Growing up and passing through the woefully inadequate Public School system, I was told that the far east was home to ancient civilizations with grand histories stretching back far, far into the past, being one of the cradles of civilization alongside Mesopotamia, the Nile, and the Indus valley. To little me, that sounded perfectly reasonable. Why not.
Of late, as I’ve continued to correct the shortcomings of my education, I’ve been somewhat shocked by the dates that are coming up in discussions of Asian history. It all seemed so… recent.
So, I began digging, looking to reconcile the information and find out what was true. As with all things historical and archeological, I had to contend with the fact that there are simply gaps in the record. To do my reconciliation of why East Asian history sounded so recent when I’d been assured it was as ancient as the other roots of civilization, I had to establish guidelines or criteria for what I’d regard as the ‘start’ of history in a region. This will be separate from whatever established academia has decided upon because, well, I’m not an academic, I’m just some guy trying to make the facts make sense. I’m going to go with the Greco-Roman idea of a civilization, as in city-builders.
So, What are these criteria? One, we have to have evidence people were there. Since people usually arrived in an area long before anything else in this list, this will be a given. Two, we need evidence that these people were not just transitory. That we’re not dealing with nomadic hunter gatherers who stop by every so often. Why? Because we need to filter out guys who aren’t keeping records. Which we’ll do more solidly with criteria three. Three, some record of the civilization having a degree of sophistication, either their own records or a contemporary account from another if the locals hadn’t developed or imported writing. Four, these sophisticated cultures are shown to be progressing into states with influence over a significant area.
Basically, I want something recognizable that would exclude the millennia of barbarians from which I claim my heritage.
That said, what benchmarks can I put down? Narmer unified upper and lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty sometime between 3275 BC and 2987 BC. Three hundred years is not very precise, but as a ballpark figure, it’ll do. By Narmer’s time, Egypt was settled, agricultural, town-building, and had a written language, otherwise, we’d not know his name. So Egypt easily gets into the Civilization club at an early date, as it crossed the benchmarks sometime in the predynastic era prior to Narmer. This is fairly uncontroversial, which is why I started here.
The city of Eridu near modern Basra is another data point. We can tell it was settled sometime around 5400 BC, but this predates writing, as proto-cuneiform only gelled into a script sometime around Narmer’s day. The younger city of Ur was settled around 3800 BC. But I did include writing in my criteria, so Mesopotamia gets a hard credit at 3300 BC, with the fuzzy date potentially predating predynastic Egypt, as they battle for the dates in the 5-6000s. Either way, both have what we can call ancient civilizations.
I am less well-read on the Indus valley than on any of the other regions we’ll discuss, but the numbers appear to be contemporaneous with our first two, settled agriculture popping up in the 5-6000s, and solid evidence of civilization meeting the criteria around the 3300. Since I’m more focused on East Asia’s odd numbers, I’ll leave this as a given unless I come across something that throws that into doubt.
So, our three archetypical ancient centers of civilization had the same general pattern of early agriculture and were well-established, city-building farmers with writing by 3300 BC. When we pivot to China, we get an interesting observation by the Chinese themselves. Gu Jiegang observed, “the later the time, the longer the legendary period of earlier history… early Chinese history is a tale told and retold for generations, during which new elements were added to the front end.” So we have texts telling of an exceedingly long history, but as we look at the earlier versions of those, the history doesn’t have so much history at the beginning anymore.
This is why I stipulated contemporary accounts for civilizations that didn’t leave text themselves. The earliest claimed Chinese Dynasty that is asserted as historical was never referenced in any of the writings of the people who supposedly supplanted them. The Xia Dynasty is first mentioned two Dynasties later as part of Zhou Dynasty propaganda to support their recent overthrow of the Shang. We know the Shang existed because we have bits of their own writing inscribed on various objects that included things like their own king list. But the Shang Dynasty is a bit of an awkward data point for Ancient China. Those with an interest in making China ancient can only push back the founding of the Shang to 1600 BC.
A date of 1600 BC is respectable, it’s fairly old. But you know what other civilization crossed the finish line for meeting my criteria around 1600 BC? The Olmecs.
Without the Xia, China is only Olmec old, and about two thousand years younger than the three archetypes. And evidence of the Xia is largely in documents from the Han Dynasty – written circa 200-300 BC. With no Shang records, and only an oblique propaganda reference from the Zhou, it’s looking like the Xia is fictional. Now, I’m not claiming there weren’t people there during the time prior to the Shang, we know there were. What I’m saying is that the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys looked a lore more like early predynastic Egypt and pre-Sumerian Mesopotamia. Lands of scattered agriculturalists still conglomerating into what would be recognized as a civilization.
Sure they grew crops, had their chieftains, and waged wars, but so did my Celt forebearers long before they had anything that fit the criteria for civilization we’re working from.
Earlier I used the phrase “Those with an interest in making China ancient”. This is because one of the confounding factors is political. There’s a lot of pressure to keep up the image of “oldest, greatest, first” among civilizations where an Olmec-peer start date would cost a lot of face. People who want to study the archeology can only access the sites and artifacts with the permission of the political party whose interest is in as ancient a China as possible. So, numbers get fudged. If there’s an error margin, put the oldest plausible date on it. If there’s a picture scribed in something, it’s writing. Little things that confound the search for truth to fit the desire for an unearned label.
But there’s another set of dates that really shocked me – Japan. In my ill-educated mind, that triad of East Asian countries of China, Korea, and Japan were supposed to be equally old. In this too, I was misinformed. The native Ainu of Japan were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers from pre-antiquity until about 1000 BC when the in-migration of the rice-farming Yayoi people took over. As with many of these migrations in antiquity, we are uncertain of how much killing was done, how much was mere displacement north, and how much intermarriage took place. But, from 800 BC to 300 AD, the Yayoi were settled agriculturalists who almost, but not quite, crossed the line to meet the criteria for being counted as a civilization for this exercise. They crossed those lines only between 300 AD and 538 AD as their culture transformed due to imported ideas from the mainland. Their artifacts and manner of building changed, they showed definite signs of unified authority, and in 538, they imported two things – Buddhism, and writing.
The Chinese do have written accounts of Yayoi kingdoms prior to the transformation of that time period, but it’s hard to tell whether it really counted as uncivilized by the criteria short of writing, or if it was just typical Imperial Chinese condescension towards foreigners.
Still, the earliest writing in Japan is from 538.
538.
The Byzantines are fighting the Gothic war. Gregory or Tours is being born. The Coptic Church is schisming from the Catholic.
Japan is Young.
I could have waffled on more about what pre-Shang China might have looked like, or gotten into Philosophical weeds about what counts as civilization… but it was 3am, and I had spent my cognition on double-checking my numbers.
I think your definition of “civilization” is a good one to work with. The one criteria likely to catch the most flak is writing. Traditionally, the academic discipline of history is based on written records, although it can get kind of messy where there are sufficient non-written archeological records.
The other difficulty with writing is that ancient writings can survive only on very limited materials – stone and clay tablets and, nothing else really comes to mind. It’s entirely possible that other civilizations had writing, but none of it survived.
To demonstrate the problem, there are virtually no contemporaneous written records of Alexander the Great, and he had a bunch of scribes following him around basically writing propaganda. Similarly, without Caesar’s Gallic Wars journal, the record on even Julius Caesar is shockingly thin. Even for Charlemagne, who grew up in a major court with monks and everything as an heir apparent, there are no written references to him until he was an adult.
Well done, though. Yeah, Japan really surprised me.
I like it. And yeah, it is surprising sometimes how many “ancient” civilizations arent at all ancient.
For example, the Aztecs didnt migrate to the Valley of Mexico until the 12th century AD. They were being pushed around by the Culhuacan in the 13th century, and finally established Tenochitlan in 1325 AD.
Their empire lasted 1325-1521, not even making it to a bicentennial.
And really, the empire isn’t established until 1427, so it didnt make a centennial.
Similar to the Aztec story, the Inca had just consolidated their conquest of the region when the Spanish arrived, so they had an even shorter run.
One number that also stuck with me was that the Apache arrived in the southwest in the 1600s, after Eruopeans had settled on the East coast.
The Apache were there when the Spanish were in Santa Fe – that’s about a century earlier.
The Spanish colonization changed the Apache and Comanche into the tribes they became famous for. Before the Spanish brought horses, they were just like many other tribes in the area scraping out a living with some hunting and some subsistence agriculture.
Saw an interesting YT on that – supposedly the Commanche had a very marginal existence, until the Spanish horses were loosed. They became the first tribe to master the horse as a fighting platform, not just transport.
I think I saw that too – maybe somebody here linked it.
I am terrible at jokes so I dont remember this one well. There is an old joke about an injun that hated whitey. After finishing a rant on his hatred he declares that he does not want to have anything whatsoever to do with whitey. He then saddle holsters his winchester, hops on his horse, calls his dog and rides off wearing cotton clothing, including blue jeans.
^This^
Also, the Aztecs did not build much of anything. They found those pyramids and temples intact and abandoned. They simply moved in.
Interesting.
On an unrelated note- I watched “The Adventures of Marco Polo” the other night. Made in 1938, with Gary Cooper and Basil Rathbone. It was silly. It definitely could not be made now, what with all the colonialist imbedded racism.
1999 is ancient history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblt2EtFfC4
Dafuq. 1999 was 3 years ago.
Yeah, shocking how fast that 3 years turns into 3 decades.
Japan is Young.
And like the Chinese, the Japanese claim their civilization is older.
Even 660 BC is pretty recent.
But that puts him between 140 and 340 years after the Yayoi migration into the Archipelago. If you want to be charitable, you could associate him with an oral tradition around a leader who consolidated power over other Yayoi clans in that time frame.
I can’t speak to whether or not his mother was a sun goddess though.
Japanese Rice Kingdoms were older:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5LY4Mz15o
And possibly ending soon. If the population decline doesn’t get them their lack nuclear competency will.
World’s biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor launched in Japan
I wonder what happened with Lockheed’s efforts at using smaller, more rapidly iterated reactors? (The idea being that the smaller and chaper builds could be used to refine the technology at a faster pace than the big tokamak reactors.)
The Green Lobby?
Public’s inability to evaluate risk vs return?
Racism?
Anti-Semitism?
Trump?
Lockheed shut their project down, but I think there are others still working on compact reactors.
Four, these sophisticated cultures are shown to be progressing into states with influence over a significant area.
Eeewwwww
I know it’s unpopular with many philosophers around these parts, but recorded history is largely a product of civilizations, of which the state is an emergant feature.
That is a very important distinction.
For me it also throws me off looking at Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan, etc – built in 9th-12th cent AD…and then being lost for centuries….no actual evidence of vastly older artifacts.
Ankor Wat is in a inacessable area that was rendered farmable through hydrological engineering projects. So you’re not likely to see a significant settlement prior to a more technologically advanced and organized culture deciding to put in the effort.
Fun fact, Ankor Wat was never actually abandoned. Bhuddist monks maintained a monastary there (of modest size) until its ‘rediscovery’ by the outside world. But there was no significant settlement after the mass abandonment of the site.
Civilization began when the Irish invented whiskey.
This seems a reasonable hypothesis.
More seriously, I would put civilization as organized agriculture (and the introduction of brewing).
But I recognize UnCiv’s criteria as being a great marker as well.
I couldn’t get good dates on organized agriculture.
Understandable.
Hard to identify civilizations that didn’t leave infrastructures or written records behind.
I think your criteria are an excellent standard for measuring levels of progress across disparate locations and cultures.
FWIW: MOST people I know who teach the first part of World History (however defined) start their detailed classes with the first cities (they may do an intro class that discusses agriculture. One person I know actually starts their intro class with the first migrations out of Africa, but that is only a quick summary).
Bolivia. High on the altiplano south of Titicaca there are thousands of square miles of flat nearly featureless land that still have checkerboard remnants of levees.
Atop every odd hill are the ruins of dwellings including decorated pottery shards. Their tombs date ar around 5000 years. The sophisticated system of levees on such a large scale did not pop up overnight. Given the availability of food occurring naturally there I would guess those guys were farming for a very long time before they built the levees.
It’s a good marker. I would say that real civilization begins with slot machines and drink specials. That’s when the exo-planetary cultures get interested.
🙂
Comps…
Yeah, baby! And don’t pour small. Unless you like probing….
Brewing specifically for the more involved process than wine making?
In my hobby, where we talk about the history of making alcoholic beverages, it is way too cumbersome to talk about brewing, vinting, mazing, and what whatever you want to call making cider when speaking generically about making all of said beverages. So. brewing becomes the shorthand.
Even though I’ve gotten the local beer club to call themselves the brew club and gotten some of them into making mead and cider, the still tend to flinch when I say brewing when talking about making wine, mead, and cider.
Fair enough. I generally consider brewing (like sake making) to be a different process than mazing/vinting, as it involves the breakdowns of starches into sugars instead of using readily available sugars.
On the other hand, I had a semi-drunken conversation with a fellow hobbyist about whether or not making beer from extract was legitimately “brewing”.
Extract of what?
Malt extract.
A factory does the mashing of malted grain to produce sugar water, then removes most of the water (resulting in liquid malt extract) or all of the water (resulting in dry malt extract).
And as Neph says, it is the conversion of starch to sugar that defines “brewing”.
Everything is irrelevant except for the skin color of the people creating these civilizations.
Thanks, UCS. This was interesting.
You’re welcome.
I found it interesting that the earliest civilizations all emerged in semi-arid regions with dependable water from large rivers.
Was the life of a nomadic (or settled) hunter-gatherer still too easy or attractive in the rest of Asia, Africa, and Europe? Or too hard? Too much tribal competition and warfare for a civilization to emerge? Predators and parasites?
Did arid land with easy access to water spark innovations in irrigation and agriculture? Make it easier to store large quantities of food to support a population?
I propose a alternative, there is a lot of evidence of civilization around arid areas because they are based on building with primarily stone.
A civilization in a wet or temperate climate might build with primarily wood. Wood would easily rot and degrade in such a climate.
Of the conditions which best preserve archeological evidence – dry, extreme cold, anarobic – people only really settled the dry lands early on.
So you think that there may have been similarly advanced civilizations in Europe or wetter parts of Asia around 3000 BC but the evidence all rotted away?
Maybe.
I would speculate that such cultures would more resemble the tribal ‘barbarians’ the Romans ran into than the city-builders, because it did not require as much organization to maintain viable farmland in these other regions, so less pressure to consolidate. With less centralized populations and commerce, virtually no pressure to develop a written language.
From what we can find of their pottery in Europe, we don’t have settlements of similar size.
Roman and Greek records 2000 years back up that speculation.
Reminds me of Frank Herbert’s throw-back hydraulic despotism – controlling water in an arid environment is a good way to control people.
One of the key duties of a Mesopotamian King was the maintenance of the canals.
If he failed at this, he was usually overthrown, violently.
You can also go the Niven route for that.
I was taught that the secret was being by a river that flooded annually. You got a constant replenishment of fertile silt that made training-wheels agriculture possible.
I recall the same thing. No idea if that’s still current thinking because I recall learning the “food pyramid” at the same time.
If I had to speculate, I’d say that the earliest farming was more assisted gathering. That is, they’d sow seeds of the plants they wanted to gather, and then just leave the area, with the understanding that when they came back, the plants would be more prevalent than if left to their own devices. Sedentary agriculture would then be a logical next step, as keeping the plants alive ensured greater yields. Perhaps trading with the other folk of their tribe for meat until some bright spark figured animals could be corralled the way plants were…
That’s not what the record shows. It shows agriculture starting in areas where rainfed farming was possible and moving to the rivers, where more extensive fields could be put to the plow by controlling the water in canals. The Nile is really the only one of the early rivers with predicatble floods of consistant depth. Much of the disasters along the Euphrates comes from when it did flood and wiped out that which had been built along it.
Semi-arid today. The Sahara region and much of the Middle East was not always barren the way it is now. In fact there is lots of fairly recent evidence of human habitation in places completely uninhabitable now.
As for rotting away, yes. The Mississippians here, long gone before whitey showed up, left the Mississippi River valley peppered with mounds. Since there is nothing left but piles of dirt we have a very poor idea on dates.
You’re leaving out some much older, if more recently discovered, civilizations: Minoan culture, and Troy and Solnitsata may be contemporaneous with the unification of Egypt, and Gobekli Tepe seems to reach back a few more millienia.
Also Norte Chico (in Peru) was city-oriented in the middle of the 4th millenia BCE.
You have a typo there.
The main thrust of the article was the disconnect between what I’d been told about East Asia and the dates supported by the evidence.
Gobikli Tepe was not built by an agricultural civilization. The archeological record indicates they were still hunter-gatherers.
Very interesting article, thanks UCS.
You’re welcome
A not completely unserious question:
How/when did the Hawaiians get to Hawaii?
Best carbon dating shows between 1200 and 1300 AD for polynesian settlement of Hawaii.
They arrived on small boats, which they were very good at navigating bogglingly large expanses of open ocean with.
much smaller gap between them and europeans than i expected.
To be fair, the islands are a bit remote and someone has to find them before they can be settled. I imagine they were spotted, occassionally visited, but not settled until the last set of islands started feeling crowded.
I vaguely recall discussing a community of Japanese living on an island off of the coast of central or South America. They arrived in pre-columbian times, are still genetically Japanese and speak some weird dialect of Japanese.
People were ;moving around back in the day more than we give them credit for.
When Europeans arrived in the Pacific Northwest the Indians there had some metal artifacts from Japan because the ocean currents carry Japanese detritus – damaged ships, flotsam and jetsam – to the coast of the Americas. Some of these ships had survivors, who had no idea how to get back home. Some groups of survivors did better than others.
That is a reasonable theory.
Also, Russians were coming over for furs and such since the first time the sun came up.
Pre-eskimo there were caucasians living in arctic NA and as far south as Washington state. Whether they came from Europe or Asia, we dont know.
I would hazard a guess that it was some of both.
UnCivil – an interesting study for you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk5-ynRPfss
Rather than looking at artifacts I tend to think of human history in terms of environmental changes. With the advent of the last ice age and subsequent waning of it there has been a tide of people’s washing back and forth over habitable locals.
I think farming was likely a survival strategy developed to adapt to the loss of large herd animals.
I am not sure of the date but there are ruins of cities submerged under sea water. Those at the mouth of the nile we have records of and know the dates. There is another in the now submerged Indus River floodplain. By looking at the sea level rise since the peak of the last ice age we might be able to make a half-assed guess as to the age of those ruins. *Keep in mind sea levels are dependent not only on volume of liquid water but also on plate tectonics. *
What might we one day find o n the beds of the Black and Caspian seas?
Since cities tend to be on coasts I imagine there are a number of such submerged ruins perhaps dating back ~20K years. Yes, I pulled that right out of my ass. Pre-ice age? Has evidence of them been scrubbed away by ice sheets? We just dont know. Shit, we are still debating history from our own lifetimes. Thinking we know a lot about human history is akin to the climate scientists that tell us with certainty blah blah blah but cannot predict rain on a day to day basis.
Cities don’t tend to be on coasts. They tend to be on rivers.
The post ice-age sea level rise did innundate a number of paleolithic sites, but we have no evidence, submerged or on land, of cities that far back.
The ones that we do have in the water fell there thanks to earthquake activity.
As I said, I dont know the date but there is one in the Arabian Sea. I want to say it is 100 or so feet under?
just off the coast of Florida 60 feet under the Gulf is a well preserved injun village. Given the nature of the Gulf one must go a very long way out to get to 60 feet.
At the time when oceans were 60 or more feet lower than today there was a shitload of dry land worldwide.
My gut tells me the ‘old’ stuff we know about is really not that old.
Do you have any links or at least site names I can look into?
The injun village in the gulf is not the only one. There are a few off of the coast all around the gulf. I discovered its existence while diving at Crystal River. The wildlife department had a map of it and plans to excavate it but that was mid-’80s. I am not aware that it has been excavated.
The Indus ruins…let me look around.
*I dont know how long ago the oceans were 60 feet lower. My guess? ~10Kya?
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1370272/india-ancient-discovery-lost-underwater-city-gulf-cambay-civilisation-archaeology-spt
To think that that is the only one that old would be silly. People are people. They do people things. If that city was built that long ago there are others we haven’t found yet.
Reading through that….fuck. We just cant help ourselves, can we? Yep, lots of cities are submerged but it happened at the rate it is happening today. There was no thunder, lightning or sex scandals involving the royal family. No, Bigfoot didn’t do it. The sky didn’t crack open. It happened gradually just like we see today. What is this ridiculous need for magic and drama we cant seem to shake?
My favorite one is the disappearance of the dinosaurs. A great asteroid set the sky on fire, cracked the earth open BAM! BOOM! BLAM! earthquakes! Volcanos! Tidal waves! AAAAAAAAAH.
“Yeah? When did this happen?”
“Between 65 and 75 million years ago.”
“Uh…you realize that is a TEN MILLION YEAR SPREAD, right? Ten. Million. Years.”
“Yeah…uh…now that you put it like that….”
“Exactly. it happened slowly from climate change cycles, the evolution of competitors, etc. Also, they did not die out. At least one branch of them is nesting in my chimney as we speak. ”
“Goddamit Suthenboy, you take the fun out of everything!”
OT and much too good not to share, from behind the paywall…
I think Goldman has taken the lead for being the biggest jackass with the smallest brain in the entire Democratic caucus. He didn’t even have to wait for Schiff to leave office or Raskin to die.
Goldman is what Scott Adams calls a “designated liar”. Goldman, Schiff, and Raskin are on that list. When you see them in a hearing or doing an interview, you can be 100% sure they are lying because that’s their job.
That bint from Puerto Rico is another.
Don’t forget Göbekli Tepe, which has the world’s oldest megaliths, dating back to 10K-11.5K years ago. And sister sites like Karahan Tepe. No writing has been found, but they were obviously highly organized, permanent settlements, possibly predating the advent of agriculture (no signs of agriculture have been found yet).
I didn’t forget them. Once I put together my criteria, they fell into the category that got the rest of pre-3300 BC Mesopotamia excluded.
Also, evidence of habitation at those sites is lacking.
So far all we can show is that they were static ritual locations that may not even have been continuously occupied. That suggests a culture that fits the same general mold of the Ainu before the Yayoi – semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers, but with more ambitions towards construction.
That was the belief of the people originally doing excavations, but it’s not the current belief. More recent excavations have pointed to domestic use. Also, these and related sites are far more vast and numerous than the original excavators knew.
I get that it’s excluded from your final criteria, but other sites that don’t meet the criteria were also mentioned, so I thought it was still relevant.
I wonder what the current oldest known city is…
I think it depends on how you define it. Uruk is the oldest known undisputed city. But there are large settlements (but much smaller than Uruk) that are older, that could be called cities depending on the criteria you use.
Note: I consider pre-ice age to be ‘ancient’. Anything in the last 20K years is recent history.
GOLDMAN: No, sir. The problem is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia.
Why not the DNC?
All history seems to be a series of “here, hold my beer” and “whataboutism.”
I am not saying it was aliens….
Watch your back Fetterman.
I was kind of surprised to hear that from him.
I wonder if recovering from the stroke has changed his perspectives on things.
Good for him. I had the same thought and it isn’t like the Dems will lose a seat of Menendez goes.
OT – Was thinking of you and Sean below when I saw Philly has banned ski masks.
NYC sucks, but it ain’t Philly.
/s guy that went to school in Philly and Philly sports fan.
It’s already been attacked…as profiling colored people.
But banning menthols is totes ok?
And I bet it took all of five seconds.
Menendez is up for re-election in 2024? So he won’t run, and then the investigation is dropped. Nothing else happens.
Santos is looking for work. I’m not sure how long he needs to a resident of NJ, however.
Wow. I’m stunned.
We’ve got to get these phony-baloney numbers up!
But even with the reintroduction of the anti-Arab hate crime category, many believe there continues to be a severe underreporting of incidents. In 2022, the FBI reported just 91 instances of hate crimes targeting Arabs, and 158 targeting Muslims. Even in comparison to the general underreporting of hate crimes believed to impact numbers across nearly all categories, experts say that this issue is particularly pronounced among Arab- and Muslim-American communities.
“Anti-Muslim hate crimes pose a real difficulty because of an attenuated relationship with law enforcement, with immigration authorities, language barriers among other things,” said Brian Levin, former founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Levin said that post-9/11 surveillance programs undermined the trust that Arab and Muslim communities otherwise might have built with local and federal law enforcement.
“So I really think when we’re looking at this, we have to remember that there are certain communities where underreporting, I believe, is far more rampant than in other communities,” he said.
It’s hate, all the way down.
All crimes are hate crimes. I hate you because you stole my girl, or because your wallet is thicker than mine, or because you live in a different neighborhood, or because you are (or present yourself) as a woman. It doesn’t matter if you assault me for these reasons or because you don’t’ like my parentage or choice of gods.
Gosh, we aren’t getting many reports of anti-Muslim hate crimes. That can’t possibly be because there just aren’t many anti-Muslim hate crimes. We just know it’s rampant, even though there is zero data to support that, so it must be that it’s underreported.
All history seems to be a series of “here, hold my beer” and “whataboutism.”
Don’t forget, “I know you are, but what am I?”
Fashion genocide
As an online debate rages over the appropriateness of Melania Trump’s gray coat at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral while other first ladies wore black, pockets on the right are starting to push back against the narrative with some photos of their own.
At the top of the heap is Jesse Watters, who, during his Wednesday show on Fox News, displayed a photo of “Rosalynn Carter herself” wearing a grayish top while attending the funeral of Richard Nixon in 1994.
Watters showed some headlines demeaning Melania Trump’s attire at Tuesday’s funeral in Atlanta, Georgia, before saying: “So, the media thought that wearing a gray overcoat to a funeral was a crime against humanity, but, what do we have here?”
Then he showed a photo of Hillary Clinton wearing a gray coat just before sitting down at Barbara Bush’s funeral in 2018, and another of Barbara Bush wearing a brighter coat at Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004.
Subsequent photos of Bush and Clinton at those events indicate they wore black underneath while it’s unknown what Trump wore beneath her coat, and she did not respond to Newsweek’s emailed request for comment.
It’s squabbling retards, all the way down.
FFS. I’m tempted to say this is the dumbest scandal ever, but I know better.
+1. Something dumber will show up within hours.
Twitter fight!
The Romney binders-full-of-women on was good, as was the scandal where someone (Marco Rubio?) took a sip of water during a rebuttal to one of Obama’s state-of-the-union addresses.
I hope Melania was wearing a festive red dress under her grey coat.
And a black bustier under the dress.
Sandy O’Connor past away.
I imagine it will be in the afternoon links.
Who?
https://imgflip.com/i/71aye
No idea either until reading GT’s comment below.
Let’s see if it gets the same outpouring of grief and eulogizing as when St. RBG died.
O’Connor was a first, but it doesn’t count because of reasons.
Let it be so
Most U.S. cities would have to replace lead water pipes within 10 years under strict new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency as the Biden administration moves to reduce lead in drinking water and prevent public health crises like the ones in Flint, Michigan and Washington, D.C.
Millions of people consume drinking water from lead pipes and the agency said tighter standards would improve IQ scores in children and reduce high blood pressure and heart disease in adults. It is the strongest overhaul of lead rules in more than three decades, and will cost billions of dollars. Pulling it off will require overcoming enormous practical and financial obstacles.
“These improvements ensure that in a not too distant future, there will never be another city and another child poisoned by their pipes,” said Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and clean water advocate who raised early alarms about Flint.
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Lead crises have hit poorer, majority-Black cities like Flint especially hard, propelling the risks of lead in drinking water into the national consciousness. Their impact reaches beyond public health. After the crises, tap water use declined nationally, especially among Black and Hispanic people. The Biden administration says investment is vital to fix this injustice and ensure everyone has safe, lead-free drinking water.
“We’re trying to right a longstanding wrong here,” said Radhika Fox, head of the EPA Office of Water. “We’re bending the arc towards equity and justice on this legacy issue.”
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Replacing the country’s lead pipes will be expensive, but the EPA says the health benefits far outweigh the cost.
Sure, why not? We’ve got more money than we know what to do with.
Show your work. I bet one trillion dollars it doesn’t exist.
I haven’t looked into it but there is something very wrong with this ‘scandal’.
Lead pipes? Are these pipes actually made out of lead? I suspect not.
‘Lead pipe’ used to be a common term used to describe galvanized iron pipe.
When lead pipe was used way back when it was used as waste water pipe only, not water supply pipe.
This is another canard by the left to stir shit, that is my strong suspicion.
Or you could just put an activated charcoal filter on your drinking water faucet and remember when to change the filter cartridge.
Thanks for this, U. I, too, feel the need to fill in the extensive gaps in my public school education, not just what was known at the time but left out entirely (::remembers encountering a question on a standardized test about the Rosetta Stone and thinking “Who’s she?”::) but also what’s been discovered since I left school.
Mother of Mister Stone?