Area hoops teams who have impressed so far – Cheboygan Daily Tribune

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It's hard to believe it's almost the end of January.

And thankfully unlike last January we've already been able to play actual games and not have the season start in February.

From the start ofbasketball games being played this season (late November) until now, we've had some teams impress, while others haven't quite found their footingjust yet.

So, I've decided to go through what teams I've been impressed with so far.

These aren't power rankings or anything like that, but it will put together bothboys and girls basketball teams who havedelivered the most on the court so far. Thankfully, we've quite a few teams that have stood out so far.

Mackinaw City Girls Still undefeated, still dominating their conference, and still playing with so much fluidity, unselfishness and confidence, the Lady Comets check in at the top. Already with so manydouble-digit victories under their belt, Mackinaw City has crushed just about every opponent its faced this season.

The first real testfor the Comets came in a clash against Cedarville-DeTour at home last week. Cedarville-DeTour actually handled the Comets in a win last year, but the Mackinaw City girls got the upper hand this time around, thumping them with a double-digit victory.

Whether it's been the dominant post presence of junior Madison Smith, the stellar guard play of fellow juniors Marlie Postula and Larissa Huffman, or atremendous supporting cast, the Comets lookpoised to not only record another unbeaten Northern Lakes Conference campaign, but challenge for that elusive regional title they've been craving for years.

There's still plenty of work to be done, but the NLC looks like it's going to Mackinaw City once again.

Once we hit the end of February, we can really start talking about how far this team can go.

Right now, the Cometsjust continue to do their thing until that time comes. With the exception of possibly St. Ignace, I don't see where the Comets will slip up in theregular season. Like Cedarville-DeTour, that'll be another great matchup to watch.

Onaway Boys Oh, yes, the Mackinaw City girls have some company at the top.

I couldn't pick one over the other here because bothteams have been incredible so far, both are insanely talented, both are in the driver's seat to capture a conference crown, and both are, of course, undefeated.

I don't think I or Onaway head coach Eddy Szymoniak, for that matter ever thought the Cardinals would start this season out 9-0.

But here we are with the Cardinals, who have benefitted from the return of senior center Jager Mix, a player who was just out for nine months because of aknee injury. What a memorable night it was for Mix last Friday night (Jan. 24), when he became the most recent Onaway playerto surpass 1,000points for his career.

But if you thought Mix was the only star on this Onaway team coming in, think again.

There's lots of them.

How about the emergence of junior guard Bridger Peel, who's become one of the team's top scorers. Or the smooth play of sophomore guard Austin Veal, who's transformed into a deadly perimeter shooter and a gritty defender as well. Or the strong two-way play of sophomore guard Jadin Mix, another capable shooter and tenacious defender. In addition to Jager Mix's experience, the Cardinals have another two-way talent in seniorHunter Riley, who's shown an ability to knock down a big shot andgive a good offensive opponent problems defensively.

I always thought the Cardinals would be a good team, but I didn't imagine them being this good. There's still so much work to be done, but if this Onaway team continues to play at this level, they're going to win something. Or maybe a few things, who knows.

Either way, they've been so fun to watch so far. May it long continue.

Mackinaw City Boys I had no idea what the Mackinaw City boys would look like without arguably the best player in theschool's history Kal O'Brien graduating last season.

Butthe Comets have really done a good job of compensating for O'Brien, an all-state performer a season ago.

The junior guard tandem of Lars Huffman and Cooper Whipkey has really stood out so far, with Huffman being more of the aggressive driver-to-the-basket type players and Whipkey being the deadly outside shooter. Either way, each have helped the Comets get off to a decent start in the Northern Lakes Conference.

Mackinaw City has also been helped out by players like Lucas Bergstrom, Noah Valot, Trystan Swanson and many others, who have all made nice team contributions throughout the campaign. If Mackinaw City's supporting cast continues to improve, the Cometscould be a tough out come postseason time.

While the Comets did suffer a tough loss to NLC favorite Ellsworth earlier this winter, they'll still have a shot to knock them off in a rematch when that time comes.

That game is one I really don't want to miss, because it'll basically determine the conference again. So buckle up with the Comets!

Inland Lakes Girls After a slow start to the season, head coach Daryl Vizina's squad has really shown improvement, compiling victories in five of their last seven games.

Behind the terrific play of junior guard Natalie Wandrie, the Bulldogs went on a five-game winning streak to help put them near the stop of the Ski Valley Conference standings.

Although the offense struggled in a recent loss at Cheboygan, the Bulldogs bounced back a couple days later with a dominating win at Central Lake. The Bulldogs also showed they can hang with the top of the Ski Valley aftermaking things interesting against the Gaylord St. Mary Snowbirds, despite suffering defeat.

Wandrie has been the standout for the Bulldogs, but they also have other weapons to go to. Offensively, seniors Alyssa Byrne and Olivia Monthei have shown they're solid shooters, while junior forward Hannah Robinson has impressed defensively.

They'll be another team to keep an eye on once the postseason arrives.

Plenty of potential

Cheboygan Boys The Chiefs don't have the best record right now at 2-7, but they recently had their best performance of the season in a narrow 52-51 home loss to rival St. Ignace.

This was the tightest game I've covered all season and, while it didn't go Cheboygan's way, I came out of it so impressed with the fight and grit the Chiefs showed.

The key now for head coach Jason Friday and his players will be building off it and turning things around.

The Chiefs have plenty of talent at their disposal, led by seniors Henry Stempky, David Heyer and Carson Mercer, so they're more than capable of getting hot at some point and maybe pull off an upset along the way.

Inland Lakes Boys The start to the winter wasn't a good one for Lee Nash's Bulldogs, but they've really started to come along herethe last few weeks.

About a week-and-a-half ago, the Bulldogs battled against a terrific Onaway team, and now it appears they're starting to find their stride, especially offensively.

One of the standout performers has been sophomore Sam Schoonmaker, whose scoring and rebounding numbers have been strong.

Inland Lakes also has experience with seniors Austin Brege and Andrew Kolly, while junior Connor Knight, sophomore Payton Teuthorn and a few others have also made their impact known.

This could be one of those surprise teams come postseason time, so we'll see if the Bulldogs can keep improving.

Others to keep an eye on: Cheboygan Girls, Onaway Girls, Pellston Boys, Pellston Girls

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Area hoops teams who have impressed so far - Cheboygan Daily Tribune

Asteroid 2022: how big is Nasa tracked asteroid which passed Earth, and could it hit our planet in the future? – NationalWorld

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Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) - which is bigger than any building on earth - narrowly missed us in January 2022

What you might not realise is that this narrow escape was followed up by an even closer pass of the earth - this time by a space rock the size of 10 Big Bens in London.

So how close did asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) come to the earth, will it threaten humanity again - and how is Nasa trying to save us from death by asteroid?

Heres what you need to know.

Will a massive asteroid hit earth in 2022?

The asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) came within an astronomical whisker of earth on 18 January.

But a near-miss in space terms wouldnt be considered close at all by most peoples standards.

The space rock passed us at a distance of more than 1.2 million miles - or roughly five times the distance between the earth and the moon.

This is half the distance at which 4660 Nereus passed the earth in December.

While thats probably close enough for your liking, asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) has come much closer to earth in the past.

In 1933, the asteroid shot by at a distance of just 700,000 miles.

4660 Nereus is set to come within a similar distance of us on Valentines Day 2060.

How big is the asteroid?

At more than a kilometre in diameter (1,052m) and travelling at almost 44,000 miles per hour, the space rock has the potential to destroy all life on earth.

It is also defined this way because its orbit has and will cause it to come within less than half the distance from the earth to the sun - roughly 93 million miles.

This means that any slight deviation in its orbit could put it on a collision course with us.

As things stand, asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) is not predicted to come as close to the earth again until at least 18 January 2105.

Other space rocks are set to come even closer in the meantime, but other asteroids or comets could well come out of nowhere.

While Nasa says there is no significant chance any of the more than 10,000 asteroids over 140m in size it has come across will hit the earth in the next 100 years, its estimated these figures account for just half of the potentially deadly objects out there.

In fact, there could be more than 25,000 near-earth objects in space, meaning we are tracking less than half of the killer asteroids out there.

What is Nasa doing to stop asteroids or comets hitting earth?

Work to save humanity from death by asteroid is still very much in its infancy.

And it only launched its first exploratory mission to see how easy it is to knock an asteroid off course in November 2021.

The space agencys Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission will see a spacecraft smash into a harmless Nasa-tracked asteroid in a bid to alter the space rocks course.

If it succeeds, humanity might have discovered a way to keep itself safe from a future deadly impact.

But it is currently the only real-world experiment taking place in this field, so if it comes to nothing, well still be just as vulnerable as we currently are.

What is an asteroid?

An asteroid is a rocky fragment left over from the formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago.

Most of them orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.

Scientists estimate there are millions of space rocks in this part of space - some of which are hundreds of kilometres in size.

Sometimes, these asteroids change their orbits if they come under the influence of a planets gravity.

They can also collide with one another - incidents which can throw out smaller, but still hazardous, shards of rock.

One such stray rock - measuring just 20m in diameter - hit the earth in 2013 with up to 33-times the power of the atomic bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two.

This blast took place over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and blew out windows in more than 3,600 apartment blocks and injured 1,200 people.

A much larger stray asteroid as big as six miles wide is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

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Asteroid 2022: how big is Nasa tracked asteroid which passed Earth, and could it hit our planet in the future? - NationalWorld

The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and Euthanasia …

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Am J Public Health. 2018 January; 108(1): 5357.

The authors are with the Center for Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA.

All authors contributed research, conceptualization, writing, and review.

Peer Reviewed

Accepted September 4, 2017.

This article, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, reflects on the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs and their relevance for today. The Nazi doctors used eugenic ideals to justify sterilizations, child and adult euthanasia, and, ultimately, genocide.

Contemporary euthanasia has experienced a progression from voluntary to nonvoluntary and from passive to active killing. Modern eugenics has included both positive and negative selective activities.

The 70th anniversary of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg provides an important opportunity to reflect on the implications of the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs for contemporary health law, bioethics, and human rights. In this article, we will examine the role that health practitioners played in the promotion and implementation of State-sponsored eugenics and euthanasia in Nazi Germany, followed by an exploration of contemporary parallels and debates in modern bioethics.1

The involvement of health practitioners in conceptualizing, initiating, and implementing Nazi mass murder remains an unparalleled case of medicine and public healths participation in genocide.2 By January 1933, more than half of the German medical profession had joined the Nazi Party and many participated in the murder of Jews, Sinti, and Roma; the disabled; the mentally ill; and other unfit persons under the guise of improving public health and Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene, the German version of eugenics).3,4

Doctors in Germany became tightly integrated into the Nazi Party and supportive of its ideals. During the Weimar period, a large number of German doctors were unemployed or under-employed and witnessed a decline in their honor and prestige. The Nazi Party seemed like an organization that could reestablish physicians with the power and status they had lost. In 1929, physicians within Germany formed Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher rtzebund (The National Socialist German Physicians League) and unified the goals of physicians and the State. Physicians joined the Nazi Party both earlier and in larger numbers than any other group of professionals. As the historian Michael Kater writes, Physicians became Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazis they did more in service of the nefarious regime than any of their extraprofessional peers.3(p45) By 1942, 38000 physicians had joined the Nazi Party. In addition, the Nazi Physicians League began a process of removing Jewish physicians from the medical profession in March 1933, and in April 1933 a law was passed forbidding Jewish physician civil servants from practicing medicine at universities and hospitals throughout Germany.3

Physicians further medicalized Nazi ideology by propagating the science that formed the foundation of a supposed truth. By portraying or certifying Jews and other peoples as racially, physically, or mentally unfit, physicians and government officials claimed to be cleansing Germany of the hereditarily imperfect and the weak. Nazi physicians rose to power and prestige as they used their skills to treat a supposed racial sickness that threatened to contaminate the Volkskrper (body of the German people). Cooperation between the Nazis and health practitioners added powerful justification and facilitated a State-run program of forced sterilization and murder that would have been much harder to accomplish without the willing participation of physicians. What began as purification would ultimately lead to genocide.

A series of recurrent themes arose in Nazi medicine as physicians undertook the mission of cleansing the State: the devaluation and dehumanization of segments of the community, medicalization of social and political problems, training of physicians to identify with the political goals of the government, fear of consequences of refusing to cooperate with civil authority, bureaucratization of the medical role, and the lack of concern for medical ethics and human rights. Nazi physicians viewed the State as their primary patient; some came to see quarantine (ghettoization), exclusion (emigration), then extermination of an entire people as treatment required for the States health. These physicians thought of themselves as biological soldiers instead of healers and caretakers.5

Eugenics arose in the late 19th century as a science that dealt with the improvement of hereditary qualities.2 Indeed, it was considered to be the leading, cutting-edge science of the time, as it was developed and practiced in several countries. This included the United States, where scientists and politicians worked together to research and implement ways of decreasing the number of people considered to be hereditarily weak (negative eugenics) and increasing the number of people thought to be hereditarily strong (positive eugenics).

In some ways, US eugenics programs served as models for the early eugenic initiatives promulgated in Germany.6 Though the Nazi regime later made eugenics infamous through mass genocide, Britain and the United States also promoted policies to apply eugenics to social problems. The United States was at the forefront of the eugenics movement and initiated involuntary sterilization through laws often drafted by physicians. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact a law sanctioning the sterilization of social misfits. By 1926, 23 states had involuntary sterilization laws motivated primarily by eugenic ideas.7 In 1927, Virginias law was found constitutional by the US Supreme Court in an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, which used an analogy to the wartime draft.8

Hitlers enthusiasm for eugenic theory is well-known. He read Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene), the standard eugenics textbook during the Weimar years, and incorporated its ideas into Mein Kampf (My Struggle).9 Though Mein Kampf is known for its promotion of eugenic ideas, it was preceded by a number of other formative texts and acts that developed the scope of eugenics to include eradicating diseases, disabilities, mental illnesses, and, finally, whole races.

Following World War I, German health practitioners openly discussed sterilization of the unfit, labeling the care of certain populations a financial burden on the State.10 In Germany, State-sponsored sterilization began in the early 1930s, in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, after legislation was approved to encourage, but not require, the sterilization of patients deemed unfit.11 Compulsory sterilization of the unfit, promoted for decades by prominent figures in German medicine, quickly became official policy soon after Hitler took power in 1933.

On July 14, 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring required the compulsory sterilization of people with any of the following categories of disease: hereditary or congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, hereditary epilepsy, Huntingtons disease, chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, malformation, and severe alcoholism. Patients were sent to eugenic health courts by their primary care doctorsfurther integrating the State and doctors into Germanys eugenic mission. Decisions regarding sterilization were then made by Hereditary Health Courts, which consisted of a 3-person panel. Two panel members were physicians, one a health official likely tied to the Nazi Party and the other an expert in eugenics and hereditary diseases.12 A district judge, usually a Nazi Party member, served as the third, coordinating member of the panel. German physicians forcibly sterilized 360000 to 375000 persons between 1933 and 1939.10(p533)

Euthanasia, which literally means a good death, is most commonly understood today as the bringing about of a merciful death for the terminally, irreversibly ill who are in pain and are suffering. Many patients also fear a loss of autonomy and wish not to be a burden. In a medical context, voluntary euthanasia is understood as the patients decision to end his or her life. But in the Third Reich, euthanasia was a program of State-sponsored medicalized mass murder. The Nazi euthanasia program was part of negative eugenics and Nazi racial hygienes claim that the only way to purify the Volk was by eliminating the unfit. To purify the Aryan German population, 200000 to 300000 people were murdered under the guise of mercy killing, including many of the mentally ill, disabled, asocials, and others deemed unfit.13

Like the eugenics movement, advocacy for a large-scale program of State-sponsored euthanasia preceded the Third Reich. The prominent German jurist Karl Binding and German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a widely discussed book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertes Lebens (Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living), in 1920.14 In their text, written as a standard academic treatise, Binding and Hoche introduced the idea of lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of living) and the legalization of the mercy killing of such populations. Drawing on eugenics and Social Darwinism, they argued that the burden on society by having to care for these individuals was too high and their human status too low, that the appropriate solution was the killing of these populations. Although not accepted by the majority of German physicians at the time, many of the procedures put forward by Binding and Hoche, including the 3-person panel deciding whether a patient should be killed, were adopted into the Nazi euthanasia program.12(p4648)

A pivotal case of State-sponsored euthanasia occurred in fall 1938 and was granted personally by Hitler.15 The father of an infant born blind, with a malformed brain, and with 1 arm and part of 1 leg missing, petitioned Hitler for the right to a mercy death for his son. Karl Brandt, Hitlers personal physician at the time, was sent to Leipzig by Hitler, where the baby was hospitalized, to consult with the doctors in charge.15 At the Doctors Trial, Brandt described the orders Hitler gave him: If the facts given by the father were correct, I was to inform the physicians in Hitlers name that they could carry out euthanasia, an order that Brandt followed.12(p51)

Brandt attempted to defend his decision at the Trial by testifying that the decision to kill the infant was hardly unique and in line with a procedure already followed in many German hospitals. In maternity wards in some circumstances it was quite normal for the doctors themselves to perform euthanasia in such a case without anything further being said about it, Brandt said at the Doctors Trial.12(p51) Upon returning to Berlin, Brandt was told by Hitler to proceed in similar fashion with other incurably ill children, an order that initiated the establishment of a formal structure for the euthanasia program.12

A systematic program of euthanasia of unfit children and adults became official policy in Germany in 1939 when Hitler issued a decree commissioning doctors to perform mercy killings on those who were judged incurably sick by medical examination.4 It was thought that the killing of the very young, newborns, and children up to age 3 or 4 years, would be considered the most natural or acceptable, and so the euthanasia program began with the killing of children. These first mercy death[s] involved 5,000 children killed by starvation, exposure in unheated wards, or the administration of cyanide, chemical warfare agents, or other poisons.4(p187188) The program was then expanded to include adults in mental hospitals in accordance with the decree issued by Hitler in October 1939 and backdated to September 1 to coincide with the beginning of the war.12(p6263) The killing of adults was further employed as means of freeing space in hospitals for soldiers who suffered injuries in battle.4(p182) Hitler chose Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, chief of Hitlers Chancellery, to lead and administer the program. Brandt assured the doctors operating the program that Hitlers decree had the force of law and that they would not be prosecuted for their involvement.16 The overall program for killing adults was given the codename Aktion T4 after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address that housed the offices for the program in Berlin.

The doctors and administrators responsible for carrying out the program created a medicalized structure for each step of the killing process. Midwives and doctors were ordered to report all cases of children with serious hereditary diseases to the Reich Health Ministry. Similarly, doctors were required to report adult patients with certain diseases, patients deemed mentally ill, or patients who had been institutionalized for at least 5 years.12(p6566) These reports resembled a standard medical questionnaire and led some physicians to believe that these reports were merely being used to further scientific research. Then, solely on the basis of these questionnaires, a panel of 3 medical experts was asked to judge whether the patient needed treatmentkillingor whether postponement or observation was appropriate.12(p5253) The 3-member panel consisted of representatives of the T4 leadership, usually Brandt or Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, along with outside consultants such as Werner Catel or Hans Heinze, who were in charge of the child euthanasia operations at several hospitals. The whole process encouraged the 3 experts to issue a decision for killing.12(p55) The killing was usually ordered by the supervising doctor and often was done by repeated dosages of strong sedatives or morphine. False death certificates were then issued; the cause of death usually listed an ordinary disease.12(p55)

In the case of the larger killing operation of adults and children, transport lists were issued for those ordered to be transferred and murdered at one of the killing centers.12(p70) Buses operated by Schutzstaffel (SS) officers dressed in white medical uniforms took patients to the killing centers. The destination of the buses was kept secret from the staffs of most hospitals and the patients themselves. Thus, from the reporting of hereditarily ill children and adults to the killing operation itself, the whole euthanasia program was a medical procedure administered by medical personnel.12

Six sites were chosen as euthanasia centersBrandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim, Grafeneck, Sonnenstein, and Hadamar. The 6 sites were selected for their isolated locations; each had been mental hospitals, nursing homes, or jails before being transformed into killing centers.12(p71) At first, killing was done by lethal injection, and it was later performed through carbon monoxide in gas chambers disguised as showers.12(p71) After SS chemists had perfected the gassing operation, Brandt insisted that only doctors should carry out the gassings.12(p7172) The bodies were disposed of in crematoria and the ashes sent in urns to the families along with falsified death certificates issued under a false name by the Condolence Letter Department.12(p70)

Hidden from the German public for years, knowledge about the true nature of the euthanasia program became increasingly common in Germany in 1940 and 1941. After widespread public opposition in Germany, including by churchmen, such as Mnster Bishop Clemens von Galen, the program appeared to end when Hitler ordered its termination in August 1941. But the official ordering of the end of the euthanasia program occurred just as killing in concentration camps began, and a decentralized killing campaign continued in the hospitals.17 Further murder of the unfit started in concentration camps in Germany after August 1941, where a new program titled 14F13 continued as a way of killing large numbers of inmates.12(p133) In total, between 200000 and 300000 people were killed under T4, 14F13, and other related euthanasia programs.18

The atrocities justified and performed by the health practitioners serving the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs exemplify how small steps along a slippery slope can lead to crimes against humanity. The Nazi doctors gradually progressed from eugenic sterilization to child and adult euthanasia and ultimately to murder and genocide. Framed in such medical terms as healing work and death assistance, German health practitioners carried out the murder of thousands of the unfit. Seventy years after Nuremberg, it is important to reflect on lessons we can draw from the history of the Third Reich and to examine the role of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia in medicine today.

Contemporary euthanasia is legally sanctioned in several countries and states. Euthanasia began by facilitating a good death in dying patients who were terminal and irreversibly ill and in pain and suffering. Increasingly there has been a move away from these narrow inclusion criteria to euthanasia in the nonterminally ill, those with chronic disease, reversible treatable disease, and broad notions of psychological and existential suffering. In addition, there has been a progression from voluntary euthanasia to reliance on advance directives or previous statements in cases such as dementia and expanding assisted suicide to active killing. Finally, there has been a limited expansion to include euthanasia of infants and children as well as the incompetent.

Several US states have Death with Dignity Statutes allowing physician involvement in assisted suicide, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, DC. Montana allows the end-of-life option through a state Supreme Court ruling. In June 2016, Canada by judicial opinion legalized medically assisted dying to relieve the suffering of terminally ill adults. This legislation specifies that assisted suicide is only permitted if there is voluntary, informed, and understanding consent from the patient. Increasing the slippery slope, however, Canada allows not only assisted suicide but also direct killing for those unable to kill themselves, thus permitting active euthanasia. Assisted suicide for the relief of suffering from a mental illness is permitted by statute in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. Using advance directives to provide prior consent for euthanasia is practiced in Belgium. The Netherlands allows an active ending of the life of an infant or child who is classified as having no hope of a good quality of life or no hope of improvement. (See the box on this page).

Despite this contemporary progression of acts of euthanasia, the modern protocols are open and transparent, and publically reported and debated. Nonetheless, there is evidence of the slippery slope moving from competent suicide with physician assistance for adults to the incompetent, including euthanizing children and newborns.19 Current practices raise the question of ensuring the establishment of proper limits, especially in protecting competent individuals through voluntary and informed consent and defining the role of the State in preventing abuses.20,21

A focus primarily on positive eugenics differentiates modern eugenics as it exists today from American and Nazi eugenics of the early to mid-1900s. Contemporary examples of positive eugenics widely discussed among bioethicists include sex selection, genetic screening or testing, and the more recent controversy over designer babies. As research on genome editing has developed, some foresee a danger in modifying human DNA and the creation of genetically modified humans. A designer baby is an embryo whose genetic makeup has been selected or modified to eradicate a particular defect or to ensure a particular gene is present.22 This can be accomplished by using gene editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, which can remove, add, or alter sections of DNA. All of these tools can be used to promote a healthier population, but also contain the potential for abuse. Thus, genetically modified human embryo work that goes beyond disease prevention has become a global concern.23,24 Further modifying DNA of living human beings may have evolutionary impacts.25 The use of embryo selection and genetics blurs the distinction between positive and negative eugenics. In addition, there is a blurring of public and private roles in eugenics. Rather than government mandate, social pressures arguably encourage private eugenic practices.

An example of contemporary negative eugenics is the case of the sterilization of female inmates in California prisons, performed without proper legal permission to do so or without appropriate informed consent procedures.26 According to the California State Auditor, 144 female inmates were sterilized via bilateral tubal ligation during the years from 2005-2006 to 2012-2013.26 At least 39 of those women, about a quarter of the female inmates sterilized, were sterilized following an improper informed consent process, making these 39 sterilizations illegal.26 The audit also found that medical staff rarely requested approval from prison administrators to sterilize inmates, and when they did so, it was not always clarified that the requests were approved.26 As a result of this investigation, a law was enacted prohibiting the use of sterilization as birth control for any inmate under the supervision of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or in a county correctional facility in the state of California.27 Within this law are specified criteria for when sterilization is permissible, as well as criteria for reporting that such a procedure has been performed.27 The case highlights the continued responsibility to guard and raise concern for vulnerable people and their rights, especially those who are under guardianship of the State. Of particular concern is the role of doctors in carrying out the sterilizations.28

Although the proceedings of the Doctors Trial accomplished much in documenting the medical crimes performed under the Third Reich, the Trial did not go as far as it could have done in establishing the crucial role that medicine, in particular the frameworks of eugenics and euthanasia, played in Nazi ideology and mass murder. One of our aims in this review is thus to add to the understanding we now have of the degree of participation of physicians in medical crimes and mass murder during the Third Reich.

In his discussion of the Trial, the historian Michael Marrus has argued that the Trial offered only the crudest of explanations for what had occurred and made no links with eugenic thought and the medical culture of Germany.29(p118) As Marrus points out, because the Nuremberg trials focused on crimes committed against peoples of the nations who triumphed over Germany rather than on the German people, the trial gave little attention to the history of forced sterilization and the euthanasia program within Germany, programs that involved the widespread participation of physicians.29 As Marrus writes,

The Trials focus on non-German victims, mainly in the concentration camps, entailed a downplaying of forcible sterilization and medicalized killingthe victimization of several hundred thousand people, mainly Germans, in which physicians were so heavily involved. . . . As a result, the trial suffered grievously as a chronicle of the medical crimes of the Third Reich . . . and deflected attention from the involvement of the medical profession as a whole in the Nazi enterprise.29(p115)

Most startling, as Marrus highlights, is the judges response to Brandts claim, discussed previously, that there was basis in precedent and humanitarian reasons for the euthanasia killings.29 In their verdict the judges stated,

Whether or not a state may validly enact legislation which imposes euthanasia upon certain classes of its citizens is a question which does not enter into the issues. Assuming that it may do so, the Family of Nations is not obligated to give recognition to such legislation when it manifestly gives legality to plain murder and torture of defenseless and powerless human beings of other nations.30(p11395)

These words ought to give us pause as we consider medical and legal defenses of cases of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia.

One of the most troubling unanswered questions about the Third Reich is how it was possible that physicians could have so willingly participated in mass murder. Were physicians true believers in Nazi racial ideology or instead were they willing and enthusiastic opportunists, who, like Germans in many other professions, joined the Nazi Party for the purposes of career advancement? In dealing with this problem, it could be argued that the medical profession itself includes elements of dehumanization and numbing, as means of coping with the suffering of patients. Alternatively, it could be asked whether the modern medical profession encourages group obedience to authority and the diffusion of responsibility. Physicians may be particularly vulnerable to these pressures, as they have a tendency to compartmentalize, justify, and rationalize problems as a way of coping with what the profession requires. Regardless of whether one finds any of these theories of the perpetrator convincing, there is no denying the vast role that physicians played in shaping and implementing the worst genocide the world has ever witnessed.5

Seventy years after the Doctors Trial, we recognize that it is the duty of those in the medical profession to discuss the implications of the Trial and its lessons for today. We have offered this preliminary discussion of examples of contemporary parallels in pursuit of this goal, but much work remains. As we have made clear, although some aspects of the contemporary cases are troubling, we must be careful not to conflate instances of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia with Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. The misuse of the Nazi analogy is not only offensive and irresponsible, but it can also prevent a clear and important understanding of current cases we need to examine.

The 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Doctors Trial reminds us of the great atrocities that physicians can inflict when medical ethics is distorted by the ideology of a totalitarian State. It is our obligation to study how and why physicians dedicated to health and healing can turn to torture and murder in the service of their country. Reflection on the Doctors Trial reminds us that physicians have a special obligation to use their power to protect human rights and that medical ethics devoid of human rights is no more than hollow words.

Partial funding was provided by the Project on Ethics and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University.

See also Annas and Grodin, p. 10; Wilensky, p. 12; Crosby and Benavidez, p. 36; Annas, p. 42; and Shuster, p. 47.

8. Buck v. Bell, 274 US 300 (1927).

13. Faulstich H. Die zahl der euthanasie-opfer [The number of euthanasia]. In: Frewer A, Eickoff C, eds. Die Historischen Hintergrnde Medizinischer Ethik [The Historical Background of Medical Ethics]. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus-Verlag; 2000: 218229.

15. Benzenhoefer U. Der Fall Leipzig (Alias Fall Kind Knauer) und die Planung der NS-Kindereuthanasie [The Leipzig Case (Alias Fall Kindknauer) and the Planning of the NS Child Euthanasia]. Mnster, Germany: Klemm & Oelschlger; 2008.

16. Hohendorf G. The National Socialist patient murders between taboo and argumentis it possible to draw conclusions on the current debate on medical decisions concerning the end of life from the history of National Socialist euthanasia? In: Bialas W, Lothar F, eds. Nazi Ideology and Ethics. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2014.

27. Cal Penal Code 3440 (2014; enacted).

30. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, Nuremberg, October 1946April 1949, 15 vols. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office; 1949;2:198.

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The Cruel Truth about Population Control | The National …

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Canadas government has issued areportconcluding that the countrys mistreatment of indigenous women amounts to genocide, citing, among other travesties, nonconsensual sterilizations. In North America, various prejudices motivate coercive population control policies; in Asia, where most forced sterilizations take place today, unfounded overpopulation alarmism acts as the primary motivation. However it may be rationalized, there is never any moral or practical justification for coerced sterilization.

In late 2018, sixty indigenous Canadian women alleged that they had suffered forced sterilizations andfileda class-action lawsuit against the Saskatchewan province health system. New allegations have continued to come forth in 2019, and one recentaccountclaims an involuntary sterilization took place as recently as last December.

The United States has its own sinister history of forced sterilizations. Roughlyseventy thousandindividuals were forcibly sterilized in the twentieth century under eugenic legislation in the United States. Eugenics was the pseudoscience of trying to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children. Marginalized groups such as Native Americans were particularly vulnerable. In the 1960s and 1970s, one out of four U.S. Native American womenunderwentsterilization, with that figure rising as high as 50 percent between 1970 and 1976.

Recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States have targeted prisoners, echoing earlier eugenic policies intended to eliminate criminal behavior. Tennessee onlybannedthe coercive sterilization of inmates last year. In 2014, Californiapassedlegislation to stop prisons from non-consensually sterilizing inmates. More than a quarter of tubal ligation sterilization surgeries in Californian prisons from 2004 to 2013 were carried out without the prisoners consent.

As disturbing as reports of coercive population control in the United States and Canada are, such abuses occur on a far larger scale today in India and China.

In 2016, the Supreme Court of India ruled that informed consent is often not obtained from patients prior to conducting the procedures in mass sterilization camps anddirectedthe government to discontinue them. However, an investigationlast year found that camps continue to thrive in the same way as prior to the 2016 ruling. And the U.S. State DepartmentsCountry Reports on Human Rights Practicesfor 2018foundthat coerced abortions and sterilizations continue to take place in China, which softened its one-child policy, restricting families to a single child, to a two-child policy beginning in 2016.

The victims of recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States and Canada are marginalized groups: indigenous women in Canada, and incarcerated, often ethnically minority, women in the United States. Bigotry and paternalism are likely behind these abuses.

The primary motivator of coercive population control measures in China and India is different: concerns about so-called overpopulation. In the 1970s, alarmist writings such as the Club of Romes reportThe Limits to Growthand Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlichs bookThe Population Bombhelped spread fear that overpopulation would deplete resources and result in disastrous shortages. That fear funneled money towards population control. In the 1970s, encouraged by tens of millions of dollars loaned from the World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority and the UN Population Fund, India began large-scale sterilization efforts. Those efforts peaked in 1975, when the prime minister suspended civil liberties in a national emergency and sterilized oversix millionpeople in a single year. In 1979, China instituted its infamous one-child policy,inspiredbyThe Limits to Growth.

It should be noted that, in addition to overpopulation fears, there are also cases of prejudice against ethnic or religious minorities in China and India. Many victims of forced abortion under the two-child policy in China are minorities, such as ethnicKazakhsandUyghurs. Those groups practice Islam, a minority religion the governmentdeemsinsufficiently Chinese. And in India last year, a union minister of one of Indias two major political parties opinedthat the government must formulate a law regarding population control to save India from the growing non-Hindu population. Still, many victims of coercive population control in both China and India do not belong to any minority group.

While the abuses alone are reason enough to oppose coercive policies, the premise that overpopulation is a problem at all is incorrect. Its quite the opposite, in fact. Newresearchshows that population growth goes hand-in-hand with more abundant resources.

Consider the amount of time it takes an average person to earn enough money to buy one unit in a basket of fifty basic commoditiesthe time-price of those items, so to speak. The Simon Abundance Index, coauthored with Marian Tupy, found that between 1980 and 2018, the time-price declined by nearly one percent for every one percent increase in population. In other words, every additional human being to be born seems to make resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.

Moreover, economic development causes birth rates to fall without any need for draconian population control measures. It is now well-documented that as countries grow richer, and people escape poverty, they tend to opt for smaller families. That phenomenon is called the fertility transition.

In 1979, the year the one-child policy began, Chinas birth ratewasjust under three children per woman. Chinas economy has grown dramatically since it adopted policies of greater economic freedom in 1978, and as the country has grown richer, its fertility rate has fallen. The decline has been perfectly in line with trends in neighboring countries that have also seen rapid economic growth, and that do not coercively limit family sizes.

In India, where liberalizingeconomic reformsdidnt begin until 1992, much later thanin China, the birth rate has alsofallen, albeit less dramatically. This change has occurred as India has grown richer, though not as rich as China. As with China, the decline in Indias birth rate is in line with trends seen in neighboring countries, most of which have seen evensteeperdeclines as their economies have grown. In fact, among Indias neighbors, only Pakistan and war-torn Afghanistan have higher birth rates, although their birth rates are declining as well.

Overpopulation hysteria is just as groundless a reason to forcibly limit reproduction as ethnic or religious bigotry and the pseudoscience of eugenics. Whether motivated by a desire to keep marginalized people from having children or to shrink the population, coercive population control remains abhorrent.

Chelsea Follett is a policy analyst at the Cato Institutes Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and managing editor ofHuman Progress.org.

Image: Reuters

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White nationalists are flocking to the US anti-abortion movement – The Guardian

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This weekends March for Life rally, the large anti-choice demonstration held annually in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, has the exuberant quality of a victory lap. This, the 49th anniversary of Roe, is likely to be its last. The US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe in Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health, which is set to be decided this spring. For women in Texas, Roe has already been nullified: the court went out of its way to allow what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a flagrantly unconstitutional abortion ban to go into effect there, depriving abortion rights to the one in 10 American women of reproductive age who live in the nations second largest state.

These victories have made visible a growing cohort within the anti-choice movement: the militias and explicitly white supremacist groups of the organized far right. Like last year, this years March for Life featured an appearance by Patriot Front, a white nationalist group that wears a uniform of balaclavas and khakis. The group, which also marched at a Chicago March for Life demonstration earlier this month, silently handed out cards to members of the press who tried to ask them questions. America belongs to its fathers, and it is owed to its sons, the cards read. The restoration of American sovereignty must follow the restoration of the American Family.

Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. In addition to Patriot Front, groups like the white nationalist Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker party have also lent support to the anti-abortion movement. These groups see stopping abortion as part of a broader project to ensure white hegemony in addition to womens subordination. Tim Bishop, of the Aryan Nations, noted that Lots of our people join [anti-choice organizations] Its part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race. That the growing white nationalist movement would be focused on attacking womens rights is maybe to be expected: research has long established that recruitment to the alt-right happens largely among men with grievances against feminism, and that misogyny is usually the first form of rightwing radicalization.

But the affinity goes both ways: just as the alt-right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt-right. In 2019, Kristen Hatten, a vice-president at the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists, shared racist content online and publicly identified herself as an ethnonationalist. In addition to sharing personnel, the groups share tactics. In 1985, the KKK began circulating Wanted posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers. The posters were picked up by the anti-choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s. Now, sharing names, photos and addresses of abortion providers and clinic staff is standard practice in the mainline anti-choice movement, and the stalking and doxing of providers has become routine. More recently, anti-abortion activists have escalated their violence, returning to the murderous extremism that characterized the movement in the 1990s: in Knoxville, a fire that burned down a planned parenthood clinic on New Years Eve was ruled an arson. Maybe the anti-choice crowd is taking tips from their friends in the alt-right.

Its not that the anti-abortion movements embrace of white nationalism is totally uncomplicated. When the Traditionalist Worker party showed up at a Tennessee Right to Life march in 2018, the organizers shooed them off, and later issued a statement saying they condemned violence both from the right, and from leftwing groups like antifa. Hatten was fired from her anti-choice job after a public outcry. The anti-choice movement has even started trying to appropriate the language of social justice. They posit equality between embryos and women, try to brand abortion bans as feminist, incessantly compare abortion to the Holocaust, and claim that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation, in the words of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. Anti-choice groups are eager to claim the moral authority of historical struggles against oppression, even as they work to further the oppression of women.

But the link between the anti-choice movement and white supremacy is much older and more fundamental than this recent, superficial social justice branding effort. Before an influx of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception had only been partially and sporadically criminalized. This changed in the early 20th century, when an additional surge of migrants from Asia and Latin America calcified white American racial anxieties and led to white elites decrying the falling white birth rate as race suicide.

Abortion bans were quickly introduced nationwide. As the historian Leslie Raegan put it, White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women. The emerging popular eugenics movement supported this campaign of forced birth for fit mothers, while at the same time implementing a widespread campaign of involuntary sterilization among the poor, particularly Black women and incarcerated women. Meanwhile, white women who sought out voluntary sterilization were discouraged or outright denied the procedure, a practice that is still mainstream in the medical field today.

In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of race suicide has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called Great Replacement, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being replaced by people of color. (Some antisemitic variations posit that this replacement is somehow being orchestrated by Jewish people.)

The way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties have always animated the anti-choice movement, and they have only become more fervent among the March for Lifes rank and file as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country sometime in the coming decades. The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.

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Sheldon’s Constitutional Theory: Somatotyping …

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WILLIAM H.SHELDON

THE SOMATOTYPING THEORY

When looking at life aspects many things need to be taken into consideration. Some of those things involve what we base our thoughts on, and what we believe to be true and what we believe to be false. What a lot of people do not realize is that our world is constructed off of the ideas of theories. One theory specifically curious to me is the Constitutional Theory, specifically focusing on the idea of somatotyping. With this theory and the ideas that follow it, I am focusing on the findings behind crime behavior, and how the Constitutional theory specifically deals with crime and criminology. Don't believe this.

To start there needs to be an understanding of what exactly somatotyping is. By definition somatotyping is: the structure or build of a person, especially to the extent to which it exhibits the characteristics of an ectomorph, an endomorph, or a mesomorph (American heritage, Dictionary.com, 2012). A U.S. psychologist W.H. Sheldon created the idea of somatotyping; in his system he classified human beings in regards to their body type or build. He based his classifications on three specific body types, those being: endomorphic, or round, fat type; mesomorphic, or muscular type; and ectomorphic, or slim, linear type (Encyclopedia Britannica, Dictionary.com, 2012). In order to determine who falls under what body type a somatotype number of three digits must be determined. With Sheldons system the first digit refers to the endomorphy, the second refers to the mesomorphy, and the third refers to the ectomorphy; and each digit is on a one to seven scale, with one being very low and seven being very high (Encyclopedia Britannica, Dictionary.com, 2012). Once a score is determined for an individual, with Sheldons system, you should then be able to determine a personality type for that individual. But with that there lies controversy(s), which will later be explored.

The three areas of the body types now need to be better described. According to Sheldons original model this is how the body types are broken down: he concluded on three extreme types. These extremes were then described as fat or round, muscular or square, and thin or linear; with these extremes then coming together into a balanced center. Directly from Sheldon this is how he characterized and categorized his samples according to body types, to what we now know as somatotyping. To start, Sheldon wrote four books about this theory, and from those four books these things were drawn: individually and collectively, these books deliver three sorts of messages: methodological (how-to-do-it information on somatotyping), substantive (applications of somatotyping to social problems), and visionary or salvationist (assurances that constitutional psychology can guide a eugenics program and save the modern world from itself) (Rafter, 2007).

So basically, Sheldon breaks it down like this: The three layers are called the endoderm or the innermost layer of the body, the mesoderm or the middle layer of the body, and the ectoderm or the outermost layer of the body. The lining of the stomach, intestines, and other internal organs forms the endoderm. The mesoderm is then the tissue from which muscle and bone emerge. Finally, the ectoderm forms skin, nerves, and the brain. He felt it would be appropriate to name the various body-type dimensions after the tissue layers that were most significantly connected with their dominant features (Worldpress, 2011). That being said, the classifications are most simply put like this: endomorphs appear gut dominant, while mesomorphs generally are more muscular, and finally the ectomorphs are highly invested in nervous and cerebral features (Worldpress, 2011). Now that the body types have been broken down, this allows for the investigation into crime patterns associated with the somatotypes, and also the possible future conclusions that can be drawn from each one of the somatotypes.

After extensive research it has been stated that Sheldon classified or implied that the mesomorphic body type individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), were more prone to committing violent and aggressive acts, and therefore criminality is rooted in biology, when compared to the other two body types and their crime patterns and tendencies (Maddan, Walker, & Miller, 2008). According to some research, Sheldons idea has been pushed back into the closet, or kept unknown to criminologists, because specialists in the causes for crime are not ready to bury the idea, but at the same time hesitate to put it on display due to the uncertainty of how this idea even got into their field to begin with (Rafter, 2007). Not only has this idea brought lots of confusion among researchers, but it has also brought on deeper thought and curiosity by other researchers, so much so that, for example, Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) use Sheldons terminology and go far beyond his original findings to claim that, Wherever it has been examined, criminals on the average differ in physique from the population at large. They tend to be more mesomorphic (muscular) and less ectomorphic (linear) (Rafter, 2007). With Sheldon being the first person to explore the idea behind body type and behavior with criminal tendencies a lot of controversy has occurred from his thoughts. One of the bigger trends with the controversies is that, very few researchers raise questions about Sheldons methods or findings, they leave the impression that indeed a relationship exists between body build and criminality-therefore somewhat agreeing with Sheldons model (Rafter, 2007). Some go as far as saying Sheldons ideas resemble those of the beloved past topic of phrenology and personality characteristics, but how accurate is it really? So with an insight into some of the basic controversy about this theory, here are some of the findings to both support and reject Sheldons theory and findings.

One thing needs to be stressed with this theory, and that is that Sheldons model and results are based off of male body types, therefore instant controversy is drawn with women and their crime patterns due to body type. Sheldon not only classified people by their body type but by their temperament most associated with each body type in a similar manner, which is where he then concluded the crime tendencies of the individuals. With that, the temperaments were described as biologically determined attitudes, beliefs, and motivations associated with the basic body types; viscerotonia (the relaxed, sociable, gluttonous temperament), somatotonia (dominated by muscular activity and a drive toward action and power), and cerebrotonia (restrained, asocial, dominated by the cerebrum) (Rafter, 2007). With those guidelines, Sheldons conclusions were then drawn. Which as previously stated, implies that the mesomorphic body type individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), were more prone to committing violent and aggressive acts based on their scores for mental insufficiency, medical insufficiency, psychiatric insufficiency, and persistent although not necessarily criminal misbehavior, (Rafter, 2007) and their standings under body shape, and temperament classification (Rafter, 2007). Sheldon noticed that from the scorings on his scales, his test subjects and some worldly known individuals that (these) adjudicatable delinquents were superior physically to the other youths, excelling in general strength and general athletic ability (Rafter, 2007). Giving exact reasoning for their higher likelihood for committing crime later in life. After his extensive studying, some interesting findings came about,

Sheldon claimed that crime is caused by inherited biological inferiority and delinquents are less worthy beings than the college man; they (delinquents) are mesomorphs whose behavior is governed by their muscular physiques and not their cerebrums, Dionysian types from whom the world needs savingbut while declaring this he ended up proving the exact opposite in that his actual delinquents turned out to be healthy, vigorous young men and nonetheless, in Sheldons view, his constitutional psychology series demonstrated that biology is destiny, the chief determinant of character and behavior (Rafter, 2007).

Later researchers, have come to discredit many of Sheldons findings, because many of the individuals who he classified as delinquent had not broken criminal laws, but more so just had predispositions to criminal activity (Rafter, 2007), but that he then also ignored key factors such as the individuals environment in sequence to his body and temperament scales (Rafter, 2007). But to counter these findings Eleanor Glueck (1958) had an analysis of the five traits of character structure (social as- sertiveness, defiance, suspiciousness, emotional labiality and destructiveness) shows that only destructiveness is found to exert a significantly different impact on the delinquency of the physique types, being much more characteristic of delinquent mesomorphs than of ectomorphs. So in connection with Sheldon, these findings go on to give more explanation for why certain body types may be more likely for crime behavior: although there are difficulties inherent in somatotyping children at a stage sufficiently early in their lives to make preventive efforts most meaningful, it may prove desirable to construct prediction tables for each body type, using as a basis for them those clusters of traits and socio-cultural factors that have been found in "Physique and Delinquency" most sharply to differentiate delinquents from non-delinquents within each predominant physique type (Glueck, 1958). So where it seems that Rafter may have some sort of disagreement with Sheldons theory, Glueck seems to remain somewhat neutral or somewhat negative on the topic in that her results say that, "mesomorphs and delinquency," contrasts boys of this body build, and for those who represent the great majority of persistent offenders, with boys of other body builds, and indicates which traits and socio-cultural factors contribute most significantly to their delinquency in contrast with other body types (Gleuck, 1958). Finally, there is the individual who finds all options available to an individual to take a role in their resulting behavior with crime. Richard Snodgrasse (1951), simply says this at the conclusion of his studies: the method of studying physique should certainly utilize the techniques of anthropometry (including indices of disproportion), somatotyping, and inspectional assessment of individual morphological traits (Snodgrasse, 1951). Basically saying that more than body type or temperament has to be taken into consideration when trying to map out a specific person or persons crime patterns or tendencies. Regardless of a researchers support or rejection for Sheldons theory, the understanding behind his theory is given in each of their findings. To the extents, that although we may be able to somewhat predict an individuals likelihood for something like committing a crime, there will always be that one person who bucks the system on all angles, which allows us to constantly debate and criticize they theory.

All in all, not one person is right or wrong in their findings and thoughts on Sheldons theory, but in laments terms, Rafter (2007), says it best: criminologists in general may keep Sheldons skeleton in the closet because they are unsure about what to do with it. Social history offers a way to think about and even value Sheldon, apart from the degree to which his findings were correct. After all, he contributed new words to the criminological vocabularysomatotyping, endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphyand his photographic displays constitute one of the most powerful visual rhetorics in criminological history (Rafter, 2007).

As it has been earlier addressed, Sheldons theory has progressed along with the modernization of the world, but has also become a very hesitated topic of conversation among specialists, especially criminologists. Throughout the years, Sheldons theory has had to adjust to new world morals and values, in order to properly be asserted within society. Somatotyping has become the significant focus of this theory of constitutionalism, in order to define somebody by their body type or physical build. Although there is much controversy with this theory, it has been proven pretty prevalent, that the body type of the mesomorph individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), seem to be the most likely candidates when predicting crime trends and patterns. Defining individuals by their body type, has become a standard practice with researchers, when attempting to map crime in coordination with specific individuals. There is not a normal body type, but more so a body type that appears to predict crime behavior. This theory has had to evolve in order to apply to the socio-economic changes that have occurred over the centuries, and many researchers have conflicting results on the topic with its relevancy to crime likelihood. From these conflicting results, many factors are responsible, some of those being, the economic status in which an individual is brought up, an individuals family, education, community; all representing the nurture side of an individual which may or may not weaken the argument that the problem(s) stem in an individuals biological make up, bringing in the nature aspect. From this, Sheldons theory strictly based on body type alone is weakened, because more factors are significant in future actions of an individual. These social aspects, therefore weaken Sheldons strict biological explanations for the crime patterns from certain individuals. Sheldons idea has similarities to Lombrosos theory of biology and criminals, in that criminals are physically different from law-abiding citizens and that these differences demonstrated the biological causes of criminal behavior (Akers & Sellers, 2009). To people like Lombroso and Sheldon, people are impacted by their biological breakdown, through genes, disorders, and basic biological make-up. Therefore, criminals are biologically innate to commit crime regardless of anything else from the socio-economical world. From this view, that some may see as a consequence, the inability of those who are born with bad genes are subject to a likely future in crime. Therefore they are destined to be criminals because of their biological make ups, and are then at a social disadvantage regardless of what they attempt to do to avoid it. The formation of and individuals genetic makeup, and their resulting body types, more often than not, supports, Sheldons somatotyping and constitutional theory.

So with those ideas, what can the criminal justice system do to change this, and prevent future rise in crime What policies need to be applied in order to make a difference in these individuals lives, if as according to Sheldon or Lombroso they are genetically destined to be criminals? Some may agree that an individual is biologically destined to be criminal, but so many other theories point to criminal behaviors being a result of so much more. We cannot go around an destroy a line of people, just because they have bad genes or biological factors, so therefore the socio-economic aspect needs to take a bigger role in these theories. There has to be a way to change a path of an individual, who has these poor genes, by the influences of their families, communities, educations, etc. We cannot set these people up for failure, but in turn should use these thoughts to set them up for success- step in before the option to commit a crime is there. All people, regardless of their biological factors and body types, should be eligible for equal futures. Some people feel the need to fulfill a stereotype that is given to them just because they think that is a means to the rules, but other feel the need to buck the system and go against what society has mapped out as socially acceptable for them; with that although this theory may have helped predict and prevent crime from happening, it has probably also caused a lot of negative attention on innocent individuals. It is very clear that this theories, will remain, just that, theories, because regardless of what findings and results people have come to there is always the ability to prove something wrong and discredit it. From Sheldons theory, a specific body type may represent a possibility of a criminal, but it does not seal the deal. The actual crime must be committed. So finally, as mentioned earlier this theory is very touching with criminologists, because they do not know what to do with it, or how exactly to interpret it. All in all, although Sheldon may have had some positively reflective information on how to prevent crime, many aspects were missing from his theory.

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Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization – Shepherd Express

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Forced sterilization was deemed constitutional in a 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, after which forced sterilizations increased dramatically, to at least 60,000 forced sterilizations in some 32 states during the 20th century, predominantly targeting women of color. And while state laws have been changed, its still constitutional, and still going on todaywith at least five cases of women in ICE custody in Georgia in 2019while thousands of victims await restitution, as reports from the Conversation and YES! Magazine has documented.

Organizations such as Project South, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab are actively working to document the extent of this underreported problemand to bring an end to it. Project Censored noted. But their work is even more underreported than the problem itself.

During the height of this wave of eugenics by means of sterilization in the U.S., forced hysterectomies were so common in the Deep South that activist Fannie Lou Hamer coined the term Mississippi Appendectomy to describe them, Ray Levy Uyeda wrote in a YES! Magazine article, How Organizers are Fighting an American Legacy of Forced Sterilization, which begins with the story of Kelli Dillon.

Dillon was a California prison inmate in 2001 when she underwent a procedure to remove a potentially cancerous growthand the surgeon simultaneously performed an unauthorized hysterectomy, one of 148 forced sterilizations that year in California prisons, and one of 1,400 carried out between 1997 and 2010.

Dillon began organizing inside the womens prison gathering testimonials from other victimized prisoners and provided the personal accounts to staff at Justice Now that was laying the groundwork to petition for legislation that would ban the procedures in prisons, Uyeda reported. She eventually sued the state of California for damages and helped to shape legislation to compensate victims (finally passed this year) a story told in the 2020 documentary film, Belly of the Beast.

All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation," Alexandra Minna Stern wrote at the Conversation. Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, where Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories35,000 of them so far captured from historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.

The history was more complicated than one might expect, Stern explained. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like feeblemindedness and mental defective. Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism, she wrote. It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway.

California Latinas for Reproductive Justice is working to secure legislative change for victims of the states sterilization efforts between 1909 and 1979, Uyeda wrote. It was signed into law after Project Censoreds book went to print, making California the third state with such legislation, following the lead of North Carolina and Virginia, in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

The history of eugenics has been thoroughly researched and criticized by scholars and human rights activists, but coverage by the corporate media of the U.S. practice of forced sterilization throughout the 20th century and into the 21st has tended to be limited and narrowly focused, Project Censored noted. There was some corporate news coverage after the ICE forced sterilization stories emerged, but generally without any mention of the activists resisting the practice Some establishment press articles on the topic of forced sterilization include comments from members of these organizations to provide context on the issue, but few spotlight the groups tireless organizing and record of accomplishments.

Two exceptions cited were articles from Marie Claire magazine and Refinery29, a website targeted at younger women. This only began to change in July 2021, as Project Censoreds book was going to print, with the Associated Press and other establishment news outlets reporting that California is preparing to approve reparations of up to $25,000 per person to women who had been sterilized without consent.

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Letter to the EditorIn support of Luther West – North Wind Online

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On December 10, the NMU Board of Trustees met for about 10 minutes to strip Luther Wests name from the science building. The West family was given about 10 days notice of this event, and when they asked if they could have time to put together a rebuttal, they were denied.

I am writing this letter because I believe that I am one of few people alive who knew West well. I grew up with his youngest son and spent as much time at the West house as my own. After I graduated from NMU and started teaching, I continued to visit West whenever I was home and had many conversations about teaching and how one should conduct oneself. West always made a point of emphasizing that all students should be treated the same, regardless of who they are or where they came from. That was what he always tried to do when he taught.

We also talked about his time at Battle Creek College. He was not happy with the way it was run, but with a growing family to support he stayed as jobs were hard to come by at the time. He also stated many times that if you have nothing good to say about someone, dont say anything at all.

I noted with interest that the Board did agree to keep the L. S. West scholarship. I wonder if they will place a warning label on it.

I knew West from 1946 until his death and never heard him utter a derogatory word about any person of any race; I cant think of any other person I can say that about.

In a North Wind Letter to the Editor, Aaron Loudenslager states that West voluntarily attended a conference on eugenics and presented a paper there. How does he know it was voluntary? Miriam Hilton interviewed West in August 1972, and in that interview it was clearly stated that Kellogg, whose school he worked at, required everyone on staff to support the eugenics movement. Does that support the voluntary part? I do not know if it did or not but I do not believe we can say one way or another.

Wests talk also included a critique of the methodology used to back up the conclusions of the conference as being inappropriate and hence does not back such conclusions.

West joined the faculty at Northern in 1938 with a family of 5 to support. The curriculum as approved by the administration included a course on eugenics which he was required to teach. That course or a similar one continued being taught till in the 40s. I do not know why it took so long to get rid of it but based on my similar experience as a one-man department, I know it is prudent to establish yourself before making changes. He also may have hesitated because he had a family to support and very few options because of the Great Depression.

I started teaching in 1964 but I stopped to visit West almost every time I returned to Marquette, 2-3 times a year. I knew him to be a true gentleman who showed no hints of racism but only concern for the wellbeing of all others.

Carl W. Anderson, community member, NMU alumnus B.S. 1964

Editors Note: The North Wind is committed to offering a free and open public forum of ideas, publishing a wide range of viewpoints to accurately represent the NMU student body. This piece is a letter to the editor, written by a reader of the North Wind in response to North Wind content. It expresses the personal opinions of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the North Wind. The North Wind reserves the right to avoid publishing letters that do not meet the North Winds publication standards. To submit a letter to the editor contact the opinion editor at [emailprotected] with the subject North Wind Letter.

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Letter to the EditorIn support of Luther West - North Wind Online

Bath Festival Announces First Wave of 2022 Lineup – Broadway World

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Bath Festival is back with a bang in 2022 as it announces big names from the world of music, literature and comedy. Historian David Olusoga, comedian Phil Wang, Nobel Prize winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah and saxophonist Jess Gillam are among those announced as part of this years star-studded line-up.

Celebrating music and books in a beautiful city, this year's Bath Festival will run from Friday 13 May to Saturday 21 May 2022 and festival organisers have released a handful of names ahead of the official line-up announcement at the beginning of March.

From pioneer pop up gigs to discussion around immigration and postcolonialism with some of the world's most eminent authors, this year's highlights will include:

The festival will open with the traditional Party in the City on Friday 13 May, offering dozens of free live music events in city venues for an evening of celebration which attracts tens of thousands of visitors.

The Bath Festival will be once again hosting events in some of the World Heritage city's beautiful historic buildings, including the 18th century Assembly Rooms, Bath Abbey and St Swithin's Church. There will also be events in the Forum, Komedia, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute in Queen Square, at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights at Persephone Books, at Walcot House and in the festival's intimate Literature Lounge which will be set up in Alfred Street.

Following the success in 2021 of a series of guided walking tours created for The Bath Festival, three new themed walking tours have been developed for the May 2022. There will also be creative workshops and, for the first time at The Bath Festival, proof parties at which readers will be able to hear from the rising stars of literature and go home with coveted proof copies of as yet unpublished works.

The Bath Festival 2022 will tackle topics including sense of identity, race, home, grief and families. There will be a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, of classical music, jazz, folk and contemporary sounds. The festival's official bookseller is the independent Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights and the festival is supported by sponsors, including Bath Spa University, Bath BID, Wessex Water and The Royal High School, its patrons and members and an invaluable army of volunteers, without who the festival would not happen.

The full festival programme will be announced on Friday 4 March and tickets go on general release on Friday 11 March.

To sign up for festival news or join as a member for priority booking, visit: https://bathfestivals.org.uk/the-bath-festival/sign-up/

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Bath Festival Announces First Wave of 2022 Lineup - Broadway World

City Lights: Professor and Author Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose – Washington City Paper

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Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose

Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality might sound like a book written by a 20th-century eugenicist, but its author, Kathryn Paige Harden, is far from that. A professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, and co-director of the Texas Twin Project, Harden has spent years researching how DNA differences play a large role in educational and economic success to propose a new society where everyone thrives, regardless of how one fares in the genetic lottery. In her book, Harden chronicles the complicated history of genetics, sharing both her and other scientists findings, as well as personal experiences and analogies that help demonstrate how genetic inheritance can sometimes be sheer luck. Throughout Genetic Lottery, Harden challenges notions of racial superiority and eugenics to reclaim the field of genetics, arguing that we must acknowledge the importance (and power) of DNA to create a fairer world. On Jan. 24, at yet another Politics and Prose virtual event, Harden will be joined by Angela Duckworth, founder and the CEO of Character Lab, to discuss Genetic Lottery and how it can be applied to making real-life social change. The virtual talk starts at 6 p.m. on Jan. 24. Registration required. politics-prose.com. Free.

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City Lights: Professor and Author Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose - Washington City Paper

Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts – The New Yorker

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In the fall of 1999, The New Yorker published a short piece about a twenty-three-year-old writer who had just released her first novel, in England. Zadie Smiths White Teeth was due to be published in the U.S. in the spring of 2000kicking off the millennium with a bang. White Teeth, a gentle satire of migration and cultural identity, concerns, among other matters, Nazi eugenics programs, the eschatology of Jehovahs Witnesses, the DNA of mice, and a militant group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN, the piece, by Kevin Jackson, observes. Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream. It can be immensely pleasurable, years later, to revisit the initial discovery of new talents and works of art, the people and projects that gave a decade its own flavor and Zeitgeist.

Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.

This week, were bringing you a selection of piecesa culture review, of sortsthat capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands. In Dont Look Back and New Frontiers, Anthony Lane explores the mind-bending machinations of Michel Gondrys Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the spare poignancy of Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain. (Brokeback Mountain, which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow.) In Flesh on Flesh, John Updike reviews Atonement, Ian McEwans majestic novel of unfulfilled love. (The frail, moist flesh, mutilated in war, corseted and shamed in peacetime, and subject, in the long view, to swift decay, gives this intricately composed narrative its mournful, surging life.) In Living Pains, Sasha Frere-Jones considers Mary J. Bliges accomplished career as she releases her eighth studio album. In Under the Spell and Counterlives, Joan Acocella delves into the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series and analyzes the far-reaching themes of Philip Roths The Plot Against America. (In an eerie conversion, The Plot Against America transforms the piety-spouting, finger-shaking elders of the Roth oeuvre into prophets.) In Sympathy for the Devil, Kelefa Sanneh studies the shifting musical styles of the rapper Eminem. Finally, in Heartbreak Hotels, David Denby examines how Sofia Coppola captures the loneliness and humor of Bill Murrays faded movie-star character in Lost in Translation. Coppola doesnt punch up her scenes; shes not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being, Denby writes. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell.

Erin Overbey, archive editor

Ian McEwans semi-Austenesque novel, Atonement.

At twenty-three, the author has had the nerve to ignore her misgivings and produce her dbut novel, White Teeth.

Philip Roths The Plot Against America.

Brokeback Mountain and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lost in Translation and Dirty Pretty Things.

Eminem pleads his case.

Harry Potter explained.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mary J. Bliges chronic brilliance.

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Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts - The New Yorker

Texas GOP gubernatorial candidate says he won’t fire staffer tied to white nationalist movement – The Texas Tribune

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Republican gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines said Wednesday he will not fire a campaign staffer who said on his YouTube channel in 2020 that he wants to restore historical American culture by maintaining a supermajority of the original stock of the United States, and maintaining a homogeneity, referring to white people.

The staffer, Jake Lloyd Colglazier, has previously done fieldwork for the campaign, Huffines said, adding that he will not take any action against Colglazier.

On his YouTube channel, Colglazier warned that were nearing the demographic cliff, a reference to an increase of people of color gaining more political and economic power. On another livestream platform, he mocked a woman who appears to be Asian, saying she needed to be in China getting the shit beat out of her by her husband. In another post, he said, I spit on George Floyd.

If I were to go through the social media history of any young Texan I would find something I disagree with, Huffines said in an emailed statement. My campaign will not participate in cancel culture.

Huffines did not respond to questions about whether he condemned Colglaziers comments or whether he condemned white nationalism.

Colglazier, 24, a self-proclaimed American nationalist, previously worked for the far-right conspiracy site Infowars, owned by Alex Jones. While at InfoWars, he interviewed white supremacists such as Vincent James Foxx, who founded the now-banned alt-right Red Elephants site, and Faith Goldy, a conspiracy theorist who was fired from a conservative Canadian website for talking on a podcast hosted by the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

Political Research Associates, a social justice think tank, first reported evidence of Colglaziers connections to the America First/Groyper movement on Friday. So-called Groypers make up an alt-right network of people who advocate for a majority white, Christian nation and identify as American nationalists. They coalesce around their support of Nick Fuentes, a white supremist podcaster who has been banned from Twitter, YouTube and the streaming platform DLive for violating hate speech policies.

Until Friday, the True Texas Project, a conservative nonprofit, had a biography for Colglazier on its website that identified him as currently the Deputy Communications Director for the Don Huffines for Governor campaign. That sentence has since been removed, and the True Texas Project did not respond to a request for comment.

Huffines, a former state senator from Dallas, said in his Wednesday statement that Colglazier is not his deputy communications director, but acknowledged hes done work for the campaign.

America First started as a conservative TV commentary series by Fuentes. With episode titles such as Combating Anti-White Hatred, Diversity Is Code for Anti White and Modernity Kills Women, the series also boasted guests including Foxx, Goldy and Patrick Casey, a leader in the Groyper white nationalist movement. The show also featured Colglazier, who went by Jake Lloyd at the time, on an episode about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Colglazier was one of three speakers at an America First conference in December 2019, when he called on the Groypers, to overtake the countrys conservative party.

The greater political establishment of the United States will crumble at the hands of the Groypers. History will remember the Groypers and the movement that followed, that flowed from America First, Colglazier said at the conference.

Colglazier could not be reached for comment.

Regardless of his staff position, Colglazier publicly remains a strong supporter of Huffines for governor, as he said in a December interview with Current Revolt and as seen in his Twitter profile.

Huffines is running to the right of Gov. Greg Abbott, whom he criticizes frequently for not being conservative enough. Among Huffines top campaign platforms are bans on critical race theory and building a wall at the Texas-Mexico border to try to block illegal immigration.

Abbott did not respond to a request for comment.

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Texas GOP gubernatorial candidate says he won't fire staffer tied to white nationalist movement - The Texas Tribune

The world has moved on from Colleyville. American Jews cant. – Vox.com

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When an armed man stormed a Texas synagogue on Saturday, taking a rabbi and three worshippers hostage, it seemed fairly obvious that the victims identity had something to do with the attack. But in a press conference after all four hostages escaped Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, FBI special agent Matthew DeSarno seemed to deny that, telling reporters the attacks motive was not specifically related to the Jewish community.

DeSarno was attempting to communicate that the hostage takers core demand the release of imprisoned jihadist Aafia Siddiqui wasnt about Jews. But interviews with the hostages themselves revealed a clear connection: Their captor believed that a Jewish conspiracy ruled America and that, if he took Jews hostage, he could compel the US to release Siddiqui.

He terrorized us because he believed these anti-Semitic tropes that the Jews control everything, and if I go to the Jews, they can pull the strings, hostage Jeffrey Cohen told CNN. He even said at one point that Im coming to you because I know President Biden will do things for the Jews.

Perhaps DeSarno wasnt aware of this when he made his comments, which the FBI has since walked back. But major media outlets ran with his line, blaring headlines that downplayed the anti-Semitism at the core of the attack. It was as though the attacker had chosen Beth Israel at random, rather than targeted a Jewish community near where Siddiqui was imprisoned.

The coverage only underscored a creeping sentiment that spread among us last weekend. Many Jews, myself included, already felt like few were paying attention to the crisis in Colleyville as it unfolded over the weekend; that we Jews were rocked by a collective trauma while most Americans watched the NFL playoffs.

This is not a new feeling.

In the past several years, American Jews have been subject to a wave of violence nearly unprecedented in post-Holocaust America. If these anti-Semitic incidents garner significant mainstream attention a big if attention to them seems to fade rapidly, erased by a fast-moving news cycle. The root causes of rising anti-Semitism are often ignored, especially when politically inconvenient to one side or the other.

There are always exceptions: In the wake of the Colleyville attack, for example, many Muslims have been particularly vocal allies. But for the most part, the world has moved on. American Jews, on the other hand, cannot for good reason.

Lets recount what the past few years have been like for American Jews.

In August 2017, the torch-carrying marchers at Charlottesville chanted, Jews will not replace us, as they rallied to protect Confederate iconography. Armed individuals dressed in fatigues menaced a local synagogue also named Beth Israel while neo-Nazis yelled, Sieg heil! as they passed by.

In October 2018, we saw the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history: the assault on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which claimed 11 Jewish lives. The far-right shooter believed that Jews were responsible for mass nonwhite immigration and wanted to kill as many as he could find in retaliation.

In April 2019, another far-right shooter preoccupied by fears of a Jewish-perpetrated white genocide attacked the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, killing one and injuring three.

In December 2019, New York and New Jersey the epicenter of American Jewry were swept by a wave of anti-Semitic violence.

Two extremist members of the Black Hebrew Israelite church, a fringe religion that believes they are the true Jews and we are impostors, killed a police officer and three shoppers at a kosher market in Jersey City. A man wielding a machete attacked a Hanukkah party at a rabbis home in Monsey, New York, killing one and injuring four. Orthodox Jews in New York were subject to a wave of street assaults and beatings.

In May 2021, the conflict between Israel and Hamas led to yet another spike in anti-Semitic violence, including high-profile attacks perpetrated by individuals who blamed American Jews for Israels actions. In Los Angeles, for example, a group of men drove to a heavily Jewish neighborhood and assaulted diners at a sushi restaurant. The attackers were waving Palestinian flags and chanting, Free Palestine!

This sort of violence is certainly not the norm. In absolute terms, most American Jews are still quite unlikely to be targeted by anti-Semitic attacks. But both quantitative and anecdotal data suggest that there has been a sustained rise in anti-Semitic activity.

The following chart shows data on anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds, ranging from murders to harassment, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish anti-hate watchdog. The ADL data, while not perfect, is one of the better sources of information on the topic and it shows a spike in the past several years.

The explanation among scholars and experts for this rise tends to focus on Donald Trumps presidential candidacy and the concomitant rise of the alt-right.

In this telling, Trumps ascendance shifted the Overton window for the far right, leading to a rise in anti-Semitic harassment and violence. (Trump himself repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments despite having Jewish family.) Recent academic research finds that, in the United States, anti-Semitic beliefs are more prevalent on the right.

The attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway suggest this diagnosis is in large part correct. But the past few years of anti-Semitic violence demonstrate clearly that its not the full story.

The Colleyville siege seems to have been perpetrated by a British Islamist. The 2021 attacks seem to have emerged out of anti-Israel sentiment, a cause more associated with the left. The 2019 violence in New York and New Jersey doesnt really connect to politics as we typically understand it, emerging in part out of a radical subsection of the already-small Black Hebrew Israelite group and local tensions between Black and Jewish residents in Brooklyn.

What this illustrates, more than anything else, is the protean and primordial nature of anti-Semitism a prejudice and belief structure so baked into Western society that it has a remarkable capacity to infuse newer ideas and reassert itself in different forms.

Today, we are seeing the rise not of one form of anti-Semitism but of multiple anti-Semitisms each popular with different segments of the population for different reasons, but also capable of reinforcing each other by normalizing anti-Semitic expression.

There is no mistaking the consequences for Jews.

In a 2021 survey from the American Jewish Committee, a leading Jewish communal group, 24 percent of American Jews reported that an institution they were affiliated with had been targeted by anti-Semitism in the past five years. Ninety percent said anti-Semitism was a problem in America today, and 82 percent agreed that anti-Semitism had increased in the past five years.

Synagogues have had to increase security spending, straining often tight budgets that could be spent on programming for their congregants. Measures include hiring more armed guards to patrol services, setting up security camera systems, and providing active shooter training for rabbis and Hebrew school teachers.

Some of this is familiar; there have been armed guards at my synagogue as long as I can remember. But much of the urgency is new. For a community that has long seen America as our haven, a place different in kind from the Europe so many Jews were driven out of, its a profoundly unsettling feeling.

Dara Horn, a novelist and scholar of Yiddish literature, spent 20 years avoiding the topic of anti-Semitism. She wanted to write about Jewish life rather than Jewish death.

But the past few years changed things. In 2021, Horn published a book titled People Love Dead Jews, an examination of the role that Jewish suffering plays in the public imagination. Her analysis is not flattering.

People tell stories about dead Jews so they can feel better about themselves, Horn tells me. Those stories often require the erasure of actual Jews, because actual Jews would ruin the story.

One of the more provocative examples she mentioned is the oft-repeated poem, attributed to German pastor Martin Niemller, citing attacks on Jews as one of several canaries in the coal mine for political catastrophe. Youve probably heard this version of it, or at least seen it on a Facebook post:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak for me

In theory, the message is one of solidarity: What happens to Jews should be of concern to all of us. But Horn argues that theres a worrying implication to this message, one that instrumentalizes Jews rather than centering us.

What youre basically saying is that we should all care when Jews are murdered and attacked because it might be an ominous sign that real people might be attacked later, Horn tells me. I get that thats not what its trying to say, but it plays into this idea that Jews are just this symbol that you can use for whatever purpose you need.

In American political discourse, anti-Semitism often gets treated in exactly the way Horn fears: as a tool to be wielded, rather than a problem for living, breathing Jewish people.

Among conservatives, support for Israel becomes equated with support for Jews to the point where actual anti-Semitism emanating from pro-Israel politicians, from Donald Trump to Marjorie Taylor Greene, is treated as unimportant or excusable. The Jewish experience becomes flattened into a narrative of Judeo-Christian culture under shared threat from Islamist terrorism, eliding the ways in which Americas mostly liberal Jewish population feels threatened by the influence of political Christianity on the right.

Colleyville is already being deployed in this fashion. In a public letter, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) turned an attack on Jews into an attack on admitting Afghan refugees.

I write with alarm over reports that the Islamic terrorist who took hostages at a Jewish synagogue in Texas this past weekend was granted a travel visa, Hawley claims. This failure comes in the wake of the Biden Administrations botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and failure to vet the tens of thousands who were evacuated to our country.

Never mind that the attacker came from Britain, not Afghanistan. Never mind that he was not a refugee. Never mind that Jews are some of the staunchest supporters of refugee admittance in the country, owing to our own experiences as refugees after the Holocaust.

There are also problems like this on the left, albeit less common among mainstream political figures.

Incidents of anti-Semitic violence are mourned and then swiftly deployed in partisan politics, turned into a brief against MAGA America, rather than serving as an opportunity to confront the way many progressives fail to take anti-Semitism seriously as a form of structural oppression. Similarly, Jewish concerns about anti-Israel rhetoric crossing the line into anti-Semitism are ignored or even dismissed as smear jobs. I have had brutal, sometimes even angry conversations with progressive friends and acquaintances on this very topic.

The throughline here is that Jews dont own their stories; that anti-Semitism means what others want it to mean. And thats when people pay attention to anti-Semitism at all, which they often do not except for the few days after incidents like Colleyville.

A common refrain from Jews I know during and after the Colleyville standoff was a sense of total alienation, that they were glued to their phones and TVs while most others had no idea that American Jews were in crisis. It wasnt that we had been made into object lessons for others, at least not yet; it was that our suffering was barely worth noticing.

What American Jews need from mainstream American society right now is to be listened to, for our fears about rising anti-Semitism to be heard and, once heard, taken seriously on their own terms.

This does not require the false assumption of a monolithic Jewish community, where all of us agree on how to tackle anti-Semitism. What it does require is a mental reorientation among Americas non-Jews: a willingness to reckon with the fact that anti-Semitism remains a meaningful force in American society, one that requires a response both unfamiliar and politically uncomfortable.

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The world has moved on from Colleyville. American Jews cant. - Vox.com

Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently – The New York Times

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Dont put me on the McDonalds takeout window, Temple Grandin said over Zoom from her home in Fort Collins, Colo. Not going to do very well there cant multitask, cannot follow long strings of verbal instruction. Its a little humbling to hear what Grandin says she cant do, considering how insubstantial it is compared with what she can do and has done. The author, scientist and Colorado State University professor is as responsible as anyone for broadening our understanding of autism, through her tireless lecturing and the many books she has written on the subject. (Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism, published in 1995, is the classic.) Grandin, who is 74, also helped transform the meat industry through her design of more humane handling systems for livestock. Though she has been so influential on how we think and feel about autism and animal welfare, its the more tangible things that matter most to her. I am interested in my practical projects, Grandin says. Where I can actually do stuff.

During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about whos vaccinated and whos not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. Thats all Im going to say.

Well, if its OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if youll answer or not. Thats a subject where thats pretty much all Im going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I dont have to worry about going to the hospital. Ill leave it at that.

In the past, youve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines because of No comment.

Is it your understanding that the concern that certain parents have with vaccines is No comment.

OK, Ill move on for now. Youve written so much about being a visual thinker. How does a thinker like yourself think about moral problems, which often begin as abstractions? I have to convert it to a picture with a specific example. As Ive gotten older and loaded more and more pictures into my mental database, then I can search that database sort of like Google for images. So when I think about moral things, I see them as little video clips. Now lets explain how I categorized things as a young child. Lets take dogs versus cats: All the dogs in my neighborhood when I was 4 years old were large. I sorted horses, dogs and cats by size. But when a dachshund came into the neighborhood, I could no longer sort dogs by size because it was smaller than the other animals Id sorted as dogs. I had to find other sensory-based features that dachshunds shared with dogs: barking, nose shape, smell. I had to use the different criteria to put the dachshunds in the dog category. Id like to talk now about three kinds of thinking: Theres an object visualizer like me, who thinks in photorealistic pictures; then the other kind of thinker is the visual spatial, pattern thinker; then of course youve got your verbal thinkers. One of the big problems with verbal thinkers is they tend to overgeneralize. Theyll talk about some concept like an inclusive classroom, but theyll have absolutely no idea of How do I implement that?

Temple Grandin in 1993. Laura Wilson

On the idea of moral questions and visual thinking: Youve been asked a million times about the morality of someone like yourself, whos concerned with animal welfare, being part of the meat and poultry industry. Ive done a lot of thinking about that.

I understand how one could visualize something like a more humane slaughterhouse. But how do you visualize the moral aspect of something that might be harder to see, like, say, the negative ecological impacts of the industry? Ive been thinking about that very much. About four years ago, I went to a really important departmental seminar, and we had an older agronomist, a crop person, come talk to all the livestock people in our department, and he told me something that was a game changer on how I thought about things. I learned that the animals made some of the best crop land. If you do grazing wrong, it wrecks land. If you do grazing right, you actually improve the soil health and improve the land, and you can also sequester carbon. Also, theres research on things like seaweed that you can feed cattle to reduce the methane they put out. Now, thats not going to be sustainable youd strip the oceans of seaweed if you did use that but we need to find out whats in the seaweed, and then you could probably manufacture that ingredient. The other thing we need to think about on sustainability with some of these plant-based burgers is that they have a whole lot of ingredients different grains, peas, stuff like that. Each one of those ingredients has a supply chain, and that involves diesel-powered trucks and equipment to harvest that crop, grow that crop. Some of that could get unsustainable.

Do beef manufacturers have enough incentive to change to more sustainable behaviors? I learned a long time ago the importance of economic incentives. Some of the first research I did was on bruising. What I learned from that is if you had the wrong economic incentives, you had more bruises. If you had the right economic incentives, you reduced the bruises. I dont like to I have a no politics policy, so Im not going to get into specifics, but the United States and other countries have subsidies that motivate practices that are not sustainable. Ill leave it at that.

Im not going to ask you the specifics of your politics Im not getting into politics.

But given that politics touches everything, what does it mean to have a no politics policy? And why have it? Because politics interferes with the stuff I care about. Right now, at the age of 74, one of the big things I care about is I want to see the kids who think differently having successful careers, successful lives. Im seeing a lot of parents that overprotect their kid. Theyve got a 16-year-old who might be doing well in school, but he has never gone shopping. Youve got to get them out doing things. Thats stuff I care about.

Do you find politics too abstract? One of the things that bothers me is when its all gobbledygook, because theyre not talking about how youre actually going to fix something. Like when they had the power failures in Texas, they just talked gobbledygook. My approach to that and I know a lot about equipment is I would visit each of those power plants and find out exactly what froze. I wouldnt be fighting over who owns them, because I only have one goal: I dont want that mess to happen again. But I dont want to talk to suits. Get me alone down in the maintenance shop in that plant, and Ill find a guy who will sing to me. Hell tell me everything. As soon as the suit walks in the room, that guy will clam up because hes afraid hell get in trouble. Ive got to talk to the good technical people. Theyll tell me whats wrong, and they cant tell me much abstract BS.

What about when people talk about issues of race or polarization? Is that abstract? I try to figure out specific ways to solve something. One of the things thats really shocking is the rsum studies. You put different names on them, and theyre not called back for interviews. Its disgusting. Ill discuss that because thats hard scientific data that is specific, and I can look those papers up on Google Scholar.

There are specific studies debunking the idea that vaccines have a causal relation to autism, right? No comment. No comment. No comment.

You dont think it could be useful for people to hear your opinion? No comment. No comment.

I got it. You better get it. Because Im not discussing it.

Have you gotten in trouble for talking about this subject before? No comment. Ive had my two Pfizer shots and my booster. If they require a fourth shot, Ill be first in line, thank you.

I was just reading about how nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of the cattle industry. Do you think we should be moving toward a future where we eat less beef? One of the things we need to be doing is reducing food waste. The amount of food that we throw out is absolutely disgusting.

And reducing food waste would be a sufficient counterbalance? Its certainly going to help. Theres simple ways you can reduce it. A lot of university cafeterias got rid of giving you trays, because if you put your food on trays, you take more stuff and waste more stuff. But, you know, theres methane emissions, but there are also carbon emissions, and the power plants and transportation put out the most carbon emissions.

Grandin teaching at Colorado State University in 2010. William A. Cotton/Colorado State University

Do you feel protective of the beef industry? I want to work on improving the beef industry. The work that probably brought about the greatest change was when I worked with McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys on implementing auditing and inspection of plants. I developed a simple scoring system, and the plants had to get acceptable scores on things like electric-prod use, stunning. When you have a big buyer insist on standards, I dont care what industry youre in, that can bring about great change. Thats also something thats a doable project. I avoid the vague things because they interfere with doable projects like my audits that brought about a big change. I dont want talk. I want measurements. Something I can observe with my eyes.

Youve had such success conveying your experience of autism to neurotypical people. Are there aspects of your autism that you feel you havent been able to convey? Thats too vague a question for me to even begin to answer.

In Oliver Sackss New Yorker profile of you, its evident that your search for meaning in life was driven by anxiety and fear. Why those emotions? I think Ive got that simplified now: The meaning of life is if something that you did made something better. Like, I get an email from a parent: Thank you so much. My kid is employed now because I read one of your books. That is a little piece of the meaning of life right there. Thats something that I did. I also think, having spent so many years in heavy commercial construction, its about finishing a project and making it work. I take that same approach to working with some of these autistic kids. If a smart autistic kid ends up on a disability check playing video games all day, thats a failed project compared with, lets say, he could learn a skilled trade and now owns a metal fabrication shop.

A handful of times now, Ive asked you sort of philosophical questions, and each time your answer was about a practical, tangible thing. I understand thats what Thats what I do.

Thats what you do. But Im interested in knowing whether you see any interrelationship between the philosophical and the practical because Im going to just talk about the practical.

But isnt the philosophical what helps determine how practicality is put to use? For example, making the philosophical determination that animals should be treated with respect then drives practical decisions about their treatment. Does that make sense to you? All right, Im going to give you an example: I got my brand-new copy of Nature that I like for my breakfast reading. I was looking at a complicated article about superconductors that can be used in computers. Ive read a lot of articles on batteries, and there are issues with mining rare earth metals to make batteries. Now, theres research going on where we could make some of these things out of easy-to-get materials like iron, for example. Im putting something thats more philosophical together with an engineering thing: If you can make batteries out of easy-to-get stuff, then it solves a lot of problems with mining rare earths where its likely to cause social-justice issues.

Do you feel social-justice issues are intrinsically important? Yes, they are important, but I want to avoid the politics. Ill give an example of a social-justice thing I totally believe in: We use DNA testing to prove that a prisoner did not do a crime. Thats a practical application of something that involves social justice.

Might there be impractical applications of social justice? Theres all kinds of theories that dont work. Id rather talk about stuff we know works.

I realize that maybe earlier I should have just asked this question bluntly: Do you believe vaccines can cause autism? Im not discussing that. I will give you one thing about vaccinations: I listened to the news, and a doctor was complaining about having heart-attack patients die because they could not get into the emergency room because the hospital was so full of unvaccinated Covid people. And then I talked to this person that was not vaccinated about, you know, maybe all these people filling up this hospital killed some heart-attack patients. He said, I never thought about that. That I will talk about.

But why not vaccines and autism? I dont want to talk about that.

Im curious about your reluctance. Im not discussing it.

OK. There are certain things I dont talk about because it interferes with stuff I care about. Its that simple.

Going back to that Oliver Sacks profile: You didnt give an answer for why it was fear and anxiety that motivated your search for meaning. When I was young, I was totally driven by anxiety. I found out my amygdala was three times bigger than normal. Ive been on antidepressant medication, an old form called desipramine, since 1980, and it stopped all that anxiety, that frenzied looking for the meaning of life. That made the frenzy go away. I have done some of my best work when it comes to design after I went on that drug. I just visited one of my projects: Its over 35 years old, and Im so pleased. None of the gates are broken off got the best gate hinges in the industry. Yeah, Im proud of that.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

Opening illustration: Source photograph by Matthew Eisman/Getty Images

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate goal of parenting and Tiffany Haddish about Gods sense of humor.

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Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently - The New York Times

This Crypto Will Be the Ethereum of 2022 – Motley Fool

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Several cryptocurrencies are emerging to take on the king of the hill, Bitcoin. Ethereum's (CRYPTO:ETH) trading price rose 408% in 2021.Investors like Ethereum as a viable competitor to Bitcoin because of its faster transaction speeds and its large ecosystem ofdecentralized applications (dApps), which are programs that run on blockchains.

But there is another up-and-coming crypto starting to show promise. NEAR Protocol (CRYPTO:NEAR) rose 984% last year.This layer-one blockchain offers similar benefits in transaction speeds and utility value as Ethereum,but with much greater upside potential. Let's check it out.

Image source: Getty Images.

The entire crypto market is currently worth just over $1.5 trillion.If you're looking for a relatively safe but strong performer that can multiply your original investment, I would look at smaller blockchains that are seeing price momentum supported by a growing developer community.

NEAR currently has a market cap of $6.2 billion. It could rise 42-fold in value, and it would still only match Ethereum's current market cap of $268 billion.

On the other hand, if Ethereum increased 42 times in value, it would command a market cap of over $11 trillion, which is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Supporting the upside case for NEAR are some key developments in the past year that are starting to attract investor interest.

It can take six minutes to finalize a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, but NEAR can currently process up to 1,000 transactions per second and has the potential to reach 100,000 per second.

NEAR uses a technology called sharding, which fundamentally makes it faster than Ethereum.With Ethereum, every transaction must be processed through every node in the network, which slows it down. But with sharding, the work is split among different nodes, so transactions can be processed much faster.

The NEAR Foundation says the rollout of its Simple Nightshade sharding mechanism will make its blockchain "super-fast, incredibly secure, and capable of onboarding millions of users into the world of Web3 without skipping a beat."

In the same announcement, NEAR disclosed that only 13% of the network was being used in mid-November of 2021, but the NEAR team said that the average number of daily transactions had risen to more than 300,000, with "more and more projects building" on the blockchain.Prices of cryptocurrencies tend to follow growth in developer projects, so this is a strong indicator of where NEAR might be heading.

NEAR has one of the fastest-growing developer communities, and that's being validated by a rising value in the market. I believe it's a promising cryptocurrency to buy with higher upside than Ethereum in 2022.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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This Crypto Will Be the Ethereum of 2022 - Motley Fool

Down 67% from high! Are golden days of this ‘Ethereum Killer’ over? – Economic Times

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New Delhi: The recent crypto market crash has dragged a number of cryptocurrencies sharply lower, with many of them trading at less than half their prices from peaks.

One such example is Solana, which enjoyed the title of 'Ethereum Killer' till a few weeks ago. But now, it has lost its mojo.

The digital token has slipped down to the eighth spot among the largest crypto tokens from the fifth position earlier. It has lost two-thirds of its value from the peak of $260 hit last November. The crypto-token was trading around $86.5 on Monday. In the last 24 hours, Solana has tanked more than 17 per cent with its traded volume down about 25 per cent in the given period. The volume in this token has remained low off late.

Shivam Thakral, CEO of BuyUcoin, a homegrown cryptocurrency exchange, said Solana network faced a major outage and was down for almost 48 hours. "The issue was resolved on Sunday but the damage was already done as Solana witnessed heavy liquidations," he said.

Vikas Ahuja, CEO of CrossTower India said that the instability issue was experienced by validators and also many excessive duplicate transactions were noticed according to a notice on the Solana website on January 22.

A point to observe is that Solana has not created a new defined low from a high time frame perspective, indicating that buyers are getting active and preventing a further decline, said Raj A Kapoor, Founder, India BlockChain Alliance.

OUTLOOKSolana could drop to the $78-80 range if the crucial supports are breached and the present signals suggest that the market is headed for the same, thanks to the extremely volatile crypto space, said experts.

However, they said that investors with a 2-3 year horizon will always make a profit in the crypto market. Solana is an attractive buying option at $60-70, they added.

Kapoor of India Blockchain Alliance refrained from giving a long-term estimate but advised to stay invested in the token and buy it on dips.

Currently, Solana is commanding a market cap of little more than $27.3 billion, which was around $80 billion during its golden days. Its market cap is marginally ahead of Terra ($25.5 billion).

Gaurav Dahake, Co-founder & CEO, Bitbns said the overstressed beta version is one of the reasons for this fall in Solana and is expected to be resolved in a short time. Although there is more to be expected in terms of price going downwards, he said.

Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technologys permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions.

The idea and initial work on the Solana project began in 2017 and the token was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Solana is a layer 1 token which is the base layer for cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.

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Down 67% from high! Are golden days of this 'Ethereum Killer' over? - Economic Times

Ethereum Scraps "ETH 2.0" in Roadmap Rebrand – Crypto Briefing

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Key Takeaways

The Ethereum Foundation has rebranded the terms Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 in order to avoid future confusion. Going forward, they will be known as Ethereums execution layer and consensus layer, respectively.

In a Mondayblog post, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it would retire the terminologies ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 in favor of the terms execution layer and consensus layer.

The execution layerformerly known as Ethereum 1.0refers to the Proof-of-Work blockchain that is known today as Ethereum. The Proof-of-Stake Beacon Chain, which is intended to take over consensus processes after the merging of the two blockchains, will henceforth be known as the consensus layer. Taken together, they are to be known collectively as Ethereum.

The critical step in this direction will be the upcoming merge, a future upgrade in which the current Proof-of-Work chain will unite with the Proof-of-Stake Chain. It is scheduled tentatively in June 2022.

Proof-of-Stake is a consensus system requiring validators to stake their funds on the network to validate new transactions. Ethereums move from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake is intended to enable greater scalability and eventually lower transaction costs.

In the post, the team aired concerns that the existing terms, Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0, have the potential to confuse new usersit wrote that users intuitively think that Eth1 comes first and Eth2 comes after. Or that Eth1 ceases to exist once Eth2 exists. Neither of these is true. Per the team, after the upgrade takes place this year, there will no longer be two distinct networksor even conceptsof ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0. The two will simply be separate but integral components of the overall network known as Ethereum.

Another critical objective behind the rebranding was the prevention of scams. The team aims to prevent users from getting scammed by malicious entities who have taken advantage of the confusion created by the numerical names for Ethereum Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Such scams sometimes involve tricking users into believing they must migrate their ETH to ETH 2.0, resulting in lost funds.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and other cryptocurrencies.

The information on or accessed through this website is obtained from independent sources we believe to be accurate and reliable, but Decentral Media, Inc. makes no representation or warranty as to the timeliness, completeness, or accuracy of any information on or accessed through this website. Decentral Media, Inc. is not an investment advisor. We do not give personalized investment advice or other financial advice. The information on this website is subject to change without notice. Some or all of the information on this website may become outdated, or it may be or become incomplete or inaccurate. We may, but are not obligated to, update any outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate information.

You should never make an investment decision on an ICO, IEO, or other investment based on the information on this website, and you should never interpret or otherwise rely on any of the information on this website as investment advice. We strongly recommend that you consult a licensed investment advisor or other qualified financial professional if you are seeking investment advice on an ICO, IEO, or other investment. We do not accept compensation in any form for analyzing or reporting on any ICO, IEO, cryptocurrency, currency, tokenized sales, securities, or commodities.

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As of today, the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract contains about 9 million ETH, equivalent to about $30.2 billion. Users Stake $30 Billion For ETH 2.0 9 million ETH have been...

Ethereum has launched its Kintsugi testnet, the latest step toward replacing its Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism with Proof-of-Stake. Kintsugi Is a Step Toward Proof-of-Stake Ethereum Foundation member Tim Beiko posted today...

Vitalik Buterin has published a new piece addressing Ethereum gas fee markets. Specifically, he discussed launching a new multidimensional EIP-1559 update. Vitaik Buterin Makes New Ethereum Proposal Vitalik Buterin has...

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Crypto.com says hackers stole more than $30 million in bitcoin and ethereum – CBS News

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Crypto.com said Thursday that cybercriminals had breached its security systems earlier in the week and made off with more than $30 million in stolen bitcoin and ethereum.

The cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, known for its viral commercial starring Matt Damon as well as its recent $700 million deal to rename the Staples Center in Los Angeles as Crypto.com Arena, said the hackers managed to bypass its two-factor authentication system and withdraw the funds from 483 customer accounts, according to a statement the Singapore-based crypto exchange posted Thursday on its corporateblog.

"Unauthorized withdrawals totaled 4,836.26 ETH, 443.93 BTC and approximately US$66,200 in other currencies," the company said in the post.

That works out to around $15 million and $19 million in ethereum and bitcoin, respectively, based on current exchange rates. All customers have been "fully reimbursed" for any lost funds as a result of the hack, Crypto.com said.

The blog statement serves as a postmortem of the hack, which the company said happened Monday. It provides details of the event and the company's detection and response to the cyber breach, as well as its "next steps," but it does not offer information on the identity of the hackers behind the breach.

The timing of Crypto.com's public statement, a full three days after the hack, is viewed by many as belated confirmation. According to an article from CoinDesk on Wednesday, about 4,600 etherium that was reportedly stolen from Crypto.com was "currently being laundered via Tornado Cash an Etherium Mixer." Thursday's blog post also followed a Bloomberg interview Wednesday with Crypto.com Chief Executive Kris Marszalek, in which the CEO acknowledged that approximately 400 customer accounts were hacked.

"Given the scale of the business, these numbers are not particularly material and customer funds were not at risk," the CEO told Bloomberg.

The company first acknowledged something unusual was up in a January 16tweetin which it announced the temporary suspension of withdrawals following user reports of "suspicious activity on their accounts."

"We will be pausing withdrawals shortly, as our team is investigating. All funds are safe," the company said.

The company's claim that "All funds are safe" was quickly challenged by customers, most notably Los Angeles-based jeweler Ben Baller, who immediately tweeted back, "I messaged yah guys hours ago about my account having 4.28ETH stolen out of nowhere and I'm also wondering how they got passed the 2FA?"

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, is the multistep security system that requires users to provide two distinct forms of identification, such as a one-time passcode in addition to a password, when logging into an online account. The commonly used security measure provides an extra layer of protection against weak passwords such as, say, a surname followed by "123." While used by industries across the board, 2FA is considered a must for digital currency accounts. Monday's breach, however, brings into question the reliability of 2FA in keeping digital assets safe from hackers.

For now, Crypto.com says it is sticking with 2FA, but not for long.

Upon discovery of the breach, the company "revoked all customer 2FA tokens" and used the 14 hours of downtime from withdrawal activity to "revamp," according to the statement. Customers were then "migrated to a completely new 2FA infrastructure," as an additional security measure.

That is only temporary, however, as the company says it plans to ditch 2FA for "true Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), providing added strength for our global user base."

Shares of Crypto.com have fallen more than 6% since news of the security breach, closing Thursday at 46 cents a share.

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Experts React to the Feds Digital Currency Report and Falling Prices for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Heres What Investors Should Know – NextAdvisor

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Editorial IndependenceWe want to help you make more informed decisions. Some links on this page clearly marked may take you to a partner website and may result in us earning a referral commission. For more information, see How We Make Money.

Its official: The Federal Reserve is toying with the idea of issuing a U.S. digital currency.

In a long-awaited report released last week, the Fed explored the costs and benefits of a government-issued digital currency, but deferred a final decision on whether to move forward. Instead, the Fed is giving the public and other stakeholders until May 20 to share their input before taking further action.

Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are typically created within the private sector and regularly see big price swings, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be a digital form of cash thats issued and backed by Americas central bank. However, whatever move the Fed makes next could fortify cryptocurrencies or detract from their value, according to Grant Maddox, a certified financial planner and founder of Hampton Park Financial Planning based in South Carolina. It depends on the direction our government chooses to take, he adds.

The Fed was clear in the report that it wont proceed with the issuance of a CBDC without clear support from the executive branch and from Congress, ideally in the form of a specific authorizing law.

The Fed is attempting to be politically savvy as it weighs a digital dollar, says Salman Banaei, head of public policy in North America for crypto data firm Chainalysis. If the Fed had taken a clear stance on the matter, they would have gotten a lot of political pushback, says Banaei.

Hours after the reports release, and amid the stock markets worst week in nearly two years, Bitcoin and Ethereum saw significant drops. The prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum havent been this low since July.

There are two leading factors influencing the demand for crypto now: its value as an inflation hedge and its value as a risk asset, says Banaei. The perceived likelihood of a crypto future rises or falls based on regulatory risk too.

Heres what experts are saying about the report released this week, and what investors should make of it.

Point of view: Head of public policy in North America for crypto data firm Chainalysis

Reaction: What I was surprised by was how seriously the Fed took the notion of a CBDC. The crypto industry is excited to see that this is happening. A lot of the infrastructure that has been built to support the crypto industry could easily integrate the CBDC into existing providers. But the timeline for a CBDC is going to be far more extended I think its going to take two to four years before we get another major milestone.

Point of view: Host of the Unchained Podcast and author of The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

Reaction: Its not surprising that the Fed would be exploring a central bank digital currency because blockchain technology, although its still being developed, has many advantages over our current analog systems. Plus, it could help the US dollar maintain its global reserve currency status. It already looks like China could try to leverage its digital yuan to chip away at the USDs status as the global reserve currency. Its also not surprising that the Fed is not ready to announce any decision, but are currently just soliciting feedback, because a central bank digital currency raises a lot of questions about security and privacy, plus has the potential to disrupt existing financial institutions.

Point of view: CFP and founder of Hampton Park Financial Planning

Reaction: They are keeping up with the likes of China and others who have advanced in blockchain. A digital U.S. currency may allow for quicker payments to foreign allies, improving our geopolitical outlook. The move could improve monetary policy decisions by allowing for easier distribution. We join about 90 other countries reviewing this option. The addition could add additional complexity to our world markets and distract attention from the dollar.

Point of view: CFP and founder of Insight Financial Strategists

Reaction: Blockchain has plenty of applications that dont have to be a currency, so there are still plenty of things to do in the private sector. I firmly believe that no self-respecting government will give up control of its currencies to a private sector entity. Governments need to retain control of the money supply and of interest rates. Like it or not, these are major tools for managing economies. The U.S. is not the only country thinking of digitizing its currency. China is on its way, too, as are a number of other countries.

While there probably arent any immediate changes crypto investors should make based on the Fed report released this week, its a good reminder that policy makers are paying attention to how perceptions of crypto are taking shape.

The Fed move means that people who were thinking of crypto as actual currency are going to get their bubble popped, says Chen. Many Bitcoin types were thinking that it is a currency and that it would replace traditional currencies. Well, not if the Fed, the European Central Bank, and other central banks have anything to say about it.

The fundamentals of cryptocurrency investing remain the same. Experts say you should stick to the big two cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and only invest what youre OK with losing or no more than 5% of your total portfolio. Always prioritize important aspects of your finances, such as saving for emergencies, paying off high-interest debt, and saving for retirement, ahead of cryptocurrency investments. As for where you buy and trade crypto, stick with a mainstream, high-volume cryptocurrency exchange, like Coinbase or Gemini, that proactively complies with evolving federal and state regulators.

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Experts React to the Feds Digital Currency Report and Falling Prices for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Heres What Investors Should Know - NextAdvisor

Could Decentraland Boost Ethereum’s Valuation? – The Motley Fool

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ThisJan. 12edition of "The Crypto Show" on Backstage Passhighlighted an interesting discussion of whether Decentraland(CRYPTO:MANA) and other metaverse games could indirectly boost the value ofEthereum(CRYPTO:ETH).Fool.com contributors Chris MacDonald and Jon Quast took on this topic.

Jon Quast:I don't mean to put you on the spot here, but as far as the NFTs go, I know this can be built on various blockchains. Are these built on the Decentraland or is it built on something else like the Ethereum blockchain? I might be asking the wrong question here.

Chris MacDonald: Decentraland is built on the Ethereum blockchain. Each of these metaverse cryptocurrencies have different ways of transacting.

We're going to talk about The Sandbox (CRYPTO:SAND) in a second. But for The Sandbox, they have their own cryptocurrency SAND. We have to use SAND tokens to trade NFTs and with Decentraland, I'm actually not 100% sure. I think the transactions are done in Ethereum but I might be wrong on that. Viewers can correct me if I'm wrong, but it is built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Quast: As Decentraland is adopted, is this also good for Ether?

MacDonald: Well, that's one of the growth arguments for Ether and for the Ethereum network, in general, is that as these metaverse cryptocurrencies built on top of Ethereum, that the value of Ether should grow.

There's a theoretical valuation model, that a token is worth all of the sum aggregate value of all the applications built on top of its network. For Ethereum, projects like Decentraland are really important and we're seeing more interest in these projects. There's an indirect valuation argument that can be made for Ethereum as well for sure.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Could Decentraland Boost Ethereum's Valuation? - The Motley Fool