The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua passed through our solar system in 2017. Loeb has suggested it could have been sent by extraterrestrials. (Credit: European Southern Observatory/Kornmesser)
Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, Cosmology, SETI
Life, for all its complexities, has a simple commonality: It spreads. Plants, animals, and bacteria have colonized almost every nook and cranny of our world.
But why stop there? Some scientists speculate that biological matter may have proliferated across the cosmos itself, transported from planet to planet on wayward lumps of rock and ice. This idea is known as panspermia, and it carries a profound implication: Life on Earth may not have originated on our planet.
In theory, panspermia is fairly simple. Astronomers know that impacts from comets or asteroids on planets will sometimes eject debris with enough force to catapult rocks into space. Some of those space rocks will, in turn, crash into other worlds. A few rare meteorites on Earth are known to have come from Mars, likely in this fashion.
“You can imagine small astronauts sitting inside this rock, surviving the journey,” says Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and director of the school’s Institute for Theory and Computation. “Microbes could potentially move from one planet to another, from Mars to Earth, from Earth to Venus.” (You may recognize Loeb’s name from his recent book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which garnered headlines and criticism from astronomers for its claim that our solar system was recently visited by extraterrestrials.)
Loeb has authored a number of papers probing the mechanics of panspermia, looking at, among other things, how the size and speed of space objects might affect their likelihood of transferring life. While Loeb still thinks it’s more likely that life originated on Earth, he says his work has failed to rule out the possibility that it came from somewhere else in space.
In the desert just north of Las Vegas, a long white metal tube sits at the base of the mountains, promising to one day revolutionize travel.
That is where Virgin Hyperloop, whose partners include Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is developing the technology for passenger pods that will hurtle at speeds of up to 750 miles an hour (1,200 kph) through almost air-free vacuum tunnels using magnetic levitation.
“It will feel like an aircraft at take-off and once you’re at speed,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Josh Giegel, who gave Reuters an exclusive tour of the pod used in its November test run, where it was propelled along a 500 meter (1,640 ft.) tunnel.
“You won’t even have turbulence because our system is basically completely able to react to all that turbulence. Think noise-canceling but bump-canceling, if you will.”
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights
Munchausen Syndrome was named after a German cavalry officer Baron von Munchausen (1720-1797), a man who traveled widely and was known for his dramatic but untruthful stories. In 1951 Richard Asher described a pattern of self-abuse, where individuals fabricated histories of illness. These fabrications most often led to complex medical investigations, hospitalizations, and needless surgery. Remembering Baron von Munchausen and his mythical tales, Asher named this condition Munchausen Syndrome.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, often referred to as MSbP, is a term coined by pediatrician Professor Roy Meadow in 1977. The term refers to the circumstance where the child is the subject of the fabrication of an illness by the parent. It was thought that the parent ‘with MSbP’ was motivated by trying to gain attention from medical professionals by inducing or fabricating the sickness in their child. In Meadow’s first article, he explored two case studies of children admitted to hospital with illnesses thought to be fabricated or induced by their carers: ‘These two [parents] flourished there [in the hospital] as if they belonged, and thrived on the attention that staff gave to them…. In these cases, it was as if the parents were using the children to get themselves into the sheltered environment of a children’s ward surrounded by friendly staff’ (Meadow 1977: 344-345).
The “Republican Party” is a name. It has no “principles” it lives by. It exists, to paraphrase Steve Schmidt, for the accumulation, acquisition, and maintenance of power for power’s sake.
Where the “Republican Party” is was eventually going to metastasize. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to political systems, and philosophies.
Cutting the corporate tax rate from 70% to 28% sounds great: if you’re in industry, or on the receiving end of corporate largess from lobbyists. To say that Social Security is insolvent doesn’t begin to address the real problem: a theft in plain sight occurred, and reparations – not just slavery in the 1860s, but 1980s reparations – have yet to be paid.
“For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people–one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s,” says Thom Hartmann. Taiwan’s single-payer system enabled the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down its economy, resulting in just seven deaths, while in the United States more than 350,000 have died.
Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current “sickness for profit” system. Modern attempts to create some kind of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn–including Obamacare, which Hartmann regards as basically a sellout to the health insurance industry.
A large part of why we don’t have universal healthcare in the United States is that “those people” (black, brown, LGBT, women who delay or forego marriage) would get it. Like the filibuster, it’s a relic of slavery. It’s remarkable in its longevity.
Everything about the “Republican Party” can largely be explained by sadomasochism, and Munchausen by proxy to feed oligarchy, their true, and only constituency. They claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism and spend like drunken sailors. They harm the body politic, then promptly blame it for the dysfunction they’ve caused. Politicians at their basic level are caregivers to the republic. It’s why we constantly recover from the lunacy of previous republican administrations during democratic administrations, then go right back to the lunacy after the change in administrations AS IF they’re capable of doing anything different than their previous debacles. They revel in a dysfunctional government, they cheer for dystopia and Armageddon. “Government is not the solution to our problem: government IS the problem” became a Reagan mantra, lazy politics, and intellectual bankruptcy. Why not goose the racist inclinations of your constituents, instead of leading them to help you solve problems, and actually earn your pay? For the crumbs from a chipped table between the Rich Man and Lazarus, they are willing to put hundreds of thousands of people to death, to gaslight about taking a vaccine to ameliorate a pandemic, to sacrifice Fox Propaganda viewers on the altar of Moloch so the economy can fail, and they can return to power, not because they have any novel ideas: It just makes them feel better.
They’ve been running this con for forty years. I have witnessed it and knew it would reach a saturation point: that it could not be sustained, as no lie, big or small can. They are desperately trying to patch the dam with fingers, hire QAnon “cyber ninjas” to audit Arizona ballots (already audited three times), to dwell in the “created realities” realm of Karl Rove. You can call it “religious freedom,” the “silent majority,” but it legitimizes their personal bigotry against whole groups for things they have no control over, nor they would change about themselves if they could. They can’t gain their votes, so, they block their votes.
The Whig Party: The Whig Party was a political party formed in 1834 by opponents of President Andrew Jackson and his Jacksonian Democrats. Led by Henry Clay, the name “Whigs” was derived from the English antimonarchist party and was an attempt to portray Jackson as “King Andrew.” The Whigs were one of the two major political parties in the United States from the late 1830s through the early 1850s. While Jacksonian Democrats painted Whigs as the party of the aristocracy, they managed to win support from diverse economic groups and elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. The other two Whig presidents, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore gained office as Vice Presidents next in the line of succession.History.com
The Know-Nothing Party: Know-Nothing party, by name of American Party, U.S. political party that flourished in the 1850s. It was an outgrowth of the strong anti-immigrant and especially anti-Roman Catholicsentiment that started to manifest itself during the 1840s. A rising tide of immigrants, primarily Germans in the Midwest and Irish in the East, seemed to pose a threat to the economic and political security of native-born Protestant Americans. In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city.Britannica.com
Neither of these parties exists in the United States.
Implosions are ugly, but like Entropy and blowing out gaslights, they are inexorable.
MIT engineers have developed self-cooling fabrics from polyethylene, commonly used in plastic bags. They estimate that the new fabric may be more sustainable than cotton and other common textiles. (Courtesy: Svetlana Boriskina)
Topics: Ecology, Environment, Green Tech, Materials Science
Polyethylene is one of the most common plastics in the world, but it is seldom found in clothing because it cannot absorb or carry away water. (Imagine wearing a plastic bag – you would feel very uncomfortable very quickly.) Now, however, researchers in the US have developed a new material spun from polyethylene that not only “breathes” better than cotton, nylon, or polyester, but also has a smaller ecological footprint due to the ease with which it can be manufactured, dyed, cleaned and used.
The textile industry produces about 62 million tons of fabric each year. In the process, it consumes huge quantities of water, generates millions of tons of waste, and accounts for 5–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the world’s most polluting industries. Later stages of the textile use cycle also contribute to the industry’s environmental impact. Textiles made from natural fibers such as wool, cotton, silk, or linen require considerable amounts of energy and water to recycle, while textiles that are colored or made of composite materials are hard to recycle at all.
Hydrophilic and wicking
Researchers led by Svetlana Boriskina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to produce an alternative. They began by melting powdered low-density polyethylene and then extruding it into thin fibers roughly 18.5 μm in diameter (as measured using scanning electron microscopy and micro-computed tomography imaging techniques). This process slightly oxidizes the material’s surface so that it becomes hydrophilic – that is, it attracts water molecules – without the need for a separate chemical treatment.
Astronomers searched for candidate antimatter stars among nearly 6000 gamma-ray sources. After eliminating known objects and sources that lacked the spectral signature of an antistar, 14 possibles remained. (Courtesy: Simon Dupourqué/IRAP)
Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology, High Energy Physics
Fourteen possible antimatter stars (“antistars”) have been flagged up by astronomers searching for the origin of puzzling amounts of antihelium nuclei detected coming from deep space by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) on the International Space Station.
Three astronomers at the University of Toulouse – Simon Dupourqué, Luigi Tibaldo, and Peter von Ballmoos – found the possible antistars in archive gamma-ray data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. While antistars are highly speculative, if they are real, then they may be revealed by their production of weak gamma-ray emission peaking at 70 MeV, when particles of normal matter from the interstellar medium fall onto them and are annihilated.
However, when it was announced in 2018 that AMS-02 had tentatively detected eight antihelium nuclei in cosmic rays – six of antihelium-3 and two of antihelium-4 – those unconfirmed detections were initially attributed to cosmic rays colliding with molecules in the interstellar medium and producing the antimatter in the process.
Subsequent analysis by scientists including Vivian Poulin, now at the University of Montpellier, cast doubt on the cosmic-ray origin since the greater the number of nucleons (protons and neutrons) that an antimatter nucleus has, the more difficult it is to form from cosmic ray collisions. Poulin’s group calculated that antihelium-3 is created by cosmic rays at a rate 50 times less than that detected by the AMS, while antihelium-4 is formed at a rate 105 times less.
The mystery of matter and antimatter
The focus has therefore turned back to what at first may seem an improbable explanation – stars made purely from antimatter. According to theory, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts in the Big Bang, and subsequently, all annihilated leaving a universe full of radiation and no matter. Yet since we live in a matter-dominated universe, more matter than antimatter must have been created in the Big Bang – a mystery that physicists have grappled with for decades.
“Most scientists have been persuaded for decades now that the universe is essentially free of antimatter apart from small traces produced in collisions of normal matter,” says Tibaldo.
The possible existence of antistars threatens to turn this on its head. “The definitive discovery of antihelium would be absolutely fundamental,” says Dupourqué.
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Propaganda
Tucker Carlson appears to be made of Teflon. Fox News’ top-rated host has been repeatedly accused of anti-immigrant and racist comments, which have cost his political opinion show many of its major advertisers. Yet Carlson endures in his prime-time slot.
Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.
Attorney Sidney Powell is defending herself from a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit using the same tactic successfully deployed by Tucker Carlson‘s Fox News show last year.
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Powell for a series of statements claiming that the company was involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election for President Joe Biden.
Powell’s attorneys have said in a court filing that no reasonable person would have believed her allegations as fact and therefore she can’t have defamed Dominion. This approach was successfully argued by lawyers representing Fox News in a 2020 defamation case.
“[I]n light of all the circumstances surrounding the statements, their context, and the availability of the facts on which the statements were based, it was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” Powell’s lawyers wrote.
“Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.”
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Fox knows the pandemic is real, as does Tucker Carlson. Like most other functional news outlets, he’s probably getting a PCR test: polymerase chain reaction as well as temperature tests each time he comes to the building and set. Likely, his audience knows it’s real as well. They might know one, or two people who have had it, or perished from it.
But the lie is more intoxicating than truth.
Barack Obama is a talented, superficially charming politician that can retail politic and kiss babies credibly with anyone. As a graduate of Columbia and Harvard, a constitutional scholar, he was never this rabid liberal-secret Muslim-closeted-socialist Fox Propaganda and right wing talk radio made him out to be. He said a speech in 2004 that put him on the political map. The economy was in a tailspin in 2008 due to the moribund philosophy of “trickle-down economics,” that is more like a vacuum sucking up money from the lower classes to the 0.01%. The 46th president chimed the death knell to the moribundity.
The mother of lies was the “mama grizzly” from Alaska, saying the rabid liberal-secret Muslim-closeted socialist “palled around with terrorists.” A public display of affection with his wife became a “terrorist fist bump.” This was reductio ad absurdum on steroids.
After losing with her running mate, she glommed onto the “death panels” myth by former NY lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey’s objections to Section 1233 of HR 3200: the Affordable Care Act. The recently-departed Rush Limbaugh, along with Laura Ingram, and Sean Hannity parroted the claims because that’s what a propaganda echo chamber does. Add to this Orwellian programming trio, the irascible Newton Gingrich, who turned conciliatory political protocol into blood sport. They have killed more grandparents this pandemic than the aspect of affordable healthcare to all Americans from a black president.
The lie metastasized with birtherism: the notion that Barack Hussein Obama (emphasis always on the middle name) wasn’t born in America. Newsflash: he was, despite the desperate attempts to decertify Hawaii as the reluctant 50th state. However, neither John McCain (Panama Canal) nor Raphael Edward Cruz, Jr. (Canada) was born on American soil. They are both American citizens because at least one parent – in McCain’s case both parents, were American citizens, so the argument that Stanley Ann Dunham could not confer the same status to her son had he been born in another country is feckless, racist, and moot. He was the living, breathing symbol of the change coming to the US.
The Tea Party reflected back to the beginnings of this republic with the Boston Tea Party: “taxation without representation” the battle cry and apparent raison d’etre for the existence of the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. All of them have one thing in common: a preponderance of Melanin, and fewer senators than Wyoming.
T.E.A.: taxed enough already, the modern battle cry for people not willing yet to admit their angst with the Affordable Care Act had little to do with socialism, or death panels, hence the pejorative “Obamacare,” because hanging him in effigy, and witch doctor placards were the last remnants of “wink and nod” genteel, subtle racial politics. The Tea Party “Freedom” Caucus (Orwellian as it sounds) swept into power in the 2010 midterms, despite Obama’s pleading with his following to vote in the same numbers as the 2008 presidential election. As history demanded, the opposition party took the House in 2010, helped by GOP Chair Michael Steele, jettisoned immediately after his token role was fulfilled. Moscow Mitch started his reign of terror with the 2014 midterms. Post Mr. Steele’s quixotic effort to engage more African Americans in the party, they went for the nasal-pronouncing Reince Priebus, soon-to-be in a distinguished succession of former White House Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Steele has since redeemed himself with The Lincoln Project.
An unlikely union occurred between a carnival barker, and a master spy, the latter master to the former: Dumbo Gambino pimped by Dr. Evil; the Ku Klutz Klan owned by the KGB. Neither of them planned for him to win against his more qualified, consequential opponent, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, so they had no plan for success, even for nefarious goals. It is why the last four years of Keystone Cop politics, chaotic, semi-form hand gestures; mumbled diction, misspelled tweets, hamberders, covfefe, and Page Six sensationalism ended in the current pandemic Zoom kerfuffle we’re all in.
“Palling around with terrorists”; “terrorist fist bump”; “death panels”; “birtherism”; the T.E.A. Party; “Freedom” Caucus: no challenges, not a single reset, no “this is not our party.” There were speed bumps that led to the biggest lie, even bigger than the Big Lie of stolen elections, and a January 6, 2021 insurrection: an alternative reality known as QAnon, that despite evidence to the contrary, the lie has its audience in sway because the truth requires responsibility.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Even with the current revelations that QAnon is a guy and his dad in the Philippines, the 2020 platform that wasn’t, the lie has primacy over facts, which is imperative if you want to run something based on facts, like science in the lab, or a democracy.
In her laboratory in Barcelona, Spain, Miki Ebisuya has built a clock without cogs, springs, or numbers. This clock doesn’t tick. It is made of genes and proteins, and it keeps time in a layer of cells that Ebisuya’s team has grown in its lab. This biological clock is tiny, but it could help to explain some of the most conspicuous differences between animal species.
Animal cells bustle with activity, and the pace varies between species. In all observed instances, mouse cells run faster than human cells, which tick faster than whale cells. These differences affect how big an animal gets, how its parts are arranged, and perhaps even how long it will live. But biologists have long wondered what cellular timekeepers control these speeds, and why they vary.
A wave of research is starting to yield answers for one of the many clocks that control the workings of cells. There is a clock in early embryos that beats out a regular rhythm by activating and deactivating genes. This ‘segmentation clock’ creates repeating body segments such as the vertebrae in our spines. This is the timepiece that Ebisuya has made in her lab.
“I’m interested in biological time,” says Ebisuya, a developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Barcelona. “But lifespan or gestation period, they are too long for me to study.” The swift speed of the segmentation clock makes it an ideal model system, she says.
A graphene-based “beam splitter” for electronic currents has been built by researchers in France, South Korea, and Japan. Created by Preden Roulleau at the University of Paris and colleagues, the tunable device’s operation is directly comparable that of an optical interferometer. The technology could soon enable allow electron interferometry to be used in nanotechnology and quantum computing.
An optical interferometer splits a beam of light in two, sending each beam a long a different path before recombining the beams at a detector. The measured interference of the beams at the detector can be used to detect tiny differences in the lengths of the two paths. Recently, physicists have become interested in doing a similar thing with currents of electrons in solid-state devices, taking advantage of fact that electrons behave as waves in the quantum world.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick and is widely considered to be the best material for realizing such “electron quantum optics”. Indeed, researchers have already used the material to make simple electron interferometers. Now, Roulleau’s team has created a fully-adjustable electron beam splitter that could be used to build more sophisticated devices. It exploits the quantum Hall effect, whereby the application of a strong magnetic field perpendicular to a sheet of graphene will cause an electron current to flow around the edge of the sheet.
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights
JELANI COBB, STAFF WRITER, “THE NEW YORKER”: It was kind of a whiplash, you know, because there was a great deal of relief and joy, jubilation really, at the guilty verdict that came down in the Derek Chauvin trial. And then just that quickly, people were kind of whipsawed back into this grieving mode. The Eleventh Hour, Brian Williams, transcript
*****
In 1961, author James Baldwin was asked by a radio host about being Black in America. He said:
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance. Now, since this is so, it’s a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn’t the way it works. A complex thing can’t be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.
I wept at the verdict Tuesday. Seeing George Floyd’s murderer led out in handcuffs was cathartic, saddening, and angering. This was not justice: it was accountability.
Justice would be George Floyd alive. Justice would be George tucking Gianna in at night. Justice would be Gianna riding his giant shoulders again. Justice would be George walking Gianna down the aisle. Justice would be George being called “Paw-Paw” by his grandchildren from Gianna if she were to choose to be a mother. Before “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Thomas Jefferson penned the requisite of “life.”
This pandemic has revealed our “American exceptionalism” is a farce – a joke. This “exceptionalism” had the United States with the highest death and infection rates in the world. This “exceptionalism” has a caste system, parallel to the Indian Varnas, and more brutal than the German Nazis, that is cutting off our noses to spite our own faces.
In the book “Castes: The Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson, she says in an NPR interview: “caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, the benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.” Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that “what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system.” -NPR
Also in her book is Leon Lederman.
Leon M. Lederman The Nobel Prize in Physics 1988
Born: 15 July 1922, New York, NY, USA
Died: 3 October 2018, Rexburg, ID, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL, USA
Prize motivation: “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”
Dr. Lederman, Isabel Wilkerson writes, died having sold his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to pay his medical bills in the richest country in the world. A Nobel laureate died in a nursing home, in “exceptional America.” That fact gobsmacked me.
Just like Rodney King’s beating. Just like Eric Garner’s public lynching for selling loose cigarettes in NYC, the first black man to say “I can’t breath” recorded. Tamir Rice only had seconds to play with a toy gun before he was summarily executed. Just like George Floyd.
We held our breaths because we’ve all been down this road before. Guilty on all counts, and the same forces that freed Klansmen, Nazis, and rogue cops started harping that the sequestered jury was somehow “bullied” because they looked at the evidence, and reached a verdict. It feels wrong to them because the jury wasn’t in a southern courtroom, or Semi Valley: because the jury wasn’t “all-white,” making a mockery of the term “jury of one’s peers.”
We didn’t get to breathe for George before losing Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant. This state terror feels mechanistic, steampunk: programmed. This timeline of death is psychotic and persistent. Like the Coronavirus, its only function is to exist, to thrive, even though its complete migration throughout the body politic causes eventually, according to Merriam-Webster: “[T]he irreversible cessation of all vital functions especially as indicated by a permanent stoppage of the heart, respiration, and brain activity : the end of life.”Apoptosis can apply to nation-states. Rome and England are tourist destinations now.
Racism is a moribund concept. It’s the ultimate narcissism, the mother of all “isms” when you’re supremely confident your “in” group has discovered and propagated the perfect gaslighting shtick over people of color, women, LGBT, immigrants. The only way the façade continues is that it must relentlessly be reinforced by state-sanctioned violence.
It is state-sanctioned violence to steal land inhabited by First Nation people already here, then put them on “reservations,” segregated from the political machinations of power.
It is state-sanctioned violence to kidnap Africans for uncompensated labor, hold them in bondage for centuries, segregate them in government housing projects (“ghettos”), refuse to discuss reparations, redline homeownership, give white GIs home loans, and scholarships for college after WWII, and complain the problem with the African diaspora is they’re “lazy.”
It is state-sanctioned violence that forty-four transgender or gender-nonconforming citizens were killed in 2020.
It is state-sanctioned violence that the Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Bill had one lone nay vote from the same raised-fist “Mr. Woody” senator that helped incite an insurrection.
State-sanctioned violence has a boomerang effect: it is karmic. It is why we performed so badly in a once-in-a-century pandemic. It is why their mortality rates are high, their opiate addiction is a crisis, and their birth rates are low. They are not being replaced. The very machinations put in place to publicly lynch, put Orwellian boots-to-face, or “knees on necks” on society’s “least of these” eventually affects someone even narcissists might care about.
Like smokestacks on pickup trucks to “own the libs,” as if they breathe some other atmosphere on another planet, this state-sanctioned violence caused the bankruptcy and eventual death of a physics Nobel laureate. This is the epitome of madness.
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.”
You can’t possibly imagine how enraged I feel most of the time.
Scientists aren’t superheroes. Or are they? Superheroes defend the defenseless and save humanity from any number of disasters, both natural and unnatural, often using powers of logic and some really hip techno-gadgets.
The Earth is in crisis and while it has its own mechanisms to fight back, it could use a helping hand. Earth could use a superhero.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are stepping up and applying decades of expertise and research to combat some of Earth’s toughest foes, from waste and pollution to climate change. And they’ve assembled a cache of some of the world’s coolest technology for this crusade.
So, this Earth Day, we take a look at just a few of the ways Argonne’s scientist-superheroes are swooping in to keep Earth healthy and its citizens safe.
Predicting Earth’s future
What better way to save the planet than knowing what the future holds? Argonne and DOE are leaders in modeling Earth’s complex natural systems to help us keep tabs on the planet’s health. The best of these models can simulate how changes in these systems and our own actions might influence climate and ecosystems many years into the future. They give us a better understanding of the roles played by tropical rain forests, ice sheets, permafrost and oceans in maintaining carbon levels and help us devise strategies for protecting them — ultimately, identifying how much carbon dioxide (CO2) we need to reduce from human activities and remove from the atmosphere to stabilize the planet’s temperature.
Physics and Nano 