequality scores are higher in America than they are in Mali and Yemen. A closer country to America in inequality is Israel, a country which functions as an apartheid state. And the US ranks 81st in the world in terms of women’s political representation. So, you’ve got a better chance of making it into office as a woman if you live in Vietnam, or Albania. Sub-Saharan Africa is most comparable to America – 24% of seats in the region’s parliaments are held by women, the same figure as in the US. In the United States, 83% of students graduate high school. That figure is higher in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Barbados, Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro. None of those countries are considered “developed economies” by the United Nations."

"So why does the United Nations consider the US as a developed economy when its own statistics so clearly suggest otherwise? One might argue that it’s about simple wealth, or gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, per capita. But if that were the measure of development then European countries such as Romania, Hungary and Slovakia should not qualify for the term “developed economy” while Bermuda, Qatar, Singapore and China should all make the list. Besides, GDP per capita is no reliable measure of wellbeing in a country like the US where the richest 5% of people own two-thirds of the national wealth."

"The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not. You cannot charge a woman $39.95 to hold the baby that she has just given birth to. You cannot constantly operate hospitals at close to capacity in order to maximize profits. The pursuit of in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically."

"We have a brain that just is desperate for . I mean, it's such a fussy organ. That's the only thing it really takes in for energy. Well, meat is not a very good source of glucose. To have a big brain like this, you need to eat something different, and the most efficient way to get glucose is to eat carbohydrates."

"We went on the day on the boat train. I was 7, I had never seen a ship before. It looked very big. Everybody was very excited. We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't!" I saw that ship sink, "I never closed my eyes. I didn't sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it, and nobody could possibly forget it." "I can remember the colours, the sounds, everything," she said. "The worst thing I can remember are the screams." "It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead." The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church." "I never closed my eyes at all – I saw that ship sink. And I saw that ship break in half."

"...people shouldn’t have to make statements and their lives should be private if they want to be. But I think if someone’s feeling restricted by not making a statement, then they should be free to do so. I chose to speak to you because I don’t want to lie by omission and I want to be very straightforward about my life..."

"As a seven-year-old, I remember people were appalling – they would just comment on his physicality…We’d walk down the street together and people would shout out insults. I remember feeling incredibly angry."

"If you’re told that’s how you behave in order to survive and flourish, then you actually question far less in your 20s and 30s because you think: ‘Oh, nothing’s as bad as that.’ So it’s a real issue. No one wants their teenage daughter thinking that’s what you should expect from your life."

"…Teenagers today are so fluid and non-binary; they’re fantastically unafraid. My house [growing up] was a bit like that. I’ve loved men and I’ve loved women and I was raised to feel like I could love who I wanted. We could talk about everything in the world."

"There are two separate answers…For people in general, I think they should name themselves in whatever way they wish. The flourishing of the gay movement in America is clearly very necessary and the identity that people could proudly lay claim to is crucial. Lives are lost every day because of bigotry in this country. So I think that should not prevail."

"In the wake of teachers’ strikes in a number of states, recent polling shows public support for unions at 64 percent—the highest, except for a few blips, in half a century. These are important developments. Labor is finally stirring. And Americans are on to the fact that Trump’s faux populism is actually all about rigging the game in favor of the wealthy."

": This administration is all about enriching -style businesses at the expense of low-income workers and consumers. This is the same administration, after all, that has gone out of its way to turn the into a vehicle to protect payday lenders and that has waged war on the student loan forgiveness program. The NLRB’s extraordinary anti-union efforts are more of the same. They are about making workers more vulnerable and more insecure, as are the administration’s relentless efforts to roll back the and expansion—because the more insecure that people at the bottom of the economy are, the easier they are to bully and exploit."

"Perhaps you are wondering if I myself believe in flying saucers? Yes I do. I have thought it all out, and, from what I have learned from my husband, I think there is no doubt that they do exist... Until Desmond had had actual contact with the men from the other worlds I doubted their existence. But his letters are full of facts which have amazed and shaken me. What is more, I share my husband's belief that the present "cold war" conditions in the world may flare up at any time, and that the saucer men may be our only means of salvation."

"Desmond Leslie, who has died aged 79, was a celebrated Irish eccentric and self-styled "discologist" best known for his book The Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), which became a key text of the New Age movement. The prevailing scientific materialism of Leslie's time held no appeal to him, and he turned his attention instead to the world of mysteries. Attracted to ancient history, archaeology and esoteric philosophy, he saw in them evidence of a world view quite different from that of more soberly academic contemporaries. To Leslie, ancient monuments and artefacts were proof of a sophistication of culture and technology that could not be attributed to the people of their times. The makers, he concluded, were evidently super-human - or came from elsewhere... Leslie joined forces with another Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Brinsley le Poer Trench, who as the 8th Earl of Clancarty later promoted a debate on UFOs in the House of Lords. Together they founded Flying Saucer Review. Contributors included C G Jung, who published his own book on flying saucers in 1959.Thereafter, Leslie continued to preach the message of the space people. Their intentions, he was at pains to explain, were wholly peaceable."

"Desmond Leslie was born in London in 1921 and educated at Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, but, throughout his childhood and later, he spent idyllic summers and other periods at Castle Leslie (of which his elder brother, Jack, was the heir). After a couple of terms at Trinity College Dublin, and simultaneous tuition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he reacted against “the constraint of orthodox harmony”, Desmond joined the RAF to fight as a Spitfire pilot during the second World War. His experiences at this time formed a basis for his first novel, Careless Lives. A sense of humour was one of Desmond Leslie’s assets, though it chimes a bit oddly with a few of his outre obsessions. He was, for example, a flying-saucers devotee, and co-wrote a book on the subject that became a best-seller in the early 1950s. He was also, in defiance of his Catholic upbringing, an adherent of an esoteric religious group called the White Eagle Lodge, founded in 1936 by a spiritualist"

"For this we have lived; for this we have planned; for this have many died and suffered. You were told and you scoffed, that the meek shall inherit the Earth. But I say to you the day has come when the man of peace and brotherhood shall Inherit the kingdom he will build. But those who oppose it shall never again tread this long-suffering Earth. Those who wish to live shall live; but those who cannot live without destroying, shall themselves be destroyed, till the end of time. It is for you, and you alone, to make the choice. Think well, for the great heritage is yours."

"Only minutes were required to impress these thoughts indelibly on their minds, for a thought is instantaneous and its grasping depends on its strength and clarity.(p. 211)"

"This power, I tell them, shall change the face of the Earth. No more shall small groups, nor even single men, be able to rule multitudes through hunger in their bellies; for there shall no more be hunger nor want nor cold; and in time again there shall be no more disease, for as man learns to live in harmony with nature, instead of continually struggling against it, he will destroy the cause of disease. (p. 206)"

"It seems that a lot of people have forgotten about George Adamski. In the 1950s he was one of the very first people to speak out about his contacts. He wrote a very famous book he coauthored with an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Desmond Leslie, called Flying Saucers Have Landed, which was published in 1953. It’s mainly a historical overview, a study by Desmond Leslie, of the flying saucer phenomena."

"Why should they risk a public landing? Their ship would be impounded for evasion of custom duties. Their clothes would be torn off and sold as souvenirs."

"Out of nowhere I have appeared. They see me for the first time. No longer the image, but reality. They see and they hear me. I raise my arms, and the gasps and babble die down. I begin to speak the words we knew and decided long ago. Each hears me in his own tongue. (p.200)"

"Of all the contactees, Adamski attracted the most controversy and odium; and none but a man of his strength of character could have survived the onslaught."

"How do you speak that all men may hear you in their own tongues? It is an art known and practiced by teachers of old."

"I do not judge them, criticise nor take sides. I address them as representatives of the human race, nothing more. Then I project a picture of the world divided against itself into countless pockets of insanity, and with it the question why this should be so? Why should semi-rational beings behave worse than those with no reason at all- Why ?"

"Coming into San Diego we saw a beautiful golden ship in the sunset, but brighter than the sunset. I had ten-power binoculars with me, and was able to study it for half a minute from the halted car. It slowly faded out, the way they do... We have been given their simple philosophy. It runs parallel with the original teachings of Jesus."

"I ask... What would they do if every nation had unlimited electrical power-power for the taking-power costing nothing to obtain and available to all men equally?"

"I see here some foolish ones fidgeting and wondering why the guards do not remove me from the floor. Save your energy, for the guards cannot touch me. Nor can you so much as rise from your seats to lay hands on me. Try it, if you do not believe me."

"Now let us see what he can do with it. Let us see if, under easier conditions, he is able to build the planetary paradise he has always desired, or will abuse his new leisure to the destruction of his soul. Let us see if godly power will make him a little more godlike. (p. 201)"

"He was just there, looking fantastic... the bastard."

"I'm all lost in the supermarket I can no longer shop happily I came in here for that special offer A guaranteed personality"

"In playing the character of Bernard Woolley, I thought, "I guess I've made it. Here am I, from a secondary modern school, playing a classics scholar from Marlborough and Oxford who's going to be head of the Civil Service." Paul Eddington used to correct my pronunciation. I said garij and he said, "What's that word?" I should have said guh-rarrge."

"Without concerted and swift international action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, the 1.5°C threshold is likely to be passed by 2040 and the report () sets out very starkly the costs of inaction."

"I think it’s going to be very, very, very difficult to get to 1.5C."

"We were aware of it back in the late 1970s. There was a lot of talk about the greenhouse effect."

"Solar geoengineering, I’m afraid I think it’s a fool’s paradise, and I’ve been saying the same thing for many years."

"I think it is possible to get the carbon dioxide emissions down and to get the temperature increase slowed down. It just requires everybody to work together to do it."

"She appears regularly on TV, radio and in print media, and as a result, gets a lot of emails – many from people who do not believe that humans are causing climate change. She tries to reply to them all unless they are directly offensive, but admits she has about a “two percent success rate” in positive responses to her explaining the science."

"The climate system takes decades to respond to changes in carbon emissions so decisions made now will affect future generations - for better or worse."