Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a very deceitful answer to a question about Biden-Blinken waiving sanctions against Nord Stream 2 pipeline and its CEO. He referred to the CEO of Nord Stream as “a German individual” and Nord Stream 2, owned by Russia’s Gazprom, as “a Swiss company”. (See ca 4 minutes: https://youtu.be/OWkit5zeK3g ). Gazprom is majority Russian government owned. Permit requests for the pipeline actually started in 2012, during the Obama-Biden administration.
Nord Stream 2 is a Russian government owned and controlled (Gazprom subsidiary) company registered in Zug, Switzerland, so Sullivan says that they waived the sanctions on a Swiss company. Zug is well known for postal box companies. Here is the registration: https://www.zefix.ch/en/search/entity/list/firm/1229955
Sullivan’s gall is appalling.
He refers to Nord Stream’s CEO – former East German Stasi spy and friend of Putin from his KGB days – Matthias Warnig as “a…
Special diet: gluten-free, nut-free, soy-free, vegan
Bursting with flavor from fresh herbs, cinnamon, and cumin, this vegan shredded carrot and orange salad is easy to make in 15 minutes. It’s light and refreshing and compliments a variety of dishes from rice pilaf to chickpea stew. Jump to:
Carrots often play a supporting role in soup, stew, and sauce recipes. But here they take center stage in this vibrant raw salad.
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Why you’ll love this recipe
You can make it in 15 minutes (or less, if you use store-bought shredded carrots).
The fragrant spices and fresh herbs impart delicious Moroccan-inspired sweet- and-savory flavors.
It goes with just about everything and can be made in advance.
Ingredients
Carrots: Purchase them pre-shredded or use a food processor or box grater to shred them yourself.
Oranges: Cut them into segments by removing the bitter white pith and chewy membranes.
Fresh cilantro
Fresh mint
Homemade dressing: Combine olive oil, juice from the oranges, ground cinnamon, ground cumin, pure maple syrup, and salt and pepper.
I like the use herb scissors with 5 blades to quickly and easily cut the fresh herbs. It even works well when the herbs are still wet from rinsing them.
Herb Cutter Scissors
5 Stainless Steel Blades
Safety Cover
Cleaning Comb
How to shred carrots
Use the large grate on a box grater: This method works best if your carrots are large. Peel the carrots and cut off the top and bottom tips. Shred the carrots over a cutting board or plate.
Use a food processor with the shredding blade: This is my preferred method. Peel the carrots, remove the ends, and half or quarter the carrots so that the pieces fit inside the cylinder of the food processor lid. Turn on the machine and push the carrots down against the shredding blade. Quick and easy!
Purchase pre-shredded carrots at the supermarket: This may be the most time-saving option. If the carrots appear a little dried out, place them in a colander and run cold water over them. If you have more than you need for this recipe, you can use the rest of the carrots in other salads. Or you can add them to pasta sauce, rice pilaf, or stir fry.
How to cut citrus into segments
Using a sharp paring knife, slice off the top and bottom of the orange.
Cut away the peel and white pith.
Hold the orange over a bowl and slice between the membranes. This will release the individual segments. Save the juice to use in the dressing.
For this recipe, if the segments are large, cut them in half so you end up with small chunks of orange.
Success tip
Reserve the juice that comes out of the orange when you are cutting it into segments and use it in the dressing.
For the complete list of ingredients with measurements plus recipe instructions, please see the recipe card at the bottom of this post.
Instructions
Making this salad is really easy. Simply mix the dressing ingredients in a small jar or bowl, pour them over the carrots, oranges, cilantro, and mint, and toss well to coat all the ingredients.
Serving suggestions
This salad goes well with just about everything from casual lunches to holiday dinners. And it’s a great choice for potlucks and picnics.
Leftover salad can be covered and refrigerated for up to 3 days. Toss to recombine the ingredients before serving. Do not freeze.
FAQ
Can I shred the carrots a day before making a salad?
Yes, you can shred the carrots and store them covered in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
How many carrots equal a cup?
Depending on the size of the carrots, 2 to 3 shredded carrots equal a cup.
Should I keep carrots in the fridge?
Yes, whole unpeeled carrots should be stored in the refrigerator in the product drawer. They will last up to a month.
What are orange segments called?
Another name for the segments after the bitter white pith and chewy membranes are removed is supremes.
What does Moroccan food taste like?
Moroccan cuisine uses a lot of fragrant spices like turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, paprika, and ginger. It has a lot of flavor but is mild rather than spicy “hot”.
▢ Combine the dressing ingredients in a small jar and shake well.
▢ Pour the dressing over the salad and toss well to coat. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.
Success tips:
To shred the carrots, use a food processor, box grater, or purchase pre-shredded carrots.
To cut the oranges into segments, use a paring knife to slice off the top and bottom of the orange. Then cut away the peel and white pith. Hold the orange over a bowl and slice between the membranes to release the individual segments.
Reserve the juice that comes out of the orange when you are cutting it into segments and use it in the dressing.
Storing:
Leftover salad can be covered and refrigerated for up to 3 days. Toss to recombine the ingredients before serving.
PLEASE KEEP CONTACTING YOUR SENATORS AND ASKING THAT THEY PROHIBIT ANY FEDERAL FUNDING OF THE ADOPTION INCENTIVE PROGRAM until a thorough investigation is completed. In addition we want you to know that Skydog is exploring legal options. These include the potential illegality of policy and protocol changes during the tenure of William Perry Pendley as the acting Director of the BLM. The lawsuit by Governor Bullock of Montana was successful and Pendley’s term deemed illegal. This raises the potential to overturn many policy changes. The AIP may be one of the programs that could face legal challenge.
Skydog Sanctuary started this petition to Animal lovers and wildlife rescuers
Skydog is a Wild Horse Sanctuary with ranches in California and Oregon for the rescue, rehabilitation and re-wilding of mustangs who have been rounded up from public lands across the American West. One year ago the Government Agency charged with managing and protecting these wild horses introduced an incentive plan offering people one thousand dollars for each horse or donkey they adopted.
One year later as the Bureau of Land Management heralds this program a success in press releases, we are seeing the same wild horses they paid people to take away, being dumped in Kill Pens in record numbers. These mostly young horses are being shipped to slaughter in Mexico and Canada one year after being rounded up from America’s public lands. This wild horse and burro program is broken and is complicit in sending wild horses to their deaths. The BLM is not doing any real tracking or follow-up to ensure the safety of our wild horses. This is one failure of their mandate under the law.
Please sign our petition urging the Bureau of Land Management to disband this terrible ADOPTION INCENTIVE PROGRAM – which is paying people to dump wild, untrained, young horses in Kill Pens. These horses and burros are federally protected and they need to be PROPERLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY managed on public lands by the BLM and the Department of the Interior. Current wild horse roundups should be halted until there is a successful program in place to adopt out the 50,000 horses already sitting in holding pens. Having lost their freedom and families they should not now also lose their lives.
STOP THE BLM ADOPTION INCENTIVE PROGRAM BEFORE ONE MORE HORSE SHIPS TO SLAUGHTER.
NOTE – Please do not donate on this page – the donation goes to Change.org not to help us fight this cause.
End Pandas YaYa & LeLe’s suffering and send them back home now!
In 2003, Giant pandas YaYa and LeLe travelled to Memphis Zoo in Tennessee US, as lovely, impressionable little furballs. After 18 years serving the zoo, today, they look extremely malnourished and sickly. YaYa, the female panda’s fur has been shedding profusely. Yet Memphis Zoo claims they are perfectly healthy.
I am asking you, my fellow animal lovers, to encourage the Memphis Zoo CEO Jim Dean to return YaYa and LeLe back to their hometown where food is abundant and medical care is accessible.
From 2007, the zoo performed 4 artificial inseminations on Yaya in 5 years, none of which were successful, possibly causing irreversible health damage to her. As early as 2008, YaYa was already shedding patches of fur. 13 years later, YaYa’s shedding has spread throughout her entire body.
Beijing Zoo has confirmed that as early as 2014, YaYa has parasite infections that are causing her skin disease. Yet Memphis Zoo continues to claim that YaYa has a seasonal hormone fluctuation that causes hair thinning and that she looks thin due to her small frame. They also told fans YaYa is just “not photogenic”. Both the Zoo and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums who credited the zoo stated that “she is perfectly healthy!”
Panda’s diet is 99% bamboo and only eat certain species. The Zoo only provide 4 species from its 10 acres bamboo farmfor BOTH pandas. Research has shown that at least 17 acres (100 mu) bamboo is sustainable for ONE panda.
The bamboo quality is also questionable, Yaya LeLe often rejected the bamboo provided. Even the panda in Toronto Zoo rejected the bamboopurchased from Memphis zoo.
YaYa and LeLe not only suffer physically from disease and hunger, which is already incredibly heartbreaking, they also suffer psychologically from being caged in a small “den” every day for up to 18-HOURS! In the past 4 weeks, YaYa was allowed to go outdoors only 4 times! Consequently, both YaYa and LeLe show severe signs of stereotypical behaviours, an irreversible mental impair caused by abnormal environment.
These unspeakable sufferings of YaYa and LeLe was not just a recent discovery but have lasted for more than a DECADE! Years of apparent neglect on pandas as well as other animals, and the lack of transparency seems to indicate that the zoo has little interest, if any, on animal welfare.
We ask you to encourage Memphis Zoo CEO Jim Dean to send YaYa and LeLe back to their homeland China immediately! They have already sacrificed their entire lives to entertain humans. Now they are senior pandas reaching to the end of their life span, YaYa and LeLe deserve a retirement life without sufferings!
Please sign and share this petition to help bring YaYa and LeLe one step closer to a healthier and happier life. On behalf of Yaya and LeLe, we sincerely thank you for your support!
For detail on YaYa and LeLe’s condition, please visit this article
For more ways to support the cause, please visit Pandavoices.org
*DISCLAIMER: Any monetary donation made when signing this petition goes to Change.org. We currently have no donation activities. All the information provided by Panda Voices and its affiliated media channels is published in good faith. We encourage viewers to exercise independent judgment and due diligence.
Roughly 4,500 years ago, some Mesopotamians living in present-day Syria decided to remodel and repurpose one of their community’s most prominent monuments: a rippled white dome that entombed the dead. For generations residents periodically climbed the monument’s exterior to pour libations and place offerings over graves beneath its surface. But the renovation around 2450 B.C. covered this communal space with earthen terraces, transforming the dome into a six-story ziggurat, or stepped pyramid. And those steps were packed with more than soil: The renovators also deposited assortments of human bones, skins from animals that drew wagons and two-inch-long clay bullets, handy for arming slingshot-like weapons.
These skeletons seem to have been fallen soldiers—wagon drivers and sling-shooters—exhumed and reburied to potentially create the world’s first military memorial, according to a study forthcoming in Antiquity. The Syrian site, known as the White Monument, could offer the best evidence yet that urban rulers wielded enough power to support standing armies by the third millennium B.C., in the Early Bronze Age. Unlike other tombs from the time, which included valuable metal weapons and jewelry, the remodeled White Monument contained partial skeletons of mostly adults and teens, buried with the ammo or animals needed for specific tasks in battle. Like the United States’ Arlington National Cemetery, the monument likely held soldiers, whose remains were retrieved from battlegrounds or other gravesites to be buried with co-combatants.
Such a massive memorial for battle-dead suggests the town had a standing army: “people who identify as soldiers, as opposed to people who go out and fight in the offseason or when someone’s attacking,” says Stephanie Selover, an archaeologist at the University of Washington who studies ancient warfare in nearby Anatolia, but was not involved in the study.
“The possibility of standing armies that are so controlled and centralized you’re even able to make a monument… There’s nothing else like this,” in the Early Bronze Age, she adds.
The monument would have served as a conspicuous reminder that leaders had the means to maintain and memorialize an army—a message that would have been received by locals as well as outside foreigners. “Burying these people in the sort of function that they would have had in a military is really a statement of power at that point, both locally and externally, because this thing was really visible for miles,” says University of Toronto archaeologist Anne Porter, lead author of the Antiquity study.
Prior to this research, scholars have found ample evidence for violence during the Early Bronze Age, including massacre sites and daggers tucked in graves. “Nothing makes this a particularly crunchy or peaceful time,” says Seth Richardson, a historian of the ancient Near East at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study.
But the idea that professional soldiers existed then mainly comes from inscriptions and artifacts, like the Stele of the Vultures, limestone fragments that once constituted a roughly six-foot-tall carving, made between 2600 and 2350 B.C. Discovered in the late-19th century at the Iraqi site of Tello, the stele depicted battle scenes including ranks of spear-totting soldiers in helmets. It also showed a haphazard assemblage of bodies, thought to be slain enemies, and a carefully piled stack of bodies, interpreted as the victor’s lost soldiers. Artistic works like the Stele of the Vultures “are the propaganda. You always have this mighty king smiting somebody, the little men behind him and then the enemy soldiers with their heads cut off. It’s very formulaic,” explains Selover. But if the researchers are right about the White Monument, it would be the first physical example of memorial mound for a victor’s fallen soldiers, depicted on carvings. A jar packed with about 100 beads was found in the White Monument.
The artifact likely was placed as an offering before the structure was repurposed for soldiers. (Euphrates Salvage Project)
In the 1990s, the White Monument bulged from cotton fields like a dune-colored cone. “It was just this huge pile of dirt,” recalls Porter. But when sunlight struck, the mound twinkled white—thanks to gypsum and marl used as building materials—and earned its moniker.
The gleaming dirt stood several hundred feet from a more sprawling ruin-layered hill, or tell. Porter’s team excavated both spots, and called the White Mountain, “Tell Banat North,” and the more expansive feature, “Tell Banat.” Though in the 20th century, Tells Banat and Banat North looked like two distinct hills, back in the third millennium B.C. they belonged to a single urban center, which spread over 70 acres. Within Tell Banat the archaeologists found the town itself, including buildings, streets, pottery workshops and a stone tomb. The White Monument, or Tell Banat North, was solely a burial monument, which loomed just beyond the city walls.
“Everywhere we put a pick and a trowel revealed something truly remarkable,” recalls Porter. The full area “was a site… that you could spend a lifetime working.”
Though they knew at the time that wouldn’t happen: The ancient settlement, along with more than a dozen other sites, was in the planned flood zone of the Tishreen hydroelectric dam, which was being built in the 1990s. Pressed for time and resources, the team unearthed and documented as much as they could—and moved the finds to a storehouse in Syria—before floodwaters engulfed the ancient sites as well as modern villages in the area. Porter and excavation codirector Thomas McClellan of the Euphrates Salvage Project witnessed the flood. “It was a really traumatic experience, watching the water rise and all these mudbrick villages collapsing,” says Porter.
For the next decade, the team examined skeletal remains and artifacts recovered from the site, until ISIS razed the dig’s storehouse. The militants obliterated ancient bones, pottery and other items, and reportedly dumped the debris into the river. “I don’t think there is anything to retrieve there,” Porter says, based on secondhand accounts of the attack.
Though the site and the finds are gone, the researchers have continued making discoveries from archival data, as all professional digs do. As excavations unfolded, archaeologists compiled meticulous notes, photos and spatial measurements, which documented how each find was positioned, relative to the surrounding sediment and architectural remnants. For this site, experts on skeletal analysis described and measured the human and animal bones recovered, before ISIS destroyed them. The data survived in published reports as well as unpublished notebooks, photographs, sketches and spreadsheets, kept with Porter in Canada.
Sussing patterns and meaning from this data is the behind the scenes work of real archaeology, which the public or beginning students rarely glimpse. Porter and her professional colleagues chipped away at the Tell Banat and Banat North records after the dig wrapped in 1999. Several years ago, she realized the work could provide a unique learning opportunity. “I really wanted to teach a class where students actually did what archaeologists do, rather than seeing the world’s greatest hits or all the pretty stuff,” she says.
In 2018 Porter taught a seminar called “Death on the Euphrates” at the University of Toronto. About ten undergrads set out to answer: Who was buried in the White Monument?
“They learned very quickly that the life of an archaeologist isn’t all glamour and Indiana Jones, and that it’s really very tedious work, a lot of the time,” Porter says.
Through the semester, she lectured about Mesopotamian culture, ancient mortuary practices and what was already known about Tell Banat and Banat North. At the same time, the students tried to understand the burials in the White Mountain, based on the notebooks, photos and other documents.
Alexandra Baldwin, a 2019 graduate who took the class, recalls her first day: “I walked in and there were just these enormous folders of all of the data. I had never seen anything like it.”
Porter figured the class would be a valuable learning opportunity. She didn’t expect the group to discover something new about the ancient Near East. The students mapped out the clusters of bones and grave goods in the White Monument and compared the contents of each deposit. Through discussions and comparisons with other sites, it became clear that the human remains were deliberately placed in a manner that changed over time. “There was a meaning behind that,” explains Brittany Enriquez, a student in the class who graduated in 2018. “It wasn’t like there was just stuff all through the dirt.”
The team’s analysis convincingly showed that the White Monument was really a series of tombs, built over several centuries. Like a Russian nesting doll, the ~2,450 B.C. final construction encased a prior monument erected between 2450 and 2,700 B.C., which contained a still older mound. Porter’s excavation reached the smooth, white surface of this third-inner monument, but the flood occurred before the team could dig its contents—and see if even earlier monuments nested within.
Enigmatic rituals took place at the middle monument. Its numerous tombs contained assorted bones from about two to five individuals, along with animal remains and pottery. The Banat morticians covered these modest graves with white gypsum, rammed into horizontal bands, which made the full monument look like a groomed ski hill. Later, the Banat individuals dug through the surface to bury more partial skeletons, possibly of ordinary residents, this time sealed with layers of plaster. They also seem to have left offerings, including beads, alabaster bowls, human shinbones and ritual libations—suggested from soak stains on the plaster.
A rammed gypsum and earth surface covered the burial mound that preceded the possible soldier memorial. (Euphrates Salvage Project)
According to the researchers, the monument’s last renovation around 2450 B.C. marked a drastic change: The communal tomb became a monument for slain soldiers. Within the added steps, the renovators buried at least 29 individuals in discrete patches with rings, figurines and other artifacts. In one corner of the monument most of the burials included skulls and appendages of donkey-like animals, probably interred as hides with heads and hooves still attached. These equids likely pulled battle wagons. In another corner, loads of clay bullets or pellets accompanied the human bones.
Those pellets “are the unsung heroes of the ancient near,” says Selover. Though the artifact has long puzzled scholars, evidence has mounted that, when shot from slings, they hailed down on foes and could be lethal. “It’s a really sophisticated weapon for being a very simple weapon,” she adds.
“The means of violence in deep antiquity didn’t need to be particularly scary by our standards to be effective by theirs,” explains Richardson. Even if some weapons were simple, and the monument only held a few dozen soldiers, it sent a message of might.
Given the scale of the renovations, it’s doubtful they came about in a grassroots fashion. Rather, the White Monument remodel suggests leaders around 2450 B.C. had enough authority within the settlement to take over a long-used community tomb and devote it to their soldiers. And at 72-feet-tall, the monument could be spied from afar, deterring potential invaders and raiders.
Former students Baldwin and Enriquez know that their take is one plausible interpretation of the available evidence, but that other explanations are possible. Still, Baldwin says she’s proud of their work, “sifting through all this material to leave a narrative… something probable that supports looking at the distant past with more depth and with more humanity.”
Watch this mom SCOLD her school board over its sex-ed curriculum.@RyanGirdusky tells @BuckSexton how @1776ProjectPac is leading the fight to take back our schools.
"Activating 5 percent of [conservatives] to get out & vote could drastically swing these school board elections." pic.twitter.com/hViEwzbmwh
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "...truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity--it is simply true and that is the end of it" - Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” - Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Following in the spirit of Britain's Queen Boudica, Queen of the Iceni. A boudica.us site. I am an opinionator, do your own research, verification. Reposts, reblogs do not neccessarily reflect our views.
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"OUR WORLD" 