There are about 3X as many white women as black in the US but white women get 8X as much for donated eggs and Diane M. Tober in
"Eggonomics" suggests wealthy people looking for specific traits has gotten to the point of being eugenics.
The World Health Organisation, the last major body to accept that COVID-19 was a pandemic, is out in front extending its highest emergency level over, of all things, monkeypox.
We now know WHO held off on declaring COVID-19 an emergency because former President Donald Trump said it was an emergency and we should cut travel from China. Then he instructed FDA to prepare emergency use authorization standards for a vaccine they believed the private sector could create fast if government got out of the way.(1)
Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west?
See: I was a Virgo this morning, now I am a Leo! I totally feel different.
If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.
Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around like you can in Cappadocia. That is the case with the Göbekli Tepe temples in southern Turkey. It was inhabited in neolithic times and is ground zero in the culture wars over whether agriculture begat civilization or the other way around. Archaeological evidence shows they processed grain there, for example, but not that they grew it.
Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)
During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.
They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.