Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
The Western world owes their adoption of surnames to Etruscan tradition, which differed significantly from other ancient naming practices. In Hebrew civilization, the first name was followed by a patronymic.* In early Greek civilization, the first name was followed by a patronymic plus a name corresponding to the person’s tribe. After the rise of cities in the fourth century BC, Greeks used the first name plus a locative indicating where the person was born (eg Socrates of Athens).
The Etruscans were the first to introduce a family name, a practice Romans adopted and passed on to the Western world. Some Etruscan women took both their husband’s and father’s name as a family name, a process replicated in Spanish culture.
In early Rome women only had one name, a feminine version of either their father’s or husband’s first name name (eg Julius Caesar’s daughter was Julia). Subsequent daughters added secundo or tertia to their names.
Greek women were forbidden to engage in any financial transactions beyond weekly food shopping. Unlike Greek homes, which had an exclusively male space called the Anderon (where men held their symposiums), Etruscan homes had no exclusively men’s, women’s or children’s rooms.
Greek culture also tended to emphasize individual rather than collective achievements (there were no Olympic team sports). This is born in striking differences between Greek and Etruscan gods. Zeus, the chief Roman got was a serial adulterer and occasional rapist, with a jealous wife (Hera) who brutalized his rape victims and their offspring. In Greek creation myth, every male ruler was eventually attacked and overthrown by his son. Plato banned the immoral Olympian gods from his ideal Republic.
In contrast, the Etruscan chief god Tinia and his consort Uni were loving and faithful. Unlike Zeus, Tinia exerts no male dominance and control over Uni and tends to use his lightning bolts for peacekeeping.Tinia always consulted with other gods (usually Terms and Ablo) in making important decisions.
The Etruscans altered numerous Greek myths of violence and doom to reflect positive societal wide values, such as care for the young. Unlike the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite with her string of adulterous love affairs, her Etruscan counterpart Una is more focused on the care of infants and children.
In Etruscan mythology even children of adulterous relationships are raised lovingly. Contrary to Greek myth, in which Helen of Troy returns to her husband Menelaus, in Etruscan mythology Paris and Helen end up together as an exemplary couple.*
Life expectancy in Etruria was 46 for men and 48 for women. This compares with 1900 US life expectancy of 48 years for men and 51 years for women in white populations and 32 years for men and 35 years for women in non-white populations.
*A patronymic is a second name based on the father’s given name.
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Jack Giacaman enjoys telling customers that every day is Christmas in his shop, which features hand-crafted olive-wood Nativity scenes, camels and crosses.
But this year there will be no Christmas in the city that is synonymous with the birth of Jesus, located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Last month, Palestinian leaders of Christian denominations here came together, and citing the devastating war in Gaza made a unanimous decision to cancel public celebrations.
There’s no Christmas tree or sparkling lights in Manger Square or along the cobble-stone streets that should be bustling with foreign tourists this time of year. There will be no Christmas parade with musicians weaving through the old city’s labyrinth walkways, no Santas on street corners doling out joy to children. Instead, the main square is a simple parking lot, without a hint of holiday decoration to be seen.
At Christmas House, Giacaman’s shop, things have been bad since shortly after the Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas militants that killed 1,200 people, Israel says. Israel’s military has responded with an air-and-ground assault that has killed more than 28,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
“This is the worst Christmas. Even during the first intifada, the second intifada, it was not like this,” he says, referring to the Palestinian uprisings against Israel that began in 1987 and 2000, respectively.
Giacaman, a Christian who has lived in Bethlehem all his life, traces his ancestry back to conquering crusaders who arrived in the area centuries ago. At his shop, a small group of artisans are hard at work, shaping statues of Mary and the infant Jesus and stamping out Christmas tree ornaments, all piled up, ready for a holiday rush that isn’t coming this year.
The shop has been in the family for three generations. Over the years, it’s weathered more than a few shocks to the business, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic — but Giacaman says this is the worst he can remember.
[…]
Just off of Manger square, Osama Al-Alli chats with a dozen or so of his fellow taxi drivers, as they wait in vain for a fare. In most years, there would be “many people coming from all the world,” he says, with so many lights. “Now, it’s dark at night.”
Al-Alli, who is a Muslim, worries about the future. “But I am praying for peace, for Israel and Palestine to come together,” he says.
A few feet away, stands the Church of the Nativity, famous for its grotto marking the exact location where Christians believe Jesus was born. The church, first built in the fourth century by the Roman emperor Constantine, should be packed, with a long queue snaking toward the sacred spot. But now, it’s nearly empty.
One of the few visitors is Florida resident Linda Nocera. It’s her fifth trip to Israel, but her first visit to Bethlehem. Nocera thinks the decision by the city’s churches to forego Christmas celebrations is the right one, “because of the war and because of all of the terrible killing,” she says.
“It’s heart-wrenching and I believe it’s not of God in any way, shape or form,” she says. “I am praying to the Lord that there will be an end [to it], forever. And there will be a solution to this.”
Since veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in February that the US blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline the previous September, Western media has rushed to create an alternate narrative involving Ukrainian operatives possibly working at Kiev’s direction, and to discredit Hersh’s revelations.
The White House had already made the decision to destroy the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline by early 2022, several weeks before the start of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, Seymour Hersh has reported in his latest expose story.
According to his report, based on comments from an American official “who is knowledgeable about the political use of energy,” by the time US President Joe Biden hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House on February 7, 2022, he had already given the order to a CIA-led team in Norway to find a way to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a liquified natural gas line from Russia to Germany that was slated to soon open.
That was, he noted, “a few weeks before” Ukraine intensified its attacks on the Donbass people’s republics, forcing Moscow’s hand in recognizing the independence of the breakaway states from Kiev and sending its forces into the Donbass to defend them – events that set in motion the launching of Russia’s special operation to neutralize and de-Nazify the country several days later.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics on February 22, 2022, Scholz announced the termination of the Nord Stream 2 project – something he had been under pressure from Washington as well as some other European Union leaders, such as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to do for years.
The month prior, Republicans in the US Congress attempted to pass a bill that would have sanctioned the Russian side of the pipeline project regardless of whether or not Russia sent troops into Ukraine, and Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, had repeatedly deferred implementation of other sanctions against the pipeline in order to keep Berlin in their good graces.
According to Hersh’s report, the CIA-led team had planted the explosives on three of the four Nord Stream 2 pipes along the seafloor of the North Sea by May of 2022, but Biden delayed their detonation for months without explanation until finally giving the order in late September of that year. The bombs were detonated using a “low frequency sonar device,” he reported.
The veteran investigative journalist suggested the timing was chosen, coming at the start of autumn, in order to ensure Berlin didn’t get cold feet about the operation.
Successive German governments had been enthusiastically in support of the pipeline, which would have brought plentiful and cheap gas into Western Europe, and downplayed Washington’s suggestion that it would give Moscow leverage over European affairs.
Earlier this week, Germany’s Sefe and Norway’s Equinor, their state-owned gas firms, struck a massive $55 billion deal that would see Norway supply one-third of German gas needs for the next 10 years – essentially the same volume that Nord Stream 2 would have brought.
The US official with whom Hersh spoke quipped that the deal was “an amazing stroke of good luck for Scholz, just when his base was facing another gas-free winter.”
“Magically,” the source added, “the deal coincides with Russia’s earlier closure of gas and oil fields that – except for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines – would have been the source of gas for the two pipelines.”
It’s unclear to what exactly the official was referring; possibly the May 2022 closure of western traffic in the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which runs from the northwestern Siberian Yamal Peninsula westward into Europe via Poland.
Home Office data shows shoplifting has reached the highest level since records began. Photograph: John Angerson/Alamy
Rafiq A. Tschannen
Muslim Times
Goods such as meat, cheese and confectionery stolen in large amounts to be sold to people hit by high cost of living
Increasing numbers of people are turning to a growing black market for food to supplement their diets as prices rocket, experts have said.
Meat, cheese and confectionery are among the items being stolen in large quantities from shops and lorries in order to be sold to people hit by the cost of living crisis.
With food prices rising, figures in policing, retail and academia said action was needed to stop people exploiting the rising demand for stolen food.
Retailers are reporting a record year for shoplifting, costing the industry £1bn this year, according to the British Retail Consortium’s estimate. Home Office data shows the crime has reached the highest level since records began, while the proportion of shoplifting incidents that resulted in a charge has fallen.
Andrew Goodacre, the chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association said the cost of living crisis had made people “think of alternative ways of sourcing items that are essential to them”. He said shops that had not faced shoplifting in the past were reporting thieves clear whole shelves in seconds.
“I think that’s because the black market has got so much bigger,” he said.
Prof Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist and shoplifting expert at City, University of London, agreed. She said, facing a cost of living crisis, many consumers were more willing to “turn a blind eye” to stolen food.
She said: “I don’t think hardworking people who are now finding themselves in poverty are suddenly turning into criminals overnight. I think it’s more complicated than that.
“A lot of people are more willing to buy stolen goods than to actually shoplift themselves because they’re one step removed from it.”
Taylor said people told themselves it was a victimless crime, that theft was built into the business models of big retailers, that supermarkets were the real criminals for raising prices or that shops were ripping off farmers or their own staff.
She said this was known as neutralisation, essentially “moral justifications that people conjure up to make themselves feel better when they’re doing something wrong”.
“Another technique of neutralisation would be, ‘Well how was I supposed to know it’s stolen?’ And that’s much more palatable for somebody than knowing full well themselves that they did steal something. So that’s where I think the cost of living crisis is creating the demand for stolen goods.”
Wendy Chamberlain, a former police officer turned Lib Dem MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for the elimination of food banks, said it was “not surprising” that people were obtaining food through criminal means.
She said important nutritional foods had “essentially rocketed in price” and that food poverty could be particularly acute this time of year, with food banks providing only essentials that were generally “not particularly attractive or nutritional”.
She said: “When money is tight, when they’ve spent a long time saying ‘no’ to other family members, the opportunity to buy something a bit more premium and high end, with ‘ask no questions’, and ‘off the back of a lorry’, as it were, is appealing.”
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She pointed out how, when universal credit claimants were given a £20 uplift in their payments during the pandemic, food bank usage dropped. During this time, crime statistics show shoplifting also fell.
She said one way of reducing the market for stolen goods was for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to urgently tackle the backlog that was causing people to miss out on crucial cost of living payments.
“It’s about processes within DWP not working so that people that really need the help can get it,” she said, adding that more research was needed to understand how big the black market had grown and how the criminal supply chains could be disrupted.
In October, police and the government launched an initiative called Pegasus, with £600,000-worth of funding provided by some of the UK’s biggest retailers. Among other things, it involves a new police intelligence team aiming to target organised crime gangs moving into retail theft.
It is being led by DCS Jim Taylor, who is the head of Opal, the national intelligence unit for organised acquisitive crime.
He said: “Professional knowledge tells us and history tells us that during a cost living crisis – high inflation and high unemployment – community crime rises. What we’re trying to do here is be ahead of the curve. We know that crimes like this are increasing and actually we know that it’s the organised element to it.”
A government spokesperson said police should be taking “a zero-tolerance approach” to shoplifting, adding: “We support millions of people every year to get the benefits they are entitled to, including providing advances to those who need immediate help, and to help people struggling with the cost of living are delivering an additional £3,700 on average per household.”
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its fellow unelected globalist leaders are pushing for governments around the world to phase out fossil fuels. Leading experts have spoken out against their plans and are warning the public that the WEF’s “Net Zero” goal to eliminate fossil fuels will result in the deaths of over four billion people or more.
The “Net Zero” target to end fossil fuel use is part of the WEF and UN’s “Agenda 2030” and “Agenda 2050” plans for humanity and involves dramatically reducing fossil reliance by 2030 and completely eliminating their use by 2050.
The WEF continues to push its agenda and has been calling for taxpayers worldwide to pay $3.5 trillion per year, which they insist is necessary to fund the noble global power in order to meet the globalist organisation’s “Net Zero” goal of “decarbonizing” the planet.
However, critics argue that “decarbonization” is just a euphemism for the WEF’s anti-human agenda and experts are raising the alarm about what this will actually mean for civilization, which includes the death of over four billion people.
Starvation
Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg is just one who has warned that ending fossil fuel use will lead to the deaths of around half of the world’s population through starvation alone.
“4 billion people are dependent on fossil fertilizer for food,” Lomborg notes. “Without, 4 billion will starve to death. “It is time to call out the astoundingly destructive & misanthropic campaigners,” he declared.
Campaigners: "just stop oil"
Absurd. Just on food: 4+ billion people dependent on fossil fertilizer
The article Lomborg was responding to was by British economist Neil Record in the Telegraph, who argued that the number of people that might die was closer to six billion.
Six Billion Would Die in a Year.
Neil Record reported: “If we literally just stopped using fossil fuels and “did without the natural resources on which the world, its economies and populations depend, most likely six billion people would die within a year.”
Breaking down what would happen in a world without fossil fuels, Record notes that most people would suffer blackouts due to the grid being so seriously compromised, possibly fatally, and they may be widespread and permanent.”
From day one, gas users would be the first to feel the change of no more mining of coal; the world’s oil wells shut down; the world’s gas fields likewise, and in10 or 15 days, the UK would have to turn off its gas distribution system as it would be unable to maintain pressure.
In turn, the domestic supply would be shut down too – gas would stop flowing, and some 21 million households (74% of the population) would no longer have heating, hot water, and cooking facilities.
“In their panic, people might turn to electricity for their cooking and heating, but wait…” says Record, who adds, “The UK electricity grid relies on natural gas as its “buffer” energy source. Every day, demand varies according to consumer demand, and the other main energy supplier, renewables, are highly variable and can only power the grid when gas is picking up the lion’s share of the gap between their output and consumer demand.”Source
So the moment that the main gas distribution system is de-pressurised, the grid-balancing system fails and power cuts ensue.
Electricity demand would have rocketed through the switch to electric space heating, cooking and water-heating, and so it seems very likely that the sudden excess demand would be undeliverable, and therefore that the grid would spiral into uncontrollability resulting in no electricity. This also means there would be no communication systems no mobile phones and no television.
Without power, there will be no running water and no heating and the most vulnerable people will start to die, according to Record. Initially, this will be the elderly in their own homes, then in hospitals when the diesel backup generators run out of fuel. Within the first 25 days new “existential problems emerge for ordinary people in the form of food availability and distribution.” Source
Starvation Begins From Day 25
Day 25 – By the twenty-fifth day, diesel and petrol are likely to have run dry, although, Record says that he is probably being generous with the timing here, but what this will mean is that food distribution would fail, and so as most of the population are entirely dependent on bought food they will begin to starve.
Interestingly, it will be only the isolated rural communities, and those who are agriculturally self-sufficient would be relatively unaffected.
Day 50 – Many people in urban areas would now be near death from starvation, Record claims, and “law and order would have broken down” and due to the “increasingly desperate search for the means of survival” he suspects there will have been “mass conflict and slaughter taking place.
Without the sanitary conditions that we have due to power, water supply, and sewage flow, we will see a return of Victorian diseases such as cholera and dysentery.
Day 100 – money and status will be irrelevant as time passes and just three months after the world stops oil, Neil Record, guesses that around half of the world’s population of approximately four billion, people would be dead “The first to die would be the urban poor; then the middle and upper classes”
Again, the survivors would be those in rural areas and able to live off local agricultural produce or live off dwindling food stocks.
For fifty-five percent of people in urban areas, it will be almost impossible to access food and safe water as there will be none of the normal distribution routes for food or storage facilities (chillers/freezers) without electricity, and without pumped water, clean water would be unavailable, or close to impossible to access. Source
A Year Without Oil – Murder and Mayhem.
Day 365 – after a year without oil Record says “perhaps a further two billion people would have starved or frozen to death, leaving, say, two billion left alive remaining food stocks would have been exhausted or spoiled, and the inevitable breakdown of law and order would have meant many would meet a violent end.”
“Competition for scarce resources, so elegantly solved by the invention of markets and prices, would be replaced by murder and mayhem”
There is now no going back as the means to reverse the just stop oil experiment would have gone.
“The mass extinction would have robbed societies of their cultures, education, and survival techniques. A new dark age would ensue” and as Record says this is a nightmarish scenario, but claims that everything in this scenario is well supported by fact. Source
Meadows Depopulation
Members of the WEF have repeatedly suggested that mass reductions in the number of humans on earth would help the organisation reach its green agenda goals, and as Slay News has reported, Dennis Meadows who is a “celebrated member of the WEF, has called for a staggering 86 percent reduction in the population of humans.
Australia is the latest country to reject a request from the United States to send warships to the Red Sea under the command of the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect commercial vessels along the critical maritime trade route from Iran-backed Houthi.
Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that Australia’s military would not send a “ship or a plane” to the Red Sea but would triple the number of troops for the US-led maritime force.
“We need to be really clear around our strategic focus and our strategic focus is our region,” Marles said.
The Australian Government continues to work with the United States and other partners in support of the international rules-based order in the Middle East and surrounding region.
The Pentagon’s formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new task force to protect shipping from Houthi drone and missile attacks in the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, requires increased warship patrols by the US and allies. This will create a security umbrella over commercial vessels to defend from attacks.
Reuters said about twenty countries have signed up for the Pentagon’s new operation. However, several countries, including Australia, Spain, Italy, and France, have rejected the Pentagon’s request to participate in the operation.
Spain’s Defence Ministry said it would only participate in NATO-led missions or European-coordinated operations – not ones commanded by the Pentagon:
“We will not participate unilaterally in the Red Sea operation.”
Italy’s Defence Ministry voiced similar concerns, indicating it would send naval frigate Virginio Fasan to the Red Sea but only respond to requests by Italian shipowners.
“Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea has practically Collapsed as France, Spain, and Italy have all announced their Withdrawal from the US Command Structure for the Operation, with the Three Nations stating they will only conduct further Maritime Operations under the Command of NATO and/or the European Union and not the United States,” X account OSINTdefender wrote.
Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea has practically Collapsed as France, Spain, and Italy have all announced their Withdrawal from the U.S. Command Structure for the Operation, with the Three Nations stating they will only conduct further Maritime Operations under the… pic.twitter.com/zhfih2XpTa
“France, Spain, and Italy aren’t withdrawing because they don’t want to escalate the conflict. On the contrary, they’re withdrawing because they don’t believe the operation coordinated by Biden regime will protect their vessels. This is the result of a weak ‘President’ / lack of leadership.”
France, Spain, and Italy aren’t withdrawing because they don’t want to escalate the conflict. On the contrary, they’re withdrawing because they don’t believe the operation coordinated by Biden regime will protect their vessels. This is the result of a weak ‘President’ / lack of…
Protection is a conceptual counterpart to par. When you decide to take money out of a sight deposit, you expect the same amount back that you put in (par).
When you sail foreign cargo from port A to port B, you expect to unload the same amount of cargo that you onloaded.
Banks can deliver par on deposits most of the time. When not, central banks step in to help.
Commodity traders can deliver foreign cargo from port A to port B most of the time, but when not, the state intervenes again: not the monetary arm, but the military arm of the state.
What central banks are to the protection of par promises, the military branch is to the protection of shipments: foreign cargo ne
As of Saturday morning, the number of container ships in the Red Sea with destinations to Asia, Europe, and the US is less than five.
Tonight, the establishment effort to avoid facing Donald Trump before the electorate at the ballot box saw one of its gravest and most unprecedented escalations yet. Just as Trump rises to his highest point yet in polling for 2024 and as Biden sings to his worst level of disapproval yet, a state court in Colorado full of Democratic Party-appointed judges just decided yesterday by a 4 to 3 ruling that Trump is ineligible to appear on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot. In the view of these four judges, he is guilty of being an insurrectionist and thus ineligible to run for the presidency under the 14th Amendment.
There are so many grave and glaring flaws in the legal reasoning of this decision, which we will show you, but one need not have a law degree to detect its most significant error: Donald Trump, despite being indicted in four separate jurisdictions, has never once been charged with, let alone convicted of the crime of insurrection. Both DOJ special prosecutor Jack Smith, as well as the Democratic Party prosecutor in Atlanta, charged Trump with multiple felonies relating to his conduct regarding the 2020 election. And yet both of them, despite being able to do so, opted not to charge Trump with engaging in an insurrection or even inciting an insurrection. But no matter these four state court judges, without any of the due process required for judging someone guilty of a crime, have decreed that he is nonetheless guilty of that crime, one with which he has never even been charged and thus never had the opportunity to claim all of the constitutional safeguards guaranteed to someone when charged with a crime.
As this court itself recognized, this ruling will almost certainly now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s why they stayed the order until January 4 to give the court time to say whether it will rule on it or not. This is especially so since the same liberal advocacy groups that spearheaded this case in Colorado have done the same in at least 14 other states where they’re trying to block the presidential frontrunner, meaning the person who more Americans say they want to be president next year, from even appearing on the ballot. Yet again, what we have here are the very same people, in politics and media, who endlessly glorify themselves as the Sole Guardians of American Democracy, relying on classically anti-democratic weapons to try to cling to political power. Beyond this ruling, Trump has been charged with felony counts in four other cases, the first one brought by a liberal prosecutor in Manhattan; the other state case brought by the Democratic Party machine prosecutor in Atlanta and then, the two federal cases brought by a special prosecutor under the auspices of the Biden Justice Department.
Regardless of one’s views on January 6 and Trump’s conduct concerning it, it is beyond dispute now that the primary tactic of the Democratic Party and their media allies for winning in 2024 is not to convince voters to vote for them, but instead to imprison their chief political opponent and to prevent American citizens forcibly from voting for him. Whatever else this is, “saving democracy” most definitely has nothing to do with it. Quite the contrary: on top of the ongoing attempts to impose increasing levels of constraints on the expression of political speech, it is genuinely hard to imagine a more glaring and more dangerous full frontal assault on democratic values than what American liberals in the Democratic Party is doing to prevent Trump from running or even remaining free.
We will spend tonight’s episode examining this ruling and showing you the legal components of it. We’ll show you the critical political context and the legal context in which it has arisen, and we’ll examine the implications. Suffice it to say, liberals and Democrats are really playing with fire in this country, trifling with the fundamentals of American Democratic life, and other than their most ardent followers, it’s hard to believe that anyone is failing to see right through this. That’s almost certainly one of the reasons that every time they abuse it and weaponize the justice system, the United States is against Trump, further, his candidacy only seems to get stronger.
Dr. McCullough Reveals Threat of Transgender Medicine to Growing, Vulnerable Population
We are witnessing a modern day chronic disease epidemic of autism spectrum disorder. The rate has gone from 1:10,000 in the 1960’s to 1:36 today correlated with the ever increasing and intensive childhood routine vaccination schedule. The exact cause of this neuropsychiatric syndrome is not known, however, many parents are growing ever more concerned and are following advice from the World Council for Health, that is, to defer on any more routine childhood vaccination until this and a multitude of safety questions can be answered.
I was asked to give a verbal summary for REACT: Research and Education for Autistic Children’s Treatment, hosted by Andrea Dimidik. Please listen to this 5 minute capsule that makes the following points: 1) autistic children are far more likely to consider gender change than normal kids, 2) puberty blockers, androgens, and estrogens cause harm to normal growing children, 3) gender change operations performed on normal adolescents and young adults are loaded with surgical complications, disfiguring, and sterilizing, 4) as a package, transgender medicine increases the burden of psychiatric disease, and the risk of death from all causes.
For these reasons I conclude that transgender clinical programs represent unethical and harmful forms of management for gender dysphoria. I support statewide bans on transgender clinical programs for persons < 18 years old. Consenting adults with proper psychiatric care can make there own decisions on sexual preference and whether or not to pursue the fantasy of living in the appearance of the opposite gender provided it is done with full informed consent and at their own cost.
Reports on the Israeli pilots involved in the airstrikes that targeted hospitals and civilians in Gaza have been published by Nournews.
Tal Zahavi, pictured on the left, boasting over 23 years in the Israeli Air Force, has been involved in air operations against civilians in Gaza for the past 73 days, including the bombing of Deir al-Balah’s residential areas on October 19 and November 7, and the bombing of Rafah on October 26 and December 12, leading to the tragic killing of at least 675 Palestinians, including 230 children.
Guy Isaac Alon, pictured on the right, has also been actively involved in the last 73 days, participating in the bombing of two hospitals, namely Gaza’s Baptist Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital. He also played a role in the bombing of six mosques, Al Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis, as well as other densely populated civilian areas, resulting in the tragic killing of at least 500 Palestinians, including 165 children.
According to Greek and Roman historians, aristocratic Etruscan women (who shaved their bodies and exercised to keep them fit) were “luxurious,” frivolous and depraved, because they drank alcohol and appeared in public in immodest attire revealing their beautiful bodies. Etruscan children also participated in public life, and both boys and girls learned to read. These attitudes are depicted in Etruscan tomb paintings.
In contract, depiction of nursing mothers or children in Greek or Roman Art was extremely rare. In Greek and Roman society, childbirth was viewed as comparable to a baker baking a loaf of bread – and getting all the credit for it. Etruscan families were like those of Israel and Egypt, in which men accepted all children born to the household of the birth mother. This was totally unlike Greece and Rome, where the male head of household could reject a newborn and order it “exposed.”*
In marriage Etruscan women kept their own names, rather than their father’s or husband’s name, and were allowed to inherit and bequeath property. Etruscan women of all classes had clearly sexually defined roles, mainly child rearing and spinning, dyeing and weaving wool. Fabric production was commonly performed by groups of women who sang and told stories as their worked. Some historians believe this was how Etrurian myths were passed to new generations.
Elite Etruscan woman oversaw slaves in food preparation for banquets. Elite Etrurian men were expected to undertake religious (including divination) duties, civic and military duties.
As high priestesses and oracles, Etruscan women were also agents of political change, a function denied Greek and Roman women (except for the Greek oracle at Delphi and the Roman vestal virgins). Tuck gives as examples the Etruscan priestess at Mater Matuta (the temple to Uni Servius) who had to approve new Roman kings* and the Sybillic Cumae who predicted Rome’s defeat of Hannibal.
Greek and Roman historians also condemned religious fertility rites (depicted in Etruscan tomb paintings) in which couples engaged in group sex to increase crop fertility or whipped women with rawhide to help them conceive and to increase their likelihood of surviving child birth. Etruscans were legitimately concerned about high maternal mortality rights, which remained high (around 1%) until the late 20th century.***
***Although infant exposure (rejection from the household) often equated with infanticide (the outright killing of a newborn), it allowed the possibility of the infant’s survival and rescue by a third party/
**Once the Roman senate elected a new king, he had to spend the night at Mater Matuta for the Etruscan priestess to pronounce him fit for office.
***In 1936 US maternal mortality was 1% – approximately 36% of US troop mortality in World War I.
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