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Showing posts from November 10, 2024

Trump's Second Term: Foreign Policy

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  Trump's Second Term: Foreign Policy Eric Striker Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign revived his 2016 outsider crusade against the Washington’s military adventures. In his latest run, the president-elect struck a remarkably sober tone on the many conflicts that have erupted in the last few years — which Jewish think-tanks  calmly dismiss  as baseless vote-getting — though he provided scant details on how he would approach Ukraine and the Middle East. The realities of America’s current geopolitical predicament were muffled under his questionable mantra that “no new wars” were prosecuted when he was in office. Buffing Trump’s everything-to-everyone shtick were a series of former left-wing anti-war influencers, such as Jimmy Dore, Dave Smith, and Tulsi Gabbard, who have in recent years hitched themselves to the MAGA wagon, citing the movements supposed non-interventionism as their reason. Perhaps Trump’s most audacious deception was his campaign’s outreach to the Arab community, led by the

Recent evolution of the ability to read and write

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  Recent evolution of the ability to read and write The Visual Word Form Area provides an interesting case of gene-culture coevolution. Written by Peter Frost. The Visual Word Form Area is a brain region that helps us recognize written words and letters. (We can read without it, albeit less easily.) When a man suffered an accidental lesion to his VWFA during brain surgery, he lost much of his reading ability but experienced no loss of object recognition and naming, face processing or general language abilities. Six months later he had partially recovered, but reading still took twice as long as it had before the surgery ( Gaillard et al, 2006 ). The VWFA is composed of neurons that were once used for face recognition: Thus, learning to read must involve a ‘neuronal recycling’ process whereby pre-existing cortical systems are harnessed for the novel task of recognizing written words. … [Such areas of the cortex] possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted