What happens in chapter 7 of "The 13th Valley"?

Chapter 7 begins with "the big soldier" alone in the enlisted men's club. The bartender is upset because they have too much Fresca. The big soldier, AKA Whiteboy, is playing solitaire and chatting with the bartender. They discuss what happens when they get incoming fire and about why they're in the war.

As other people come in, the bartender and White boy sing a song called "Boonie Rats." A white soldier begins pretending to broadcast about the war as if it is a boxing match, and then an old-fashioned radio show. Jax orders a soldier named Chelini to take off his dog tags and then his boots, then laces them together and throws them at their owner. 

Jax joined the army at 17, after nearly failing out of school, and received his GED and got married before he was sent to Vietnam. He got in trouble for fighting a few times but eventually ended up here. 

Chelini asks the men what he is supposed to do the next day, as he is not trained to be an 11-Bravo. The men laugh and say none of them are, then describe a little of a combat situation. 

Monk tells a story of a man who stopped an attack by playing the bagpipes terribly, but then gets shot. The men continue drinking, although many soldiers are leaving the club.

Alpha Company 402D is made up of many men who have extended their enlistment in order to be able to automatically discharge when they return home. Most of these men have been working together for a long time. They discuss at politics and the idea of revolution, which will never happen among American soldiers at war. Chelini/Cherry quietly listens and feels he is being educated.

Many soldiers leave, but Whiteboy remains and begins singing "Boonie Rats" again. The bar quiets as the bartender joins in. The noise resumes seconds after the song ends. The remaining men discuss women and how they are like cats, then get into a heated discussion of racism. This eventually begins a bar fight in which Doc gets slammed into the table by a white soldier, Molino the bartender frantically tries to kick everyone out, and black soldiers and white soldiers fall out the door still flailing at one another.

Is it possible to produce clones of animals? Explain how this can occur both naturally and artificially.

To add to the previous answer, if an organism reproduces sexually, the offspring will never be a clone of its parents. That is because if a sperm and egg nucleus fuse combine DNA, the offspring will have genes from both parents. Therefore, in sexual reproduction, due to independent assortment and recombination of gametes at fertilization, the offspring will display characteristics from each parent and can never be a clone of one. 

However, one additional way of producing a clone naturally is when identical twins are produced. One sperm nucleus fuses with one egg nucleus to form a zygote. Mitotic divisions occur forming an embryo. If the embryo splits into two clusters of cells, these will be clones with the same identical blueprint. However, due to environmental influences on genes, even identical twins have slight differences. For example, their fingerprints are unique.

Why does Granny and her family move so much in Toni Cade Bambara's "Blues Ain't No Mockin' Bird"?

In Toni Cade Bambara's "Blues Ain't No Mockin' Bird," the narrator explains why Granny moves around so much soon after Granny relays to the kids her story of the man being photographed who was about to jump off a bridge, a story she uses to explain that she feels photographing human suffering is a major infringement of human rights.

According to the narrator, people drive Granny crazy to the point she feels the need to "get up in the night and start packin'," saying, "Let's get on away from here before I kill me somebody." The narrator further explains in what way people drive Granny crazy by listing a few examples. For example, Mr. Judson drove Granny crazy when he brought her "boxes of old clothes and raggedy magazines," and Mrs. Cooper drove Granny crazy by coming into Granny's kitchen and complimenting her cleanliness. However, since the narrator is young and limited in understanding, the reader must draw inferences from these examples as to exactly why Granny feels driven crazy.

One inference the reader can draw is that all troubles in the story relate to racial discrimination. Therefore, the man in the story who was about to jump off the bridge may have been driven to do so in part due to racism. In addition, Granny was angered when she was brought discarded clothes by Mr. Judson because she understood he did so based on racial discrimination: based on the color of her skin, he had reached the conclusion that Granny was too poor to take care of her own, when in reality she works hard enough to get by. Furthermore, Granny was angered when Mrs. Cooper complimented the cleanliness of her kitchen because she knew Mrs. Cooper did so based on the assumption that people of Granny's class and race are not clean people. Hence, after drawing inferences, the reader is able to see that Granny is angered by racial discrimination and moves frequently in an effort to escape it.

What are some of the criticisms of the modern world made by Christians and Muslim fundamentalists?

Christian and Muslim fundamentalism share common characteristics by virtue of a shared orientation toward religion and belief system. Fundamentalism is a religious orientation highlighting a religious system's fixed, fundamental beliefs. Fundamentalism arises historically as a response to religious liberalism and to increasing modernity (which includes a separation of church and state and the rise and dissemination of secular ideals). A key criticism of modern society made by fundamentalism is that modern society has degraded from a state of higher ethical behavior and higher morality to lower morality and a relative loss of ethics. Fundamentalist arguments usually posit a period of time before modernity in which people/society were more morally upright than they are currently. In addition, fundamentalism argues that modern society has moved away from living by fundamental truths. One consequence of this moving away from fundamental truths may be that individuals in modern society have less chance of acquiring a favorable afterlife than those who lived in pre-modern times. 

In Animal Farm, when the pigs think Napoleon is dying from drinking alcohol, what is his final dying command?

Towards the end of Chapter VIII in Animal Farm, Napoleon and some of the other pigs get drunk.  They are celebrating what they claim was their great victory in the Battle of the Windmill.  They get drunk even though one of the Seven Commandments was that no animal was allowed to drink alcohol.  The next morning, Napoleon is evidently badly hungover because Squealer announces that he is dying.  When he makes this announcement, he tells the other animals that

As his last act upon earth, Comrade Napoleon had pronounced a solemn decree: the drinking of alcohol was to be punished by death.

So, this is Napoleon’s “final dying command.” 

Orwell has Napoleon give this command to illustrate how his edicts tend to change based on his own whims and needs. When Napoleon thinks he is dying from drinking the alcohol, he bans it on pain of death.  (This order itself shows his capriciousness because, up until the last chapter, one of the commandments was that no animal shall kill another animal.)  But when he recovers from his hangover, he starts to plant rye and to get booklets about how to make alcohol.  At the end of the chapter, we see his hypocrisy and his willingness to rewrite history when the Fifth Commandment is changed from “No animal shall drink alcohol” to “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.” 

How were Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum similar?

Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum were both ideological constructs that emphasized the right of allegedly superior peoples to claim the lands of neighboring peoples they deemed inferior. Manifest Destiny in the United States referred to the supposed right of the United States to expand throughout North America all the way to the Pacific Coast. It was a very popular concept, indeed one that virtually drove the policy of the United States near the mid-nineteenth century. Supporters of manifest destiny claimed that the new century had the right to take western lands from Mexico, which controlled the entirety of the American Southwest, and of course native peoples, whose ancient claims on Western lands were not deemed legitimate. Manifest Destiny was based on assumptions that white Anglo-Saxon Americans were culturally and racially inferior to Mexicans and Native Americans, and that they thus had the right to the lands. 

Lebensraum, or "living space," was a concept formulated by Adolf Hitler. Hitler believed that Germans, as the "master race," were entitled to lands in the east inhabited by people that he deemed inferior. These included especially Russians and other Slavic peoples. Indeed, Hitler claimed that it was the destiny of the Germans to enslave these unfortunate peoples, and his invasion of Russia in 1941 was aimed in part at achieving this end. The concept of Lebensraum went a horrible step further than Manifest Destiny in that Hitler advocated, and tried to carry out, the annihilation of the Jewish people, many of whom also inhabited what he regarded as Lebensraum for the German people. Manifest Destiny was catastrophic for Indian people, but the horrific scale of the Holocaust was unparalleled in world history, much less that of the United States. But these two ideas had similar racial overtones. Hitler himself said as much when he explained his plans for the East in chilling terms. "[I]n the East," he said, "a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America."

What are the major themes of the book and what is its historical significance? How can I write a short response to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair?

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906, is a fictionalized account of a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus who attempts to make a living in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The major theme of the book is that immigrants and other working-class people in America at the turn of the turn of the 20th century could not survive financially, physically, and morally with the back-breaking jobs available to them.

After his wedding, Jurgis tries to make a living in the filthy stockyards in Chicago, where cows were butchered and packed for sale, but he falls prey to con men. His wife is raped by her boss, and when Jurgis retaliates against this man, he is sent to jail. Eventually, his wife dies in childbirth, and he becomes an alcoholic. His only salvation is attending the socialist workers' rallies that teach him that workers must have a say and a share in their livelihood.

As stated above, the main theme of the book is that the jobs available to immigrants and the poor at the time did not allow these people to support themselves. They are still prey to con men and do not have the means to afford healthcare. The related theme is that American capitalism at the time did not work for the poor and that they needed a larger share in the profits, as well as access to cheaper and better housing, medical care, and food. In addition, the book calls attention to the hideously dirty conditions in slaughterhouses at the time.

The book resulted in major political and other changes, as Teddy Roosevelt, who was President at the time, sent investigators to look at the dirty conditions of the slaughterhouses and examine the safety of the meat that was sold from these places. As a result, the Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. These acts made sure that meat was packed under clean conditions and that the food and drugs sold in this country were labeled correctly, were produced under sanitary and conditions, and were safe for consumption.