The problem with annexing Russia-backing parts of Ukraine is that the border of Russia now sets deeper into Ukraine. Note that not everyone in the previous Soviet Union wanted to be separate and they do count, whether or not USA and European Union think it in their own best interests.
Sure, the missile defense system won’t/can’t be installed in those previously sensitive Ukrainian regions, but all the Ukrainians will do is install USA and NATO backed defense systems in the regions now bordering Russia. Moving the Russia-Ukrainian border simply delays the process.
Note also that there’s an African Union, an Arab League, a British Empire aka British Isles, European Union, United States of America (more like separate countries under a federal umbrella; while California and Texas wanted to separate from the union, the union strongly resisted such moves), United States of Mexico, Canadian Provinces; the Union of South American Nations is currently in flux, but they possess desires to work together on common goals which require the involvement of multiple contiguous countries to achieve a more uniform result. There’s the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a one China policy including Taiwan, which is also discouraged by the USA and European Union, demanding in lighter terms that the status quo remain as is – separate with China-Taiwan cooperation, leaving China intact as a country, and Taiwan in a state of perpetual independence limbo.
So what happened to the Soviet Union? The USA fully expected to free by cold war methods/strategies all Soviet countries from the Russian umbrella rule. It worked, but looking back, it was overkill – way over. Not everyone wanted such a drastic geopolitical move, and those who didn’t obviously didn’t feel they had the right to resist, which put the USA into a dictator mode, something the USA claims to want to end in other countries. It’s one thing to dictate terms in your own country, but to dictate terms in everybody else’s country is just not a viable strategy for peaceful co-existence. The citizens of each country need greater say and the last say regarding their own right of determination, which countries outside the region currently impose. The USA appears to have swiped the free will of the people clean away from any consideration – and that disturbing reality is what keeps nations at war.
What excuse will the USA tell Ukraine to use as justification for those missile defense systems at the new Russia-Ukrainian border? Probably the same as before. Even if Ukraine is accepted into NATO, the issue remains the same, though not as relevant, since NATO is no longer necessary to avert war. The Russia/Ukraine conflict that was instigated by NATO led by the USA is a perfect example why, which serves as an admirable truth.
Adults playing childish games with people’s thoughts and views.
THE JAIL HAPPY PEOPLE @ FACEBOOK shouldn’t be censoring anybody unless they are committing a crime. And even then, people in the USA have been bred to expect innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers, no matter the offense, not by a jury of wealthy advertisers from Madison Avenue.
Why should USA citizens have to bow to countries with dictatorships by acting like them? I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Facebook aka government policies use the most rigid models for controlling behavior based on the most rigid governments. Am I in China? Russia? Iran?
Who are these Faceless people running Facebook behind the scenes acting like they own people’s minds, thus their views? The United Nations?
People have a right to their opinions. It’s like the dictatorship everybody hates, but it’s the only game in town. After all, one can socialize without leaving the comfort of home.
The people who work for Facebook need to stop harassing the writers and players. Facebook is a platform for the voiceless – those whom politicians and governments never hear from. Why?
Because we don’t matter to them – across the board – every ethnicity, gender, age.
Be careful, it could get ugly before it gets better. Schoolyard brawls and all.
HWH Comment: My question is why scientists would think it okay to dissect an Axolotl in a laboratory? If they have brains, then they feel pain. Scientists absent a conscience. What do you think they’ll do with that knowledge? Use it to apply to humans, hoping someday we’ll be able to automatically regrow damaged brain tissue?
The axolotl (/ˈæksəlɒtəl/; from Classical Nahuatl: āxōlōtl [aːˈʃoːloːtɬ] ( listen)), Ambystoma mexicanum, is a paedomorphic salamander closely related to the tiger salamander. Axolotls are unusual among amphibians in that they reach adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis.
Atanzón will continue celebrating its patron saint, San Agustín, in the same fashion as Pamplona does — praying to the saint that no one is killed by the bulls for another summer.
Lab-made mouse embryos grew brains and beating hearts, just like the real thing
HWH Comment: What’s the point? Lab-made mouse embryos grew brains and beating hearts, just like the real thing. Next stop humans? The perfect human? Scientists have no collective conscience. They need to get one, before the world turns on them.
Synthetic mice they call them? Synthetic humans next. They used real animal cells; there’s nothing synthetic about that. No mouse was harmed? It’s unclear what scientists call harm these days. Enslavement, torture and eventual slaughter doesn’t seem to fit into their designed-to-cover-reality definition of what harm means.
Does this mean that synthetic fabric has animal hair cells as its origin?
Find a better word than ‘synthetic’. A synthetic cow is a real cow.
Does synthetic rubber mean it used real rubber cells to make it?
Regarding the scientists absent a conscience: Getting overly-complicated with your definitions causes pain and suffering. It’s a sure sign that you’re covering something that the world would frown upon.
Science is supposed to be all about accuracy. Yet the interpretations and applications suggests otherwise.
Accuracy from start to finish.
There are valid reasons why so many people don’t trust the science, and I know that you know them all, so act as such and people will accept the truth as truth. The minute you bend it, you corrupt the science.
For example, these were not lab-made embryos as if the mouse had nothing to do with it, so right there out of the box you lie to make people think you created a mouse in the laboratory. Even God can’t do that. But you did?
No, you did not. You used mouse stem cells that contain mouse DNA and everything else needed to create an embryo.
Understand? Or is that over your head, because you’re not required by law to have a conscience?
Scientists made synthetic mouse embryos (left) that closely resemble natural embryos (right) during the early days of development. (Image credit: Amadei and Handford)
Scientists coaxed mouse stem cells to grow into synthetic embryos that began developing hearts and brains, just like the real thing.
The lab-made embryos, crafted without any eggs or sperm and incubated in a device that resembles a fast-spinning Ferris wheel full of tiny glass vials, survived for 8.5 days. That’s nearly half the length of a typical mouse pregnancy. In that time, a yolk sac developed around the embryos to supply nutrition, and the embryos themselves developed digestive tracts; neural tubes, or the beginnings of the central nervous system; beating hearts; and brains with well-defined subsections, including the forebrain and midbrain, the scientists reported in a study published Thursday (Aug. 25) in the journal Nature(opens in new tab).
“This has been the dream of our community for years and [a] major focus of our work for a decade, and finally, we’ve done it,” senior study author Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental and stem-cell biologist with labs at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.
The new work produced very similar results as an earlier study, published Aug. 1 in the journal Cell, which was led by Jacob Hanna, an embryonic stem cell biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and co-author of the new Nature paper. In their recent Cell study, Hanna’s team used different starting stem cells but the same incubator to culture synthetic mouse embryos for 8.5 days. Those embryos also grew digestive tracts, beating hearts, and tiny, wrinkled brains before ultimately dying, Live Science previously reported.
Although the two recent studies produced similar embryos, the experiments started out slightly differently. In the Cell study, the researchers started by coaxing mouse stem cells into a naive state from which they could morph into any cell type, such as heart, brain or gut cells. From there, the team divided these naive cells into three groups. In one group, they switched on genes to form the placenta, and in another group, they switched on genes to make the yolk sac. The last group they left alone to develop into embryos.
Zernicka-Goetz’s research group, on the other hand, began with three mouse stem cell types, rather than starting with only naive cells. One type of stem cell gave rise to the embryo, while the other two morphed into the placental tissues and yolk sac. Throughout the experiment, they observed how these three stem cell types interacted, exchanging chemical messages and physically butting up against each other in the glass vials.
Studying such exchanges could give hints as to how the earliest stages of embryonic development unfold in humans — and what happens when things go awry.
“This period of human life is so mysterious, so to be able to see how it happens in a dish — to have access to these individual stem cells, to understand why so many pregnancies fail and how we might be able to prevent that from happening — is quite special,” Zernicka-Goetz said. “We looked at the dialogue that has to happen between the different types of stem cell at that time — we’ve shown how it occurs and how it can go wrong.”
In both the Cell and Nature studies, the resulting synthetic embryos closely resembled natural embryos, albeit with some slight differences and defects in how the tissues self-organized. However, in both experiments, a very low proportion of the stem cells actually gave rise to embryos, suggesting that the efficiency of both systems could be improved. In addition, neither set of synthetic embryos survived to the ninth day of development — an obstacle that would need to be overcome in follow-up studies.
“The reason for the block in further development is unclear but might relate to the defects in the formation of some of the placental cell types that the authors report,” James Briscoe, a principal group leader and assistant research director at the Francis Crick Institute in the U.K. who was not involved in either study, told the Science Media Centre(opens in new tab), a U.K.-based press office that works with researchers, journalists and policymakers to disseminate accurate scientific information.
The research also raises ethical questions about if and how such technology might be applied to human cells in the future.
Maybe it’s whatever created/designed us, not whoever created/designed us that we should be looking at.
We are virus-originated-virus-engineered-virus designed creatures.
That’s why we attract viruses. We’re designed to attract them.
We are in fact a virus.
Do chemicals come from viruses? If their base is found naturally in plants, fungi and/or animals.
Chemicals come from the swamp, animal creations and rock/mineral, combined in various degrees and amounts to produce new product. If they’re individually altered or created in a laboratory using the same properties, they still stem from natural inhabitors and ingredients of planet Earth.
There are 118 elements on the chemistry periodic table. They all exist in nature, by the mere fact that they exist, whether manipulated or not down the road to create something new – it still came from Earth, whether laboratory bred or planet-bred. Okay?
The USA government under the direction of Joe Biden via the military at his command altered and diminished the threat of Monkeypox on behalf of black African peoples who copulate with monkeys apes chimpanzees, then come to America to continue the sexual carnage via gay humans. It’s a highly contagious sexually transmitted disease which also can be passed person to person absent sexual contact.
Gay men in Africa demonized by the government and the general population choose to stay safe by engaging in sex acts with beasts who will love them back.
Apes monkeys chimpanzees gorillas.
Then they come to America to spread the word.
The World Health Organization is changing the name monkeypox stating the name is racist against black peoples, when in fact it’s gender biased against gays.
It’s like saying chicken pox doesn’t come from birds.
Stop having sex with non-human animals is the way to avoid this virus.
Then stop discriminating against monkeys.
Engaging in sex with non-human animals is an epidemic throughout Europe. Address that issue, before bending to the will of people who prefer to have sex with beasts. It’s called beastiality in case the World Health Organization forgot.
Oh, and yes it can be transmitted to heterosexuals much like a contact dermatitis. It’s a contact virus, not airborne. We hug a lot in my neighborhood, which means transmission is more likely than in more distant communities – no matter your gender or sexual orientation.
The reason some people associate monkeypox or monkey virus to COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) is it’s similarity to the COVID rash and bat rash (histoplasmosis).
Note that no one recommended changing the bat rash or chicken pox to other names.
Stop discriminating against non-human animals. I’m European. An anthropology professor at Smith College classified her students according to color (not skin) and whether they were knuckle walkers. I don’t know what color category she put me into, but I was definitely a knuckle walker. She was right. My arms are long and my knuckles face forward when I walk. So what! I evolved from an ape. A pretty smart ape at that!! Not bad lookin’ either, some say.
Why does India have so many sick people, very sick, damaged, disfigured people, when they say turmeric and pepper cures the world of all that ails it? Why does the world buy into it? Because they say it with confidence and back it up with science.
How can one prove something like that? One can’t. But it sells a lot of turmeric and black pepper and a whole bunch of other India grown and used supplements. Hey even I take it, till my teeth started turning yellow and it took a chemical whitener to remove it.
Architecture, agriculture, art and more first blossomed in these cultures.
HWH Commentary: No where does it list Israel or Jews in the ancient history logs anywhere in the world. So why do they act like they own the planet? They were here first? Just where were the Jews during these formative times? China? Iraq? Egypt? India? Peru? Mexico? If so, then that would make them Chinese, Iraqi (Arab), Egyptian (Arab), Indian and/or Peruvian.
Which is it?
Unrelated questions: If Jews only mated with their own as they claim, then why do so many of them look Roman?
When counting Jews globally, do only purebred Jews count or all peoples with some Jew in them, like say a Jew marries a Brit?
While modern civilizations extend to every continent except Antarctica, most scholars place the earliest cradles of civilizations—in other words, where civilizations first emerged—in modern-day Iraq, Egypt, India, China, Peru and Mexico, beginning between approximately 4000 and 3000 B.C.
These ancient complex societies, starting with Mesopotamia, formed cultural and technological advances, several of which are still present today. “A great many of the details of modern life, not just in the Middle East and the West, but across the world, have origins that go back for thousands of years to the ancient cultures in their respective regions,” says Amanda Podany, author and professor emeritus of history at California State Polytechnic University.
Here’s a look at six of the earliest civilizations—and the legacies they left to the world.
1. Mesopotamia, 4000-3500 B.C.
Meaning “between two rivers” in Greek, Mesopotamia (located in modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and Syria) is considered the birthplace of civilization. The culture that grew up between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is noted for important advancements in literacy, astronomy, agriculture, law, astronomy, mathematics, architecture and more, despite near-constant warfare. Mesopotamia was also home to the world’s first urban cities, including Babylon, Ashur and Akkad.
“Mesopotamia is the earliest urban literate civilization on the globe—and the Sumerians, who established the civilization, established the ground rules,” says Kenneth Harl, author, consultant and professor emeritus of history at Tulane University. “Those who know how to research and write run the civilization and everyone [else] does the grunt work.”
The cuneiform writing system, used to establish the Code of Hammurabi, is among the most famous Mesopotamian advancements. They also created the base 60 numeric system, which led to the 60-second minute, 60-minute hour and 360-degree circle. And it was Babylonian astronomy that first divided the year into 12 periods named after constellations—what the Greeks would later evolve into the zodiac.
Persia eventually conquered Mesopotamia in 539 B.C. Centuries of upheaval followed.
“Within the three millennia in which ancient Mesopotamia flourished, innumerable individual kingdoms came and went, and a few empires rose and fell for various reasons,” says Podany, author of the forthcoming book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. “But at its core, the civilization was recognizably the same from around 3500 BCE to as late as 323 BCE—and, many would argue, beyond that. The region was rarely unified, but the civilization was very stable.”
2. Ancient Egypt, 3100 B.C.
Perhaps the most romanticized of past civilizations, ancient Egypt stood as one of history’s most powerful empires for more than 3,000 years. Set along the fertile Nile River and at one time extending from today’s Syria to Sudan, the civilization is most known for its pyramids, tombs and mausoleums and the practice of mummification to prepare corpses for the afterlife.
Harl, author of the forthcoming book, Empires of the Steppes: How the Steppe Nomads Forged the Modern World, says Egypt’s use of labor to undertake architectural projects—such as the pyramids—was unrivaled. “The ability to amass 100,000 men to assemble the great pyramid in 2600 B.C. is just not matched anywhere,” he says.
The Egyptians also proved extremely skilled at agriculture and medicine, he adds. And they developed exquisite sculpture and painting traditions, as well.
The ancient Egyptians also left a legacy of monumental writing and mathematics systems. The cubit, a measure of length roughly the span of a forearm, was key to designing the pyramids and other structures. They developed the 24-hour day and 356-day calendar during this time. And they established the hieroglyphic pictorial writing system, followed by the hieroglyphic system that used ink on papyrus paper. The civilization came to an end in 332 B.C. when it was conquered by Alexander the Great.
In ancient India, where Hinduism was founded, religion held great importance, Harl says, along with great literary traditions and incredible architecture. The Upanishads, or sacred Hindu texts, include the ideas of reincarnation and the caste system based on birthright, both of which have endured into modern times.
Unlike other ancient civilizations, the Indus River Valley Civilization, built in the Indus River Valley (modern-day India, Afghanistan and Pakistan) does not appear to have been war-torn. Historians and archaeologists instead point to sophisticated, organized city planning, complete with uniform baked-brick homes, a grid structure and drainage, sewage and water supply systems.
The collapse of the Indus Valley, around 1700 B.C., is often credited to migration prompted by climate change or possible tectonic movement that caused the Saraswati River to dry out. Others cite a great flood.
4. Ancient China, 2000 B.C.
A Xia-era miniature bronze bell, c. 2100 B.C. The ancient Chinese are credited with inventions including the abacus and the sundial.
Museum of East Asian Art/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Protected by the Himalayan Mountains, Pacific Ocean and Gobi Desert, and situated between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, the earliest Chinese civilizations flourished in isolation from invaders and other foreigners for centuries. To stop Mongols from the north, they built barriers seen by some as early precursors to the Great Wall of China, built later in 220 B.C.
Generally divided into four dynasties—Xia, Shang, Zhou and Qin—ancient China was ruled by a succession of emperors. The civilization is credited with developing the decimal system, abacus and sundial, as well as the printing press, which allowed for the publication and distribution of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, still relevant more than 2,500 years later.
Like the Egyptians, the ancient Chinese were able to mobilize populations to build massive infrastructure projects. The construction of the 5th century-era Grand Canal, which links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, for example, allowed vast numbers of military forces and goods to move across the country.
“China is perhaps the most successful centralized state in human history,” Harl says. “And at several points in human history is without a doubt the greatest civilization that stayed on the globe.”
Peru served as the cradle of civilization to a number of cultures, including the Chavín, Paracas, Nazca, Huari, Moche and Inca. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of metallurgy, ceramics and advanced medical and agricultural practices from within these groups.
The civilization culminated with the great Inca Empire, which stretched from today’s Colombia to Chile and is noted for the Andean city of Machu Picchu, with its elaborate urban grid.
The Incas did not develop a writing system; instead they used pictures and symbols. But they did use a knot-based accounting system, built paved roads on rugged terrain connecting towns and settlements and created sophisticated agricultural and architectural innovations.
Smallpox and other diseases, introduced to South America by the Spaniards, ravaged the Inca populations, Harl says, causing an internal weakening that helped the Francisco Pizarro-led conquest of 1532. “So many people were being carried off by disease—they had no immunity,” he says. “So rather than the state itself weakening in any significant way, it was disease introduced by the outside that helped prepare for the Inca toppling of civilization in Peru.”
Parts of today’s Mexico and Central America were once home to a number of Indigenous cultures, beginning with the Olmec around 1200 B.C., followed by the Zapotec, Maya, Toltec and, ultimately, the Aztecs.
Fertile farmland led to agricultural advances, with corn, beans, vanilla, avocado, peppers, squashes and cotton becoming important crops. Pyramid-style temples, intricate pottery, stone monuments, turquoise jewelry and other fine arts have been uncovered. Scholars believe the Zapotec developed Mesoamerica’s first written calendar and writing system, while the Mayans are noted for their advancements in mathematics, hieroglyphics, architecture and astronomy.
The nomadic Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City) in 1325 on small islands in Lake Texcoco, and the city became a booming market for trade. The Aztecs used a 365-solar calendar along with a 260-day ritual calendar, practiced human sacrifice and bloodletting, used a form of picture writing and created works of art with terracotta, feathers, mosaics and stone.
The Hernán Cortéz-led 1519 Spanish invasion, aided by Mesoamerican foes of the Aztecs, brought the Aztec civilization to an end by 1521. “When Cortez showed up, the Aztecs were having great difficulty maintaining control over their subject tribes,” Harl says. “They were greatly hated, and Cortez gave enough advantage to all those disadvantaged subjects to topple the Aztec Empire.”
“The US supports Ukrainians’ right to resist military occupation, and will supply them with all they need to fight back,” said political analyst Omar Baddar. “In Palestine, the US supports Israel’s brutal military occupation, & will ensure the occupiers get the weapons they need to maintain it.”…”
USA LEFT OUT A PART. The occupation by Israel in Palestine is in the USA interest. The resistance to the occupation by Russia in Ukraine is in the USA interest. There’s no morality here. It’s what suits the USA militarily globally. Putin still insists this is not an occupation; it’s a military operation.
USA SUPPORTS SLAVERY IN PALESTINE. THAT’S WHAT OCCUPATION IS. YOU CAN’T FIGHT BACK AND LIVE TO TELL ABOUT IT. THAT MEANS YOU ARE OWNED.
USA ARMS OCCUPIERS/SLAVEHOLDERS in 2022 in Palestine to pressure Iran into submission to Israel.
PALESTINE UNDER Jewish OCCUPATION since 1948. Seventy-four years, and 28 years before that under Great Britain. All these years the world told Palestinians they had to earn their freedom.
What a lie. There was never any intention of freeing anybody. There is no deal on earth that could be made to free these slaves on their own land that would be in any way satisfactory for what they suffered by the hands of Jews worldwide. The world knows it and the world lives just fine with that hypocrisy. Enslaving humans to get back at another country is torture and the Jews worldwide were witness to their slaughter time and time again. Seal the borders, no corridors for slaves, then bomb them to hell.
In my own country, boasting to be the greatest nation on earth, riding on the tails of imaginary freedom from bondage, while supporting slavery in foreign countries when it is in their best interest to do so. They do that in our name. In the name of We the People.
It is not in We the People’s best interest to promote slavery since 1948 and beyond until not one Palestinian remains on the land of Palestine, except as placement in settlement centers to discourage or deter Palestinians from conducting freedom operations where Palestinians live.
The Jews once again made a laughing stock of the USA. And we paid them 4.8 billion dollars to do it – in just one year. They should be paying us instead of us paying them to hold slaves in captivity, as payment to the Jews post WWII fulfilling the promise of Adolf Hitler – work shall set you free – to occupy the land of Palestine and all who inhabit it.
That’s ownership. That’s Hitler bartering with people. The Jews worked for Hitler, and Hitler paid them in Palestinians rather than dollars. Paid them in People. The land came along with the people. Nobody objected strongly enough to make a difference – 74 years now, and they’re still siphoning money from the USA to maintain that occupation. Billions of dollars every year. You can bet, not much of that goes to quality of life maintenance.
Hi, this is Phil Weiss, filling in for Michael Arria this week.For a while we’ve pointed out how much energy the Anti-Defamation League spends attacking anti-Zionists, including younger Jews, as supposed antisemites. Now the American Jewish Committee has thrown in. I watched a few hours of the AJC’s conference this month in New York, and my jaw dropped as speaker after speaker directed criticism at young Jews for not standing up for Israel.
The entire organization has signed up to the angry lament of its outgoing director, David Harris: “What are we doing wrong in our homes? What are we doing wrong in our schools? What is it that brings shame among some?”
The answer is, you can’t sell apartheid to idealist young people, but the AJC can’t hear that part.
Author Abigail Pogrebin despaired to Ted Deutch, the incoming director of the AJC, that young Jews won’t stand up for Israel.It’s harder for those under 30 to stand strong. We’re both seeing it. We have kids in their 20s. It’s a constant conversation at AJC. It’s gotten harder than it has ever has in my lifetime to stand up particularly with the pressures that are virulent on social media in May 2021 [during the Israeli assault on Gaza]. You know the challenges. The number of young people who are hiding their Jewishness [saying] It’ s not just a headache, it’s not worth the fight, I’m going to be canceled or attacked.
Deutch, a Florida congressman until he assumes his new position, said the next generation is the ballgame. And he said the mission of the AJC is to try to give those reluctant young Jews a spine.You have to prepare the young people to be advocates. People who aren’t comfortable but they want to [advocate].
That means telling “a very positive story” about Israel, Deutch said. Its technology foster agricultural production in food-insecure countries and battles climate change. “Our young people should feel comfortable telling it.” (And when people point to the human rights reports that say Israel practices apartheid, Deutch calls them antisemites.)
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was pessimistic. He said you can “feel the energy” of young Jews turning away from Israel. Something really has “gone wrong” with the Jewish community, he said.”
The turn away from Israel is extraordinarily worrying for a variety of reasons… For millions of secular minded American Jews, Israel was the glue, Israel was the cause, Zionism was an effective and powerful and emotionally satisfying substitute for religious observance that many people found themselves leaving behind… At the height of last year’s war, so many young American Jews were eagerly signing letters denouncing Israel’s behavior with nary a word to say about suffering of Jews in bunkers under rocket fire… That should have been another moment for us to worry about what has gone wrong with the American Jewish community.
Again– no acknowledgment of Israel’s human rights abuses and unending occupation. Stephens even said antisemitism was gaining a foothold in the Congress, witness the introduction of a bill to commemorate the Nakba, the creation of 750,000 Palestinian refugees during the establishment of Israel.Daniel Pincus of the AJC bewailed the choice that young Jews face on campus. Social justice causes that Jews have traditionally allied themselves with, including women’s rights and LGBTQ rights groups, “demand a renunciation of Zionism,” he said. So, “What are proud Jews to do with this clash of core aspects of their identities?”
Pincus turned to Rachel Fish, an Israel educator, who said Zionists should take no prisoners. No, those young Jews have to learn to stand up to the “blood libel” against Israel.I get calls from those students… The majority of those students desperately want to be accepted by the group whatever it may be [feminist, LGBTQ, or other minority groups]… and they beg for a crumb to be accepted into that room. I have to tell you, it is all of our jobs to actually tell them to stop begging and stand up. We need to get them to stand up, to stand extremely tall and have the moral courage to recognize those organizations and individuals are engaging in acts [of antisemitism]
The AJC trotted out a number of young Jews who are standing up for Israel on campus. For instance, Natalie Kahn, president of the Harvard Hillel and an associate news editor at the Harvard Crimson, said that Zionists need to fight anti-Zionist fire with fire.”We are losing the marketing game and letting the loudest voices win while we attempt to play nice and let them walk all over us… We let the cancel culture mob ally with BDS supporters and now activists have channeled their fervor to the wrong side. People are afraid to go big, go loud, and create controversy.”
Obviously I have a bias, but I think the AJC strategy will fail because more and more young Jews are seeing that Israel has no desire to end the occupation– no Judea and Samaria are the crowning glory of the biblical Jewish state– so they will simply walk away from ethnonationalism (as both Bret Stephens and Eric Alterman say they are doing). And I’m hardly the first person to say that when people in their 70s scold young adults, it doesn’t work. You’d think that the AJC might spend a minute or two confronting the racist and murderous conduct that is driving young people away from Israel. No, the AJC can’t face that.
I heard only one intelligent response as I watched the AJC forum: Hebrew Union College president Andrew Rehfeld who said that the Jewish community “must allow diverse opinions within our communities flourishing about the very things we are challenged about.” He included BDS (which he opposes). “I believe we need to have broader shoulders, wider hallways for conversations, and not alienate our very people, our young people, who want those conversations.”
Rehfeld’s was a lonely reasonable voice. I think it’s just a matter of time before the AJC’s smashmouth strategy completely implodes. Or runs out of rightwing donors.
–Because as our Palestine bureau is documenting, Israel has no answers to inequality besides violence. This week there were four more killings of young Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, three by Israeli forces, and a fourth man killed by Jewish settlers seeking to take more Palestinian land.
–Oh and that’s why the one-year-old “Change” government fell in Israel. It sought to extend the apartheid law that governs the West Bank, and failed only because the further-rightwing parties wouldn’t sign on, in an effort to bring back the most popular leader in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
–Speaking of anti-Zionism’s growth, there was a fascinating discussion this week between Beth Miller, the political director of JVP Action, and Robert Herbst, co-chair of the board of ICAHD, about the politics of Palestine. Miller is very positive. She said the movement is much further along than she would have thought five years ago. “People weren’t talking about conditioning military funding” to Israel in Washington then. “Now it’s constantly being discussed.”
That discussion will only widen, Miller said, as organizers publicize Israel’s human rights record. She looks forward to the day when overwhelmingly Americans conclude, “We shouldn’t be sending money to an apartheid regime.
”Miller acknowledged the power of the pro-Israel organizers. Progressive Summer Lee was up by 24 points in polls for the Democratic congressional primary in Pittsburgh last month and won by a nose thanks to millions spent for her mainstream opponent by AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel. Miller also explains why JVP Action is not endorsing incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York. “Jamaal Bowman has done a lot in Congress that’s been really good for the Palestinian rights movement, and he’s done a lot that has not been good for the Palestinian rights movement… We have to change the political calculus for everyone.”
–And speaking of the lobby’s power, AIPAC isn’t starving. “Republican billionaires Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus each gave $1 million to the United Democracy Project in May as the new AIPAC-affiliated super PAC has intervened in Democratic primaries in NC, PA, TX, MD, and CA,” says Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times notes.
I see in Wikipedia that Singer is 77 and Marcus is 93. So no wonder the AJC has an outdated strategy. Like every other rightwing Israel lobby group it depends on older Zionists who have a ton of money.
— There was quite a setback this week. A federal appeals court ruled that Arkansas’s anti-boycott-of-Israel law is not an unconstitutional violation of free speech. The Arkansas Times joined by the ACLU had sued over the law, which requires anyone who receives state funding to pledge not to endorse boycotts of Israel; and they argued that boycotts are a longstanding element of political speech.
The very conservative court said that boycotts are strictly commercial activity, “not expressive,” and the state can regulate them. Pretty much what 28 states have argued in imposing these absurd rules on folks who don’t want to underwrite apartheid.
ACLU attorney Brian Hauss pointed out the important political history of boycott in a comment to the Arkansas Times. “This country was founded on a boycott of British goods and… boycotts have been a fundamental part of American political discourse ever since.
”The Times said it expects to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, and that overwhelming reader support for its position has cushioned the blow. Alan Leveritt, the Times publisher, is inspiring: “We consider being banned from doing business with our state government for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel a ridiculous government overreach that has nothing to do with Arkansas.”
How activists got General Mills to dump its Israeli settlement factory
Michael Arria speaks with the AFSC’s Economic Activism Director Dov Baum about the successful Pillsbury boycott campaign, and what comes next.
BY MICHAEL ARRIA
PROTESTERS CALL ON GENERAL MILLS TO STOP MANUFACTURING PILLSBURY PRODUCTS ON AN ILLEGAL SETTLEMENT IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY IN SEPTEMBER 2020. THE DEMONSTRATION TOOK PLACE AT THE CORPORATION’S MINNEAPOLIS HEADQUARTERS ON THE EVE OF ITS ANNUAL BOARD MEETING. (PHOTO: EMMA LEIGH SRON / AFSC)
On May 31 General Mills announced that it had divested from its business in Israel and would stop making Pillsbury products in an illegal settlement annexed during the 1967 war. The move came after a two-year campaign by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which called on consumers to boycott Pillsbury products until they stopped manufacturing on stolen land.
General Mills has been using the factory, located in the Atarot Industrial Zone, since 2002. A 2019 report on the settlement from Al-Haq, documents how the facility impacts Palestinians living nearby. “When they pour the flour [into the mixers which are outdoors], the flour comes into our house. Sometimes the bags of flour overflow into the house,” explained one resident. In 2020 the United Nations identified General Mills as one of the 112 companies that are violating international law by operating in the occupied territories.
General Mills statement about the divestment does not mention AFSC’s campaign, or Israel’s human rights record. “This divestiture represents another step in General Mills’ Accelerate strategy, which is centered on strategic choices about where to prioritize our resources to drive superior returns,” it claims. “Internationally, the strategy includes efforts to reshape the company’s portfolio for sustainable, profitable growth by increasing its focus on advantaged global platforms, which include Mexican food, super-premium ice cream and snack bars.”
The statement has predictably been cited by pro-Israel websites who insist that the BDS movement can’t claim credit for the victory. Mondoweiss’s Michael Arria spoke with the AFSC’s Economic Activism Director Dov Baum about the factory, the end of the boycott, and how to parse the General Mills statement.
Can you talk about the General Mills factory and why the group began the campaign?
At AFSC we publish database of corporations that are directly involved in the Israeli occupation in specific ways and we look at all the larger corporations that operate factories in Israeli settlements on the West Bank. This is because settlements are illegal and also by the mere fact of being there, they exploit confiscated land. It’s land that was confiscated from Indigenous legal owners by force. They exploit the captive labor of Palestinian workers that have no civil rights and therefore no recourse for organizing.
One of these companies for years was General Mills. General Mills has sourced Pillsbury products from a factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone, which is in East Jerusalem and this is an area that was confiscated from Palestine many years ago. The company did not own the factory, but it did make Pillsbury products in it. In fact, the factory had a big sign on the entrance with the Pillsbury Doughboy logo and the word “Pillsbury” on it. They were making solely Pillsbury products. So we asked General Mills to stop producing in that plant. The company has appeared in a database published by the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights as one of only seven US based companies with direct operations in the illegal settlements.
THE PILLSBURY FACILITY IN THE ATAROT INDUSTRIAL ZONE (PHOTO VIA AFSC)
This campaign began in 2020. Can you talk about what kind of actions you carried out during that time and what other groups were involved? I’m also wondering if you had any communication with General Mills during the campaign.
We launched the campaign shortly after writing the company and sharing our concerns about this factory. We have not received any answer directly from the company. We have seen answers that the company has given to news outlets. For example, they would say things like, oh, we give Palestinians a good salary and a place to work, and we thought that was not a sufficient answer considering the fact that it is a Palestinian campaign asking companies to stop doing business in the settlements.
Shortly after we launched the campaign with the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), we had other national and local groups join the campaign coalition, including American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and local groups in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which is where the company is headquartered. One of those groups was Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), which organized several rallies outside the company headquarters, many at the same time as the company’s annual shareholder meetings.
There were local groups in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Philadelphia and other places that have staged vigils and picket lines outside grocery stores. For example, I’ve joined in with QUIT, Queer’s Undermining Israeli Terrorism, and they’ve organized some really colorful and creative protests outside grocery stores here in the Bay Area. They dressed up with big chef hats, handing out non-Pillsbury cookies, and handing out vouchers for consumers to buy “Killsbury” products. I thought that was hilarious. We also had someone wearing a large Doughboy suit that was handing out those vouchers and he was very popular, especially with the kids coming into the grocery store who wanted to poke his belly.
We also had an investor coalition. We contacted the company asking to learn more about their policies in conflict affected zones. We participated as shareholders in the annual meetings and encouraged other investors to ask the company questions about this factory. Both times we did that we actually got responses from CEO of General Mills that indicated that he was not very informed about the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, which was quite interesting for us to find out.
American Muslims from Palestine (AMP) launched a bake off during the holidays. Pillsbury usually sponsors a bake off competition during the holidays, so they had an alternative bake off. At the height of COVID restrictions, it was hard to come up with ideas for what people could do at their homes to show support for the campaign. Another action were initiative by two congregations, two local congregations that we hoped were the beginning of a wave of faith community involvement in the campaign. Two congregations declared themselves “Pillsbury Free.” One was United Church of Christ congregation that Charlie Pillsbury is a member of. Charlie Pillsbury is a direct descendant of Charles Pillsbury, who founded the Pillsbury company that later merged with General Mills. He and four other members of the Pillsbury family wrote an op-ed in the [Minneapolis] Star Tribune last year calling for a boycott of Pillsbury.
Charlie joined the campaign very organically. I mean, he’s somebody who has been active as an activist for many years. I had some conversations with him. He told me about campaigns he had joined 50 years ago, looking at corporate malfeasance and complicity of large corporations in all sorts of violations of people’s rights in war and occupation abroad. So this is not his first campaign. And it made sense for him to take a public stance on the company that uses his name as the brand name. That was a very powerful op-ed. I think it had a big impact on the general public, but also with the company itself.
When General Mills made this announcement they framed it as a business decision and didn’t mention the campaign at all. Their statement has been cited by pro-Israel media as proof that the BDS movement didn’t have an impact on them. What do you make of their statement and that argument?
There are two things that people really need to understand. The first and most important one is that companies are not moral subjects. We don’t expect the company to come out with an ethical, moral political announcement. Corporations are not people, they are money making machines. They are made up of people, but they are machines that are designed just to maximize their bottom lines. So in the 15 years of me working on these issues, I’ve seen dozens of companies stepping back for their exposure to the risks of doing business in occupied Palestinian territory. This is a controversy risk. It’s potential legal risk. It’s really a large controversy in a very small market. So it’s a good business decision. I want to just say very clearly, the company is telling us the truth. It is a business decision. I believe that a company such as General Mills cannot afford to continue doing business in an occupied Palestinian territory in an illegal settlement, especially after being highlighted, as it was internationally by the UN, because this is a high controversy issue. It is something that is not going away. And as a company that tries to sell things to people, I’m sure they didn’t want to be associated with this controversy.
Also it’s a very small business for them. That factory is a small factory. In fact, the entire Israeli market is a small market. So it is a very solid and sound business decision they have made and it’s very rare that a company would come out with an ethical statement on these issues. I know two such examples around the settlements, the latest one being Ben and Jerry’s. With the current legal situation and anti-BDS legislation, Ben & Jerry’s can expect a very serious backlash from Zionist organizations and from these new preposterous legal mechanisms that are penalizing all speech on Palestine. So I think General Mills made solid business decision to step away from this market, but at the same time try to avoid this hateful backlash from Zionist sympathizers. So they made a good decision. This is one big point. This is a good business decision indeed.
The second point to note is that they have a very clever messaging strategy. The company has chosen to come out with a statement about restructuring and a sale of the Israeli subsidiary, General Mills Israel, and to highlight the fact that they will continue making business in Israel. They have directed this messaging directly at Zionist media outlets and the Israeli media, they had lengthy conversations with these media outlets. They don’t want to end up on that list of companies who have caved to BDS pressure.
So I understand why they did that, but the messaging they came out with was misleading. For two years, our campaign has asked them to stop sourcing Pillsbury products from that factory, but their original statement didn’t say anything about that factory. So selling off their Israeli subsidiary did not necessarily mean that they would stop sourcing from that factory. We wrote to the company asking for clarification about that and, again, we received no answer. In the last few days, our campaign came out with a victory statement saying, yes, we think the company really, indeed plans to stop sourcing from the factory. We do that on the basis of reading between the lines of their statements and between the lines means that they came out with another statement saying that they would continue selling their other brands in Israel, which to me means they will no longer sell Pillsbury products in Israel.
They also said that they are moving away from the dough business. The factory is a frozen dough production line, so that means they would stop producing in that factory. In one of the news outlets, they were actually asked about the factory and they said, “Well, that is a dough factory. So we will not continue using it.” So I find this all to be very clever maneuvering on their part, but a total victory for our campaign. They’re doing what we’ve asked them to do and I congratulate them for that.
I think it was really important for the company not to come and clearly state that they would no longer make Pillsbury products in this factory because that might be interpreted as stepping away from the settlements. For us it really doesn’t matter how they speak about it as long as they’re doing it.
The boycott has ended, but what can people do to help support this effort going forward?
You can go to our campaign website BoycottPillsbury.org and sign a letter to the company thanking them for their good decision. I think it is important that the news of this campaign and the news of what General Mills is doing reaches a wider audience because they are not the first, and hopefully not the last, to withdraw from activities in the occupied territories and potentially in the Israeli market altogether. We don’t just want other people to learn about this, but also other companies. We have almost 20 companies that have done that already. In fact General Mills was almost one of the last large corporations with business in the settlements. There is maybe one or two left. That’s it. It’s important to create a new standard for corporate behavior on the ground. Even if the political situation is really awful it is still important that large multinationals do not have a stake in that business because they also have political influence and power. We don’t want them meddling and making sure settlements are recognized and legalized. So that’s one thing that people can do.
This is just one campaign out of many. If you go to Investigate.info you can find out more about companies around you. The main call for action right now is for institutions, including people’s workplaces or universities or faith communities, to divest from Israel. So if you go to our website you can see a divestment recommendation list. We’re asking institutions to divest from companies that are involved in severe human rights violations as part of Israeli apartheid and we give all the tools for them to implement such decisions. The hard part would be to come out publicly and say so. Maybe these days it is a little easier because so many corporations have announced stepping back from their activities in the Russian market or from activities in the occupied areas of the Ukraine. This is the same reasoning. We don’t want to directly support brutal military occupation with our money.
HWH Commentary: Here’s what YOU need to know??According to whom? Who’s in charge of what ‘We The People’ need to know? A tabloid news agency pretending to be real news – just what you NEED to know RIGHT NOW.
According to whom, the writer? Who cares if all news agencies play The Copycat News Game, but how about the truth? That’s all anybody wants. That would be a breath of fresh air. Yet all governments, planet-wide, lord over the deliverance of the news to the populace as if they were the government writing it.
News agencies need to stop acting like government agencies and start telling the truth, which includes pointing out where government sources lied to the news media. Can you Imagine it? The PRESS stopped lying. Seemingly out of the blue, they started telling the truth of the story.
Why trust ‘government sources’? If the government has something to say, then speak directly to the people and not through news agencies that paint the story according to approved government snitches.
Statements approved anonymously by the government demonstrate a weak, insecure operational process that doesn’t stand by its intel. Acting like writers of the bible – remaining anonymous so no one has to accept responsibility for mistakes made – creates chaos, not calm.
The populace needs the confidence of the truth, instead of being influenced thus controlled by people refusing to identify themselves on behalf of the government.
When the news media tells you your opinion before you read the story, that’s oppression by the news media and the government.
Relying on government approved snitches/sources, corrupts the process of information dissemination. Information crafted for the purpose of influencing the masses based on incomplete, thus flawed intel, sets the stage for more flawed intel to come. One lie after another is where it leads.
It doesn’t matter if the government snitch is accurate, who’s to say next time will be the same? Unidentified government source. There’s no transparency. No wonder there are so many conspiracy theorists. Unidentified people are essentially writing the stories before the press even gets them.
Perhaps it’s time to separate serious government news from opinion news that has taken over all news. It’s time all governments owned up to their own words and actions. If corrections need to be made at least the populace will hear only one rendition, instead of going through government appointed snitches and wading through the corruption of third and fourth party generated transmissions.
God says when you eat all the cows and all the pigs and all the chickens, your taste for flesh and blood will not abate until you eat your own and then it’s too late.
Back away from the animals as your right to consume. Wake up to their reality, which you impose without thoughtful consideration of their contribution to the future of the planet thus the Universe.
The soul leaves the body upon death. That’s how one knows that the soul is connected to the body. No body, no soul. No life, no soul.
Pope Francis via the Vatican announced to the Catholic brethren a while ago that cremations should be discouraged when making final burial arrangements, since in his view the soul cannot be found and guided to heaven if the body is turned to ashes. I disagree.
The soul is God, therefore each individual has a God of their own, which makes them each unique and each similar in that each has a soul and each has life.
The life-force is the Universe. The soul enters with the first connection that allows for life to be activated. Therefore, one might conclude that the Universe is an incubator creating structures and formations that ultimately could support some form of life.
Our individual and collective mind(s) use the organism to tame the life force which once activated becomes the soul.
Your soul therefore becomes your conscience thus your will to do or not to do, free to use and free to discard. Your soul communicates through your body and your mind directing your activities, subconsciously or with full awareness.
Some may call the soul instinct, that which is autonomically determined, for instance when threatened all animals instinctively seek to protect themselves from harm. It also includes an intuitive process or programming that comes with the package of each new life, regardless how that life is categorized or nurtured. And the soul seeks, thus strategizes ways to continue life until such time the organism wears out and life is no longer feasible. The soul, although not alive in the same sense as the organism, is nevertheless required to sustain life, making the soul, the organism’s basic form of life support.
The soul gives the organism life; it’s like a portal to the universe. Only under certain conditions, very precise conditions, will life appear. Communicate with it. The soul which is expressed through a combination of electricity, minerals, water, chemicals, carbons and gases, runs through every cell of your being for the purpose of teaching you how to survive as long as you can under harsh conditions on planet Earth.
When and while the organism is created, it needs to be tamed. That’s the job of the soul. That’s the universe continuing it’s support of the organism once birthed. The mind isn’t the same as the soul. The soul feeds the mind.
When the spark ignites the elements that produce the soul, which powers the organism to create a fully functioning life form, with very few tools by the way, a miniature universe is created in each organism.
We’re basically comprised of a multitude of maps with very precise instructions on how to fully function effectively.
The Universe recreates itself in every life and non-life form. That’s God, recreating itself in all life and non-life.
God aka Universe. God made everything in it’s likeness. The likeness of the Universe. Yes, humans, but also everything else. Jesus only saw himself, thus a male, generalized to all males as being created in the likeness of God. A little short-sighted I’d say.
When your soul detaches by any means, that means you are dead and your soul is on it’s way to delivering the results of your life to some other source, beyond my recognition.
Life is the soul. Use it to your advantage. Your soul is as unique as you are. You grow together, no matter how long or short the journey. That particular soul is yours forever. You grew with it from inception. It grew with you.
I am writing on behalf of wild burros and horses to urge you to set them free on the land they inhabit. Federal lands.
‘Cattle Ranchers leading cattle to slaughter get more government subsidies than do animals protected from slaughter to run free on the land they love./
Please reverse the practice of rounding up these innocent mustang horses as if they were enemies of the state being issued the death penalty for merely existing. It is their land too.
I don’t stand alone when preferring to see federal lands used to nurture and preserve life, not to nurture for the purpose of ending life. Humans love to see wild horses running free on the land they love. We understand that freedom. We connect whenever we see it.
The mustang horses, like us, were born to be free, not caged and sold as slaves or worse, killed to make the lives of humans more convenient. Imagine the suffering.
Thank you for your time and efforts Mr. President on something which we can all agree. All animals connect with freedom.
Mass producing cows and other animals to be laid to rest in the stomachs of humans is not a sustainable endeavor and never will be. Give them their freedom. It’s not a big ask.
Yours truly,
Sharon Lee Davies-Tight, artist, author, animal-free chef, rights activist
White Privilege Is A Racial Slur used by non-white people to stigmatize all white people as rich, evil and stupid.
All white people are the same bad is the message.
Black people reject individuality in European white people. Maybe because black people speak in one voice, they see others the same way.
Well, if everybody speaks in one voice, no matter the group, then there is some major discrimination thus oppression going on within that group.
When people fear calling American cheese white, that stigma has already taken control of the white populace. That’s enslavement when one group seeks to control the thoughts of another group, no matter the group. Blacks act as if they invented American cheese. Coming from New England, my mother made her macaroni and cheese with extra sharp Vermont cheddar, which was not orange.
I grew up on Kraft American white cheese. In two-three pound blocks; that’s how it was sold. My mother bought a box every two weeks. Frankly, I preferred a cheese sandwich to peanut butter and jelly, but that was just me and my tastebuds.
Now, try to call the cheese that I ate growing up in New England by its name, white American compared to orange American in the presence of black Americans brought up on orange American cheese and they’ll bristle with contempt. I’ve seen it. Some will say, then just call it American cheese.
Why should anyone have to? There’s white and there’s orange and I prefer white. It’s not that I didn’t also like orange, but I preferred white. I certainly shouldn’t feel uncomfortable calling white American cheese white. So a white person can’t even differentiate between colors of cheeses without some black people being offended? That’s not just discrimination. That’s just plain bizarre.
I suppose they could invent a black American cheese and level the field as it were, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest, except to bristle when they hear the word white associated with American. It almost seems as if the tag American is reserved for usage by black people only. That’s discrimination too.
I suppose white people could, and maybe should, start calling themselves white Americans, so there’s no discriminatory ambiguity when black Americans call themselves a color with the word American attached.
We all came from a different place, many times unwillingly. In other words, people weren’t escorted out, they were forced out due to unsurvivable conditions and they had to leave secretly. There were no large bus caravans and fleets of ships announcing to the world every step of their journey to America. The children had no say in the immigration aspirations of their parents. So now to punish those children, because their parents lived in oppressive times, seems harsh to say the least. That’s discrimination too.
African American and European American. That sounds okay too, but it’s not okay for one, and not the other. Equal means equal.
Call people what they want to be called. Nobody ever asked the white populace if it was okay to deny their individual ethnicity in lieu of a white label.
They can’t be Irish, they’re white, and all white people are the same.
white white white
Yeah, I’ve heard it. A lot. Living in Cleveland.
Just because you’re reticent to have your DNA checked to see what country you’re really from, don’t deny others their ethnic roots, because yours are generalized to one continent. Most white people are surprised to learn that their ethnic roots aren’t as limited as they thought. Non-white people’s ethnic roots may not be either.
There appears to be an uneven, thus unfair, amount of accommodations to which one group is forced to comply/submit via fear tactics used by the enforcer group. That’s discrimination. It will always be discrimination.
It should never be a particular group’s turn not to be discriminated against. That’s the brain child of social engineers who call themselves scientists, who work for governments. Remember that scientists are the ones who devise torture strategies to control everybody’s behavior, not just the behavior of one group over another or over many.
The strategy is based on, ‘you can’t satisfy all the people all the time’, so select a group and then rotate from group to group every now and then, but not everybody at once to give each group a portion of what they need.
The problem is obvious; the slogan is faulty. Yes, you can satisfy all the groups by treating all groups equally all the time, but so many groups, maybe all the groups, are continually gaming the system and being successful, that it appears that some are better at the game than others, and actually end up taking away from some groups what they need to survive, throwing off the entire system of allocation.
It shouldn’t be looked upon as a game or even having to game the system, but that’s what rich people and large companies do too; they’re always gaming something for preferential treatment or financial benefit. The cards are not stacked in favor of rich people, since they’re such a small minority in the world. Everyone is controlled – even the rich. They do not by any means live stress-free lives.
Of course rich people and rich businesses aren’t starving, but we all could do better in the money management category. Some will immediately knee-jerk with, ‘if we had money to mange, we could do really well’. There is no satisfactory response to that statement, which means it’s a non-starter. The smart thing to do is offer a solution along with the gripe. Most don’t. All they can muster is, ‘take money away from the rich and give it to the poor, simple, see??
Well, if it were so simple, then why aren’t people doing it? Maybe they are, and that’s why so much of the poor-world steals. Why be forced to do something that is against the law and against cultures and against your own neighbor and against your own value system?
In a capitalist society a grounds keeper can’t expect to make as much money as a neurosurgeon. That’s what the poor peoples want until they get it – everybody gets paid the same no matter the job. Then they realize they don’t like the system; there’s no room for competition, for reward. All one gets is their basic needs met – end of story. Why leave a socialist regime to go to a democratic regime for the purpose of changing it into a socialist one?
Then those scientists and social psychologists people will say that a job well done is reward enough. That’s fine for them to say, when their jobs challenge and utilize their potential and capabilities. Somebody has to do the menial work, so my across the board suggestion is to raise the pays of those doing the jobs that don’t allow workers to challenge themselves and each other. Boredom should pay. You want me to be bored with my job, because the country needs me, then increase my wage so I can at least daydream about how I’ll spend it.
It’s a long way to travel and a lot of money that could be better spent to immigrate to and change another country to meet your standards, rather than work to change the system in your own country of origin, the one with which you’re most familiar
It seems that democracies put the poor of their nations into a situation similar to a socialist system of government, nobody has much money with which to manage beyond their daily needs.
The problem with how democracies manage the poor is they develop programs with which to obtain goods and services for free, but the degree of bureaucracy involved through the application process plus the ‘poor’ stigma attached to it plus the design by social scientists to insert humiliating features to get people out of the poor category all serve to keep the poor in the poor category by demoralizing them to the point of accepting their fate. What it takes to get out of the poor category is just too much for a lot of people with little means to handle.
I’m wondering now if that isn’t part of the plan, so that governments don’t have to provide or at least find jobs above the subsistence level for the poor in any nation. Keep them where they’re at, we’ll feed them the crumbs nobody wants and keep them stressed; stress is good right?
This isn’t a color problem. Right away I can hear somebody say, yes it is because more black people are poor than white people, per capita, proportionately.
Maybe instead of focusing so much on percentages, spend more time on solving, then fixing the problem for all poor people, not just your color, but all colors. If black activists in America had their way instead of demanding fifteen dollars minimum wage across the board for all workers, they’d cite some discriminatory reason why blacks should get twenty dollars and whites ten dollars hourly wage. Again, when you do what you accuse somebody else of doing, no one takes you seriously. Oh, they will if we burn some more cities. Well if that’s the way you want to go, then you lost a whole heap of support.
And I say, there you go again, blaming the children of ancestors and making the children throughout history pay for past grievances and wrongs instituted by adults. It’s a non-starter. It’s too discriminatory. Again, you can’t cure a discrimination with a discrimination.
Claiming your people, or tribe or group incapable is like saying they’re all handicapped. I believe that prejudice and discrimination are forms of handicaps, but when the job is there and the worker is skilled and still won’t take the job, that is out of handicap territory.
When a woman is skilled and keeps having children to increase her monthly welfare check that is out of handicap territory. If a person can wheel and deal their way to fancy clothes, car, entertainment, then they can wheel and deal in a paying above the table job. That’s not a handicap.
When someone has the will and the skill and is refused jobs or advancements, then that’s a handicap. The problem is it happens to all colors.
It happens more to women of all socio-economic backgrounds. Prejudice and discrimination are not only about the color of skin. The poor in all groups are discriminated against the most – across the board.
Yet women, who make up fifty-percent of the human race of all groups – that’s one super large group – take a backseat to all non-women (males) all the time. Even a person who has a sex change operation from male to female notices the difference in how they’re treated – worse – as if they don’t matter.
It’s the women in the world who don’t matter, not the race.
The black people making mattering all about them, would have been more successful without the violence they required to increase the fear, which temporarily increased the status, if they had focused on an equal rights amendment for half the human race, instead of in the USA black people only and in reality, mostly black men. The proof is that highly paid black women are still crying all over cable talk shows as hosts.
Stigmatizing all white people as rich, evil and stupid by calling them privileged will not change black on black discrimination in the home, in black churches or at black schools. That’s a cultural condition that needs to change within the culture. Black people alone need to do that themselves. It is not the jobs of white people to become therapist, social worker and babysitter for black people, which is pretty much where the social engineers put the responsibility of addressing the needs of black people in the communities across the nation.
White people have a history of policing their own. Black people say they do, but their interpretation of policing or taking care of their own is different than that of white people. White people will call out bad behavior of other white people. I’ve been in Cleveland, Ohio for twenty-eight years and never once have I seen a black person call out another black person’s bad behavior. I was on a bus with a black woman driver speeding down the highway, making turns that leaned the entire bus to one side, making people slide in their seats. All black people on the bus, except for me and my husband, and not one black person even looked at another to raise an eyebrow. Nobody shouted at the driver to slow down. I found that alarming and telling at the same time.
Blacks don’t publicly call each other out for bad behavior, even when it could avert a tragedy. There could have been a catastrophic crash, yet not one black person even looked up at the driver. When Steve and I got off the bus the driver came over to apologize, citing some fight she got into with dispatch or whatever you call it, that made her see red. Even though no one reacted on the bus, there was a general air of relief when the driver stopped to let everybody off to wait for another bus. They mingled about, making grunting noises without interacting with anyone.
That situation would have been a good opportunity to police themselves as black activists say black people do.
No they don’t. And it shouldn’t matter who’s watching.
Finding common ground won’t be easy when terms like violence and threat and safety have different meanings for different groups of people. And as long as one group wants immunity for bad behavior based on past conditions, which have nothing to do with the people now, there will never be equity. The activists count on that ‘never’ word to keep the flames of prejudice dancing in the heads of white people to get preferential treatment and financial benefits over what they equally deserve.
COVID-19 may shrink the brain’s gray matter, primarily in areas of the brain involved in smell and memory processing, a large study suggests.
These distinct changes in brain structure crop up in both people who required hospitalization for COVID-19 and those who had less severe infections, according to the study, published March 7 in the journal Nature. And the tissue loss and damage seen in these study participants was “above and beyond” the structural brain changes that normally occur with age, said Jessica Bernard, a neuroscientist and associate professor at Texas A&M University, who was not involved in the study.
To peer inside the participants’ brains, the team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique that uses a strong magnetic field and radio waves to generate images of soft tissues in the body. In the infected group, participants caught COVID-19 about 4.5 months prior to their second scan, on average. These MRI scans revealed distinct patterns of shrinkage in the brains of people who caught COVID-19; the damage was more extensive and occurred in different regions than the normal changes that show up in people who never caught the virus.
Compared with the control group, the infected group showed greater tissue loss in specific regions of the cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outer surface of the brain. One region, called the orbitofrontal cortex, sits just above the eye sockets, receives signals from brain areas involved in sensation, emotion and memory and plays an important role in decision-making. The other, known as the parahippocampal gyrus, surrounds the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure in the middle of the brain that’s important for encoding new memories.
Shrinkage was most pronounced in these areas, but the infected group also showed a greater reduction in overall brain size than the control group, the authors reported. The team also uncovered tissue damage in brain areas connected to the primary olfactory cortex, a bulbous structure that receives sensory information from scent-detecting neurons in the nose.
“Certainly they’re showing, particularly, the areas that are involved in memory encoding being affected, and connections to the olfactory cortex and the limbic system being involved,” Frontera said; the limbic system is involved in emotional behavior, learning and memory.
On average, the infected group showed 0.2% to 2% greater tissue loss and damage over the course of about three years, compared with the control group. To put that in context, estimates suggest that aging adults lose about 0.2% to 0.3% of their gray matter in regions related to memory each year, according to a 2021 report in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, so additional loss beyond that would be out of the ordinary.
The study participants also completed several cognitive assessments; the study authors repeated some of these tests during their study, to see how the participants’ scores had changed. Notably, the infected group performed significantly worse on so-called trail making tests than the controls; these tests are designed to test attention and executive function, Frontera said.
“I think it’s really important also, that they showed that there’s a difference in quantitative, cognitive testing, as well as the structural data from the MRIs,” she said.
Although it has many strengths, the new study does have a few limitations. For example, while the authors know which participants developed mild or severe COVID-19, they don’t catalog exactly what symptoms each person experienced during their infection. It would be interesting to know which participants had symptoms of smell loss or olfactory dysfunction, as that might provide hints as to why damage occurred in brain areas connected to the primary olfactory cortex, Frontera said. A loss of sensory information from the nose could theoretically cause such areas to atrophy, she noted.
The study authors agree that this loss of sensory information could potentially explain the observed damage. Alternatively, it’s possible that the coronavirus may directly infect the brain, or that the virus may set off an inflammatory immune response that damages the brain indirectly, they suggested in their report.
“I don’t know that there’s anything that suggests one way or another at this point,” Bernard said. “I think it is completely up in the air.”
“I don’t think we know mechanistically, still, what’s underpinning this,” Frontera agreed. That said, based on recent studies, “I don’t think that there’s direct invasion involved,” meaning the coronavirus isn’t necessarily invading these regions of the brain and causing direct damage, she said.
A recent study, published Feb. 1 in the journal Cell, supports this idea, she said. The research suggests that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t directly infect olfactory neurons in the nose, which could theoretically serve as a highway into the brain. Instead, the virus infects cells that lie near the olfactory neurons, embedded in the lining of the nasal cavity. This infection then triggers inflammation that messes with the function of the neighboring olfactory neurons, causing them to produce fewer scent receptors, for example. This, in turn, causes smell loss, the authors concluded.
Whatever is driving the observed brain shrinkage, it’s possible that the mechanism might slightly differ between coronavirus variants, Frontera noted. The study only included individuals infected between March 2020 and April 2021, who most likely caught the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 or the alpha variant, the authors noted. Future studies could zoom in on how more recent variants, such as omicron, affect the brain, and others could focus on whether these findings extend to people with long COVID, many of whom report memory problems and “brain fog,” she noted.
And of course, ideally, another study would be conducted with the individuals from the U.K. Biobank, to see how their brains change in the coming months and years, Frontera said.
“What will we see five, 10, 15 years down the road?” Bernard said. Hopefully, the rate of structural change will plateau relatively soon after infection and the participants’ cognitive deficits will resolve, she said. But there’s a possibility that, down the line, the COVID-related brain damage could accelerate normal processes of aging and cause cognitive decline to occur at a faster rate than would normally be expected.
“And to be clear, this is entirely speculative,” Bernard said. “It’s way too early to know.”
Beyond the U.K., many other research groups are tackling these questions. “Certainly, a lot of people have their eyes on this,” Frontera said. Frontera and her colleagues at NYU are currently launching a study to assess markers of neurodegenerative disease, namely Alzheimer’s, in individuals who recovered from COVID-19; their participants will also undergo MRIs and cognitive assessments.
“Never forget, lest it happen again”? Where were the Jews in Mexico, Central and South America when this Holocaust took place right under their noses? eh?
How would they know? How could they not know?
Sound familiar?
Where Jews move they know everybody’s business. I know. I lived for seven years among the Hasidic Jews in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Have to say, they’re a bitter bunch, the women especially. The men are more outgoing, not by much. The women’s liberation movement didn’t seem to affect the women in religious separatist groups. Though the modern Jews played a big part. The few Muslims I’ve encountered while living elsewhere in Cleveland share that bitterness. Low on patience. Preoccupied, frustrate easily. Self-conscious of every movement they make, not necessarily how they look.
One hundred thousand Mexicans exterminated in Mexico. And the Jews didn’t know? They couldn’t use that sixth sense of theirs always looking for incoming, to notice an extermination camp in their midst? People disappeared and nobody in law enforcement wanted to look for fear of what they might uncover?
Sound familiar?
I’m sure they never imagined the scope when they did uncover the proof of the truth being all those corpses. I don’t know if 100,000 dead included those destroyed by acids which wouldn’t leave a trace. They claim the cartel workers burned them with acids in places where burials would make people suspicious and alert the authorities.
Sound familiar?
Nobody forgot the Jewish Holocaust and it happened again. The dead only know where all the other sites are, or maybe they’re already known and fear keeps authorities from approaching – maybe now they’re booby trapped. Be careful.
Why did the USA allow cartel workers unfettered access to the USA grounds and markets?
It was too difficult to squash the cartels in Mexico, so they move them to the USA and be squashed here? But they’re not squashed. They proliferate with impunity. The government claims to know where they all are located, and are keeping an eye on them, but what else? That’s it? We know you’re here, behave yourselves? Why murder them in Mexico, then tell the leftovers to come to America and ‘we’ll keep you safe and you won’t have to pay off any politicians or law enforcement’?
Ops, I think I got that last one wrong. That’s why cartels are allowed to set up and run operations with impunity in America, because they’re paying to do it. Lots of money. They move the money in Ryder trucks and other moving vans, even use live animals going to slaughter trucks. A wide awake dream told me while it slept. (it, not I)
Please note that a certain percentage of Mexicans have no problem with cutting up bodies – dead or alive. Some of them enjoy it. These are the people allowed safe passage over our southern border by the USA government – anyone cartel related gets a free pass. The proof is that they’re here and growing huge profitable drug businesses.
These are the politicians in congress who won’t legalize marijuana, but they bring cartel workers across the border unharmed to set up profitable drug businesses. These are the politicians already making money from the cartels, much more than they’d make if legalizing pot in America. Those are the politicians holding back.
Hey, I’m not in favor of torturing and killing these people who commit atrocities to terrorize people into silence or to stop a breadcrumb trail to them. Not in Mexico do I approve and not in the USA do I approve. But if you’re going to murder cartel heavyweights in Mexico then let them operate freely in Chicago or Los Angeles that reeks of corruption on the USA side.
Even if some of the people reported missing relocated themselves elsewhere to stay hidden from the cartels, the bones, teeth, clothes, trinkets tell a frightful, chilling story of a Holocaust in Mexico.
The question that remains unanswered is why the Jews living in those countries who spy on everybody didn’t report this to the authorities? If others suspected for a long time, then they had to get wind of it, which means they turned the same blind eye that was turned on them in Europe during World War II.
So that little ditty about neverforgettinglestithappenagain? It’s an excuse to keep what happened to Jews at the forefront of the world’s collective mind, so when it does happen elsewhere, nobody notices. There is only one Holocaust according to the orthodox Jews who appear to run the world in areas of who and what is important to remember and that is the Jewish Holocaust. Lest it happen again.
Well, there’s something questionable about accepting wrongs in the world as natural occurrences when people make lots of money by allowing those wrongs to exist and then to allow the continuance and proliferation of those wrongs unrighted.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House once said about the horrific murders in Chicago that they didn’t matter, because they were cartel-related. Bad guys committing atrocities against bad guys was okay by her. She gave the political green light, that accompanied her ‘don’t forget me on pay day’ requirement for that endorsement of cartel-related atrocities.
My searing thought-question at hearing her speak those words as if it was a no-brainer was, ‘you mean Chicago has cartels’? How could that be? How would she seem so accepting of the fact, then much later in time call for the dissolution of DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency)? So now there is no war on drugs are we to assume? So why not legalize marijuana? Too many fat-cats from the tobacco industries want to create a monopoly and they’re digging their heels in to prevent a free for all swarm of mom and pops sprouting up all over the USA.
Well, I think a swarm of mom and pops growing and selling marijuana may not be such a bad idea given the pandemic we’re still in and the work force diminishing due to unbearable work conditions that make people want to branch out on their own, creating a personal survive and thrive space. I don’t see anything wrong with it, and frankly a lot right with it.
If I were running this country I’d say let ‘er rip…Back to the basics. If our own government allows cartels to survive and thrive, then we’ve become a nation of hypocrites supporting the criminal we once murdered when they were in somebody else’s country. Here, in the USA we let them live, set up farms, conduct business and otherwise survive and thrive.
No holocaust is more or less important than anyone else’s. It is discriminatory to even claim ownership of a holocaust. Many other people, besides Jews, were holocausted in Adolf Hitler’s factories/camps. But the Jews insisted on “in our name only”. It makes one wonder if further generations were in the plan to benefit from it as they obviously have.
One must wonder why Adolph Hitler gave the Jews enough pens/ink paper to document the lives of six million Jews whom they claim he murdered and then give them places to store all those documents. Over a span of how many years? Their memories aren’t that good.
There’s something missing from their stories. To them, ‘what does it matter, we’re all dead”. But it does matter. It matters that when atrocities are committed or reported that they be done accurately. How often does accurate happen in the reporting of any war, that doesn’t become sanitized after the fact by governments wanting to project a certain image to the world?
Still, the bones, teeth, clothes, trinkets tell the story of a Mexican Holocaust. So, let’s forget it and it won’t happen again? Nobody was thinking about a Jewish Holocaust when these bodies were desecrated for purpose of hiding what needed to be hidden – a person who talks. I doubt the Mexicans will be exploiting their deaths for profit and political gain. Therein lies the difference between the Spanish and the Jewish.
Maybe a Mexican Holocaust Museum to commemorate all the people who died during the war on drugs. Lest the war on drugs decides to revitalize itself.
The Jews blamed all the world for not knowing what was happening to them. How could they not know? Then they consequently punished each and every country, each and every citizen for not believing once they were told and then not acting fast enough to save them.
And to this day they’ll ruin the life of any person who to them trivializes their holocaust, by asking questions, labeling them for life.
Well where were the Jews when it was happening to the Mexicans? They live in the same country. They knew people were disappearing. Why did they not ask questions when it was somebody else?
By MARÍA VERZA
28 February 2022
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (AP) — For the investigators, the human foot — burned, but with some fabric still attached — was the tipoff: Until recently, this squat, ruined house was a place where bodies were ripped apart and incinerated, where the remains of some of Mexico’s missing multitudes were obliterated.
How many disappeared in this cartel “extermination site” on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, miles from the U.S. border? After six months of work, forensic technicians still don’t dare offer an estimate. In a single room, the compacted, burnt human remains and debris were nearly 2 feet deep.
Uncounted bone fragments were spread across 75,000 square feet of desert scrubland. Twisted wires, apparently used to tie the victims, lie scattered amid the scrub.
Each day, technicians place what they find — bones, buttons, earrings, scraps of clothing — in paper bags labeled with their contents: “Zone E, Point 53, Quadrant I. Bone fragments exposed to fire.”
They are sent off to the forensic lab in the state capital Ciudad Victoria, where boxes of paper bags wait their turn along with others. They will wait a long time; there are not enough resources and too many fragments, too many missing, too many dead.
Who knows if the 100k figure is accurate within an acceptable margin of error.
Maybe a lot of people that went missing immigrated to other countries without leaving a trail or saying good bye to their families.
And people continue to disappear. And more remains are found.
“We take care of one case and 10 more arrive,” said Oswaldo Salinas, head of the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s identification team.
Meanwhile there is no progress in bringing the guilty to justice. According to recent data from Mexico’s federal auditor, of more than 1,600 investigations into disappearances by authorities or cartels opened by the attorney general’s office, none made it to the courts in 2020.
Still, the work goes on at Nuevo Laredo. If nothing else, there is the hope of helping even one family find closure, though that can take years.
That’s why a forensic technician smiled amid the devastation on a recent day: She had found an unburnt tooth, a treasure that might offer DNA to make an identification possible.
___
When Jorge Macías, head of the Tamaulipas state search commission, and his team first came to the Nuevo Laredo site, they had to clear brush and pick up human remains over the final 100 yards just to reach the house without destroying evidence. They found a barrel tossed in a trough, shovels and an axe with traces of blood on it. Gunfire echoed in the distance.
Nearly six months later, there are still more than 30,000 square feet of property to inspect and catalog.
The house has been cleared, but four blackened spaces used for cremation remain. In what was the bathroom, it took the technicians three weeks to carefully excavate the compacted mass of human remains, concrete and melted tires, said Salinas, who leads work at the site. Grease streaks the walls.
Macías found the Nuevo Laredo house last August when he was looking for more than 70 people who had disappeared in the first half of the year along a stretch of highway connecting Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, the busiest trade crossing with the United States.
The area was known as kilometer 26, a point on the highway and the invisible entrance to the kingdom of the Northeast cartel, a splinter of the Zetas. There are small shops with food and coffee. Men sell stolen gasoline and drugs. Strangers are filmed with cell phones. The power poles lining the highway farther north have been blasted with large-caliber weapons.
Most who disappeared here were truck drivers, cabbies, but also at least one family and various U.S. citizens. About a dozen have been found alive.
Last July, Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, said the disappearances appeared to be related to a dispute between the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which was trying to enter the area, and the Northeast cartel, which wanted to keep them out. It’s not clear if the victims were smugglers of drugs or people, if some were abducted mistakenly or if the goal was simply to generate terror.
The phenomenon of Mexico’s disappearances exploded in 2006 when the government declared war on the drug cartels. For years, the government looked the other way as violence increased and families of the missing were forced to become detectives.
It wasn’t until 2018 — the end of the last administration — that a law passed, laying the legal foundations for the government to establish the National Search Commission. There followed local commissions in every state; protocols that separated searches from investigations, and a temporary and independent body of national and international technical experts supported by the U.N. to help clear the backlog of unidentified remains.
The official total of the missing stands at 98,356. Even without the civil wars or military dictatorships that afflicted other Latin American countries, Mexico’s disappeared are exceeded in the region only by war-torn Colombia. Unlike other countries, Mexico’s challenge still has no end: authorities and families search for people who disappeared in the 1960s and those who went missing today.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government was the first to recognize the extent of the problem, to talk of “extermination sites” and to mount effective searches.
But he also promised in 2019 that authorities would have all the resources they needed. The national commission, which was supposed to have 352 employees this year, still has just 89. And Macías’ state commission has 22 positions budgeted, but has only filled a dozen slots. There the issue isn’t money; the difficulty is finding applicants who pass background checks.
___
Disappearances are considered the perfect crime because without a body, there’s no crime. And the cartels are expert at ensuring that there is no body.
“If a criminal group has total control of an area they do what we call ‘kitchens,’ because they feel comfortable” burning bodies openly, Macías said. “In areas that are not theirs and where the other side could easily see the smoke, they dig graves.”
In 2009, at the other end of the border, a member of the Tijuana cartel confessed to having “cooked” some 300 victims in caustic lye. Eight years later, a report from a public university investigation center showed that what officially had been a jail in the border city of Piedras Negras, was actually a Zetas command center and crematorium.
Perhaps the largest such site was yet another border setting near the mouth of the Rio Grande called “the dungeon,” in territory controlled by the Gulf cartel. The memory still stirs Macías. The first time he went he saw “pelvis, skulls, femurs, everything just lying there and I said to myself, ‘It can’t be.’”
Authorities have recovered more than 1,100 pounds of bones at the site so far.
According to the Tamaulipas state forensic service, some 15 “extermination sites” have been found. There are also burial sites: In 2010, graves containing 191 bodies were found along one of the main migratory routes through Tamaulipas to the border. In 2014, 43 students disappeared in the southern state of Guerrero. Only three have been identified from pieces of burnt bones.
Most of the extermination sites have been found by family members who follow up leads themselves with or without the support and protection of authorities. Such search groups exist in nearly every state.
For the families, the discoveries inspire both hope and pain.
“It brings together a lot of emotions,” said a woman who has been searching for her husband since 2014 and two brothers who disappeared later. Like thousands of relatives across Mexico, she has made the search for her loved ones her life. “It makes you happy to find (a site), but at the moment you see things the way they are, you nosedive.”
The woman, who requested anonymity because of safety concerns, was present for the discovery of two sites last year. When she entered the Nuevo Laredo location with Macías, she could only cry.
A few months earlier, she had found the site in central Tamaulipas where she believes her loved ones are. That day, accompanied by the state search commission and escorted by the National Guard, they entered the brush in search of a drug camp.
“I’m not well psychologically after that,” she said as she showed photos of the deep graves where burnt remains were buried, some wrapped in barbed wire. They recovered around a thousand teeth, she said.
___
On a recent day in Nuevo Laredo, gloved hands sifted through the dirt, separating out bits of bone: a piece of a jaw, a skull fragment, a vertebra.
The work is hard. The forensic technicians clear brush and then dig. Some days the temperature hovers around freezing, others it’s above 100 degrees. They wear head-to-toe white protective suits and are constantly guarded.
Security is a concern, and so authorities have separated the search function from the investigations — the cartels appear less concerned with those just looking for bones, though anything they find could eventually become evidence in a prosecution. Each day before dusk, they are escorted to a safe house and don’t leave except to return the next day to the site.
When cartel violence exploded in Tamaulipas in 2010, the capital’s morgue had space for six bodies. In a single massacre that year, a cartel killed 72 migrants. In those days, the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights denounced serious negligence in Tamaulipas’s forensic work.
Pedro Sosa, director of the state’s forensic services, said that their way of working changed radically in 2018 with the establishment of the identification team. But it’s not enough. “A single forensic anthropologist in the whole state is not compatible with all of this work.”
It can take four months for the Nuevo Laredo remains to be cleaned, processed and arrive to the genetic lab. It can take longer if something urgent emerges like in January of last year, when nearly 20 people — mostly migrants — were incinerated in an attack near the border.
Even if they manage to extract DNA, identification isn’t assured because the profile will only automatically be crossed with a state database.
It could be years before the profile is added to one of the national databases. In 2020, the federal auditor said that that system had only 7,600 registered disappeared and 6,500 registered dead.
Though the federal law calls for a system in which various databases can interact, that doesn’t exist, said Marlene Herbig, of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Each state or federal database of fingerprints or genetic profiles is like an island, despite calls for bridges to connect them.
No one can estimate how much money is needed or how many years it could take to see significant results in Mexico’s efforts to locate and identify the disappeared.
Herbig offered a clue: A similar effort mounted on the island of Cyprus took 10 years to identify 200 disappeared in the conflict between Greece and Turkey during the latter half of the last century. And there are many thousands more missing in Mexico than there were in Cyprus.
“This issue is a monster,” Macías said.
__
AP writer Alfredo Peña in Ciudad Victoria contributed to this report.
HWH: NEW FORM OF MATTER – NOT LIQUID. NOT SOLID. MAYBE LIKE HOT LAVA FLOW?
It sloshes, like egg whites thinking about going crazy in a bowl of broken soft shells? Aluminum? Alloy. Superionic? I thought that said supersonic. Sounds like solid and liquid don’t like to mingle, like oil and water.
“”superionic state” — a whirling mix of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon molecules, continuously sloshing through a grid-like lattice of iron./
Sounds yummy, think I’ll make one in the kitchen! I’ll call it HOC MOUSSEY dressed in edible iron lace. Youch that was super hot!! Warn your guests.
Mysterious new substance possibly discovered inside Earth’s core
The planet’s core could be a mushy mix of solid and liquid.
Earth’s core is weirder than first thought. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
Earth’s inner core may be filled with a weird substance that is neither solid nor liquid, according to a new study.
For more than half a century, scientists believed that Earth’s deepest recesses consist of a molten outer core surrounding a densely compressed ball of solid iron alloy. But new research, published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature, offers a rare insight into the inner structure of the planet — and it’s far weirder than previously thought.
New computer simulations suggest that Earth’s hot and highly pressurized inner core could exist in a “superionic state” — a whirling mix of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon molecules, continuously sloshing through a grid-like lattice of iron.
“We find that hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in hexagonal close-packed iron transform to a superionic state under the inner core conditions, showing high diffusion coefficients like a liquid,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “This suggests that the inner core can be in a superionic state rather than a normal solid state.”
The planet’s core is subject to bone-crushing pressures and scorching temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun, and its contents have long been a subject of speculation among scientists and science fiction authors alike. Since the 1950s, advances in the study of earthquake-generated seismic waves — which travel through the core — have enabled researchers to make more refined guesses as to what’s inside the heart of the planet, but even today the picture is far from clear.
A 2021 study of how a type of seismic wave called a shear (or “s”) wave moved through our planet’s interior revealed that Earth’s inner core isn’t solid iron, as was once believed, but is instead composed of various states of a “mushy” material, Live Science previously reported, consisting of an iron alloy of iron atoms and lighter elements, such as oxygen or carbon.
But scientists weren’t sure what this mush consisted of. Accessing the core by probe is impossible, so for the new study, the researchers turned instead to a simulation — compiling seismic data and feeding it into an advanced computer program designed to recreate the effects of the core’s extreme pressures and temperatures on an assortment of likely core elements: such as iron, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. In a regular solid, atoms arrange themselves into repeating grids, but the core simulations suggest instead that in Earth’s core, atoms would be transformed into a superionic alloy — a framework of iron atoms around which the other elements, driven by powerful convection currents, are able to freely swim.
“It is quite abnormal,” study first author Yu He, a geophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. “The solidification of iron at the inner core boundary does not change the mobility of these light elements, and the convection of light elements is continuous in the inner core,”
If the simulation lines up with reality, the constant swilling of the mushy superionic materials could help to explain why the inner core’s structure seems to change so much over time, and even how the powerful convection currents responsible for creating Earth’s magnetic field are generated. But first, the model will have to be proven.
“We will have to wait until the experimental setting becomes ripe to replicate the inner core conditions and scrutinise the proposed models. We will then see which of the models are physical,” Hrvoje Tkalčić, the head of seismology and mathematical geophysics at the Australian National University in Canberra who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. “In the meantime, global seismology is making progress, with more seismological probes becoming rapidly available, and we hope to constrain some of the key parameters determining geophysical models of the inner core in this coming decade.”
To be considered African you need to be Black. Even though you and your family were born and raised in Africa, if you are white, you don’t fit into their mind design of what is Africa. Black equals African – to black people. I say it’s discriminatory. They don’t. What’s theirs’ is theirs’. It’s still discriminatory.
Nobody that I know of refers to white peoples born and bred in Africa as Africans. I’ve never heard it. Even in America when someone uses the adjective African, black Africans think you’re talking about over there, not here. They’ve become so attached to the black label that Africa to them means people who live on continental Africa.
I’m Irish. I’m Lithuanian. I’m British and a whole lot of other ethnicities. Never once did I refer to myself with the word American attached. How would it sound if I introduced myself as an Irish, Lithuanian, British American. Who does that?
The African people living here now are not American by DNA. Neither am I; neither is anybody. The USA is too young to reflect DNA in its inhabitants blood. I suspect that ancestral Indians who were on this land prior to the arrival of the Europeans whose DNA reflects Indian blood as they call it, is really reflecting Asian blood. Indians didn’t drop down from the sky; they came from somewhere.
If you’re going to go back far enough to put us underwater as simple celled organisms that evolved into the original humans that walked from, not on, the waters planet-wide, aka aboriginal/indigenous, then we all came from the sea, but in different regions on the planet. We all have indigenous roots.
When you think about it, every person living in the USA is from another country – even the so-called natives originally coming from Asia and before that, from muddy, bacteria-laden waters.
I don’t usually refer to Indians as Native, since we’re all natives from some place, usually many places. In conversation, in order to differentiate them from the Indians in India I say ‘American Indians, not the ones from India. That’s a lot to say to describe Indians. Otherwise it’s Indians. I’m a native of a lot of different countries, which one would I choose? If you’re living on this planet, you’re native to the planet and a native to a region on the planet.
Just so you know, some people in some places don’t like that word ‘native’. It really doesn’t connote longevity in a region, only that one was born there.
In the USA if you’re born and bred with legal status you’re an American, no matter your color or ethnicity.
Blacks are the only ones who demanded to be called a color, then they got the Spanish to claim the color brown and join color forces with them. They do it to the European people too, only they keep them separate, someone to exploit. They take your identity away by calling you a color is what’s being said here.
Black isn’t really black, brown isn’t really brown, red isn’t really red, yellow isn’t really yellow, and white isn’t really white. I still have yet to see a red Indian or a yellow Oriental/Asian/.
Now of course since everybody has a color, those who don’t feel left out, so the Indians from India and Pakistanis are calling themselves brown. Some call Arabs brown – maybe it’s from the sun living in the desert. I don’t really know. Most Arabs in Cleveland are very white with very black hair.
Maybe the Arabs should join forces with the Europeans to increase the white numbers, since everybody these days is talking about how to raise theirs.
You do know that white people are not the majority race, right? In fact, they’re in the minority. I don’t know how many indigenous people there are in the world, and maybe the indigenous are the smallest minority.
When traveling outside the USA, people usually don’t refer to themselves as their ethnicity, since American isn’t yet an ethnic classification. People from America meeting foreigners call themselves American. If you’re not legal, nobody knows you’re here, so how could anyone call you American?
With the Blacks it’s a double standard. In America they want to add black to their country to differentiate themselves from all other colors. It’s either Black or African American. They want that American label plus the color label.
In my view, the color coding system stigmatizes people, no matter the color, where as ethnicity doesn’t. There’s nothing negative attached to African; that’s why I use it. I also use the color black to differentiate between white and black African, because black people don’t want to be in the same group as white people. That’s their prejudice and their welcome to it, but don’t turn around and say other races can’t do the same. Then you’re in discriminatory language territory, which connotes supremacy.
So, HELLO to all the Africans in Africa.
No matter your color status or country of origin, each of you is equally important, and each group no matter the number is equally worthy.
HAPPY WHITE HORSE™ 