Category Archives: landscape wondrous

May 8, 2020 · 5:29 am

Popular Assessments of Sri Lankan Government’s Covid Battle: In Graph Mode

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May 7, 2020 · 4:56 am

Keeping Covid at Bay: Sri Lanka’s Work ….1st January to May

Dr Palitha Kohona, in IndepthNews, .…… with this heading “Sri Lanka Has Been Successful in Countering COVID-19”

Sri Lanka has been successful so far, compared to most countries in the world, in the fight against Covid-19. The mind-numbing figures of death and infection streaming in from many parts of the globe are not being reflected in Sri Lanka. An infection rate of around 700 with 7 deaths in a population of over 21 million are figures to arouse excitement. But surprisingly, no glowing headlines applauding the success of this small relatively poor Indian Ocean island embellish the front pages.

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May 6, 2020 · 5:55 pm

Medical Pontifications from Australia that miss the Mark

 The universe today has been bombarded by medical expertise from every which way pontificating on “solutions” to a covid-pandemic of an extremely complex and varied character. Chandini Liyanagama, a senior Sri Lankan Australian medic, has essayed criticisms of the processes in Sri Lanka on the basis of a webinar broadcast from the island.[1] It is, of course, best to respond to this appraisal on the foundations of the webinar sessions that provoked this assessment.[2] So, I sent it to a few Sri Lankan medicoes within the island for their appraisals.

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May 6, 2020 · 2:08 pm

A Pooja for Kandy

Gerald H. Peiris **

Almost exactly eighty years ago a young woman, then in her first appointment as a teacher serving a village school off the township of Mawanella, and her husband, evangelist of the Methodist Church in the same village, rushed their infant son to the General Hospital in Kandy in the desperate hope that he would somehow survive through the bout of high fever and infection diagnosed as diphtheria – a disease with which an infant mortality rate quite close to 100% was associated at that time in ‘Ceylon’. They both maintained vigil at the hospital cot, day and night, throughout the fortnight or so of treatment and their child’s erratic recovery.

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May 5, 2020 · 2:52 pm

On Kandy. For Kandy.

Gerald H Peiris’s New Book: PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE OF KANDY …. a monograph

2. Cover image ….. 

Kandy 1

Kandy is considered the epitome of Sri Lanka’s civilisational heritage, both as a supremely venerated sanctum in the world of Thēravāda Buddhism as well as from perspectives of harmonious multiculturalism evident in its demographic, structural and functional characteristics…..

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May 4, 2020 · 12:12 pm

Marooned between LA and Colombo as Working Man

Escape from LA: Why Lockdown in Sri Lanka works for MyEtherWallet Founder …. http://www.dailynews.lk/2020/05/01/features/217633/escape-la-why-lockdown-sri-lanka-works-myetherwallet-founder

Any rational assessment of the 1996 Kurt Russell thriller Escape From L.A. will conclude that the movie is truly awful. How ridiculous is a plot in which an authoritarian dubs himself President For Life and builds a giant wall to keep undesirables out of the United States, before injecting the hero with a potent strain of a ‘flu-like virus?

These days the 28-year-old co-founder of MyEtherWallet climbs thirty flights of stairs each day. Or to be precise, he climbs the same flight of stairs, thirty times. It’s about the only physical exercise he can get at his mother’s house in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, which has been under a diligently-enforced 24 hour a day curfew.

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May 4, 2020 · 7:47 am

‘Covidiot Specialists’ as Another Menace

Dr Upul Wijayawardhana, in Island, 4 May 2020, where the title is “Which is more dangerous, Covid or Covidiot?”

“Where knowledge is sparse, experts proliferate” is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have learned during this troubled time we all are going through. At times, I wished Sir Tim Berners-Lee patented his invention – the World Wide Web – rather than gifting it to humanity. That would have prevented so many of my friends, and relatives, from forwarding many frivolous items, by e-mail and WhatsApp, as I am a Facebook shunner. Had they been obliged to pay, even the tiniest amount, they would have thought twice before forwarding most of these which, at best, are silly and, at worst, laden with darned lies. Had Sir Tim been selfish, he would have been a multi-billionaire, the richest man in the world, perhaps, and could then be a ‘philanthropist’, like some Americans, doling out millions to help the fight against the unseen-enemy. But that is another story.

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May 2, 2020 · 1:50 pm

Where Sri Lanka’s England Medical Training derailed Its Covid-Discovery Programme

Darshanie Ratnawalli

Having a technocrat as President, we started off well following in the footsteps of China and East Asia. We also introduced innovations such as using intelligence services for contact tracing and root ball operations, trying to cut out the infection paths from society the same way a malignant tumour is cut from the body.

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April 30, 2020 · 6:34 pm

Pirapāharan the Megalomaniac: Stephen Champion’s Reading from 2007

A Composite Collection

Michael Roberts: An Introductory Note, 30 April 2020

In early April this year 2020 I came across new data – or rather, information which had bypassed me earlier – garnered by DBS Jeyaraj via his exchanges with KP Pathmanāthan[1] in KP’s capacity as the head of the international arm of the LTTE from 31 December 2008.[2] This data confirmed and elaborated on the processes of Western imperialistic intervention in Sri Lanka in 2009 as the LTTE slid to defeat.

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April 28, 2020 · 6:57 am

Reading Stephen Champion’s Photo Event in 2008 …. Today 2020

Michael Roberts

When I came across some ‘new’ material[1] of great import relating to KP Pathmanathan’s valiant efforts to extricate the LTTE leadership from their deteriorating military situation in early 2009 and to whisk them away to Eritrea with the active support of the great powers, and then reiterated my longstanding criticisms of the Western powers’ imperial effrontery in a fresh article this April,[2] I was surprised to receive an email note out of the blue from Stephen Champion in March this year 2020 – one wholly supportive of my slashing criticisms of the West.

I assumed that Champion was writing to me from UK and was mighty pleased because I was aware of his enterprising camerawork in trying and dangerous conditions in the late 1980s and have a copy of at least one of his pictorial works.[3] I decided to seek out more information on Champion via Google and immediately chanced upon Saroj Pathirana’s report in the BBC Sandeshaya programme describing an event mounted by Amnesty International in July 2008 displaying some of Champion’s photographic collections (see Pix above). Adhering to the principle of progressing step-by-step in temporal order, I placed this item within my Thuppahi site on 20th April 2020.

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