"Cacerolazos" Spontaneous protests in Argentina after the decree announced by President Milei that cuts rights and makes the economy more flexible, allowing a transfer of wealth from the working class to concentrated capital, in the context of a very serious income crisis for the middle and lower sectors. The decree is illegal and undemocratic.

It happens on another anniversary of the social outbreak of 2001 in the midst of the worst economic crisis in our history. Those responsible for the 2001 crises now constitute the Milei government: Patricia Bullrich, who was minister of social security in 2001 and who cut 13% of pension for retirees, is now minister of security with an anti-protest protocol that is unconstitutional for not guaranteeing constitutional rights of protest and freedom of expression. Federico Sturzenegger, secretary of economic policies in 2001, advisor and main person responsible for the design of the decree that repeals and modifies more than 300 laws announced yesterday by Milei.

Thoughts on 4x10 “The Deep hearts core”

Hello! Anyone still reads this? I’m so sorry, I barely had time to sit in front of my computer to write something and yesterday I had no electricity, internet or battery in my phone so...awful day 

Well, there’s something with this ep that can’t decipher even now, I mean, I like it but at the same time I didn’t and the writer’s decision to change parts of the book and put more drama than is necessary bothers me a lot. I hate to be negative but I just want to yell at them WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH MY FAVORITE SHOW??? There were so many beautiful moments that were missing and we won’t get the opportunity to watch them right now. But well, its already done so there’s no use in complaining, I just wish they listen to the critics and do something about it, maybe read the books for one.

Now, about the ep:

I loved the first parts, honestly live for the Fraser’s in the Ridge spending time together, Jamie/Bree bonding their relationship, this is the kind of content I want, from the little chats between them, to Claire/Bree folding clothes, the whole family eating together, tending to the animals etc etc etc. I LOVE IT and I wish there will be more.

Claire/Bree

How difficult it must be for Claire to advise her daughter in the matter of what would she do about the baby, if she wants to have an abortion or not, and more important if her daughter isn’t sure about the paternity of that child. And how difficult to offer herself of being the one who has to perform any decision Bree wants, being the abortion or the birth. For a mother who already had to say goodbye to her once, it must be terrifying to affront the possibility to let her go forever, I mean, what if something goes wrong? (It won’t, but let’s suppose) she would be blaming herself for not being able to care for her own daughter. But Claire let her make a choice, whether it would be going back to the future, or staying there and affront whatever happens.

Now I want to talk about the decision of involving the abortion thing into the episode. I know this is a subject that tends to bring a lot of discussion and don’t want to offend any of you but I honestly think is a clever decision, and putting Cait, a person who fights for the rights of woman is interesting. It wasn’t a wow conversation but at least is how it’s supposed to be. And with this I mean mother and daughter really talking about that possibility, and not making her experience a pregnancy she doesn’t want just because someone else made that decision for her, being Claire or anyone else. I know not everyone thinks like me, but in the last year, with the abortion movement here in Argentina, I realized about a lot of things, but the most important is that there always were abortions and most of them under horrifying circumstances, most of the times the woman who aborts does it in secret, with the fear that if they tell someone, they can exclude them from society, as if it were something bad, a big sin. And that is why it is marginalized, and becomes a taboo. I think it's great to talk about it, make it visible, so applauses for that scene 👏🏻👏🏻

As I said before, the scene when they’re folding clothes was a beautiful moment between them, so intimate, sharing things they miss of the 20th century, eventually missing a part of them they had to leave behind, and things they have in common after all, a relief for having someone who really understands what the other is talking about. For Claire, I think she has Jamie and can talk to him about how things are in the future, but they’re things he hadn’t experienced, but Bree had, and understands for example how modern music sounded, or the pleasure to have a proper toilet. I hope for more of these scenes in the future, is always a pleasure to see them sharing a pleasant moment/chat/whatever.

Jamie/Bree:

I’m still sensitive with how in awe Jamie is over his daughter, he loves her so much and is eternally grateful for having her there. The first scene, when he shows Bree she couldn’t fight against Bonnet and comforts Bree afterwards, was imo really special, but difficult to watch. Jamie knows the feeling of being raped, used as some other wants and without even resisting, and to have his daughter experiencing the same thing as him breaks him into a million pieces. So provoking her and then making her fight, it must be a difficult moment for him, I mean, he doesn’t think like that, he doesn’t want her to remember the incident, but he has to, so he can make her understand that even if she fought, it was in vain and wouldn’t make any difference if she kills Bonnet. Another bonding moment that I will treasure, even if is a hard one.

Another beautiful moment was the one when they look at Claire. Even if it hurts me when Bree refers to Frank as “my father” in front of Jamie (I won’t lie, I hate that. I know is his father for her and maybe isn’t on purpose but seeing Jamie’s face reacting to that breaks my heart into a million pieces), the change of his face when she says she went through the stones for him too is priceless. Again, he loves her so freaking much ♥️

Although, Bree’s reaction about what Jamie did to Roger was a lot. And that’s when the mixed feelings comes to me. I know she has all the right to react as she pleases, after all she was the one raped, and what Jamie did wasn’t good either. I mean, yes Jamie, you are a furious dad searching for vengeance after realizing what happened with your daughter, but beating a man nearly to death? Mmm I don’t think so babe.

The thing is that everything was a huge chain of misunderstandings that ended with Roger being sold to the Mohawk. I repeat what I said last week, it’s a part of the books that I never liked, even though I’m still angry with Roger he didn’t deserve it.

But let's get back to the big fight. I understand both bells, Bree's and Jamie's. He reacted by pure impulse wanting to defend his daughter, and she reacts by getting angry obviously because he sent an innocent man almost to death. Although I still believe that Bree's reaction was exaggerated, disrespectful and very demanding. In other words, hitting everyone, yelling at them and giving them orders about what they have to do is a lot. I don’t know, I was taught to respect the elderly, and however angry I am, I don’t behave that way. And it broke my soul when (again) she mentioned Frank to make him look like the hero who always treated her well but to Jamie like a savage who doesn’t know how to control himself 😔

Jamie telling Bree that she went to bed with someone for lust then faked the rape because she got pregnant was also overstepping, but once he finds out that the rape was real and with a different man, he gets really stunned, and really regrets having said what he said before. I won’t justify what he did, but the man fell into a misunderstanding, trap, however you want to call it, and once he learned the truth he can’t do more than ask his daughter for forgiveness and feel like shit.

We know that both have a strong character, they are stubborn and they want to be right, but so much drama makes me upset and the only thing I want is to skip that fight and go back to the first minutes of the chapter, adding that making Jamie the bad guy and having everyone against him breaks me (I think I already said it) and I only want to hug him and say everything will be okay 😭

I also read a lot of criticism of Claire for not taking sides with anyone. Come on, her daughter is on one side and her husband on the other, and for that matter she loves both, so I understand that it may be difficult for her to side with either of them. Could she have said something? Yes, but she did not. I remember reading in the book that when the two Frasers fought in that way it was preferable to let them get all the fury and not interfere. If I remember correctly, it was what Ian told her in the first book the first time J/C went to Lallybroch and Jamie and Jenny started fighting.

Although, I can only think in my mom. Even if she loves my dad, she always (or almost always) gets on my side. I don’t assume that Claire does it but for that matter she knows the true story. Perhaps also empathized by everything her daughter went through, I don’t know, nobody will know what was going through Claire's head in that moment, and because of this I am annoyed with the writers, if things are not clear there is something that doesn’t work, it’s supposed that the viewer doesn’t have to assume a character thinks one thing or another 🤷🏻‍♀️ But well, I do think she knows Jamie is really sorry and won’t get mad with him for that, at the end of the day, none of them wants to see their daughter hurt.

Roger:

I've already said it many times, and I'm going to repeat it: I don’t like Show!Roger, and at the moment that won´t change. That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel bad seeing the man walking days and nights tied to a horse without the possibility of eating, having a drink or resting, and to that let’s add that he has been beaten. When I saw the ep for the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about 3x03 when LJG took Jamie in the same way and I thought, maybe when Jamie deigns to talk to Roger and mend fences with him, and finds out what he suffered, he feels sorry for that man, maybe remember those moments, that weren’t nice for him either.

I also though, how in hell does he have so many energy to be running in the middle of the woods trying to escape? I can’t run like that even if someone pays me for it, haha. But seriously, that scene was dense, like a lot of screen time just between a man escaping and a bunch of natives following him, with what purpose? It could have been used to add something else.

And the scene with the stone, well I’m still confused. I really though there wasn’t any standing stone in the book but in a post of a few days ago, some people clarified that I was wrong (thank you tho!). The only way I found of why he is so hesitant to leave or not is because he is really tired, that he has no strength to continue at a time when (maybe) he doesn’t belong. Maybe it's the only way he finds so that he doesn’t get caught again. But…what about Brianna? Wasn’t it that he wanted to escape to get back to his wife? It is obvious that he won’t return to the future, but that cliffhanger disoriented me. Anyone who likes Roger and explains to me what his thoughts may be?

OH, I ALMOST FORGOT! Murcasta omg. Have you seen that flirting? I’m already aboard of that ship and ready for that relationship to happen 🛳♥️ Sorry @boyneriver-fraser 🙏🏻

I know I'm complaining a lot about this chapter, but I really don’t know what to think. I always try to look around and understand why the characters do what they do, but idk, maybe it's a problem of the writers, of the editors that cut scenes that prevent the story from being fluid, maybe it’s just me. Anyway, let me know what you think and sorry for any grammatical mistakes, it’s 3:30 AM here and i’m sleepy 😴

PS: gifs by Giphy

HMH Teen Teasers: NOT EVEN BONES by Rebecca Schaeffer!

If you like your books a little bloody, prepare to devour this killer YA debut: NOT EVEN BONES by Rebecca Schaeffer is about a girl who dissects dead bodies for the magical black market...but soon enough finds herself the one in danger of being sold for parts. To save herself, she must unleash the monster within.

Keep scrolling to read the first FOUR chapters of NOT EVEN BONES!

***

ONE

Nita stared at the dead body lying on the kitchen table. Middle-aged, and in the place between pudgy and overweight, he wore a casual business suit and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with silver handles that blended into the gray at his temples. He was indistinguishable on the outside from any other human — the inside, of course, was a different matter.

“Another zannie?” Nita scowled at her mother and crossed her arms as she examined the body. “That’s not even Latin American. I thought we moved to Peru to hunt South and Central American unnaturals? Chupacabras and pishtacos and whatever.”

It wasn’t that zannies were common, but Nita had dis- sected plenty during the months she and her mother spent in Southeast Asia last year. She’d been looking forward to dissecting something new. If she’d wanted to cut up the same unnaturals as usual, she would have asked to stay with her dad in the States and work on unicorns.

Her mother shrugged, draping her jacket over a chair. “I saw a zannie, so I killed it. I mean, it was right in front of me. How could I resist?” Her black-and-red-striped bangs fell for- ward as she dipped her head and half smiled.

Nita shifted her feet, looking at the corpse again. She sighed. “I suppose you’ll want me to dissect and package it for sale?”

“Good girl.” Her mother grinned.

Nita went around to the other side of the dead body. “Care to help me move it to the workroom?”

Her mother rolled up her sleeves, and together they heaved the round, deceptively heavy body down the hall and onto a smooth metal table in the other room. White walls and fluorescent lights made it look like a hospital surgery room. Scalpels and bone saws lay in neat lines on the shelves, and a scale for weighing organs rested in front of a box of jars. In the corner, a tub of formaldehyde caused everything to reek of death. The smell kept sneaking out of the room and making its way into Nita’s clothes. She found it strangely comforting. That was probably a bad sign.

But, if Nita was being honest with herself, most of her habits and life choices were bad signs.

Her mother winked at Nita. “All ready for you.”

Nita looked down at her watch. “It’s nearly midnight.” “And?”

“And I want to sleep sometime.”

“So do it later.” Her mother waved it aside. “It’s not like you have anything to get up for.”

Nita paused, then bowed her head in acceptance. Even though it had been years since her mother had decided to illegally take Nita out of school, she still had some leftover instinct telling her not to go to bed too late. Which was silly, because even if she’d had school, she’d gladly have skipped it for a dissection. Dissections were fun.

Nita pulled on a white lab coat. She always liked wearing it— it made her feel like a real scientist at a prestigious university or laboratory somewhere. Sometimes she put the goggles on even when she didn’t need to just so she could complete the look.

“When are you heading out again?”

Her mother washed her hands in the sink. “Tonight. I got a tip when I was bringing this beauty back. I’m flying to Buenos Aires.”

“Pishtacos?” asked Nita, trying to hold in her excitement. She’d never had a chance to dissect a pishtaco. How would their bodies be modified for a diet made completely of human body fat? The promise of a pishtaco dissection was the only thing that had convinced Nita moving to Peru was a good idea. Her mother always knew how to tempt her.

Nita frowned. “Wait, there are no pishtacos in Argentina.” Her mother laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s something even better.”

“Not another zannie.” “No.”

Her mother dried her hands and headed back toward the kitchen, calling out as she went, “I’m going to head to the airport now. If all goes well, I should be back in two days.”

Nita followed and found her sitting, booted feet on the kitchen table as she unscrewed the top of the pisco bottle from the fridge and took a swig. Not cocktail-drink pisco, or mixed-with-soda pisco, just straight. Nita had tried it  once when she was home alone, thinking it would be a good celebration drink to ring in her seventeenth birthday. It didn’t burn as much as whisky or vodka, or even sake, but it kicked in fast, and it kicked in hard. Her mother had found her with her face squished against the wall, crying because it wouldn’t move for her. Then Mom had laughed and left her there to suffer. She showed Nita the pictures afterward — there was an awful lot of drool on that wall.

Nita hadn’t sampled anything in the liquor cabinet since.

“Oh, and Nita?” Her mother put the pisco on the table. “Yeah?”

“Don’t touch the head. It has a million-dollar bounty. I plan to claim it.”

Nita looked down the hall, toward the room with the dead body. “I’m pretty sure the whole wanted-dead-or-alive thing ended in the Old West. If you just turn this guy’s head over, you’ll be arrested for murder.”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “Why, thank you, Nita, for teaching me such an important lesson. Whatever would I do without you?”

Nita winced. “Um.”

“The zannie is wanted for war crimes by the Peruvian government. He was a member of the secret police under the Fujimori administration.”

No surprise there. Pretty much every zannie in the world was wanted for some type of war crime. When your biological imperative was to torture people and eat their pain, there were only so many career paths open to you.

That reminded Nita — there was an article in the latest issue of Nature on zannies that she wanted to read. Someone who had clearly dissected fewer zannies than Nita, but with access to better equipment,  had written a detailed analysis of how zannies consumed pain. There were all sorts of theo- ries about how pain was relative, and the same injury on two people could be perceived completely differently. The scientists had been researching zannies — was it the severity of the injury that fed them, or the person’s perception of how much it hurt?

They’d also managed to prove that while zannies could consume emotional pain, as well as physical, the effect was significantly less. Emotional and physical pain receptors over- lapped in the brain center, so the big question was, why did causing other people severe physical pain feed zannies, while causing severe emotional pain had less effect? Nita privately thought it was because physical pain had the added signals from nociceptors, but she was curious to see what others thought.

Her mother continued, oblivious to Nita’s wandering mind. “A number of interested parties have offered very large bounties for his head. They, unlike the government, don’t care if he’s alive to face trial.” There was a sharp flash of teeth. “And I’m happy to oblige them.”

She rose, put the pisco away, and pulled on her burgundy leather jacket. “Can you have him all packed up by the time I get back?”

Nita nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

Her mother came over and kissed the top of her head. “What would I ever do without you, Anita?”

Before Nita could formulate a response, her mother was out the door. There was a creak and then a bang, and the house was silent. When her mother departed, sometimes Nita felt like she took more than just noise. She had a presence, a tangible energy to her that filled the house. Without her, it felt hollow. Like the life had left, and there was only a dead zannie in its place.

Which, really, there was. Nita turned back to her newest project and allowed herself a small smile. A pishtaco or a chupacabra would have been better, but she’d still enjoy a zannie.

The first thing she did was empty its pockets. An old- fashioned timepiece, some Brazilian reais (no Peruvian soles though, which was odd), and a wallet. Nita gazed at it a long time before putting it on the tray, unopened. Her  mother would have already taken the credit cards and used them to get as much cash as possible before ditching them. The only other things left in the wallet would be identity cards, club memberships — things that would tell her about the person she was dissecting.

Nita had learned a long time ago — you don’t want to know anything about the person whose body you’re taking apart.

Better to think that it wasn’t a person at all. And really — it wasn’t. This was a zannie.

Nita took an elastic and tied her hair back in a puffy attempt at a ponytail. Her hair tended to grow sideways in frizzy kinks instead of down. In the glow of the fluorescent lights, its normally medium-brown color took on an orange tint. No one else thought it looked orange, but Nita insisted— she liked orange.

She put a surgical mask over her mouth, just below her freckle-spattered cheekbones, before putting the goggles on. After snapping on a pair of latex gloves, she rolled her tool set over to the metal slab where the body rested. She slipped her earbuds in and flicked on her Disney playlist.

It was time to begin.

  Nita couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been fascinated by dead things — perhaps because her home was always full of them. As far back as she could remember, her parents had acquired the bodies of unnaturals and sold the pieces on the internet. The darknet, to be specific. Black market body part sellers didn’t just post their items on eBay. That was how you ended up with a short visit from the International Non- Human Police — INHUP — and a long stint in jail.

When Nita was younger, she used to run around the room, bringing her parents empty jars. Big glass ones for the heart, small vials and bags for the blood. Afterward, she’d label them and line them up on the shelf. Sometimes she’d stare at them, pieces of people she’d never met. There was something calm- ing about the still hearts, floating in formaldehyde. Something peaceful. No more beating, no more thumping rhythm and noise. Just silence.

Sometimes, she would look at the eyes, and they would stare back. Direct, open gazes. Not like living people, who flicked their eyes here and there while they lied, who could cram an entire conversation into a single gaze. The problem was, Nita could never understand what they were saying. It was better after people were dead. The eyes weren’t so tricky anymore.

It took Nita all night and the better part of the next day to finish with the zannie, put everything in jars of formaldehyde or freezer containers, and clean the dissection room until it sparkled.

The sun was up, and she didn’t feel tired, so she went to her favorite park on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Tropical trees with large, bell-shaped flowers covered the benches like a canopy, and blue and white mosaics patterned the wall that prevented people from tumbling over the side of the cliff and into the sparkling waters below. Newspapers sat abandoned on the benches, from tabloids announcing Penelope Alvarez looks twenty at age forty-five. Good skin care or something more “unnatural”? to official news sources with headlines like Should Peru sign into INHUP? The advantages and disadvantages to an extraterritorial police force for unnatural-related incidents.

Peru was one of the only South American countries left that wasn’t a part of INHUP. There were always a few countries on every continent that stayed out so that black market dealers had somewhere to flee when INHUP finally nailed them. Certain people paid politicians handsomely to ensure it stayed that way.

Nita took a seat far away from the other people in the park. Under the shade of a floripondio tree, she cracked open her medical journals on unnaturals.

Sometimes it was frustrating reading them and knowing they were wrong about certain things. While lots of unnaturals were “out” and recognized by the world, most still hid, afraid of public backlash. So when the journals talked about zannies being the only species of unnatural that consumed nontangible things, like pain, Nita wished she could point out that there were creatures who consumed memories, strong emotions, and even dreams. INHUP just hadn’t officially recognized them yet. INHUP was big on doing damage control, and part of trying to decrease racism and discrimination against unnaturals was not telling people just how many types there were.

It also kept people like Nita’s mother from finding out about them. Sometimes.

Nita whiled the afternoon away in the shade of the tree, devouring medical research like candy, until the sun dipped so low there wasn’t enough light to read by.

When Nita got home, she was greeted by a string of exple- tives.

She crept into the hall, shoulders tight with tension. Her mother could be unpredictable when angry. Nita had been on the receiving end before and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

But ignoring her mother was more dangerous, so Nita padded into the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” Nita gaped, staring at the mess.

Her mother tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and gave Nita a wry smile. Around her, empty shipping crates littered the floor, along with packing materials like bubble wrap and Styrofoam worms. A gun sat on the kitchen table, and Nita briefly wondered what it was doing out.

“I want to have the zannie parts shipped out tomorrow.

We’ve got something new, and to be frank, this apartment isn’t big enough to hold all the parts.” Her mother flashed her another smile.

Nita was inclined to agree. Her dissection room was already at capacity, and they’d only dissected one zannie. There really wasn’t room for a second body.

“Something new, huh? I take it everything went well, then?” Nita’s mother laughed. “Do things ever go well with unnaturals that aren’t on the list?”

Among the unnaturals that were public knowledge, there was a list of “dangerous unnaturals” — unnaturals whose continued existence depended on  them  murdering other  people. It wasn’t a crime to kill them in INHUP member countries, it was “preemptive self-defense.” But anything not on the list, the harmless unnaturals (which was most of them, in Nita’s experience), it was very much a crime to kill.

Her mom mostly brought Nita unnaturals on the list. Mostly.

Nita knew her mother had probably killed a lot of not-evil, not-dangerous people and sold them. She tried not to think about it too much, because really, there wasn’t much she could do about it, was there?

Besides, they were always dead by the time they got to Nita. And if they were already dead, it would be a shame to let their bodies go undissected.

Speaking of . . .

“What did you bring back?” Nita asked, weaving through the crates to the fridge, where she took out last night’s leftovers and shoved them into the microwave.

“Something special. I put it in the dissection room.”

Nita felt her fingers twitch, the imaginary scalpel in her hand making a sliding cut through the air, like a Y incision. She couldn’t wait for the slow, relaxing evening, just her and the body. The straight autopsy lines, the jars full of organs watching over her, like her own weird guardian angel.

She shivered with anticipation. Sometimes she scared herself.

Her mother looked at Nita out of the corner of her eyes. “I have to say, this one was tricky to get.”

Nita removed her food from the microwave and sat down at the kitchen table. “Oh, do tell?”

Her mother smiled, and Nita settled in for a good story. “Well, it wasn’t hard at the beginning. Buenos Aires was lovely, and hunting down my tip was easy. Even acquiring our new . . . I don’t even know what to call him.”

Nita raised her eyebrows. Her mother knew every unnatural. It was her job. This one must be something really rare.

“Well, anyway.” Her mother sat down beside her. “It wasn’t even so bad getting him. Security wasn’t too much of an issue, easily dealt with. The problem was getting him back.”

Nita nodded. Airlines usually frowned on stuffing dead bodies into overhead bins.

Her mother gave her a conspiratorial wink. “But then I thought, well, why don’t I just pretend he’s a traveler? So I put him in a wheelchair, and the airline never even guessed.”

“Wait, a wheelchair?” Nita scowled. “But wouldn’t they notice that he didn’t, well, move or breathe or anything when they were helping him to his seat?”

She laughed. “Oh, he’s not dead. I just drugged the hell out of him.”

Nita’s fingers twitched, then froze. Not dead.

She gave her mother a sickly smile. “You said you put him in my room?”

“Yes, I spent the morning installing the cage. Bugger of a thing. You know they don’t make human-size cages anymore? And I had to get the handcuffs at a sex shop.”

Nita sat there for a long moment, smile frozen like a rictus on her face. Then she rose and began making her way through the crates to her dissection room.

Her mother followed. “This one’s a little different. He’s quite valuable, so I’d really like to milk him a bit for blood and such before we harvest the organs.”

But Nita wasn’t listening. She had opened the door to see with her own eyes.

Part of her beautiful, sterile white room was now taken up by a large cage, which had been bolted to the wall. Her mother had put a padlock and chain around the door. Inside the cage, a boy with dark brown hair lay unconscious in the fetal position. Given the size of the cage, it was probably the only way he could lie down.

“What is he?” Nita waited for her mother to list off the heinous things he did to survive. Maybe he ate newborn babies and was actually five hundred years old instead of the eighteen or nineteen he looked.

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s a name for what he is.”

“But what kind of unnatural is he? Explain it.” Nita felt her voice rising and forced it to calm down. “I mean, you know what he does, right?”

Her mother laughed. “He doesn’t do much of anything. He’s an unnatural, that much I’m sure of, but I don’t think you’ll find any external signs of it. He was being kept by a col- lector in Buenos Aires.”

“So . . . why do we want him?” Nita pushed, surprised at how much she needed an answer, a reason to justify the cage in her room and the small, curled-up form of the boy. His jeans and T-shirt looked like they were spattered with something, and Nita wondered if it was blood.

“Ah. Well, he’s supposedly quite delicious, you know. Something about him. That collector had been selling vials of his blood — vials, not bags, mind you — for nearly ten thousand each. US dollars, not soles or pesos. Dollars. One of his toes went up for auction online last year, and the price was six dig- its. For a toe.”

Her mother had a wide, toothy grin, and her eyes were alight at the prospect of how much money an entire body could make. Nita wondered how soon the boy’s time would be up. Her mother preferred cash in hand to cash in the future, so Nita doubted the boy would be prisoner for long.

“I already put him up online, and we have a buyer for another toe. So I took the liberty of cutting it off and mailing it while we were in Argentina.”

It took a few moments for Nita to register her mother’s words. Then she looked down, and sure enough, the boy’s feet were bare and bloody. One foot had been hastily wrapped in bandages, but they’d turned red as the blood soaked through.

Her mother tapped her finger to her chin. “The only problem is, his pieces need to be fresh — well, as fresh as we can get them. So we’ll sell all the extremities first, as they’re ordered. He should be able to survive without those, and we can bottle the blood when we remove them and sell it as well. We’ll do the internal organs and such later, once we’ve spread the word. Shouldn’t take too long.”

Nita’s mind spun in circles, not quite processing what her mother was saying. “You want to keep him here and cut pieces off him while he’s still alive?”

“Exactly.”

Nita didn’t even know what to say to that. She didn’t deal with live people. Her subjects were dead.

“He’s not . . . dangerous?” Nita asked, unable to tear her eyes off the bandages around the missing toes.

Her mother snorted. “Hardly. He got unlucky in the genetic draw. As far as I can tell, everyone wants to eat him, and he has no more defenses than an ordinary human.”

The boy stirred in the cage and tried to twist himself around to look at them. Nita’s heart clenched. It was pathetic.

Her mother clapped her on the shoulder before turning around. “We’re going to make good money off him.”

Nita nodded, eyes never straying from the cage. Her mother left the room, calling for Nita to help her organize the crates in the kitchen so they could start packing the zannie parts.

The boy lifted his head and met Nita’s eyes. His eyes were gray-blue and wide with fear. He reached a hand up, but it stopped short, the handcuffs pulling it back down toward the bottom of the cage.

He swallowed, eyes never leaving Nita’s. “Ayúdame,” he whispered.

Help me.

TWO

Nita was not a heartless, murdering, body-part thief.

That was her mother.

Nita had never killed anyone. Her plan was to keep it that way.

Why couldn’t Mom have killed him before she came back? If she’d killed him before coming home, Nita wouldn’t have had to see him like this. She could have just pretended he died naturally. Or blamed her mother and chalked it up to another of those well, too late to do anything now cases. But now he was alive, and in her apartment, and she actually had to think about this.

About the living, breathing person her mother planned to kill.

And have Nita dissect. Alive.

What would it be like to cut someone up while they were screaming at you to stop?

“Nita?” Mom came around the corner from the kitchen, and Nita realized she’d been standing in the hall staring off into space for the past few minutes. “Something wrong?”

Nita hesitated. “He’s alive.”

“Yes. And?” Mom’s eyes were as tight as her voice. Nita had a sudden feeling she was treading on very dangerous ground.

“He talks.” She shifted her shoulders in unease, more so from her mother’s look than anything else.

Her mother’s face relaxed. “Oh, don’t worry about that, sweetheart. He won’t be around for long. He’ll be on your table shortly, and no one talks back to you there, do they?”

Nita nodded, appreciating her mother’s efforts to quell her anxiety even as her nausea rose. “Yeah.”

Her mother gave her an appraising look. “You know, if you want, I can go cut his tongue out now. I have some pliers — I can pull it right out. Then you won’t have to worry about him talking.”

“That’s okay, Mom.” Nita forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re sure . . .” Her mother gave her another searching look before sighing. “All right. Shall we start packing some of those zannie parts?”

Nita nodded, glad for the change in subject.

They spent the rest of the afternoon filling up crates. Her mother had arranged the bribes to get them back to the family warehouse in the States. Her father would handle them from there. He dealt with the online sales, storage, and shipping of the body parts, while her mother dealt with the retrieval. Her father was also their major cover, if INHUP ever came sniffing. Nita was sure her mother had a record a mile long — her stack of foreign passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards was probably two feet high. That sort of thing usually came with a record, in Nita’s opinion.

Her father, though, was squeaky clean as far as Nita knew.

By day, he worked as a legal consultant in Chicago, and by night, he sold body parts on the internet. Nita missed him, and their home, and their shitty Chicago suburb that was actually a two-hour drive from Chicago. She hadn’t been home since she was fourteen.

She wondered what her father would say about this situation. Would he be unhappy her mother had brought a live unnatural home? And moreover, a harmless one?

It  was  one  thing  when her  mother  dumped  a  zannie or a unicorn  on Nita’s  table.  For one,  they  were monsters  who couldn’t continue to live without killing other people. And the world agreed — that was why there was a Dangerous Unnaturals List. It wasn’t even a crime to kill them. You were saving lives.

But someone like the boy in the other room? How could she justify that?

Sighing, Nita wiped the sweat off her forehead as they closed another crate. No matter how she thought about it, she couldn’t find a way to justify murdering that boy.

Well, except money.

“It looks like we’re going to need a few more shipping crates.” Her mother ran a hand through her hair. Her manicure caught the light, black and red and yellow, like someone had tried to cover a fire with a blackout curtain.

Nita poured a glass of juice. “Probably.”

“I think we deserve pizza now. How about you?” Nita heartily agreed.

After dinner, they realized they were low on bottled water.

Tap water wasn’t drinkable unless boiled, and Nita’s mother didn’t like the taste. She’d been promising they were going to get a UV light for purifying water since they arrived a few weeks ago, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Her mother sighed and got up, dusting pizza crumbs off her lap. “I’ll go down to the store and get a seven-liter bottle. I’ll start on the boy when I come back.”

“Start what?”

Her mother grinned. “I sold his ear an hour ago.” Nita stiffened. “You’re going to cut it off tonight?” “Of course.”

Nita swallowed, looking away. “But you can’t mail it until tomorrow morning. It makes more sense to cut it off tomorrow. If freshness is important, like you said.”

Her mother’s eyes narrowed. Nita tried to resist the urge to shift in place, but failed.

Finally, in a small voice, Nita whispered, “I don’t want to hear him screaming all night. I won’t get any sleep.”

Her mother laughed, throwing her head back, then came over and clapped Nita on the back. It was just a little harder than it should have been, and Nita stumbled forward a step.

“You’re absolutely right, Anita.” Her mother grinned as she walked back to the door. “We’ll do it tomorrow morning.”

Nita stood there, trembling, as the door closed with a thud and a click. She remained in place for a few minutes, calming her breathing before picking up a slice of pizza and walking back to the dissection room.

When  she opened  the  door, she  found  the  boy sitting cross-legged in the cage, watching her. She approached with caution, and as she got closer, she was able to discern that yes, those stains on his clothes were definitely dried blood.

She put the pizza close enough to the bars that he could wiggle his fingers through and pull pieces off. She skittered back, afraid if she got too close he would leap at her. Not that he could do much, chained to the cage, which was chained to the wall. But she was careful anyway.

He looked down at the pizza and licked his lips. “Gracias.” “De nada.” Nita was surprised at how hoarse her voice was. She stood there for a long moment, awkward, not sure

what to do next. Logically, she knew better than to talk to him. She didn’t want to know anything about him if — when — she had to dissect him. But she also felt weird just giving him food and leaving.

This was the part where she could really have used more social skills practice. Was there etiquette for this kind of situation?

Probably not.

He wormed his fingers through the bars and ripped off the tip of the pizza. His hands wouldn’t reach to his mouth because of the handcuffs, so he had to bend his head over to eat. He chewed slowly, and after one bite, just sat, looking at the pizza but not eating. She wondered if he didn’t like pep- peroni.

“Cómo te llamas?” he asked, still not looking up. His accent was clearly Argentinian, his y sounds blurring into sh, so it sounded like “cómo te shamas?”

His accent wasn’t too hard to understand, unlike Nita’s.

Her father was from Chile, and she’d lived in Madrid until she was six, so Nita’s Spanish was a hopeless tangle of the two accents. Sometimes the Peruvians in the grocery store couldn’t understand her at all.

“Nita.” She hesitated. “Y tu?”

“Fabricio.” His voice was soft. “Fabricio Tácunan.” “Fabricio?” Nita couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her

voice. “Is that from Shakespeare or something?”

He looked up at her then, and frowned. “Pardon?”

Nita repeated slowly, trying to make her accent less pro- nounced.

This time he understood. He raised his eyebrows, voice pitched slightly differently. More curious, less sad, his Spanish soft and barely audible. “Who is Shakespeare?”

“Umm.” Nita paused. Did they teach Shakespeare in Latin American schools? If the boy — don’t think of him by name, you’ll get too attached and then where will you be? — had been a captive of a collector, had he even gone to school? “He’s an English writer from the fifteen hundreds. One of his characters was named Fabrizio, I think. It’s . . . I guess I thought it was kinda an old name.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s fairly common where I’m from. One of my father’s employees has the same name. But he spells it with a z, Fabrizio. The Italian way.”

Fabricio looked down at his shirt, crusted with dried blood and swallowed. “He spelled it with a z.”

Oh.

Nope, too much information. Nita didn’t want to hear about this.

Why did you even talk to him, then? she scolded herself. This was going to make everything worse later.

Nita turned to leave, but he called her back. “Nita.”

She paused, wavering, before glancing over her shoulder at him. “Yes?”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

She watched how he strained against the handcuffs, leaning forward in the cage. His face was tense, fear shining through in the angle of his head, the crease on his forehead, and the wide blue eyes.

She turned away. “I don’t know.”

But that was a lie. She just didn’t want to admit it to him.

  THREE

Heading back into the kitchen, Nita found her mother waiting for her.

There was no water.

Nita paused when she entered the room, uncomfortable. Her mother was watching her with cold eyes, hand resting near her gun. Casually, not on purpose. Not that her mother had ever needed a gun. She preferred poison.

“You weren’t talking with him, were you, Nita?”

Nita shook her head, looking at the floor. Her shoulders hunched as her body instinctively tried to curl into itself. Nita’s mother had an aura around her, an unspoken sense of coiled menace when she was angry. Nita would never admit it to either of her parents, but she was secretly terrified of her mother. She’d only stood up to her once in her life.

When Nita was twelve and they’d been living and operating near Chicago, her mother had tried to get into the dact fur business. Dacts, small fluffy balls of adorableness people kept as pets, were totally harmless. Her mother would come home with groups of them in cages, never saying where they were from. And every night, after her parents went to bed, Nita would sneak down to the basement and take the cages to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet clinic and ask them to give the dacts to the SPCA or shelter. A few times they’d scanned the dacts for microchips and found they’d been stolen from someone’s backyard.

Nita’s mother had not been impressed. She’d come home one day with a cage of dead dacts instead of live ones, and Nita had responded by flushing five pounds of pure powdered uni- corn bone down the toilet (that stuff sold better than cocaine and was more addictive by far). She took the dead dacts’ bodies to the emergency vet clinic anyway.

Nita’s mother hadn’t appreciated Nita’s discovery of morals. After her father calmed everyone down and ended the plan to sell dact fur, Nita’s mother still hadn’t been satisfied. So she’d poisoned the dact food in the pet store, and every single dact in their suburb had died. Her mother, knowing Nita’s pro-pensity for ignoring things that weren’t right in front of her nose, took to putting the corpses in Nita’s bed for a week.

It had only  ended when  Nita broke  down crying  on the front step, begging her mother to stop. Her father had agreed and told her mother  it was affecting their  profit margin — by that time Nita was dissecting most of the bodies coming through, and she was such an emotional wreck she hadn’t worked in a week. Money convinced her mother to stop when nothing else had.

But there was an unspoken promise: if Nita ever disobeyed her mother again, the punishment would be far, far worse.

Nita swallowed and tried to push away the memories. “Why would I talk to him? What would I even talk about?”

“Of course you weren’t talking to him, you’re socially incompetent.” Her mother took a step forward, and Nita nearly flinched. She kept herself in check. Barely. “Because, if you were trying to talk to the boy, you might develop sympathy. I don’t need that. And I can promise you” — a sharp, mean smile— “you don’t want that.”

Nita shrugged, trying to play it nonchalant when every nerve screamed at her to run, run far and fast and never ever look back. “I gave him his food. He said thanks. I said you’re welcome. Then I left.”

Her mother gave Nita a long, searching look before bestowing a condescending smile on her. “That’s good. It’s always appropriate to be polite.”

Nita tried to force a smile, but it wouldn’t come. “I’m tired. I kinda want to go to bed. If you don’t mind?”

Her mother waved her away. “After you pick up some water. I decided I didn’t want to go myself after all.”

So her mother didn’t trust her. She’d just sat there, eaves- dropping, and knew Nita had lied to her.

Great. “Okay.”

It was always best to obey her mother.

Nita grabbed her sweater and a bag on her way out, making sure to lock the door behind her. She took a deep breath, leaning her head on the door and closing her eyes. She felt like she was walking a tightrope. One wrong step, and she could fall to either side. The problem was, she wasn’t sure what exactly she’d be falling into, except that it would be bad.

Would her mother kill Fabricio while she was out so Nita couldn’t interfere?

No. Of course not. But she might start cutting off pieces. Nita swallowed, hands clenched at her side. Would that be

so terrible? It wouldn’t be Nita’s fault then — she wouldn’t be here; she couldn’t do anything about it. She could just brush it aside.

But she’d still have to dissect him when it was all over. Scoop out those scared blue eyes and put them in a jar.

Nita let out the breath she’d been holding. It would be a waste to start cutting pieces off Fabricio now.

She walked down the hall and to the stairwell, heading for the store.

Outside, it was dark and hazy, but the streetlights kept things moderately well lit. Nita lived in a nice part of Lima, right in the heart of Miraflores district, and she wasn’t too concerned about safety at night.

The heat of the evening settled comfortably on her skin, and a gentle breeze brought her the scent of something spicy in a nearby restaurant. She’d only been in Lima a month, but she liked it a lot so far. It was one of the nicer places they’d set up shop.

Nita and her mother moved around a lot. They would move to a central location on a continent, and her mother would tar- get all the nearby countries, hunting for unnaturals she could kill and sell. They’d spent years doing this in the US before they’d moved on to Vietnam, Germany, and now Peru.

She passed by the open door of a restaurant and saw a pair of American tourists snapping at a waiter. The woman was snarling something in English, and the waiter just stared at her, smile frozen on his face while shaking his head and try- ing to tell her, in a mix of broken English and Spanish, that he didn’t understand.

“Well, find me someone who does!” snapped the woman, and then she turned to her husband. “You’d think they could hire people that speak English.”

Nita rolled her eyes as she passed. Why was there this obsession Americans had that others should learn their language to accommodate them? They were in Peru. Why didn’t those American people learn Spanish?

She saw it everywhere, the weird entitlement. Tourists who stole pieces of pottery and coins from German castles because they could. Rich men who flew in to Ho Chi Minh thinking they could buy anyone they wanted for a night and do anything they wanted to them, laws of the country be damned.

Nita kept walking past the restaurant and down the street. Her footsteps slowed just beneath a plaque commemorating a battle against the Spanish. She thought about the Spanish conquistadores five hundred years before, who’d swept through South America and painted the whole continent red in their hunt for gold.

Something uncomfortable and squiggly shifted in her chest. The plaque was talking about Pizarro, the man who’d carved a bloody swathe through Peru. He’d taken the Inca — the  ruler of  the  Incan  people — hostage, and  then  ransomed him for a room full of gold. When the Incan people gave him the gold, he killed the Inca anyway.

Pizarro wasn’t even the worst of the conquistadores. Christopher Columbus used to cut the hands off indigenous people who didn’t dig enough gold for him each month.

Like her mother cut off Fabricio’s toes. Nope.

Nita really didn’t want to think about that.

So she ignored the niggling little voice that told her she had no right to claim the tourists were being entitled jerks when her mother felt entitled to take these people’s lives and sell their body parts for profit.

She went to the local bodega instead of the giant grocery store. She didn’t like how crowded the grocery store was. People were always talking to her and breathing near her, and some- times they brushed by her, and she found it uncomfortable.

The bodega was smaller, and she actually had to talk to the person at the cashier sometimes, but it was worth it to not feel the press of so many bodies around her. Also, the bodega never had a line.

As she was paying, Nita’s eyes were drawn to the television sitting on a chair on the other side of the room, a stack of toilet paper and Kleenex packages on top. It was an old, boxy unit, and someone had put on the news.

“The debate over whether to add unicorns to the Dangerous Unnaturals List continues, as INHUP starts its third day of discussions over the proposal.”

Nita smiled as a memory surfaced, one of the few she had where she really felt her mother cared. A man with blond hair and swirly black thorn tattoos had reached to ruffle her hair at a store, and her mother had nearly shot him right then and there. Nita had been swept away before the man could get too close, and while her mother never said, Nita knew that particular soul-eating unicorn was dead now. He would never again target virgins. She’d seen the new powdered unicorn bone stock.

Letting out a breath, Nita shook her head. Her mother might be many things, but she loved Nita. It was a scary kind of love, but it was there. That was important. Sometimes it was easy to forget, given her mother’s suspicious nature and obsession with money.

A reporter was interviewing a scientist about unnatural genetics.

“Unicorns are another type of unnatural linked to reces- sive genes. This means these creatures can reproduce with humans, and the genetic makeup can lie dormant for generations before the right circumstances combine and two per- fectly normal parents give birth to a monster.

“It’s not only unicornism that’s hereditary,” the man on the screen ranted. “But other creatures. Zannies. Kappa. Ghouls. Even vampires, to some extent.”

Nita thought of the pieces of zannie in her apartment. She wondered how many people it had tortured in its life to feed its hunger for pain. It was a good thought, because she had no guilt about cutting up a monster like that, and even admired her mother for killing it.

“Could you describe the proposal you’ve submitted to INHUP, Dr. Rodón?”

“Genetic manipulation. It’s a very select series of genes unique to each species, so once fully mapped, it should be easy to screen for and eliminate them. If we catch it before they’re born, we can eradicate all dangerous human-born unnatu- rals.”

The clerk gave Nita her water with a smile, and she nearly ripped it out of his hand as she stormed out of the shop, unable to listen to another minute of that drivel.

Nita hated people.

While Nita agreed it might be an effective, even humane way to reduce the monster population, she knew people would take it too far. People always took it too far. How long before people started isolating genes from harmless unnaturals and eliminating them too? Aurs, who were just bioluminescent people? Or mermaids? Or whatever Fabricio was?

Or even Nita and her mother?

FOUR

The next morning, Nita woke to screaming.

She yanked the covers off and reached for the scalpel she kept on her nightstand. Her feet tangled in the sheets as she stumbled out of bed and fell on her knees with a thud.

The screaming rose in pitch, sharpening into a long, horrible shriek.

Breathing fast, Nita freed herself and climbed to her feet. She crept out of her room, scalpel first, toward the source of the noise. The screams were punctuated by the rattle of metal against metal, the scraping squeak of something heavy on the linoleum floor, and her mother’s vicious swearing. Nita’s heartbeat stuttered.

Her mother hadn’t been testing her when she mentioned cutting off Fabricio’s ear. She was actually doing it. Right now.

Nita opened the door to the dissection room and saw blood. It had spattered her clean white walls and floor. Droplets clung to her mother’s angry face, and streaks of red tears patterned Fabricio’s cheeks. He’d scooted his head as far into the cage as he could and had bunched his legs so his feet were pressed to the front of the cage. He rocked it from side to side, trying to prevent her mother from getting a grip. The padlock was on the floor, but the cage door had swung shut, and Fabricio was holding it closed by wrapping his remaining toes around the door and tugging.

Her mother was holding a syringe, probably something to sedate Fabricio. He knocked it out of her hand with his shoulder, and it clattered to the bottom of the cage. He used an elbow to smash it, spilling the contents and chunks of broken glass across the ground.

Both of them turned as Nita entered, and Nita flinched when she saw Fabricio’s face straight on. Her mother had clearly tried to cut off his ear while he slept, and he’d woken up mid cut. His ear had been partly severed, and then the knife had slipped, slicing a deep red line across his cheek.

Nita took an involuntary step forward to stop this, to do something. Her mouth opened to protest. Then it closed.

You can’t stop this, Nita. You can’t save him.

If you show sympathy, your mother will make sure you regret it. She wouldn’t hurt me, Nita protested. But that didn’t mean

there weren’t worse things her mother could do. The memory of small broken bodies stuffed between her sheets surfaced, but she shoved it away.

She let her hands fall to her sides as she talked herself out of action and looked away. She was no stranger to blood and carnage, but she hated that shard of hope shining from Fabricio’s eyes. She didn’t want to see it replaced by betrayal.

“Nita.” Her mother rose, flicking blood off her fingers. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Nita paused. “Are you trying to get the ear?”

“Yes. He’s not cooperating.” Her mother beckoned her. “Give me a hand.”

Nita hesitated only a split second before approaching. “How can I help?”

The hope in Fabricio’s eyes cracked, and then melted into terror and anger. Nita tried not to look.

Her mother took out another syringe, presumably full of sedatives. “I’m going to try and hold him still. I want you to sedate him.”

Nita took the syringe with trembling fingers, not letting herself look at Fabricio. It was better this way, wasn’t it? This way he wouldn’t feel the pain when his ear came off.

Nita wouldn’t have to hear him scream.

“Why didn’t you sedate him before you started?” Nita asked, hiding her shaking hand from her mother.

Her mother shrugged, nonchalant. “I thought I could cut it off fast enough.”

No, Nita realized, looking at the half smile twitching across her mother’s face. You thought no such thing. You wanted this to hap- pen, so I would wake up and be forced to help you.

Nita was being tested. She didn’t know what the conse- quences of failure were, but she knew they weren’t good.

You shouldn’t have talked to Fabricio and then lied about it to her. Nita had been stupid. She should have known better. Clenching her jaw, she put the syringe down. “I don’t see how it’ll be any easier to sedate him than it would be to just get the rest of the ear off.” She showed her mother her scalpel.

“There’s only a strip of flesh left. It won’t take much to finish the job.”

Her mother’s smile widened until it seemed to consume her face. “If you think so, I’m happy to try.”

“Nita.” Fabricio spoke for the first time. “Nita, por favor.” Nita’s mother laughed. “Oh, it figured out your name.” Nita clenched the scalpel in her sweaty palm and focused

on the ear, ignoring Fabricio’s crying and continued whispers of her name like a prayer.

Just get this over with. Then she could figure out where to go from there. But if she failed this, bad things would happen. She didn’t want a repeat of the dact incident with parts of Fabricio in her bed each morning.

She tried not to look at his face as she pushed the scalpel through the cage bars, but she couldn’t escape his sobs and cries. Her hand was shaking, and her palm was so sweaty that when Fabricio shook the cage again, the scalpel was knocked right out of Nita’s fingers, leaving a deep, bloody gash across her palm along the way.

Nita yanked her hand back, swearing as the blood dripped down her arm.

Her mother gave her a tired look. “Well, heal it already, and we’ll try again.”

Nita turned away so her mother wouldn’t see the flash of anger in her expression. Then she let out a breath and focused her body. She increased blood clotting factor in the affected area to speed up the scabbing process. She didn’t want to do too much repairing until she had some disinfectant, though— while she could stimulate her body’s natural defenses against the microbes, it was just easier to wash the wound in soap.

Nita wasn’t sure how old she’d been when she discovered that other people couldn’t control their bodies the same way she could. Her mother did it all the time — enhanced her own muscles so she could run faster, hit harder, heal quicker.

The more Nita understood about her body, the more she could control it. But it was dangerous — there was a reason for swelling, and if you took away the symptom without dealing with the underlying cause, it could make things worse. She’d discovered that the hard way when she was seven  and  her father had to take her to a hospital because she’d accidentally paralyzed herself trying to make her bicycle-butt bruise go away. Only after the x-rays and scans, and the doctor’s detailed explanation of the precise issue, had Nita been able to fix it.

After that, she’d been very cautious about how she altered herself.

“Are you done yet?” Her mother’s voice was cold.

Nita nodded and turned back to her mother. “For now. But it’ll take time to fully heal. I severed a tendon — I don’t think I’ll be able to hold a scalpel for a day or so.”

Her mother scowled, clearly displeased. Nita made no comment and kept her face blank. It wouldn’t do for her mother to see how relieved this injury made Nita feel, or for her mother to realize she was stalling and could, if she wanted, finish healing the wound much sooner than tomorrow. Now she had at least a day where she didn’t personally have to do the slicing. That was something.

“Fine.” Her mother picked up the bloody scalpel, gave it a quick rinse in the sink, and then, before either Nita or Fabricio had a chance to react, spun with near superhuman speed and threw it. It neatly sliced through the last piece of cartilage connecting Fabricio’s ear to his body, and he screamed as the sev-ered piece of flesh tumbled to the ground. He tried to clap his hands over his ear, but they were still chained to the bottom of the cage, and he couldn’t reach. Instead, he wept as blood coated the side of his face.

Her mother scooped up the scalpel and speared the ear like a piece of steak. She showed it to Nita with a grin. “You know, I think my aim could have been better.”

Nita resisted the urge to throw up.

 ***

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WEEK THREE

Early English Settlement in America 

West Africans and Central Africans are being shipped to Europe, South America and North America. To put into perspective this is at a time when tobacco is the big crop in North America and not cotton.  Below are some statistics to see where the Africans are being shipped to bring a larger context to the slave trade. 

Destination of enslaved Africans. (1500 - 1870)

-Spanish America including spanish carribean - 15%

-Other Caribbean Islands - 41%

-Europe and Asia -  2.5%

-British North America -  4.5%

-Portuguese Brazil - 37%

Number of enslaved Africans arriving on the American continent. (1514-1866) 

Europe - 7,600 

United States - 307,000

Cuba - 765,000

Jamaica - 935,000

other Caribbean 2,760, 000

Guyanas - 356,000

Brazil - 3,169,000

Argentina/Uruguay - 92,000

There is also intertrading going on which causes the number of slaves in the region to fluctuate. Colonies in the Americas are trading with the Caribbean and vice versa and sending goods back to England. The North American English colonies are trading cloth, and food which is used to feed and clothe slaves. From the Caribbean English colonies they are selling slaves, sugar, and rum. 

This is going on during the early Chesapeake period where there were settlers, servants and slaves. The Chesapeake was located in what would be modern day Virginia and Maryland. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm7pluf_gEY 

This is a video to give background information about English America and slaves who worked the plantations. 

Early English America

The English are the first to have successful colonies in the “New World.” The English arrive much later in the “New World” than the Portuguese or Spanish. They were not looking for permanent colonies in the “New World” until the early 1600s. To give greater context to when this is taking place the Spanish and the Portuguese  have been creating colonies and have been occupying territory in the Caribbean and North America for around 100 years. The Spanish and Portuguese have not been successful at all in setting up colonies in North America.

The English failed with the Roanoke colony but they were successful with the Jamestown colony. Jamestown had many hardships before it became successful. They suffered through a harsh winter where they turned to cannibalism of horses and possibly people to survive the harsh winters. The colony needed to show the home country they could produce something. They begin to grow tobacco as it is not a good place for sugar or mining gold and silver. It allows Jamestown to create a tobacco economy which is the main product being sold. The English need to find labor to farm the tobacco. The colonists search for labor and start with indentured but move to exclusively slave labor. 

 English need labor to work on this new colony. They differ from the Spanish and have their own forms of servitude for labor. The Spanish only use slave labor but the English use a mixture of slave labor and indentured servitude.  The English do not have a formal slave system at this time but they are aware of the system the spanish and portuguese have and would like to replicate something like that. A slave system would be laws and regulations to differentiate slaves and indentured servants. This would allow for a constant workforce for the plantations. If slaves and indentured servants both have a path to freedom then the English colony would lose its main labor force.

Societies with slaves versus Slave Societies 

In this era with the colonies you have societies with slaves and also slave societies. The English colony is a society with slaves as the English do not have an established slave system. Slave labor is not their main source of labor as they also use indentured servants.  They don't have any laws differing slaves from indentured servants. This makes it possible for African slaves to achieve freedom. Indentured servants work for as long as their contract is and then become free men. In most cases slaves are bought and are succumbed to labor for their lifetime. The fact that slaves are able to gain their freedom like indentured servants means that Africans have a path to freedom and can die free men. Some examples of slave societies are Spanish and Portuguese colonies. This means that the main source of labor for these colonies  is slave labor.  

Indentured Servants vs. Slavery 

In this early period their are no distinct laws indicating differences between indenturred servitude and slavery so in some cases they are treated the same and allowed to receive freedom. They do the same work. They are receiving the same punishments of being beaten, whipped, flogged. Some enslaved are slaves for life but some slaves can be treated like indentured servants and have the same benefits as stated earlier. Some people might be enslaved but you call them indentured servants. Slavery is onely one form of labor in this early period. 

Background of the Africans In English America 

First Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619. They are captured off a portuguese ship called the Bautista. They are from Angola and Central Africa. The ship was going to Mexico and they were captured by English privateers. English pirateers are hired by the english to make life difficult for the spanish.  They sell the goods and slaves to the Jamestown colony.  This is the earliest arrival of Africans in an English colony but not in North America and especially not in the Americas. 

Example of Freedom

A man named Anthony Brown is one of the few examples of an African who gets his freedom due to lack of clear laws about indentured servants and slaves. He becomes Christian and changes his name to  Anthony Johnson. He gained his freedom and became a free person and a landowner. He also used slave labor and indentured servants to work on his plantations. 

“Settlers landing on the site of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America.” MPI/Getty Images

The Uprisings of the Enslaved 

The treatment that slaves had to endure was beyond inhumane and cruel to many degrees. They were overworked, beaten, raped, and robbed of their freedoms. This treatment was not uncontestedly accepted by the enslaved. Like it is described in the textbook, “enslaved Africans proved to be difficult to control” (White, Bay, Martin Jr. 76). Regardless of how strict the slave code became, the slave insurrections and resistance continued. An example of this is the Stono Rebellion. The aftermath of the rebellion, however, is also important to talk about.  

In 1739, there was a slave rebellion in South Carolina led by Jemmy Angola. It began with around a group of 20 gathering near the banks of Stono. They began their march toward freedom, which was in Spanish Florida, while carrying a flag that stated “Liberty to Slaves”. They broke into a gun store, killed the shopkeeper, and stole all the weapons that they could arm themselves with. As they headed south, they would kill all the whites they encountered in their way, except for one man whose life was spared for being kind to his slaves. As they continued to march others began to join and they grew to be a group of 60. However, in the afternoon they were tracked down by armed whites. More than 40 slaves were killed and around 20 whites were killed by the group. The remaining enslaved were either captured or killed. This rebellion served as a wake up call to white colonists across the south. Their commitment to slavery was unshaken and from the rebellion came the South Carolina Negro Act in 1740. This act removed any remaining “freedoms” that slaves still had. They could “no longer travel beyond the boundaries of their masters’ plantations without a ticket or pass granting permission” (White, Bay, Martin Jr. 75). It gave whites the authorization to whip any slave who was caught without a pass and it also made it legal for them to kill any slave who resisted punishment or questioning. There was no longer a need for a trial, whites were allowed to kill any rebellious slave. 

Black people, especially black men, were being feared during this time. The New York Slave Plot of 1741 was accompanied by the fears that white colonizers had of slave rebellions. In their eyes, African American males were one of the greatest dangers in society. On March 18, 1741 a fire broke out at Fort George, which was the home of the governor. For the next three weeks, fires continued to rage across the state. In attempt to blame this on African Americans, indentured servants were promised their freedom if they testified and blamed African Americans for the fire. Due to this approximately 100 black males over the age of 16 were arrested along with several white with conspiracy against New York. As a result of this, 30 blacks were hanged or burned at the stake. Out of the whites arrested, four of them were hanged as well. The aftermath of the fires led to stricter control of black life in New York. White men were even asked and allowed to carry their guns, as a form of policing black people. The very existence of black people brought fear to whites. 

This is a plaque that can be found in South Carolina explaining the rebellion. It has a front and a back which are shown in the above two images. 

This is an illustration of the New York Slave Plot of 1741. It is showing all the wooden buildings burning and its flames raging.

Bitcoin Is Replacing The El Salvador Economy For The Unbanked

Bitcoin was created to become a monetary system that exists outside the control of third parties, such as governments and banks. It is also a solution for unbanked individuals to hold an account that stores value, and can transfer that value to others on a peer-to-peer basis. And while this is a long-term vision for the first-ever cryptocurrency, in a rural village in El Salvador, BTC is already replacing the hard-hit economy and providing a much-need solution for unbanked citizens residing in an area along the coast called Bitcoin Beach. Bitcoin Beach Is Home to Budding BTC Economy, Ideal Solution For Unbanked During Crisis All nations across the globe are currently struggling financially, as the coronavirus has caused a complete stop of economic production due to lockdown conditions in an attempt to reduce the impact of the outbreak. Major economic superpowers such as the United States and China are suffered, but it’s the cash-strapped regions where unbanked citizens are commonplace that are left without a monetary system they can rely on. RELATED READING | FLIGHT TO BITCOIN IN ARGENTINA DUE TO DEBT CRISIS IS A SIGN OF WHAT’S TO COME In a rural beach located along the coast of  South American nation, El Salvador exists a village now dubbed Bitcoin Beach, where the locals are relying almost solely on Bitcoin to transact and get essentials like groceries. Real world #Bitcoin transaction in mobile store 15 seconds. Quicker than cash (by the time you give change) and definitely quicker than Credit card. Rural village in El SALVADOR selling out of a van to people banks don’t want to serve. Forget buying coffee w/BTC. This is real pic.twitter.com/YOOo1mL6Hv — Bitcoin Beach (@Bitcoinbeach) April 27, 2020 In a video shared by the official village’s Twitter account, promoting the adoption of the leading cryptocurrency by market cap, villagers can be seen buying eggs via a contactless mobile app. This is ideal and even recommended by the Wolrd Health Organization as a way to avoid cash during the outbreak. These mobile payments are being made in Bitcoin, however, not through bank accounts, Venmo, or other options. Locals prefer Bitcoin for its speed, but its also a necessity, as many people in the area don’t have access to traditional banking solutions. RELATED READING | MOST IMPORTANT CHART EVER? BITCOIN S2F COMBINED WITH REDDIT RAINBOW CHART EMERGES With the coronavirus further impacting the economy across the world, and more specifically, in El Salvador, Bitcoin is showing its power as a monetary solution that can exist without a physical form. Over the last month alone, more than 5 BTC have been distributed to the local villagers, helping local businesses stay in business by selling goods to the over 350 families that are benefitting from the BTC transfers. Bitcoin was born out of the last crisis and is being used to help the unbanked and most vulnerable get thru the current one pic.twitter.com/irjT7n8y7g — Bitcoin Beach (@Bitcoinbeach) April 23, 2020 Bitcoin was born from the last major economic crisis, and it is already showing how important the cryptocurrency is during the current one. Not only can Bitcoin provide a solution for the unbanked, even if all other traditional banks collapse, but it is also inflation resistant, and a contactless payment method. As smaller economies collapse under the pressure of the economic crisis, Bitcoin could continue to prove its worth by serving as a solution for the unbanked – wherever they reside. Featured image from Pixabay from Cryptocracken Tumblr https://ift.tt/2Wbwevv via IFTTT

Saturday, June 12, 2021

G-7 nations gather to pledge 1B vaccine doses for world (AP) World leaders from the Group of Seven industrialized nations are set to commit at their summit to share at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with struggling countries around the world—half the doses coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the U.K. The leaders meeting in the resort of Carbis Bay hope to energize the global economy as well. On Friday they are set to formally embrace a global minimum tax of at least 15% on corporations, seconding an agreement reached a week ago at a meeting of their finance ministers. The minimum is meant to stop companies from using tax havens and other tools to avoid taxes. The official summit business starts Friday, with the customary formal greeting and a socially distanced group photo. Later the leaders will meet Queen Elizabeth II and other senior royals.

The West is the driest it's been in 1,200 years (NBC News) Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history, and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain. Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S.—where 72 percent of the region is in "severe" drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming. Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise. This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region.

Earthquakes and oil (Bloomberg) According to an analysis of data from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico, in the shale-producing regions, there were 938 earthquakes registering at least a 2 on the Richter scale last year, quadruple the number detected in 2017. Such tremors are linked to shale production, which entails wastewater being pumped underground. In 2019, 12 billion barrels of wastewater were disposed of underground, which can make the seismic conditions a little more unstable. The figure has been rising steadily, and year to date there have already been 570 such earthquakes in the southwest, which is on pace for a record.

Bitcoin in El Salvador (Foreign Policy) The country has become the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency a legal tender. It will be exchangeable for dollars at a market rate, a system that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said could reduce transfer fees on migrant remittances and attract investment. The move also risks enabling money laundering and use of El Salvador as a tax haven.

Argentina Is the Pandemic’s Latest Hot Spot (Foreign Policy) At the end of a first-floor wing of the Mariano y Luciano de la Vega Hospital in the Argentine municipality of Moreno, the day unfolded like many others during the pandemic here, with razor-sharp focus on each and every bed—juggling patients who have COVID-19 and those who suffer from other ailments afflicting a working-class and low-income population. “Every bed is super important,” according to the hospital’s director, Emmanuel Alvarez. “We have to have a minute-by-minute accounting of the available beds,” he said. “The collapse can happen because of COVID or because of something else.” The prospect of a collapse is very real. Argentina has been cataloging record levels of contagion—41,000 new cases in one day last week. The country of 45 million people has counted more than 3.8 million cases and nearly 80,000 deaths since the pandemic began, with a growth rate trending upward even as other countries’ rates begin to slow. In the last two weeks, it has ranked among the three countries with the highest number of deaths per capita. Around 95 percent of intensive care beds are occupied in eight of the country’s 23 provinces, according to the Argentine Intensive Care Society, with 90 percent occupied in another five jurisdictions, including the capital city.

America May Be ‘Back’ in Europe, but How Much Has Really Changed? (NYT) Few images captured the rupture in trans-Atlantic relations better than that of President Donald J. Trump in 2018, arms folded across his chest as he resisted Chancellor Angela Merkel and other frustrated leaders in their doomed effort to salvage their summit meeting in Canada. When the same leaders reconvene in Cornwall, England, on Friday, President Biden will reverse the body language, replacing impasse with embrace. But beneath the imagery, it is not clear how much more open the United States will be to give-and-take with Europe than it was under Mr. Trump. “America’s foreign policy hasn’t fundamentally changed,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament. “It’s more cooperative and inclusive, but substantially it’s the same.” “Like all leaders,” he added, “Biden is putting his own country first. How he achieves that is what has distracted many.”

EU countries clear plan to ease cross-border tourism over summer (Reuters) European Union countries agreed on Friday to an easing of travel restrictions over summer that will allow fully vaccinated tourists to avoid tests or quarantines and broaden the list of EU regions from which it is safe to travel. Ambassadors from the 27 EU member states approved a modified European Commission proposal that people who have been fully vaccinated for 14 days should be able to travel freely from one EU country to another, current EU president Portugal said. Restrictions for other travellers should be based on the degree to which the country they are coming from has COVID-19 infections under control. The revised guidelines come as the EU introduces COVID-19 certificates that will indicate whether a person is vaccinated, has immunity because they were previously infected, or has had a recent negative test. The system is set to be ready by July 1, although some countries will launch certificates earlier.

As U.S. Withdraws, Afghan Interpreters Fear Being Left Behind (NYT) It was an offhand comment, blurted out in frustration. It may have destroyed Shoaib Walizada’s chances of earning a cherished visa to the United States. Mr. Walizada, who interpreted for the U.S. Army for four years until 2013, said that he had complained one day, using profanity, that his assigned combat vest was too small. When the episode came to light later that year, Mr. Walizada’s preliminary approval for a visa was revoked for “unprofessional conduct.” Mr. Walizada, 31, is among thousands of Afghans once employed by the U.S. government, many as interpreters, whose applications for a Special Immigrant Visa, or S.I.V., through a State Department program, have been denied. The program, established to relocate to the United States Iraqis and Afghans whose lives are threatened because they worked for the American military or government, has rejected some applicants for seemingly minor infractions and others for no stated reason. Now, as American troops depart and Afghans experience a growing sense of anxiety and despair, the visa applications have taken on renewed urgency. With the Taliban taking advantage of the U.S. withdrawal, many former interpreters say they are more likely than ever to be killed.

Israel’s Netanyahu lashes out as end of his era draws near (AP) In what appear to be the final days of his historic 12-year rule, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not leaving the political stage quietly. The longtime leader is accusing his opponents of betraying their voters, and some have needed special security protection. Netanyahu says he is the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. He speaks in apocalyptic terms when talking about the country without his leadership. “They are uprooting the good and replacing it with the bad and dangerous,” Netanyahu told the conservative Channel 20 TV station this week. “I fear for the destiny of the nation.” Such language has made for tense days as Netanyahu and his loyalists make a final desperate push to try to prevent a new government from taking office on Sunday. With his options running out, it has also provided a preview of Netanyahu as opposition leader.

France ends Sahel military operation (Reuters) President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday France’s operation battling Islamist militants in the Sahel region of West Africa would come to an end with troops now operating as part of broader international efforts in the region. France, the former colonial power, has hailed some success against Sahel militants in recent months but the situation is extremely fragile and Paris has grown frustrated with no apparent end in sight to its operations and political turmoil especially in Mali. “The time has come to begin a deep transformation of our military presence in the Sahel,” Macron told a news conference, referring to the Barkhane operation, which has some 5,100 soldiers across the region.

In Tigray, food is often a weapon of war as famine looms (AP) First the Eritrean soldiers stole the pregnant woman’s food as she hid in the bush. Then they turned her away from a checkpoint when she was on the verge of labor. So she had the baby at home and walked 12 days to get the famished child to a clinic in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray. Here, in war-torn Tigray, more than 350,000 people already face famine, according to the U.N. and other humanitarian groups. It is not just that people are starving; it is that many are being starved, The Associated Press found. In farming areas in Tigray to which the AP got rare access, farmers, aid workers and local officials confirmed that food had been turned into a weapon of war. Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers are blocking food aid and even stealing it, they said, and an AP team saw convoys with food and medical aid turned back by Ethiopian military officials as fighting resumed in the town of Hawzen. The soldiers also are accused of stopping farmers from harvesting or plowing, stealing the seeds for planting, killing livestock and looting farm equipment. “If things don’t change soon, mass starvation is inevitable,” said a humanitarian worker in the region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to escape retaliation from armed groups. “This is a man-made disaster.”

Missing Characters (Annenberg) A new study of the 200 top-grossing films produced by the United States, U.K., Australia and New Zealand from 2017 to 2019 found that just 1.6 percent of the 8,965 speaking characters in those films were Muslim. Given that 24 percent of the global population is Muslim, that’s a rather steep under-representation; further, a deeper look at the characters determined that only one of the Muslim characters was portrayed in the United States. In aggregate, the portrayals of the characters were one-dimensional: of 41 primary and secondary Muslim characters, 58.5 percent were immigrants or refugees, 87.8 percent spoke English with an accent, if at all, 39 percent were perpetrators of violence, 19 percent were dead by the end of the film, and only eight of the characters were children.

Health Benefits of Passion Fruit

Passion fruit, also known as granadilla, is more readily available in supermarkets across the country today than in the past but, visually, although they’re unquestionably exotic, they’re rather unimportant looking. The exterior is rather like a hairless kiwi and a small grapefruit, but it’s when you cut the fruit in half that it gets really interesting.

NDTV describes passion fruit, aka Passiflora edulis, as a “type of berry which is sweet-sour, highly aromatic and seedy.” Ripe fruits are eaten by cutting them in half and scooping out the bright yellow contents with a spoon, avoiding the thin membrane similar to that in a grapefruit. Hungry Harvest describes the passion fruit’s unique flavor profile this way:

“Slightly wrinkled fruits are ripe and will have a sweeter taste than the smooth skinned passion fruit! If the skin is smooth, your passion fruit will taste tart … They also have a strong and characteristic perfume. You can absolutely eat them raw by themselves if you don’t mind the tartness. We recommend enjoying them with something sweet or creamy.”1

Besides eating them raw, the serving options are numerous for passion fruit. The pulp can be placed in a blender with a little stevia and orange juice, then placed back inside the rinds for a creamy, delicious fruit bowl. You can make passion fruit pudding, ice pops, tarts, sauces and vinaigrettes for salad, and that’s just the short list; researching recipe options will net a harvest of tasty results.

Native to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, passion fruit is also grown in the tropical areas like India, Australia and South Africa. Inside the tough rind, the pulp is soft, but both are edible and often juiced to make a nutritious drink. Like so many other plant-based foods, the nutritional aspects are considerable.

Nutritional Aspects of Passion Fruit

According to Medical News Today,2 two of the most beneficial nutrients in passion fruit are vitamins; principally 229 IU of vitamin A (aka International Unit, usually used to measure fat soluble vitamins, and 5.4 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C, which, as an antioxidant, is well known for its ability to battle colds and flu. Vitamin A helpsimprove your skin, immune system and vision.

Raw passion fruit also provides minerals, including 63 mg of potassium, one of the seven essential macrominerals, which is significant because 100 mg of potassium are recommended per day to support your body’s functions. In fact, a high intake has been shown to reduce the risk of overall mortality by 20 percent;3 however, that’s predicated on balancing potassium with your sodium intake.

Further, a healthy potassium intake decreases your stroke risk, lowers your blood pressure, maintains your bone strength, decreases your chances of forming kidney stones, regulates your body’s fluids and controls the regular activity of your heart and other muscles.4

Passion fruit also brings significant amounts of magnesium (5 mg), important for more than 300 enzymatic reactions in your body, such as metabolizing the foods you eat and synthesis of proteins and fatty acids;5 calcium (2 mg), another essential element that’s the most abundant one in your body, critical for bone health and for vital brain communication to other areas of your body;6 and iron (.29 mg).

As for fiber, of which 25 grams are provided in 1 cup of passion fruit (or 1.9 grams when you eat one),7 top recommendations specify a daily intake of 30 to 38 grams of fiber per day for men, and 21 to 25 grams a day for women. Supporting a 2015 study reporting a 10 percent reduced risk for all-cause mortality for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily intake,8 I recommend 50 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories consumed, ideally from fiber-rich foods.

Passion Fruit Shown to Reduce Anxiety and Sleeplessness

One little-known bonus associated with eating a whole passion fruit is decreased stress and anxiety, due to the 5 mg of magnesium it contains. According to a systematic review, not only are most people grossly deficient — 68 percent in the U.S. alone9 — but the results can lead to hypertension, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. The study concluded:

“The potential effect of (magnesium) in attenuating psychological response to stress merits further investigation since stress is a ubiquitous feature of modern lives. The modulation of the HPA axis by (magnesium), which has been demonstrated to reduce central and peripheral endocrine responses, suggests that behavioral effects of stress exposure such as anxiety could be attenuated by (magnesium) supplementation.”10

The HPA axis, incidentally, refers to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal dysfunction, and can trigger adrenal fatigue symptoms. While the above study is careful to note that the science is scant in regard to magnesium’s involvement in mental and emotional health, it’s worth noting that a deficiency can result in personality changes, not to mention serious illnesses from seizures to abnormal heart rhythms, the National Institutes of Health11 notes.

An alkaloid compound in passion fruit known as harman has also been noted as good for people suffering from insomnia, as well as restlessness, tension and nervous anxiety. Harman actually functions as a sedative, noted by Vanguard12 as imparting “blood pressure-lowering, sedative and antispasmodic” actions.

Passion Fruit: Improves Insulin Sensitivity

Most people don’t consider that eating certain fruits can raise your glycemic index, which can result in a rapid and steep increase in blood sugar. The American Diabetes Association13 calls it the GI value, and reveals that most fruits, among them pineapples and melons, have a low GI value. However, passion fruit does not, making it a great fruit option for people with diabetes. News-Medical addresses several related issues:

“Modern lifestyle diseases, such as obesity and metabolic syndrome, may lead to many complications, including hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease. They also accelerate the aging processes. Appropriate dietary interventions may help to regulate glucose and energy metabolism, and thus improve the outcome for affected individuals.

Among the interventions are caloric restriction, which helps reduce insulin resistance by preventing sustained hyperglycemia. This often requires long-term control of dietary choice and portion size, which is difficult to maintain for a majority of overweight subjects. For this reason, functional foods, such as passion fruit are being studied for their potential contribution to reducing weight and insulin resistance.

One compound in passion fruit, which has garnered plenty of interest is piceatannol, an analog of resveratrol. The latter is a polyphenol, which has been shown to lower glucose levels, and to increase stamina, in several rodent studies.”14

The aforementioned piceatannol found in passion fruit was identified in a 2017 randomized, placebo-controlled study as a substance that could improve your metabolism. According to the study authors, 39 participants, men and women, half being overweight, were given 20 mg of piceatannol per day for eight weeks.

Assessing the blood pressure, heart rate, inflammation, endothelial function, lipids, oxidative stress and mood of the subjects beforehand, the researchers found that while the nonoverweight men and women, and some overweight women, showed no overwhelmingly beneficial effects, the overweight men did. They concluded that piceatannol supplementation can improve metabolic health, including insulin sensitivity and other aspects of metabolic health.15

Additional Perks From Eating Passion Fruit

Another advantage you get from eating the exotic passion fruit has to do with your skin. Besides the vitamins A and C, riboflavin and carotene are additional antioxidants that bring about a remarkable renovation in your body through the eradication of free radicals. One of the fringe benefits is what that process does for slowing the aging process, including that of your skin.

Antioxidants also boost your health by flushing harmful toxins from your body, which not only affects the appearance of your skin, but fights inflammation to help stave away many forms of infection. Working with potassium and vitamin C, antioxidants help retain your skin’s moisture and elasticity and improve your blood flow. According to one study:

“Most dermatologists agree that antioxidants help fight free radical damage and can help maintain healthy skin. They do so by affecting intracellular signaling pathways involved in skin damage and protecting against photodamage, as well as preventing wrinkles and inflammation.”16

One of the most desired results found in terms of health benefits from eating passion fruit is its anticarcinogenic potential with their ability to render free radicals impotent in their attempt to mutate healthy cell DNA into cancerous ones.

A 2012 study published by the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research indicates that different concentrations of passion fruit extract were tested to see which would be most effective against Streptococcus mutans, a common dental bacteria causing caries, tooth cavities and root canal infections, and a 40 percent to 45 percent concentration was found to be the most effective, exerting a “significant antimicrobial effect against S. mutans,” and better than commonly used drugs.

The same publication noted that several powerful polyphenols and carotenoids in passion fruit have been shown to initiate apoptosis in cancerous cells, also known as programmed cell death, especially in leukemia, according to a thesis presented at the University of Florida in 2003.

With all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and obscure compounds such as piceatannol and harman loaded in passion fruit, it’s no wonder that so many studies have shown improvement in people with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Those results have also been shown to lower the risk of cardiovascular issues, as well, as a natural result.

from Articles http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/02/18/passion-fruit-health-benefits.aspx source https://niapurenaturecom.tumblr.com/post/182885923581

Health Benefits of Passion Fruit

Passion fruit, also known as granadilla, is more readily available in supermarkets across the country today than in the past but, visually, although they’re unquestionably exotic, they’re rather unimportant looking. The exterior is rather like a hairless kiwi and a small grapefruit, but it’s when you cut the fruit in half that it gets really interesting.

NDTV describes passion fruit, aka Passiflora edulis, as a “type of berry which is sweet-sour, highly aromatic and seedy.” Ripe fruits are eaten by cutting them in half and scooping out the bright yellow contents with a spoon, avoiding the thin membrane similar to that in a grapefruit. Hungry Harvest describes the passion fruit’s unique flavor profile this way:

“Slightly wrinkled fruits are ripe and will have a sweeter taste than the smooth skinned passion fruit! If the skin is smooth, your passion fruit will taste tart … They also have a strong and characteristic perfume. You can absolutely eat them raw by themselves if you don't mind the tartness. We recommend enjoying them with something sweet or creamy.”1

Besides eating them raw, the serving options are numerous for passion fruit. The pulp can be placed in a blender with a little stevia and orange juice, then placed back inside the rinds for a creamy, delicious fruit bowl. You can make passion fruit pudding, ice pops, tarts, sauces and vinaigrettes for salad, and that’s just the short list; researching recipe options will net a harvest of tasty results.

Native to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, passion fruit is also grown in the tropical areas like India, Australia and South Africa. Inside the tough rind, the pulp is soft, but both are edible and often juiced to make a nutritious drink. Like so many other plant-based foods, the nutritional aspects are considerable.

Nutritional Aspects of Passion Fruit

According to Medical News Today,2 two of the most beneficial nutrients in passion fruit are vitamins; principally 229 IU of vitamin A (aka International Unit, usually used to measure fat soluble vitamins, and 5.4 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C, which, as an antioxidant, is well known for its ability to battle colds and flu. Vitamin A helps improve your skin, immune system and vision.

Raw passion fruit also provides minerals, including 63 mg of potassium, one of the seven essential macrominerals, which is significant because 100 mg of potassium are recommended per day to support your body’s functions. In fact, a high intake has been shown to reduce the risk of overall mortality by 20 percent;3 however, that’s predicated on balancing potassium with your sodium intake.

Further, a healthy potassium intake decreases your stroke risk, lowers your blood pressure, maintains your bone strength, decreases your chances of forming kidney stones, regulates your body’s fluids and controls the regular activity of your heart and other muscles.4

Passion fruit also brings significant amounts of magnesium (5 mg), important for more than 300 enzymatic reactions in your body, such as metabolizing the foods you eat and synthesis of proteins and fatty acids;5 calcium (2 mg), another essential element that’s the most abundant one in your body, critical for bone health and for vital brain communication to other areas of your body;6 and iron (.29 mg).

As for fiber, of which 25 grams are provided in 1 cup of passion fruit (or 1.9 grams when you eat one),7 top recommendations specify a daily intake of 30 to 38 grams of fiber per day for men, and 21 to 25 grams a day for women. Supporting a 2015 study reporting a 10 percent reduced risk for all-cause mortality for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily intake,8 I recommend 50 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories consumed, ideally from fiber-rich foods.

Passion Fruit Shown to Reduce Anxiety and Sleeplessness

One little-known bonus associated with eating a whole passion fruit is decreased stress and anxiety, due to the 5 mg of magnesium it contains. According to a systematic review, not only are most people grossly deficient — 68 percent in the U.S. alone9 — but the results can lead to hypertension, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. The study concluded:

“The potential effect of (magnesium) in attenuating psychological response to stress merits further investigation since stress is a ubiquitous feature of modern lives. The modulation of the HPA axis by (magnesium), which has been demonstrated to reduce central and peripheral endocrine responses, suggests that behavioral effects of stress exposure such as anxiety could be attenuated by (magnesium) supplementation.”10

The HPA axis, incidentally, refers to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal dysfunction, and can trigger adrenal fatigue symptoms. While the above study is careful to note that the science is scant in regard to magnesium’s involvement in mental and emotional health, it’s worth noting that a deficiency can result in personality changes, not to mention serious illnesses from seizures to abnormal heart rhythms, the National Institutes of Health11 notes.

An alkaloid compound in passion fruit known as harman has also been noted as good for people suffering from insomnia, as well as restlessness, tension and nervous anxiety. Harman actually functions as a sedative, noted by Vanguard12 as imparting “blood pressure-lowering, sedative and antispasmodic” actions.

Passion Fruit: Improves Insulin Sensitivity

Most people don’t consider that eating certain fruits can raise your glycemic index, which can result in a rapid and steep increase in blood sugar. The American Diabetes Association13 calls it the GI value, and reveals that most fruits, among them pineapples and melons, have a low GI value. However, passion fruit does not, making it a great fruit option for people with diabetes. News-Medical addresses several related issues:

“Modern lifestyle diseases, such as obesity and metabolic syndrome, may lead to many complications, including hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease. They also accelerate the aging processes. Appropriate dietary interventions may help to regulate glucose and energy metabolism, and thus improve the outcome for affected individuals.

Among the interventions are caloric restriction, which helps reduce insulin resistance by preventing sustained hyperglycemia. This often requires long-term control of dietary choice and portion size, which is difficult to maintain for a majority of overweight subjects. For this reason, functional foods, such as passion fruit are being studied for their potential contribution to reducing weight and insulin resistance.

One compound in passion fruit, which has garnered plenty of interest is piceatannol, an analog of resveratrol. The latter is a polyphenol, which has been shown to lower glucose levels, and to increase stamina, in several rodent studies.”14

The aforementioned piceatannol found in passion fruit was identified in a 2017 randomized, placebo-controlled study as a substance that could improve your metabolism. According to the study authors, 39 participants, men and women, half being overweight, were given 20 mg of piceatannol per day for eight weeks.

Assessing the blood pressure, heart rate, inflammation, endothelial function, lipids, oxidative stress and mood of the subjects beforehand, the researchers found that while the nonoverweight men and women, and some overweight women, showed no overwhelmingly beneficial effects, the overweight men did. They concluded that piceatannol supplementation can improve metabolic health, including insulin sensitivity and other aspects of metabolic health.15

Additional Perks From Eating Passion Fruit

Another advantage you get from eating the exotic passion fruit has to do with your skin. Besides the vitamins A and C, riboflavin and carotene are additional antioxidants that bring about a remarkable renovation in your body through the eradication of free radicals. One of the fringe benefits is what that process does for slowing the aging process, including that of your skin.

Antioxidants also boost your health by flushing harmful toxins from your body, which not only affects the appearance of your skin, but fights inflammation to help stave away many forms of infection. Working with potassium and vitamin C, antioxidants help retain your skin’s moisture and elasticity and improve your blood flow. According to one study:

“Most dermatologists agree that antioxidants help fight free radical damage and can help maintain healthy skin. They do so by affecting intracellular signaling pathways involved in skin damage and protecting against photodamage, as well as preventing wrinkles and inflammation.”16

One of the most desired results found in terms of health benefits from eating passion fruit is its anticarcinogenic potential with their ability to render free radicals impotent in their attempt to mutate healthy cell DNA into cancerous ones.

A 2012 study published by the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research indicates that different concentrations of passion fruit extract were tested to see which would be most effective against Streptococcus mutans, a common dental bacteria causing caries, tooth cavities and root canal infections, and a 40 percent to 45 percent concentration was found to be the most effective, exerting a “significant antimicrobial effect against S. mutans,” and better than commonly used drugs.

The same publication noted that several powerful polyphenols and carotenoids in passion fruit have been shown to initiate apoptosis in cancerous cells, also known as programmed cell death, especially in leukemia, according to a thesis presented at the University of Florida in 2003.

With all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and obscure compounds such as piceatannol and harman loaded in passion fruit, it’s no wonder that so many studies have shown improvement in people with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Those results have also been shown to lower the risk of cardiovascular issues, as well, as a natural result.

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/02/18/passion-fruit-health-benefits.aspx

Health Benefits of Passion Fruit

Passion fruit, also known as granadilla, is more readily available in supermarkets across the country today than in the past but, visually, although they’re unquestionably exotic, they’re rather unimportant looking. The exterior is rather like a hairless kiwi and a small grapefruit, but it’s when you cut the fruit in half that it gets really interesting.

NDTV describes passion fruit, aka Passiflora edulis, as a “type of berry which is sweet-sour, highly aromatic and seedy.” Ripe fruits are eaten by cutting them in half and scooping out the bright yellow contents with a spoon, avoiding the thin membrane similar to that in a grapefruit. Hungry Harvest describes the passion fruit’s unique flavor profile this way:

“Slightly wrinkled fruits are ripe and will have a sweeter taste than the smooth skinned passion fruit! If the skin is smooth, your passion fruit will taste tart … They also have a strong and characteristic perfume. You can absolutely eat them raw by themselves if you don't mind the tartness. We recommend enjoying them with something sweet or creamy.”1

Besides eating them raw, the serving options are numerous for passion fruit. The pulp can be placed in a blender with a little stevia and orange juice, then placed back inside the rinds for a creamy, delicious fruit bowl. You can make passion fruit pudding, ice pops, tarts, sauces and vinaigrettes for salad, and that’s just the short list; researching recipe options will net a harvest of tasty results.

Native to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, passion fruit is also grown in the tropical areas like India, Australia and South Africa. Inside the tough rind, the pulp is soft, but both are edible and often juiced to make a nutritious drink. Like so many other plant-based foods, the nutritional aspects are considerable.

Nutritional Aspects of Passion Fruit

According to Medical News Today,2 two of the most beneficial nutrients in passion fruit are vitamins; principally 229 IU of vitamin A (aka International Unit, usually used to measure fat soluble vitamins, and 5.4 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C, which, as an antioxidant, is well known for its ability to battle colds and flu. Vitamin A helps improve your skin, immune system and vision.

Raw passion fruit also provides minerals, including 63 mg of potassium, one of the seven essential macrominerals, which is significant because 100 mg of potassium are recommended per day to support your body’s functions. In fact, a high intake has been shown to reduce the risk of overall mortality by 20 percent;3 however, that’s predicated on balancing potassium with your sodium intake.

Further, a healthy potassium intake decreases your stroke risk, lowers your blood pressure, maintains your bone strength, decreases your chances of forming kidney stones, regulates your body’s fluids and controls the regular activity of your heart and other muscles.4

Passion fruit also brings significant amounts of magnesium (5 mg), important for more than 300 enzymatic reactions in your body, such as metabolizing the foods you eat and synthesis of proteins and fatty acids;5 calcium (2 mg), another essential element that’s the most abundant one in your body, critical for bone health and for vital brain communication to other areas of your body;6 and iron (.29 mg).

As for fiber, of which 25 grams are provided in 1 cup of passion fruit (or 1.9 grams when you eat one),7 top recommendations specify a daily intake of 30 to 38 grams of fiber per day for men, and 21 to 25 grams a day for women. Supporting a 2015 study reporting a 10 percent reduced risk for all-cause mortality for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily intake,8 I recommend 50 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories consumed, ideally from fiber-rich foods.

Passion Fruit Shown to Reduce Anxiety and Sleeplessness

One little-known bonus associated with eating a whole passion fruit is decreased stress and anxiety, due to the 5 mg of magnesium it contains. According to a systematic review, not only are most people grossly deficient — 68 percent in the U.S. alone9 — but the results can lead to hypertension, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. The study concluded:

“The potential effect of (magnesium) in attenuating psychological response to stress merits further investigation since stress is a ubiquitous feature of modern lives. The modulation of the HPA axis by (magnesium), which has been demonstrated to reduce central and peripheral endocrine responses, suggests that behavioral effects of stress exposure such as anxiety could be attenuated by (magnesium) supplementation.”10

The HPA axis, incidentally, refers to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal dysfunction, and can trigger adrenal fatigue symptoms. While the above study is careful to note that the science is scant in regard to magnesium’s involvement in mental and emotional health, it’s worth noting that a deficiency can result in personality changes, not to mention serious illnesses from seizures to abnormal heart rhythms, the National Institutes of Health11 notes.

An alkaloid compound in passion fruit known as harman has also been noted as good for people suffering from insomnia, as well as restlessness, tension and nervous anxiety. Harman actually functions as a sedative, noted by Vanguard12 as imparting “blood pressure-lowering, sedative and antispasmodic” actions.

Passion Fruit: Improves Insulin Sensitivity

Most people don’t consider that eating certain fruits can raise your glycemic index, which can result in a rapid and steep increase in blood sugar. The American Diabetes Association13 calls it the GI value, and reveals that most fruits, among them pineapples and melons, have a low GI value. However, passion fruit does not, making it a great fruit option for people with diabetes. News-Medical addresses several related issues:

“Modern lifestyle diseases, such as obesity and metabolic syndrome, may lead to many complications, including hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease. They also accelerate the aging processes. Appropriate dietary interventions may help to regulate glucose and energy metabolism, and thus improve the outcome for affected individuals.

Among the interventions are caloric restriction, which helps reduce insulin resistance by preventing sustained hyperglycemia. This often requires long-term control of dietary choice and portion size, which is difficult to maintain for a majority of overweight subjects. For this reason, functional foods, such as passion fruit are being studied for their potential contribution to reducing weight and insulin resistance.

One compound in passion fruit, which has garnered plenty of interest is piceatannol, an analog of resveratrol. The latter is a polyphenol, which has been shown to lower glucose levels, and to increase stamina, in several rodent studies.”14

The aforementioned piceatannol found in passion fruit was identified in a 2017 randomized, placebo-controlled study as a substance that could improve your metabolism. According to the study authors, 39 participants, men and women, half being overweight, were given 20 mg of piceatannol per day for eight weeks.

Assessing the blood pressure, heart rate, inflammation, endothelial function, lipids, oxidative stress and mood of the subjects beforehand, the researchers found that while the nonoverweight men and women, and some overweight women, showed no overwhelmingly beneficial effects, the overweight men did. They concluded that piceatannol supplementation can improve metabolic health, including insulin sensitivity and other aspects of metabolic health.15

Additional Perks From Eating Passion Fruit

Another advantage you get from eating the exotic passion fruit has to do with your skin. Besides the vitamins A and C, riboflavin and carotene are additional antioxidants that bring about a remarkable renovation in your body through the eradication of free radicals. One of the fringe benefits is what that process does for slowing the aging process, including that of your skin.

Antioxidants also boost your health by flushing harmful toxins from your body, which not only affects the appearance of your skin, but fights inflammation to help stave away many forms of infection. Working with potassium and vitamin C, antioxidants help retain your skin’s moisture and elasticity and improve your blood flow. According to one study:

“Most dermatologists agree that antioxidants help fight free radical damage and can help maintain healthy skin. They do so by affecting intracellular signaling pathways involved in skin damage and protecting against photodamage, as well as preventing wrinkles and inflammation.”16

One of the most desired results found in terms of health benefits from eating passion fruit is its anticarcinogenic potential with their ability to render free radicals impotent in their attempt to mutate healthy cell DNA into cancerous ones.

A 2012 study published by the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research indicates that different concentrations of passion fruit extract were tested to see which would be most effective against Streptococcus mutans, a common dental bacteria causing caries, tooth cavities and root canal infections, and a 40 percent to 45 percent concentration was found to be the most effective, exerting a “significant antimicrobial effect against S. mutans,” and better than commonly used drugs.

The same publication noted that several powerful polyphenols and carotenoids in passion fruit have been shown to initiate apoptosis in cancerous cells, also known as programmed cell death, especially in leukemia, according to a thesis presented at the University of Florida in 2003.

With all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and obscure compounds such as piceatannol and harman loaded in passion fruit, it’s no wonder that so many studies have shown improvement in people with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Those results have also been shown to lower the risk of cardiovascular issues, as well, as a natural result.

from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/02/18/passion-fruit-health-benefits.aspx

source http://niapurenaturecom.weebly.com/blog/health-benefits-of-passion-fruit

5 reasons why Venezuela's nightmare could get worse

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/HDzW14

5 reasons why Venezuela's nightmare could get worse

Andrea Oelsner, Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) (The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Andrea Oelsner, Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) and Federico Merke, Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) (THE CONVERSATION) “It’s time for a coup in Venezuela.” That statement appeared in Foreign Policy magazine on June 5, two weeks after Nicolás Maduro was re-elected as Venezuela’s president on May 20 in an election widely considered to be rigged. José R. Cárdenas, the former Bush administration official who wrote it, argued that “the United States and its allies should lay the groundwork” for overthrowing Maduro because “nearly two decades of creeping authoritarianism and large-scale economic mismanagement have taken a staggering toll on Venezuelans.” Venezuelans have endured acute shortages of food, medicine and other basic necessities since 2015, thanks in large part to Maduro’s mishandling of an economic crisis originally triggered by a drop in global oil prices. Other responses to Maduro’s re-election were equally strong, if less extreme. The United States and Europe tightened economic sanctions on the South American country, though they have so far stopped short of crippling the country entirely by sanctioning oil exports. How long can a cash-strapped rogue regime facing international condemnation and humanitarian crisis survive? Our international relations analysis of Venezuela reveals five reasons why Maduro may hang onto power for quite a while. 1. Money Low international oil prices and political instability have dramatically reduced Venezuela’s revenues since Maduro took power in 2012. His country is effectively bankrupt. Yet Maduro still commands more than enough state resources to avoid a coup. For years, the president has purchased the loyalty of Venezuela’s armed forces by giving the military loans and control over state-run enterprises. The Ministry of Defense is now in charge of importing, producing, selling and distributing all food in Venezuela, for example. And in a country where people are starving, says retired Gen. Cliver Alcalá, the black market of “food is now a better business than drugs.” Maduro has also stacked his cabinet with generals, personally investing them in his government’s survival. Currently, they lead nine of 33 national ministries. Military officers suspected of plotting against Maduro have been jailed and tortured. 2. Crimes against humanity Just a few years ago, a powerful protest movement challenged the Maduro regime with daily demonstrations that involved hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. Brutally repressive tactics ended that. According to a recent report on human rights in Venezuela, police and other government forces killed 131 protesters between 2014 and 2017. And since 2013, the Venezuelan security forces have arrested 12,000 citizens, executed 8,292 and tortured nearly 300 people. The report was written by a panel of independent international experts appointed by the Organization of American States and based on witnesses’ public hearings. These actions amount to “crimes against humanity,” the report states, recommending that Maduro’s regime be investigated by the International Criminal Court at the Hague. The United Nations made a similar recommendation in a June report on human rights violations there. After years of violent repression, most people are now too afraid to protest. 3. A neutered opposition The Maduro regime has neutralized almost all its domestic political opponents, too. In August 2017, President Maduro stripped the National Assembly of its powers. The National Assembly was Venezuela’s legislative branch, dominated by opposition parties. Maduro replaced it with a regime-controlled “Constituent Assembly.” Maduro has also ensured that his Socialist Party stays in power by blacklisting and jailing opposition candidates, shutting down news outlets that report on the regime’s actions and offering food in exchange for votes. And pro-democracy groups that receive foreign funding are now subject to prosecution on charges of “financing terrorism” under a 2012 anti-money laundering law. The controversial legislation has handicapped Venezuelan society’s ability to organize against the regime. 4. Widespread hunger Scarcity itself is a now a tool of repression in Venezuela. Due to hyperinflation, food shortages and high prices, 93 percent of the population does not earn enough to buy food, according to a 2017 study conducted in Venezuela. Venezuelans have lost, on average, 20 pounds since the country’s humanitarian crisis began in 2015. Almost 1 million Venezuelans have fled hunger and repression by migrating to neighboring Colombia over the past two years. Another roughly 50,000 sought asylum in the United States. Eight hundred Venezuelan refugees cross the border into Brazil every day. The Venezuelans who remain must devote hours every day just to finding food. Starvation and endless food queues do not leave much time or energy for political resistance. 5. No international agreement A government like Maduro’s might not last long in, say, France, because neighboring countries and the European Union would exert sufficient diplomatic, political and economic pressure to punish the rogue regime for its actions. Research shows that economic sanctions alone, such as those recently levied against Venezuela, rarely work to coerce governments into better behavior. But international pressure can have some positive effect under two conditions. First, the target country must be heavily dependent on international economic exchange, without other strong allies. Second, the sanctions must be multilateral. Neither condition is true of Venezuela. The Organization of American States has tried for two years to expel Venezuela because it is no longer a democracy. But member countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua – all of which have strongman leaders allied with Maduro – oppose the initiative. Even if the group did manage to suspend Venezuela, the move would be symbolic. Venezuela has already announced its own withdrawal from the Organization of American States, calling it “a colonial body at the service of Washington.” In any case, its Latin American neighbors are not Venezuela’s main international financial partners. China and Russia are largely keeping Maduro’s bankrupt regime afloat by buying oil concessions and extending the repayment period on loans. If Latin America isolated Venezuela in an attempt to force political changes, Maduro would just increase his reliance on these two non-democratic regimes. We know this assessment isn’t what millions of suffering Venezuelans will want to hear, but Maduro may hold on to power for quite some time. Until and unless all these domestic and international sources of support run out, we believe an imminent transition to democracy in Venezuela is unlikely.

__

By Associated Press

Yayoi Kusama – Artist

Yayoi Kusama (Kusama Yayoi, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.

Raised in Matsumoto, Kusama trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract Impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.

Yayoi Kusama’s wide ranging practice reflects a lifelong preoccupation with the infinite and sublime, as well as the twin themes of cosmic infinity and she has developed a practice, which, though it shares affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, Eccentric Abstraction, the Zero and Nul movements, distilled within the important, ongoing My Eternal Soulseries are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art, encapsulating a surreal and humorous, each new work of the My Eternal Soul series abounds with imagery. Some appear psychedelically primordial, other examples bring to mind ancient. The fundamental tenets of Kusama’s art – the ultimate, immersive expression of her lifelong exploration of infinity, illusion, self-obliteration and repetition – are unmistakable in the “all-over” quality of her Infinity Nets. Forging a path between abstract expressionism and minimalism, Kusama first showed her white Infinity Nets in the late 1950s to critical acclaim. She continues to develop their possibilities in restlessly beautiful works. The pumpkin occupies a special place in her iconography and is a motif she has returned to repeatedly throughout her career. Kusama has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture. Created for her 2016 Victoria Miro exhibition, All the Love I Have for the Pumpkins is a centrepiece of the major exhibition focusing on Kusama's immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, touring North America in 2017 and 2018. Originating in 1966, when Kusama first participated, albeit unofficially, in the Venice Biennale, Narcissus Garden comprises mirrored spheres displayed en masse

Kusama’s extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and immeasurable yet intimate, Kusama’s art may possess a kind of universal language but it speaks to us one by one. Pictured: Infinity Mirror Room – Filled with the over the past five years there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, North America and Scandinavia. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours in Japan. She was also selected as one of TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People and named Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, the first major survey of Kusama’s work in Southeast Asia, opened at National Gallery Singapore in June 2017. In 2017, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the most significant North American touring exhibition of Kusama’s work in two decades, opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. On 1 October 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo with the exhibition Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art. Opening displays at the Yayoi Kusama Museum include works from the My Eternal Soul and Love Forever series and the mirror installation Pumpkins.

For almost seventy years Yayoi Kusama has developed a practice, which, though it shares affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, Eccentric Abstraction, the Zero and Nul movements, resists any singular classification. Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, she studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s, and by the mid-1960s had become well known in the avant-garde world for her provocative happenings and exhibitions. Since this time, Kusama's extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature, fashion (most notably in her 2012 collaboration with Louis Vuitton) and product design.

An enduring feature of Kusama's unique art is the intricate lattice of paint that covers the surface of her Infinity Net canvases, the negative spaces between the individual loops of these all-over patterns emerging as delicate polka dots. These motifs have their roots in hallucinations from which she has suffered since childhood, in which the world appears to her to be covered with proliferating forms. Forging a path between abstract expressionism and minimalism, Kusama first showed her white Infinity Nets in New York in the late 1950s to critical acclaim. She continues to develop their possibilities in monochromatic works which are covered with undulating meshes that seem to fluctuate and dissolve as the viewer moves around them.

Another key motif is the pumpkin form, which has achieved an almost mythical status in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home and the pumpkin continues to occupy a special place in her iconography. She has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture.

From these to Accumulation sculptures, where everyday objects are made uncanny with a covering of soft-sculpture phallic forms or dried macaroni, to monumental outdoor sculptures and installations, such as Narcissus Garden, originating in 1966 when Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale, and to the entrancing illusions of recent experiential mirrored room installations, Kusama's work is far-reaching, expansive and immersive. Simultaneously infinitesimal and unlimited in scale, immeasurable yet intimate, it allows the viewer to enter into a fully realised world.

It is with characteristic dynamism that Kusama’s My Eternal Soul series, first began in 2009, has grown far in excess of the hundred works originally conceived by the artist. Distilled within the My Eternal Soul paintings are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art, encapsulating a surreal and humorous, as well as instinctual approach to art making. Each new work of the ongoing series abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile and other more indeterminate forms recalling cell structures, often in pulsating combinations of colour. Some appear psychedelically primordial, other examples bring to mind ancient landscapes and grand geological patterns. This is Kusama, a pioneer in her command of a variety of media, at her most personal and direct, relying on brush, paint and canvas alone. They reveal an artist overflowing with ideas and undiminished in her desire to depict the apparently contradictory, unpredictable and undepictable, well into her ninth decade.

Over the past five years there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, North America, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In 2016 Kusama was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People. She was also recently named the world’s most popular artist by various news outlets, based on figures reported by The Art Newspaper for global museum attendance. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours bestowed by the Imperial Family.  Kusama is the first woman to be honored with the prestigious medal for drawings and sculptures.

Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and currently lives and works in Tokyo, where the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened October 2017 with the inaugural exhibition Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art.

A major exhibition focusing on the evolution of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms tours the US throughout 2017 to 2019. The most significant North American tour of Kusama’s work in nearly two decades began at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (23 February - 14 May 2017), travelling to Seattle Art Museum (30 June - 10 September 2017), The Broad, Los Angeles (October 2017 - January 2018), Art Gallery of Ontario (March - May 2018), Cleveland Museum of Art (July - October 2018) and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (November 2018 - February 2019).

Further current and recent major international touring exhibitions include Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, National Gallery of Singapore (2017); travelling to Queensland Art Gallery - Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017 - 2018), and Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity, which travelled from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, (2015 - 2016) to Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016) and Helsinki Art Museum (2016 - 2017). Kusama Yayoi: A Dream I Dreamed was first presented at the Daegu Art Musuem, Korea (2013) and travelled subsequently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2013 - 2014); Seoul Arts Centre, Korea (2014); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015); and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2015). The widely acclaimed Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession toured from 2013 to 2015 at the South American institutional venues Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires (2013); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília (2013 - 2014); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2014); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014 - 2015) and Fundación CorpArtes, Santiago (2015). Previously, from 2012 to 2014 the large-scale exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Eternity of Eternal Eternity was staged in museums in Japan including The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Modern Art, Saitama; Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Matsumoto; Niigata City Art Museum, Niigata; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka; Oita Art Museum, Oita; The Museum of Art, Kochi; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto; Akita Senshu Museum of Art & A  Akita Museum of Modern Art and Matsuzakaya Museum, Nagoya. A touring retrospective of the artist's work was presented from 2011 - 2012 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Previous significant surveys include Mirrored Years, which travelled from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand from 2008 - 2009. Yayoi Kusama: Eternity-Modernity was presented at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2004), and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (2005).

Yayoi Kusama had her exhibtion in Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as 'Accumulations', to her 'Infinity Net' paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an 'outsider' in many contexts – as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most prominent contemporary artist.

This is a varied, spectacular exhibition of a truly unique artist. There has never been an exhibition of this size of her work in the UK and this is an unmissable opportunity for both Kusama fans and those new to her work.

Expert: I was recently told by an Asian friend of mine who is working in Paris: Lately I stopped following almost all that is happening politically in the United States, in the UK and even here in France. It all feels suddenly so irrelevant, a waste of time. Statements like this would be unimaginable only one decade ago. In the past, what came from Washington and (to a smaller extent) from London was monitored with great attentiveness and fear all over the world. But all of a sudden, things have begun to change, rapidly. Despite the extremely violent nature of the Western-designed-and-manufactured global regime, which has been over-imposed on so many parts of the world for decades and centuries, increasing amounts of people in Asia, Latin America and Africa stopped worrying and went leisurely to the ‘barricades’, beginning to rebel against the perverseness of the ‘world order’. Did it all really happen ‘all of a sudden’? Or were there various catalysts at work for already quite a substantial period of time? It is a well-known fact that any deep-seated, chronic anxiety cannot disappear in just a short moment. People who are enslaved, humiliated, scared into obedience, people who are forced to feel uncertain and constantly frightened, cannot reverse their state of mind without some important external factor or set of factors. It became obvious to me, as I have been working continuously on all continents and in almost all conflict zones of our Planet, that the renewed pride and courage which is now inspiring millions of oppressed human beings, actually came from the decisive and determined stand of just several brave and determined nations, big and small. The myth about the omnipotence of the Empire has received a few significant blows. The fable of invincibility has not completely disappeared yet, but at least it has got fractured and gravely injured. The gate of the terrible prison began cracking. It has not collapsed, but the fractures were wide enough for at least some sunlight to enter the dark and dreadful cavities inhabited by billions of unfortunate and shattered beings. Some victims stood up immediately; not many but at least some did. Others raised their heads in feeble hope, still lying down on the dirty ground, still chained, and still shaking. That weak light alone entering the dungeon was actually much brighter than what most people ever experienced in their entire life. It has been strong enough to provoke wonderful, brilliant sparks of hope. ***** Except for some temporary setbacks (like in Brazil and Argentina), the anti-imperialist coalition is now steadier than ever; it is determined and constantly expanding. And it is clearly winning! It is truly a ‘rainbow coalition’ of countries, big and small, ‘red’ and ‘pink’, even ‘green’. The only unifying factor is the shared determination not to be controlled by Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. For decades, Cuba stood against the Empire, even after the Soviet block was broken to bits, even when all mutual agreements ceased to be honored by the criminal Yeltsin administration. The Cuban people never surrendered. It is because most of them always believed, from the bottom of their hearts, in socialism and internationalism. And also because they have been convinced that the Western Empire is a morally corrupt and illegitimate entity and therefore has to be resisted. A small and relatively poor country – Cuba – demonstrated to the entire world that while the Empire is mighty, sadistic and brutal, it is not omnipotent, and it is possible to defy it. There is no reason why one should not dare, or one should not dream about a much better world, why one shouldn’t fight for true freedom, attempting to win. Cuba inspired the world. Its daring Revolution took place just a few miles from the shores of the United States. Soon after, its teachers and doctors went to all parts of the earth, spreading optimism, solidarity and kindness. Its heroic revolutionaries went to fight against the most dreadful forms of colonialism, which were torturing people in such places as Congo, Angola and Namibia. After Obama’s attempts to water down the determination of the Cuban citizens, many enemies began to predict, cynically: “Now Cuba will compromise and sell its Revolution.” It never did! I traveled to the Island last year, driving through the countryside, and speaking to people in Havana, Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba. Almost no one was ready to compromise. A greatly educated nation, Cuba saw through the Empire’s tricks and deceptions. Now almost nobody speaks about the “Cuban compromise”, anymore, simply because there isn’t any on the table. China, one of the oldest and greatest civilizations on Earth, went through the terrible period of ‘humiliation’. Divided, occupied and plundered by the West, it has never forgotten nor forgiven. Now the Chinese Communist state and its mixed economy are helping countries in virtually all parts of the world, from Oceania and Latin America, to the Middle East and especially Africa, to survive and to finally stand on their own feet. Despite all the vitriolic propaganda regurgitated by the West (those people in Europe or North America who know close to zero about Africa or China, habitually passing ‘confident’ and highly cynical ‘judgments’ about China’s involvement in the poor world; judgments based exclusively on the lies and fabrications produced by the Western media), China has been gaining great respect and trust in virtually all corners of the globe. The Chinese people and their government are now standing firmly against Western imperialism. They will not allow any recurrence of the disgraceful and dreary past. The West is provoking this mighty and optimistic nation, pushing it into a terrible confrontation. China doesn’t want any military conflict. It is the most peaceful, the most non-confrontational large nation on Earth. But it is becoming clear that if pushed against the wall, this time it will not compromise: it will fight. In the last years I have spoken to many Chinese people, as I traveled to all corners of the country, and I’m convinced that by now the nation is ready to meet strength with strength. Such determination gives hope to many other countries on our Planet. The message is clear: the West cannot do whatever it wants, anymore. If it tries, it will be stopped. By reason or by force! Russia is ready again, too. It is standing next to China, enormous and indignant. Go to Novosibirsk or Tomsk, to Khabarovsk, Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. Talk to Russian people and you will soon understand: almost nobody there believes or respects the West anymore. Throughout history, Russia was attacked and ransacked from the West. Millions, tens of millions of its people were murdered, literally exterminated. And now, the nation is facing what some consider to be yet another imminent attack. Like the Chinese people, Russians are unwilling to compromise anymore. The old Russian forecast is once again alive, that very one professed by Alexander Nevsky: Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcome as a guest. But those who come to us sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands and forever will we stand! In Russia, as in China, and as in so many other nations that were devastated by the Western plunderers, nothing is forgotten and no one is forgotten. It only appeared for a while that the memory had fainted. It never does. You cannot burn down an entire land, ruin the cities, burn the fields, and still pose as one with the moral mandate. Or as we say in Chile: “Justice takes time, but it always comes!” And the world is watching. It is suddenly clearly registering this determined and brave epic stand of morally strong nations. Many of those who are watching are deeply impressed with what they are seeing. Perhaps not in London or in Paris, but go and ask those in Johannesburg or Beirut, or even in Calcutta, Cairo or Buenos Aires. Perhaps you suspect what answers you’d receive there! Throughout modern history, not once has Iran invaded a foreign country. Yet its secular, progressive and democratic government (under the leadership of Mohammad Mosaddegh) was overthrown in 1953, in a CIA-backed coup. What followed was the monstrosity of the ‘pro-Western Shah’, and then a horrendous war, an invasion by Iraq, which was also fully backed by the West and which took hundreds of thousands of human lives. Since then, Iran has been suffering from targeted killings of its scientists (by the West and Israel), as well as terrorist attacks also backed from abroad. Instead of falling on its knees and begging for mercy, Iran defied the West. On several occasions and when provoked, it sent its battleships to the neutral waters near the US coast, and it pledged to defend its land, in case it was to be attacked. Iran also showed great solidarity towards Latin America, working closely with virtually all of the revolutionary governments there. It stood firmly by Venezuela in a time of great crises, building social housing in Caracas and supporting the Process by all other means. In Latin America, no one will ever forget how former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Caracas to attend the funeral of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, his dear friend. During the memorial, the aged mother of Chavez suddenly approached Ahmadinejad, in tears. Breaking all religious protocol of a Shi’a country that he was representing, the Iranian President embraced her, and held her against his heart, until she calmed down. This moment was expressing one simple and powerful reality: all of us, the internationalists and anti-imperialists, are fighting for the survival of humanity and this planet. There is more that unites us than what is tearing us apart. Once we win, and we will win, the world will be able to find a common language. The West wants to divide us, by spreading hostilities and distrust, all through ‘false news’ and fabrications. But we understand its game. We will not break our ranks anymore. The West is clearly losing. It knows it. It is in panic. Its nihilism, its propaganda and indoctrination tactics will soon be defeated. I wrote a lot about the DPRK and how it joined the list of the ‘most hated nations on Earth’. It is a well known fact that North Korea was, for years and decades, much richer and more democratic than South Korea (ROK). But it embarked on one tremendous humanist ‘project’, and together with Cuba, the Soviet Union and to some extent China, it liberated almost the entire African continent, at great cost and sacrifice. And not only that: it sent its top educators and doctors to all corners of the most devastated continent on Earth. Its pilots also flew Egyptian MIGs against Israel, during the 1967 war. These facts have been silenced by Western propaganda, but they clearly explain why the DPRK has been ostracized, pushed to the corner, hit by senseless embargos, and forced to react the way it has been reacting for at least the last two decades. North Korea has never surrendered either, and it never will. Neither has Venezuela, for many years the great sentinel and engine of the Bolivarian Revolution, as well as of Latin Internationalism and solidarity. Surviving coups, embargos, plots and propaganda campaigns, surviving attacks, even terror, of the foreign-backed ‘opposition’, Venezuela has been injured but it is alive. Just a few days ago I spoke to an Italian Parliamentary delegation, consisting of  the“5-Star-Movement” MPs, which recently returned from Caracas. Their conclusion was simple: “The worst is over”. The world knows it! Venezuela, DPRK, Cuba – they never fell. No matter how many knives penetrated their bodies, despite so much pain caused by the sanctions, coup attempts and direct acts of terrorism administered by the West and its monstrous Empire. It is becoming clear and obvious: the West is helpless against determination, true courage and patriotic love. It is powerless when confronted with humanist ideologies, and with true loyalty! And the world keeps watching, drawing its conclusions. I wrote about Syria, comparing Aleppo to the 20th Century Stalingrad. This is where racism, terrorism, and the lowest forms of Western imperialism (and shameful acts of the regional lackeys) were decisively stopped. The price was terrible, but the message to the world extremely clear: The people who love their country with their entire hearts can fight and win against all odds, especially if by their side stand truly great and reliable friends and comrades! One day the world will thank the Syrian people, profusely and properly. One day, everything will be understood. One day, perhaps soon. ***** This is one of the greatest moments in human history, perhaps the greatest. It has arrived without big salvos announcing monumental revolutions. Everything is happening fast, in an organized and determined manner. The greatest minds of Russia, China, Latin America and the rest of the world, are feverishly, day and night, trying to determine what really brought our world, our civilization, to this ludicrous downfall. The simplified and stripped-down answer is this: Western imperialism (military, economic and ‘intellectual’/ ’cultural’), colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as that dreadful by-product of all the above combined – a set of unchecked and savage form of capitalism. Simultaneously, new forms of government, of economy and social systems are being, once again, planned. The military strategists of the countries that are refusing to kneel in front of the barbaric terror of the West, responsible for hundreds of millions of murders and billions of ruined lives, are planning how to defend their countries and the world. Once again, the world is at work! It is building trenches, educating people, preparing them for the final showdown with the culture that has been tormenting our Planet for centuries. It is the moment of great hope and renewed enthusiasm. Of course, if seen from Western capitals, everything is bleak and depressing. There is no ‘hope’ at all. I agree fully: there is no hope ‘for them’. The logic, the ‘philosophy’ with which the Europeans and the North Americans have become accustomed to analyze the world, has arrived at a dead end. Yes, it is ‘the end of philosophy’, or as they say, ‘the end of history’. I fully agree: it is the end of their philosophy and of their history. That’s why, reading about their elections or statements produced by their politicians, is nothing less than a waste of time. The world realizes it, more and more. Their ‘new tricks’ are actually very old. Their entire system is outdated. It should have been retired at least one hundred years ago. It survived only because of its savagery and cruelty. It will go soon, anyway. These days, encountering people inhabiting the West is like encountering those zombies who were living in Nazi Germany during WWII. After the war was over, they were street walking for years, at least many of them, repeating the same refrains: “We didn’t know!” “We never realized”. The Nazi propaganda and the one, which has been used in the West and in the colonies (as Noam Chomsky and I defined in our book “On Western Terrorism”), are based on precisely the same roots, foundations and methods. Both are extremely effective when it comes to the total brainwashing of the population. To follow up the last chapter of the imperialist and turbo capitalist morass of the West is embarrassing and useless. Both Europe and the United States are suffering from a series of devastating mental illnesses, as was defined by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, right after WWII. Getting too much involved in pathological behavior, constantly studying and analyzing it, could only break and deeply depress any healthy person’s mind. There is nothing more to understand. Hundreds of millions of victims in all parts of the world are speaking for themselves. The only rational issue here is this: how to stop this horror as soon as possible? How to allow humanity to return to its natural development and evolution patterns? I don’t believe in ‘punishments’ and ‘trials’ and other vehicles of intimidation and of spreading fear. I don’t care whether the West will ‘pay’ for all that it has done to the world. I only want it to be stopped, once and for all. I work very hard for it to be stopped. So are others. And the world is watching, and all of a sudden enjoying what it sees. Suddenly more and more people are daring to laugh at the global regime. Of course not in Paris, London or New York (here they are scared and obedient, even more than before). But outside, yes! People on all continents want to see and hear about what ‘others do’, what ‘we do’, not what the Empire and its mental conditions are producing. They are laughing and waiting impatiently for what a new day, a new year will bring. They are waiting for the true new beginning to arrive. http://clubof.info/