Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - throwing dissenters down mine shafts violent.)
The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.
The book "The scramble for Africa", a history of colonialism in Africa written in 1991, has this upbeat assessment of Mugabe as representative of a new breed of progressive African leaders: "his creed was pragmatic African nationalism .. he told the new nation that the 'wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten'. Mugabe was a statesman in the making."
How depressing that this turned out to be so wide of the mark.
To blame? The US embargoed the state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on every single political and economic issue we could find. We created Zimbabwe.
Rhodesia was run as a segregationist society on ever level. But if you want to change that, you don't just wall off the people, throw a knife in the pit, and declare that the strongest survive. Which is exactly what we did. Both sides were forced to wage all kinds of guerilla warfare in an attempt to survive. It is no surprise that a brutal, corrupt leader like Mugabe emerged. They were the only ones that would survive such a challenge.
Rhodesia was a productive state with a developed economy. After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, decades of progress was undone. The new regime essentially just looted the country for themselves. Everyone there is worse off now! Worse yet, the segregation of blacks was just replaced with the segregation of whites via 'land redistribution' schemes.
The red zones can be inhabited but most of the ground is either polluted either completely destroyed. And as the boards said some zones still have armed explosives in them.
I went there once. It's pretty beautiful when you forget it has been caused by a useless and slaughtering war.
I thought it was pretty common knowledge in France that live ammunition for the Great War are still found in this part of the territory and should one find such a device they should immediately contact the Gendarmerie.
As the article alluded to we are in many ways free falling and waiting to be crushed to death. It's just we are free falling through time rather than space.
It depends on what you mean by "inside" a black hole. If this means "inside the event horizon", well, if the black hole is big enough, you can put yourself in orbit around it relatively easily, you'll just never be able to achieve escape velocity. If you take the Earth for example, a geosync orbit has a velocity of 3.07km/s, whereas escape velocity is 11km/s
BTW most of what I know about black hole physics is from Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence". Which covers quite a lot of science for a work of fiction (and overall extremely inspiring).
