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.
Depending on who you read or the year in which you read it, a child’s most formative years are 0-8. It used to be through seven, then zero through five. Whichever it is, a few years after birth is when the infant, toddler, child learns the quickest and forms a basic foundation of character.
Formative vs learning.
formative: serving to form something, especially having a profound and lasting influence on a person’s development.
learning: the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught.
Based on what I’ve read, the formative part is the most vague. Character I suppose can be taught or learned by watching how others behave, but it seems that character building is, or at least should be, something that continues to develop until death of the organism.
Learning, the same thing. More rapidly in the beginning, maybe that’s how it looks from the viewer watching the development of the child, but maybe in later years and throughout life, learning happens just as quickly. Compare amount of learning in the first four years of life to four years in college, and the college years would win. So I’m not sure if the learning happens more rapidly in the beginning than it does during other later stages of life.
To look at formative one must define it more precisely. For instance, when does a child develop their defense mechanisms in a psychological sense, instead of being more or less imprinted by outside stimuli without a filter mechanism?
What does age of reason mean? A child reaches the age of reason at seven years old. According to researchers it’s when a child can distinguish right from wrong. What does right and wrong mean? At seven years old suddenly a child’s conscience gets activated? What activates it? Why would it happen suddenly and not progressively? Why wouldn’t the child be using these skills as they develop even when not fully developed?
There are a lot of questions about those early years and how a child develops, but even if the answers are somewhat intuitive rather than more empirical, there seems to be a consensus on a child being adversely affected by early trauma, that becomes more deep-seated or stuns the psyche to a degree that remains lasting even if it is not remembered, which can influence the person’s entire life thereafter.
Yet simultaneously we’ll hear that children shrug off what the adult calls trauma easier than adults do. They bounce back quicker. They’ve yet to learn how to carry grudges. One minute to the next is a new, better or worse experience. Never-the-less it’s a continuous journey of learning by observation and forming views, even when those views are not attached to language.
So here’s my point.
Raise your own kids, especially during the formative years, now called by researchers 0-8 years old.
Many wealthy kids were essentially raised by black African of Spanish speaking Nannies. These usually low-paid employees had full reign over those under their charge. If you have a problem with their views and actions now that they’re adults in important, powerful positions that affect your life, then look to who raised them. Not their parents.
Wealthy parents characteristically distance themselves from their children early in life detaching to make them stand on their own. But children are children. They turn to love their Nannies, but obviously based on the white hatred coming from black Africans 24/7 for long past grievances, it’s becoming clear that those Nannies did not love those children back.
So here we have a bunch of loveless rich kids, raised by Nannies who hated them for their white color and money. How does a child process that? Kids sense when someone doesn’t like them, and while the parents are gone, God only knows how many children were damaged in their formative years by hate-filled caretakers. Children see nuances in behavior better than adults – that’s my non-scientific view.
‘No, no I wasn’t angry with the children; it was the parents I was angry at/.
Anger comes through intentional or not. The child might not understand that you hate their parents, unless you tell them; all they understand is that you’re cool to them. That coolness lingers through life.
I saw a movie once that showed black women working for wealthy families make a chocolate pie out of their own feces flavored to disguise the contents. Then it showed the white woman who was the target of the hate prank eating it, appreciative that someone had made her a pie and seemingly loving every bite, while the black woman filled her with sweet talk to distract her so she’d actually eat it.
I’m assuming it was based on a true story, since black Africa would have objected if it weren’t true, right? Maybe they wouldn’t have objected, but loved the hate so much that it was worth keeping it in the movie even if it made black maids look bad.
Who could trust a black maid after that? That’s a scene that never leaves the consciousness, much less the subconscious or unconscious mind. I suppose the movie industry would claim art imitating life there. Did it really happen though? It could have. But did it? If it didn’t then there’s a hole in the art imitating life position.
I often wondered why white people would entrust their treasure (their children) to people who hated them, or on the other hand to people that black Africa claims white people hate. If you hated the black race would you hire someone from it to raise your child in the formative years? If white people love their children like black people say they do, then why hire someone from a race they hate to nanny their children? I still don’t get it.
If Blacks don’t love their own children, as many black people have said about other black people, then why hire them to take care of yours? It didn’t make any sense, still doesn’t.
Dog sitting isn’t much different. Why hire someone from a group who claims to think and act as one, when you know through watching the movies and living in the neighborhood what some groups think is okay to do to dogs?
The movie industry has long said that movies are art imitating life. Some of it is. But life also imitates art. Just go back to the ‘bobo doll’ experiment – the adult acts aggressively, and in turn the child acts aggressively. It’s basic copycat behavior. See aggression in the movies, and people act more aggressively in their own homes, on the road and later in the community.
To say that this bobo doll experiment was a ground breaking discovery, when copycat behavior was around since humans existed was disingenuous.
For the movie industry to produce movies depicting violence against women as nothing more than what they see at home, actually makes the behavior seem normal to the observer and even justified.
Why not tell the story without punching women in the face or raping them or torturing them or otherwise demeaning them?
Evidently people like to watch it, which some in the field of psychology may describe as cathartic or vicarious pleasure. Maybe the social engineers are responsible, thinking if people watch movies containing violence against women, the violence against women rate will plummet in real life.
Men get out their frustration with women by watching other men on the screen punch, rape or mutilate them. They get a release. How does that effect women? That men are getting a release from watching men abuse women, when a woman is sitting in the same room watching the same movie?
But that’s not what really happens. Watching aggressive behavior heightens a person’s autonomic nervous system, putting them in a fight or flight mode; there is no release until the person fights or flees – or drinks a liter of alcohol and lets the alcohol do the fighting for them.
The bobo doll experiment does not conclude that by watching aggressive behavior it makes one avoid aggressive behavior or that someone achieves a release from seeing a doll get beat up.
Quite the contrary, yet when the movie industry puts forth these arguments with their own studies citing aggression on the screen does not translate to real life or that it has no affect, congress throws its collective hands in the air and settles on symbols denoting violence on movies watched, so the tender-hearted people can avoid them.
Just so congress knows, the tender-hearted people are often the ones in the community who become targets for said violence. ‘Well, toughen them up, make them watch, put violence in every God-damned movie, so nobody cares’.
Why put it in if nobody cares? Somebody cares.
The USA had begun to move away from the particularly gruesome, real to life violent scenes. Then all of a sudden there was this influx of foreign films that made the Mafia films of the past look like high school plays.
What was particularly shocking was the closed full-force fists to women’s faces by men, equal to men punching men. For people who have never seen that, it’s shocking. I suppose the men will argue that if they punch men in the face, they should be able to punch women in the face if women want equal treatment.
And believe it or not, that’s the view of many men in Eastern Europe and Africa. And anywhere that Eastern Europeans and Africans populate outside of their respective countries, those beliefs are present. Asia, same thing. Middle Eastern countries, same thing.
I grew up thinking an equal fight was one on one. Not so with the Africans – with them it’s a pile on. Kick a person when they’re down and the whole crowd does the same. Samoans beat you until they’re satisfied; if you die, then that’s what it took to reach their point of satisfaction.
Nobody needed a study to prove it. It’s copycat behavior, but in the movies there’s just so much of it. Again I think the social planners think it actually reduces violence in the community, but with all the shootings happening, alongside the influx in violence toward women and men in movies offered by Netflix, where people can turn it on 24/7 and get their daily fix, it’s too prevalent to be coincidence.
Add to that the size of the screens and the accompanying music to magnify and heighten the violent experience, and it becomes over kill, over saturation, beyond satisfaction.
One shouldn’t conduct a study on violence using emergency room visits or domestic calls to police as their data to determine accurately the violence level in the home, at the workplace, on the street, and then claim no correlation exists between what happens on the screen and what happens in life. If aggressive behavior can be copied by children, it can be copied by adults, whether in person in real time, or by watching a film.
If a pornographic film can induce sexual behavior, then so can a violent film induce violent behavior.
In the case of violence against women in the home it will do no good to ask if the couple just watched a film with violence in it. It could have been last week, or last month or they could have witnessed a blow up at work. It’s the constant deluge, throughout films, in most films that contain violence that slow triggers the brain into thinking it is acceptable behavior. They become so desensitized to it, that their own violent action becomes almost automatic. She deserves it.
Some will cite that violence in the home and community were around long before movies existed. That’s correct, but not to the same extent of duration, degree, and frequency as it does now with gruesome, abhorrent, perverse acts of depravity on screen, on demand.
One hesitates to even use the word violent any more, since black Africa recently showed the world that burning cities to them was not violent, that punching people in the face with a cinderblock was no more than getting an ass whoppin’.
Violence means different things to different people, races and ethnicities, gender too. ‘If she’s gonna fight like a man, she’s gonna get punched like a man’.
My lingering question is why does anybody need to punch anybody? What does it say about the culture that encourages and applauds it? Why? Especially against women who most of the time are not an equal match in physical prowess. If they were, then men and women would compete in sports and they don’t.
Do the cultures that don’t allow women equal rights status exhibit more violence toward women? I suspect so, but I don’t know.
What I do know is that humans copy behavior, across the board.
Different cultures, ethnicities and races behave differently behind closed doors. The implication here is that they also behave in similar ways both private and public.
If you can copy bad behavior, you can copy good behavior. It’s the way the system is set. Fifty-fifty, you choose and the Universe hopes you choose wisely.
If the bad behavior has greater impact in duration, degree and frequency, then there are negative consequences – ‘not intended’ the movie industry will claim based on their scientific studies on violence in films. Something else, besides the movie triggered that person to do what they did.
That’s one of those science-based lies.
Why is the movie industry so hell-bent on keeping the most gruesome violence in their movies if it doesn’t have any affect? Movies are all about affect.
They say violence in movies imitates what happens in the real world. Yes, but with one major caveat.
No one in the real world actually sees the gruesome act in real time, otherwise every violent crime on earth would be solved – the whole world would have seen it.
Contrary to what the movie industry would have you believe, the familiarity factor is missing, so there’s no buffer or filter with which to emotionally deal with what they see on the screen; it’s raw. And it startles. People have to turn away from it.
Not every person who had a bad start in life due to the people charged with raising them in their formative years becomes narcissistic, but if you’re going to single out one race as being distant and insensitive to your needs as an adult, look to who raised them, then look at who raised you and why you seek reassurance from narcissistic people now that you’re an adult.
Frankly I think white people hire black people and Spanish speaking people to nanny their kids, because they trust them. Unfortunately the world is seeing that trust eroded and rightly so. Faking that you like somebody’s children so you can get a job, no matter the color or ethnicity is always bad for the children. Find a different career focus than the one that includes caring for somebody else’s children in their formative years.
As it turns out, many of those wealthy white people grouped in the top one to ten percent whom the black activists were sticking it to during the year-long riots across America were nannied by black and brown people during their formative years.
Frowns and groans and finger points, accuses, bares teeth, pounds fists thumps chests. You copycatted me. Such is life bro’
Flip it.
If it weren’t for copycats we, the Universe, would not exist.
I’m not talking copyright here. Putting your name on somebody else’s exclusive creation is not copycatting; it’s stealing.
Heck, some organisms are so hot-to-trot that they replicate, duplicate, copy themselves.
For anything/anyone to expand, then a copy-component or predisposition is present, which means it’s present in everything and everyone, because the Universe copies everything. It is in the nature of everything in the Universe to replicate.
Copycat exists in all forms Universal.
Divide to grow or divide and die.
Most unions end in separation.
The ones that stay together learn to live with differences in personalities and style.
Forced separation by outside instigators is a different matter. How both adjust to…
Why Is Russia Required By NATO To Verify Troop Withdrawal At Their Own Border?
Big Mistake.
Stop with the domination tactics. Nobody has to verify anything with you. Russia is not a member of NATO. Who are you, the enemy of everybody not in NATO? Why all this enemy junk?
Wow. You can count the number of troops on the ground in Russia from the USA, half way around the world. Yet you couldn’t locate any of the multitudinous arsonists for a year, setting fires in full view on city street buildings on T.V. during riots you called peaceful.
You didn’t even consider it a National Security threat.
Withdraw your own troops. Thought the deployment was just an exercise.
You lied. It wasn’t.
Stop lying, so they’ll correct you, thus verify. I don’t care if it works. It leaves resentments that fester long after the lie.
Tell truth or say nothing.
Why do you keep announcing blow by blow what Russia is doing all over T.V. ? Trying to justify a war? Nobody cares.
What are you going to do, call back all those Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans to fight yet another war?
Stop acting King dictator of the world.
What’s your name?
Adolph America?
NATO does not control Russia’s pullback. Russia controls Russia.
Stop provoking Russia and treating countries with disrespect.
The Olympics isn’t over. You pulled a fast one during the 2014 Olympics in Russia – Trojan Horse style.
Settle down.
Stop your public humiliation campaign. You’re the cause of all this, wanting military power over Crimea and now Ukraine for your own to exploit for nefarious purposes.
Who says you won’t point your missiles at Russia? You lie too easily.
Right, first it’s a missile defense shield, then you sneak in the missiles.
What’s the missile defense shield going to do in Crimea? Who’s going to be launching missiles at Crimea? Ukraine?
That the USA keeps Israeli nuclear missiles secret, as in a lie, is proof that the intentions of the USA cannot be trusted elsewhere. You took part in that lie, so stop agitating the entire world with your demands.
Learn to get along with people.
Disband NATO. They are global troublemakers, looking to bomb someone, and deploy there over-worked and fatigued military. How many tours of duty do you require?
You send troops too fast. No one is attacking America. You know the history of the Olympics 2014 in Russia. No one can trust you. You don’t care? You should on behalf of the American people, and all the other NATO member states that will send their sons and daughters to a fight that should not exist. Stop meddling in the affairs of other countries.
Other NATO countries don’t pay their share of the expenses/dues, which makes NATO a unilateral organization. One leader, USA, defends all member states that can’t or won’t pay for nothing, for free. Who pays? Why is no one asking? Two percent of their GDP (gross domestic product).
Call for public inspections of Israeli nuclear weapons. They need to be checked. Saying you have them when you don’t is an act of terrorism, an act of aggression toward the world.
Brits. Always, nearly always? No. Always trying to change the behaviors of others.
Change your own. Just do it without making a scientific study out of it and standardizing it to everybody else. It defeats the purpose, makes it look like you want to change everybody else to your liking, so you don’t have to change.
Not all minds think alike, except in general, rudimentary ways – mostly based on emotion and basic needs. Being right all the time is not a basic need. Getting more than anybody else not a basic need either.
Stop using emotionally charged strategies to get what you want. It falls apart in the end, and the end needs your focus now, devoid of emotion. Remember anger is emotion.
Be real – or is that the German mind at work – for a change of pace. The world will notice. Don’t tell them you’re being real. That defeats the purpose too.
Stop trying to cover yours and everybody’s bases. It’s impossible.
Stop stealing the work of others, which means the minds of others, when you fail to think their thoughts. They’re not your thoughts. Think your own thoughts.
Stop assigning duties to everyone. Do your own duties. People will notice. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that why you colonized ninety percent of the planet to get your way noticed?
Under my thumb, your thumbs, what’s up and down depends who’s on the ground.Do your thumbs hurt yet?Switched to the boot, didya?See, you didn’t even know you switched.Don’t mess with other people’s art; you never know where you’ll end up. It’s not yours with which to mess.
Quit while in stand down. False alarm.
Everybody has a right to protect their territory, their neighbors, from USA Big Brother. Ukraine had no right to reach across the ocean to put USA inhabitants in danger, to show off the largest military in Europe. Ukraine I’m talking your language now. Pot of Gold Ukrainians. Take it to your own bank. Leave USA families out of military spectacle, bragging to the world how big you are. Then run like little children to Big Daddy USA to protect you. Get your own Big Daddy.
Big Mommy answering this call. No more USA children’s mothers and fathers die for foreign mishaps orchestrated by child bragging with big military. Feed, clothe, educate, house, doctor and nurse your people before you run to Big Mommy for help. Largest military in Europe isn’t enough to keep you safe from what? Yourselves? Too much competition with Russia isn’t good for the family.
You called for a Big Daddy. That means you’re a child. You’re too old to be adopted, so stop this charade.
Make your own contribution to peaceful co-existence, not everybody else’s contribution in your name. Ante up.
Usually done this way, usually done that way.
Keep your British phobias and perversions to yourselves. That means private parts stay private. Haven’t you done enough damage? Your asses must hurt from sitting on everybody else’s forever fences. Who invented fences? Get to work. No more stalling. Okay. Time up. Lines in sand. The first animal who drew a line in the sand. What happened?
That was cruel to demand a breakup of the Soviet Union and leave all those states, suddenly as if overnight, on their own to sink or swim in the global world as individual countries. There was the USA waiting like starving human animals to feed off the dead carcasses.
If there is a coup anywhere in the world one can bet that the USA and Britain had something to do with the masterminding of it.
How does one do that? Become a country with no handbook of instructions on how to do it?
Many of those states from the Soviet Union, turned into countries practically overnight were not ready, they didn’t know how to do it, and they’re still struggling with it.
You won’t hear that on USA T.V.
The USA and Britain along with other NATO countries helped stage a coup during the 2014 Winter…
World leaders stood motionless, even though they were all briefed on what was about to happen, when the State of Israel committed a massacre against the State of Palestine. ‘Revenge from hell’ Netanyahu called it. ‘A revenge that not even Satan would unleash on the world’ – meaning that Jews are not only better than every human, every other animal, greater than God, but more vicious than ‘even Satan’.
Hey Netanyahu slaves fight back.All slaves do. Even when all they have is a sling shot with which to fight your bombs, tanks, sophisticated equipment, and obsessive humiliation. The humiliation part reminds me of Hitler. ‘Don’t worry I’ll take care of you. I’ll clothe and feed you. And give you work you don’t want to do ‘.
“I decide”, said Hitler. So goes Netanyahu. Nothing will deter him. Nothing.
Bring Back The Word Orientals Make Russia A Continent
Asians that I talked to said they never minded the Oriental designation. After all, they were different than Russians, Turks and Indians/Pakistanis. It was the activists who used it as a strategy to get Orientals attention and bring non-Orientals into their fold by making it look like the Orientals were removing their designation as different and joining forces with the rest of Asia. It could have been construed as a humble gesture. It was a scam.
Orientals are different than Asians from other Asian countries. Ever see them work, or put on a gala event with multitudes of dancers? Sure you have. They are precision and synchrony oriented. Everything they do is done with precision and synchrony. They should keep that name. It is a fine distinction.
Yes, but where do the Russians fit in? Russia spans two continents: Asia and Europe.
In fact, Russia homeland is so large that it should be called a continent. Russia. Not Asia. Not Europe. Russia.
How big is Australia? Who truly occupied that continent? The British. Do you see how they wrangled a continent out of an island, taking it away from the original aborigines? From 1788-1901? It is an independent country and continent. The Brits figured they already had islands, the British Isles. Australia comprises a bunch of smaller islands in its vicinity, so that’s nothing new. But a continent? Theirs (essentially), by their design, still called the Commonwealth of Australia. The British settled it. Six colonies came together to form a commonwealth of countries (sort of, more like states) then called it one country no longer an island, but something better! A continent.
I propose a toast to Orientals, the precision/synchrony-oriented people and to Russia, the continent.
Confidence Building Measures Are Strategies Used To Dominate the Opponent
Confidence measures are schemes.
When somebody announces confidence building measures, what they want is for the target-enemy to give them reassurances of trust and that trust means they have to concede on one of many points, one at a time until the one applying the measures gains total control over the target-enemy. That’s the result. The intention is a lie.
The USA in announcing confidence building measures to Russia is using the same strategy the Jews use on the Palestinians, making them submit to their will, one measure at a time, until the Jews are comfortable that they can get whatever they want from these babies who have a penchant for candy.
The USA however announced the measures to Russia, a giant presence on the world scene, long before the USA was artificially invented by the British via their…
I say, if one lives and works in the USA and is a resident with an address, even if it is a homeless shelter, or they’re living with somebody else, they should be able to vote at the local, state, county and federal level. Put a two year holding time on it, so people won’t jump the border just to vote, then return to their homeland country.
Make it simple.
√ Regarding Citizenship For Non-citizens of the USA
A path is not a solution. Like the stock market it is too fraught with volatility. Solution is easy if one leaves the money factor out. Make everyone legal who resides here seven years, whether they want to be legal or not.
It takes seven years of residing in the USA to reach the age of reason, whereby an informed decision regarding the pros and cons of USA citizenship can be made. Let their country of origin figure out what to do with their citizenship in that country.
Automatic USA citizenship in seven years. Use employment records to validate and/or rental payments or other forms of residency proof. Do not make the process cumbersome with too much detail – multiple forms.
Most people think a democracy means the majority rules. Only in elections though, and how often are those? Where are the issues listed on the ballots? Few and far between – and usually only local or state, like we have fifty different countries – that one can barely understand what they’re voting on, they’re written with such ambiguity.
Okay, it’s not the issues we vote on, it’s the people whom we elect who vote on the issues. What do we know about the people we elect? Not much other than a few bumper sticker phrases and their personalities as they appear in ads; not many of us ever get to one of their town halls, and then it’s about how well they perform, not the questions asked or answered. Same is so when candidates debate each other. How well do they debate? Debates aren’t about saying what’s really on your mind, it’s about outwitting your opponent.
The winner of debates doesn’t gain anything beyond a debate win. Most good debaters are not good problem solvers, they’re all about window dressing. In real life, the debating occurs behind the scenes, where it doesn’t matter; people say what’s on their minds. When meeting figureheads of various countries, everybody is scripted by the same type of ‘behind the scenes’ people; there is nothing of value debated out front.
All leaders sound essentially the same; it’s the party for which you vote that makes all the important decisions; they set the tone and they set the policy. The person under election is a figurehead representing the party, without a mind of their own is the ideal candidate from the viewpoint of party leaders. Malleable, a quick study, can think on their feet for the party, not for you. The party gets their person nominated and it’s the party that puts them in or out of office, by manipulating you the voter.
When an elected official starts veering from the party line, the party leaders get nervous and campaign to get them back in line, using positive and negative strategies. If not possible, then the party starts wargaming for fill-ins, should the elected official go totally rogue, or he met some unfortunate fate, like death.
That’s what happened with Donald Trump; he went roque. In the end he lost the second go around. If he was fixed to lose, his own party was responsible. Get him out before he damages the party beyond repair. If they got him out before the election, it would have spelled disgrace for the party, since the party got him in.
They all fell back on the identical line – I knew he was a democrat at heart; he just switched to get in, well we can get him out and be the heroes of that election. We took down one of our own, even if he was a turncoat.
Look who he went up against, would have been a shoe-in had he played the game by the rules – our rules. Well, he sure got us a hell of a lot of free publicity – 24/7 the republicans were front and center on the news. Yeah, he wasn’t a politician, he was an actor. Nah, he couldn’t lie like us; he was reality T.V. He was more real than the real reality T.V. players turned actors.
Politicians and actors are liars; it’s a matter of how good they are at lying. Smooth steals the day every way. You got that right. Reagan, he was an actor, smooth operator. With Trump it was like watching a wrestling match. He could be wearing a tuxedo and he still looked like he was wrestling. One of a kind. History will treat him better than we all did. Good luck with that. She done with this story yet?
Who gets the ear of the president? congress? mayors? governors?
How much does it cost to rub elbows with the rich and famous? Do poor people really have a voice? Democracies are not unlike monolithic, autocratic and dictatorship governments when dealing with the masses/populace. They are unmovable in respects that control what they want the masses to know and to act on. And Madison Avenue is their best friend.
The poor do not have access, thus they protest or riot in massive numbers to be heard. But agitators from outside the group usually serve as provocatuers based on their own, unknown to you, agendas.
An agent provocateur is a person who commits or who acts to entice another person to commit an illegal or rash act or falsely implicate them in partaking in an illegal act, so as to ruin the reputation or entice legal action against the target or a group they belong to or are perceived to belong to. Wikipedia
The common person in a democracy does not have access to the president or other influential people. Even middle class and upper middle class do not. The rich and very rich do.
A poor person does not have access to the Speaker of the House in Congress. The poor must go through a long, complicated maze of channels. Even to get onto the chess board you need to carry with you the clout of a lot of voters who back you. A very rich person always goes to the front of the line – doors open automatically any time a person of financial stature sees money or a way to save money behind it. And politicians love people with deep pockets.
Money speaks louder than words. Always has in any governing style.
A democracy where the majority rules automatically puts all minority people, groups or ideas at the end of the line around the block, in the back seat, in the last row, not at the table.
One would think that the middle income people who are the actual majority would rule, but the way the system is set up, the minority people at the top, with most of the money, are the ones ruling the planet.
Money supersedes numbers in every democracy. Truth be told, no matter how large the group of middle income people, you could never get them to agree on anything in a timely manner. Middle people don’t have the weight of expendable income that the very wealthy do.
Money talks, walks, dances, slides, jumps, does it all with nary a blink for the rich class. No regrets. Middle people do not know that type of luxury. Pool all your money together, and you still cannot agree on how to allocate it to projects.
So there you have it, the elite ruling class in all democracies is the top richest people and businesses, the ones who hire the most people. Workers have more clout than non-working people, because they contribute something to society that society needs and wants – goods and services.
No matter the governing style of the country/nation/state, the ones who can financially contribute to the success of a project will have more influence in the outcome than anyone else, simply because they paid for it.
If you’re looking for a governing style to support, that does not contain an elite group of rulers, it does not exist. You’d have to create a new style of government without an elite, but you still need money to compete and that money comes from rich people.
The best thing is not to get rid of the rich class, but to put them under greater scrutiny and more supervision when they’re the contributors to a project that they want done their way. That’s where you can get the majority to rule. Open the project to public debate. Let the people whom the project is going to impact have a say, not through activism, through the voting booths. Special voting sessions not party affiliated. Do it on the internet.
Make the democracy more like a true democracy. Why not make it better than it is? More transparency. Stop closing doors and start opening them, not to special people, to the public.
We are tired of seeing actors on television news shows playing our part, when questioned on the street by a person with a microphone, as to their views on the topic of the day. It’s a lie.
Let the public know that they matter. Stop telling them to trust you. That’s a telling sign of corruption. ‘They don’t need to know. It’s too complicated, they wouldn’t understand. It’ll cause a shit storm/. Then hire people to do that job, make it understandable without making it political. Not Madison Avenue. Figure it out. Figure Madison Avenue out of the equation. For profit means conflict of interest.
A new and improved democracy.
DOES THE MAJORITY RULE?
Does The Majority Rule?
Most people think a democracy means the majority rules. Only in elections though, and how often are those? Where are the issues listed on the ballots? Few and far between – and usually only local or state, like we have fifty different countries – that one can barely understand what they’re voting on, they’re written with such ambiguity.
Okay, it’s not the issues we vote on, it’s the people whom we elect who vote on the issues. What do we know about the people we elect? Not much other than a few bumper sticker phrases and their personalities as they appear in ads; not many of us ever get to one of their town halls, and then it’s about how well they perform, not the questions asked or answered. Same is so when candidates debate each other. How well do they debate? Debates aren’t about saying what’s really on your mind, it’s about outwitting your opponent.
The winner of debates doesn’t gain anything beyond a debate win. Most good debaters are not good problem solvers, they’re all about window dressing. In real life, the debating occurs behind the scenes, where it doesn’t matter; people say what’s on their minds. When meeting figureheads of various countries, everybody is scripted by the same type of ‘behind the scenes’ people; there is nothing of value debated out front.
All leaders sound essentially the same; it’s the party for which you vote that makes all the important decisions; they set the tone and they set the policy. The person under election is a figurehead representing the party, without a mind of their own is the ideal candidate from the viewpoint of party leaders. Malleable, a quick study, can think on their feet for the party, not for you. The party gets their person nominated and it’s the party that puts them in or out of office, by manipulating you the voter.
When an elected official starts veering from the party line, the party leaders get nervous and campaign to get them back in line, using positive and negative strategies. If not possible, then the party starts wargaming for fill-ins, should the elected official go totally rogue, or he met some unfortunate fate, like death.
That’s what happened with Donald Trump; he went roque. In the end he lost the second go around. If he was fixed to lose, his own party was responsible. Get him out before he damages the party beyond repair. If they got him out before the election, it would have spelled disgrace for the party, since the party got him in.
They all fell back on the identical line – I knew he was a democrat at heart; he just switched to get in, well we can get him out and be the heroes of that election. We took down one of our own, even if he was a turncoat.
Look who he went up against, would have been a shoe-in had he played the game by the rules – our rules. Well, he sure got us a hell of a lot of free publicity – 24/7 the republicans were front and center on the news. Yeah, he wasn’t a politician, he was an actor. Nah, he couldn’t lie like us; he was reality T.V. He was more real than the real reality T.V. players turned actors.
Politicians and actors are liars; it’s a matter of how good they are at lying. Smooth steals the day every way. You got that right. Reagan, he was an actor, smooth operator. With Trump it was like watching a wrestling match. He could be wearing a tuxedo and he still looked like he was wrestling. One of a kind. History will treat him better than we all did. Good luck with that. She done with this story yet?
Existing on hand-outs is not freedom. It is bondage. It appears that some people prefer bondage to freedom. They want to be taken care of and go to great lengths to achieve and maintain that status.
Bondage or freedom? Dependent or independent?
Who sets up that system? Employers pay low wages, that make the employee independent on one hand, then on the other hand, due to the low wages, the employee must become dependent on the government to level the income field, by giving free food and services, which results in being looked down upon by the general population who gets higher wages, enabling them to remain independent of the government handouts.
Everybody likes getting something for free. However, when some people live off of goods and services that are more free than not free, society as a whole sees them as a drag with the potential to drag the whole group down with them.
That’s when you lose your rights. When you sign up for assistance programs you are treated with less respect than those who don’t. Those who service you, act like the police, like they own your life and you do what they tell you do do, the way and when they tell you to do it or don’t bother applying for assistance.
Everybody understands that the system needs to be standardized, but many times the way it is applied is with distain for the applicant.
Do you really want to be in prison is what they’re trying to tell you. They want you to feel uncomfortable, thinking that discomfort will motivate you to make more money doing something else, but the government allows companies to pay below subsistence wages, which put all, unskilled they call them, workers at a financial disadvantage.
Ease up. Anybody could be in that situation.
President Biden is too old school. He waits too long to get anything done, always putting decision-making off, until it’s war time, and he’s hot to trot all over the globe acting like the great negotiator with his armies in tow.
Get out of the old school. We don’t want to hear what you’re going to do in a year. We want you to do it now. What are you waiting for, problems to resolve themselves? Do you want riots from the Spanish speaking people next? Raise wages. Small businesses will have to hire fewer people. So what. They’re already doing that and saving a windfall on payroll due to the pandemic.
People don’t want to be on food stamps and electric bill vouchers and rent vouchers, they want to pay their own way, so let them.
It seems like you want to perpetuate a slave-wage economy with handouts.
Keep your handouts, we want wages, not handouts. Grubby, stinky food. You know don’t you that whenever the government gives a grant for poor people, the organizers take most of it and give the actual poor people crumbs.
We want wages, not crumbs. We’re not birds, so stop feeding us like birds. The middle people always take the most of it anyway – the distributors of the handouts, the organizations that tell you they’ll handle it. Yes, right into their own pockets.
Fifteen dollars across the board, unless you’re in the tipping business, or get rid of tipping. Selecting certain groups to get different minimum wage benefits is discrimination.
You’re not going to get your work force back unless you do. Now. I know you’re waiting until the pandemic is over. Who forecasted that?
One you cannot understand, due to your violent, punishing, humiliating ways of communication.
When you scream too loud, nobody hears what you say. It sounds like someone trying to kill somebody and you want them to stop. Upon examination, the screams of murder are based on optical lies. Like the slaughter industries, hiding what they do with multiple distracting devices, strategies and happy cow going to slaughter images. Only you’re not the cow; you’re the slaughterer taking away from the cows their rights to survive and thrive.
You mixed up all your messages.
When the entire world took a knee on your behalf, to stop and listen, you had nothing to say. Something about hair rights and legacies, and letting criminals be criminals. You wanted money; you weren’t being murdered at all.
Now when somebody hears a cow scream, they think it’s you asking for privileges without earning them. The universe dismisses it as fraud. A forever lottery payout, based on a forever fictitious legacy.
You hurt the cows going to slaughter – and every other animal on the planet about to be murdered right now. You took their scream away.
Do not pattern yourselves, your behavior, your strategies after the slaughter industries. They lost the minute they picked up the axe or built slaughter rooms with thick walls to blunt the slaughter sounds.
You’re not being slaughtered, but the noise you make tells a different story based on optical lies. No animal likes being tricked into doing something.
Don’t you get it? You think this is a contradiction? Well, that’s how you came across, when you screamed like you were going to slaughter, but were not.
Stop engaging police officers with your scams and cons. It is not their job to conduct street business with you.
The universe thought you were the cows going to slaughter, being slaughtered. The voiceless. Have to laugh on that one. Yours are the only voices the world ever hears. Time to raise your more civilized voices on behalf of others besides yourselves for a change of pace and venue.
Drop the sword, lower the fist, open that hand to pick up a seed and plant it in your soul where your heart used to be.
Your soul, not the soul of another animal – human or non-human.
Stop trying to own everybody’s soul. It cannot be done. You lose again and again with each attempt.
Your soul defines you as an individual. Their souls define them.
Groups do not have souls. There is no such thing as a group soul, or a pack of souls, or an army of souls.
Souls exist for the individual, your ticket in and out of wherever you choose to go, or whatever you choose to do, minute by minute.
Stop wanting magic to control your lives, so you don’t have to expend the effort like everybody else.
Your soul follows you, in you, not outside of you.
Your soul does not walk before you; it walks with you, more like a second set of eyes and ears.
Talk to it; it knows your language and anybody else’s language you come in contact with – near and far.
Souls are not miracle makers; they’re miracle drivers.
You need a strategy adjustment, and then to undo the harm you did to the animals going to slaughter, by that God-awful scream when you were perfectly fine.
When you scream too loud nobody hears you.
The residual? Repulsion.
Those you tried to trick are now repulsed by any images or sounds of you. And right now Madison Avenue is sticking your faces all over the globe to be repulsed by anyone who views them, including you. You got had. Do you see how crafty their strategies? Madison Avenue does not do anything for anyone for free.
The next time you have an uncontrollable urge to burn somebody’s business to the ground, pick up that seed you keep dropping. Plant it in your soul. Ah. So easy it hurts.
On Tuesday, February 1, London-based international human rights group Amnesty International (AI) released an extraordinary report, which labels Israel an ‘apartheid state’. The report calls for Israel to be held accountable for its practices against Palestinians.
The 280-page document, entitled ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’, outlines how the Israeli state segregates and controls Palestinians in order to maintain Jewish hegemony.
Though to be fully appreciated, the AI document must be read in its entirety, below are the top ten points raised by the international human rights group.
1. What is Apartheid?
After defining “apartheid” as “a violation of public international law, a grave violation of internationally protected human rights and a crime against humanity under international criminal law”, Amnesty, in its report, describes Israel’s “intent to oppress and dominate Palestinians:
“Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.”
2. Geographic Scope
According to Amnesty, the system of segregation “extended beyond the (so-called) Green Line to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which (Israel) has occupied” in 1967.
“Today, all territories controlled by Israel continue to be administered with the purpose of benefiting Jewish Israelis to the detriment of Palestinians, while Palestinian refugees continue to be excluded.”
“Although Israel’s system of apartheid manifests itself in different ways in the various areas under its effective control,” the report reads, “it consistently has the same purpose of oppressing and dominating Palestinians for the benefit of Jewish Israelis, who are privileged under Israeli civil law regardless of where they reside.”
3. Treatment of Palestinians
Israel should be labeled an apartheid state because “Palestinians are treated by the Israeli state differently based on its consideration of them as having a racialized non-Jewish, Arab status”.
Starting in 1948, Israel pursued a policy of territorial fragmentation and legal segregation, Amnesty said in its report.
“(Israel) chose to coerce Palestinians into enclaves within the State of Israel and, following their military occupation in 1967, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They have appropriated the vast majority of Palestinians’ land and natural resources. They have introduced laws, policies and practices that systematically and cruelly discriminate against Palestinians, leaving them fragmented geographically and politically, in a constant state of fear and insecurity, and often impoverished.”
“Meanwhile, Israel’s leaders have opted to systemically privilege Jewish citizens in law and in practice through the distribution of land and resources, resulting in their relative wealth and well-being at the expense of Palestinians. They have steadily expanded Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law,” the report adds.
5. Legal Segregation
Amnesty describes the way “Israel has used military rule as a key tool to establish its system of oppression and domination over Palestinians across both sides of the Green Line, applying it over different groups of Palestinians in Israel and the OPT almost continuously since 1948”.
“Israel maintains its system of fragmentation and segregation through different legal regimes that ensure the denial of nationality and status to Palestinians, violate their right to family unification and return to their country and their homes, and severely restrict freedom of movement based on legal status.”
6. Restrictions of Movement and Apartheid Wall
Amnesty denounces the closure system imposed on Palestinians within the Occupied Territories and between the OPT and Israel, “gradually subjecting millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip to ever more stringent restrictions on movement based on their legal status. These restrictions are another tool through which Israel segregates Palestinians into separate enclaves, isolates them from each other and the world, and ultimately enforces its domination.”
Moreover, the report highlights how “the 700km fence/wall, which Israel continues building mostly illegally on Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank, has isolated 38 Palestinian localities in the West Bank (…) and has trapped them in enclaves known as ‘seam zones’”.
7. Political Rights
According to Amnesty, “Israel’s version of democracy overwhelmingly privileges political participation by Jewish Israelis.”
“Limitations on the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to participate in elections are accompanied by other infringements of their civil and political rights that limit the extent to which they can participate in the political and social life of Israel. This has included racialized policing of protests, mass arbitrary arrests and the use of unlawful force against protesters during demonstrations against Israeli repression in both Israel and the OPT.”
8. Dispossession of Palestinian Land
Amnesty illustrates how, since its creation on the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages, “the Israeli state has enforced massive and cruel land seizures to dispossess and exclude Palestinians from their land and homes.”
Suffice it to say, “in 1948, Jewish individuals and institutions owned around 6.5% of Mandate Palestine, while Palestinians owned about 90% of the privately owned land there. Within just over 70 years the situation has been reversed.”
Amnesty also mentions Israeli laws and regulations currently implemented by Israeli authorities to carry out demolitions of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem, including the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 and the Administrative Matters Law.
“In Israel and East Jerusalem, (the Israeli government) transferred from the state to Jewish national organizations and institutions, many of which serve Jews only, while the legal title of the land remained in the state’s name.”
9. Crimes against Humanity
Amnesty’s report analyzes three major categories of crimes against humanity, that’s to say, the “inhuman and inhumane acts as proscribed, respectively, by the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute”.
First, it condemns the forcible transfer of Palestinians, explaining that, “since 1948, Israel has demolished tens of thousands of Palestinian homes and other properties across all areas under its jurisdiction and effective control.”
Second, the report addresses the issues of administrative detention, torture and other ill-treatment.
“Israel’s systematic use (of the administrative detention) against Palestinians indicates that it is used to persecute Palestinians, rather than as an extraordinary and selective security measure.”
The report also illustrates how “Israeli courts have admitted evidence obtained through torture of Palestinians, accepting the justification of ‘necessity’. Prompt, thorough and impartial investigations by Israeli authorities into allegations by Palestinians that they have been tortured are extremely rare, effectively giving state endorsement to the crime of torture.”
Third, Amnesty strongly condemns Israel’s unlawful killings and injuries, which were “perpetrated outside the context of armed conflict during Israeli law enforcement activities in the OPT, including during the suppression of protests, arrest raids, when enforcing travel and movement restrictions, and conducting house and search operations.”
10. Recommendations
Amnesty states in its report that “dismantling this cruel system of apartheid is essential for the millions of Palestinians who continue to live in Israel and the OPT, as well as for the return of Palestinian refugees who remain displaced in neighbouring countries”.
Also, it urges the need for “the international community to urgently and drastically change its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and recognize the full extent of the crimes that Israel perpetrates against the Palestinian people.”
Amnesty directly calls on “the USA, the European Union and its member states and the UK” to “recognize that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid and other international crimes, and use all political and diplomatic tools to ensure Israeli authorities implement the recommendations outlined in this report and review any cooperation and activities with Israel to ensure that these do not contribute to maintaining the system of apartheid”.
Finally, Amnesty calls on the International Criminal Court (ICC) “to consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation,” and on the United Nations Security Council to “impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid, and a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel.”
GAZA, PALESTINE – 2014/09/19: A Palestinian child sits above the ruins of his ruined home, and looks at thousands of homes destroyed because of the war on Gaza.
– Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.
Like in cowboys and Indians? Nobody does that any more. It was gone with the wind.
If settlements are now outlawed in the USA, then the USA cannot in good faith support them elsewhere in the world.
Well, I guess we do. We also claim not to torture, so we send people to be tortured to countries that sanction it. Black sites. aptly named. concentration camps for those we regard as a threat to our existence.
Oh, you mean they are not outlawed? Why has no one discussed that? Yes or no. Oh, the Jews have the last say in what’s published about them in the USA? Other countries too? They edit other people’s work? Oh, you mean their people write about their people, so it is not unbiased news. It is biased, thus prejudicial and if the written word…
Should Scientists Super-Charge Viruses To Make Them More Contagious?
Re:Scientists Tweak Lab Viruses To Make Them More Contagious.
Some “gain of function” studies explore how a dangerous pathogen might cross species barriers to start an outbreak. They are not without controversy
By Emily Willingham on June 14, 2021
“If a virus has already moved from an animal host to humans, gain-of-function research may be unnecessary, Imperiale says. “In these cases, there may be animal models that serve as useful surrogates for humans” in testing the virus’s effects, he says.”
Sharon Lee Davies-Tight
HWH Commentary by Sharon Lee Davies-Tight:
√ Scientists are already fully aware that there are non-human animals, that can be used as surrogates for humans in testing the virus’s effects. What that ultimately means is that if those surrogates can be infected with the virus in the lab, then they can be infected with the virus through transmission in nature.
√ Name those non-human animals that could be surrogates for humans during the testing process.
“In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors of the editorial wrote, the source of a pathogen—whether from nature or a lab—does not change how the world should prepare to respond to it. But gain-of-function experiments should be governed by transparency in planning the research, a “rededication” to biosafety and a strong surveillance program to capture breaches.”
Now, if they do indeed super-charge viruses, then there’s a reason. Human population testing purposes. They need to disseminate these super-charged viruses into the environment to see if they work. How fast can we get through this pandemic? This is a horror show in the making. If they didn’t use humans, then how did humans initially contract the virus?
If they used non-human animal surrogates, then what non-human animals were they? Name them. Rats? Pigs? Mice? Monkey’s? Cats? Cows? Which animals do they sell at Wuhan markets?
It looks like they wanted to manipulate ‘herd or community’ immunity.
How many people died as a result of that manipulation?
Attempted murder is what it looks like, turned to murder is the result.
How many non-human animals were affected by the super-charged virus?
Nobody seems interested in what scientists do to negatively impact the lives of all humans and all other animals for the advancement of science. They all say they have the best of intentions, but we all know that’s impossible when using live subjects. Enslavement, torture and slaughter is what it is.
Try to walk through that well-intentioned dance to all the families of all the dead during WWII who were tortured in live experiments in the so-called name of and the so-called sake of science, that somebody went to far for too long.
They claim overworked technicians or short staffing, or people rushing to get someplace. The ‘ors’ can go on and on and none of them can be blocked from occurring again, when it’s human error, human recklessness.
I worked in a lab once and truth be told, nobody followed safety protocols; they were too cumbersome. Management didn’t either. Worldwide I believe there is a huge problem in laboratories, across the board, with personnel adhering to safety protocols. They must be adhered to absolutely all the time. No exceptions. Laboratories need to be treated like hospital operating rooms. There is no room for error. It seems that safety is the least of their concerns, when it should be always number one concern, and not only concern, but actionable concern. You do it; you don’t just think you should do it.
It looks like these labs were altering viruses to make them super-contagious, which means they became biological weapons and people then got careless? With biological weapons?
√ So, the answer is NO. Even if it helped a few, the answer is still no. Humans can’t be trusted. It’s in their nature to deceive.
These labs absent the animals would not exist. Take the animal out and find another way. When you do, then one mistake with any microorganism results in the lab being shut down for three years.
The implication is that they’ve already done it and those super-charged ultra-infectious microorganisms are out there in the wild.
So are We supposed to assume that scientists intentionally passed the coronaCOVID virus aka SARS-CoV-2 to the human population and it wasn’t the bats and rats that transferred it by mistake to humans, somewhere in China? Wet markets, kill and sell markets, that’s where it was said to originate. The news. It was on the news. Wuhan, China, a few miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; somebody even said it was owned by Pfizer, the COVID vaccine people. Later denied, but they didn’t deny a relationship, only ownership.
So Pfizer or the Institute put the virus onto wet meat surfaces, then a few miles down the road had a local sell the meat to Wuhan markets, then the virus infected from there the world, then Pfizer developed a vaccine to prevent serious illness when contracting the virus and to significantly lower the virus’s spreading capability?
What’s the relationship between Pfizer and Israel?
The intent was a massive global exposure. They knew; they just couldn’t prove that they knew unless they had the data to back it up.
How about this Omicron virus, a mutation of SARS-C-oV-2, that is super-contagious, sounds like a product of ‘gain-of-function’ (increased capabilities of a virus)
“The high-risk practices are those that create mutations to examine whether a pathogen becomes more contagious or lethal as a means of estimating future threats.“
What that means is all those mutations of SARS-CoV-2 are the result of laboratory manipulation? They create a mutation to see if it becomes more contagious? And then what? It estimates future threats? What good did all that manipulation research do, the world still was caught unaware, unprepared. What’s the point? How can the USA Congress, who know nothing of science or threats or human behavior, much less viral behavior be passing laws to allow mistakes or malfeasance by politicians or scientists or institutes or governments or a lab worker with a grudge to occur?
Like maggots seemingly bloom out of nowhere, in wet garbage in the summer, eggs of flies laid on moist surfaces, simultaneously transform into worms before becoming a fly, like butterflies.
Do wet markets sell bats? Out the back door to unsuspecting locals? Ferrets?
Why did China build Wuhan Institute of Virology near wet markets in Wuhan? Or did the wet markets come later?
“It’s a suspicion that the coronavirus may have escaped, accidentally or otherwise, from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where the virus was first recorded.
Its supporters point to the presence of a major biological research facility in the city. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been studying coronaviruses in bats for over a decade.
The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged in Wuhan.”
“As for SARS-CoV-2, the virus of most urgent interest right now, the NIH released a statement on May 19 that neither the agency nor its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has “ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.””
√ Look, Just because the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases claim not to have approved research on viruses that would increase transmissibility or lethality, doesn’t mean it was not done. Everybody was given lots of time to cover their tracks.
√ The truth is there; it exists. Governments and scientists are covering it up for a reason. I don’t think this is a case of the cover-up being worse than the crime.
√ Get the United Nations involved. Terrorism is on the loose.
√ Shut down that Wuhan Institute of Virology and all wet markets in all countries DOWN NOW not next month. That means New York City too. San Franciso on the map; any wet markets in Seattle? Too bad, they should have found other employment; they all knew better, all those mongers knew. Better work fast. Why did the world give China so much time to cover their sins? What did China give for it – the time to sanitize? They didn’t sanitize enough. That institute murders people and other animals. I don’t care how prestigious it is. Shut it.
You sat on this long enough and nothing was done. What are you afraid of? The Science Mob?
ARTICLE: needs to be read – the underlying reckless regard for life and casual tone should sound the alarm in every scientific community, institution of higher learning, and in every household in the world.
Why Scientists Tweak Lab Viruses to Make Them More Contagious
Some “gain of function” studies explore how a dangerous pathogen might cross species barriers to start an outbreak. They are not without controversy
By Emily Willingham on June 14, 2021
Security suits for a biosafety training lab at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. Credit: Preston Gannaway Getty Images
The microbiology toolbox includes techniques to induce mutations in viruses that give the microbes new powers. Scientists perform these manipulations for many reasons, including wanting to understand how the microbes evade detection by our immune systems. But adding capability to a pathogen carries obvious risks, especially if this “gain of function” involves enhanced virulence or infectiousness. Escape from a lab, by accident or design, is a possibility. So why do it? Some researchers argue the work can offer a peek at what a virus can do before it goes into the natural world and poses a threat to people.
Controversy over gain-of-function research has generated academic papers, conferences and even a moratorium in 2014, when the U.S. government paused funding for three years until steps could be taken to ensure the safety of the procedure. Debate about gain-of-function experiments continues in the latter phases of the pandemic as thoughts turn to the “next one” or a possible second act for COVID-19. Science policy makers must wrestle with defining the rare instances in which the benefits of experiments that enhance a virus’s capacity to survive and flourish in human hosts outweigh any risks.
Densely technical discussions often bog down over the very definition of gain of function. Recently, semantics were front and center in the debate over whether National Institutes of Health–funded work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China constituted gain-of-function research, a contention denied by the U.S. agency. The WIV has also been the focus of a revived dispute over whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from its facility.
Here are a few basic answers to questions about why an obscure technical term now receives so much attention.
What is gain of function research?
Techniques to enhance some aspect of an organism’s functioning are commonplace in research and applied to everything from mice to measles. One typical application of this approach is tweaking mouse genes to generate more of a protein that limits fat deposition.
But that is not the kind of gain-of-function study that raises fears among scientists and regulators. The high-risk practices are those that create mutations to examine whether a pathogen becomes more contagious or lethal as a means of estimating future threats.
Some experts acknowledge the critical differences between the two types of studies. One proposed term to represent the more threatening subset of this research is “potential pandemic pathogens,” says Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. That phrase “singles out the name and reason for being concerned,” he adds. It has not caught on in common usage, however, returning only about 8,500 results in a Google search, compared with 13.4 million for “gain of function.”
Making this distinction is important for a few reasons, Lipsitch says. When the U.S. government placed the 2014 moratorium on “gain of function research,” some of the studies that were affected carried no obvious risk of setting off a pandemic.
What is the purpose of this research?
Knowing what makes a microbe more dangerous enables preparation of countermeasures, says Lipsitch, who is one of 18 signatories to a May 14 letter, published in Science, that calls for the investigation of a SARS-CoV-2 lab spillover as one of several possible explanations for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. He points to the difficulties of studying viruses for the development of vaccines and treatments without doing experiments in a mouse or in other nonhuman animals. There is, Lipsitch says, a “direct path from doing that research to gaining public health benefits,” enabling a balancing of risks and potential benefits.
The riskier version of gain-of-function research creates viruses with abilities they do not have in nature. In two separate studies in 2011, scientists famously and controversially did just that with the H5N1 influenza virus, or “bird flu,” resulting in a version capable of airborne transmission among ferrets. The naturally occurring virus does not have this ability. Making mammal-to-mammal transmission easier set off alarm bells and triggered discussion of a U.S. moratorium.
In 2015 researchers engineered a hybrid pathogen that combined features of the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV) that infected humans in the early 2000s with that of a bat coronavirus. Most bat coronaviruses cannot infect the cells lining the human respiratory tract. This experiment was intended to mimic what would happen if a third speciesserved as a mixing vat for the bat and human viruses to exchange genetic material. The result was a pathogen that could enter human cells and also cause disease in mice. Reactions to this work were polarized, as demonstrated by experts quoted in a 2015 article in Nature: one said that all the research did was create a “new, non-natural risk” among the multitude that already exist, while another contended that it showed the potential for this bat virus to become a “clear and present danger.”
Experts in the latter camp argue that gain-of-function virus studies can presage what will eventually happen in nature. Speeding things up in the lab gives researchers firsthand evidence about how a virus might evolve. Such insights could drive predictions about future viral behaviors in order to stay a step ahead of these pathogens.
That calculation must be made on a case-by-case basis, Lipsitch says. “There is not one-answer-fits-all,” he adds. But the key question to address in this complex computation is “Is this work so valuable for public health that it outshines the risk to public health in doing it?”
Lipsitch was “very outspoken,” as he puts it, about the influenza-ferret study, and he led the effort for the 2014 moratorium on similar gain-of-function work.“I did that because I thought that we need to have a real accounting of the benefits and risks,” he says. “I had a view that the benefits were very small, and I still have that view.”
The moratorium was lifted in 2017. A U.S. government review panel later approved a resumption of funding for more lab studies involving gain-of-function modifications of bird flu viruses in ferrets. Conditions of the approvals, according to reports, included enhanced safety measures and reporting requirements.
As for SARS-CoV-2, the virus of most urgent interest right now, the NIH released a statement on May 19 that neither the agency nor its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has “ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
What are the risks?
Predictions based on gain-of-function studies may be hypothetical, but lab breaches in the U.S. are not. Serious violations are uncommon and have almost never resulted in a pathogen being released into the community. But 2014 showed why human error may prove to be the biggest wild card in planning these experiments.
Several lab accidents that year endangered researchers and set off waves of uneasiness. These incidents were not gain-of-function mishaps, but they demonstrated the potential threats posed by a biosafety lab—whether from negligence or malfeasance. In 2014 about 75 Atlanta-based employees at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learned about their potential exposure to anthrax after safety practices were ignored. Also, several long-forgotten vials of freeze-dried smallpox—a pathogen long thought to be stored in only two places, one in Russia and one in the U.S.—turned up during a cold-storage cleanup at the NIH that year. And the CDC made news again a month later, after it sent out vials of a relatively benign influenza virus contaminated with the much more deadly H5N1 avian flu virus. The possible reason, as reported in Science, was that a researcher was “overworked and rushing to make a lab meeting.”
Michael Imperiale, a professor of microbiology and immunology and associate vice president for research and compliance at the University of Michigan, co-authored a 2020 editorial about gain-of-function studies that said that the key to planning them is to have proper mechanisms to ward off the threats of accidental or intentional harm. “If proper biosafety procedures are in place and proper containment is used, the risks can be mitigated substantially,” he says. Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs have the highest containment precautions in place, and the U.S. currently has 13 or more such facilities planned or in operation.Research on the novel coronavirus is handled in labs one notch down: BSL-3.
In their editorial, Imperiale and his co-author Arturo Casadevall, editor in chief of mBIO, wrote that even predicting the threat level of an accidental release is difficult. After publication of the studies of ferret-to-ferret transmission of engineered H5N1, two groups tried to predict what would have happened if this virus had escaped into the human population. One team, Imperiale and Casadevall wrote, predicted an “extremely high level” of transmission. The other, from one of the labs involved in the ferret-influenza work, concluded otherwise.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors of the editorial wrote, the source of a pathogen—whether from nature or a lab—does not change how the world should prepare to respond to it. But gain-of-function experiments should be governed by transparency in planning the research, a “rededication” to biosafety and a strong surveillance program to capture breaches.
What alternative techniques are available to test a potential viral threat?
If a virus has already moved from an animal host to humans, gain-of-function research may be unnecessary, Imperiale says. “In these cases, there may be animal models that serve as useful surrogates for humans” in testing the virus’s effects, he says.
Researchers can also test the capacity of virus proteins to engage with different kinds of cells. Software can predict how these proteins might interact with various cell types or how their genetic sequences could be associated with specific virus features. Also, if the researchers use cells in a lab dish, the viruses might be designed not to replicate.
Another option is loss-of-function research. Using versions of a virus with less pathogenic potential is another way to unlock that microbe’s secrets. Still, highly pathogenic forms can be quite different from their less threatening counterparts—for example, they may differ in how often they replicate—possibly limiting the usefulness of such studies.
Commentary by Sharon 1.18-21.2022: I’m in support of the vaccine, however, if experts claim that domestic animals can be infected, but they can’t pass it on, then why kill all those hamsters and minks and other small animals who tested positive? If the dogs and cats can’t give it to humans, can they give it to each other? What makes a pet different than a rat in whether they become contagious and to whom they become contagious? Are hamsters, minks, rats domesticated?
HWH Commentary: Scientists worldwide (according to news stories) keep saying that transmission between humans and non-human animals or vice versa is not possible, yet they trace the original transmission to bats. Bats are non-human animals.
Now they say that domestic animals cannot pass the virus onto humans, but they’re vaccinating domestic animals. Against whom? Who are they vaccinating them against? When humans get vaccinated it is most people’s understanding that the purpose is to keep the virus from spreading to other people.
“A recent coronavirus cluster in humans traced to a pet shop worker prompted checks on hundreds of animals in the Chinese-ruled territory, with 11 hamsters found infected, officials said.”
At first glance one could say that either the the hamsters passed the virus onto the workers, or the workers passed the virus onto the hamsters. That human and non-human in the same location contracted the virus would lead anyone to conclude that the two were connected.
That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. It could be that the workers who contracted the disease did so from other workers or from friends and family outside of work. The hamsters could have just happened to have the same virus and been infected before they arrived at the pet shop.
Or one of the hamsters could have been exposed to the virus before arriving and later infected the other hamsters at the shop.
Denmark culled millions of minks in 2020 to curb COVID mutations.
It may have been a wiser choice to stop farming minks for fur. That being said, how did all these minks contract the virus? The virus had to jump at some point from another animal or another source. An animal doesn’t just start blooming the virus on it’s own. The original animal had to pick it up someplace. In the soil, the water, the food, something humans were disposing of, or some conditions that attracted the virus that made it airborne and isolated and warm and moist enough to keep the virus alive.
The only way the world is going to get a handle on this virus is to dismantle all factory farming operations globally.
Stop eating animals, experimenting on animals, wearing animals.
It may be that where massive numbers of animals are congregated, in very close proximity, conditions are presented and made available under which viruses can be created. A virus. Depending on conditions, any virus. Maybe that’s why there are so many different mutations. Maybe it doesn’t have to be transmitted originally. Maybe it didn’t have to jump inter-and/or intra-species.
The conditions themselves are the original host. The animals infected by the conditions, then become the secondary host. And then it spreads.
The reason it appears that the virus doesn’t jump from one type animal to another is that animals are housed according to type. No one mingles cows with pigs and chickens in the same factory farms. Nor minks with foxes on the same farm. Or goats with lambs.
Herds are separated by animal type. It’s the herd in closed unsanitary environments that create the conditions for a virus to emerge, take hold and spread.
Inside or outside. Could happen in both environments.
Original Article:
January 18, 20229:11 AM EST Last Updated an hour ago China
Hong Kong to cull 2,000 hamsters after COVID-19 outbreak
Hamsters to be put down after positive coronavirus tests
Hong Kong tests hundreds of rodents, chinchillas and rabbits
Territory follows China’s strict COVID-19 regime
Infected hamsters came from Netherlands – TV
Russia and Denmark also took action over animals in pandemic
HONG KONG, Jan 18 (Reuters) – Hong Kong warned people not to kiss pets and ordered a mass cull of hamsters on Tuesday, to the outrage of animal-lovers, after 11 of the rodents tested positive for COVID-19.
A recent coronavirus cluster in humans traced to a pet shop worker prompted checks on hundreds of animals in the Chinese-ruled territory, with 11 hamsters found infected, officials said.
Echoing the mainland’s zero-tolerance policy even as much of the world shifts to living with COVID, Hong Kong ordered 2,000 hamsters “humanely” put down, and imports and sales stopped.Report ad
Various pet shops were shuttered and disinfected around the city, while men in protective gear scoured the store at the heart of the cluster in the bustling Causeway Bay district.
The local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which runs veterinary clinics, urged a rethink.
“The SPCA is shocked and concerned over the recent government announcement on the handling of over 2,000 small animals, which did not take animal welfare and the human-animal bond into consideration,” it said.Report ad
Health Secretary Sophia Chan told a news conference authorities were acting out of caution even though there was no evidence domestic animals can infect humans.
“Pet owners should keep a good hygiene practice, including washing hands after touching the animals, handling their food or other items, and avoid kissing the animals,” Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department director Leung Siu-fai Leung also told reporters.Report ad
Hong Kong has also been testing rabbits and chinchillas but only the hamsters were positive. They were all imported from the Netherlands, according to local broadcaster RTHK.
Around the world, there have been coronavirus cases in dogs and cats too, though scientists say there is no evidence animals play a major role in human contagion.
HAMSTER HOTLINE
Leung said the Hong Kong hamsters had to be put down as it was impossible to quarantine and observe each one. Buyers of hamsters after Dec. 22, 2021 should hand them to authorities for culling and not leave them on streets, he added.
A hotline for enquiries was being set up, while some 150 of the pet shop’s customers were going into quarantine, officials said.
Last September, three pet cats that tested positive for coronavirus were put down in the Chinese city of Harbin, bringing a social media backlash. read more
Elsewhere, Denmark culled millions of mink in 2020 to curb COVID-19 mutations. And some Russian regions have inoculated animals against COVID-19 after Moscow said it had registered the world’s first vaccine for animals following tests with dogs, cats, foxes and mink. read more
Nikolaus Osterrieder, dean of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong, said human-to-animal-to-human transmission chains are rare but do happen as with mink cases.
“It is obviously a drastic measure but one that is a consequence of zero Covid (rules),” he said of Hong Kong’s moves. “Hamsters are very susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and can produce large amounts of virus.”
Global welfare group World Animal Protection said the measures were premature. “Culling animals should always be a last resort and we encourage governments to explore other options, such as quarantine, first,” said research head Jan Schmidt-Burbach.
After three months without any local transmission, Hong Kong has seen dozens of new coronavirus cases in humans this year, triggering fresh curbs on flights and social life.
Thousands of people have been sent to a makeshift government quarantine facility. Most of the new cases are of the highly-contagious new Omicron variety, though the cluster traced to a pet shop worker was Delta.
‘Over 600,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law.
How is this not extreme discrimination? JEWISH ONLY? Sounds like water fountains FOR WHITES ONLY in America many decades ago. Did the Jews learn nothing from that?
JEWISH ONLY neighborhoods? So this was Adolf Hitler’s plan? Free land in Palestine in exchange for free work in forced labor factories in Europe during WWII?
Why would Jews make a deal with Adolf Hitler?
How does the world body stand still when this is done in clear view and in clear violation of international law?
How is this not JEWISH SUPREMACY?
There can be no excuses or deals allowing subjugation via discrimination and slavery.
So these terrorist Jews force themselves onto the land of Palestine uprooting Palestinians by uprooting trees, destroying crops so they cannot eat or sell their product.
Apparently these terrorist Jews don’t care much about the environment either, considering it takes years for an olive tree to produce a significant amount of fruit.
Apparently laws don’t apply to Jewish people stealing land and destroying crops and forcing Palestinians to live elsewhere.
The Jews in the region have long claimed that the Palestinians posed an existential threat to them. The only existential threat in the region is the one systematically implemented and executed against the Palestinians by the Jews.
The Jews are wiping out the Palestinians not the other way around.
Apparently the world is holding the Palestinians hostage – an entire race of people. That slavery system that was abolished in the USA didn’t die; it was transferred elsewhere in the world and now thrives with Adolf Hitler’s best friends, the Jews, the designated slave masters.
The systematic takeover was all laid out in full view of the world and the world can’t move. That’s how powerful a band of gypsies can become with nuclear weapons in their arsenal!
Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is routine in the West Bank and is rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities. (Photo: via Social Media)
Jewish settlers on Thursday uprooted hundreds of olive trees in the towns of Yatta and Tarqumiya, near Hebron (Al-Khalil), the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
Fouad al-Amour, Coordinator of the Protection and Steadfastness Committees in Masafer Yatta, told WAFA that illegal Jewish settlers destroyed a one-donum-and-a-half grove planted with over 60 olive trees belonging to Ahmad Hamada.
Al-Amour added that the assailants came from the settlement outpost of Avigayil, in the occupied South Hebron Hills, while pointing that the move was intended to displace Palestinian farmers and make room for colonial settlement expansion.
Meanwhile, settlers also uprooted 300 olive saplings belonging to Atta Ja‘afra and his brother, Aziz, in the al-Taybeh area of the town, according to the coordinator of the Protection and Resilience Committees, Muhammad Abu Dabbous.
Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is routine in the West Bank and is rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities.
A reconstruction of Baby Yingliang, an oviraptorid dinosaur embryo laid 70 million years ago in what is now China. (Image credit: Shoulin Animation)
Impeccably preserved dinosaur embryo looks as if it ‘died yesterday’
HWH Comment: It doesn’t really look like it died yesterday, since the preserved egg contained bones absent the flesh. The photo that includes the flesh is an artist’s rendition of how the bird dinosaur may have looked just prior to dying.
It appears that dinosaurs were actually birds. Big birds.
Formerly thought to be reptiles that flew, it may turn out that they were birds that don’t fly. Was there ever an conclusive evidence that reptilian dinosaurs did indeed have wings to fly or wings for some other function?
By Laura Geggel 6 days ago 12.21.2021
The embryo’s position shows it was getting ready to hatch.
Reconstruction of oviraptorid embryo.
A reconstruction of Baby Yingliang, an oviraptorid dinosaur embryo laid 70 million years ago in what is now China.
About 70 million years ago, a wee ostrich-like dinosaur wriggled inside its egg, putting itself into the best position to hatch. But that moment never came; the embryo, dubbed “Baby Yingliang,” died and remained in its egg for tens of millions of years, until researchers found its fossilized remains in China.
Researchers have discovered many ancient dinosaur eggs and nests over the past century, but Baby Yingliang is one of a kind.
“This skeleton is not only complete from the tip of the snout to the end of its tail; it is curled in a life pose within its egg as if the animal died just yesterday,” said study co-researcher Darla Zelenitsky, an assistant professor of paleontology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
This curled-up pose is what interests researchers. Living bird embryos are known to move into the best position, known as tucking behaviors, to help them hatch from their eggs. But these behaviors had never been documented in dinosaurs, until now.
“The discovery of this embryo hints that some pre-hatching behaviours (e.g. tucking), which were previously considered unique to birds, may be rooted more deeply in dinosaurs many tens or hundreds of millions of years ago,” study co-lead researcher Fion Waisum Ma, a doctoral student of paleobiology at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.
Baby Yingliang’s egg — unearthed in the city of Ganzhou, in southeastern China, in 2000 — wasn’t analyzed until 2015. That’s when Yingliang Group, a Chinese stone company that had acquired the egg and put it into storage, rediscovered the fossil during the construction of Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum, a public museum in Xiamen, China.
“Fossil preparation was conducted and revealed the beautiful skeleton of the embryo,” Ma said. “It is one of the best-preserved dinosaur embryos ever reported in science.”
The embryo of the oviraptorid — a bipedal, toothless, bird-like, feathered dinosaur — measured nearly 11 inches (27 centimeters) long, but it was curled up to fit into its 6.7-inch-long (17 centimeters) oval egg. The skeleton was scrunched up, with its head lying on the dino’s abdomen and its legs on each side of the head. It appears to be a late-stage embryo, “which roughly correlates to a 17-day-old chicken embryo (which hatches on day 21),” Ma said in the email.
Just like a well-positioned chicken embryo, Baby Yingliang was getting ready to hatch. In chicken eggs, the embryo moves its body and limbs to get into a series of tucking postures a few days before hatching, she said. On hatching day, the embryo is in the best position to crack out of the egg, with its body curled and its right wing on top of its head. This position is thought to help stabilize and direct the head when the chicken embryo uses its beak to crack the eggshell. “Failure to do so increases the chance of death, as the embryo is less likely to break out of the egg successfully,” Ma said.
In essence, birds inherited these pre-hatching behaviors from their dinosaur ancestors, Zelenitsky said. “This study strengthens our understanding of the close evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds,” she said.
The study was published online Tuesday (Dec. 21) in the journal iScience.
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