#the south have MULTIPLE cultures and in the north you could at least argue the coasts are distinct culturally

[sylvielauffeydottir]

Hi I just saw your post about Israel and Palestinian. I don't know if you're the person to ask or if this is a dumb question but I was wondering if anyone has considered starting a second Jewish state? I was wondering because there's a bunch of Christian countries so why not multiple Jewish ones.

Sorry if I'm bothering you and Thanks for your time.

That’s actually a pretty interesting question. I am going to apologize right now, because I essentially can’t give a short answer to save my life.

I’m not a ‘Jewish Scholar,’ so while I can speak with some authority about the history of Zionism, I definitely couldn’t speak about it with as much authority as others. I mentioned in at least one of the posts I have written about the history of plans for a ‘Jewish state’ when Zionism was originally being proposed, and I can kinda of track the history of Zionist thinking for you if you are interested, though essentially it’s just about arguing where to go. But there are better scholars for this than me, so I would recommend Rebecca Kobrin, Deborah Lipstadt, Walter Laqueur … idk. Maybe just read some Theodor Herzl, honestly. With all of that said, I can speak with some authority about the post-war history of this in the Middle East. So let’s go.

In post-war times, there has really only been one serious discussion of an alternative Jewish state, as far as I know. And actually, this is part of why I find it so ironic that people are campaigning so hard to be “anti-Zionist” and to express views like “anti-Zionism” in their activism, because the Jews in Israel who are most anti-Zionist are actually the settlers of Palestinian territories, who want to secede and form a “Gaza-State” called Judeah. There's a great book about this called The Deadly Embrace by Ilana Kass And Bard O'Neill, if anyone is interested. Anyway, most of those people, who are largely Haredim (the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, though some of those settlers are semi Orthodox), have essentially been waging a “culture war” about what it means to have a Jewish state and what the identity of that Jewish state should look like basically since the 1980s.

There is a really good article about this that you can find right here written by Peter Lintl, who is a researcher at the Institution of Political Science for the Friedrich-Alexander Universitat. I’ll summarize it for the lazy people, though, because it’s like 40 pages. Just know that this paragraph won’t be super source heavy, because it is basically the same source. Essentially, the Haredim community has tripled in size from 4% to 12% of the total Israeli population since 1980, and it is probably going to be about 20% by 2040. They only accept the Torah and religious laws as the basis for Jewish life and Jewish identity and they are critical of democratic principles. To them, a societal structure should be hierarchical, patriarchal, and have rabbis at the apex, and they basically believe that Israel isn’t a legitimate state. This is primarily because Israel is (at least technically, so no one come at me in the comments about Palestinian citizens of Israel, so I’ll make a little ** and address this there) a ‘liberal’ democracy. Rights of Israeli citizens include, according to Freedom House, free and fair elections (they rank higher on that criteria here than the United States, by the way), political choice, political rights and electoral opportunities for women, a free and independent media, and academic freedom. It is also, I should add (as a lesbian), the only country in the Middle East that has anything close to LGBT+ rights.

[**to the point about Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel: I have a few things to say. First, I have recommended this book twice now and it is Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, which absolutely fantastically talks about the ways in which the entire structure of the Palestinian ‘citizenship’ movement, Palestinian rights, and who was responsible for governing Palestinians changed after the Six Days War. If you are at all interested in the modern Middle East or modern Middle East politics, I highly recommend you read this, because a huge tenant of this book is that it was 1967, not 1947, that caused huge parts of our current situation (and that, surprisingly, a huge issue that quote-on-quote “started it” was actually water, but that’s sort of the primary secondary issue, not the Actual Issue at play here). Anyway, I’ve talked about the fact that Israel hugely abuses its authority in the West Bank and Gaza and that there are going to be current members of the Israeli Government who face action at the ICC, so please don’t litigate this again with me. I also should add that the 2018 law which said it was only Jews who had the natural-born right to “self-determine” in Israel was passed by the Lekkud Government, and I really hate them anyway. I know they’re bad. It’s not the point I’m making. I’m making a broader point about the Constitution vis-a-vis what the Haredim are proposing, which is way worse].

To get back to the Haredim, basically there is this entire movement of actual settlers in territories that have been determined to belong to the Palestinian people as of, you know, the modern founding of Israel (and not the pre-Israel ‘colonial settler’ narrative you’ll see on instagram in direct conflict with the history of centuries of aliyah) who want to secede and form a separate Jewish state. They aren’t like, the only settlers, but I point this out because they are basically ‘anti-Zionist’ in the sense that they think that modern Zionism isn’t adhering to the laws of Judaism — that the state of Israel is too free, too radical, too open. And scarily enough, these are the sort of the people from whom Netanyahu draws a huge part of his political support. Which is true of the right wing in general. Netanyahu can’t actually govern without a coalition government. Like I have said, the Knesset is huge, often with 11-13 political parties at once, and so to ‘govern’ Netanyahu often needs to recruit increasingly right wing, conservative, basically insane political parties to maintain his coalition. It’s why he has been so supportive of the settlements, particularly in the last five years (since he is, as I have also said, facing corruption charges, and he really can’t leave office). It would really suck for him if a huge chunk of his voters seceded, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, that is the only ‘second Jewish State’ I know about, and I don’t think that is necessarily much of a solution. I really don’t have the solutions to the Middle East crisis. I am just a girl with some history degrees and some time on her hands to devote to tumblr, and I want people to learn more so they can form their own opinions. With that said, I think there are two more things worth saying and then I will close out for the night.

First, Judaism is an ethno-religion. Our ethnicities have become mixed with the places that we have inhabited over the years in diaspora, which is how you have gotten Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, and even Ethiopian Jews. But if you do actual DNA testing on almost all of the Jews in diaspora, the testing shows that we come from the same place: the Levant. No matter how pale or dark, Jews are still fundamentally one people, something we should never forget (and anyone who tries to put racial hierarchy into paleness of Jews: legit, screw you. One people). Anyway, unlike other religious communities, we have an indigenous homeland because we have an ethnic homeland. It’s small, and there are many Jews in diaspora who choose not to return to it, like myself. But that homeland is ours (just as much as it is rightfully Palestinians, because we are both indigenous to the region. For everyone who hasn’t read my other posts on the issue, I’m not explaining this again. Just see: one, two, and three, the post that prompted this ask). This is different from Christians, for example, who basically just conquered all of Europe and whose religion is not dependent on your race or background. You can be a lapsed Christian and you are still white, latinx, black, etc right? I am a lapsed Jew, religiously speaking, and will still never escape that I am ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish.

Second, I think you raise a really good point about other religious states. There are many other religious majority states in the world (all of these countries have an official state religion), and a lot of them are committing a lot of atrocities right now (don't even get me started on Saudi Arabia). I have seen other posts and other authors write about this better than I ever could, but I am going to do my best to articulate why, because of this, criticism of Israel as a state, versus criticism of the Israeli Government, is about ... 9 times out of 10 inherently antisemitic.

We should all be able to criticize governments. That is a healthy part of the democratic process and it is a healthy part of being part of the world community. But there are 140 dictatorships in the world, and the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel 45 times since 2013. Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council, it has has received more resolutions concerning Israel than on the rest of the world combined. This is compared to like … 1 for Myanmar, 1 for South Sudan, and 1 for North Korea.

Israel is the world’s only Jewish majority state. You want to talk about “ethnic cleansing” and “repressive governments”? I can give you about five other governments and world situations right now, off the top of my head, that are very stark, very brutal, very (in some cases) simple examples of either or both. If a person is ‘using their platform’ to Israel-bash, but they are not currently speaking about the atrocities in Myanmar, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, South Sudan, or even, dare I say, the ethnonationalism of the Hindu Nationalist Party in India, then, at the very least, their activism is a little bit performative. They are chasing the most recent ‘hot button’ issue they saw in an instagraphic, and they probably want to be woke and maybe want to do the right thing. And no one come at me and say it is because you don’t “know anything about Myanmar.” Most people know next to nothing about the Middle East crisis as well. At best, people are inconsistent, they may be a hypocrite, and, whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, they are either unintentionally or intentionally buying into antisemitic narratives. They might even be an antisemite.

I like to think (hope, maybe) that most people don’t hate Jews. If anything, they just follow what they’ve been told, and they tend to digest what everyone is taking about. But there is a reason this is the global narrative that has gained traction, and I guarantee it has at least something to do with the star on the Israeli flag.

I know that was a very long answer to your question, but I hope that gave you some insight.

As a sidenote: I keep recommending books, so I am going to just put a master list of every book I have ever recommended at the bottom of anything I do now, because the list keeps growing. So, let’s go in author alphabetical order from now on.

One Country by Ali Abunimah Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Noam Chayut If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State by Daniel Gordis Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis The Deadly Embrace by Ilana Kass And Bard O'Neill Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate by Tom Segev Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

#ask #jew tag

[weirdestbooks]

Secret States Chapter 14

Figuring Out America

America POV

A faint buzzing noise began pulling my mind out of sleep. My thoughts were muddled and I couldn't recognize the noise. Sleep kept it pulling down on my brain, and for once, I let it win. I began sinking deeper into sleep before I heard a voice. I groaned and moved my face into the pillow, trying to stay asleep.

"Dad. You need to wake up." The voice pierced into my tired mind and I began pulling open my eyes and lifting up my head, seeing NATO standing in my room.

"Nate?" I questioned, eyes drooping and my head dropping back towards the pillow. This is why I hated sleeping. I always felt so tired when I woke up. I'm NATO sighed.

"As much as I like making sure you sleep, now isn't the time. UN wants you to meet them and the other organizations to talk about you being a union." NATO explained. That woke me up slightly and I began pulling my body off the bed, rubbing at my still drooping eyes.

"Why? There were, and are countries that are technically unions too. Why do they want to see me?" I said as I stood up and yawned, before remembering what I had done before I fell asleep.

"Oh no." I said. I had cried on Maman. Now she was going to worry about me. My family was already suspicious enough after I freaked out about Uncle North asking about the 1860s. Now my family was going to be concerned for me.

What if they tried to help me? They would just see how much of a weak, worthless failure I am, and realize I'm not worth their time. If they find about any of this, I won't be able to prove Dad wrong. I didn't need anyone's help. I was fine on my own.

I couldn't be seen as weak. I couldn't. Sharing my difficult history would just make me seem weak. If they saw me as weak I wouldn't be able to protect my kids. I had failed to protect them too many times before. I had to be strong. I had to be unbreakable.

I was the United States of America. I wasn't allowed to be weak.

"Dad? Are you alright?" NATO asked. I nodded. NATO didn't look convinced, but he didn't question it.

"UN also asked for me to come with you. I'll meet you in your car when you're ready. Please don't fall back asleep." NATO said, walking out of my room.

I groaned. I didn't want to do UN's interrogation, but it's not like I had a choice. ——————————————————

UN's POV

I was waiting in an empty meeting room with the other unions, waiting for America to show up. I wanted to discuss America's claims, the fact that he was a union. He had the black eyes like the rest of us unions, but so did his state, New York, which makes me think that black eyes aren't just reserved to unions.

I looked up as America opened the door, not wearing sunglasses for once. While I had seen America's eyes before, it was brief, and quick. I don't think he liked showing them. NATO followed America, his father, into the room before they both took a seat at the table.

"So you know why you're here?" African Union, or AU asked. America nodded.

"How can you be a union?" ASEAN asked, jumping right into the questions, with the question I knew we all wanted the answer too. NATO snorted.

"Britain's a union to, kinda technically. Why are you so confused by Dad being one when Britain never kept the fact that he was a political union secret?" He questioned. I paused at his question.

I had never thought about that. Britain was a political union, but that was common knowledge, or at least public knowledge, so it was never a big deal. But America being a union was a secret. Not many countries knew about it.

That's what made it strange. America said it was because the states didn't want him to, and I understood that he probably couldn't argue against it. I knew that unions, depending on how much influence the countries or states or territories or whatever made them up, were sometimes at the mercy of what their parts decided.

Their decisions were the products of decisions their parts made, even if it wasn't what they personally believed. But America hadn't let anything slip about it he wanted to tell anyone. He seemed cautious about people knowing, but it could be concern for his states, his children, that caused it. Not because he wanted people to know.

America was always a bit of a private person. I always thought it was because of his isolation that other countries had told me about. How he spend almost a century ignoring people and doing his own thing. And even after being forced into global politics by the world wars and becoming a world power, I always though his want for privacy originated from that and the Cold War.

I never imagined any if this.

"We understand how Britain is a political union. We knew about that. We didn't know about America, and the way he works is different than America." EU said. NATO nodded, and looked towards America.

"I'm a union because I cannot be a country because I violate three requirements of a country, and my government follows the definition of a union more than it does the definition of a country. My constitution even refers to me as a union." America explained.

"What requirements of a country don't you follow?" Organization of American States, or OAS asked.

"Definite territory, sovereignty over an area, and one government, although I'm not really sure if the last one is a requirement, but I have over 350 governments, and I don't think a country is supposed to have that." America said, smiling slightly.

"350?!" Caribbean Community or CC questioned. That was a high number. I thought America only had 50 states, and his territories. Were some of the governments included town governments or something? There's no way America could have that many sovereign pieces.

"There is no way you have that many governments. Not even UN has that many governments." World Health Organization, or WHO (Yes we make fun of him for that name. Why wouldn't we?) cut it. America shrugged.

"Well I do." He said, amusement glinting in his eyes as he tried to hide the smile on his face, "I have my states, and then the tribes. There are 326 Native American reservations in my country. I have no power, or little power in those reservations. They're managed by one or more tribes, like Havasupai or Miccosukee."

"Your native people's countryhumans are alive?" OAS asked. America nodded.

"Thankfully." He said, his voice quiet. NATO puts his hand on America's shoulder and whispered something in his ear. America shook his head and NATO put his hand down and gave America-his father, a sad and resigned look.

What was that about? I didn't get a chance to think much on it before BRICS spoke up.

"How are you even considered a country if you have over 350 governments. How has no one seen all of those countryhumans?" He asked. America shrugged.

"You guys are idiots. Plus my children, or most of them at least, kept themselves hidden. The tribes don't stay in this world very often either. They never did before colonization, and with their history and cultures in risk of being lost forever, they'd rather spend time with their people keeping as much of their culture alive as possible." America explained.

That made since, from what I knew at least. I didn't know much about America's history, or the history of my parts, and learning about my different pieces was always something I enjoyed, especially since it was rare. Not many countries enjoyed talking about their past.

"Why don't you get involved with the reservations? It sounds like you get involved with the states frequently, but you've neglected to mention how you run the reservations." OAS asked

"That's like asking me why I don't govern Mexico. I'm not going to govern another nation." America said. I froze up. Did America recognize the reservations as independent nations? I had always prided myself on knowing the names of every country, and every who hoped to be a country, like Kosovo, who was still bugging me about her UN membership.

How did I miss 326 countryhumans that were recognized as nation by the nation they used to be a part of?

"I'm sorry, but did you say your Native American reservations were nations?" League of Arab States said. America raised a hand and shook it in a so-so motion before sighing.

"My government recognizes them as being domestic dependent nations. Basically independent, but also not. It's a weird and complicated relationship between my government and theirs. They don't hold any strong connections to the state or federal fovernment, which is a big reason for why they're considered separate entities." America explained.

"What about the states?" Nordic Council asked.

"The states and I share sovereignty. I handle things that involve the entire country, multiple states, and international things. The states handle internal things like education and whatnot on their own. That's why I couldn't  impose a federal quarantine when you were asking me to. That's not a power I have. It's one the states have. Quarantining was up to them and their governments." America explained.

Now I felt bad. I had been one of the people pressuring America the most to impose a federal quarantine. To find out that he wasn't able to do that makes me feel like an asshole. I had just been putting extra stress on America, and finding out about his children, that extra stress probably wasn't good for him.

"Seriously? What can you do then?" Union of South American Nations (USAN) asked. America laughed.

"In terms of what I control directly, not a lot. Congress, who is in charge of lawmaking, declaring war, making treaties, setting the federal budget and a whole lot more, is made up of people the the states elect. So Congress is more of the states than me. I can have some influence in Congress, but general decisions in Congress are based around what each senator and representative wants for their states." America explained.

That was common though. Decisions by unions were normally based around the countries deciding what action the union should take for its own best interests. America really did seem like a union. There where just little pieces that didn't make sense. America's states got no international relations, outside of what America chooses that is.

That wasn't something that happened in unions. While I do believe that America is a union, I also thing that he might not be a union in the same sense me and the other unions in this room where. But if that was true, what exactly was the United States of America?

I tuned back into the conversation as Arab Maghreb Union asked another question. I felt bad questioning America like this. He seemed uncomfortable with it, but that might just be because he had kept the very thing we're questioning him about secret. America was a very confusing person.

"What powers do you have, powers that are just yours and have nothing to do with your state?" Arab Maghreb Union asked.

"I don't have a lot. The executive branch is fully mine, but it's main purpose is enforcing the laws that the states decide in Congress. That branch, through the president, can veto laws, but mainly they enforce laws through the various government organizations like the FBI or the CIA. The only power that branch has that is not affected by Congress is executive orders, but those don't have the same effect as laws made by Congress do." America explained.

"Are you saying that you don't have any real power?"  Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) asked leaning forwards over the table. I saw a flash of fear in America's eyes that was quickly hidden by the disinterested look he's been wearing the entire meeting.

"I do have power. I just don't have full control over it. It's the same story for all of you." He snapped, becoming defensive. CELAC looked confused at America's reaction before her eyes widened in realization.

"Lo siento. It's just weird thinking of you as a union when I've, we've always thought of you as a country. I didn't mean any offense to you. It's a just big change, thinking of you as a union." She said.

"Nothing's changed that much." America said. Maybe not for him, but for us, a lot had. We were no strangers to countries being unions, USSR taught us that much, but America being one and keeping it secret was strange. Britain had also been around when America first became a country, so it's not he was the only country that was made up of states.

So why did he hid it? I know he said it was the states choice, but I think that's answer is bullshit. Sure, it might hold some truth, but it definitely wasn't the full reason.

"Maybe not for you, but for us a lot is different. Especially because you keep acting different and mature, instead of the incompetent idiotic fool you normally act like, no offense. We're not sure what to make of all this." Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIS) said.

"And how can you be a union if your states don't act like counties?" International Organization of Turkic Culture (TÜRKSOY) said.

"Because I'm not entirely a union. I also have characteristics of a country, and I'm also an empire. So I don't really know what the hell I am. I'm considered a country by other countries, I'm considered a union by my governments and my people, and I'm considered an empire because of my overseas territories." America explained.

"I though you said you were a union?" AU asked. America shrugged.

"I am. I'm just a lot of other things as well. I don't really know what I'm supposed to be. My states and I have always considered me a union, but the countries don't and consider me a country. And since I'm not like the rest of you and do have characteristics of a country, I am a union, just not the same kind of union as the rest of you." America explained before standing up.

"Where are you going?" BRICS asked.

"I'm done with this interrogation. I'm leaving." America said before leaving, NATO watching him before pulling out his phone.

"What are you doing?" USAN asked, tilting her head to the side.

"Calling someone." NATO said, "Dad's going to need it."

What did that mean?

#secret states by weird #weird’s wattpad stories #countryhumans #statehumans #writing

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/white-house-admission-on-pandemic-overshadows-trumps-lastpush-for-reelection-cnn/

White House admission on pandemic overshadows Trump's last push for reelection - CNN

“We are not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday, arguing that “proper mitigation factors” like therapies and vaccines should be the priority.

The window into the administration’s thinking came as Trump spent the weekend constructing a giant confidence trick for voters, declaring the country was “rounding the corner beautifully” in the battle against Covid-19.

The latest signs that Trump is putting his political priorities ahead of his duty of care to the American people come as the President plans a frantic week of packed rallies that flout good social distancing practice.

View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling

But the weekend of grim health data and controversy means the climax of the campaign will be overshadowed by the pandemic — a tough reality for Trump since 60% of Americans in a recent CNN Poll disapproved of his crisis management. The President has all along downplayed the threat from the virus. He mocked mask wearing, turning the practice into a culture war issue, and pressured Republican governors to open their states before the virus was under control, helping to unleash a wave of infections in the Sun Belt during the summer. As a result, his handling of the pandemic is a central campaign issue, and his behavior in recent days signals there will be no change to the White House’s approach to the pandemic if he wins the election — no matter how bad the virus gets this winter.

The final week of the campaign opens with Trump trailing Biden in national popular vote polls by 9 or 10 points and by smaller margins in many of the states that will decide the election on November 3. If the polling is accurate, Trump does have a narrow path to reelection but will need to make good on his vow to massively expand his political base with new conservative voters, and he will have to almost run the table in competitive states.

Remarkably, more than 58 million Americans have cast early ballots, surpassing all early voting in the 2016 election, meaning that it will be more difficult for either candidate to shake up the dynamics of the race at the last minute. Biden appears to have more routes to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory, but Democrats are nervous after a late surge by Trump in 2016 carried him to a shock victory over Hillary Clinton.

“I’m one of those folks, or competitors, it’s not over till the bell rings. And I feel superstitious when I predict anything other than going to be a hard fight,” Biden said in an interview aired on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday when asked whether Trump could still defeat him. “We feel good about where we are. But, you know, I don’t underestimate how he plays.”

Meadows sends shock waves through Washington

The extent to which the White House has all but given up fighting the pandemic — for instance, public briefings by top government scientists have disappeared — was made clear by Meadows.

The issue with his comments is that a vaccine, even if it is approved by regulators in the coming months, is unlikely to be available to all Americans by well into next year. The kind of state-of-the-art treatments that helped Trump beat his case of Covid-19 are not yet available to the general public or the tens of thousands of Americans now getting infected every day. Public health officials like Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC, have said masks are one of the most powerful weapons to fight the virus.

Biden leapt on Meadows’ comments as he tries to make a case that Trump’s denial and downplaying of the greatest public health crisis in 100 years means he should be disqualified from serving a second term.

He said the White House chief of staff had “stunningly admitted this morning that the administration has given up on even trying to control this pandemic, that they’ve given up on their basic duty to protect the American people.

“This wasn’t a slip by Meadows, it was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.”

The President and Pence — the head of the coronavirus task force — have consistently refused to model the social distancing and mask wearing that is the most effective way to cut infections until treatments and vaccines arrive.

On Sunday for instance, the President mixed with supporters who were unmasked and closely huddled together, offering fist bumps and signing “Make America Great Again” hats.

That is exactly the wrong message the President should be sending given a new modeling study from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that notes that in September only 49% of Americans reported that they “always” wear a mask in public. If that number was 95%, more than 100,000 lives could be saved from Covid-19 through February, according to the study.

In a new opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned that it might be time to consider a limited and temporary national mask mandate.

“Deaths are starting to rise again, and vaccines won’t be widely available until next year even in the best-case scenario. Everyone banding together to wear masks, for a limited time, will be the least costly way for society to weather a difficult winter,” Gottlieb wrote.

Pence an ‘essential worker’

Even as news broke of the multiple infections in the vice president’s office, the White House declared he was an “essential worker” — a designation normally reserved for first responders and front-line medical staff — and said he would go on with his campaign program.

Pence, who was wearing a mask, clapped and jogged up to his podium at an event in North Carolina Sunday, the latest attempt by Trump and his team to foster a false impression of normality as the crisis deepens every single day. He never brought up the infections among his inner circle, barely mentioning the virus at the rally.

But the virus is now rising in 35 states and is steady in 15. New infections rose past 80,000 cases on both Friday and Saturday, breaking previous single-day records. US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams cautioned Friday that hospitalizations are up in 75% of the jurisdictions across the country. Deaths will likely also soon start rising.

The utter disconnect between the fast worsening reality and the behavior of Trump and Pence prompted David Gergen, an adviser to presidents of both parties who was speaking on CNN, to condemn what he said was, “a President and a vice president putting their own peoples’ lives at risk to advance their own political good fortunes.”

Build your own road to 270 electoral votes with CNN’s interactive map

The comments by Meadows appeared to be in line with the philosophy of White House adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, who has the President’s ear and has infuriated government scientists on the White House coronavirus task force. Atlas has cast doubt on mask wearing and appears to favor an approach akin to herd immunity — letting the virus circulate freely in society to build resistance among citizens. Such an approach could cost hundreds of thousands more lives, according to William Haseltine, chair and president of ACCESS Health International.

Meadows’ statement also had troubling echoes for another expert.

“I hear a lot of herd immunity in that statement and that is horrifying,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of Medicine at George Washington University, told CNN on Sunday.

“We can control the pandemic,” said Reiner, citing Washington, DC’s low incidence of the virus after earlier spikes and crediting mask wearing for the improved situation..

“What the chief of staff is saying is surrender. No, no, no, we get everyone to mask up — that is how we get the rates down.”

The responsibilities of leaders

The comments by Meadows caused awkward moments for several Republican senators, in town to advance the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to a final floor vote on Monday.

“We all have control, and we all have responsibility as leaders to set an example that consists of doing the right thing to stop the spread,” the second-ranking Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, told reporters.

“There are certain elements of it that yes, we cannot control. It’s a virus. It’s very aggressive. It wants to infect a lot of people, but there are things about our own behavior that we can control.”

The other South Dakota senator, Mike Rounds, said the government should “definitely not” stop trying to control Covid-19. Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun advised throwing “the kitchen sink at getting the virus under control.”

The new cases of Covid-19 in the White House could not be closer to Pence.

Marc Short, his chief of staff, tested positive on Saturday, the vice president’s office announced in a statement late in the day. Sources told CNN that Marty Obst, a senior adviser to Pence who is not a government employee, and at least three staffers in Pence’s office also tested positive for the virus in recent days. Zach Bauer, a longtime aide and one of the staffers who works closest with Pence, has tested positive for coronavirus, CNN learned Sunday.

New fears about coronavirus at the White House will not stop Trump swearing in Barrett after her expected Senate confirmation on Monday — despite the fact that her Rose Garden announcement ceremony last month turned into what the government’s top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci called a “superspreader” event.

The event is due to take place at 9 p.m. ET, outside, a source familiar with the invitation told CNN.

#admission #house #overshadows #pandemic #reelection #trump #white #Politics

[mideastsoccer]

Saudi sports diplomacy: A train barrelling towards an abyss

By James M. Dorsey

 A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

 Saudi efforts to position the kingdom as a key player in global soccer resembles a train crashing multiple times with the locomotive continuing to barrel ever closer to an abyss.

 The train’s last crash, Saudi Arabia’s decision to drop its US$392 million bid to acquire English Premier League club Newcastle United, has not brought the train to a standstill.

 Almost simultaneously, Saudi Arabia, a potential Middle Eastern powerhouse on the pitch, formally appealed against a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling that it facilitated the piracy of Premier League matches. Saudi Arabia initially welcomed the ruling, claiming it was in its favour.

 A WTO inquiry concluded that Saudi courts had stopped the Premier League from acting against BeoutQ, a pirate broadcaster widely believed to have had at least tacit Saudi government support.

 BeoutQ was pirating the broadcast rights of beinQ, a Qatari global sport and entertainment network. beinQ was banned in Saudi Arabia as part of the more than three-year old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

 Repeated crashes since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched his effort five years ago to turn Saudi Arabia into a powerhouse in soccer as well as the global governance of the sport have tarnished rather than enhanced the image of a 21st century forward and outward-looking kingdom that he has tried to promote.

 If anything, Saudi sports diplomacy has proven to be a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s challenged domestic, regional, and foreign policies.

 The diplomacy bears the hallmarks of the assertive style associated with Prince Mohammed as well as of Turki al-Sheikh, a 39-year old brash and often blunt former honorary president of Saudi soccer club Al Taawoun based in Buraidah, a stronghold of religious ultra-conservatism, and a former bodyguard of the crown prince.

 Mr. Al-Sheikh served as Saudi sports czar until late 2018 when he was shifted to overseeing the kingdom’s burgeoning entertainment sector in the wake of the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Mr. Al-Sheikh has not been linked to the Khashoggi murder.

 The Newcastle United failure and the WTO appeal suggest that the appointment in February of Prince Abdul Aziz bin Turki Al-Faisal, a 37-year old racing driver and businessman, as head of a newly created sports ministry does not signal a realization that financial muscle coupled with varying degrees of coercion does not guarantee success.

 The ministry replaced the General Sports Authority that had been headed by Mr. Al-Sheikh until his reassignment.

 Mr. Al-Sheikh sought to position Saudi Arabia, counter Qatari sports diplomacy crowned by its hosting of the 2022 World Cup, and enhance domestic entertainment opportunities through a host of costly initiatives, many of which came to naught.

 He launched a flawed effort to become a major player in soccer-crazy Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, that sparked ridicule and anger from both fans and club officials.

 Mr. Al Sheikh unsuccessfully tried to use Morocco’s bid for the 2026 World Cup hosting rights to bully the North African state into supporting the boycott of Qatar.

 He created a new Middle Eastern and South Asian soccer federation independent of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, that collapsed within months.

 Finally, Mr. Al Sheikh helped engineer a failed bid, together with the UAE, to buy influence in FIFA with a US$25 billion investment in two new competitions through venture capital fund Softbank.

 From Prince Abdul Aziz’s perspective, Saudi sports diplomacy’s latest Newcastle United crash may not be all bad news.

 Tens of thousands of Newcastle fans have signed a petition demanding an independent investigation of the Premier League’s handling of the Saudi bid that led to the kingdom withdrawing its interest.

 The fans charged that the Premier League had been influenced by Qatar and critics of Saudi Arabia’s troubled human rights record and alleged involvement in broadcast piracy who have no relationship with English soccer.

 “Now, the Saudis have a large percentage of a Northern English city fighting to defend them, to say their regime isn't as vile and wicked as it is, to say they deserve to be accepted by Western society. Why buy #NUFC (Newcastle United Football Club) for £300m (US$392 million), when you can get everything you want for £17m (US$22.2 million)?” tweeted writer Andrew Lawes.

 The Newcastle experience could reinforce Prince Mohammed’s belief, shared with his UAE counterpart, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, that the public diplomacy and soft power fruits of harnessing sports outstrip reputational risks.

 Simon Pearce, Abu Dhabi’s director of strategic communications and a director of Manchester City, the British club bought by the UAE crown prince’s brother, said as much in emails that were leaked in 2018 and allegedly obtained from the hacked inbox of Yusuf Al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador in Washington.

 Talking about the United States’ political environment, Mr. Pearce argued that Emirati interests were best served by associating UAE investments in US soccer with City Football Group, the Abu Dhabi’s soccer investment vehicle, rather than the government.

 Mr. Pearce said this would allow the government to shield itself from criticism of the UAE’s criminalization of homosexuality, progressive but mixed record on women’s rights, and refusal to formally recognize Israel despite maintaining close security and commercial relations with the Jewish state.

 Prince Abdul Aziz may be able to get some mileage out of the support of Newcastle fans, but it will take a lot more to stop Saudi sports diplomacy’s locomotive from falling off a cliff.

 The sports effort’s poor performance cannot be disassociated from Saudi Arabia’s larger reputational problems resulting from its handling of the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, its arrests of government critics and activists, and its foreign policy fiascos in Yemen and Lebanon.

 "Football was once the game of the people," said Uri Levy, the editor of Babagol, a soccer news website. "But it is now very much a geopolitical soft-power playing field."

 Saudi Arabia’s decision to fight the WTO’s broadcast piracy ruling in the wake of the Newcastle United experience suggests that Prince Abdul Aziz may be fighting an uphill battle in efforts to stabilize the kingdom’s sports diplomacy and create an environment that would allow it to play a soft power card on a scale larger than a mid-sized city in the northeast of England.

 Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He is also a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture in Germany.

#soccer #football #Sports #sport #saudi arabia #uae #Newcastle United

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Sen. Bernie Sanders objectively did not have a good Super Tuesday. He won just three states outright (Colorado, Utah and Vermont) and across the board, he underperformed expectations.

He does seem on track to win delegate-rich California — but because so many voters mail in their ballots, it’ll be weeks before we know the final vote there.

But at this point, it does seem as if Sanders hasn’t succeeded in turning out the voters he needs to win, and now some are arguing that to find a path to the nomination, he has to stop running as an insurgent. So is it time for Sanders to adopt a new strategy?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I’m not sure I accept the premise of that argument? Obviously, being an insurgent is a core part of Sanders’s identity. And a lot of the party is attracted to that. (He is still averaging almost 30 percent in national polls!) But, of course, that doesn’t preclude him from doing some things to reach out to new voters.

For example, a majority of voters in Super Tuesday exit polls said they supported Sanders’s key policies of Medicare for All and free college — but, paradoxically, a plurality of voters in many states said they wanted to return to former President Barack Obama’s policies. And perhaps as a nod to that, Sanders released an ad today featuring Obama saying nice things about him.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): So, with the big caveat that we do need to wait and see how Sanders performed in California, which is where he put a lot of resources, it does seem like his choice to bank on voters who don’t normally turn out in high numbers (especially young people) backfired.

In some states, the share of young voters who turned out was actually lower than it was in 2016. That is not a good sign for Sanders.

But I don’t know if his “insurgency” is to blame.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): To me, that Obama commercial feels like a bit of an admission of failure. Wouldn’t the time to run a commercial saying “Obama loves me” be in the run-up to a bunch of primaries in the heavily black Deep South, not afterward?

nrakich: I don’t know if I buy the argument that Sanders screwed up by not being more aggressively conciliatory before Super Tuesday.

The events of Sunday and Monday — the party clearly deciding on former Vice President Joe Biden, and multiple establishment politicians giving up their personal ambitions to do so — were extraordinary.

And would have been very difficult to predict.

A week ago, I ran a table titled “Sanders is forecasted to rack up wins on Super Tuesday“!

I think that until basically Monday, when it was too late, Sanders was totally justified in thinking that divided opposition would allow him to win Super Tuesday if he just stuck to his usual schtick.

perry: I agree with that.

ameliatd: But there was probably some hubris on Sanders’s part in assuming that he could rely mainly on low-turnout voters’ excitement about him.

sarahf: Wait, aren’t you inherently arguing, Nathaniel, that Sanders still needed to pivot at some point?

nrakich: Yeah, maybe, Sarah, but really I’m just saying Sanders has so far made perfectly rational strategic decisions with the information he had.

And now that he has the new information of his loss on Super Tuesday, the timing of this Obama ad makes sense.

ameliatd: I’ll disagree with that a little, Nathaniel — I think Sanders could have done more to reach out to people who are not in his core base once he started doing well in the early states. And maybe being conciliatory could have helped. Or at least he could have, like, not doubled down on his comments praising Fidel Castro last week.

sarahf: I guess the counterargument, though, is: Did a tweet like this ever make sense for Sanders?

I've got news for the Republican establishment. I've got news for the Democratic establishment. They can't stop us.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 22, 2020

It’s weird and it’s complicated and, as you said earlier, Nathaniel, part of Sanders’s appeal is that he is a political outsider and isn’t afraid to call the establishment out. But he’s also not running as an underdog this year, and he’s trying to win the Democratic nomination, so at some point, you have to win … some Democrats. Right?

perry: My view is that Sanders’s losses in Minnesota and the Northeast were related to the consolidation of the establishment. He had no control over that. It was surprising, as Nathaniel said.

The total blowouts in the South were not shocking — but I do think running an ad about how Obama loves him would have been most useful before a lot of the South voted. So we will agree to disagree on that!

But Sarah, I think that tweet was fine and is being overblown.

Sanders’s appeal in the general election is partly based on running as an outsider to both parties.

nrakich: Yeah, tweets are overrated. Only about a fifth of Americans are even on Twitter!

perry: Voters don’t think they are in the establishment either.

nrakich: And I guess I would point out that Sanders has tried to make inroads with voters he wasn’t strong with in 2016. We’ve written about this: Sanders invested a lot in Latino outreach in Nevada and California, and he has improved his numbers with black voters to an impressive degree.

ameliatd: OK, so a lot of things moved very quickly and somewhat unpredictably in the past few days, and none of those things were helpful to Sanders. What should he do now? Again with the caveat that we don’t know what happened in California, it does seem like Sanders has to start appealing to some non-young Democrats.

sarahf: Right, next Tuesday six more states vote: Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota, Washington, Missouri and Mississippi.

So does Sanders pivot now? Will he do a bit better with at least some of those states no matter what? (Three of them are at least sorta kinda in the West, which is where Sanders is supposed to be strongest.)

nrakich: That’s actually a pretty good group of states for Sanders. Sanders is strong in Western states (I think North Dakota kinda counts as culturally Western). And he scored a shocking win in Michigan last cycle, which many Democrats there probably remember.

However, Missouri and Mississippi, as Southern (or Southern-ish) states with significant black populations, definitely do feel like Biden states. Also, next week we’ll get the results of the Democrats Abroad primary, which should be good for Sanders.

ameliatd: I would assume that Bloomberg getting out of the race will be helpful to Biden in Michigan, though.

nrakich: Yeah, that’s going to be the barnburner of the evening. It’s the closest of next week’s races per our forecast (as of Tuesday morning), and it’s also worth the most delegates of any state voting next Tuesday.

perry: Sanders has a bunch of blocs where he is weak: 1. older black voters; 2. college-educated white women; 3. basically anyone over age 45.

And I don’t see how easy it is for him to pivot to win these groups, because his whole campaign is about shaking things up, and these might be groups that are resistant to big change.

ameliatd: There was one very consistent aspect of Sanders’s voters last night (and in the first four states) — he gets more support from men than women. That is going to be hard for him to change.

sarahf: So this is from The Washington Post’s analysis of Super Tuesday exit polls, and as Perry says — aside from really young voters, really liberal voters and Hispanic voters — Sanders really does have a bunch of blocs where he is weak.

So he has to at least start trying to win some of these voters from Biden, right? Or is there an argument to be made that Sanders should double down on his current strategy?

One thing we talked about on the live blog is that if it’s a two-person race by March 15, that could be bad for Biden and good for Sanders, just considering their skills as debaters.

perry: Is Sanders good at debates? (Conceding that Biden is fairly bad at them.)

sarahf: Sanders is more reliable, I’d say.

ameliatd: The problem is that without high turnout among his core groups, how can Sanders stay the course and win? I keep coming back to the fact that young voters have not been turning out in high numbers. That was a big part of his strategic bet, and it just doesn’t seem to be paying off.

nrakich: Not to, like, invalidate this entire chat, but I’m not sure this debate is even relevant. I think Sanders will double down on his current strategy, because it’s just who he is. He is a progressive insurgent bomb-thrower, and he has been remarkably consistent about it throughout his career.

perry: I agree with that Nathaniel.

In fact, Sanders does too. He tweeted this on Wednesday:

This campaign is different. We have received 8.7 million contributions from over 1.9 million donors.

We don't hold high-dollar fundraisers. We don't have a super PAC spending millions of dollars on TV ads. We don't have a single billionaire donor.

We have the people.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 4, 2020

ameliatd: One possibility, I guess, is that Biden’s sudden surge could galvanize Sanders supporters and convince them to turn out in higher numbers.

perry: But Nathaniel, are you suggesting that Sanders can’t pivot or won’t pivot?

He did get better on racial issues and outreach to black voters and Latino voters from 2016 to 2020. So he can do better outreach to women and older people? Yes, right?

nrakich: Yeah, that’s a good point, Perry.

Maybe the distinction is that his rhetoric won’t change, but maybe the strategy of his campaign operation will?

ameliatd: But again, I keep coming back to the groups where Sanders is weak. It’s not obvious to me that Warren supporters who see the writing on the wall for their candidate will throw their support to Sanders. And that’s a problem for him.

perry: Amelia, I agree — right now, I don’t think Warren supporters are going in bulk to Sanders if she drops out.

His first move should be trying to get her to endorse him enthusiastically, and I have no idea how that will happen.

ameliatd: What would it mean for the strategy of his campaign operation to change without his rhetoric changing, Nathaniel? I don’t want to sound too down on Sanders, but part of his brand is his rhetorical consistency. How does he change his campaign’s outreach without changing how he talks about his candidacy?

Getting a Warren endorsement would be a big deal, Perry, I agree. Maybe Sanders’s mistake was not being more conciliatory to Warren.

perry: Well, the Obama ad was a shift. Sanders thinks Obama was too centrist as president, but he did run the ad. So I think Sanders can adapt.

nrakich: Right, I think that’s a great example. Lots of people might see that ad and think, “Sanders is trying to reach out to me.” Meanwhile, at rallies, Sanders can keep delivering his usual applause lines.

perry: I think reaching older voters is hard because my sense is they are wary of free college and debt forgiveness (“I paid for college myself, why can’t this generation, etc.”)

The socialist label is hard too, as is the perception that Biden is electable and next in line.

nrakich: Yeah, I feel like the canary in the coal mine will be if Sanders ever begins to deemphasize the “socialism” label.

I feel like he probably won’t. But IMO that is a big obstacle for him winning over both older Democrats in the primary and swing voters in the general.

perry: He should downplay or recast the socialism hat immediately. Give a big speech about how he is a liberal Democrat and that “socialism” is not a big part of his political identity.

ameliatd: I’ve also felt just kind of a sense of exhaustion from the voters I’ve talked to. The idea that Biden was finally getting it together seemed like a relief to a lot of people I spoke with over the weekend and on Monday.

That’s a difficult sentiment to quantify, of course, but I wonder how many Democrats really have an appetite for a knock-down, drag-out fight between Biden and Sanders at this point.

perry: I think that’s right, Amelia.

The group in the party that wants a fight might just be the 30 percent of voters already with Sanders.

sarahf: Right, and as you said earlier, Perry, if his whole campaign’s message is about shaking things up, that might not be an attractive message for a lot of these voters if they’re resistant to big change. Buttigieg had tried to attack him on this front in some of the debates, and I think maybe that’s the biggest problem with a Sanders pivot. He can’t really back down from that message of systemic change.

ameliatd: Also, I wonder if Biden has benefited from Bloomberg being in the race, if only by making him seem a little more liberal and palatable.

perry: I’ve been fairly down on Sanders in this chat. What does his comeback look like? The race has flipped a bunch of times. Surely it can flip again.

nrakich: Exactly.

Maybe Biden is in for another scrutiny cycle now.

Maybe Sanders gets some momentum from some of the good states he has coming up.

Maybe Warren drops out and endorses him.

Or maybe she stays in and her delegates are what Sanders needs to get a majority at a contested convention!

Sanders-Warren unity ticket, anyone?

ameliatd: Part of his comeback has to hinge on doing really well in California, which could still happen. I’ve been critical of Sanders’s outreach campaign in this chat, but he was smart about how he approached that state. And we won’t know the full results there for a while.

nrakich: That’s a great point, Amelia. If California is strong enough for him, it’s still possible that Sanders will be the delegate leader after Super Tuesday!

ameliatd: And I don’t know, maybe his supporters were taking him for granted on Super Tuesday and they get really motivated in the next round of states.

I do agree with you, Perry, that this race has turned around so many times that it feels dangerous to assume everything is settling into place for Biden.

sarahf: Right, we are entering a new phase of the race. The field isn’t as crowded, and to some extent it’s a two-person race now, which will change both Biden’s and Sanders’s strategy. The race can definitely flip again, and I do think Sanders will pivot in some way moving forward. The Obama ad is evidence of this even if its timing felt off.

Biden “won” Super Tuesday, but we’ve still got a ways to go. And Sanders is still very much in this race.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

[cargopantsman]

On the Topic of Tribes, Part II

Disclaimer and Table of Contents

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So in covering Tacitus' naming of the three major tribes, or at least geographic groupings; the Ingaevones, Istaevones, and Herminones, I have better generalized grasp of the distribution of the Germans that Rome was primarily concerned with in the first century BCE. Exploring the mentioned names of the Gambrivii and the Marsi turned into a bit of a disappointment since the Gambrivii appear to have gained no major notority and the Marsi were brutally exterminated in their sleep by Germanicus Caesar around 15 CE.

In his listing of tribes descended from Mannus, he does mention the Vandali, which should seem familiar to most due to their famous sacking of Rome itself in 455 CE (granted they took the long way around both geographically and temporally to do it).

Pliny the Elder includes the Vandali (or Vandili) as one of five main groups of the Germans. "There are five German races; the Vandili, parts of whom are the Burgundiones, the Varini, the Carini, and the Gutones ... [Ingaevones, Irminones, and Istaevones] ... the fifth race is that of the Peucini, who are also the Basternæ, adjoining the Daci previously mentioned." Natural History (4.28)

Now granted, this is the same Pliny the Elder that claims "Male corpses float on their backs but female corpses float on their faces as though nature were preserving their modesty even in death." Natural History (7.77)

Aaaaaanyway. Including the Vandals as a major subgroup of the Germanic peoples is sensible enough because it allows me to nicely fill in a big empty spot on my map. 

The Vandals contribute to an important linguistic division among Germanic peoples in that Scandinavia and the Ingaevones will branch into the North Germanic languages, the Istaevones and Herminones the West Germanic, and the Vandali the East Germanic/Gothic languages. The Vandalic/Gothic migration hit the shores of Northern Europe between the Oder and Vistula rivers prior to 200 BCE and had settlements in Silesia (the southern end of the Oder) by 120 BCE.

As concerns Rome, the Vandals were relatively quiet until the 2nd century CE. A footnote aptly summarizes their eventful future history: 22 [ The Vandals are said to have derived their name from the German word wendeln, "to wander." They began to be troublesome to the Romans A.D. 160, in the reigns of Aurelius and Verus. In A.D. 410 they made themselves masters of Spain in conjunction with the Alans and Suevi, and received for their share what from them was termed Vandalusia (Andalusia). In A.D. 429 they crossed into Africa under Genseric, who not only made himself master of Byzacium, Gaetulia, and part of Numidia, but also crossed over into Italy, A.D. 455, and plundered Rome. After the death of Genseric the Vandal power declined.]

As early as 200 BCE though, the Basternae enter the Greco-Roman historical record in the Balkans. Conflict followed in the first century BCE when the Basternae and other Sarmatian tribes resisted a Roman campaign to subjugate the Dardani and Moesi tribes north of Macedonia around 75 BCE. Gaius Scribonius Curio became the first Roman general to reach the river Danube with his army. Resistance from the Dacian area tribes persisted for decades under the command of Burebista, a Thracian king. Julius Caesar had plans set to fight on this eastern front, but was repeatedly punctured and was unable to attend. The Dacian/Thracian front collapsed anyway in that same year (44 BCE) upon the overthrow and death of Burebista. The Basternae, or Peucini, are debated to be of Germanic, Sarmatian, or Celtic origin, if not a mixture of all. Taking it on faith (read as: adding to my library list), Roger Batty in "Rome and the Nomads: the Pontic-Danubian region in Antiquity" argues that assigning an "ethnicity" to the Bastarnae is meaningless, as in the context of the Iron Age Pontic-Danubian region, with its multiple overlapping peoples and languages, ethnicity was a very fluid concept: it could and did change rapidly and frequently, according to socio-political vicissitudes. This was especially true of the Bastarnae, who are attested over a relatively vast area.

Tacitus relates "46. I am in doubt whether to reckon the Peucini, Venedi, and Fenni among the Germans or Sarmatians; although the Peucini, who are by some called Bastarnae, agree with the Germans in language, apparel, and habitations. All of them live in filth and laziness. The intermarriages of their chiefs with the Sarmatians have debased them by a mixture of the manners of that people." In this it clear that Tacitus would disagree with Pliny on the Basternae/Peucini counting as a fifth "race" of Germanic people due to this inter-nationality intermingling. The important point to draw from his mentioning of them at all is to highlight the extent of Germanic migration throughout central Europe. Not just along the Rhine border as stressed in the Gallic Wars and later Romano-Germanic skirmishes in the west, but also along the Roman provinces of Rhaetia, Noricum and Pannonia in the south and plunging deep into the eastern Black Sea regions where so many diverse ancient cultures collided.

All that remains to parse out of Tacitus' one line list of introductory tribes are the Suevi. . .

Let me tell you, this was, and still is a bit of a rabbit hole.

The Suevi, or Suebi, are mentioned often, to the extent that I'm not even sure what anyone is referring to. Julius Caesar describes them as "by far the largest and the most warlike nation of all the Germans." (Gallic War, 4.1) Strabo writes: "The country next the whole [eastern] bank [of the Rhine] is inhabited by the Suevi, who are also named Germans, but are superior both in power and number to the others, whom they drove out, and who have now taken refuge on this [western] side the Rhine." (Strabo, Geographica 4.3)

Later on within "Germania," Tacitus relates that "38. We have now to speak of the Suevi; who do not compose a single state, like the Catti or Tencteri, but occupy the greatest part of Germany, and are still distributed into different names and nations, although all hearing the common appellation of Suevi." A footnote for this paragraph continues; "207 [ The Suevi possessed that extensive tract of country lying between the Elbe, the Vistula, the Baltic Sea, and the Danube. They formerly had spread still further, reaching even to the Rhine. ...]"

The Suebi appear to take up the whole of Germania. To a point where Suebi might well be synonymous with German in its vague definition. At most it is handy to consider that mention of Suevi will encompass events in the south-west of Germania.

Beyond the expanse of space that the Suebi claim, there is a vast expanse of time between Caesar noting them during the Gallic wars up at least until the Third Council of Toledo, Spain where the Visigoth Kingdom of Toledo converted officially from Arianism to Catholicism, king Reccared I stated in its minutes that also "an infinite number of Suebi have converted" in 589 CE. It is from this "tribe" that we get the modern name of a region in Germany "Swabia."

Within the constraints of Latin, Suēbī is the nominative plural of Suēbus. According to the "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) William Smith, LLD, Ed." "SUE´BUS (Σούηβος), {is} a river on the north coast of Germany, between the Albis {Elbe} and Viadus {Oder}, which flows into the Baltic at a distance of 850 stadia to the west of the mouth of the Viadus, and which, according to Ptolemy (2.11.1), divided at its mouth into several branches. Notwithstanding these explicit statements, it is extremely difficult to identify the river, whence some regard it as the Peene, others as the Warne, and others again as the Viadus or Oder itself, or rather the central branch of it, which is called the Swine or Schweene {Świna in modern Poland}."

Within Germanic language considerations, the name Suebi stems from the Proto-Germanic *swēbaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *swé is a reflexive pronoun "self" leading *swēbaz to form "our own" as a sort of cultural identifier. This leads me to think that the use of Suebi might well be the formation of a larger cultural identity to delineate themselves from their Celtic/Gallic and Roman neighbors.

Tacitus later names a "Suevic Sea" in paragraph 45 that is equated with the modern Baltic Sea into which the Suebus river flows. This is as much evidence as I have at the moment for the claims that the Suevi originated in the Baltic region and migrated southwest. But to take a moment to hop north of the Baltic into Swe-den, where we see the PIE root *swé again shifting into Proto-Norse *Swihoniz, Proto-Germanic *Sweoniz and, as Tacitus calls them in Latin, Suiones.

Short of losing myself in a whirlwind of linguistics at this point I think I will settle on chalking Suebi to be a name brought about by a particular migration from Sweden to the mouth of the Oder/Suebus river and spreading westwards and south while arbitrarily considering the eastward migrating tribes will be the forerunners of our future Goths. (Yes, subsequent migrations from Scandivania will follow and displace the Gotlandic pioneers, but let's keep this simple for now.)

#projecttacitusgermania #tribes #germany #germania #rome #suebi #history #tactitus #projectnorsemyth

[propshophannah]

Part 1: So I'm reading the mixed race/mixed ethnicity threads and I couldn't help but relate a lot to the struggles. I'm half Mexican half Asian (I'm saying Asian here instead of a country because at least I know what to label it under these ridiculous categories) but I really hate it when I have to mark down what I am even though I'm not sure what the Mexican "race" is? Like, I know I'm biracial but is the other non-Asian part white? (Cuz I do not look white at all, and neither does

Part 2: the Mexican half of my family) but Hispanic is technically considered white? The worst part is when the dumb boxes say like “African, non-Hispanic” “Asian, non-Hispanic” “Hispanic” but no single box to choose for me (Asian-Hispanic) Like, race and ethnicity are not excludable?! At least I’m seeing more opportunities to check more boxes but still sorta confused and stuff…

—

So Hispanic is a loaded term, and it’s used in so many different ways, to mean and designate so many different things.

And here is where this gets complicated: In the U.S., Hispanic and Latino are an ethnicity and not a race. (But racially, the U.S. says we can racially identify as whatever the heck we want! Keep reading.)

And some would argue that there are decent reasons for that. Reasons such as there are many different races that fit within that designation. And there are some that argue that not having adequate space (a label) for people to racially identify as hispanic or latino is an erasure of them and their existence.

Several civil rights groups have spoken out about this because it is so problematic. For people on all sides of the argument. Because Spanish/European colonists came, they commit systematic genocide of three entire native nations (and irrevocably changed the rest), they enslaved them, bred them (with whomever they wanted), raped them, worked them to death, imposed their culture and the Spanish language on them etc.

So now Latin America is very very very mixed. Therefore the U.S. Census Bureau defines “Hispanic” as:

“People who identify with the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” are those who classify themselves in one of the specific Hispanic or Latino categories listed on the decennial census questionnaire and various Census Bureau survey questionnaires – “Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano” or ”Puerto Rican” or “Cuban” – as well as those who indicate that they are “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.“ Origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s ancestors before their arrival in the United States. People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.”

Yes, you read that correctly. We can be of any race. Not to dumb this argument down, or sound like a complete asshole, but the U.S. government is basically saying that South American history is so complicated, they they don’t want to deal with picking it apart to decide who gets a racial designation. “Let them be whoever they want to be because it’s in their bloodline somewhere.” Which is a gross dumbing down of what Census Bureau means….but it’s not completely incorrect either.

The U.S. Census Bureau also says:

“The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

Pause here because race doesn’t exist in an empirical, measurable sense, right? Any college professor/educated person will tell you that. BUT the effects of race are very very VERY measurable. Therefore race exists in a real, tangible way.

Last thought, if we could get an anthropological definition of racial categories, it would 100% be the only one worth using because it would take into account all the nuance.

Moving on!

“In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as “American Indian” and “White.” People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.

OMB requires five minimum categories: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.”

“White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

Bet you (and probably Trump) didn’t know that about people from the Middle East!

“Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.

American Indian or Alaska Native – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.”

“… An individual’s response to the race question is based upon self-identification. The Census Bureau does not tell individuals which boxes to mark or what heritage to write in. For the first time in Census 2000, individuals were presented with the option to self-identify with more than one race and this continued with the 2010 Census. People who identify with more than one race may choose to provide multiple races in response to the race question. For example, if a respondent identifies as "Asian” and “White,” they may respond to the question on race by checking the appropriate boxes that describe their racial identities and/or writing in these identities on the spaces provided.”

I feel like so much of my identity can be summed up as “In the space provided.” LOL

This doesn’t help right? Because PLENTY of us racially identify as Latino or Hispanic. But if that’s not on the list, I can’t choose it. ALSO, they pretty much told everyone not on the list that they can identify however the heck they want. Because they decided to ignore a huge chunk of the world. (And there are absolutely political reasons for why so much of planet Earth is left off the Census/fails to exist to the U.S. government.)

So the point to this, is that you, my friend, are not the only confused one. And as far as I’m concerned the U.S. government gave us all permission to racially identify however the hell we want. Go forth a be…white, or black, or Asian, or whatever side of the bed you work up on. But yes, this is fucked up, and confusing, and it’s just one more way that people who are not black and not white have been kept from the conversation on race and racism…because how can we say you’re being racist, if we, ourselves, were never afforded a race?

#mixed race #latin america #US Census #In the space provided

[oltnews]

"What's going on now?" Philip Levin, 8, wonders after Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election in the HBO miniseries "The Plot Against America". Later, as the shadow of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism falls on his family and their Newark neighborhood, he will ask, "What does this mean?"Philip - whose name, in Philip Roth's book in 2005, was Philip Roth - is a sensitive and curious child, perhaps a novelist in the making, and more an observer of history than his protagonist. His questions have a double meaning: they cross the minds of all those who watch a story unfolding on television, and also of all those who feel caught up in the intrigue of history, especially in times of crisis.Like, say, now. From the point of view of the present locked, the road ahead seems even more forked than usual. Not only is the course of the coronavirus pandemic uncertain, but its possible social, political and economic consequences seem to point in extremely divergent directions: towards greater solidarity or an intensification of conflicts; far from inequalities deeply rooted or more deeply in authoritarianism; return to normal or through the mirror.Ultimately, we will know how it all turned out. But even then, we could be - we might already be - haunted by the feeling that things could have gone differently, for better or for worse. The real question Roth asked in "The Plot Against America" ​​is "What if?" In an era of great uncertainty, this can be a strangely reassuring question, but also a frightening one, if only because it may be worth remembering that uncertainty is nothing new.The world of Philip Levin in the early 1940s, for those of us looking at him from our position in the early 2020s, seems both familiar and bizarre. Clothes and cars, cigarettes, and household furnishings evoke a period of mostly benign nostalgia, a pivotal moment between times, when Americans listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt on the radio, and Pearl Harbor was just around the corner. the street.The ingenuity of Roth's novel and the most faithful television adaptation created by David Simon and Ed Burns lies in the way this easy familiarity is turned into terror. The series sometimes has an almost unbearable suspense because most of the stories set in the years before the Second World War are the opposite. The story is by definition without spoiler. (Unlike this article, which will leak information about "The Plot Against America" ​​and several other movies and TV series.) We keep arguing about what it means, but we pretty much agree on what happened next.But "The conspiracy against America" ​​is not history. His characters, an extended and surging family of lower middle class Jews, are trapped in an alternative timeline in which the unthinkable has become commonplace. A fanatic celebrity without political experience, operating on an "America First" platform (and perhaps in the service of an undemocratic foreign power) spoils the hopes of the Democratic Party for a third consecutive term in the White House. Admirer of Hitler (as was notoriously historic Lindbergh), the new president initiates policies that undermine the reputation and confidence of Jewish American citizens, who are exposed to open prejudice, stigma and, ultimately, violence . Someone checks the name of Sinclair Lewis' bestseller in 1935, "It can't happen here." Roth, Simon and Burns respond: But suppose it is.Counterfactualism of this kind has never found much favor in the historical profession. And it's not always welcome in popular culture either. Earlier this year, HBO has canceled "Confederate", a series proposed by the creators of "Game of Thrones" on what America could have looked like if the North had not won the Civil War. But there are a lot of puzzles in the air these days, as the notion of multiple timelines migrates from science fiction to more conventional, realistic narratives.Before Roth's “intrigue”, the most important work in American prose fiction to tackle an opposite past was probably “The Man at the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick, who also imagined that the fascism, rather than being defeated in the 1940s, had triumphed. The TV adaptation, which lasts four seasons on Amazon Prime, was one of the first examples of the current vogue in alternative history for film and television.Quentin Tarantino was the first to arrive. With “Inglorious Basterds” (2009), “Django Unchained” (2012) and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” last year, Tarantino, despite his taste for nihilistic violence, has become one of the main providers happy endings and lucky breaks, a master of anything optimistic. What if Hitler and the Nazi elite had been overthrown in June 1944 by two overlapping plots rather than by millions of American, British, and Soviet soldiers? What if the slaves of the pre-war South had recovered their reward directly from their oppressors, rather than waiting for the civil war? What if Charles Manson's supporters never arrived at Sharon Tate's on Cielo Drive in August 1969?What is happening is that the public is treated in a consoling fantasy, a momentary release from fatalism that weighs down on real historical knowledge. The hedonism of succumbing to this kind of dream is linked to the masochistic pleasures of the dystopian nightmare. The alternative past and the dystopian future are explicitly linked in "Watchmen", who ran on HBO last fall and wove the story that was both real (the massacre at the Tulsa race in 1921) and fanciful (the presidency of Robert Redford) in a wildly inventive criticism and passionately revisionist like the superhero.It is a commonplace where chronicles of the dark future - ecological catastrophe, technological domination, totalitarian politics - project the anxieties of the present. "The Handmaid’s Tale", in print and television (two novels by Margaret Atwood; three seasons on Hulu by Bruce Miller), can replace the many stories that combine allegory and warning. This is what life could look like if you don't pay attention to it, and what it already looks like if you look at it carefully.The authoritarian Theocratic Republic of Gilead in "Handmaid" is not supposed to be another world, but an at least probably plausible extrapolation of the one we already inhabit. Misogyny, religious extremism and damage to the environment are already common threads in the tapestry of reality. They were present when Atwood wrote the first novel in the early 1980s, and also when Miller highlighted them brighter and bolder in the late 2010s.It's not hard to imagine a path from here to there - from America to Gilead - and some of the mind-blowing and scary fun of the movie "The Handmaid’s Tale" is what it suggests we, the citizens of a democracy, transformed into their, subjects and officials of a clerical-fascist police state. History is not played as a simple matter of good and bad, but rather as a series of political and ethical puzzles. How is the nature of state power changing? Does human character change with him?These are the kinds of questions that drive "Years and Years", a British mini-series created by Russell T. Davies and aired on HBO last summer. Maybe he was just a little ahead of his time. Catching up on its 10 episodes last month, I found the story almost unbearably relevant, which may or may not be a recommendation.The approach is more linear than the built-in flashbacks and digressions from the last seasons of "The Handmaid’s Tale". A recognizable now - Brexit, climate change, President Trump, Sino-American tensions - turns in sometimes almost imperceptible increments into an increasingly alarming situation so. A populist demagogue (played by Emma Thompson) begins as the semi-comic figurehead of a vague protest movement until she is inevitably, inevitably, elected Prime Minister. Anti-immigration policy and the specter of Russian interference in a Western election sparkle on the screen. The economy is collapsing. When the global pandemic arrives, it's almost an afterthought.All of these events - as well as developments in digital technology that hardly seem like science fiction at all - are refracted through the experiences of the Lyons family, a multigenerational and multiracial clan living primarily in Manchester. Lyons are sometimes hard hit by conflicts and global disasters, but they also go through the usual domestic troubles of marriage, adultery and divorce, childbirth and adolescence, sibling rivalry and problems by right.Like the Levins at Newark, they don't all respond consistently or in the same way, and aren't easily classified as heroes and villains. Each family member represents a slightly different mix or sequence of compromise and resistance, wishful thinking and panic, cowardice and grain. Most of them believe that everything will be fine in the end.Which turns out - big spoiler here - to be true. Optimism is justified in a highlight that I found both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because of the way some characters find the strength and ingenuity to achieve a great victory against the forces of repression and xenophobia, and frustrating because their triumph seemed much less realistic than anything in previous episodes. When videos of blatant injustice go viral in the world, the world awakes from its sleep, snatching the possibility of an engaged democratic future from the jaws of tyranny and cynicism.It would be nice to believe it, but history often speaks of the voice of Marlo Stanfield in "The Wire": "You want it one way, but it's the other." This is the disturbing message from "Watchmen" and "The Plot Against America". We think of stories of superheroes - the genetic material of "Watchmen" - one way: like stories of just and disguised vigilantes fighting crime outside the bounds of the law. "Watchmen" suggests another path, drawing a subtext of racism and the ideological bad blood that had been there all the time.The modern super-heroism in this tale finds its origin in the massacre of the Tulsa race, an act of terror in the real world which cost the life of a prosperous African-American district, to be euphemized (like a "riot") and treated, at best, as an unfortunate sidebar in the textbooks. Placing it at the center of the story blurs both the familiar landscape of comics and the folklore of the cultural war that underlies it. Law and order, rebellion and obedience, liberals and conservatives, black and white - none of these words mean exactly what we thought they were doing.This dislocation is both exhilarating and terrifying, a description which also suits "The Plot Against America", although the scrupulous naturalism of its methods is a world away from the phantasmagoria of the "Watchmen". Roth took exquisite care to replace a single thread in American tapestry and to limit the Lindbergh presidency to a single episode. Like "Years and Years", his book ends with a return to normality, a return to the familiar chronology signaled by references to later events - the death of Roosevelt in power; The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy - it will happen as we have always thought. Halfway through his term, as the country turns upside down in his own version of Kristallnacht, Lindbergh takes flight, paving the way for a special election that will bring Roosevelt back to power."The nightmare was over," says young Philip Roth. Its effect on him is recorded with a frightening factual reality: "I will never again be able to resuscitate this feeling of imperturbable security first nourished in a small child by a large protective republic and its fiercely responsible parents." In other words, the Philip Roth we know of, who turned that youthful security into a confident assertion of American Jewish identity - and turned these parents into comic but nonetheless heroic embodiments of American-Jewish normality - would have written his books in another way.It's disturbing, but Simon and Burns' version goes further, transforming Roth's subtly furious false memory into a bubbling and ambiguous allegory. In the heartbreaking final episode, we are not looking at an imagined past but an alternative present and a possible future. The series ends with a cliffhanger, a moment of lady-or-the-tiger non-resolution that turns Roth's speculative history into a political challenge. Maybe everything will be fine and maybe not. History is a nightmare from which none of us can wake up. Imagining it differently is not so much a challenge to the truth as a protest against necessity. It should not be so. It doesn't have to be that way. https://oltnews.com/once-upon-a-time-in-america?_unique_id=5e9e64d317fd8

[componentplanet]

Report: China Sells Minorities Into ‘Forced Labor’ to Benefit Apple, Foxconn, Others

Ongoing human rights violations in China were a significant topic of discussion at the end of 2019. The country has sought to block criticism of its policies towards Tibet, the still-ongoing Hong Kong protests, and its imprisonment of a million or more Uighurs and other ethnic minority groups in forced re-education camps. A new bombshell report from Australia indicates that the Uighurs and other minorities aren’t just being subjected to forced re-education — they’re being used as slave labor after completing their terms of “study.”

The paper, by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, doesn’t use the term “slavery,” preferring to rely instead on the euphemism of “forced labor.” Here’s how the situation is described (Uighur and Uyghur are two different ways of spelling the same word):

It is extremely difficult for Uyghurs to refuse or escape these work assignments, which are enmeshed with the apparatus of detention and political indoctrination both inside and outside of Xinjiang. In addition to constant surveillance, the threat of arbitrary detention hangs over minority citizens who refuse their government-sponsored work assignments. Most strikingly, local governments and private brokers are paid a price per head by the Xinjiang provincial government to organise the labour assignments…

The Uyghur workers, unlike their Han counterparts, are reportedly unable to go home for holidays… Uyghur workers are often transported across China in special segregated trains… Multiple sources suggest that in factories across China, many Uyghur workers lead a harsh, segregated life under so-called ‘military-style management’. Outside work hours, they attend factory-organised Mandarin language classes, participate in ‘patriotic education’, and are prevented from practising their religion. Every 50 Uyghur workers are assigned one government minder and are monitored by dedicated security personnel. They have little freedom of movement and live in carefully guarded dormitories, isolated from their families and children back in Xinjiang. There is also evidence that, at least in some factories, they are paid less than their Han counterparts.

There’s a common perception that the difference between slaves and free individuals is that the latter is paid for their work, but the truth is more complex. This article from the Organization of American Historians is a deep dive into the history of slaves earning wages in the South. In some cases, slaveowners found it advantageous to allow slaves to earn a certain amount of money and to spend it on improving their own lives or the lives of their families. The same is undoubtedly true in China today.

If you can’t refuse a work assignment, can’t go home to see your family, can’t practice your religion, are forced to live by a schedule in which virtually every minute of your life is regimented for you, are kept under constant or near-constant surveillance and subject to the whims of headhunters who earn a bounty for delivering you to a job, and didn’t get any choice in the matter, I’d argue you’re effectively a slave. In some cases, workers’ families are also under simultaneous surveillance back at home, which provides an extra incentive for the slaves “prisoners with jobs” to behave themselves.

Image by Disney, from Thor: Ragnarok. This is one of those “I needed a bit of a joke, because the next few images are really nauseating” moments.

The ASPI estimates that up to 80,000 Uighurs have been forced into labor camps this way, some of them directly after finishing their indoctrination at Chinese re-education centers. The report includes three case studies focused on factories producing goods for Nike, Adidas/Fila, and Apple. A total of 83 companies have been identified as benefiting from these practices:

Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Electric, General Motors, Google, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, The North Face, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, and ZTE.

How many vocational schools do you know of that don’t have completely fenced-off areas and a dozen or more security checkpoints?

The report details how this massive system of relocation and forced labor has been built up under the guise of an aid program known as “Xinjiang Aid.” What appears superficially as a targeted aid program for the poor and undereducated people in the province is a relocation and reeducation program meant to destroy their culture and religious practices. Companies all over China have been encouraged to provide “industrial Xianjing aid” by building factories in the province to absorb what China terms “surplus labor capacity” or to hire Uighurs for other tasks in factories across the rest of China.

Factories are well-compensated for taking these workers and advertisements for their services have reportedly begun popping up in Chinese publications, as shown above and below:

Compare that with some vintage advertisements for American pre-owned human property.

The report details how, days before Tim Cook visited an O-Film Technology factory in 2017, the company transferred 700 Uighurs to a separate factory. In a now-deleted press release, Cook praised the company for its “humane approach towards employees.” The company reportedly continued to hire more Uighur prisoners throughout the year.

The ASPI doesn’t make any damning accusations that any specific Western company knew that its products were being built by slave labor. There are multiple diagrams attached to each case report that make it clear how intricate some of these supply chains are. When you look at the supply chains for companies like O-Film, you immediately see just how many major firms could be buying products tainted by the use of slave labor:

The ASPI does not argue that Apple or any other company has been aware of what has been going on within their supply chains. But the web of connections between these firms implies many companies have benefited from this practice and need to take immediate action to address it. Past that immediate problem, this is another area where we as a society have to choose whether we want to stay quite so cozy with a nation with an increasingly awful human rights record.

If you’ve paid attention to the clashes over issues like freedom of speech between the United States and China over the past six months, it’s become very clear that China isn’t just attempting to control what is said within its borders. In multiple instances, the Chinese have targeted low-level employees or minor embarrassments with hostility beyond all proportion to the alleged offense. This overreaction is not an accident. It’s part and parcel of how the nation is demonstrating its willingness to enforce its own cultural and social norms on others.

While it is absolutely possible for nations to have positive effects on each other, it is past time to let go of the fiction that engaging with China in economic terms will intrinsically lead the company to democratize its policies or protect the rights of its citizenry. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has moved to curtail freedom of the press and freedom of speech. It has imprisoned 1-2 million citizens in political re-education camps and is forcing some of those citizens into what is effectively slavery to manufacture cheap goods for Western markets.

I’m Not Just a Consumer

Businesses make a lot of assumptions about what their customers will or won’t want. One of the most offensive, I’d argue, is the idea that customers are sensitive to nothing but price. Suggest that we might benefit from moving production to a country where minority workers and their families aren’t literally enslaved to provide cheap labor, and someone will instantly bring up the fact that prices would go up if anything changed. In some cases, that’s probably true. A more meaningful question that few people seem to have the guts to ask these days is, “So what?”

Over the past few years, we’ve watched smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung jack up the price of smartphones to the point that $1,000 isn’t even guaranteed to buy you a top-end product any longer. The iPhone XR starts at $600 while the iPhone 11 Pro Max starts at $1,100, but everybody knows that it doesn’t cost Apple an extra $500 to build an iPhone 11 Pro Max. For the past few years, both Samsung and Apple have increased prices simply because they could increase prices.

Somehow, however, the same MBAs who confidently predict to the Tim Cooks of the world that the market will cheerfully absorb a price increase engineered for the sole purpose of installing more gold-plated bathtubs in the C-suites would quail at the idea of refusing to do business with a reprehensible dictatorship that inflicts catastrophic human rights abuses on its own citizenry. The idea that I might be willing to pay more for an iPhone because Apple wants to spend more money propping up its own stock is treated as a given. The idea that I might be willing to pay more for an iPhone because I don’t believe the Chinese government should be rewarded for literally enslaving people? Well, that’s letting morality get in the way of business.

And yet, the fact remains: I would vastly rather pay an extra $50-$100 to know my phone wasn’t made with slave labor than I would to pay an extra $50-$100 so that some rich schmuck on Wall Street can make an extra million bucks in bonuses this quarter. I know I am not the only person who feels that way.

The clash of values between China and the United States isn’t going to go away. Writing in 1945, philosopher Karl Popper described what is now known as the paradox of tolerance, stating: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

I am aware of all of the reasons — literally billions of reasons — why United States’ companies seek access to Chinese markets. I am aware of the hyper-optimized supply chains and the decades of investment US companies have made in them. Any effort to shift even a small amount of manufacturing out of China would be difficult and time-consuming, and in many cases, alternatives would have to be developed from scratch. Furthermore, because the Earth’s resources are unevenly distributed, some nations have a much larger supply of valuable resources than others. The United States has most of the world’s helium. China has a huge percentage of rare earths. Bolivia has a huge chunk of the world’s lithium reserves. Even in the best of cases, we live in a global, interconnected economy. There is no way to simply wave a wand and roll the clock back to the early 20th century.

There is, however, still time for Americans to push back on the idea that access to Chinese markets is the highest value to which we, as a people, can aspire to. And since every conversation starts with someone choosing to start it, I’ll go first. I am not willing to pay higher drug prices so that the pharmaceutical industry can continue ripping off Americans with exorbitant drug prices. I am not willing to pay higher prices for goods and services so that “disruptive” companies can pocket their employees’ tips. I am not willing, generally speaking, to watch my own costs rise so that people who already make more money in a day than I’ll make in a year can get just a little richer.

But I would be willing to pay more for my electronics and devices if it meant knowing that the countries and companies where these devices were manufactured weren’t enslaving their employees, driving them to suicide, exposing them to poisonous toxins, or otherwise destroying their lives, particularly when one of the benefits of doing so is knowing that my fellow citizens will not be subject to being fired for the crime of accidentally liking the wrong tweet.

If Tim Cook wanted to demonstrate the courage Phil Schiller claims Apple possesses, he could declare that Apple would take a leadership position in certifying that the workers employed at every company in every part of its supply chain were ethically treated and that none of the profit from its raw material purchases would be used to finance wars or conflict around the world. It would be an enormous challenge — one befitting a trillion-dollar company with enough yearly revenue to qualify as the 42nd-largest economy in the world. If the other companies named in this report joined him, they would collectively represent enough purchasing power to force even China to the bargaining table, if backed up by the US government.

The very concept of the “marketplace of ideas” is that people are allowed to bring their thoughts and ideas to the metaphorical table for everyone to peruse them. The connection between China deploying slave labor in factories and, say, the protests in Hong Kong, is that China doesn’t want anybody talking about any of this, and it’s already proven its own willingness to use extraordinary measures to clamp down on dissent, even when that dissent comes from other countries. We ignore these trends at our own peril.

Now Read:

Report: China’s New Comac C919 Jetliner Is Built With Stolen Technology

Leaked: How Chinese Use AI, Apps for Mass Incarceration, Internment

Blizzard Lowers Penalty on Hong Kong Streamer, Says China Uninvolved in Censorship

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306909-report-china-sells-minorities-into-forced-labor-to-benefit-apple-foxconn-others from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/report-china-sells-minorities-into.html

#Report: China Sells Minorities Into ‘Forced Labor’ to Benefit Apple #Foxconn #Others

[englishchinesetranslations]

1. Serious About Socialism

2. Gender and Identity Politics Are Ascendant

3. Open Borders Is Becoming a Litmus Test

4. ‘Clickbait’ Communism Is Being Used to Propagandize Young Americans

5. The Green Movement Is Red

6. Socialism Can’t Be Ignored as a Rising Ethos on the Left

While you were enjoying your Fourth of July weekend, I was attending a national conference on socialism.

Why? Because socialism is having its moment on the left.

Since there’s often confusion as to what socialism really is, I decided to attend the Socialism 2019 conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend.

The conference, which had the tag line “No Borders, No Bosses, No Binaries,” contained a cross-section of the most pertinent hard-left thought in America. Among the sponsors were the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin, a quarterly socialist magazine.

The walls of the various conference rooms were adorned with posters of Karl Marx and various depictions of socialist thinkers and causes.

Most of the conference attendees appeared to be white, but identity politics were a major theme throughout—especially in regard to gender.

At the registration desk, attendees were given the option of attaching a “preferred pronoun” sticker on their name tags.

In addition, the multiple-occupancy men’s and women’s restrooms were relabeled as “gender neutral,” and men and women were using both. Interestingly enough, the signs above the doors were still labeled with the traditional “men’s” and “women’s” signs until they were covered over with home-made labels.

One of the paper labels read: “This bathroom has been liberated from the gender binary!”

While the panelists and attendees were certainly radical, and often expressed contempt for the Democratic Party establishment, it was nevertheless clear how seamlessly they blended traditional Marxist thought with the agenda of what’s becoming the mainstream left.

They did so by weaving their views with the identity politics that now dominate on college campuses and in the media and popular entertainment. The culture war is being used as a launching point for genuinely socialist ideas, many of which are re-emerging in the 21st century.

Here are six takeaways from the conference:

1. Serious About Socialism

A common line from those on the modern left is that they embrace “democratic socialism,” rather than the brutal, totalitarian socialism of the former Soviet Union or modern North Korea and Venezuela. Sweden is usually cited as their guide for what it means in practice, though the reality is that these best-case situations show the limits of socialism, not its success.

It’s odd, too, for those who insist that “diversity is our strength” to point to the culturally homogeneous Nordic countries as ideal models anyway.

It’s clear, however, that while many socialists insist that their ideas don’t align with or condone authoritarian societies, their actual ideology—certainly that of those speaking at the conference—is in no sense distinct.

Of the panels I attended, all featured speakers who made paeans to traditional communist theories quoted Marx, and bought into the ideology that formed the basis of those regimes.

Mainstream politicians may dance around the meaning of the word “socialist,” but the intellectuals and activists who attended Socialism 2019 could have few doubts about the fact that Marxism formed the core of their beliefs.

Some sought to dodge the issue. One was David Duhalde, the former political director of Our Revolution, an activist group that supports Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and that was an offshoot of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Duhalde said that Sanders is a creation of the socialist movement—having had direct ties to the Socialist Party of America in his youth—but hasn’t maintained an official connection to socialist political organizations throughout his political career.

Sanders’ position, according to Duhalde, is “anti-totalitarian” and that he favors a model based on “neither Moscow, nor the United States, at least in this formation.”

It’s a convenient way of condemning capitalist-oriented societies while avoiding connections to obviously tyrannical ones.

It was also difficult to mistake the sea of red shirts and posters of Marx that adorned the walls at the conference—or the occasional use of the word “comrades”—as anything other than an embrace of genuine socialism, but with a uniquely modern twist.

2. Gender and Identity Politics Are Ascendant

Transgenderism, gender nonconformity, and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues at Socialism 2019.

One panel, “Social Reproduction Theory and Gender Liberation,” addressed how the traditional family structure reinforced capitalism and contended that the answer was to simply abolish families.

Corrie Westing, a self-described “queer socialist feminist activist based in Chicago working as a home-birth midwife,” argued that traditional family structures propped up oppression and that the modern transgender movement plays a critical part in achieving true “reproductive justice.”

Society is in a moment of “tremendous political crisis,” one that “really demands a Marxism that’s up to the par of explaining why our socialist project is leading to ending oppression,” she said, “and we need a Marxism that can win generations of folks that can be radicalized by this moment.”

That has broad implications for feminism, according to Westing, who said that it’s important to fight for transgender rights as essential to the whole feminist project—seemingly in a direct shot at transgender-exclusionary radical feminists, who at a Heritage Foundation event in January argued that sex is biological, not a societal construct, and that transgenderism is at odds with a genuine feminism.

She contended that economics is the basis of what she called “heteronormativity.”

Pregnancy becomes a tool of oppression, she said, as women who get pregnant and then engage in child rearing are taken out of the workforce at prime productive ages and then are taken care of by an economic provider.

Thus, the gender binary is reinforced, Westing said.

She insisted that the answer to such problems is to “abolish the family.” The way to get to that point, she said, is by “getting rid of capitalism” and reorganizing society around what she called “queer social reproduction.”

“When we’re talking about revolution, we’re really connecting the issues of gender justice as integral to economic and social justice,” Westing said.

She then quoted a writer, Sophie Lewis, who in a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” embraced “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.”

3. Open Borders Is Becoming a Litmus Test

It’s perhaps not surprising that socialists embrace open borders. After all, that’s becoming a much more mainstream position on the left in general.

The AFL-CIO used to support immigration restrictions until it flipped in 2000 and called for illegal immigrants to be granted citizenship.

As recently as 2015, Sanders rejected the idea of open borders as a ploy to impoverish Americans.

But Justin Akers-Chacon, a socialist activist, argued on a panel, “A Socialist Case for Open Borders,” that open borders are not only a socialist idea, but vital to the movement.

Akers-Chacon said that while capital has moved freely between the United States and Central and South America, labor has been contained and restricted.

He said that while working-class people have difficulty moving across borders, high-skilled labor and “the 1%” are able to move freely to other countries.

South of the border, especially in Mexico and Honduras, Akers-Chacon said, there’s a stronger “class-consciousness, as part of cultural and historical memory exists in the working class.”

“My experiences in Mexico and my experiences working with immigrant workers, and my experiences with people from different parts of this region, socialist politics are much more deeply rooted,” he said.

That has implications for the labor movement.

Despite past attempts to exclude immigrants, Akers-Chacon said, it’s important for organized labor to embrace them. He didn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

For instance, he said one of the biggest benefits of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was that there was a brief boost in union membership amid a more general decline in unionism.

Besides simply boosting unions, the influx “changed the whole AFL-CIO position on immigrants, [which was] still backwards, restrictive, anti-immigrant,” Akers-Chacon said.

“So, there’s a correlation between expanding rights for immigrants and the growth, and confidence, and militancy of the labor movement as a whole,” he said.

4. ‘Clickbait’ Communism Is Being Used to Propagandize Young Americans

The magazine Teen Vogue has come under fire recently for flattering profiles of Karl Marx and promoting prostitution as a career choice, among other controversial pieces.

It would be easy to write these articles off as mere “clickbait,” but it’s clear that the far-left nature of its editorials—and its attempt to reach young people with these views—is genuine.

Teen Vogue hosted a panel at Socialism 2019, “System Change, Not Climate Change: Youth Climate Activists in Conversation with Teen Vogue.”

Teen Vogue panel SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE at the @socialismconf with @SatansJacuzzi @TeenVogue (Lucy) @SunriseMvmtChi (Sally) and me @usclimatestrike! Thanks @haymarketbooks!

The panel moderator was Lucy Diavolo, news and politics editor at the publication, who is transgender.

“I know there’s maybe a contradiction in inviting Teen Vogue to a socialism conference … especially because the youth spinoff brand is a magazine so associated with capitalist excess,” Diavolo said. “If you’re not familiar with our work, I encourage you to read Teen Vogue’s coverage of social justice issues, capitalism, revolutionary theory, and Karl Marx, or you can check out the right-wing op-eds that accuse me of ‘clickbait communism’ and teaching your daughters Marxism and revolution.”

The panel attendees responded enthusiastically.

“Suffice to say, the barbarians are beyond the gates. We are in the tower,” Diavolo boasted.

5. The Green Movement Is Red

It’s perhaps no surprise that an openly socialist member of Congress is pushing for the Green New Deal—which would essentially turn the U.S. into a command-and-control economy reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti recently said, according to The Washington Post: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”

“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running for president in the Democratic primary. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Economic transformation barely disguised as a way to address environmental concerns appears to be the main point.

One of the speakers on the Teen Vogue climate panel, Sally Taylor, is a member of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented environmental activist group that made headlines in February when several elementary school-age members of the group confronted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about her lack of support for the Green New Deal.

The other speaker on the Teen Vogue climate panel was Haven Coleman, a 13-year-old environmental activist who has received favorable coverage for leading the U.S. Youth Climate Strike in March. She was open about the system change she was aiming for to address climate change.

She noted during her remarks that she was receiving cues from her mother, who she said was in attendance.

Haven said the answer to the climate change problem was moving on from our “capitalistic society” to something “other than capitalism.”

Interestingly, none of the glowing media profiles of Haven or the Climate Strike mentioned a link to socialism or abolishing capitalism.

6. Socialism Can’t Be Ignored as a Rising Ethos on the Left

According to a recent Gallup survey, 4 in 10 Americans have a positive view of socialism. Support among Democrats is even higher than among the general population, with a majority of Democrats saying they prefer socialism to capitalism.

But many who say they want socialism rather than capitalism struggle to define what those terms mean and change their views once asked about specific policies.

As another Gallup poll from 2018 indicated, many associate socialism with vague notions of “equality,” rather than as government control over the means of production in the economy.

What’s clear from my observations at Socialism 2019 is that traditional Marxists have successfully melded their ideology with the identity politics and culture war issues that animate modern liberalism—despite still being quite far from the beliefs of the average citizen.

Socialists at the conference focused more on social change, rather than electoral politics, but there were still many core public policy issues that animated them; notably, “Medicare for All” and government run-health care, some kind of Green New Deal to stop global warming (and more importantly, abolish capitalism), open borders to increase class consciousness and promote transnational solidarity, removing all restrictions on—and publicly funding—abortion, and breaking down social and legal distinctions between the sexes.

They were particularly able to weave their issues together through the thread of “oppressor versus oppressed” class conflict—for instance, supporting government-run health care meant also unquestioningly supporting unfettered abortion and transgender rights.

Though their analyses typically leaned more heavily on economic class struggle and determinism than what one would expect from more mainstream progressives, there wasn’t a wide gap between what was being discussed at Socialism 2019 and the ideas emerging from a growing segment of the American left.

#morningbell

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New Post has been published on https://atticusblog.com/us-travel-advisory-will-not-hit-arrivals-tour-operators/

US travel advisory will not hit arrivals: Tour operators

US government’s advisory to its citizen’s approximately possible terrorist assaults in India will now not impact overseas tourist arrivals, say excursion operators. The US is the primary source market for Indian tourism. In 2015, over 1.2 million US residents visited India, accounting for 15 according to cent of India’s foreign traveler arrivals.

“We do now not see lots impact due to the advisory. Those who’ve booked months earlier will now not cancel their trips, even though there might be a few deferrals. Overall, the effect of the advisory will not be multiple-two in step with cent,” Subhash Goyal, chairperson of Stic Travel, stated.Inbound tourism is predicted to develop 10 in step with cent this 12 months, with the strong increase from Asian markets, said Goyal.

According to Karan Anand, head, relationships, Cox & Kings, “Tourism to India has been on an upswing and such advisories do no longer alternate the belief of India being a secure vacation spot. In the past twelve months, there were terrorist attacks in Europe however it has now not deterred guests from traveling the continent. Compared to them, India has been incident-unfastened and we expect the equal momentum in tourist arrivals.’’ According to the tourism ministry, India is anticipated to acquire a report nine million overseas travelers in 2016, up over 12 percent of the eight million visitors the last yr.

Social Stratification In United States

  When we communicate of social stratification we suggest inequality between numerous organizations of people. Inequality exists in all varieties of societies and cultures. Societies consist of layers that are hierarchical.

The four fundamental stratification systems are:

1) slavery

2) caste

3) estate

4) elegance.

Stratification systems of slavery, caste, and estate have been demolished in present day societies besides a few tribal societies.

The social elegance device is particularly a description of ways scarce assets (wealth, income, training, and profession) are dispensed in society. In other phrases, Class will be defined as an indication of the positions a person might also occupy inside society, positions which are not same.Thus, so as to evaluation social instructions in a society, it’s far essential to provide an explanation for that how those sources are distributed and make social lessons.

In spite of the fact that some students argue that during developed countries, inequality has decreased rather than previous societies, however, social stratification, inequality and class struggle have growing rate nowadays. In the United States, Inequality between rich and terrible has multiplied to the extent that the distance amongst them is bigger than any point in the beyond 75 years. The United States has the largest wealth disparity of any industrialized state within the global and this disparity is growing larger every year.

In the USA, income is manifestly one essential scarce aid. Clearly, it’s miles profession that gives earnings, and it’s far schooling that determines the sort of profession. At the extra volume level, income is associated with life effects, together with the high-quality and amount of schooling, fitness care, and housing one obtains, or even the how lengthy one lives. So, there may be the interrelationship between accesses to every of those assets.

In the United States, person profits rely upon on academic characteristics; in 2005 the majority of the doctorate and expert stages were in top 15% of earnings earners. Those with Bachelor stages had incomes significantly above the national median and people with university diploma had less income.

The important factor is that, at the same time as the population of the USA is turning into more and more knowledgeable on all stages, the conspicuous hyperlink among earnings and educational attainment stays. Another factor is that tertiary schooling is hardly ever unfastened; education in elite private colleges for a 4 12 months program costs $a hundred and twenty,000 approximately. While public colleges and universities expense an awful lot much less but they may be no longer unfastened. Scholarships and coffee interest loans by means of government and universities are to be had too, but nonetheless, the price of education is excessive for many human beings.

Overall, instructional attainment serves as one of the maximum vital magnificence features of maximum Americans, that’s immediately related to profits and profession.

On one hand occupational popularity is the effect of tutorial attainment, non-public or family earnings and alternatively, it defines get entry to different resources consisting of profits and health. Low-wage jobs are related to those humans who’ve much less training. Workers in those areas are unskilled because it does no longer require education so that it will carry out these jobs. But, White collar jobs require more human capital, talent, and information and consequently produce better income. With higher education, it’s far much more likely for one to occupy a professional stage activity wherein he or she may also earn a higher income. Therefore, those with less training are much more likely to be running in Low-wage jobs.

Each specific job influences on lifestyle; earnings and status that won from a task determine dwelling environment, the type of ingredients, medical care, type of social networks, enjoyment, spare instances, and conduct.

It is training that makes upper-center, middle and lower-middle ratings on an occupational spectrum; unskilled personnel, personnel with less than seven years of education, excessive faculty graduated ones, college graduate, licentiate, MS holders, specialists and professionals with Doctorate diploma located on exceptional rankings of an occupational spectrum. So whilst all capabilities and positions in society do now not determine with a profession, the task position is one of the most critical reputation functions inside the United States.

Another feature that determines individuals’ function within the society is wealth. Wealth is what humans own in belongings along with houses, automobiles, stocks, stocks, saved cash, and lands.

While the United States is the second wealthy country in the international, the distribution of wealth is simply too unfair. The top 1% of all population owned 38% of the wealth, 10% of the population had seventy-one% of the wealth and alternatively, the lowest 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.

    Hiring A Car At Miami Airport

If you’re planning a trip Florida and are flying into any in their twelve primary airports you will find automobile lease groups primarily based on all the terminal homes.

If you’re flying into Miami International Airport you’ll bypass through the bags reclaim place into the principle arrivals region, where there are 9 essential vehicle lease corporations at Miami Airport with desks inside the arrivals vicinity subsequent to the bags reclaim area within the Central and North terminals, or in case you arrive into the South Terminal there are Information and Reservation forums in arrivals and on the third ground where you could use the condo automobile phone. There is a major road around the inner hub of the Miami Airport where hire motors, shuttle buses, and coaches may be located.

When you’ve got checked in along with your automobile rent firm in the arrivals hall you need to head across the street from the terminal building and pick up a courtesy car hire shuttle bus to take you to the numerous hire car stations which might be all placed simply outside the airport on LeJeune Avenue. When you come back out of the arrivals hall you may see go back and forth buses with the call of the car rent organization on them, so simply hail one and it will forestall. Remember when you are bringing your lease a vehicle returned to Miami Airport allow at the least 30-forty five minutes to drop it off and trap the commute bus returned to the airport terminal for taking a look at in.

Decoding the Demand for Fixed Base Operators in Aviation

The aviation industry has witnessed extra special growth in the closing a long time. Business has expanded appreciably, and passengers are very eager on getting great services for the rate they pay. One of the principal worries for buyers, general aviation users, and plane owners is the management of offerings provided on-airport. This is exactly where the want for fixed-base operators (FBOs) becomes very evident. Who are FBOs? What do they do? What ought to you evaluate while choosing an FBO control carrier? In this submit, we will attempt to answer those questions in conjunction with other relevant points.

Understanding services of FBOs

A constant base operator is mostly an enterprise or company that has the proper and permissions to work at an airport, especially for various styles of aeronautical services. FBOs manage most of the constitution and personal plane activities at an airport and work various sorts of private operators at the equal time. FBOs are anticipated to offer support and offerings that help in easing the various strategies at distinctive public-use airports. These agencies operate at primary and nearby airports and make certain efficient air transportation interest their clients.

Services supplied

FBOs offer all sorts of unique services, relying on the desires of the airport and its client base. Typically, their number one process is related to airport facility control, plane fueling and aircraft managing. Aircraft Charter and Management (ACM) organizations and other private aviation clients use such organizations for handling they’re everyday flight operations requirements, which includes aircraft fueling, aircraft dealing with, and handling the general passenger revel in. Some FBOs also address Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) alongside Aircraft Charter and Management (ACM) as unique options. Other offerings encompass a wider variety of ancillary on-airport services inclusive of catering, de-icing, etc.

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This is what protest sounds like

(CNN)Black Lives Matter activist Zellie Imani remembers the moment civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 death.

Crowds had gathered to protest the fatal shooting of unarmed, 18-year-old Brown by a white police officer, and Imani remembers Jackson joining the demonstrators as they marched toward a church.

But Jackson, it seems, had missed a crucial memo.

“I think he tried to have us sing ‘We Shall Overcome,'” Imani recalls in the CNN original series “Soundtracks: Songs that Defined History,” referring to the popular hymn that has been sung as a protest anthem around the world. The song has its roots in an African-American spiritual from the early 1900s, and became a call for resistance and freedom during the African-American struggle for civil rights.

“(But) the song doesn’t tell us when we shall overcome,” Imani continues. “It is saying that we will overcome someday — and what we in the streets wanted, we wanted justice now.”

Wanting justice now doesn’t mean the newest generation of protesters failed to see the value in having some sort of battle cry; a song that could unify their movement, express their yearnings and provide a balm all at the same time.

At this protest, Imani says, “people started to chant Kendrick Lamar’s ‘(We Gon’ Be) Alright.'”

This shift from church-ready protest anthems to something less gentle and more explicit has rubbed at least one civil rights activist the wrong way.

But it also shows that the long-held American tradition of protest music didn’t fade away with the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. Artists using songs as resistance, or protesters adopting their work as de facto anthems, never went away — with each generation, and with each protest, there’s been a new voice.

Scroll through the guide below to hear the evolution of American protest anthems:

The year: 1930s – 1950s

The protest: Lynchings of African-Americans

The anthem: “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched across 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. An image of one of these public lynchings so haunted Abel Meeropol, a Jewish teacher living in the Bronx, that he wrote the protest poem that eventually became Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”

Using the popular jazz of the era, Holiday bore witness to the atrocities happening in the American South and turned protesting into art.

The year: 1940

The protest: Economic opportunity

The anthem: “This Land is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie

Today a favorite in kindergarten classrooms, “This Land is Your Land” started out as an annoyed response to the blinding optimism of late ’30s hit “God Bless America.”

American folk legend Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land” in 1940 as an alternative, standing in opposition of “Depression-enhanced economic disparity” and the “greed he witnessed in so many pockets of the country,” says American Songwriter.

The year: 1962

The protest: Civil rights

The anthem: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round”

There’s no way to separate the US civil rights movement from its music. The song was so integral to its existence and purpose that in 1962 it spawned the Freedom Singers, a quartet that sang songs steeped in African-American gospel traditions.

“We sang everywhere. We sang at house parties, at Carnegie Hall — to take the message of this movement to the North,” Freedom Singer Charles Neblett recalls in CNN’s “Soundtracks.” “Mass meetings, picket lines, in jails — music was the glue that held everything together.”

Songs like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round” may sound like another performance of a traditional spiritual, but listen closely and you’ll hear lyrics that spoke to the time: “Ain’t gonna let no jailhouse turn me round. Keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, marching up to freedom land.”

The year: 1963

The protest: The March on Washington

The anthem: “If I Had a Hammer,” Peter, Paul and Mary

Originally written by socially conscious folk icon Pete Seeger, it’s the Peter, Paul and Mary recording of “If I Had a Hammer” that took off in the early ’60s.

It was popular folk music, but it also keenly reflected the times as an anthem of resistance and fighting for justice: Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Hammer” at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington to “express in song what (the) great meeting is all about.”

The year: 1968

The protest: Black Power movement

The anthem: “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” James Brown

The assassination of MLK in 1968 not only altered the African-American fight for equal rights — it altered the music about the struggle, as well.

Before MLK’s death, “you had the hymns of unity and change,” music and culture journalist Richard Goldstein explains. But with the rise of the Black Power Movement in the aftermath of King’s death, “the hymns fade and are replaced by much more militant sentiments in the music.”

The year: 1970s

The protest: Women’s rights

The anthem: “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy

Australian artist Helen Reddy didn’t set out to become the voice of the women’s liberation movement, but that’s what she became with this 1972 women’s empowerment single.

“I was looking for songs that reflected the positive sense of self that I felt I’d gained from the women’s movement,” she told Billboard magazine, “[but] I couldn’t find any. I realized that the song I was looking for didn’t exist, and I was going to have to write it myself.” The song went all the way to No. 1, making Reddy the first Australian solo artist to accomplish that feat in the US.

The year: 1970

The protest: Anti-Vietnam War

The anthem: “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Between the civil rights movement and outrage over the Vietnam War, there were more than enough social issues happening in the ’60s and ’70s to create a new standard for protest music.

One of the songs that emerged was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s response to the police-led shootings during an anti-war protest at Kent State University in 1970.

The Guardian, which calls “Ohio” the “greatest protest record” ever, notes that the song was born out of the now iconic images of what happened at Kent State. “Neil Young was hanging out … when his bandmate, David Crosby, handed him the latest issue of Life magazine,” the Guardian recalled. “It contained a vivid account and shocking photographs of the killing of four students by the Ohio national guard during a demonstration against the Vietnam war. … Young took a guitar proffered by Crosby and, in short order, wrote a song about the killings.”

VIDEO: Why Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ matters

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The year: Late ’80s – Early ’90s

The protest: Systemic racism

The anthems: “Fight the Power,” “F*** tha Police”

The progress of the ’60s civil rights movement could be found in the law, but not necessarily in American communities. Racism and its impact was still plainly seen in large and small cities across the United States, as well as, protesters would argue, within those cities’ police forces.

This frustration was funneled into louder, angrier and more direct anthems like N.W.A.’s controversial 1988 track “F*** Tha Police” and Public Enemy’s 1989 anthem “Fight the Power.”

The year: 2010s

The protest: Marriage equality

The anthem: “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga; “Same Love,” Macklemore

The marriage equality movement hit its stride in 2015 as the US Supreme Court heard a case that would decide whether same-sex marriage would be legalized across the country.

In the buildup to this moment, popular culture played a role in pushing back against hurtful stereotypes and championing equality regardless of sexuality. It’s no surprise that Lady Gaga’s self-acceptance anthem, 2011’s “Born This Way,” and Macklemore’s “Same Love,” were both securely in the US’s Top 40 songs in the five years leading up to the Supreme Court’s historic decision in favor of marriage equality.

The year: 2010s

The protest: Black Lives Matter

The anthem: “Alright,” Kendrick Lamar

Along with the rise of Black Lives Matter, a social justice movement that began with a hashtag in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, has been the rise of a new era of protest music.

From J. Cole (“Be Free”) to Beyonce (“Formation”) to Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”), these artists aren’t making songs tailor-made to be sung while marching, but they are overtly political music in an era of increasing outcry at the deaths of black men and women by police.

Like “We Shall Overcome” did more than 50 years ago, Lamar’s “Alright” has become an almost unofficial anthem for those protesting injustice. “There are multiple messages,” says Salamishah Tillet, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “One, you’re going to be alright because we’re going to get through this day and we’re going to be able to be here tomorrow; we’re going to fight to save this nation and fight to save ourselves.”

“But,” she continues, “it’s also like, ‘We’re right’ — this is a morally righteous cause.”

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This is what protest sounds like

(CNN)Black Lives Matter activist Zellie Imani remembers the moment civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 death.

Crowds had gathered to protest the fatal shooting of unarmed, 18-year-old Brown by a white police officer, and Imani remembers Jackson joining the demonstrators as they marched toward a church.

But Jackson, it seems, had missed a crucial memo.

“I think he tried to have us sing ‘We Shall Overcome,'” Imani recalls in the CNN original series “Soundtracks: Songs that Defined History,” referring to the popular hymn that has been sung as a protest anthem around the world. The song has its roots in an African-American spiritual from the early 1900s, and became a call for resistance and freedom during the African-American struggle for civil rights.

“(But) the song doesn’t tell us when we shall overcome,” Imani continues. “It is saying that we will overcome someday — and what we in the streets wanted, we wanted justice now.”

Wanting justice now doesn’t mean the newest generation of protesters failed to see the value in having some sort of battle cry; a song that could unify their movement, express their yearnings and provide a balm all at the same time.

At this protest, Imani says, “people started to chant Kendrick Lamar’s ‘(We Gon’ Be) Alright.'”

This shift from church-ready protest anthems to something less gentle and more explicit has rubbed at least one civil rights activist the wrong way.

But it also shows that the long-held American tradition of protest music didn’t fade away with the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. Artists using songs as resistance, or protesters adopting their work as de facto anthems, never went away — with each generation, and with each protest, there’s been a new voice.

Scroll through the guide below to hear the evolution of American protest anthems:

The year: 1930s – 1950s

The protest: Lynchings of African-Americans

The anthem: “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched across 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. An image of one of these public lynchings so haunted Abel Meeropol, a Jewish teacher living in the Bronx, that he wrote the protest poem that eventually became Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”

Using the popular jazz of the era, Holiday bore witness to the atrocities happening in the American South and turned protesting into art.

The year: 1940

The protest: Economic opportunity

The anthem: “This Land is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie

Today a favorite in kindergarten classrooms, “This Land is Your Land” started out as an annoyed response to the blinding optimism of late ’30s hit “God Bless America.”

American folk legend Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land” in 1940 as an alternative, standing in opposition of “Depression-enhanced economic disparity” and the “greed he witnessed in so many pockets of the country,” says American Songwriter.

The year: 1962

The protest: Civil rights

The anthem: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round”

There’s no way to separate the US civil rights movement from its music. The song was so integral to its existence and purpose that in 1962 it spawned the Freedom Singers, a quartet that sang songs steeped in African-American gospel traditions.

“We sang everywhere. We sang at house parties, at Carnegie Hall — to take the message of this movement to the North,” Freedom Singer Charles Neblett recalls in CNN’s “Soundtracks.” “Mass meetings, picket lines, in jails — music was the glue that held everything together.”

Songs like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round” may sound like another performance of a traditional spiritual, but listen closely and you’ll hear lyrics that spoke to the time: “Ain’t gonna let no jailhouse turn me round. Keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, marching up to freedom land.”

The year: 1963

The protest: The March on Washington

The anthem: “If I Had a Hammer,” Peter, Paul and Mary

Originally written by socially conscious folk icon Pete Seeger, it’s the Peter, Paul and Mary recording of “If I Had a Hammer” that took off in the early ’60s.

It was popular folk music, but it also keenly reflected the times as an anthem of resistance and fighting for justice: Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Hammer” at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington to “express in song what (the) great meeting is all about.”

The year: 1968

The protest: Black Power movement

The anthem: “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” James Brown

The assassination of MLK in 1968 not only altered the African-American fight for equal rights — it altered the music about the struggle, as well.

Before MLK’s death, “you had the hymns of unity and change,” music and culture journalist Richard Goldstein explains. But with the rise of the Black Power Movement in the aftermath of King’s death, “the hymns fade and are replaced by much more militant sentiments in the music.”

The year: 1970s

The protest: Women’s rights

The anthem: “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy

Australian artist Helen Reddy didn’t set out to become the voice of the women’s liberation movement, but that’s what she became with this 1972 women’s empowerment single.

“I was looking for songs that reflected the positive sense of self that I felt I’d gained from the women’s movement,” she told Billboard magazine, “[but] I couldn’t find any. I realized that the song I was looking for didn’t exist, and I was going to have to write it myself.” The song went all the way to No. 1, making Reddy the first Australian solo artist to accomplish that feat in the US.

The year: 1970

The protest: Anti-Vietnam War

The anthem: “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Between the civil rights movement and outrage over the Vietnam War, there were more than enough social issues happening in the ’60s and ’70s to create a new standard for protest music.

One of the songs that emerged was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s response to the police-led shootings during an anti-war protest at Kent State University in 1970.

The Guardian, which calls “Ohio” the “greatest protest record” ever, notes that the song was born out of the now iconic images of what happened at Kent State. “Neil Young was hanging out … when his bandmate, David Crosby, handed him the latest issue of Life magazine,” the Guardian recalled. “It contained a vivid account and shocking photographs of the killing of four students by the Ohio national guard during a demonstration against the Vietnam war. … Young took a guitar proffered by Crosby and, in short order, wrote a song about the killings.”

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The year: Late ’80s – Early ’90s

The protest: Systemic racism

The anthems: “Fight the Power,” “F*** tha Police”

The progress of the ’60s civil rights movement could be found in the law, but not necessarily in American communities. Racism and its impact was still plainly seen in large and small cities across the United States, as well as, protesters would argue, within those cities’ police forces.

This frustration was funneled into louder, angrier and more direct anthems like N.W.A.’s controversial 1988 track “F*** Tha Police” and Public Enemy’s 1989 anthem “Fight the Power.”

The year: 2010s

The protest: Marriage equality

The anthem: “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga; “Same Love,” Macklemore

The marriage equality movement hit its stride in 2015 as the US Supreme Court heard a case that would decide whether same-sex marriage would be legalized across the country.

In the buildup to this moment, popular culture played a role in pushing back against hurtful stereotypes and championing equality regardless of sexuality. It’s no surprise that Lady Gaga’s self-acceptance anthem, 2011’s “Born This Way,” and Macklemore’s “Same Love,” were both securely in the US’s Top 40 songs in the five years leading up to the Supreme Court’s historic decision in favor of marriage equality.

The year: 2010s

The protest: Black Lives Matter

The anthem: “Alright,” Kendrick Lamar

Along with the rise of Black Lives Matter, a social justice movement that began with a hashtag in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, has been the rise of a new era of protest music.

From J. Cole (“Be Free”) to Beyonce (“Formation”) to Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”), these artists aren’t making songs tailor-made to be sung while marching, but they are overtly political music in an era of increasing outcry at the deaths of black men and women by police.

Like “We Shall Overcome” did more than 50 years ago, Lamar’s “Alright” has become an almost unofficial anthem for those protesting injustice. “There are multiple messages,” says Salamishah Tillet, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “One, you’re going to be alright because we’re going to get through this day and we’re going to be able to be here tomorrow; we’re going to fight to save this nation and fight to save ourselves.”

“But,” she continues, “it’s also like, ‘We’re right’ — this is a morally righteous cause.”

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