[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[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.
While US advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico’s new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks weren’t serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom’s left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico’s 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico’s “first full-fledged left-wing experiment,” AMLO’s election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book “A New Hope for Mexico,” “In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers…. Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites.”
The new president has held to his campaign promises. In 2019, his first year in office, he did what Donald Trump pledged to do — “drain the swamp” — purging the government of technocrats and institutions he considered corrupt, profligate or impeding the transformation of Mexico after 36 years of failed market-focused neoliberal policies. Other accomplishments have included substantially increasing the minimum wage while cutting top government salaries and oversize pensions; making small loans and grants directly to farmers; guaranteeing crop prices for key agricultural crops; launching programs to benefit youth, the disabled and the elderly; and initiating a $44 billion infrastructure plan. López Obrador’s goal, he says, is to construct a “new paradigm” in economic policy that improves human welfare, not just increases gross domestic product.
The End of the Neoliberal Era
To deliver on that promise, in July 2019 AMLO converted the publicly owned federal savings bank Bansefi into a “Bank of the Poor” (Banco del Bienestar or “Welfare Bank”). He said on Jan. 6 that the neoliberal era had eliminated all the state-owned banks but one, which he had gotten approval to expand with 2,700 new branches. Added to the existing 538 branches of the former Bansefi, that will bring the total in two years to 3,238 branches, far outstripping any other bank in the country. (Banco Azteca, currently the largest by number of branches, has 1,860.)
Digital banking will also be developed. Speaking to a local group in December, AMLO said his goal was for the Bank of the Poor to reach 13,000 branches, more than all the private banks in the country combined.
At a news conference on Jan. 8, he explained why this new bank was needed:
There are more than 1,000 municipalities that don’t have a bank branch. We’re dispersing [welfare] resources but we don’t have a way to do it. ...People have to go to branches that are two, three hours away. If we don’t bring these services close to the people, we’re not going to bring development to them…
They’re already building. I’ll invite you within two months, three at the most, to the inauguration of the first branches because they’re already working, they’re getting the land … because we have to do it quickly.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 08 February 2020 05:04.
Call it anecdotal if you will, but when one is innocently curious about the story behind a catchy tune and finds this, a pattern is suggested in place of arbitrary happenstance.
The rape story behind King Harvest’s “Dancing In The Moonlight”
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 07 February 2020 05:40.
Largely as a result of pandering to the predominantly German make-up of White Americans, those of us viewing world events from a White Natonalist perspective have been burdened with a preponderance of narratives depicting Germany’s war efforts in previous centuries as part and parcel of virtue, defense and victimization. While there are arguments enough for all of that to not condemn Germany for bygone programs, it can be frustrating as this overcompensating reaction is buoyed to hegemony of opinion to the exclusion of more truthful accounts of the wars (which, being more honest, could pave the way for more trustworthy, cooperative relations between European peoples). Especially as these claims typically purport to be based on a quest for truth, it can be a much welcome measure of actual truth to look upon Germany’s part in wars from The Thirty Years War, to Frederick The Great’s campaigns, to Ludendorff in World War I, to Hitler in World War II as imperialist aggressors. And just as present day Germans don’t need guilt trips for imperialist aggression of their forebears, other European nations don’t need guilt trips for their forebears having defended themselves. Not even for overcompensations in aggression or revenge on the part of our forebears (German or otherwise) do we need guilt trips.
It is to alleviate the guilt trips of a WN perspective laden with stories unsympathetic to the nations Germany aggressed against that accounts such as that of Fritz Fischer (49:15 in the video above) are welcome, with the added solidity of having a genuine ring of concern for truth all but absent in WN revisionism.
The attack on Belgium, and similar attacks in the east, such as on Kalisz circa WWI, are far more characteristically aggressive than defensive.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 February 2020 06:22.
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.
New Coronavirus ‘Won’t Be The Last’ Outbreak To Move From Animal To Human
The new strain of coronavirus that has killed hundreds of people in China and caused a travel lockdown of some 56 million people has been classified as a “zoonosis” because of the way it spreads from animals to humans.
Science writer David Quammen says the virus, which the World Health Organization last week declared a global health emergency, is just the latest example of how pathogens that start in animals are migrating to humans with increasing frequency — and with deadly consequences.
“When there’s an animal host, then it becomes much, much more difficult to eradicate or even control an infectious virus,” Quammen says. “This novel coronavirus — whether or not it turns out to be a huge catastrophe, or something we can control — one thing we know is that it won’t be the last.”
Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, traces the rise of different zoonoses around the world, including AIDS, Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He says that one of the first questions that arise with any zoonosis pertains to the animal host: How is it being transmitted?
In the case of the new coronavirus, researchers believe that the virus may have originated with horseshoe bats in China and then could have possibly spread to other animals — which people then ate.
Quammen notes that humans are the common link in all zoonoses: “We humans are so abundant and so disruptive on this planet. ... We’re cutting the tropical forests. We’re building work camps in those forests and villages. We’re eating the wildlife,” he says. “You go into a forest and you shake the trees — literally and figuratively — and viruses fall out.”
Quammen says that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously. But he also warns against panic: “Being educated and understanding it and being ready to respond and support government response is very useful. Panicking and putting on your surgical mask every time you go on a subway ride, an airplane, is not nearly as useful.”
Interview highlights
On wild animal “wet” markets where viruses can mix
When I was in southern China researching [Spillover], only briefly, I got to see some of these markets where all forms of wild animals were on sale. ... By the time I got there, [these sorts of markets] had gone underground ... suppressed after the SARS outbreak. But then [the markets] gradually came back ... allowed to continue again and proliferate when this new virus began.
If you go into a live market, you see cages containing bats stacked upon cages containing porcupines, stacked upon cages containing palm civets, stacked upon cages containing chickens. And hygiene is not great, and the animals are defecating on one another. It’s just a natural mixing-bowl situation for viruses. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. And one of the things that it allows is ... the occurrence of “amplifying hosts” [a species that rapidly replicates copies of the virus and spreads them].
On the theory that palm civets were “amplifier hosts” for the 2003 SARS outbreak
The civet is a type of mammal that belongs to the family of mongooses. But it’s a medium-sized animal, and it is both captured from the wild for food and captive-bred and raised for food, and it was the first big suspect in the SARS outbreak. It was found that some of the people who got sick very early on had eaten butchered civet. And they tested some civets, and they found evidence of the virus. They found antibodies or fragments of DNA or RNA in these civets, suggesting that they had been infected with the virus. And that didn’t prove they were the reservoir host, but it made them the No. 1 suspect, until a couple of Chinese scientists did further work and they established that, in fact, the virus was not living permanently in the civet population in the wild or in captivity. It [had] a different reservoir host. It was living in bats and had passed, presumably, at a market somewhere. It had passed from a bat into one or more civets, and they became the amplifier host. ...
Thousands of civets in captivity were butchered and electrocuted and smothered and drowned in this first, panicked blind reaction in China to the SARS outbreak.
On why bats are often hosts for viruses
Bats are implicated in what seems to be more than their share [of zoonoses]. There are a lot of different species of bats. One-quarter of all mammal species are bats. But there are other things [special] about them — including aspects of their immune system. There have been some discoveries lately that bat immune systems are “downregulated” in a certain way that allows for the metabolic stresses of being a mammal that flies. And the downregulating of the immune system to avoid overreaction to those stresses seems, perhaps, also to create an environment in which viruses are more tolerated in bats than in other mammals.
On how coronaviruses have evolved through different species
One of the reasons SARS could adapt from bat to civet to human is the fact that it is a coronavirus, which is a group of viruses that are very readily adaptable. Experts call that intrinsic evolvability. Their rate of mutation is very high when they copy themselves. Their genome contains a lot of mistakes, and that represents mutations that are sort of the random raw material for Darwinian evolution. So viruses that have high mutation rates are able to evolve quickly and adapt quickly. And coronaviruses ... have that characteristic.
There goes the neighborhood. A study has suggested that Spanish males were completely wiped out by the arrival of a new culture during the Bronze Age.
As reported by New Scientist, and presented at the New Scientist Live event in London last weekend, researchers have been studying the DNA of people that lived in Europe and Asia several thousand years ago.
The latest results, presented by David Reich of the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, concern the arrival of a group of people in Europe known as the Yamnaya. With the newly invented wheel and domesticated horses, they were able to expand like few others.
“These people spread over a vast territory from Mongolia to Hungary and into Europe, and are the single primary most important contributors to Europeans today,” said Reich.
About 4,500 years ago they arrived in Britain, replacing 90 percent of the gene pool, possibly as a result of the diseases they brought and climate change. But on the Iberian Peninsula, something more dramatic took place.
It appears there was some sort of “violent conquest”, notes New Scientist, where local males were either killed or enslaved and the females claimed by the Yamnaya. This is evidenced by a “complete Y-chromosome replacement,” according to Reich. In other words, Spanish men disappeared completely from the gene pool.
Other research has also highlighted the dramatic shifts in population as a result of the Yamnaya arriving. It’s thought that they replaced half of Europe’s genetic ancestry within a few hundred years, with a study last year suggesting 10 men for every one woman migrated into Europe as part of the group – an “extreme” ratio.
The Yamnaya were also likely responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages in Western Europe, which explains why they’re spoken so far from Asia. Much of their practices are thought to have been ingrained into European culture, too.
While we’ve known for a while the impact the Yamnaya had on Europe, this latest research from Reich and his colleagues highlights just how large that change was. And for the men of Spain, it was a change that saw them completely wiped off the map.
A Yamnaya skeleton from a grave in the Russian steppe, which was the homeland of men who migrated to Europe. XVODOLAZX/ WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.