[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Even if we can survive the manichean devils (interpersonal and intergroup trickery of other peoples), our survival will ultimately depend upon our capacity to solve Augustinian devils (natural challenges and affliction) - e.g., the ability to track asteroids and devise a way to intervene with them when they would otherwise crash into the earth and cause mass extinction as in the case of the dinosaurs.
No, an Asteroid Won’t Hit Earth on Sept. 9 and Here’s Why
Astronomers ruled out the asteroid’s chance of impact with Earth after they were not able to spot it within the area of its predicted collision course, making it the first time an asteroid impact was ruled out based on “non-detection.”
The asteroid, named 2006 QV89, was discovered on Aug. 29, 2006 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona. It measures between 70 to 160 feet (20 to 50 meters) in diameter, or somewhere between the length of a bowling alley and the width of a football field. Observations suggested that it had a one-in-7,000 chance of impacting Earth on Sept. 9, 2019.
After its discovery in 20016, the asteroid was observed for 10 days before disappearing from the astronomers’ sight, according to a statement by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). As the date for the potential collision approached, astronomers could only predict the location of the asteroid with very low accuracy, which made it difficult to locate with a telescope.
In order to confirm whether or not the asteroid was still headed for collision with Earth, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) and ESO took a different approach. Rather than trying to observe the asteroid itself, astronomers observed where it should have been if it were, in fact, heading toward Earth.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they captured deep images of the area where it would have been if it were on track to collide with our planet, ESO officials said in the statement. Following observations of the area on July 4-5, astronomers could not find the asteroid and therefore concluded that it would not be impacting Earth.
Even if the asteroid is smaller than initially believed, it would have been spotted by the telescope, ESO said in the statement. And if it were any smaller than that — too small for the telescope to detect — it would pose no threat to Earth, as it would burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.
While not exactly an ethnonationalist, in fact, prissy on a “Spencerian” level, Rick Steve does a professional job of showing us around our European nations, providing a convenient source of information for those of us who cannot make it around to all these places; a view at our convenience which should, nevertheless, give inspiration for our fight.
This one tours the Scottish Highlands. Others will be added subsequently…
I don’t even like throwing a bone to the Jewish ass-kisser Trump, or candidates from either party (Democrats either, of course) of America’s utterly baked-in and controlled liberal system - wherein “conservatives” only conserve liberalism. However, even if Trump was forced to address this issue to push back against (((Social Media Bias))) in favor of the Democrats in the coming election, and even if the examples of censorship are not those with platforms that I agree with (for example, a pro-life platform excluded from Twitter), the issue and the fact of censorship and “popularity” being manipulated, brought out into open awareness and discussion from underneath the gaslighting by (((social media))) is helpful.
As ethnonationalists, you may not like the examples of people and issues censored.
On the other hand, just as raising the issue of censorship itself provides some daylight for our concerns, so too the intersectionality that a David Horowitz experiences in his example of social media censorship provides some grounds for us to seize upon. Yes, Horowitz has concerns for intersectionality against (((his interests))) in mind, ultimately (no small matter, he’s not “one of us and on our side”); nevertheless, he’s the one who spilled significant beans on the who, what, how of Cultural Marxism/Political Correctness that allowed William Lind to articulate the matter so well for purposes of our ethnonationalist critique and increased freedom from its voodoo.
Trump hosts conservative social media personalities at White House
Fox News
President Trump’s White House summit aims to air our grievances over political bias on social media platforms. Invitees are mostly comprised of prominent, and sometimes controversial, online right-wing pundits. #FoxNewsLive #FoxNews
DNA tests have been used in Israel to verify a person’s Jewishness. This brings a bigger question: what does it mean to be genetically Jewish? And can you prove religious identity scientifically?
When my parents sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company late last year and were informed via email a few weeks later that they are both “100% Ashkenazi Jewish”, it struck me as slightly odd. Most people I know who have done DNA tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas — Chinese, British, West African. Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents’ DNA.
After arriving in Eastern Europe around a millennia ago, the company’s website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and by custom, mixing only occasionally with local populations. Isolation and intermarriage slowly narrowed the gene pool, which now gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them apart from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in Eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.
But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.
The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?”
Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.
Not that they’re alone. As of the beginning of this year, more than 26 million people have taken at-home DNA tests. For most, like my parents, genetic identity is assimilated into an existing life story with relative ease, while for others, the test can unearth family secrets or capsize personal narratives around ethnic heritage.
But as these genetic databases grow, genetic identity is re-shaping not only how we understand ourselves, but how we can be identified by others. In the past year, law enforcement has become increasingly adept at using genetic data to solve cold cases; a recent study shows that even if you haven’t taken a test, chances are you can be identified by authorities via genealogical sleuthing.
What is perhaps more concerning, though, is how authorities around the world are also beginning to use DNA to not only identify individuals, but to categorize and discriminate against entire groups of people.
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.
In Israel, matrimonial law is religious, not civil. Jews can marry Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by law to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate according to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed down through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this simply involves handing over their mother’s birth or marriage certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where being Jewish is defined differently or documentation is scarce, producing evidence that satisfies the Rabbinate’s standard of proof can be impossible.
In the past, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people herald or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity along the matrilineal line. But as was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed by David Lau, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis have been requesting that some people undergo a DNA test to verify their claim before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage.
[...]
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. “I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we’d like you to do a DNA test,” Shindler said. “They said if she doesn’t do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.”
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. “It is sad because in the Soviet Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we’re being discriminated against for not being Jewish enough,” he said.
Ibid: But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used. He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry test, but one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA – DNA that is passed down through the mother – that can be found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews.
A number of years ago Carmel consulted genetic experts who informed him that if someone bears this specific mitochondrial DNA marker, there is a 90 to 99% chance that this person is of Ashkenazi ancestry. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in 2017 that states that this specific DNA test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues have been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
For David Goldstein, professor of medical research in genetics at Columbia University whose 2008 book, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, outlines a decade’s worth of research into Jewish population genetics, translating scientific insights about small genetic variants in the DNA to normative judgments about religious or ethnic identity is not only problematic, but misunderstands what the science actually signals.
“When we say that there is a signal of Jewish ancestry, it’s a highly specific statistical analysis done over a population,” he said. “To think that you can use these type of analyses to make any substantive claims about politics or religion or questions of identity, I think that it’s frankly ridiculous.”
But others would disagree. As DNA sequencing becomes more sophisticated, the ability to identify genetic differences between human populations has improved. Geneticists can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mountain range.
In recent years, a number of high-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the former New York Times science writer, Nicholas Wade. In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences between those groups.
His book was strongly denounced by almost all prominent researchers in the field as a shoddy incarnation of race science, but the idea that our DNA can determine who we are in some social sense has also crept into more mainstream perspectives.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich argued that although genetics does not substantiate any racist stereotypes, differences in genetic ancestry do correlate to many of today’s racial constructs. “I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’.”
Reich’s op-ed was shared widely and drew condemnation from other geneticists and social science researchers.
In an open letter to Buzzfeed, a group of 67 experts also criticized Reich’s careless communication of his ideas. The signatories worried that imprecise language within such a fraught field of research would make the insights of population genetics more susceptible to being “misunderstood and misinterpreted”, lending scientific validity to racist ideology and ethno-nationalist politics.
And indeed, this already appears to be happening. In the United States, white nationalists have channeled the ideals of racial purity into an obsession with the reliability of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. In Greece, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party regularly draw on studies on the origins of Greek DNA to “prove” 4,000 years of racial continuity and ethnic supremacy.
Most concerning is how the conflation of genetics and racial identity is being mobilized politically. In Australia, the far-right One Nation party recently suggested that First Nations people be given DNA tests to “prove” how Indigenous they are before receiving government benefits. In February, the New York Times reported that authorities in China are using DNA testing to determine whether someone is of Uighur ancestry, as part of a broader campaign of surveillance and oppression against the Muslim minority
While DNA testing in Israel is still limited to proving Jewishness in relation to religious life, it comes at a time when the intersection of ethnic, political, and religious identity are becoming increasingly blurry. Just last year, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government passed the Nation State law, which codified that the right to national self-determination in the country is “unique to the Jewish people”.
“If we are to survive earth systems breakdown, then we must begin by transforming the Treasury and by removing the politicians that threaten the futures of today’s younger generations.” Ann Pettifor writes on the British Chancellor’s recent attack on ‘net zero’.
It took a child, Greta Thunberg, to alert much of the adult world to the catastrophic threat posed not just by climate breakdown, but earth systems breakdown. Sadly her voice did not reach one of the politicians responsible for defending the nation’s security: Philip Hammond. Watching the Chancellor attack the Prime Minister for wanting to invest a smidgeon of Britain’s annual income in the future survival of the nation, it’s hard to believe that it is now eighty three years since John Maynard Keynes invented the field of macroeconomics. We have had eighty three years in which to train Treasury economists to think in terms of the aggregate economy, and we still have a Chancellor that views the economy through the wrong end of a telescope – as if it were a household.
From Keynes’s macroeconomic perspective, the public sector finances are not analogous to household finances. Keynes turned Say’s Law on its head (CW XXIX, p. 81):
“For the proposition that supply creates its own demand, I shall substitute the proposition that expenditure creates its own income”
Given spare capacity, public expenditures not only are productive in their own right but also foster additional activity in the private sector, according to the multiplier. Increased employment means increased incomes, which, from the point of view of government, means higher tax revenues and lower welfare (and, later, debt interest) expenditures.
Now one can just imagine how intellectually challenging it would be for #spreadsheetPhil to accept that “expenditure creates its own income”. It does not do that for individuals, or even households, he will argue. Quite so. But the collective sum that is government expenditure, if invested in the creation of a skilled, well-paid ‘green carbon army’ would generate considerable income for government – and would help ensure the survival of life on earth.
David Baruch Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
The area in the sky where astronomers would have spotted the asteroid 2006 QV89 if it was on a collision course with Earth, with the three crosses marking the specific locations. (Image: © ESO)
