The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae: What You  Aren't Told About Traditional Diets Fermenting seals, botulism, ancestral foods and the use of decaying meat in prehistory Stone Age Herbalist Somewhere around 1950, botulism cases in Alaska began to trend upwards. The disease doesn’t wait long, and after about 15 hours or so the sufferer begins to rapidly lose control of their muscles, spreading downwards in a classic wave of paralysis. Curiously for health officials these new cases of botulism were affecting mostly the Inuit and other indigenous groups such as the Aleuts. Why would this be so? The culprits were eventually identified - putrid seal flippers, a beaver tail left to rot in a bag and then eaten, fermented fish heads buried in the ground. Who would eat this stuff, and why? The next few decades would see modern science come up against traditional circumpolar food knowledge and start to make sense of the problem. As we’ll see, diets around the world are nothing like as standa...

  Universal Basic Incompetence Simplicius Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published,  which you can find here . Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future. In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known  UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017 . The researchers aimed to answer a series...

  How a BRICS Trio Is Staring Down Israel Pepe Escobar   The Global Majority is fully aware that the genocidals in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. Contrast that combative mindset with 2,500 years of Persian diplomacy. Iran’s acting Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, has recently remarked how Tehran is trying hard to prevent “the Israeli regime’s ‘dream’ of triggering an all-out regional war.” But one should never interrupt the enemy when he is in total panic. Sun Tzu would have approved this maxim. Iran certainly won’t interfere as the US and G7 members pull out all stops to come up with some semblance of a Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel to prevent a serious military retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance. Earlier this week, that warning bore fruit: Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ahmed Abdel Hadi,  reported  yesterday that Hamas will not show up at the tentative...