U.S. Mint begins shipping quarters featuring Maya Angelou
By Megan Hadley



The Mint announced last year that several notable women would be featured in the quarter program, including Angelou, Chinese American film star Anna May Wong and former astronaut Sally Ride. Image courtesy U.S. Mint


Jan. 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. Mint says it has begun shipping a new quarter that features poet Maya Angelou, which is the first U.S. coin ever to honor a Black woman.

Angelou's quarter is part of the America Women Quarters Program, which will feature a number of historical figures.

The Mint says that coins featuring other prominent American women will also begin shipping later this year and continue through 2025.

"Each 2022 quarter is designed to reflect the breadth and depth of accomplishments being celebrated throughout this historic coin program. Maya Angelou, featured on the reverse of this first coin in the series, used words to inspire and uplift," Mint Deputy Director Ventris Gibson said in a statement Monday.

Angelou, who died in 2014 at the age of 86, was an author and social activist. Her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was nominated for the National Book Award.

In her lifetime, Angelou received more than 20 honorary degrees from institutions such as Boston College and Tufts University, and was granted the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in 1982.

The Mint announced last year that it would include several notable figures in the quarter program, including Chinese American film star Anna May Wong, former astronaut Sally Ride and Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

The program was established by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, and requires that five prominent American women be recognized on quarters between 2022 and 2025.

Read More

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Late Maya Angelou's Forever stamp features quote she didn't write

At stamp dedication, Oprah honors Maya Angelou's legacy

 

https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-begins-shipping-first-american-women-quarters-program-coins

Polish court dismisses charges against writer who called President Duda a 'moron'
By UPI Staff


Polish President Andrzej Duda speaks during a press conference. Charges against a writer who called Duda 'a moron' were dropped on Monday. File Photo by Andrzej Lange/EPA


Jan. 11 (UPI) -- A Polish Charges dismissed charges against a well-known writer who called Poland's President Andrzej Duda a moron on social media.

Writer Jakub Zulczyk faced up to three years of prison for insulting Duda in a social media post, but a regional court in Warsaw dropped the charges on Monday and decided to discontinue the case.

Judges cited free speech rights and said a conviction could lead to preventing people from criticizing authority in the future.

Judge Tomasz Julian Grochowicz said public figures like the president were at a larger risk of public criticism and that Zulczyk didn't commit any crimes.

Zulczyk's comment was a response to Duda's reaction to U.S. President Joe Biden's electoral victory.

Duda tweeted that he would await the nomination by the Electoral College. People criticized the tweet, saying that Duda suggested the victory wasn't definitive.

In a Facebook post, Zulczyk said Biden clearly won the election and that Duda was "a moron."

Zulczyk said he was probably the first writer in the country to be tried for writing something insulting.

Poland had broad insult laws including offending religious views or the country's flag, but those in violation of those laws are usually handed fines or community service punishments.

Gallup poll: Americans reading fewer books than in previous years
By Rich Klein

A new Gallup survey finds many Americans read fewer books last year -- in any format, whether print, electronic or audio. File Photo courtesy of Amazon

Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Americans read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, according to a new Gallup poll released Monday.

That represents the lowest number of books read compared to any previous survey dating back to 1990, Gallup said. In three polls conducted between 2002 and 2016, Gallup surveys showed that Americans read an average of 15.2 books per year.

"It is unclear from these data if the declines in book readership are occurring because of a lack of interest in books, a lack of time to read books, or perhaps COVID-19-related disruptions in lifestyle activities or access to books," the pollster said. "It is also uncertain at this point whether the declines in book reading mark a temporary change or a more permanent one."

The results are based on a Dec. 1-16 poll of a random sample of 811 adults living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The participants were asked how many books they "read -- either all or part of the way through" in the past year -- including electronic books and audiobooks.

The decline in book reading is mostly a function of how many books readers are consuming, rather than fewer Americans reading at all, Gallup said in a news release issued with the poll.

The 17% who said they did not read any books in the past year is in line with the 16% to 18% measured in 2002 to 2016 surveys, Gallup said.

Gallup reported that 27% of respondents said they read more than 10 books, down 8 percentage points since 2016 and lower than every prior measure by at least 4 points.

College graduates, women and older Americans also are reading a bit less.

For example, those 55 and older went from a previous average of reading 16.7 books to 12. There has been little change in the average number read by those younger than 55.

The survey's margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

A poll from the Pew Research Center last week found that more people are reading electronic books, about 30%. That survey found Americans reach an average of 14 books last year in any format, the same as its findings in 2011.

Donald Trump Has Normalized Fascism

By giving a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.

Jason Stanley GUARDIAN

by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY 2.0

LONG READ

"Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.

Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.

Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.

Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.

My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her.

Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In keeping with a tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win elections and gain power.

Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.

Fascist propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. A police militarized to address the wounds of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national humiliation by enemies both internal and external. As WEB Du Bois showed in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.

The novel development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”
Constructing an enemy

To understand contemporary US fascism, it is useful to consider parallels to 20th century history, both where they succeed and where they fail.

Hitler was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would have been among the very best Nazis.” We American Jews feel firmly at home. Now, where the fascist movement’s internal enemies are leftists and movements for Black racial equality, there certainly could be fascist American Jews.

Germany’s National Socialist party did not take over a mainstream party. It started as a small, radical, far-right anti-democratic party, which faced different pressures as it strove to achieve greater electoral success.

Despite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was something the party had outgrown. It represented itself as the antidote to communism, using a history of political violence in the Weimar Republic, including street clashes between communists and the far right, to warn of a threat of violent communist revolution. It attracted support from business elites by promising to smash labor unions. The Nazis portrayed socialists, Marxists, liberals, labor unions, the cultural world and the media as representatives of, or sympathizers with, this revolution. Once in power, they bore down on this message.

In his 1935 speech, Communism with its Mask Off, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described Bolshevism carrying “on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such”. By contrast, “National Socialism sees in all these things – in [private] property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism – these forces which carry on every human civilization and fundamentally determine its worth.”

The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization.

Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi government of the 1930s was not genocidal, nor were its notorious concentration camps packed with Jewish prisoners, at least until the November pogrom of 1938. The main targets of the regime’s concentration camps were, initially, communists and socialists. The Nazi regime urged vigilante violence against its other targets, such as Jews, separating themselves from this violence by obscuring the role of agents of the state. During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the insidious threat of communism.

Violent militias occupied an ambiguous role between state and non-state actors. The SS began as violent Nazi supporters, before becoming an independent arm of the government. The message of violent law and order created a culture that influenced all the Nazi state’s institutions. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “for violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards.”

In the US, the training of police as “warriors”, together with the unofficial replacement of the American flag by the thin blue line flag, augur poorly about the democratic commitments of this institution.

For a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically by projecting its own violations of it on to its opponents.

In the case of the takeover of the mainstream rightwing party by a far-right anti-democratic movement, the pretense must be stronger. The movement must contend with members of that party who are faithful to procedural elements of democracy, such as the principle of one voter one vote, or that the loser of a fair election give up power – in the United States today, figures such as Adam Kinzinger and Elizabeth Cheney. A fascist social and political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently anti-democratic agenda.

In the face of the attack on the US capital on 6 January, even the most resolute skeptic must admit that Republican politicians have been at least attempting to cultivate a mass of violent vigilantes to support their causes. Kyle Rittenhouse is becoming a hero to Republicans after showing up in Kenosha, WI as an armed vigilante citizen, and killing two men. Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, deliberate deception.
Black rebellion, white backlash

Street violence proved invaluable to the National Socialists in their path to power. The Nazis instigated and exacerbated violence in the streets, then demonized their opponents as enemies of the German people who must be dealt with harshly. Trump’s rise followed Black protest, at times violent, of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore. More recently, the murder of George Floyd and a historic protest movement in the US in the late spring has given fuel to fascist misrepresentation.

All of these recent developments take place as only the latest in a long US history of Black rebellion against white supremacist ideology and structures, and a parallel history of white backlash.

White vigilante groups regularly formed in reaction to Black rebellions, to “defend their families and property against Black rebellion”, the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in her recent history of these rebellions. Hinton shows that police often acted in concert with these groups. For decades, the instigator of these rebellions has typically been an incident or incidents of police violence against members of the community, following a long period of often violent over-policing that exacerbated these communities’ grievances.

Street movements in the US have often been accompanied by vigorous campus protests, from the protests against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, to recent campus protests for racial justice that attracted media rebuke (paradoxically, for “chilling free speech”). Politicians in both parties have feasted on these moments, using them to troll for votes. During these episodes of protest and rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwater onwards, placing campus protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:


You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Politicians have shown less interest in addressing the underlying conditions that lead to violence in poor Black urban communities – the widespread availability of guns, the massive and persistent racial wealth gap and the effects of violent policing and mass incarceration. And why should they? As long as these underlying conditions persist, politicians of either party can run for office by milking fear and promising a harsh law and order response. Morrison’s 1995 address is a warning that these conditions are ripe for harnessing by a fascist movement, one targeting democracy itself.

In its most recent iteration, in the form of the reaction against Black Lives Matter protesters and the demonization of antifa and student activists, a fascist social and political movement has been avidly stoking the flames for mass rightwing political violence, by justifying it against these supposed internal enemies.

Rachel Kleinfield, in an October 2021 article, documents the rise of the legitimation of political violence in the US. According to the article, the “bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending – and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.”

This kind of justification of political violence is classically fascist – a dominant group threatened by the prospect of gender, racial and religious equality turning to a leader who promises a violent response.
How to topple a democracy

We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).

The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.

The key to democracy is an informed electorate. An electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects of over-policing and over-incarceration, will be unsurprised by mass political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these problems. An electorate ignorant of these facts will react not with understanding, but with uncomprehending fear and horror at Black political unrest.

Sometimes, you trace a fascist movement to its genesis in Nazi influence on its leaders, as with India’s RSS. In the United States, the causal relations run the other way around. As James Whitman shows in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Jim Crow era in the United States influenced Nazi law. In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate impact on minority communities (as in Texas). By obscuring in our education system facts about this era, one can mask the reemergence of legislation that borrows from its strategies.

Indeed, the very tactic of restricting politically vital information to schoolchildren is itself borrowed from the Jim Crow era. Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today.

Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.

According to National Socialist ideology, abortion, at any point in pregnancy, was considered to be murder. Just as it was acceptable to murder disabled people and other groups whose identities were considered dangerous to the health of the “Aryan race”, it was acceptable to perform abortions on members of these groups. In the first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of a fascist future.

If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.

There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.

Donald Trump has shown others what is possible. But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will outlive him. As Toni Morrison warned, it feeds off ideologies with deep roots in American history. It would be a grave error to think it cannot ultimately win.

Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of How Fascism Works

Rome church condemns swastika-draped casket at funeral

A picture made available by the Italian online news portal Open, showing people gathered around a swastika-covered casket outside the St. Lucia church, in Rome, Monday, Jan. 10, 2022. The Catholic Church in Rome on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022, strongly condemned as "offensive and unacceptable" a funeral procession outside a church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute. (Open Via AP)

ROME (AP) — The Catholic Church in Rome on Tuesday strongly condemned as “offensive and unacceptable” a funeral procession outside a local church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute.

Photos and video of the scene outside St. Lucia church following the Monday funeral service were published by the Italian online news portal Open. They showed around two dozen people gathered outside the church as the swastika-draped casket emerged, shouting “Presente!” with their right arm extended in the fascist salute.

In a statement Tuesday, the Vicariate of Rome strongly condemned the scene and stressed that neither the parish priest, nor the priest who celebrated the funeral, knew what was going to transpire outside after the funeral Mass ended.

It called the swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag “a horrendous symbol irreconcilable with Christianity.”

“This ideological and violent exploitation, especially following an act of worship near a sacred place, remains serious, offensive and unacceptable for the church community of Rome and for all people of good will in our city,” it said.

The statement quoted the parish priest, the Rev. Alessandro Zenobbi, as distancing himself and the church from “every word, gesture and symbol used outside the church, which are attributed to extremist ideologies far from the message of the Gospel of Christ.”

Italian news reports identified the deceased as a 44-year-old former militant of the extreme right-wing group Forza Nuova, who died over the weekend of a blood clot.

Pope Francis is technically the bishop of Rome, but he delegates the day-to-day management of the diocese to his vicar, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis.

USA

Kroger workers survey reveals economic hardship, food insecurity

By Rich Klein

Negotiations over wages between Kroger/King's Snoopers and a union representing the company's workers in Colorado have stalled and could lead to a strike beginning Wednesday. 

File Photo by Bob Strong/UPI | License Photo


Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Nearly two-thirds of Kroger workers do not make enough money to pay for basic expenses every month, and some experience food insecurity, according to a survey of the company's retail workers in three states released Tuesday.

The survey conducted by the Economic Roundtable is the largest-ever independent survey of retail workers in the United States, according to the organization, a nonprofit research group. It was requested by four United Food and Commercial Workers unions.

Kroger is the largest grocery chain in the United States, including King Sooper's, Fred Meyer and QFC.

Three regions with 36,795 hourly Kroger workers were surveyed: The Puget Sound region of Washington state, the state of Colorado, and Southern California. Completed surveys were received from 10,287 workers, representing a 28% response rate.

Among the workers who reported being unable to afford necessities, 44% were unable to pay rent, and 39% said they wee unable to pay for groceries. Fourteen percent of respondents reported being homeless now or during the past year.

Kroger "falls short in using its abundant food resources to meet the essential needs of its front-line employees," the Economic Roundtable said.

Seventy-three percent of Kroger workers said they are not fairly compensated based on their experience and the work that they do.

Kroger's annual revenue rose 8% in 2021, to $132 billion, BuzzFeed news reported, with senior executives paid $5 million or more each in 2020. CEO Rodney McMullen earned $22 million.

Meanwhile, negotiations over wages between Kroger/King's Snoopers and a union representing the company's workers in Colorado have stalled and could lead to a strike beginning Wednesday.

As of Jan. 1, the minimum wage in Colorado was raised to $12.56 from $12.32.

#FIGHTFOR15

ALDOUS HUXLEY; ENDS AND MEANS/DO WHAT YOU WILL

 

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201445/page/n3/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.78656/page/n5/mode/2up

SOMA

Psychedelic-laced beer may have helped this ancient South American empire rule

Beer laced with hallucinogenic drugs derived from plant seeds may have helped leaders of a South American culture maintain their political control for hundreds of years, according to new research.

© Lisa Milosavljevic/Royal Ontario Museum A team of researchers excavated the Quilcapampa site in Peru from 2013 to 2017 in order to better understand the Wari civilization.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN 

JAN 11,2022

The Wari, who built an empire and ruled the highlands of what is now Peru from 600 to 1,000 AD, preceded the Incas.

Archaeological excavations at the Quilcapampa site in southern Peru, which took place between 2013 and 2017, have found that the Wari used seeds from the vilca tree and combined the hallucinogenic drug with chicha, or beer made from the molle tree. This beer was then served to guests at communal feasts, reinforcing relationships while maintaining Wari political control.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity, has shown the first evidence of vilca seeds at a Wari site.

The discovery of vilca at Quilcapampa fills a gap in the understanding of how different civilizations used substances.

"This was a turning point in the Andes in terms of politics and use of hallucinogens," said study author Matthew Biwer, a visiting assistant professor of archaeology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

"We see this kind of use of hallucinogens as different use context than in prior civilizations, who seem to have closely guarded the use of hallucinogens to a select few, or the latter Inca Empire who emphasized the mass-consumption of beer but did not use psychotropic substances such as vilca at feasts."

The power of the feast

Researchers have yet to uncover the reason behind the collapse of the Wari Empire, but studying Wari sites is revealing more about its people.

​"The Wari Empire stretched from northern Peru to the far south near the Chilean border, and from the coast to the mountainous areas of the Andes," Biwer said. "It is the first example of an empire in South America, having collapsed around 400 years prior to the rise of the Inca Empire."

It has long been known that the Wari used beer and feasting as part of their political control, but the research proved their access to vilca and its use as a hallucinogen.

Additionally, the scientists discovered evidence that the Wari were brewing chicha in large quantities. Alongside the well-preserved botanical remains were ceramics from the center of the site, which indicate that this is where the feasts were held, the study authors said

.

© Lisa Milosavljevic/Royal Ontario Museum 

These molle drupes were used to make an alcoholic beverage similar to beer called chicha.

​"The Wari added the vilca to the chicha beer in order to impress guests to their feasts who could not return the experience," Biwer said. "This created an indebted relationship between Wari hosts and guests, likely from the surrounding region.

"We argue that the feasting, beer, and vilca thus served to create and cement social connections between Wari affiliated peoples and locals as the Empire expanded. It also was a way for Wari leaders to demonstrate and maintain social, economic, and political power."

The guests of these feasts would have felt compelled to acknowledge the power of their hosts or feel the need to owe them a favor in the future, he said.

© Lisa Milosavljevic/Royal Ontario Museum

 Investigating Wari sites in South America could help researchers determine why the empire ended.

"In the Andes, this is typically known to have occurred by the consumption of beer (chicha), llama meat, various plants such as corn and potatoes, and other foods and drink," Biwer said.

The use of vilca, typically inhaled like snuff or through a pipe, dates back at least 4,000 years, indicated by an ancient pipe from that time found at the Inca Cueva site in Argentina. The drug was also used by those in Tiwanaku, a neighboring site in Bolivia, during the time of Wari rule.

A ritual for empire-building

Earlier findings also showed that vilca was only provided exclusively to some, like priests, and not available to all.

The Wari, however, were likely dropping the drug in their alcohol and providing it to others, effectively enhancing the psychoactive effects of both substances. This inclusive behavior by the Wari elites not only showed off their hospitality, but offered an experience that wasn't widely available elsewhere and couldn't be easily replicated by anyone who may want to oppose Wari control.

"They may have experienced euphoric or spiritual sensations," Biwer said. "This type of food would have been a very powerful experience for guests who were led on a journey by Wari hosts."

It would have been too dry in the region surrounding Quilcapampa to grow vilca, he said.

"Wari established a system of roads, which the later Inca used, that move people and resources," Biwer said. "I would say that it would not have been accessible to everyone, as it was in the interest of Wari leaders to control the use and access to vilca, but it would not have been extremely difficult to get vilca to Quilcapampa."

© Luis Manuel González La Rosa and Justin Jennings/Royal Ontario Museum 

Fragments of face-necked jars from Quilcapampa were likely used to serve vilca-laced beer. Afterward, the jars were sometimes intentionally broken with a blow to the chest, according to the researchers.

Vilca grows in the Ayacucho region, where the capital of the Wari Empire once stood, as well as parts of the Cusco region 249 miles (400 kilometers) from Quilcapampa, he said.

Previous research has shown that the Wari were also capable of accessing other distant resources, like seashells, obsidian and Amazonian feathers.

Next, Biwer and his team are eager to search for Wari sites in a coastal valley in Peru. Discovering new sites could help researchers determine how climate change and drought could have impacted the Wari before their reign ended.

© Luis Manuel González La Rosa and Justin Jennings/Royal Ontario Museum 

This Chakipampa-style cup from the Quilcapampa site may have been used to drink beer. It was shattered during the final feast.

© Lisa Milosavljevic/Royal Ontario Museum 

Maico Aybar Villalobos holds fragments of a Robles Moqo vessel that he excavated from Quilcapampa.

there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon...”

Soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932)

https://www.huxley.net › soma › somaquote

The prince, the mayor, and the U.S. fish that ate Japan

Christian Elliott 

National Geographic

JAN. 11,2022

When Crown Prince Akihito visited Chicago on October 3, 1960, his sole request was to visit Shedd Aquarium. Then Mayor Richard J. Daley, an avid angler, presented the prince with a gift that he scooped with a net from one of the tanks himself: 18 bluegills, the official Illinois state fish.

© Photograph by Associated Press Crown Prince Akihito of Japan looks at tropical fish at the Coney Island Aquarium in New York on Sept. 30, 1960. In the background is Dr Christopher Coates, director of the aquarium. Akihito is in New York as part of the Japanese royals state visit

© Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark 

A studio portrait of a bluegill, Lepomis macrochirus.

LONG READ

The 26-year-old future emperor was already a passionate ichthyologist, and he planned to stock the exotic fish in the moat surrounding his palace, according to accounts in the Chicago Tribune at the time.

At windy Chicago O’Hare International Airport the next day with Princess Michiko, Akihito bid the city farewell, carrying a gift that he couldn’t have imagined would cause a decades-long ecological crisis in his homeland.

In the intervening six decades, the bluegills became an invasive, species-destroying nightmare, crowding Japanese freshwater lakes and rivers and destroying native fish biodiversity, says Kenji Saitoh, a researcher at the country’s Fisheries Resources and Education Agency.

 Photograph by Trevor Mogg, Alamy Stock Photo People fishing in Lake Biwa (Biwako), Shiga Prefecture, Japan.

Fortunately, science has marched on in 60 years. Now, Japanese geneticists are experimenting with the gene editing wizardry of CRISPR to sterilize the invasive bluegills. If the initiative succeeds, wildlife managers could use the same technique to rid the U.S. of damaging aquatic invasives such as the Asian carp.

In Japan, the public is ambivalent about the bluegills and wary of genetic efforts to curtail them, and it’s easy to see why. The 60-year history of bluegill in Japan is a cautionary tale about human intervention on all sides.
The invasion begins

When he arrived home after his 1960 U.S. tour, Akihito asked Japan’s national Agency of Fisheries to breed the 15 captive bluegills that survived the trans-Pacific journey, in hopes of releasing them into the wild as a new game fish, nicknamed the “prince fish” in his honor. In 1966, the bluegills’ offspring were deposited into Lake Ippeki-ko outside Ito City in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture. Three years later, a stone monument was placed on the shore to celebrate the prince fish’s successful introduction. More bluegills were released into freshwater ecosystems across Japan.

“At that time, we had not experienced any serious invasive species problems and bluegill did not look dangerous according to its feeding habits, not being a fierce piscivore,” says Nakai Katsuki, a Japanese research scientist at the Lake Biwa Museum who has studied invasive North American fish species in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture since 1989.

The Japanese government soon stopped breeding bluegill because the fish grew slowly in captivity. For a while, the bluegill was largely forgotten, says Katsuki.

But in the meantime, the fish thrived unnoticed in the wild, multiplying in Japan’s rivers, lakes, and streams, expanding its diet beyond insects, plankton, and aquatic plants to shrimp and native fish eggs. In their North American habitats, bluegills reproduce quickly and live for a long time, whereas in Japan, native shoreline fish had temporarily kept the bluegill population under control by eating their eggs and juveniles.

By 1999, the bluegill had colonized all freshwater ecosystems in the country, spurring government-supported research into bluegill dispersal. But by then, it was way too late.
Ineffectual resistance

In 2000, Saitoh, who specializes in fish genetics and evolution, went to the U.S. to track the origins of Japan’s bluegill. At the time, Japanese scientists fiercely debated whether the ubiquitous fish really originated from one source.

The research team, led by biologist Kouichi Kawamura at Mie University, southwest of Tokyo, compared mitochondrial DNA from 13 different populations of U.S. bluegill to 56 populations in Japan. In a pool of the Mississippi River near Guttenberg, Iowa, a small town nestled against limestone bluffs, the team found a perfect match: All of the prince fish originated from the 15 bluegills gifted to Akihito by Daley decades earlier. Limited genetic diversity from inbreeding didn’t seem to hinder the bluegills in Japan at all.

By now, the bluegills posed a serious threat to important native species across the country. In Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest and oldest freshwater body, bluegills decimated the Crucian carp population, a fish unique to the lake and beloved as a fermented delicacy called funazushi. So the Shiga Prefectural Government placed a $3 per kilogram bounty on bluegill to encourage commercial fishermen to target them, and enacted a $1,000 fine for restocking bluegill and bass for lure fishing. Several research teams designed new types of traps to capture bluegill and their eggs. In 2002, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment formally identified bluegill as an invasive threat.

The Prefectural Government created a website promoting recipes for bluegill, hoping to encourage people to eat the fish. A local seafood processing firm sold bluegill sushi and funazushi bluegill. Nearby Fukui University tried selling a bluegill “eco-burger.” None caught on, according to Katsuki.

“Originally accepted and celebrated as a tasty fish,” Katsuki said, by 2002 bluegill had become “an infamous fish because of its invasiveness. In this process, the good taste of bluegill has been almost forgotten in Japan.”

In June 2005, Japan’s national Invasive Alien Species Act outlawed importing, possessing, and transporting 97 species, including bluegill. Two years later, Emperor Akihito issued a formal apology for having introduced the fish to the country in what the Japan Times called “a rare expression of contrition.” “My heart aches to see it has turned out like this,” Akihito said.

By 2007, the prince fish population reached an estimated 25 million. Along with bass, introduced from the U.S. for sport fishing in the 1970s, the invader accounted for 90 percent of all fauna in Lake Biwa, once home to 30 native fish species. In 2005, the Shiga Prefectural Government spent $1.2 million to remove 420 tons of invasive fish from the lake. Thanks to continual government-sponsored commercial fishing the population has halved since then, but bluegill and bass remain in the lake, as traditional gill nets can’t capture small juvenile fish. Over the past three years, eradication efforts cost the prefectural government $270,000 annually. If fishing ceased, the bluegill population would rise again.

“The number of habitats seems to have a little decreased, and the population size in large waters like Lake Biwa has declined since 2005, but the distribution does not seem to have decreased,” says Kawamura. “I am not hopeful for the future.”
A solution that may not happen

At long last, technology could provide an answer. Ongoing research led by fish geneticist Hiroyuki Okamoto focuses on “gene-induced suppression for alien populations” using the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. Okamoto’s team sequenced the bluegill genome and recently produced first-generation male fish that could carry a female-specific sterile gene into the wild bluegill population, eliminating their ability to produce eggs. The program is in its sixth year in the lab.

While genetic sterilization seems to work, Okamoto estimates he would need to release a number of altered fish equivalent to 7 percent of the invasive population to completely eradicate bluegill in Japan’s waterways. Still, he thinks gene suppression could succeed.

The task may seem arduous, but “there is no more efficient way to eliminate the invasive species,” Okamoto says. “Contract commercial fishing takes time, it needs a budget, and in Japan that budget is very small and getting smaller, because we have been doing it already for 20 years. Now that we have CRISPR technology, maybe there’s a possibility to solve this problem.”

Still, he’s not sure officials will approve releasing his sterile gene-carrying bluegill into natural ecosystems. Okamoto said he faces online criticism and threats for his work from people who say organisms altered with CRISPR don’t belong in the wild.

“While we are aware of the genetic methods designed to disrupt the reproduction of bluegill, we remain cautious of the potential impacts on native ecosystems and their relations in law and regulations,” Masaki Ohara, section chief of the International Strategy Division of the Japanese Ministry of the Environment said in an email.

There’s another major obstacle: limited public support in Japan for bluegill management in general.

Okamoto compared the U.S. Invasive Carp Regional Coordinating Committee’s 2021 $45 million budget to the $16 million Japanese budget for all inland fishery issues. “Seeing this,” he says, “I think U.S. people have much more concern about invasive fish issues.”

Saitoh agrees. “Ordinary people do not pay much attention to what’s happening in the water because it is invisible to them.”
No 'silver bullet'

Across the globe in Illinois, where Japan’s bluegills originated, Kevin Irons is dealing with an invasive species of his own: Asian carp. As aquatic nuisance species program manager at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, he oversees mass capture efforts to remove 750 tons of carp along the 330-mile length of the Illinois River Basin each year.

Over the past decade, Japanese and U.S. scientists have occasionally swapped advice and methods for controlling their respective invasives. Irons’ teams collect water samples to test for DNA from sloughed-off carp cells, a technique pioneered by Japanese geneticists to track bluegill. In 2012, Nakai Katsuki, the Lake Biwa Museum fish researcher, flew to St. Paul, Minnesota to present advances in electrofishing and artificial nests design to a conference of carp managers. He remembers eating fried silver carp, rebranded “silverfin.”

Despite his best efforts, there doesn’t seem to be “a silver bullet out there right now to eradicate carp,” Irons says.

But the technique Okamoto’s team is developing in Japan—genetic biocontrol, or “gene drive”—has been called just that by some U.S. National Academy of Sciences researchers.

“The implications are potentially remarkable: For the first time we may genuinely have a tool with the power to permanently eliminate a target species from the planet,” three scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, just before Okamoto’s work started in earnest.

“The question is no longer whether we can control invasive species using gene drive,” they wrote, “but whether we should.”

But there are tradeoffs and risks with the technique, researchers say, such as unintended off-target mutations that spread through the population for generations, or the global loss of a species if modified individuals somehow escaped and returned to their native habitat. It’s also possible that another invasive would quickly fill the vacant niche.

As the decades have demonstrated, whether a Japanese prince takes a souvenir tank of bluegills home or a U.S. farmer imports silver carp from eastern China, as with any human environmental intervention, good intentions aren’t always good enough.

Sidney Poitier – Hollywood’s first Black leading man reflected the civil rights movement on screen

Sidney Poitier, seen here in a 1980 photograph. 

Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images

January 7, 2022

In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.”

“He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the audience of 2,000 delegates. “I consider him a friend. I consider him a great friend of humanity.”

That man was Sidney Poitier.

Poitier, who died at 94 on Jan. 7, 2022, broke the mold of what a Black actor could be in Hollywood. Before the 1950s, Black movie characters generally reflected racist stereotypes such as lazy servants and beefy mammies. Then came Poitier, the only Black man to consistently win leading roles in major films from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. Like King, Poitier projected ideals of respectability and integrity. He attracted not only the loyalty of African Americans, but also the goodwill of white liberals.

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In my biography of him, titled “Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon,” I sought to capture his whole life, including his incredible rags-to-riches arc, his sizzling vitality on screen, his personal triumphs and foibles and his quest to live up to the values set forth by his Bahamian parents. But the most fascinating aspect of Poitier’s career, to me, was his political and racial symbolism. In many ways, his screen life intertwined with that of the civil rights movement – and King himself.

Sidney Poitier, center, marches during the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., in May 1968. Photo by Chester Sheard/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

An age of protests

In three separate columns in 1957, 1961 and 1962, a New York Daily News columnist named Dorothy Masters marveled that Poitier had the warmth and charisma of a minister. Poitier lent his name and resources to King’s causes, and he participated in demonstrations such as the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage and the 1963 March on Washington. In this era of sit-ins, Freedom Rides and mass marches, activists engaged in nonviolent sacrifice not only to highlight racist oppression, but also to win broader sympathy for the cause of civil rights.

In that same vein, Poitier deliberately chose to portray characters who radiated goodness. They had decent values and helped white characters, and they often sacrificed themselves. He earned his first star billing in 1958, in “The Defiant Ones,” in which he played an escaped prisoner handcuffed to a racist played by Tony Curtis. At the end, with the chain unbound, Poitier jumps off a train to stick with his new white friend. Writer James Baldwin reported seeing the film on Broadway, where white audiences clapped with reassurance, their racial guilt alleviated. When he saw it again in Harlem, members of the predominantly Black audience yelled “Get back on the train, you fool!”

King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In that same year, Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor for “Lilies of the Field,” in which he played Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who builds a chapel for German nuns out of the goodness of his heart. The sweet, low-budget movie was a surprise hit. In its own way, like the horrifying footage of water hoses and police dogs attacking civil rights activists, it fostered swelling support for racial integration.

Sidney Poitier, Katherine Houghton and Spencer Tracy in the 1967 film ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images

A better man

By the time of the actor’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech, both King and Poitier seemed to have a slipping grip on the American public. Bloody and destructive riots plagued the nation’s cities, reflecting the enduring discontent of many poor African Americans. The swelling calls for “Black Power” challenged the ideals of nonviolence and racial brotherhood – ideals associated with both King and Poitier.

When Poitier stepped to the lectern that evening, he lamented the “greed, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of others, corruption of our value system, and a moral deterioration that has already scarred our souls irrevocably.” “On my bad days,” he said, “I am guilty of suspecting that there is a national death wish.”

By the late 1960s, both King and Poitier had reached a crossroads. Federal legislation was dismantling Jim Crow in the South, but African Americans still suffered from limited opportunity. King prescribed a “revolution of values,” denounced the Vietnam War, and launched a Poor People’s Campaign. Poitier, in his 1967 speech for the SCLC, said that King, by adhering to his convictions for social justice and human dignity, “has made a better man of me.”

Exceptional characters

Poitier tried to adhere to his own convictions. As long as he was the only Black leading man, he insisted on playing the same kind of hero. But in the era of Black Power, had Poitier’s saintly hero become another stereotype? His rage was repressed, his sexuality stifled. A Black critic, writing in The New York Times, asked “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”

President Barack Obama presents Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier with the Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

That critic had a point: As Poitier himself knew, his films created too-perfect characters. Although the films allowed white audiences to appreciate a Black man, they also implied that racial equality depends on such exceptional characters, stripped of any racial baggage. From late 1967 into early 1968, three of Poitier’s movies owned the top spot at the box office, and a poll ranked him the most bankable star in Hollywood.

Each film provided a hero who soothed the liberal center. His mannered schoolteacher in “To Sir, With Love” tames a class of teenage ruffians in London’s East End. His razor-sharp detective in “In the Heat of the Night” helps a crotchety white Southern sheriff solve a murder. His world-renowned doctor in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” marries a white woman, but only after winning the blessing of her parents.

“I try to make movies about the dignity, nobility, the magnificence of human life,” he insisted. Audiences flocked to his films, in part, because he transcended racial division and social despair – even as more African Americans, baby boomers and film critics tired of the old-fashioned do-gooder spirit of these movies.

Intertwined lives

And then, the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sidney Poitier intersected one final time. After King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Poitier was a stand-in for the ideal that King embodied. When he presented at the Academy Awards, Poitier won a massive ovation. “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” captured most of the major awards. Hollywood again dealt with the nation’s racial upheaval through Poitier movies.

But after King’s violent murder, the Poitier icon no longer captured the national mood. In the 1970s, a generation of “Blaxploitation” films featured violent, sexually charged heroes. They were a reaction against the image of a Black leading man associated with Poitier. Although his career evolved, Poitier was no longer a superstar, and he no longer bore the burden of representing the Black freedom movement. Yet for a generation, he had served as popular culture’s preeminent expression of the ideals of Martin Luther King.

Author

Aram Goudsouzian
Bizot Family Professor of History, University of Memphis