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-- J. R. R. Tolkien

News and Opinion

When There’s No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money

The trouble is that there’s no money in the pursuit of the good, and there’s no goodness in the pursuit of money.

If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit. They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to ensure the continuation of the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right. This is what that looks like.

Is it working?

Biden, Blinken & Austin Accused of Complicity in Israel's Gaza War Crimes; ICC Urged to Investigate

ICC urged to investigate Biden for ‘aiding and abetting’ Gaza war crimes

A US-based nonprofit organization has urged the international criminal court to investigate former president Joe Biden and two of his cabinet members for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The request, submitted by the Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) last month but made public by the group on Monday, urges the ICC to investigate Biden, as well as former secretary of state Antony Blinken and former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, for their “accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza”. ...

Dawn’s 172-page submission, which the group says was prepared with the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, alleges that the former US officials violated articles of the Rome statute, the court’s founding charter, in their support for Israel.

According to a press release, the group’s submission to the ICC lays out what it describes as a “a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public support to facilitate Israeli crimes in Gaza”, including “at least $17.9bn of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection, and official endorsement of Israeli crimes, despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses”.

One passage from the submission alleges that “by continuously and unconditionally providing political support and military support to Israel while being fully aware of the specific crimes committed by Netanyahu, Gallant, and their subordinates, President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and Secretary Austin contributed intentionally to the commission of those crimes while at least knowing the intention of the group to commit the Israeli crimes, if not aiming of furthering such criminal activity”.

Dawn’s executive director, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement that “not only did Biden, Blinken and Secretary Austin ignore and justify the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s grotesque and deliberate crimes, overruling their own staff recommendations to halt weapons transfers to Israel, they doubled down by providing Israel with unconditional military and political support to ensure it could carry out its atrocities”.

BREAKING: @SenSanders has just announced joint resolutions of disapproval to block Trump’s $8.56 billion weapons giveaway to Israel.

No more of our tax dollars for Israel’s genocide.

Congress must stand with the American people and stop these weapons. https://t.co/DVUVpSKoM7

— IMEU Policy Project (@imeupolicy) February 24, 2025

An Indifferent Media Is Failing to Report the 400,000 Dead in Gaza

Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.

The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.

Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage, boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.

Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:

“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations, World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization – while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be done.”

But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis, obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists, global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.

For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues, half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.

Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024, including 800 in one day.

Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S. co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”

Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or “animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).

Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”

In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records, we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over 400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.

At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II. This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia.

To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:

ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA

Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.

Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.

Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian civilians.

Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.

Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.

Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Forcible relocation of civilian population.

Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the importance of any legitimate military objective.

War of aggression against Gaza Palestinians.

Matt Hoh : US Pays for More Gaza Genocide

Gazans say Israeli ceasefire violations are meant to cause mass expulsion

Even though a ceasefire started just over a month ago, Israel is still working to make Gaza unlivable.

On Monday, the Gaza Government Media Office stated that only 30% of the supplies that were supposed to enter the strip in accordance with the ceasefire agreement have been let in. According to the agreement, Israel is supposed to let in 600 trucks of aid per day, including 50 trucks of fuel, and a total of 200,000 tents and 60,000 prefabricated mobile homes during the first phase of the ceasefire. The Government Media Office said that Israel has only let in 8,500 trucks out of the total 12,000 (in northern Gaza, only 2,916 instead of 6,000), less than half the intended number of tents, and only a handful of mobile homes.

The practical result of this policy is that, without the humanitarian aid stipulated in the ceasefire deal, Gaza remains uninhabitable. This has pushed some Palestinians to consider leaving Gaza until they are able to return. Hundreds of thousands have already fled to Egypt since the beginning of the war, and many more are looking to join them. Others, however, vow that they will not leave Gaza no matter what.

In October 2023, Israel’s initial goal for the war was to push Palestinians into the Sinai under the pretext of providing a “humanitarian corridor” for the civilian population. After Egypt refused to be complicit in the plan, the genocidal nature of Israel’s war took center stage.

But even after the ceasefire came into effect, Israel sought to continue the war through other means, intentionally stalling the delivery of humanitarian aid — in violation of the ceasefire’s terms — in order to keep living conditions in Gaza unbearable. The objective of this strategy is clear: to push Palestinians to abandon their homeland or die. The commonly applied euphemism for this process is “voluntary emigration.”

This is what led Hamas to suspend its intended release of Israeli captives last week, citing Israel’s systematic violations of the humanitarian protocols of the ceasefire. After receiving assurances from mediators that Israel would start letting in tents, mobile homes, and heavy machinery for the removal of rubble, Hamas proceeded to release the captives as planned. Since then, however, the amount of aid Israel has allowed to enter has not seen a substantial increase.

Israel DEMANDS ALL Of Southern Syria

Netanyahu Says Israel Won’t Allow Syrian Forces South of Damascus

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Sunday that Israel wouldn’t allow any Syrian forces to be in areas south of Damascus and said the Israeli occupation of southern Syria would continue for “an unlimited period of time.”

“Take note: We will not allow HTS forces or the new Syrian army to enter the area south of Damascus,” Netanyahu said, referring to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that took power in Damascus following the regime change that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.

“We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda from the forces of the new regime. Likewise, we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria,” Netanyahu added in comments he made while speaking at a ceremony for graduating IDF combat officers.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : The UN and Russia

Zelensky Pushes Back on Mineral Deal, Says Ukraine Not in Debt to the US

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back on the terms of the rare earth minerals deal that the Trump administration wants him to sign, insisting Ukraine was not in debt to the US.

President Trump has previously said that he wants a deal with Ukraine that would give the US access to about $500 billion in Ukrainian rare earth minerals and other natural resources.

“Let’s first clarify the $500 billion figure. I know that we had $100 billion [in US aid provided to Ukraine], and that’s a fact. But I’m not going to acknowledge $500 billion, regardless of what anyone says, with all due respect to our partners,” Zelensky told reporters at the “Ukraine Year 2025” forum.

The Ukrainian leader also said he was not prepared to pay back the $100 billion because President Biden and Congress agreed to provide the aid as grants, not loans that would be paid back.

U.S. ADMITS Russia Was Provoked Into Invading Ukraine! w/ John Mearsheimer

Trump says Putin will accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine

Donald Trump has said the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, would accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a potential deal to end the three-year war. The US president was speaking alongside the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the White House on Monday as the leaders sought to smooth over a transatlantic rift to achieve peace.

But the meeting came as the US voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, siding with North Korea, Belarus and other Russia-aligned countries over European allies. Democrats branded the move a “disgrace”

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Macron said Europe was prepared to provide security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire including peacekeepers, although they would not be sent to the frontline. Trump said he saw no objection to European troops being sent to Ukraine to serve as peacemakers, adding that he had raised the idea with Putin. “Yeah, he will accept it,” the US president said. “I’ve asked him that question." ...

At a joint press conference in the East Room, he told reporters. “It’s time to end this bloodletting and restore peace. We’ve had some great conversations, including with Russia … Our focus is on achieving a ceasefire as soon as possible and ultimately a permanent peace.” The US president claimed he had made more progress in the past month than was made in the previous three years. “I believe that Emmanuel agrees with me on many of the most important issues,” he said. “Europe must take a central role in ensuring the long-term security of Ukraine.”

Macron responded that he thought he and Trump had “made very substantive steps forward” in their discussion but stressed that peace “must not mean a surrender of Ukraine or ceasefire without guarantees”.

Zelensky trainwreck media show. EU promises to cover Ukraine costs

UN general assembly backs resolution condemning Russia for Ukraine war

The United Nations general assembly has backed a resolution drafted by Ukraine and the European Union condemning Russia on the third anniversary of its full-scale invasion, spurning a rival US resolution reflecting Donald Trump’s split with Europe and growing union with Vladimir Putin.

The United States, Russia, Belarus and North Korea all voted against the EU-Ukrainian resolution underlining an extraordinary shift in US policy since the US president’s election that has largely absolved the Russian president of responsibility for the invasion.

In the vote, 93 countries supported the joint European resolution that named Russia an aggressor state and called on it to remove its troops from Ukraine, while 18 countries including the US and Russia voted against. ...

The UN votes on Monday were mostly symbolic. The US resolution was three paragraphs long and did not include any mention of Russia aggression, saying it “implores a swift end to the conflict and further urges a lasting peace between Ukraine and the Russian Federation”. The Russian ambassador to the UN had called the US resolution a “good move”.

The US sought a “simple, historic statement from the general assembly that looks forward, not backwards”, said Ambassador Dorothy Shea, the US chargé d’affaires at the UN. “A resolution focused on one, simple idea: ending the war. A path to peace is possible.

US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers

The US government’s human resources office has walked back an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk that would have forced its workers to resign if they did not submit a bullet-point list of their recent accomplishments, in one of the first signs of internal pushback to the Tesla billionaire’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce.

The demand, made in an email sent to million of government employees over the weekend and quickly sued over by a coalition of labor and advocacy groups, represented the latest salvo by the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the Trump-sanctioned cost-cutting initiative Musk chairs.

But in the days that followed, government departments gave their employees differing instructions as to whether they should respond to the message, and by Monday the office of personnel management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce, announced that responding to the email is not mandatory and that failing to do so by midnight would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had warned.

Musk, however, continued to insist that workers will be expected to respond or they will lose their jobs. “Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk said on Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the day Donald Trump had spoken in support of the demand. “By asking the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working?” the president said. “They’re trying to find out who’s working for the government, are we paying other people that aren’t working, and … where’s the money going.”

Judge blocks Musk agency access to millions of Americans’ personal data

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans, dealing a quick blow to the second Trump administration’s controversial government downsizing goals.

According to court filings on Monday, US district judge Deborah Boardman ruled that the Department of Education and office of personnel management – the government’s HR department – must stop sharing federal employees’ and student borrowers’ personal data with Doge officials, stating that such access appears to violate federal privacy laws.

“This continuing, unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiffs’ sensitive personal information to Doge affiliates is irreparable harm that money damages cannot rectify,” said a 33-page ruling from Boardman, who was appointed to the federal judiciary by Joe Biden’s presidential administration.

The two-week restraining order came in response to a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions, student loan recipients and veterans. While technically applying only to the plaintiffs, the ruling in effect creates a broad ban on Doge’s access to personal data, including social security numbers, tax information and other sensitive records.

US supreme court rejects anti-abortion challenges to clinic ‘buffer zones’

In a loss for abortion opponents, the US supreme court on Monday declined to take up two cases involving “buffer zone” ordinances, which limit protests around abortion clinics and which anti-abortion activists have spent years trying to dismantle.

The two cases dealt with buffer zone ordinances passed by the cities of Carbondale, Illinois, and Englewood, New Jersey. In filings to the supreme court, which is dominated 6-3 by conservatives, anti-abortion activists argued that these ordinances ran afoul of the first amendment’s guarantees of free speech. They also asked the justices to overturn a 2000 ruling called Hill v Colorado, which upheld a buffer zone law in Colorado.

The justices didn’t explain why they declined to hear arguments in the cases, but the far-right justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have preferred to take them up. In a dissent outlining his desire to take the Carbondale case, Thomas wrote that he believed Hill “lacks continuing force”, in part due to recent rulings such as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the federal right to abortion.

“I would have taken this opportunity to explicitly overrule Hill,” he wrote. “Following our repudiation in Dobbs, I do not see what is left of Hill. Yet, lower courts continue to feel bound by it. The court today declines an invitation to set the record straight on Hill’s defunct status.”

"No Public Oversight": Private Company Running Guantánamo Immigrant Jail Accused of Rights Abuses

Outcry as DC US attorney claims he and colleagues are ‘President Trump’s lawyers’

The interim US attorney for Washington DC Ed Martin has explicitly declared himself and other federal attorneys to be the president’s lawyers rather than an independent, law-abiding officer sworn to uphold the constitution. “As President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first,” the US attorney’s office posted in a image on X, signed by Martin.

The statement directly contradicts the federal oath of office Martin swore, which requires attorneys to “conduct myself uprightly and according to law” and “support the constitution of the United States” – with no mention of personal loyalty to any president.

This post follows a pattern of controversial actions by Martin, who recently promised the billionaire Elon Musk he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work” related to Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. Without filing any charges, Martin claimed his office had evidence people “committed acts that appear to violate the law” against Musk’s initiative.

Antioxidants in fruits and flowers seem to counteract harmful effects of microplastics, study shows

Antioxidants that give fruits and flowers their vibrant colors seem to counteract some of the most dangerous reproductive system effects of exposure to microplastics, such as decreased fertility, and could ultimately be used in developing treatments, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The paper focused on microplastics’ reproductive toxicity and plant compounds called anthocyanins, which are widely found in nuts, fruits and vegetables. The new review of scientific literature on anthocyanins found that the compounds are probably protective against a range of plastic-induced impacts on hormones, reductions in testosterone and estrogen, decreased sperm counts, lower sperm quality, erectile dysfunction and ovarian damage.

“The search for natural compounds to counteract these harmful effects is ongoing, with anthocyanins emerging as a promising candidate,” wrote the study’s authors, who are with the Finland-China Food and Health Network. “[Anthocyanins] have demonstrated potential protective effects against reproductive toxicity induced by microplastics.” ...

In males, many of the problems stem from microplastics ability to cross the blood-testis barrier, which can cause inflammation in tissue. Some anthocyanins have been shown to improve sperm count, testes weight and spermatogenesis – a critical step in sperm development – by protecting the integrity of the blood-testis barrier, which prevents microplastics from getting in tissue.

Trump ABANDONS West Virginia After Devastating Floods

Most conservation funds go to large vertebrates at expense of ‘neglected’ species

Most global conservation funds go to larger, charismatic animals, leaving critically important but less fashionable species deprived, a 25-year study has revealed. Scientists have found that of the $1.963bn allocated to projects worldwide, 82.9% was assigned to vertebrates. Plants and invertebrates each accounted for 6.6% of the funding, while fungi and algae were barely represented at less than 0.2%.

Disparities persisted among vertebrates, with 85% of all resources going to birds and mammals, while amphibians received less than 2.8% of funding. Further funding bias was found within specific groups such as large-bodied mammals towards elephants and rhinoceros. Although they represent only a third of that group, they were the focus of 84% of such conservation projects and received 86% of the funding.

Meanwhile mammals such as rodents, bats, kangaroos and wallabies remained severely underfunded, despite being considered endangered. “Nearly 94% of species identified as threatened, and thus at direct risk of extinction, received no support,” said Benoit Guénard, the lead author of the study. “Protecting this neglected majority, which plays a myriad of roles in ecosystems and represents unique evolutionary strategies, is fundamental if our common goal is to preserve biodiversity.”

Alice Hughes, a coordinating lead author of the research, said: “The sad reality is that our perception of ‘what is threatened’ is often limited, and so a few large mammal species may receive more funding than the near-12,000 species of reptile combined.”

“Not only does this limit our ability to implement protective measures, but it closes opportunities to researchers. I have lost count of the number of times collaborators have switched taxa [organism populations] purely because theirs was difficult to fund. This leads to a chicken and egg situation – some of the groups with the highest rates of recent extinction, like freshwater snails, have the most outdated assessments.”

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The Global Spread of Palestine’s Agony

Germany’s Merz Is A Moron, But At Least He’s Got Some Guts

Germany Holds an Election in an Alternate Reality

Elections In Germany: "Erst kommt das Fressen ..."

'Hell No!' Postal Workers Protest Illegal Trump Takeover Scheme

Hawaii man freed after 30 years in prison due to new DNA evidence

Elimination of federal climate tools, some used to inquire in to Musk’s firms, sparks alarm

Mars once had an ocean with sandy beaches, researchers say

Is The Right 'Creating A Monster' As A Result Of X's Lax Policies

Norman Finkelstein: Donald J. Trump, Mossad Conspiracies in Israel, and the Dying Left

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Is Trump Serious?

A Little Night Music

Roy Brown - Mighty Mighty Man

Roy Brown - Good Rockin' Tonight

Roy Brown - Hard Luck Blues

Roy Brown - Mr. Hound Dog's In Town

Roy Brown - Cadillac Baby

Roy Brown - Butcher Pete

Roy Brown - Black Diamond

Roy Brown - Boogie At Midnight

Roy Brown - Gal From Kokomo