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Why Tyrian Purple Dye Is So Expensive

YouTube video:

Making authentic Tyrian purple dye starts with extracting a murex snail gland. After a series of painstaking steps, Tunisian dye maker Mohamed Ghassen Nouira turns as much as 45 kilograms of snails into a single gram of pure Tyrian purple extract. When he’s done, he can sell it for $2,700. Some retailers sell a gram of the pigment for over $3,000. In comparison, 5 grams of synthetic Tyrian purple costs under $4.

So, why is real Tyrian purple so hard to make? And is that why it’s so expensive?

Mohamed Ghassen Nouira’s website: https://www.argamanou.com/

Continue here on the Insider Business YouTube channel…

Connecting to Korbanos, A Dialogue

Are You Really Planning to Bring Back those Animal Sacrifices?

 

Question: Please explain all this business about animal sacrifices in the Temple. Are you really planning to re-initiate this at some point?

Answer: Cain and Abel made vegetable and animal sacrifices. Noah made animal sacrifices. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—all highly enlightened people—made animal sacrifices. And the Torah prescribes a whole slew of sacrifices to be made in the Tabernacle in the desert, and then later in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. And guess what? In our prayers, for the past 2,000 years, we’ve been asking for G‑d to let us rebuild that Temple so that we can start doing those sacrifices, just like He asked us to. So there’s got to be something deep going on here, more than meets the eye.

Q: But the whole thing doesn’t make sense! Charity, prayer, study . . . all those I can understand. But why on earth would G‑d want us to burn animals on an altar?

A: Now, don’t get the idea that you’re the first one to have difficulty with this. It puzzled the students of Maimonides in the 12th century. It puzzled the students of the rabbis of the Talmud. In the Zohar it’s written that the secret of the sacrifices reaches to the secret of the infinite. It’s one of those things that if it doesn’t puzzle you, you just haven’t gotten the facts straight. I think we need to look at this from a very different perspective to make sense of it.

Q: It all looks like just a holdover from pagan rites.

A: It’s clear that there are some major distinctions between the sacrificial order of the Torah and your typical ancient-world pagan rites. For one thing, the rules and regulations were spelled out right there for all to read. In fact, every Jew has an obligation to study the details of the Temple rites. Even little children are supposed to learn everything those priests are to be doing. That’s a far cry from the cult of secrecy that empowered the priestly class of other nations.

There were some other major distinctions: The Temple was considered the property of the people, and daily communal sacrifices reinforced that fact. There were no male or female prostitutes wandering around the courtyards, no orgies or drunken revelry—or self-mutilation. The priests wore modest, standardized clothes, and were held accountable by a people’s court that sat right there at the edge of the Temple complex. Most of the meat was eaten—a lot less waste than what goes on at Safeway or Stop & Shop. And animals were slaughtered in a humane fashion. Definitely a sublime relief from ancient standards. All in all, it must have seemed a very strange place for the average Joe Ancient.

Q: But not to our standards today. If the whole point was to wean the people off sacrificial cultism, then it was good for then. But why should we be praying for it to return? Sure, it’s cool to have a central place for prayer and meditation, with the menorah, the incense, the tablets that Moses brought . . . but why the butcher shop?

A: The main act of a sacrifice was not the physical act of slaughtering an animal. You understand that the sacrificial service was principally a spiritual one.

Q: In what way?

A: Well, for one thing, when a person brought a sacrifice, his mental focus was crucial. If his mind was not focused on the correct meaning and intent of the sacrifice, the whole thing could be deemed useless, or worse.

Q: What sort of meanings?

A: Well, if it was being brought to atone for some inadvertent sin, he had to have in mind some remorse over what had happened. But it went far beyond that: The priests would focus their minds on the higher spiritual spheres, according to esoteric traditions. That explains why they had the Levites singing and the musicians playing. After all, if it was all just a grand barbecue, what need was there for inspirational music? Rather, it was a deep spiritual experience for all involved. You went away truly elevated.

Q: Okay, I can see the experiential quality of it all: an ancient temple with heavenly music and mystical song; priests in flowing robes deep in meditation; mesmerizing, choreographed ritual. It’s an image I hadn’t realized before.

A: Most people don’t.

Continue reading…

From Chabad.org, here.

Interested in Modes of Managed Media? Here’s a Simple Observation

Predictable: HRW doesn’t mention Neve Yaakov massacre until they can condemn Israel for something else

Friday, February 03, 2023
Human Rights Watch’s website was silent on the Neve Yaakov massacre last Friday night.
Six days later, they do mention it – in the context of an article condemning Israel for sealing up the houses of the family of the murderer.
The pattern, which we often see in the media as well, is predictable. When Gaza groups shoot rockets, the media only condemns Israel’s reaction. When a terrorist kills Jewish civilians, human rights groups wait as long as they can to create a context where Israel is the guilty party.
Look how HRW frames the attack in Neve Yaakov:
Israeli authorities’ actions to seal the family homes in the occupied West Bank of two Palestinians suspected of attacks against Israelis amount to collective punishment, a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today.
This punitive measure, which Israeli authorities have said they will follow by demolishing the homes, comes amid a spike in violence that has cost the lives of 35 Palestinians and 6 Israelis since January 1, 2023. The violence has included Israeli army raids that unlawfully attack Palestinian cities and refugee camps, Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and attacks on Palestinians and their property by Israeli settlers, who rarely face punishment for these crimes. 
“Deliberate attacks on civilians are reprehensible crimes,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “But just as no grievance can justify the intentional targeting of civilians in Neve Yaakov, such attacks cannot justify Israeli authorities intentionally punishing the families of Palestinian suspects by demolishing their homes and throwing them out on the street.”
Notice how you can never find a straight condemnation of attacks on Jews without a caveat or a “context” in the same sentence.  As if sealing or demolishing a home is just as bad as murdering people.
Neither Amnesty nor Human Rights Watch had a stand-alone article condemning Palestinian terror attacks last year when there were several mass casualty events against civilians. Those attacks are also buried in this HRW article, seemingly mentioned for the first time on the site, and do not rate a full sentence: “The [Jenin] raid follows more than 10 months of intensified Israeli army raids in the West Bank, after several deadly attacks by Palestinians inside Israel in March 2022.”
There were also fatal attacks in April and May and October and November, but HRW already dedicated about 10% of the article to attacks on Israelis, and that is way above their quota already.

Dave Barry

“All I Think Is That It’s Stupid”: An Interview with Dave Barry

Dave Barry on laughing at Very Big Government

GLENN GARVIN | FROM THE DECEMBER 1994 ISSUE

A New York Times profile once said that Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry “makes his living by taking prosaic ideas to incongruous extremes.” He is the only Pulitzer Prize winner to have a sitcom—CBS’s Dave’s World—based, very loosely, on his life. (They turned his one son and two dogs into just the opposite, but he enjoys cashing the checks.)

The Pulitzer Prize judges gave Barry the award for commentary in 1988 “for his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.” His concerns include beer, Barbie, a “worldwide epidemic of snakes in toilets,” exploding Pop-Tarts, and, perhaps most famously, “the worst songs ever recorded.”

To be fair to the Pulitzer committee, the real Dave does devote more column inches than the average pundit to making Very Big Government look silly and obnoxious. This is a fresh insight in New York and Washington, and wildly popular with readers, who have bought more than a million copies of his books.

Taking prosaic ideas to incongruous extremes, he writes things like: “With the federal deficit running at several hundred billion dollars per year, Congress passed a transportation bill that, according to news reports, includes $30 million for a ‘hightech’ moving sidewalk in Altoona, which happens to be in the district of Rep. ‘Bud’ Shuster, the ranking Republican on the surface transportation subcommittee.

“I don’t know about you, but as a taxpayer, I am outraged to discover that, in this day and age, Altoona residents are still being forced to walk around on regular low-tech stationary sidewalks. I’m thinking of maybe organizing a group of us to go there and carry Altoonans on our backs until they get their new sidewalk. I’m also thinking that maybe we should donate an additional $10 million or so to build them a high-tech computerized Spit Launcher that will fire laser-guided gobs onto the moving sidewalk, so the Altoonans won’t have to do this manually. ‘What have I done today to help keep ‘Bud’ Shuster in Congress?’ is a question we all need to ask ourselves more often.”

Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin interviewed Barry at his Miami Herald office.

Reason: You were in Washington recently to do a story. What was it like there?

Barry: It’s like going to Mars. When you come back out no one is talking about any of the things the people in Washington are talking about.

If we’re spending $853 trillion on some program now, and next year we spend any less, that’s “budget-cutting” to them. For them, the question is always, “What kind of government intervention should we impose on the world?” They never think that maybe we shouldn’t.

It gives me a real advantage as a humorist because I get credit for having insight and understanding—and I don’t. I don’t have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it’s stupid—which is the one perspective that’s almost completely lacking in Washington.

Continue reading…

From Reason, here.

Wait, SO NOW It’s Acceptable To Poke Holes in Big Pharma?!

Despite Racketeering, Bribery Charges, Major Drug Companies Beat The Rap 

 

Despite repeated DOJ findings of corrupt marketing by some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical giants, major drug companies continue to circumvent responsibility for much of their wrongdoing and to enjoy great public trust.

The rap sheets for some of the wealthiest drug companies go back many years, as will be seen below. Yet the billions of dollars they have been forced to pay out in penalties for their misconduct are dwarfed by lucrative profits rolling into the companies’ coffers from ill-gotten gains.

Despite the public disgrace in being repeatedly caught breaking the law, the drug manufacturers have continued to prosper. As witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic—they have even managed to reinvent themselves as humanity’s ‘saviors.’

A History Stained with Alleged Criminal Neglect

Pfizer CEO Albert Boula claimed during a recent interview that a group of medical professionals intentionally circulating “misinformation” critical of the Pfizer mRNA shot were “criminal.”

The Pfizer CEO must have forgotten the history of his own company. That landscape is stained with tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging criminal neglect and intentional wrongdoing, in marketing dangerous drugs and failing to alert consumers to their life-threatening risks.

Since 2002, the company and its subsidiaries have been assessed $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards, writes the Corporate Research Project. These payments were granted as compensation for medical injuries, for false claims by the company, and for hiding research that could hurt its marketing initiatives.

Other payments were penalties for bribing doctors and medical corporations to prescribe and promote Pfizer-manufactured drugs.

Some of the most publicized of these cases were settled in 2001, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2017, as described below.

But the shame and monetary price of having its crimes exposed have not deterred the drug giant. It’s as though the penalties and payouts are all part of the acceptable cost of “doing business.”

‘Children Were Used as Human Guinea Pigs’

In 1996, Pfizer gave the experimental drug Trovan to 200 Nigerian children ill with meningitis, without informing their parents that an approved cure already existed, or that their children were subjects of a medical experiment.

Eleven children died. Many others suffered brain damage, organ failure, or paralysis.

A Washington Post investigation reported that one 10-year-old girl suffering from meningitis was not taken off experimental Trovan and given the alternative proven treatment by Pfizer’s trial managers — even when it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. One of her eyes froze. She lost strength and then died.

Continue reading…

From Yated (English), here.