Thanks to Pamela
Karlan for so aptly capturing Democratic elites' delusional,
Reaganite, jingoistic Cold Warrior mindset in your claim that we need to
arm Ukraine "so they fight the Russians there and we
don't have to fight them here" & we remain
"that shining city on the hill." pic.twitter.com/C78aNThnUk
blackagendareport | Self-styled liberals believe they are a better class of people than
Trump, but are bigger supporters of unjust wars than the so-called
“deplorables.”
“Liberals eagerly wait for a war they can believe in.”
The trauma of Donald Trump’s presidency has created continued
insanity for American liberals. They were never very trustworthy, due to
their abiding belief in United States exceptionalism and an imagined
right for it to intervene in the rest of the world as it pleased.
Liberals could be counted on to protest wars which killed Americans in
Vietnam or in Iraq. But by and large they trust in imperialist dictates
if someone they like is in charge and who doesn’t allow too many of
their countrymen to get hurt.
Hence their dilemma with Donald Trump. Trump is their anti-Christ, a
bad mannered, proudly stupid, racist who expresses the id of the great
unwashed deplorable white masses. There are many reasons to oppose him
but liberals generally attack from the right. The same people who
remember that the surveillance state lied about the WMD threat from Iraq
now parrot every word from the same people if they are anti-Trump.
Their earlier opposition to war propaganda was more a result of their
anti-Bush, anti-Republican stance than anything else. They didn’t really
oppose U.S. interventions or stand up for peace. Instead they eagerly
wait for a war they can believe in if the rationale is to their liking.
thegrayzone | AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which
has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap
exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods
and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security
threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating
Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug
cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government.
The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance,
were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads
throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug
trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right
counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists
in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These
same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani,
to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed
direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump
administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are
creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”
“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.
Jacobin | At four o’clock in the afternoon on October 17, 2019, the Mexican city
of Culiacán, capital of the northeastern state of Sinaloa, erupted in
gunfire. Minutes before, in the exclusive Tres Ríos district, members of
the army and National Guard had arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, son of
the jailed former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán (“El
Chapo”), and one of the organization’s new generation of leaders.
The response was immediate: taking to the streets, cartel members
fired rounds of automatic weapons from trucks and blocked intersections
with burning vehicles, all in a bid to sow chaos. Surrounding the armed forces involved in the raid, they cut off access on the three bridges leading out of the area.
Over the radio frequencies used by the police and the army, the
cartel proceeded to announce that, if Guzmán was not freed, it would
take revenge against both the family members of those participating and
the general public. Following hasty deliberations, the federal security
cabinet decided to go ahead and release Guzmán, a decision approved by
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
The response from the Mexican right was equally apoplectic and
hypocritical. With no apparent irony, Marko Cortés, leader of the
National Action Party (PAN), came to the remarkable conclusion
that Mexico is a “failed state” that is “experiencing one of its worst
episodes in the combat against delinquency.” While stating his party’s
intention to sue AMLO for freeing Guzmán, Cortés stated that “the
Mexican State was subdued, brought to its knees, humiliated by organized
crime.”
Not to be outdone, elements of the military also got in on
the game: in a case of rank insubordination, General Carlos Demetrio
Gaytán Ochoa declared:
“We feel insulted as Mexicans and offended as soldiers.” Going on to
question the “strategic decisions” of the president, Gaytán Ochoa
stated: “We are currently living in a politically polarized society
because the dominant ideology . . . is based on currents from the
so-called left, which accumulated a large amount of resentment over the
years.”
Conveniently omitted from such vociferations were several key points.
First, that President Felipe Calderón was the one who launched his
homicidal, so-called war on drugs in the first place, which saw over 121,000 killed in his administration alone. Second, that Calderón himself oversaw the freeing
of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the Jalisco New
Generation Cartel, under similar siege circumstances in 2012. And third,
according to investigative journalist Anabel Hernández, Calderón’s
government was in fact an active supporter of the Sinaloa Cartel by means of his all-powerful federal police force.
But history hardly matters when the goal is to make AMLO look weak in
the fight against organized crime, the captain of a nation that is
slipping out of his control.
bloomberg | San Miguel de Allende oozes old Mexico charm.
There
are the cobblestone streets, the colonial-era buildings
and wrought-iron balconies, the neo-Gothic steeples soaring high above
the pink-sandstone church anchoring a corner of the main plaza.
Travel
and Leisure magazine has twice named it the best city in the world, a
ratification of how beloved it is with tourists and retirees from the
U.S., Canada and beyond.
But lately, San Miguel has been attracting a very different sort of crowd: the drug cartels. And the moment they arrived and began pushing cocaine and imposing their brutal brand of property tax, the murders began.
A
restaurateur died in a hail of gunfire in front of horrified customers
after he refused to pay extortion demands. The son of the owner of a
construction-materials business was killed on his way to work.
A
tortilla shop owner in the nearby town of Celaya was gunned down along
with two of her employees. And a fruit vendor, a convenience store
operator, another restaurateur and three cantina owners closed their
doors after shakedown-visits and, it would appear, are lying low.
This kind of crime was unthinkable here just a few months
ago. “It’s still hard to believe,” said Manuel, a restaurant manager
who, like many others, would give only his first name for fear of
reprisal.
townhall | Donald Trump is talking about labeling the Mexican drug cartels that
own our failed state neighbor as “terrorist groups,” and this is yet
another step toward what is increasingly looking to be an inevitable
confrontation. They just butchered several American citizens, including kids, which cannot go unanswered. They
murder thousands of Americans a year here with their poison, which
cannot go unanswered. But are we Americans even able to answer a bunch
of pipsqueak thugs anymore? Let’s put aside the question of if we should use our military against Mexico (I discussed it here in 2018, to the consternation of liberals and Fredocon sissies) and look at what might happen if we did escalate.
None of it is good.
It’s
not a matter of the prowess of our warriors. Our warriors, unleashed,
would lay waste to anything we point them at. But the question is,
“Would we ever unleash them? Would we let them do what it takes to
achieve the goal of eliminating the cartels?"
Of course not. We
haven’t decisively won a real war since World War II (except the Gulf
War, unless you accept the arguable premise that it was an early
campaign in a still-continuing Iraq conflict). And there’s a reason we
don’t win. We don’t truly want to, as demonstrated by our
unwillingness to do the hard things required to win. Could you imagine
the Democrats siding with America in a war on Mexican drug cartels? If
you can, you’re higher than Hoover Biden at a strip club on a Saturday
night.
Again, this is not to say whether a war on the Mexican drug cartels is a
good or bad idea. Nor is it to say we do not have the combat power to
do it – we do. It’s just to say that America is culturally and
politically unwilling to do what it takes to win, or to accept the
losses that would come with a military campaign against the drug
cartels.
unz |I
suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the
American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the
face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and
effectively. “
Trump
phrased this as an offer to help, not a threat to invade, which is
reassuring. AMLO, Mexico’s president, wisely declined the offer.
While
the President seems to have made the offer in good faith, he has little
idea of Mexico, the military, or the cartels. The American military
could not come close to wiping them off the face of the earth, much less
effectively and quickly. Such an incursion would be a political and
military disaster. The President needs to do some reading.
If
AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few
Americans are aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin
America, and for that matter in most of the world. They don’t know of
the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators imposed and
supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American
War, detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz,
Patton’s incursion–the list could go on for pages. The Mexican public
would look upon American troops not as saviors but as invaders. Which
they would be.
The
incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump
would do well to ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by
overestimating its own powers, underestimating the enemy, and
misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The is
exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He
probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have
all these beautiful advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things
with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed with garden trowels
couldn’t possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You
know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That
sort of cakewalk. Let’s think what an expedition against the narcos
would entail, what it would face.
To
begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the
narcos spread unevenly across it. You can’t police a nation that size
with a small force, or even with a large force. A (preposterous) million
soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it
wouldn’t.
ronpaulinstitute | Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump, who has the unilateral power to
send the United States military to bomb and invade other countries, as
several of his predecessors have done, stated at Twitter that he is
ready to send the US military to Mexico to defeat drug cartels.
This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United
States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of
the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!
Making clear he is talking about a US military action, Trump declared in
another Tuesday morning tweet that “the cartels have become so large
and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”.
The
truth, however, is that the drug war waged by the Mexico government,
with the help of the US government, ensures the continued existence of
powerful and dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. Similarly, when the US
had alcohol prohibition, there were dangerous criminal enterprises that
thrived from satisfying people’s demand for prohibited products.
Eliminating
drug cartels can best be accomplished by ending, not growing, the drug
war. Indeed, this is the course of action the Mexico government seems
poised to pursue. Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who
Trump referenced at Twitter, released this year a plan for Mexico to end its drug war. And the Mexico legislature appears to be preparing to take a major step toward ending the drug war — approving legislation to legalize marijuana countrywide.
I
am guessing Obrador will not make the phone call Trump suggests.
Obrador has available another, better avenue for dealing with drug
cartels.
oilprice | Ever since the U.S. signalled through its effective withdrawal from
Syria that it now has little interest in becoming involved in military
actions in the Middle East, the door has been fully opened to China
and Russia to advance their ambitions in the region. For Russia, the
Middle East offers a key military pivot from which it can project
influence West and East and that it can use to capture and control
massive oil and gas flows in both directions as well. For China, the
Middle East – and, absolutely vitally, Iran and Iraq – are irreplaceable
stepping stones towards Europe for its era-defining ‘One Belt, One
Road’ project. Earlier this week an announcement was made by Iraq’s Oil
Ministry that highlights each of these factors at play, through a
relatively innocuous-sounding contract award to a relatively unknown
Chinese firm.
Specifically, it was announced that China Petroleum
Engineering & Construction Corp (CPECC) has been awarded a US$121
million engineering contract to upgrade the facilities that are used to
extract gas during crude oil production at the supergiant West Qurna-1
oilfield in Iraq, 50 kilometres northwest of the principal oil hub of
Basra. The project is due to be completed within 27 months and aims to
increase the capture of gas currently being flared across the site. Two
factors that were not highlighted in the general announcement were
firstly that CPECC is a subsidiary of China’s principal political proxy
in the oil and gas sector, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), and
secondly that the gas capture project will also include the development
of the oil reserves at West Qurna 1. The current level of oil reserves
at West Qurna 1 is just under nine billion barrels but, crucially, the
site is part of the overall massive West Qurna reservoir that comprises
at least 43 billion barrels of crude oil reserves. “For China, it’s
always all about positioning itself so that it is perfectly placed to
expand its foothold,” a senior oil and gas industry source who works
closely with Iraq’s Oil Ministry told OilPrice.com earlier this week.
Certainly it makes sense for Iraq to finally begin to monetise its
associated gas that it has been burnt off for decades as a product of
its burgeoning oil production. Aside from the negative environmental
impact of this practice, there is the bizarre practical result that Iraq
– which holds some of the biggest oil and gas reserves in the world –
has to go to its neighbour Iran every year and beg for electricity
imports to plug the huge power deficits that afflict it, particularly
during the summer months. As it stands, Iraq has been steadily importing
around one third of its total energy supplies from Iran, which equates
to around 28 million cubic feet (mcf) of gas to feed its power stations.
Even with these extra supplies, frequent daily power outages across
Iraq occur and have been a prime catalyst for widespread protests in the
past, including last year. The situation is also likely to become worse
if change does not occur as, according to the International Energy
Agency (IEA), Iraq’s population is growing at a rate of over one million
per year, with electricity demand set to double by 2030, reaching about
17.5 gigawatts average.
Apart from this, burning gas associated
with the production of crude oil is costing Iraq billions of dollars in
lost revenues. It loses money in the first place because in order to try
to minimise power shortages, Iraq is forced to burn crude oil directly
at power plants that it could sell in the open market for currently well
over US$55 per barrel (and the lifting cost per barrel in Iraq is just
US$2 on average). In this context, the average volume of crude oil used
for power generation has fallen in the past two years from a peak of
223,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2015 but it still averages around
110,000 bpd, or around US$2.25 billion per year in value. It costs Iraq
money in the second place because this associated gas that is flared
could itself either be sold off directly or in LNG form or used as
high-quality feedstock to finally truly kick-start the country’s
long-stalled petrochemicals industry that itself could generate massive
added-value product revenue streams. According to the IEA, Iraq has
around 3.5 trillion cubic metres (tcm) of proven reserves of gas -
mainly associated - which would be enough to supply nearly 200 years of
Iraq’s current consumption of gas, as long as flaring is minimised. It
added, though, that proven reserves do not provide an accurate picture
of Iraq’s long-term production potential and that the underlying
resource base – ultimately recoverable resources – is significantly
larger, at 8 tcm or more.
theduran | In Part 2 we examine the geopolitical associations in Africa which
vary by nation, where major powers have a vested interest in a
particular resource causing that major power to assume an aggressive
posture to ‘protect’ its national interest by dominating or subverting
the African state, in possession of that resource.
Typically those resources include natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds,
silver, uranium, coal, rare earth elements and minerals, etc. Thus the
major powers have their ‘client states’ in pursuance of the extraction
of those resources, where that extraction may result in corruption,
confrontation, armed aggression, and even support for terrorist
organizations in those states.
In this post-Colonial era the extraction of resources by the major
powers in a region where the indigenous people are exhorted to have
their own right to self-determination is a significant challenge to
global corporations, and former colonial occupiers in Africa like
Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, etc.
When corporate interests either collide or collude with state
interests the local insurrection may be severe as mining giant Rio Tinto
discovered in Bougainville.
Other examples include coal and natural gas in Mozambique; uranium and
gold in Niger and Mali; oil in Sudan; diamonds in the Central African
Republic, and so on.
France in Africa
Perhaps the most notable component for NATO – specifically for France
– is the uranium needed to run its nuclear operations. Most of that
uranium originates in Africa even though France has reduced its capacity
for nuclear power. Even so, France still receives in excess of
two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power via the former Areva Corporation, now called Framatome.
The uranium mined for Framatome’s nuclear reactors is commonly found in the Sahel region
of Africa where most of France’s uranium comes from, primarily northern
Niger and Mali. Chad** and Mauritania also possess enormous reserves of
the dangerous material. Mali is the fourth-largest supplier of gold
too, and with falling registered gold reserves
and the already accomplished confiscation of gold by the west from its
failed states Mali makes an especially attractive target… particularly
for the EU’s struggling banks.
After the indigenous people of the Sahel suffered serious illness
from the effect of uranium mining – where drinking water is frequently
contaminated – activist leader Almoustapha Alhacen and NGO Aghirin cooperated to oppose France’s corrupt mining giant Areva in Niger and Mali after 2001.
By 2006-2009 the protests and strikes in Agadez and Mali became
effective versus Areva. And by 2011 – surprisingly coincident with
Hillary Clinton’s “Arab Spring” – mysterious new terror cells appeared in the Sahel subsequent to the NATO destruction of Gaddafi’s government, including:
Movement for Oneness Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) funded by France/Morocco Intel
Ansar Dine funded by France/Morocco Intelligence Services
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) funded by the United States of America CIA
Prior to 2011, a Tuareg rebellion led by the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad
(MNLA) had some success versus the Malian government and versus Areva.
The MNLA is a legitimate secular rebel group and is not funded by any
western intelligence service. MNLA’s success eventually led to air and
ground assaults by France in Mali in Operation Serval (with bases in Bamako and N’Djamena) by 2014.
Under the guise of striking al Qaeda and ISIL in Africa – a continent
where those groups did not exist prior to 2010 – France invoked air
strikes and ground assaults versus the indigenous people who have been
most effective in their resistance to Areva.
theduran | Russia’s intent in Africa – whatever it may be – is certainly as
misunderstood now as it was leading up to the Suez crisis of 1956. That
crisis led to a dangerous and pre-emptive invasion and occupation of
Nasser’s Egypt hatched in a crackpot conspiracy involving Israel,
France, and Britain.
The potential parallel to Suez in 1956 re NATO versus Russia in
Africa today is not altogether preposterous. Because there is another
side to the coin in what appears to be a nascent Russian Federation
attempt at taming Africa for its own — and perhaps China’s! — corporate
interests, being the toxic effect of AFRICOM/ NATO and its abject
mismanagement of resources and subversion of the African right to
progressive state self-determination.
That’s because the United States and NATO operate the largest
military infrastructure in Africa with thirty-four bases (some secret)
and thirty new US military or NATO construction projects underway in
Africa spanning four countries.
The US military has more sites in Niger – five, including Niamey,
Ouallam, Arlit, Maradi, and a secret base in Dirkou – than all other
countries combined in Western Africa.
Chebelley drone base
in Djibouti is the largest drone base in the world where the US can
strike any target in the Sahel or for that matter Iran. And AFRICOM is
building a larger base, Niger Air Base 201 in Agadez, capable of
striking Algeria or any location in the Sahel region while the US
operates a secret drone base in Tunisia (Sidi Ahmed) now opposed by
president Qays Sayed (Kais Saied).
There are five more bases in Somalia including secret bases
supporting AFRICOM’s ‘Lightning Brigade’ also known as the Danab
Advanced Infantry Brigade. Now guess who is training the Danab? Private US military contractors of course, Bancroft Global Development.
Kenya sports four more US military bases including Manda Bay and
Mombasa, where the Manda bay base has consistently launched US drone
strikes against Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq. There are three more secret
US/NATO base locations located along the Libyan coast to carry out drone
strikes as far-ranging as Pakistan.
Then there is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti where approximately 4,000 US
and NATO personnel are stationed. Camp Lemonnier is claimed to be the
‘only permanent US base in Africa’ – perhaps because so many new US/NATO
bases are under construction while many of the rest are secret or
simply addressed by some arcane acronym known only to the military.
Cameroon, Mali, and Chad also host what the US military calls
‘contingency locations’ no doubt leveraged by NATO in its rather lame
attempt to control the Sahel. They include Garoua drone base, Douala,
and Salak … bases which train private military contractors and track US drone strikes versus the immortal and indestructible Boko Haram terrorists, of course.
Another secret US base in Chad is the historic site of Faya Largeau.
The present operational status of Faya Largeau is of course officially
unknown. Gabon’s Libreville location exists to allow US military or NATO
quick access for a rapid influx of US forces analogous to the base in
Dakar, Senegal, which serves the same strategic purpose.
The list of NATO
and US bases in Africa (whether secret or not) might continue on,
however hopefully the point has been made that the mighty US/NATO
presence in Africa extends far beyond the imagination of even the most
devoted follower of military affairs.
That such a behemoth of an operation as represented by the US/NATO
military presence in Africa could be seriously undermined by an influx
of a small number of lightly armed and under-resourced Russian military
contractors is not only laughable, but patently absurd.
kondaira |Euskara
has never been in contact with the Berber dialects that are currently
spoken in the Maghreb. However, it has similar words to the ones of
those languages that perhaps were introduced in Euskara through the
Iberian language.
According to the theory of the Proto-Basque expansion that took place after the last Ice Age, which is based on the most recent researchon Archaeogenetics,
those similarities could be due to migrations of Proto-Basque human
groups to Africa. This ancient population could leave words and even
Basque verbal morphemes during the miscegenation process with the
Hamitic peoples of northern Africa that have been kept in their
languages until the present day.
Thus,
it can be explained the existence of Basque words in Berber, Guanche
(Canary Islands), Somali, Ethiopian and in old Egyptian (they are all
Hamitic languages), as well as the vigesimal numeral system that is kept in the Tachelhit dialect of Berber.
Due
to those similarities between Basque and Hamitic words, there was
proposed the Basque-Berber theory which considered Euskara as related to
Berber. This theory was abandoned some years ago since the similarities
found were only lexical or lexicographical while they are very
different today, as in the past, when concerning syntax and grammar.
However, some similarities are observed especially in the verbal
articulation as well as the usage of some particles, as stated above.
discover | In terms of historical genetics these assumptions result in the
Basque population be used as a “reference” for the indigenous component
of the European ancestry which reaches back to the Last Glacial Maximum,
and expanded from the Iberian refugium after the ice retreated. One of
reasons for the assumption of Basque antiquity & purity are genetic
peculiarities of the Basques. Foremost among them is that the Basque
seem to have the highest frequency of Rh- in the world, primarily
because of the high frequency of the null allele within the population
(it is a recessively expressed trait). Rh- is very rare outside of
Europe, but its frequency exhibits a west-east gradient even within the
continent. It has been suggested that the mixing of Rh- and Rh+ blood
groups reflects the mixing of hunter-gatherers and farmers in after the
Ice Age. The map above the illustrates the frequencies of this trait,
and you can see how the Basque region is cordoned off. It’s an old map
because blood group were widely collected in the early 20th century.
Because of the early knowledge of this heritable trait you have a lot of
weird anthropological theories which hinge around blood group genetics
having emerged in the early 20th century. But even as late as the
mid-90s L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported in The History and Geography of Human Genes using
classical markers that the Basques exhibited some distinctiveness. Over
the years with the rise of Y and mtDNA phylogenetics this
distinctiveness has taken a hit. I think the data have a tendency of
confirming expectations, or it is often interpreted as such. But the
recent story of the R1b haplogroup strongly implied that the Basques are
no different from other west Europeans, and are likely the descendants
of Neolithic farmers themselves!
A new paper in Human Genetics supports the contention that the Basque are just like other Europeans, A genome-wide survey does not show the genetic distinctiveness of Basques:
Basques
are a cultural isolate, and, according to mainly allele frequencies of
classical polymorphisms, also a genetic isolate. We investigated the
differentiation of Spanish Basques from the rest of Iberian populations
by means of a dense, genome-wide SNP array. We found that F ST distances
between Spanish Basques and other populations were similar to those
between pairs of non-Basque populations. The same result is found in a
PCA of individuals, showing a general distinction between Iberians and
other South Europeans independently of being Basques. Pathogen-mediated
natural selection may be responsible for the high differentiation
previously reported for Basques at very specific genes such as ABO, RH,
and HLA. Thus, Basques cannot be considered a genetic outlier under a
general genome scope and interpretations on their origin may have to be
revised.
reuters | From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate
cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a
study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds
create music.
The study, published on Thursday, focused on musical recordings and
ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such
diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in
Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka
descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in
Australia.
Music was broadly found to be associated with
behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings,
funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals.
The
researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the
various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University
research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study
published in the journal Science.
“The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set
of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And
that’s something we could not really test until we had a lot of data
about music from many different cultures,” Mehr said.
Penn State
University anthropology professor Luke Glowacki, a study co-author, said
many ethnomusicologists have believed that the features in a given
piece of music are most heavily influenced by the culture from which the
music originates.
“We found something very different,” Glowacki
said. “Instead of music being primarily shaped by the culture it is
from, the social function of the piece of music influences its features
much more strongly.”
newrepublic | This
way of thinking about injustice and what does and doesn’t call for
remedial action has its roots in enforcement of anti-discrimination law
in the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying disparate treatment or outcomes that
correlate with racial difference can be a critical step in validating a
complaint. However, the inclination to fixate on such disparities as
the only objectionable form of inequality can create perverse political
incentives. We devote a great deal of rhetorical and analytic energy to
the project of determining just which groups, or population categories,
suffer or have suffered the worst. Cynics have sometimes referred to
this brand of what we might term political one-downsmanship as the “oppression Olympics”—a
contest in which groups that have attained or are vying for legal
protection effectively compete for the moral or cultural authority that
comes with the designation of most victimized.
Even
short of that cynical view, a central focus on group-level disparities
can lead to mistaken diagnoses of the sources and character of the
manifest inequalities it identifies. And those mistaken diagnoses, in
turn, can reflect damaging class and ideological biases that ultimately
undercut the struggle for social justice and equality. In this column
and later ones, I will examine facets of this problem and its
entailments. A key point of departure here is the study I published in 2012
with Columbia University public health Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun,
explicating how what we call the “disparitarian perspective” has
distorted discussion of the impact of the New Deal on black Americans.
TheAtlantic | A beautiful illustration of the difference between Twitter and the real
world is the viral status of Michael Harriot’s attack on Mayor Pete
Buttigieg in The Root as a “lying MF.”
theroot | I don’t enjoy fighting. I don’t
even fight very well. In fact, if I combined my amateur fist-fighting
record, my jiu-jitsu sparring, all of my slap-boxing exhibitions, and
the time Zevalon Jackson slapped me for talking smack while running a
Boston on her in spades, my winning percentage is well below .500. But I
believe fisticuffs are a legitimate way to settle disputes while
arguments are usually pointless exercises to get one party to proclaim
why the other party is wrong. I’d rather you beat me up.
So when I received a text message from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign about an article
I wrote, I genuinely hoped that he was going to send four or five of
his thugs over to rough me up and that would be it. (And if you don’t
believe there are Pete Buttigieg supporters out there willing to throw
hands, then you probably aren’t on Twitter. I think they should call
themselves the “Pete Patrol.” Or the “Buttigang.”)
I
figured one of his surrogates would argue with me for a few minutes and
I could continue my day trying to be a thorn in the side of white
supremacy (The third thing you should know is that I actually keep a
small photo of the mouse from Pinky and the Brain beside my bed that says: “What are you going to do today, Michael?” The answer is always the same: “Fuck with white people.”)
Luckily,
as soon as I agreed to take a phone call, the phone rang. The voice
sounded vaguely familiar and I knew it wasn’t a surrogate or a campaign
volunteer when the person said:
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a ‘lying motherfucker’ before.”
courier-journal | Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the
world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you
love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.
And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.
Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco
Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his
head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted
list.
El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S.
with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and
fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover
stings, busts and lengthy investigations.
The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s
unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more
than 300,000 people since 2013.
CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old
drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’
insatiable demand for narcotics.
A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals
how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years,
overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.
kctv5 | As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking
Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.
“About
100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug
train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings
said.
Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.
A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.
“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.
Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.
Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.
Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.
“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.
kmbc | Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their
roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin
in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have
resulted in overdoses and deaths.
Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and
Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings
before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre
was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without
parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in
federal prison without parole.
fox4kc | "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled
substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there
is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for
that."
The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.
Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.
"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would
limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more
established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them
branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."
propublica |On Sept. 11, 2001,
when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, DEA agents
were among the first to respond, racing from their headquarters, less
than half a mile away. A former special agent named Edward Follis, in
his memoir, “The Dark Art,” recalls how he and dozens of his colleagues
“rushed over … to pull out bodies, but there were no bodies to pull
out.” The agency had outposts in more than 60 countries around the
world, the most of any federal law-enforcement agency. And it had some
5,000 informants and confidential sources. Michael Vigil, who was the
DEA’s head of international operations at the time, told me, “We called
in every source we could find, looking for information about what had
happened, who was responsible, and whether there were plans for an
imminent attack.” He added, “Since the end of the Cold War, we had seen
signs that terrorist groups had started relying on drug trafficking for
funding. After 9/11, we were sure that trend was going to spread.”
But other intelligence agencies saw the DEA’s sources as drug
traffickers — and drug traffickers didn’t know anything about terrorism.
A former senior money-laundering investigator at the Justice Department
told me that there wasn’t any substantive proof to support the DEA’s
assertions.
“What is going on after 9/11 is that a lot of resources move out of
drug enforcement and into terrorism,” he said. “The DEA doesn’t want to
be the stepchild that is last in line.” Narco-terrorism, the former
investigator said, became an “expedient way for the agency to justify
its existence.”
The White House proved more receptive to the DEA’s claims. Juan
Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser, in his book,
“Treasury’s War,” says that President George W. Bush wanted “all
elements of national power” to contribute to the effort to “prevent
another attack from hitting our shores.” A few months after 9/11, at a
gathering of community anti-addiction organizations, Bush said, “It’s so
important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the
work of terror. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in
America.” In February 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
turned Bush’s message into a series of publicservice announcements that
were aired during the Super Bowl. Departing from the portrayal of
illegal narcotics as dangerous to those who use them — “This is your
brain on drugs” — the ads instead warned that getting high helped
terrorists “torture someone’s dad” or “murder a family.”
In the next seven years, the DEA’s funding for international
activities increased by 75 percent. Until then, the agency’s greatest
foreign involvement had been in Mexico and in the Andean region of South
America, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and home to violent
Marxist guerrilla groups, including the FARC, in Colombia, and the
Shining Path, in Peru. Both groups began, in the 1960s and early ‘70s,
as peasant rebellions; before long, they started taxing coca growers and
smugglers to finance their expansion. The DEA saw the organizations as
examples of how criminal motivations can overlap with, and even advance,
ideological ones.
npr | President Trump says he plans to designate Mexican drug cartels as
foreign terrorist organizations, a move that is stoking fears in Mexico
that American authorities would use the label to justify a military
response across the border against the cartels.
"I will be designating the cartels," Trump said
in an interview with former Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly, who
raised the issue of the U.S. sending drones into Mexico. Trump did not
comment on the idea, but he said the terrorist designation is underway.
"I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know,
designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we
are well into that process," Trump said.
Former diplomat and
Mexico expert Jana Nelson told NPR that as Trump's comments have spread,
worries have deepened in Mexico that the designation could lead to
military action.
"It has generated some concern in Mexico that
the U.S. will actually send the military into Mexico, and if not boots
on the ground itself, then perhaps drones to combat drug cartels," said
Nelson, a Wilson Center political analyst who is based in Mexico City.
The Democratic Party plays an indispensable role in America's political machinery. It wields the dominant "narrative shaping" power in America in terms of controlling the state and setting policy. without the More importantly, without the existence of the Democratic Party, the US could no longer maintain the pretense that it's a "democracy."
If the Democratic Party disintegrates, the US will be revealed for what it really is -- a one-party state ruled by a narrow alliance of business interests.
Thus, the party's "narrative shaping" power is revealed as largely theatrical.
The Democratic Party doesn't exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. The essential service it renders to the US power structure -- lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it's not; and this is enough to relieve despair to let the system portray itself as a "democracy."
As long as the Democratic Party exists, suggestible Americans will believe they have a "democracy" and a "choice" in how they are ruled. They will not despair, and will not revolt.
So long as they have this hope for "change from within the system."
From the system's point of view, this mechanism serves as the ultimate safety valve. The Democratic Party narrative insures that a despairing but still suggestible populace, will never coalesce into rebellion. It guarantees that no serious change to the system will be mounted. The modern Democratic Party wasn't designed to play that role..
The Democratic Party is not the "lesser evil;" it is an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the American political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole.
The system can't be properly understood if one's study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this way, is a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)
If one focuses on the efforts of the few outspoken dissenters, it's easy to feel that the Democratic Party is somewhat less evil than the GOP. But in the larger picture, the Democratic Party invariably submits to what its bosses promulgate and the entire range of permissible thought and public discourse shifts to the right.
The overall function of the Democratic Party is not to fight, it is to shape and to drive the ever-rightward-moving process. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters need their Washington Generals to make their basketball games properly entertaining, Republicans need the Democratic Party for effective staging of the political show.
The Democratic Party is permitted to exist because its vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. If the Democratic Party ever actually threatened any sort of serious change, it would be disbanded. The fact that it is fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that its ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling .elites.
For the Democratic Party to even begin to serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital, it would at a minimum have to be capable of acknowledging the conflict that exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the people; and of expressing a principled determination to take the side of the people in this conflict.
A party whose controlling elements are billionaires, lobbyists, fund-raisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers; that has stood by prostrate and helpless (when not actively collaborating) in the face of stolen elections, illegal wars, torture, CIA concentration camps, lies as state policy, and one assault on the Bill of Rights after the next, is not likely to take that position.
CommonDreams | Former President Barack Obama reportedly
told advisers behind closed doors earlier this year that he would
actively oppose Sen. Bernie Sanders if the progressive senator from
Vermont opened up a big lead in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
race.
"Publicly, [Obama] has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a candidate," Politicoreported
Tuesday. "There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed
like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if
Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to
stop him."
PCR | Former US Attorney Joe diGenova predicts that US Justice (sic)
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Obama
regime’s FISA court violations and US Attorney John Durham’s criminal
investigation of the Russiagate hoax perpetrated by the CIA, FBI,
Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media will be “very bad
for people in the Obama administration. . . . it’s going to be
devastating . . . it’s going to ruin careers.”
For the sake of accountable government, I hope that Mr. diGenova is
right. But I have my doubts. Cabinet departments and government
agencies are not very good at investigating themselves. Attorney
General Barr’s job is to protect his department. He knows, and will be
often told, that to bring indictments against Justice Department
officials would discredit the Justice Department in the public’s mind.
It would affect the attitude of juries toward DOJ prosecutions. John
Durham knows the same thing. He also knows that he will create a
hostile environment for himself if he indicts DOJ officials and that
when he joins a law firm to capitalize on his experience as a US
Attorney, he will not receive the usual favors when he represents
clients against DOJ charges. Horowitz knows that his job is to coverup
or minimize any illegalities in order to protect the Department of
Justice from scandals.
In Washington coverups are the rule, and the DOJ coverup might
already have begun. One sign of a coverup is to announce a future
release date of the report. This has now occurred with Horowitz’s report
on the FISA violations. The purpose of such announcements is to allow
the report to be discredited in advance and to be old news by the time
it appears.
Another sign of a coverup is the use of leaks to shift the focus from
high level officials to lowly underlings, and this has happened with
the Horowitz report, which has leaked that a low level FBI attorney is
under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related
to the surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page in
2016. According to the leak, the FBI attorney has acknowledged that he
did alter the document. In other words, it seems we are being prepared
for a false story that the plot against Trump originated in lower levels
and not with CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and the rest. This is the way
the coverups of the US torture prison, Abu Ghraib, in Iraq was handled
and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Only the underlings take the hit as
if they were in charge acting on their own, independently of their
superiors.
Barr claims to have personally reviewed security footage that no one
entered the area where Epstein was imprisoned. Previously we were told
that the security cameras were not turned on, so what security footage
did Barr review? Can the rest of us see the “evidence”?
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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