LGBTQ/HUMAN RIGHTS VS RELIGIOUS RITES
Latinopoulou on same-sex marriage: “It’s unnatural and against our religion”

by ATHENS BUREAU


Afroditi Latinopoulou returned to social media with a new post, this time talking about adoption, marriage and the creation of a family between same-sex couples.

Through her personal Instagram account, the former New Democracy politician uploaded a video, calling the creation of a family from the LGBTI community as “unnatural.

“It is not normal for a child to grow up with two fathers or two mothers. The child wants his mother and his father and this has been clarified for years now through countless researches,” she said.

She captioned her post, and said the following in the video:

“There is increasing pressure from the LGBT community and specific media on the government to legislate civil marriage and adoption by LGBT people .

“To close the matter once and for all, both I and the vast majority of Greek society do not want to hear about marriages between men or women, let alone adoption by same-sex couples. It is something irrational, unnatural and against our religion.

“Some will say that several countries in Europe have adopted all this. Of course, they forget that many countries have not made this fatal mistake.

“In the end if we want to compare with Europe it would be better to compare with the levels of wages they receive in their purchasing power, their education system, their road network and the means of transport they have or even the access they have for their citizens with a disability.

“The last thing we are interested in is comparing whether they accept LGBT marriages and whether they are considered suitable for adoptive parents.

“Both biology and religion are clear on these matters. It is not normal for a child to grow up with two fathers or two mothers.

“The child wants his mother and his father and this has been clarified for years now through countless researches and not 52 genders purposely mixing it up so that some can promote their own agenda.

“I want to believe that the government will not bow to the concerted pressure of the LGBT community and the lobbies that support it worldwide and will not even consider allowing children from LGBT people to be adopted as if the children are products to be scrapped in order to empty the institutions.

“Father and mother play a separate but equally decisive role in their upbringing, development and character formation. They should not be insulted by some with silly fashions to play it progressive.

“Those who do not respect these and systematically seek to deconstruct our society will find us against them”.

Watch the video:




Her post comes a few days after her comment on Facebook against Giorgos Kapoutzidis, who in a recent interview with Hello, had said that he would adopt a child if he found the right partner.

“If I find the right person, I will. Another reason I speak openly about the right to marry and have children is because I did not have these rights. No one told me that I have this perspective,” he said.

“When I found out I was gay, I realised I would have to live a life alone and hidden. So I want young people to have this perspective, to know that if they want to have a person by their side, they can do it.

“And if they want to marry their partner and start a family, they should be able to do that too. What I didn’t have – and maybe the train has already left for me, I don’t know – I don’t want the young people to be deprived of them.”

Melting glaciers show us how much climate change is impacting the environment, Dr Heïdi Sevestre says

ABC RN /
By Penny Lomax and Sophie Kesteven for Late Night Live

Heïdi was a teenager when she decided that she wanted to pursue a career as a glaciologist.(Supplied)

Being a glaciologist is like being an astronaut in a frozen world, Dr Heïdi Sevestre says.

The 34-year-old has been studying glaciers for about 10 years. In 2022, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Shackleton Medal for Protection of the Polar Regions for her work as a researcher, climate activist and expedition leader.

"There's something hypnotising, something absolutely mesmerising, about the icy environments," Dr Sevestre tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.

"This is probably one of the reasons why, as [a] scientist, [I] feel so strongly about protecting these environments."
'In love with these glaciers'

Dr Sevestre's unwavering passion for nature began when she was growing up in the French Alps.

"I started hiking, climbing, mountaineering, and eventually I discovered the high-altitude environments and I simply fell in love with these glaciers," she says.

Dr Sevestre devotes her time to scientific research and science outreach.

(Supplied: Silje Smith Johnsen)

At the age of 17, a mountain guide suggested she might be interested in pursuing a career in glaciology. Since then, she studied physical geography, geology, and glaciology, and has been on numerous expeditions in the polar regions.

Sometimes she has carried out these expeditions in the harshest conditions, trekking in 140 kilometres per hour winds and in temperatures dipping below minus 15 degrees Celsius.

"Last year, I got the chance to do probably one of the most challenging expeditions of my life with some of my brightest and brilliant female colleagues," she says.

In 2021, a small team called the Climate Sentinels took part in a month-long expedition to gain a better understanding of the drivers of Arctic change.

It meant travelling 450 kilometres on skis across the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean, to collect ice and snow samples.

Collecting ice and snow samples in the Arctic.(Supplied)

The small archipelago of Svalbard sits between Northern Norway and the North Pole.

It holds a very dear place in Dr Sevestre's heart.

"[The archipelago is] covered 60 per cent by glaciers, so it's truly paradise for a glaciologist like me. But it's also a place where you feel the true power of nature," she says.

Indeed, the team faced such bad weather on their 2021 expedition that they had to bury themselves in snow to protect themselves and avoid losing their tents.

"We got to experience some of the most terrifying conditions I've ever seen on the archipelago. And bear in mind that I've been travelling to Svalbard since 2008," she says.

"We got hit by a series of scary and dramatic storms, which are the expression of climate change."

Svalbard is also home to about 3,000 polar bears and on that trip, the team had to escape one.

But while this work has its perils, it's a risk Dr Sevestre is willing to take to raise awareness of the impact climate change is having on glaciers and the implications this has on rising sea levels.

"What's super important about the surging glaciers is that they are game changers when it comes to predicting future sea level rise. This is a big part of our work right now," she says.
'Surging glaciers are so erratic'

Dr Sevestre belongs to an organisation called Glaciers on the Move, which tracks the speed of surging glaciers.

She says results can sometimes be surprising.

"When you look at glaciers around the world, you might think that they are pretty static, that these glaciers don't do much apart from melting," she says.

However, the results for Svalbard have shown that these types of glaciers can change their behaviour.

Ahead of the expedition, Dr Sevestre and her team prepared themselves for avalanches.(Supplied)

"For most of their lives they are lazy, they don't do very much, they move extremely slowly," she says.

"And suddenly, for reasons that we still struggle to understand, they can move extremely rapidly."

According to Dr Sevestre, the organisation has recorded glaciers moving over as much as 10 to 50 meters per day, over several years.

"These surging glaciers are so erratic, so chaotic, that they can suddenly, over the space of a few months, bring huge amounts of ice into the oceans and completely change our projections of future sea level," she says.

"A moving glacier is pretty much like a bulldozer that is unstoppable. It will destroy anything that is in its way."

She points to a recent disaster in Pakistan where an ice-dammed lake burst into a valley and destroyed houses and agricultural land.

Fortunately, no lives were lost as the incident was pre-empted when the glacier started to surge back in 2018.

Fine particles of black carbon

The Climate Sentinels spent 32 days in freezing temperatures collecting snow samples for their expedition. (Supplied)

In Svalbard, she's working on the frontline of climate change: a recent study has claimed that the North Barents Sea region in the Arctic is warming five to seven times faster than the rest of the world.

She says that they now know that these ice masses are being greatly affected by the increasing global temperatures linked to the burning of fossil fuels.

Dogs often accompany Dr Sevestre and the other scientists on their expeditions. (Supplied: Nina Adjanin )

There's another significant effect too.

"Every time we burn fossil fuels — whether it's wood, coal, gas, natural gas or oil — we emit fine particles and among those fine particles, you get this black carbon," she says.

These fine particles of black carbon can travel thousands of kilometres.

"For example, every time there are wildfires in California, the soot [or] the black carbon can travel as far as Greenland," she says.

"Today, we see that the Arctic is melting faster, not only because global temperatures are increasing, but also because we have more and more air pollution, more and more of this black carbon being deposited on snow and ice."

Glaciers are important water resources, she says. 

As temperatures rise, they are melting which affects sea levels.

(Supplied: Frederic de La Mure)

She says about 40 per cent of the melting of the Arctic today can be attributed to deposits of black carbon.

There's still time to stop it from getting worse, she adds, but only if we start taking action immediately.

"I have to stay optimistic. This is my duty," she says.

"If us the scientists, if the people who are so passionate about the polar regions give up, why should people care about those regions? Why should people act?"

"But it's truly now or never."

Organized Labor and the Crisis of Democracy

by Chris Wright / July 28th, 2022

We live in a time when it’s become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under attack. Whether it’s an ultra-reactionary Supreme Court, a nationwide Republican assault on voting rights, a MAGA movement that hopes to put an amoral power addict back in the presidency in 2024, a gathering backlash against women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, or the very structure of an oligarchical, billionaire-dominated political economy, circumstances in the U.S.—and abroad—are hardly encouraging for people who value democracy and human rights. It seems that things get bleaker every year, so much so that it can be difficult to have any hope at all.

There is, however, at least one glimmer of hope for democracy, and it comes from a source that might initially, to many people, seem rather unrelated: a renascent labor movement.

Given that the primary role of unions is to advocate for the interests of their members on the job, one might wonder how they could play an essential part in protecting and revitalizing the very different institution of political democracy. How can organizations with such a particular mission, a seemingly narrow economic one, serve as a buttress for the universal interest of democracy itself? Actually, according to polls, two thirds of Americans approve of labor unions, suggesting they understand what a constructive force unions are. If people knew the real history of organized labor, however, the number would probably be close to 90 percent.

So let’s take a look at history to gain some insight into why labor organizations are so fundamental to democracy, and why it’s so predictable that their decline in the last forty years has led to a political crisis and the rise of neofascism.

The origins of democracy

The very establishment of democracy in the first place—universal suffrage and equal voting “weight” across classes—was in large measure the achievement of unions, labor-based political parties (whether called Socialist, Social Democrat, Labor, or some other name), and mass working-class protest. To quote one scholar, throughout the long struggle across the West to broaden the franchise, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, the labor movement “was the only consistent democratic force in the arena,” playing a “vital role” at nearly all stages in most countries. In Britain, for example, decades of labor organizing and mass demonstrations, from the Chartists of the 1830s to the working-class Reform League of the 1860s and further union agitation up to the 1880s, were a crucial precondition for the enfranchisement of all men. By the early twentieth century, the new Labor Party also supported the women’s suffrage movement.

To take another example, that of Belgium, a comprehensive study observes that “working-class pressure and particularly the use of the political strike were constant features of the process of Belgian democratization from the 1880s on.” As elsewhere, it took decades of struggle to overcome the hostility of the propertied classes—many urban capitalists, agrarian landowners, and the Catholic establishment—but, in alliance with Liberals, the Belgian Labor Party was finally able to establish full male democracy in 1919.

Waves of democratization occurred in the aftermath of the two world wars, and in all or nearly all cases, labor and its representatives were catalysts. Germany’s Weimar Republic, which instituted universal suffrage, was a creation of the labor-based Social Democrats. In Sweden, years of strikes, worker demonstrations, and Social Democratic pressure in Parliament culminated in the passage of universal suffrage by 1920. The achievement of full parliamentary democracy after World War II in Italy, France, Austria, Canada, eventually Japan, and other countries was, of course, a result of the world-overturning mobilization of the working class and the Left against fascism, which was defeated primarily by Communists.

What about the United States? “Full” democracy in this supposedly freest of countries didn’t exist until the late 1960s, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We’re accustomed to thinking of these legislative accomplishments as the fruit of a religiously grounded movement organized around Black churches in the South, but in fact, “the long civil rights movement” of the 1930s–1960s critically depended on labor organizations such as the Communist Party (in the 1930s) and industrial unions. Historians have called it “civil rights unionism.” Communists organized Black and white workers to challenge racial discrimination in employment and politics, not least in the savagely white supremacist South, and unions in the CIO, and later (after 1955) the AFL-CIO, continued this sort of work even in the repressive political climate of the Cold War. The AFL-CIO and most of its affiliated unions funded the Civil Rights Movement, actively supported its legal initiatives, and, in the case of the UAW, sent staff members into the Deep South to assist with voter registration drives. Indeed, some of the movement’s major leaders, from A. Philip Randolph to E. D. Nixon (who organized the Montgomery bus boycott and chose Martin Luther King Jr. to lead it), came from a union background.

Conversely, it wasn’t only political democracy that was at stake; the movement aimed to emulate labor movements elsewhere and establish social democracy. The 1963 March on Washington, for example, included in its demands decent housing, adequate education, a massive federal works program, a living wage for everyone, and a broadened Fair Labor Standards Act. King, himself, later became a socialist and helped organize a vast Poor People’s Campaign, though he was assassinated before it came to fruition.

Even recent struggles against authoritarian governments have been largely driven by labor organizations and worker protests. From Spain in the late Franco years, Chile under Pinochet, and Argentina under neo-Nazi generals, to the Arab Spring of 2011, workers and unions have not only, through collective action, destabilized despotic regimes but have often led the resistance that overthrew them. This isn’t surprising, since the working class is typically the group that suffers most from a lack of democracy.

In short, it is hardly an exaggeration when yet another scholarly study concludes that “the organized working class appeared as a key actor in the development of full democracy almost everywhere.”

Organized labor means solidarity

Evidently, then, unions and other labor organizations aren’t as “narrowly economic” as it might seem. They do exist to raise wages and expand benefits for their members, and to enhance job security and increase workers’ control over their work, but their functions extend further for two reasons. First, the economic well-being of workers isn’t determined only on the job or through collective bargaining; it is a profoundly political issue, intrinsically connected with government policies and the very structures of the political economy. So there are powerful incentives to get involved in politics, whether that takes the form of mass protests, creating political parties, lobbying, or whatever.

Second, unions are, in the end, little else but their members. They are themselves, or should be, democracies. What the membership desires, therefore, is (ideally) what the union pursues. The guiding principle of business is to make profit, at all costs; the guiding principle of organized labor is simply to empower people, who can themselves determine what their goals are. So if they decide that their goal is to democratize society—as they very well might and often have—then that’s what they’ll try to do.

For both reasons, most of the time and over a long period, the large-scale thrust of labor organizations is to increase democracy: political and social democracy, and ultimately, perhaps, economic democracy, in which workers oust the boss and run the workplace themselves. The sheer size of the membership and (frequently) the immense resources of organized labor mean that the efforts can have momentous effects.

In the absence of strong unions, on the other hand, “the general prey of the rich on the poor,” as Thomas Jefferson described it, can take truly savage forms and go to lycanthropic extremes. Income and wealth inequality can skyrocket; billionaires can pay trivial tax rates of 3% or 4%, far lower than the rates that most wage-earners pay; agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that exist to protect workers’ rights can be gutted and hamstrung; vast networks of far-right dark money, political organizations, and media infrastructure can spring up unopposed by comparable networks on the left; reactionaries find it easier to be elected and to appoint fellow reactionaries to the judiciary, which subsequently eviscerates voting rights, opens the floodgates to corporate political spending, makes it more difficult for workers to organize, and overturns Roe v. Wade. In general, the decline of unions means relatively untrammeled rule by big business, which itself means oligarchy.

Millions of working people who might have found a home in organized labor, as they did in the mid-twentieth century, become socially unmoored and fall prey to far-right media, lunatic ideologies, racist demagogues, and conservative Christianity. The human need for belonging, for interpreting one’s misfortunes and finding meaning in something larger than oneself, can be fulfilled in either rational or irrational ways. It’s rational for wage-earners to join economic and political organizations that fight for democracy in all its forms; but when such organizations have an anemic social presence, people who have been bombarded by well-funded right-wing propaganda may irrationally join movements that, in effect, seek to strip them of their rights and eliminate democracy itself.

In these circumstances, the priorities of liberals, from abortion rights to anti-racism to environmental legislation, will meet failure after failure because their mass base begins to shrink, to be less readily mobilized, and to feel ever more alienated from the political system. The “professional-managerial class” isn’t enough of a mass base in itself, notwithstanding the apparent belief of two generations of Democratic leaders that it is. We’re seeing the dismal collapse of this illusion play out right now, along with the collapse of the attendant ideology, an identity politics evacuated of class content (which means, more exactly, that it is, in fact, a class politics, “the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism,” to quote Adolph Reed). After all, a major reason twentieth-century liberalism ever had any success in the first place, from the 1930s to (in an increasingly attenuated form) the 1990s, was that it had organized labor on its side, and the financial, cultural, and human resources of organized labor. It turns out that when you not only take your popular constituency for granted but collude in its decimation, sooner or later your political fortunes—the fortunes of the Democratic Party and liberalism—decline.

Any liberal who actually cares about saving democracy should be cheering the resurgent labor movement and scrambling to support it in every way possible. In the long run, the only alternative to an authoritarian and neofascist politics is a labor politics. At some point you have to decide which side you’re on.

Even the so-called “cultural” issues dear to liberals have for generations seen active support from labor. In addition to anti-racism and the Civil Rights Movement, labor has often marched beside feminists in the fight for women’s rights, whether pay equality, the Equal Rights Amendment (by the early 1970s, that is), or reproductive rights. Few writers have expressed themselves on these subjects as eloquently as the socialist leader Eugene Debs in 1918:

Freedom, complete freedom, is the goal of woman’s struggle in the modern world… She, the mother of man, shall be the sovereign ruler of the world. She shall have sole custody of her own body; she shall have perfect sex freedom as well as economic, intellectual and moral freedom, and she alone who suffers the agony of birth shall have control of the creative functions with which she is endowed.

The natural tendency of organized labor is toward solidarity with all oppressed groups. No other social force is equally equipped to defend everyone and everything under attack today: women, minorities, immigrants, the welfare state, the rule of law, and democracy. No other social force is comparably universal or has a comparable interest in resisting the predations of the oligarchy. No other force offers as much hope for humanity as the cause of labor. For labor is, precisely, the cause of humanity.

It is the duty of all believers in freedom and democracy to take up the banner of labor.

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Chris Wright, Ph.D. in U.S. history (University of Illinois at Chicago), is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. Read other articles by Chris, or visit Chris's website.

Lessons from recent US history

by Ron Forthofer / July 28th, 2022

For much of the period since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US was politically, militarily and economically unchallenged. The US was now the world’s hegemon and, to remain dominant, it couldn’t allow powerful challengers to arise. This goal meant that the US viewed the relationship with nations such as Russia and China as a zero-sum game, thus reducing the space for cooperation.

If we examine the past 30 years, what might one conclude about the outcome of this period? Has the US been a benign hegemon or has it acted primarily to remain the hegemon and to advance its corporate interests? There are many issues one could examine, but four major threats during this period were climate change, nuclear conflict, food insecurity and the wealth gap.

I’ll focus on the first two of these issues which are clearly existential. We already knew something about the climate change threat in the 1980s. Exxon scientists raised concern about climate change being real and human caused in the late 1970s and early 1980s. James Hansen, then the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the Senate Energy Committee in 1988. He said: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” The Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 began the effort to address this issue.

However, the Rio agreement and subsequent conferences lacked any real enforcement mechanisms. Disappointingly, instead of pushing for enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the US was one of the nations that led opposition to them. This shameful US position demonstrated the power of the fossil-fuel lobby in our system of legalized bribery of politicians. Had the US acted responsibly in the 1990s, could it have convinced other major fossil-fuel extracting nations to take real action to combat climate change?

We are now seeing the failure of the tepid approaches that were adopted. Record high temperatures, huge fires, long-lasting droughts, unprecedented flooding and rising sea levels are just some examples of this human-caused chaos, and they are occurring much sooner than predicted. Despite this overwhelming evidence, some US politicians and those in other major extractive fossil-fuel nations still oppose enforceable limits on greenhouse gases. The greed of fossil-fuel corporations knows no limits and they are apparently willing to sacrifice the future of humans on the planet. We big-brain humans are making the small-brain dinosaurs look a lot smarter as the dinosaurs did not cause their own extinction.

Regarding the other existential threat of nuclear conflict, the Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to assess how close we are to destroying the world through our technologies and, since 2007, climate change. Since 2020 the Clock has remained at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has been to midnight in its 75-year history. This assessment is frightening and represents a huge change since 1991 when the Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight.

A key moment occurred in February 1990 when the Soviet Union agreed to allow the reunification of West and East Germany and the US and allies promised not to expand NATO one inch eastward. Within a few years, the Clinton administration reneged on the promise and began the expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders.

In 1996, George Kennan, architect of the U.S. containment policy towards the Soviet Union after WWII, warned that NATO’s expansion into former Soviet territories would be a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” In 1998, Thomas Friedman solicited Kennan’s reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO’s eastward expansion. Kennan said: ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

In 2007 and again in 2008 Russia strongly opposed Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO. Russia was concerned about having a hostile military alliance on its border threatening its security. To understand this situation, recall how the US was willing to risk a nuclear conflict over Soviet missiles in Cuba.

NATO nations, particularly the US, have been providing huge amounts of weapons and training to Ukraine, in effect turning this conflict into a proxy fight between US/NATO and Russia. Instead of providing more weapons and risking an unintended nuclear conflict, the US needs to strongly support a diplomatic resolution.

Turning to China, its long-term economic and political outreach, particularly its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, to much of the world has proven to be far more popular than the US approach of relying on military power. The US has reacted by: 1) provoking China through its military presence close to China’s coastline; 2) creating a military alliance against China; and 3) arming Taiwan, despite allegedly accepting that Taiwan is part of China. The US is again unnecessarily increasing tension with another nuclear power.

In addition, the criminal and cruel unilateral US sanctions against many nations, for example, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, have greatly harmed tens of millions. The US war crimes in the Middle East and its support for criminal Israeli actions have also played a major role in devastating much of that region.

Looking at these past 30 years, the US political leadership has shown itself to be grossly incompetent and shamefully uncaring about the lives of the other. It has also wasted trillions of dollars on unnecessary and terribly destructive military campaigns instead of dealing with looming environmental catastrophes. The US leadership has also needlessly increased tensions by withdrawing from weapons agreements. The elite US media played a major role in these horrific crimes as it enabled the government’s actions by misinforming the US public.Facebook

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Ron Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston and was a Green Party candidate for Congress and also for governor of Colorado. Read other articles by Ron.

Lessons from Vietnam for Ukraine

by Rick Sterling / July 28th, 2022

In April 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) explained why he was escalating US involvement in Vietnam. With an Orwellian touch, LBJ titled the speech “Peace without Conquest”  as he announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam.  He explained that:

We must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny and only in such a world will our own freedom be secure… we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence and I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon the small and brave nation to its enemies and the terror must follow would be an unforgivable wrong.

Johnson further explained:

We are also there to strengthen world order… To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s words.

Learning no lessons from the failure and mass slaughter of the Korean War in the previous decade, the US military commenced widespread bombing of Vietnam and sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

At the time, spring 1965,  about 400 US soldiers had died in the conflict. The war was not yet  widely unpopular. Americans who protested against the Vietnam War were a small minority. It would be two years before Martin Luther King’s famous denunciation of the war.

Years later, after hundreds of thousands had been drafted into the military with the deaths of tens of thousands, the war became widely unpopular. Ultimately, over 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers died in the war. The cost in human lives and wasted resources was immense. The “Great Society” that LBJ hoped to build was stopped by the diversion of human lives, energy and resources into the Vietnam War.

There are similarities today with the US and NATO pouring tens of BILLIONS of dollars in weapons into Ukraine to counter the Russian military intervention. The US and western allies are providing additional support in intelligence and military advice. While there are not yet official US troops (as there were not in Vietnam for the first years), there are special operations and much other military support.

President Biden and administration leaders  sound similar to LBJ  in the early stage of the Vietnam War. In his remarks to Congress asking for additional funding for Ukraine, Biden said, “We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom…. The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.”  Making clear that the US goal is not just the “freedom” of Ukraine, Biden continues, “Investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.”

In both Vietnam and Ukraine, the US installed or promoted pro-US governments to counter “adversary” nations.  In the 1950’s, the US prevented  a nation-wide referendum in Vietnam which would have united the country without a war. In 2014, the US was instrumental in promoting the Ukraine coup  which overthrew a democratically elected government leading to the secession of Crimea and civil war in eastern Ukraine. While most in the West think the Ukraine conflict began in February this year, it actually began in February 2014. The 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire“, banned by YouTube, describes the coup.

Western media portrayed the US and South Vietnam winning the war in South East Asia until the 1968 Tet offensive exposed the lies and reality. Similarly,  western media portrays Ukrainians winning the war midst overwhelming Ukrainian public support. In reality, Russia and the secessionist Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and Lugansk Peoples Republic (LPR) have steadily taken control of south east Ukraine.  Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Zelensky has overseen the imprisonment, torture and killing of opponents. The largest opposition party has been banned.  Many Ukrainians oppose his policy and continuation of the war. There are rumors of presidential assassination attempts, just as there were in South Vietnam.

Ukrainians have become cannon fodder for the US geopolitical goals, just as the South Vietnamese were.

It is now clear that the LBJ’s escalation in 1965 was a huge and costly mistake. The needless war did immense damage to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It also had enormous negative ramifications in the United States.

Will the US and allies continue to escalate the conflict in Ukraine, to “double down” on an intervention half way around the world with the goal of hurting Russia? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam and subsequent US/Western foreign policy disasters of the past 40 years?Facebook

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Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com. Read other articles by Rick.

Greece: Baerbock calls for investigation into pushbacks at EU borders

After a report leaked by Spiegel magazine, Germany's foreign minister called in Athens for an investigation into alleged pushbacks by Greece's border patrol that Frontex knew and did nothing about.

Baerbock stated that Europe's ideals would drown in the Mediterranean if human rights

 weren't guaranteed at its borders

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has rebuffed Greek calls for further World War II reparations from Germany but expressed contrition for Greek people's suffering under occupation. She also called for a transparent and consistent investigation into reported pushbacks at Greek borders that involved the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) in Athens on Thursday. Later, her focus is to switch to strained bilateral ties with Turkey. 

What was on the program for Baerbock in Greece so far? 

To start off her visit in Greece, Baerbock commemorated the victims of the German occupation during World War II by visiting a former Nazi prison where thousands of resistance fighters and civilians were imprisoned and tortured between 1941 and 1944. 

After this, she placed flowers at the Athens Holocaust Memorial.

Greek media reported that Baerbock said that remembering German atrocities during World War II was a matter close to her heart.

"The responsibility for your own history never stops," she said. 

Despite this, Baerbock didn't acknowledge Greek calls for reparations. She said the new coalition government, elected in 2021, didn't see a change to the legal situation as perceived by past administrations, namely that such issues were settled in the immediate aftermath of the war and then again in 1990. 

Both Greece and Poland are trying to claim reparations, seeking negotiations about them with the German government. 

What did Baerbock have to say about the situation of refugees in Greece?  

Baerbock is set to visit the Greek prime minister and Turkey's foreign minister on Friday

Baerbock said it was crucial that the European Union ensure that human rights are guaranteed universally at borders. The pushbacks of refugees reported in German media recently would not be compatible with European law, she went on to say. 

Der Spiegel reported on Thursday as Baerbock departed that a leaked report accused Frontex of willfully ignoring the Greek border patrol, not allowing refugees to cross borders. The report goes on to state the Frontex was allegedly involved in these illegal activities, Spiegel reported. 

This behavior marked a human rights violation that Frontex knew and did nothing about. 

Baerbock called on the Greek authorities to systematically investigate the reports. While the EU had to protect its borders, European ideals must still be upheld, she said. 

"If we look away, our European ideals will drown in the Mediterranean", she warned. 

The foreign minister proposed an EU sea rescue program in which safeguarded migrants would be moved to other member states than the ones they arrived in. 

Baerbock had visited a refugee camp close to Athens alongside Greek Migration Minister Panagiotis Mitarachi, before making her strong statements.

Mitarachi denied the accusation that Greeke border forces were involved in pushbacks and preventing refugees from the right to apply for asylum. 

He said Greece had a right to protect its borders and that officials adhered to the rules even if there could be wrongdoing by individuals. 

According to EU law, Greece has an obligation to offer refugees the opportunity to apply for asylum. The European Commission has repeatedly appealed to the authorities to stop violent and illegal pushbacks of refugees at its borders. 

Pushbacks mean migrants are pushed back onto the ocean without being given the opportunity to apply for asylum beforehand. 

The number of refugees crossing into Greece, especially from Turkey, has increased by 30% in the first four months of the year. Often, they have fled countries such as Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq. 

Strained relations between Greece and Turkey 

Baerbock is scheduled to hold talks with Greece and Turkey, whose relationship has been strained recently, on Friday.

She will meet Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and her Greek counterpart, Nikos Dendias, first, to then fly out to Istanbul for talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. 

The relations between the countries have regressed as Turkey questioned the sovereignty of Greek islands and is demanding the withdrawal of Greek military installments, while Greece remains alert over the presence of Turkish landing boats. 

Baerbock said it was particularly important to her to visit both of these partners as Russia is trying to "divide the NATO alliance," of which both Greece and Turkey are members.

los/msh (dpa, AFP, Reuters)

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Getting on: Hormones and microbiomes influence cat sociability


By Dr. Tim Sandle
Published July 28, 2022

Domesticated cats and their bigger cousins in the wild are highly prone to genetic kidney problems - Copyright AFP Amir MAKAR

Why do some cats live (mostly) content in the same community or household whereas other cats will not tolerate any other cat at all? For cats that can cohabit, why is this behaviour relatively rare among other feline species? The answers to these questions rests with a mix of hormones and microbiomes.

Researchers from Azabu University in Kanagawa, Japan, have been examining links between hormones, gut microbes, and social behaviour in cohabitating cats, attempting to figure out why some of these solitary animals live in high densities.

The researchers conducted a two-week-long study of three different groups of five cats living together in a shelter. To gather data, the researchers used video cameras to observe the cats’ behaviour. In addition, they measured hormone levels in their urine, and collected faeces to evaluate the mix of microbial species in the cats’ microbiomes. The microbiome is the community of microorganisms together with the genetic interactions.

The outcome of the data review showed cats with high levels of the hormones cortisol and testosterone had less contact with other cats. Plus, cats with high testosterone (a sex hormone belonging to the androgen family, is positively correlated with aggression) were more likely to try to escape. In contrast, cats with low cortisol and testosterone were far more tolerant in their interactions with other cats.

Cats with high levels of the hormone oxytocin did not display bonding behaviours described as “socially affiliative.” This contrasts with the presence of this hormone with other animals that do bond, indicating that oxytocin functions differently for solitary animals living in groups.

As well as hormonal differences, the researchers discovered a greater similarity of gut microbiomes between cats who had more frequent contact with each other. Plus, there was a connection between the gut microbiome, social behaviour, and cortisol levels. Changes in food resource niches can modulate gut microbiome.

It is highly probable that the gut microbes influence hormone secretions and behaviour mechanisms of individuals.

According to lead researcher Hikari Koyasu: “Low testosterone and cortisol concentrations in cats enabled them to share the space and live together, but the higher the oxytocin, the less affiliative behaviour with others and the more lonely they are. The function of oxytocin was different from that of affinity for a group-mate. Cats may not consider other individuals living in the same space as tight relationship group-mates.”

The research appears in the journal PLOS ONE, titled “Correlations between behavior and hormone concentrations or gut microbiome imply that domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) living in a group are not like ‘groupmates’”.

Mexico: new research shows the historic link between opening schools and falling murder rates

THE CONVERSATION

Published: July 28, 2022

In Mexico an average of 94 people were murdered every day in 2021, an increase of 76% since 2015, demonstrating a rapid rise in killings across the country. Understandably, researchers and government officials are urgently looking for ways to bring down this number down. The rise in deaths is largely due to Mexico’s drug wars from 2006 onwards. Now, 35,000 people are murdered each year.

The answer might lie in the past. Before the beginning of the drug war, when the government tasked the army with confronting the cartels, Mexico had experienced a long-term reduction in the homicide rate of around 90% between 1940 and 2005. To find an explanation for this significant decline, my Mexico-based collaborator Pérez Ricart and I collected available and comparable data from the national censuses for the years from 1950 to 2005.

We published the results earlier this year in a paper for the Journal of Crime and Justice. Our findings show that Mexico was going through two historical processes other countries have also experienced after conflict – in Mexico’s case, this was the years following the revolution from 1910 to 1920 when the country experienced a long period of domestic reform and development and transitioned to a more peaceful society.

Between 1950 and 2005 Mexico tripled its GDP from US$3,741 (£3,105) to US$8,887 (£7,373) per capita, according to the World Bank, its population grew from 25 million to 106 million and the country almost eradicated illiteracy by making public schooling available to all.

Usually when a country goes through massive population expansion and urbanisation, violent crime also grows. But we found the opposite. And, interestingly, despite the population increases and considerable extra investment in public services, there was no significant territorial presence increase of police forces for law enforcement.
Expansion of schooling

So, why did homicide rates decline? After looking at a range of socioeconomic and state capacity data, we found that the increase in schooling years of the population – from an average of less than one year to eight years – seemed to be the leading cause.

Not even the chaotic urbanisation, a relatively young population (under 29s represented 68.94% of the population in 1950, rising to to 71.27% in 1980), and high unemployment in periods of economic crisis in 1976 and 1994, stopped this decline in homicide rates. Of course, in some Mexican states it declined quicker than others. For example, Mexico City had less than seven homicides per 100,000 inhabitants since the 1960s while Chihuahua had almost 20 in the same period.

The expansion of schooling in Mexico was an extraordinary achievement of the post-revolutionary Mexican government, which required that every municipality in Mexico had (and still has) access to a public school. Most people in Mexico now attend school for at least ten years – meaning that all citizens achieve primary schooling and the majority attend secondary school, but most do not complete years 10 to 12.

Another day, another funeral: an average of 94 people were killed every day in Mexico in 2021. EPA-EFE/Joebeth Terriquez

In Europe and Asia in post-war periods the decline of homicide rates has been attributed to the strength of the legal system and law enforcement. Latin America tends to be different: historically, many countries in this region have been unstable and economically weak – passing through continuous cycles of civil wars as a result. Which means the rule of law was difficult to establish, feeding into homicide rates.

Mexico is an example of how a state can establish practices and institutions capable of reducing violence differently: through development. In Mexico’s case, this was by opening schools – more than 200,000 by the end of the year 2000 according to the Secretariat of Education.

The renowned sociologist Michael Mann calls this “infrastructural power” – the idea of influencing the conduct of citizens and communities in diverse regions and territories through social policy. Mexico’s governments might have struggled to reach every region of the vast country with its army or police forces, but it managed to do so with teachers.
Educating for a peaceful society

So how does schooling reduce violence? It’s difficult to know in Mexico’s case, as the only data is at national level. But there are some scholarly ideas that are worth examining that could help explain.

The first comes from criminology and is known as “control theory” : the idea that schools, families and churches are institutions that can keep behaviour in check. Another is “social disorganisation theory” also formulated in criminology, meaning schools provide life pathways away from crime, particularly violent crime. The third is cultural: school transmits peaceful values and habits. According to criminologist Manuel Eisner and sociologist Norbert Elias, these are “civilisational values” necessary for equipping young people to be part of a functioning society.

Educational benefits: schoolchildren from Mexico City greeting the then German president, Christian Wulff, on his visit to the country in 2011. EPA/Wolfgang Kumm

There are examples of this from other countries. In England, for example, in the 18th century more widespread rates of schooling correlated with the decline of armed duels. In Chile after the 1859 civil war the state expanded primary schooling in rebel provinces – not as a concession but to teach pupils obedience and respect for authority.

In Mexico’s case, the lawlessness that has in recent years accompanied the drug wars has caused a sharp increase in homicides again. But the authorities should learn from the country’s historical success in bringing down violence through education. Mexico has succeeded in establishing universal primary education – but now needs to encourage and expand access to years 10 to 12 for pupils from the ages of 15 to 18.

The main principle here is that a peaceful society does not depend solely on political processes such as prohibition and/or punishment. Promoting education with the benefits that brings, such as the opportunity to get more highly skilled jobs and improve one’s income, can steer people away from extremism and violent or organised crime. It has worked before for Mexico – perhaps it’s time the government gave this approach some serious consideration.

Author

Raul Zepeda Gil

PhD researcher, King's College London

Murder scene: an all-too common sight in Mexico/ EPA-EFE/stringer