Remember when Barack Obama left the presidency? He said, ‘Maybe we were 15 to 20 years too early.’ Why would he say that? He’s talking about the demoralization period… He said, ‘Maybe we were 15 or 20 years too early,’ because he was a Saul Alinsky follower. He’s following the four stages of subversion.The Saul Alinsky referred to is high on the conservative right's demonology because he advocated social justice and democratic community action to achieve it. Elements of his 'community action' teaching were initially adopted by the right wing Republican faction, the Tea Party, until they realised that both Obama and Hillery Clinton had studied his work too, so he instantly became the focus of misrepresentation and bogeyman scaremongering by the extreme right.
He thought it was gonna happen, and he thought Hillary Clinton should have stepped in, and it was demoralized, destabilize, pushed to a crisis. The crisis was COVID. That’s what it was. It was to push the nation to a crisis — COVID — and so they planned on Hillary Clinton being president right at that moment. That’s why they went berserk when Trump won. They couldn’t get over that. They said, ‘We got to get him out, got to get him out, got to get him out, got to get him out,’ because they knew the virus was coming in 2020, and she should have been the president. And if it had been, the book of Revelation — we don’t have time to look at that — said she would have taken us into the Great Tribulation. And that’s what was planned.
A sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times [because] he has two parents and they’re both females. He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay.And if you believe that, you'll probably believe anything.
I’m a concerned parent who doesn’t want this swept under the rug. He's around Kids all the time. He’s a state representative. He’s in a position of power.Wellsville Unified School District Superintendent Ryan Bradbury said that Samsel will no longer be allowed to work for the district. Their priority is the safety of students.
Listen, guys, if I’m up there preaching and somebody comes up running, make sure you get them. Just kill ’em. Just shoot ’em dead.In other words, if you're late, don't run up to Jeff Jansen's church; you won't make it through the door alive. His heavies will gun you down like a dog to prove Jeff Janson isn't even a little bit homosexual and not at all effeminate.
From the UC Berkeley News release:Significance
Novel 230Th/U burial dating of ostrich eggshells complements other dating methods applicable to archaeological materials beyond the range of radiocarbon dating. New ages for the Ysterfontein 1 (YFT1) shell midden show it accumulated rapidly between ∼120 to 113 ka closely following the Last Interglacial sea-level highstand. The ages show the great antiquity of intensive human coastal adaptation, date a distinctive lithic industry, and show that teeth from YFT1 are among the oldest H. sapiens fossils recovered in southern Africa. Stable isotopes of ostrich eggshells indicate rapid cooling and drying during site occupation. Despite rapid sea-level drop and increasing aridity, the site’s occupants maintained a consistent diet, which may not indicate a stable paleoenvironment but rather results from systematic, selective foraging.
From the northern foothills of the Tibetan plateau to southern Siberia, and from western Kazakhstan to eastern Mongolia lies one of the world’s largest ecosystems, the Central Asian steppe. As far as the eye can see, an ocean of grass harbours a rich biodiversity. Elk, gazelles, brown bears, leopards and Siberian tigers, among other remarkable species, have made it their home.The team's open access paper was published last October in Science Advances:
However, until now, there was something missing from this vast region: its natural history. The evolution of the steppe over geological time remained a mystery, since it had hardly ever been studied. A French-Dutch team has now set out to fill the gap, by publishing the first-ever chronology of the main climatic and environmental events that have affected the region over the past 40 million years. This segment of history shows the extent to which this grassland is fragile and vulnerable to climate change.
Using pollen as a time machine
To reconstruct the evolution of the steppe, the researchers made use of one of the best indicators of past ecosystems: pollen. Every grain has a specific shape and pattern, making it possible to identify the plant species or family that produced it. As a result, a record of successive floras is preserved in different geological strata.
There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago. It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.In northwest China, the researchers found an exceptional location for the collection of pollen near the town of Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. “There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago,” explains Guillaume Dupont-Nivet, a CNRS researcher at the Geosciences Rennes laboratory[1] and at the University of Potsdam (Germany). “It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.”
You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen.
One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear. What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,
Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
CNRS researcher Université de Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes, France and Universität Potsdam, Institute of Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany.
Collecting these microscopic grains is a particularly tricky job. “You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen,” the researcher explains. Under the microscope, it is indeed very difficult to distinguish a 30 million-year-old grain from one that has just been released from a nearby flower.
To reconstruct the history of the climate and environment of the region, the scientists also used other information. They relied on climate models, animal fossil records, and isotopic data that can help track variations in temperature and precipitation over millions of years. This enabled them to identify three major ecological phases in the steppes of Central Asia.
Successive climate upheavals
Some 40 million years ago, two families of shrubs, the Nitrariaceae and the Ephedraceae, were found everywhere in the region. These plants fostered the emergence of a remarkable fauna dominated by the ancestors of horses and rhinoceros, the Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates.Looking for pollen in sediments, bushes and plants (Xining Basin, Qinghai province, China, 16 August 2017).
© Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
But then the local climate started to change. The Himalayas and Tibet began to rise, pushed up by the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia, leading to a change in the monsoon regime. To the north of Tibet, rainfall started to decrease. At the same time, the Paratethys, the extensive sea that stretched from Mongolia to the Mediterranean, gradually dried up, causing the area to become increasingly arid.
However, the final blow that ushered in the end of these early steppes occurred 34 million years ago. A global crisis known as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition brought about a mass extinction of species in many regions around the world. It was largely caused by the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, an event that rapidly cooled the planet, leading to a sharp drop in precipitation in Central Asia. The steppes turned into a desert as arid as the Sahara. Sand dunes covered the last refuges of life. In this hostile environment, the fauna mainly consisted of a few rodents and rabbits.
The desert persisted for millions of years. Then, in the middle of the Miocene, 17 to 14 million years ago, the climate became wetter again. As Dupont-Nivet admits, scientists don’t know what caused the change. Yet for whatever reason, there was a significant shift in conditions, which once again became more favourable to life. Steppes like those seen today, covered with grasses and shrubs, emerged. Large mammals, such as lions, aurochs and megaloceros (giant deer) encountered their ecological niche there, before being ruthlessly hunted down by a new invasive species that arrived 50,000 years ago: Homo sapiens.Evolution of the geographical distribution of pollen records in Central Asia from the Eocene period (40 million years ago) to the modern era. These paleogeographies also show mountain ranges gradually rising and the Paratethys Sea receding westwards.
© G. Dupont-Nivet/Sciences Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227
The uncertain future of the steppes
This great ape may well turn out to be the cause of another environmental upheaval. Climate change models show that Central Asia is fast becoming one of the hottest and driest places on the planet. Researchers think that the steppes could turn into a highly arid desert again. Ecosystems are already visibly deteriorating, as shown by the expansion of the Gobi Desert, which has led the Chinese authorities to embark on a massive reforestation programme dubbed “the Great Green Wall”. “One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear,” the scientist predicts.
The problem is that this process could be irreversible. “What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,” Dupont-Nivet warns. If this worst-case scenario were to come about, the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people would collapse in just a few decades.
So there we have a clear, coherent picture of how the Central Asian steppe came to be what it is today over a period of some 40 million years.Abstract
The origins and development of the arid and highly seasonal steppe-desert biome in Central Asia, the largest of its kind in the world, remain largely unconstrained by existing records. It is unclear how Cenozoic climatic, geological, and biological forces, acting at diverse spatial and temporal scales, shaped Central Asian ecosystems through time. Our synthesis shows that the Central Asian steppe-desert has existed since at least Eocene times but experienced no less than two regime shifts, one at the Eocene–Oligocene Transition and one in the mid-Miocene. These shifts separated three successive “stable states,” each characterized by unique floral and faunal structures. Past responses to disturbance in the Asian steppe-desert imply that modern ecosystems are unlikely to recover their present structures and diversity if forced into a new regime. This is of concern for Asian steppes today, which are being modified for human use and lost to desertification at unprecedented rates.
Barbolini, N.; Woutersen, A.; Dupont-Nivet, G.; Silvestro, D.; Tardif, D.; Coster, P. M. C.; Meijer, N.; Chang, C.; Zhang, H.-X.; Licht, A.; Rydin, C.; Koutsodendris, A.; Han, F.; Rohrmann, A.; Liu, X.-J.; Zhang, Y.; Donnadieu, Y.; Fluteau, F.; Ladant, J.-B.; Le Hir, G.; Hoorn, C.
Cenozoic evolution of the steppe-desert biome in Central Asia
Science Advances 09 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 41, eabb8227 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227
Copyright: © 2020 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science
Open access. Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
New research based on two skulls that have been in the Museum’s collection since the early 1930s resolves a long-standing controversy about an extinct “horned” crocodile that lived in Madagascar.
How's your Monday going? Mine started with having to file a police report in response to the increasing number of threats I'm getting for encouraging white evangelicals to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
— Jamie Aten (@drjamieaten) April 26, 2021
On April 16, clergy from 20 New York congregations, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians, met as the Interfaith Security Council held its first meeting to talk about how to share expertise and improve relations with law enforcement.This was prompted by, amongst other incidents, the mass shooting in Pittsburg, PA, in October 2018, when a gunman attacked worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people, vandalism at four synagogues in the Riverdale neighbourhood of Bronx, NY, last week, and the killing of Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn in Jersey City, N.J. on Dec 11, 2019. Armed police had to be deployed at the Brooklyn synagogue where his funeral took place.
On Tucker, Candace Owens calls the Chauvin verdict "mob justice" and declares that "this was not a fair trial. No person can say this was a fair trial." pic.twitter.com/A9OtJaKa9K
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) April 21, 2021
Coronavirus researchers led by Professor Rolf Hilgenfeld of the University of Lübeck and PD Dr. Albrecht von Brunn of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München have discovered how SARS viruses enhance the production of viral proteins in infected cells, so that many new copies of the virus can be generated. Notably, coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 do not use this mechanism, which may therefore provide a possible explanation for the much higher pathogenicity of the SARS viruses. The findings appear in the EMBO Journal.Ingenious, or what?!
Coronaviruses that cause harmless colds in humans were discovered more than 50 years ago. When it emerged in 2002/2003, the SARS coronavirus was the first coronavirus found to cause severe pneumonia in infected people. Comparisons of the RNA genomes of innocuous coronaviruses with those of the SARS coronavirus permitted researchers to identify a region that only occurred in the latter, and was called the "SARS-unique domain" (SUD). Such genomic regions and their protein products might be linked to the extraordinary pathogenicity of SARS coronavirus and its cousin, the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2.
The research groups led by Hilgenfeld and von Brunn showed that the SUD proteins of these two viruses interact with a human protein called Paip-1, which is involved in the first steps of protein synthesis. Together with Paip-1 and other proteins in human cells, SUD apparently binds to the ribosomes, the molecular machines that are responsible for protein synthesis in cells. This would lead to an enhancement of the production of all proteins, both those of the host cell and those of the virus. However, in cells infected with SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2, the messenger RNA molecules that code for host proteins are selectively destroyed by a viral protein named Nsp1. As a result of this complicated process, the infected cell predominantly produces viral proteins, so that many new copies of the virus can be created.
Albrecht von Brunn’s research group discovered the interaction between the proteins SUD and Paip-1 several years ago. "Being an experienced coronavirologist, I knew that one has to inspect the special regions of the SARS genome when trying to understand this virus,” he says.
[My emphasis]
A really shocking incident was a young black man who received a picture of a banana [with] his head superimposed on it and underneath is said 'Bananaman'. That is a deeply offensive and a deeply racist image.
He took it to HR and did file a grievance [but] the decision was that it was not racist.
[He] left and was given a very small compensation, however he was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The reason the ruling deep state of America hates the Russian people and wants to destroy them? It is the satanic Zionist power that overthrew the Russian government in 1917, did a human blood sacrifice of the Romanov family — a satanic ritual where they slaughtered the Romanovs, it was a satanic blood sacrifice — that same group of Satanists that overthrew the Russian people in 1917, that’s what controls America today.
That spirit right there is what is destroying the United States of America, destroying our freedom, destroying our culture, that spirit right there. That’s what’s making war against Russia. They overthrew it, they got free, they got out from under its bondage. And so who is under its bondage now? The American people. We’re under the bondage of that same satanic spirit.
When I prayed about if we’d ever see President Trump as our president again, God just reminded me that he’s the one that chooses the leadership, not us. He allows certain things to happen, but he also responds to the prayers of the righteous. And what he was telling me is that just like David—and I think I said this in a past livestream—but just like David, President Trump has the mantle of leadership, has the anointing of leadership. That’s why it’s kind of confusing to saints that are looking, and they’re wondering what’s going on. Because they see Joe Biden and they’re like, ‘This guy doesn’t seem like he’s authentic, like he’s real; is he really the president?’ And I said, ‘God, why are so many people questioning if Joe Biden is the president? I mean, clearly this guy is the president of the United States. Are we to doubt that? Are we not to believe that?’ And God said, ‘It’s about the mantle, the mantle of anointing, which is on President Trump, not Biden.'The 'Mantle of anointing', eh? That's the way, Todd! Talk gibberish so your dupes will think it holy wisdom!
Creationist mode: |  |
...the largely patriarchal―and increasingly embattled and radicalized―evangelical subculture [which] explicitly or implicitly promotes equating masculinity with physical strength and size, leaving men influenced by that subculture (whether evangelical or not) to seek solutions for their privately felt failure to measure up.
