Intersectionality and 53%…

Image Source: U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research, February 11, 2008

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

Excerpt from “Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice,” (August 1, 1994) Claude Anderson, Ed. D., Chapter 2: Power and Black Progress:

Chapter 2, page 33, subsection titled:

Numerical Population Power

     In a democratic society, the numerical majority wins, rules, and decides. The theoretical rights of a minority may or may not be respected, especially if they are a planned minority. Numerical population power is the power that comes to those groups that acquire power through their sheer size. The black population peaked in the 1750s when slaves and free blacks accounted for approximately 33 percent of the total population. The high numerical strength of blacks caused fear and concern among whites. They feared the loss of their own numerical power. Word of black Haitians’ successful slave revolt in the 1790s had spread across America and reportedly ignited several slave revolts in Southern states.

     The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America a nation for “whites only.” The naturalization act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnicities, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total population percentage declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins. Source: Sample chapter

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If current trends continue, the demographic profile of the United States will change dramatically by the middle of this century, according to new population projections developed by the Pew Research Center.1

The nation’s population will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the growth during this period will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their descendants. (Figure 1)

Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves, 47 million will be their children, and 3 million will be their grandchildren.

The Center’s projections indicate that nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be foreign-born in 2050, well above the 2005 level of 12% and surpassing the historical peaks for immigrants as a share of the U.S. population—14.8% in 1890 and 14.7% in 1910. (Figure 2)

By 2050, the nation’s racial and ethnic mix will look different than it does now. Non-Hispanic whites, who made up 67% of the population in 2005, will be 47% in 2050. Hispanics will rise from 14% of the population in 2005 to 29% in 2050. Blacks were 13% of the population in 2005 and will be roughly the same proportion in 2050. Asians, who were 5% of the population in 2005, will be 9% in 2050.

If you do the math: the BIPOC in these statistics adds up to ~51 to 53%, a clear majority.

What is intersectionality?

The concept of intersectionality describes how systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class, and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects. For example, when a Muslim woman wearing the Hijab is being discriminated against, it would be impossible to dissociate her female* from her Muslim identity and to isolate the dimension(s) causing her discrimination.

Source: Center for Intersectional Justice: What is intersectionality?

“Race,” as we have been conditioned to understand it, is a social construct. Yet, every employment application asks me to choose a category that best describes me: I chose Black/African American because that is my culture. I am a human being, a terrestrial inhabitant born on planet Earth. We fill out the Census because it is our “civic duty” and our habit, born of ignorance and not questioning why things are the WAY they are.

So racial capitalism was basically built based on the idea that capitalism itself is not distinct from racism. The way we think of racism is that racism is a by-product of capitalism. That is, capitalism emerges, and racism is a way to divide workers. It’s a way to extract greater value from enslaved people, Indigenous people, etc. But Cedric argued that the grounds of the civilization in which capitalism emerges are already based on racial hierarchy. If you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden, then what you end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also relies on an ideology or racial regime. The racial regime convinces a lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through slavery, through Jim Crow, convince them to support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based on white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty minuscule. Slam poet Saul Williams commenting on the Intercept Podcast: The Rebellion Against Racial Capitalism. Facebook

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The Census is crafted from the same crucible. Every ten years, we count the number of citizens, or residents, in the nation. We craft, actually, gerrymander districts based on these demographic numbers. The absurdity is evident not too far from me: my Alma Mater, North Carolina A&T State University, the largest Historically Black College and University in the nation, was split in two to dilute the impact of student voting and participation in the franchise. That was thankfully remedied, and students are voting in record numbers. It is thus important which party controls the White House (I think it should be called the Presidential Mansion) during the ten-year cycle. We’re looking at the next election in 2024. What will be of paramount importance is which party gets to draw congressional districts after the election of 2028.

Fifty years of precedent were repealed in jettisoning Roe vs. Wade: why? Perhaps it is that “for the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total 50% decline. Reasons include women’s empowerment in education and the workforce, lower child mortality, and the increased cost of raising children. Lower fertility rates, coupled with increased life expectancies worldwide, create an aging population, putting pressure on healthcare systems globally.” (World Economic Forum) Comparing national birthrates in 2020:

NationBirthrates
Niger6.7
Nigeria5.2
Senegal4.5
Ghana3.8
Pakistan3.4
World2.4
Mexico2.1
The U.S.1.8
South Korea1.1
Source: World Economic Forum: Ageing and Longevity, June 17, 2022

It makes sense, in a macabre, sociopathic, psychopathic “logic.” If your birthrates are falling, you open the floodgates to all births by repealing abortion rights; the health and career aspirations of women be damned. Similarly, for the LGBTQ community, the right to marry “who you love” contradicts the desires of capitalism: replacement workers, which can be done through surrogate parenthood. Still, these are Neanderthal minds crafting our society. The closet was valuable to them because you could, in sham marriages, procreate in public and copulate in secret. Dr. Claude Anderson stated in “Black Labor, White Wealth” that enslaved Africans and their descendants were a “planned numerical minority.” “White” is a fungible concept: as numbers declined in America, Czechs, Italians, Jews, and Russians were added to the “white” column and instructed how to address the designated pariah “others.” This façade would inevitably crash on the weight of its own hubris.

“Race” is a social and political construct. Suppose you happened to have won the “sperm lottery” and were born in “Leave it to Beaver Villes” with a prepondering lack of Melanin (and lack of empathy for those possessing it). In that case, you’re likely comfortable with the status quo as it is; reducing inequality doesn’t interest you in the slightest; therefore: you want to “conserve” what you know and are comfortable with it. And if you can’t gerrymander, voter suppress, or intimidate “others” into their diminished places, January 6, 2021, showed us conclusively that their last ditch, “in case of democracy, break glass” last move, they will resort to deadly violence to uphold a chimera. 40,000+ video security footage given to the CIA reject at Fox Propaganda ensures the next coup will have a roadmap to once-secret places. The Capitol is the scene of past and future crimes.

Intersectionality is another word for cooperation. We will have to cooperate to address the challenges of climate change, to take the mythology out of it, “it’s THOSE people, not US,” to solve the problem together. It’s not Ron DeSantis-Stan at risk of higher water levels due to climate change: it is an American state, American citizens, and, as illustrated in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina, American climate refugees and, sadly, casualties.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech on April 4, 1967, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” He condemned the Vietnam War, which would result in over 50,000 American casualties, as immoral and unjust. He was assassinated, supposedly by James Earl Ray, on April 4, 1968.

Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, for the rights of Sanitation Workers, carrying signs stating the obvious, “I am a man,” that wasn’t to the time (and since the public execution of Tyre Nichols feet from where King was assassinated) being respected. It was an extension, or arm of the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to unify the poor in urban cities and Appalachia, in other words: intersectionality.

So, it’s not a fear of Black History/CRT, or drag queen story hour (if you don’t support it, don’t go), Hispanic Heritage Month, Queer History Month, Women’s History Month: it’s the Venn Diagram that intersects each of these groups under a common foe that is determined to maintain that status quo by closing polling booths, voter purging, voter suppression. Book bans discourage intersectionality through ignorance, such that each can build coalitions to the point they could become the 53% voting majority in a majoritarian nation.

South African Apartheid existed as “white” Afrikaans declined to a numerical minority.

America might try something like this for 47%, and the continuously psychopathic 1% would like to maintain.

There is another formula:

99% = 46% + 53%, which is > 1%.

The old world had castles, kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses, with serfs willing to subjugate themselves to a monied elite because of “divine will,” not sociopathy.

The new world has mansions, billionaires, hedge fund managers, and corporations, with a bewildered herd willing to subjugate themselves to a monied elite because the propaganda they pump them says they are “blessed,” not kleptomaniacs.

Intersectionality = cooperation = survival. Authoritarian autocracy does not.

Nanowires and Climate Change…

Image Credit: Down to the wire (IMAGE), Yale University

Topics: Biotechnology, Civilization, Climate Change, Nanotechnology

Accelerated climate change is a major and acute threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused by atmospheric methane, which is 30 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Microbes are responsible for generating half of this methane. Elevated temperatures are also accelerating microbial growth and thus producing more greenhouse gases than can be used by plants, thus weakening the earth’s ability to function as a carbon sink and further raising the global temperature.

A potential solution to this vicious circle could be another kind of microbes that eats up to 80% of methane flux from ocean sediments that protect the Earth. How microbes serve as both the biggest producers and consumers of methane has remained a mystery because they are very difficult to study in the laboratory. In Nature Microbiology, surprising wire-like properties of a protein highly similar to the protein used by methane-eating microbes are reported by the Yale team led by Yangqi Gu and Nikhil Malvankar of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Microbial Sciences Institute.

The team had previously shown that this protein nanowire shows the highest conductivity known to date,  allowing the generation of the highest electric power by any bacteria. But to date, no one has discovered how bacteria make them and why they show such extremely high conductivity.

An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by bacteria provides clues to combating climate change, Yale University.

Class of ’78…

Topics: African Americans, Diversity in Science, NASA

The inclusion of women and people of color in NASA’s astronaut cadet program was unprecedented — and sometimes met fierce resistance.

The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel, Meredith Bagby, William Morrow (2023)

Growing up in racially segregated South Carolina in the 1950s, Ronald McNair saw door after door slammed in his face. The public pool was for white people only, so he could not learn to swim. When he was nine years old, a librarian called the police on him for trying to borrow calculus books.

McNair fought the racism and went on to study physics at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro — a historically Black institution — and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 1978, NASA chose him as a finalist to be an astronaut, in the first group to contain women, people of color, and scientists. His pioneering class included Sally Ride, who would become the first US woman in space; Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian American in space; and Guion Bluford, the first African American in space.

With The New Guys, Meredith Bagby, a film producer and former journalist has produced a broad and easily readable narrative about this group of US astronauts. She does not break new ground in outlining their experiences and the team’s role in space history. But she does illuminate the historic nature of their selection — and, significantly, how they helped to shape NASA’s space shuttle program, from its first flight in 1981 until its end in 2011.

NASA’s first astronaut class, chosen in 1959, was the iconic Mercury Seven which included John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Gus Grissom. The next six groups were similar: all white, male military pilots lionized for having “the right stuff.” Then came the class of 1978. Of the 35 new astronauts, 14 were civilians, 6 were women, and 4 were men of color.

It was a time of huge change for NASA. The Apollo Moon program had wound down, and NASA had set its sights on developing a reusable space plane that would launch like a rocket and land like an airplane. Astronauts on this vehicle would deploy military and scientific satellites into space. It was time for a new type of astronaut for a new type of spaceship.

Breaking through prejudice

Bagby views the shuttle era through the experiences of its astronauts, with a focus on women moving into new roles. They include Ride, a gay woman who remained in the closet while at NASA because the agency would not hire her otherwise; geologist Kathryn Sullivan; physicians Rhea Seddon and Anna Fisher; biochemist Shannon Lucid; and engineer Judith Resnik.

In the late 1970s, the view in much of NASA’s ranks was that the agency had lowered its standards to admit a more diverse class, and the class acquired the soubriquet “Those Fucking New Guys.” John Glenn and Chuck Yeager, the quintessential “right stuff” pilots, were among those who fought against hiring women as astronauts. Opposition from Yeager had probably helped to keep Ed Dwight, a Black test pilot, from joining a previous class.

Note: Younger me, off Dr. McNair’s left shoulder looking down at the floor. Someone dropped their keys, I reacted, and the faux pas is preserved for all Internet eternity.

Source:

https://journalnow.com/news/local/30-things-you-should-know-about-astronaut-ronald-mcnair/article_b6e2357c-8b07-550c-bf19-f4a713047e76.amp.html

How NASA’s breakthrough ‘class of ’78’ changed the face of space travel, Alexandra Witze, Nature

Ancient Astronomy…

Antikythera mechanism (Image), website, and publisher: Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antikythera-mechanism#/media/1/1334586/238592, access date: February 20, 2023

Topics: Archaeology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, History

In 1900 diver Elias Stadiatis, clad in a copper and brass helmet and a heavy canvas suit, emerged from the sea shaking in fear and mumbling about a “heap of dead naked people.” He was among a group of Greek divers from the Eastern Mediterranean island of Symi who were searching for natural sponges. They had sheltered from a violent storm near the tiny island of Antikythera, between Crete and mainland Greece. When the storm subsided, they dived for sponges and chanced on a shipwreck full of Greek treasures—the most significant wreck from the ancient world to have been found up to that point. The “dead naked people” were marble sculptures scattered on the seafloor, along with many other artifacts. Soon after, their discovery prompted the first major underwater archaeological dig in history.

One object recovered from the site, a lump the size of a large dictionary, initially escaped notice amid more exciting finds. Months later, however, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the lump broke apart, revealing bronze precision gearwheels the size of coins. According to historical knowledge at the time, gears like these should not have appeared in ancient Greece or anywhere else in the world until many centuries after the shipwreck. The finding generated huge controversy.

The lump is known as the Antikythera mechanism, an extraordinary object that has befuddled historians and scientists for more than 120 years. Over the decades, the original mass split into 82 fragments, leaving a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers to put back together. The device appears to be a geared astronomical calculation machine of immense complexity. Today we have a reasonable grasp of some of its workings, but there are still unsolved mysteries. We know it is at least as old as the shipwreck it was found in, which has been dated to between 60 and 70 B.C.E., but other evidence suggests it may have been made around 200 B.C.E.

One of the central researchers in the early years of Antikythera research was German philologist Albert Rehm, the first person to understand the mechanism as a calculating machine. Between 1905 and 1906, he made crucial discoveries that he recorded in his unpublished research notes. He found, for instance, the number 19 inscribed on one of the surviving Antikythera fragments. This figure referenced the 19-year period relation of the moon known as the Metonic cycle, named after Greek astronomer Meton but discovered much earlier by the Babylonians. On the same fragment, Rehm found the numbers 76, a Greek refinement of the 19-year cycle, and 223, for the number of lunar months in a Babylonian eclipse-prediction cycle called the saros cycle. These repeating astronomical cycles were the driving force behind Babylonian predictive astronomy.

The second key figure in the history of Antikythera research was British physicist turned historian of science Derek J. de Solla Price. In 1974, after 20 years of research, he published an important paper, “Gears from the Greeks.” It referred to remarkable quotations by the Roman lawyer, orator, and politician Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.). One of these described a machine made by mathematician and inventor Archimedes (circa 287–212 B.C.E.) “on which were delineated the motions of the sun and moon and of those five stars which are called wanderers … (the five planets) … Archimedes … had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed.” This machine sounds just like the Antikythera mechanism. The passage suggests that Archimedes, although he lived before we believe the device was built, might have founded the tradition that led to the Antikythera mechanism. It may well be that the Antikythera mechanism was based on a design by Archimedes.

An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets, Tony Freeth, Scientific American

Silicon Gaslighting…

Image source: Black Planet dot com

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Note: I had my bridge removed by a periodontist. That’s not as trivial as I thought it would be, recalling me pulling my baby teeth at the age of six. My pain management regimen consisted of 600 mg of Motrin and 500 mg of Tylenol four times a day for two days, plus lots of rest. I guess losing a tooth at six is remarkably different than losing one at sixty. For the sake of public safety, I opted to telework as much as I could that week. I will have posts for Tuesday – Friday next week, taking President’s Day off.

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Sematech was a consortium of semiconductor industry giants on Ben White Boulevard in Austin, Texas. The taxpayers paid their land expenses through a ten-year tax abatement. Sematech promised Austin jobs. So in the spirit of fairness, Austin obviously wanted Sematech to start paying their taxes, and repaying the homeowners who footed the bill for a decade.

May 9th, 2007

Sematech leaving Austin for Albany

Abstract:
International Sematech will move its headquarters from Austin, Texas, to Albany, N.Y., state officials said May 9.

New York will spend $300 million to provide the buildings and infrastructure required to accommodate the headquarters of Sematech, a consortium of microchip manufacturers and semiconductor research operations, said Alain Kaloyeros, the chief administrative officer of the state University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, located at Albany NanoTech.

The money will go to the University at Albany, which now hosts Sematech’s existing research operation. The deal is still being finalized, although Sematech will begin moving some personnel to Albany in July, Kaloyeros said.

Source:
phoenix.bizjournals.com

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=22519

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I worked for Applied Materials at the IBM research facility in Fishkill, New York, from 2011 to 2017 and, ironically, with Albany Nanotech/Sematech on many occasions since my company had equipment installed there. I often passed the photo in Fishkill of the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony, taken in 2005 with Governor George Pataki and IBM executives. IBM promised jobs. The company needed ten years of tax abatements to grow, and they promised job nirvana. The ten-year clock was UP in 2015. Fishkill wanted their money. IBM wanted another decade-long tax abatement. There was an obvious impasse. Something had to give.

(Reuters) – IBM Corp IBM.N said it would hive off its loss-making semiconductor unit to contract-chipmaker Globalfoundries Inc to focus on cloud computing and big data analytics.

IBM will pay Globalfoundries $1.5 billion in cash over the next three years to take the chip operations off its hands, the companies said in a statement on Monday.

IBM took a related pre-tax charge of $4.7 billion in its third quarter. It also reported a 4 percent drop in revenue on Monday, hurt by weak sales in its software and services businesses.

IBM’s shares fell 8 percent to $167 in premarket trading.

IBM to pay Globalfoundries $1.5 billion to take chip unit. Abhirup Roy, Reuters, October 20, 2014

If $1.5 billion dollars paid is saving, what in Heaven’s name did they OWE Fishkill, NY?

So, color me not exactly nonplussed when I read this article on CNN:

CNN Business — When Microsoft President Brad Smith announced in February 2021 that the tech giant had purchased a 90-acre plot of land in Atlanta’s westside, he laid out a bold vision: The company, he said, would invest in the community and put it “on the path toward becoming one of Microsoft’s largest hubs” in the United States.

The announcement, which was met with enthusiastic coverage in local media, promised the construction of affordable housing, programs to help public school children develop digital skills, support for historically Black colleges and universities, new funding for local nonprofits, and affordable broadband for more people in Atlanta.

“Our biggest question today is not what Atlanta can do to support Microsoft,” Smith wrote. “It’s what Microsoft can do to support Atlanta.”

Two years later, Microsoft announced a series of cost-cutting efforts, including eliminating 10,000 jobs, making changes to its hardware portfolio, and consolidating leases. As part of those moves, Microsoft put the development of its Atlanta campus on pause this month, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

The decision to pause plans feels like a “broken promise” that caught many residents of the predominately Black neighborhood where Microsoft planned to build the campus off-guard, according to Jasmine Hope, a local resident and chair of her neighborhood planning unit.

‘Broken promises.’ Tech industry’s real estate pullback leaves communities reeling. Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business, February 14, 2023

*****

In the book and 2003 documentary, “The Corporation” by Professor Joel Bakan, he looked at the legal fiat during the Robber Baron era using the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which conferred birthright citizenship for formerly enslaved peoples to corporations, hence making them legal “persons.”

So, Dr. Bakan asked the question, “what kind of person would this entity be?”

The chilling and provocative answer: the closest person to a corporation would be a psychopath.

The Corporation likewise forces viewers to ponder key philosophical questions about the role of science and entrepreneurship and who should own knowledge and life. Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, introduces the complexities of intellectual property by outlining the history of patenting knowledge and life forms. Here, the film pushes our sensibilities of entrepreneurship and patenting. Patenting is intended to encourage innovation by ensuring that the innovator profits from the discoveries. But indiscriminate patenting can lead to “biopiracy,” –– a recently-coined term for the activities of corporations, universities, and governments that patent the medicinal or therapeutic properties of plants or animals used in traditional and indigenous medicines. The film also discusses the ethics of genetically-modified foods, which dramatically increase food production and change farming practices. For example, “terminator technology” in rice prevents farmers from saving and re-sowing seeds because the seeds have been genetically modified to produce only one crop. Perhaps most disturbing, the film raises the specter of corporations’ owning the entire human genetic code, as well as that of all other species on the planet.

In summary, The Corporation contends that today’s ubiquitous corporations are designed to behave like psychopaths—a provocative premise likely to polarize viewers and invite debate. The film has insights for people on all points of the political spectrum. It is useful for managers who struggle with issues of ethics and corporate social responsibility and for trainers, instructors, and researchers in the fields of strategy, ethics, governance, labor-management relations, and sustainable development.

The Corporation – The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power: Movie Review

About 1.2% of U.S. adult men and 0.3% to 0.7% of U.S. adult women are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. Those numbers rise exponentially in prison, where 15% to 25% of inmates show these characteristics (Burton, B., & Saleh, F. M., Psychiatric Times, Vol. 37, No. 10, 2020). That said, psychopathy spans socioeconomic status, race, gender, and culture, and those who score high on psychopathy scales range from high-functioning executives to prison inmates to people whose psychopathic symptoms may reflect difficult life circumstances more than anything else.

One effort to coordinate thinking in the field is Patrick’s “triarchic model,” which posits three separable trait constructs underlying psychopathic symptoms: “disinhibition,” which includes tendencies toward impulsiveness, irresponsibility, difficulty regulating one’s emotions and behavior, and mistrust of others; “meanness,” which involves deficits in empathy, contempt toward and inability to bond with others, and predatory exploitativeness; and “boldness,” which includes dominance, social assurance, emotional resilience, and adventurousness. Each of these traits has unique developmental features and neurobiological correlates. Patrick developed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure to assess these trait constructs (Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2009; Journal of Personality, Vol. 83, No. 6, 2015).

A broader view of psychopathy. Tori DeAngelis, the American Psychological Association

Wafer fabs are complex places in need of specific technical STEM backgrounds. Local colleges and universities can tailor curriculums so that their graduates “fit the mold” of what XYZ employer is looking for. There are often collaborative research efforts between academia and industry that are encouraged and pursued.

Not all of the jobs are technical. If you have a cafeteria on-site, you need to staff it. Janitorial services are needed for the offices and bathrooms. You need painters, masonry workers, plumbers, and electricians.

All, from the cook to the engineer, are subject to layoffs at the whims of management and shareholders who never met them or care how such a move impacts their families. It is a string of broken promises and shattered dreams.

It’s a tax dodge. It’s grifting. It’s Silicon gaslighting.

So, let me get this straight:

The tobacco industry paid lobbyists to promote the false narrative that smoking wasn’t as bad for your health as the Surgeon General reported, and Mike Pence (not a smoker) endorsed in an OpEd that resurfaced after helming the disastrous response to the Coronavirus pandemic (and he wants to run for president, presumably getting the votes from the same people who wanted to kill him January 6, 2021). Smokers like my father were gaslighted, and paid for this lie with their lungs and lives.

The fossil fuels industry paid those same lobbyists to do their magic, promoting the false narrative that climate change wasn’t as dire as they were already aware of in the late 1970s. Instead of information we could have acted on, we were gaslighted.

A lot of American oligarchs: Bezos (Washington Post), Bloomberg (Bloomberg News), Murdoch (Wall Street Journal, Fox Propaganda), Musk (Twitter), Trump (Twitter knockoff, the Orwellian “Truth Social”), and Zuckerberg (Facebook) are heavily involved in controlling the narrative of what we believe and know as reality. The previous “off the dome” isn’t even an exhaustive list. AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, and Viacom are the six corporations that own 90% of all the media that we consume: radio, television, print, and the Internet. Thirty-eight years ago, it was fifty. We believe what we’re fed: “corporate citizens” is a term the corporations lob at us through various forms of media. We believe also from the media that billionaires/oligarchs are “blessed,” “geniuses,” “highly favored,” not tax dodging criminals because that’s what their media tell us to believe.

If corporations “are people,” are the organizations clinically psychopaths?

Are their minions in lobbying firms and congress merely servile sociopaths?

But this isn’t gaslighting?

Challenging Utopia…

Note: The origin of my harshness was this, ON the day we laid Tyre Nichols to rest, I was commenting on a police report of a double amputee being shot to death by the police. Trolls have to troll. After my rebuttal, I heard nothing else.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Star Trek

A common trope in science fiction is a misunderstanding, intentional, or unintentional, of evolution. Over time we get smarter, more peaceful, better, or something like that.

The definition of evolution given at the outset of this entry is very general; there are more specific ones in the literature, some of which do not fit this general characterization. Here is a sampling.

Although the work of Charles Darwin (see the entry on Darwinism) is usually the starting point for contemporary understandings of evolution, interestingly, he does not use the term in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, referring instead to “descent with modification.” In the early-mid 20th century, the “modern synthesis” gave birth to population genetics, which provided a mathematization of Darwinian evolutionary theory in light of Mendelian genetics (see also the entry on ecological genetics). This yielded a prevalent—probably the most prevalent—understanding of evolution as “any change in the frequency of alleles within a population from one generation to the next.” Note, however, that this definition refers to evolution only in a micro-evolutionary context and thus doesn’t reference the emergence of new species (and their new characteristics), although it is intended to underlie those macroevolutionary changes (see the entry on philosophy of macroevolution).

In a popular textbook, Douglas Futuyma gives a more expansive definition:

[biological evolution] is change in the properties of groups of organisms over the course of generations…it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population to the alterations that led from the earliest organism to dinosaurs, bees, oaks, and humans. (2005: 2)

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution/

For one hour of fictional products, it has to be shortened: over time, things get better.

Over time we will reach nirvana. Over time science will solve the mysteries that vex us. Over time we will learn to “live together as brothers and sisters” or perish as fools, per Dr. King. Both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gene Roddenberry were optimistic evolutionists. They could see a future where we conquered our prejudices along with the stars. We worked together across skin tones as one humanity, in peace (at least on Earth), expanding our survivability on other worlds. Particularly for King, Nichele Nichols represented our people would survive into the future, a detail sci-fi writers like H.G. Wells (an enthusiastic eugenicist) conveniently forgot, and H.P. Lovecraft was openly racist and hostile, a reality that still plagues both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It is why African American speculative fiction writers like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin is important in an era of projection, obfuscation, and, ironically, “cancel culture.” Afrofuturism came from the same well as women’s fiction, queer fiction, and studies centered on each genre: to be seen. Florida might as well call February Blank History Month. Frederick Douglass, a Republican, orator, and abolitionist can’t be mentioned in “DeSantis-Stan.”

Things, over time, don’t necessarily get better.

Are we living in [the] age of stupid? The era of the idiot? The answer, of course, is yes, with examples of monstrous moronicism everywhere – from climate deniers to the “plandemic” crowd who believe Covid-19 was cooked up in Bill Gates’ basement. On the other hand, human beings have always been incredible creatures. A better question is whether we are, as a species, becoming dumber. If this is already the era of the idiot, what comes next?

An “Idiocracy,” according to filmmaker Mike Judge. The Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, and Silicon Valley creator’s dystopian 2006 comedy (which he directed and co-wrote with Etan Cohen) arrived with its own terminology to help us prepare for the upcoming reality T.V. special that we may call The Collapse of Reality Itself.

Idiocracy: a disturbingly prophetic look at the future of America – and our era of stupidity, Mike Judge, The Guardian

To get to the “get better” part, fictional Earth and Vulcan two millennia before, had to go through, and survive their global nuclear conflicts (not an easy trick – so far, we have no models). The Vulcans discovered “o’thea”: a philosophy of logic/reality-truth after massive savagery and infighting. Earthlings, after MAGA, went through a few things that aren’t for the squeamish.

Leon Festnger studied an apocalyptic UFO cult in the 1950s – a precursor to the Heaven’s Gate Cult of the 1990s. They were sure the world would end and had a date. The faithful sold all their worldly goods and waited for the apocalypse, and waited, and waited. Some of the former faithful felt discouraged and left. Others felt their “vibrations” had saved the Earth from destruction. Simple Psychology defines it thus: “Cognitive dissonance (CD) refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. CD produces a feeling of discomfort, leading to an alteration in attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc. “For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition). “Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).”

“Party of Apocalypse” – Reginald L. Goodwin

Jordan Klepper turns the crazy into a shtick on the Daily Show. Crashing Trump’s first campaign rally in South Carolina, he ran into a fanbase that has not only still stayed faithful to their cult leader, but they also do not accept Joe Biden as the current president. In their minds, Trump is still president, and they probably wouldn’t mind if he suspended The Constitution, elections, and REMAINED president, plugging in his children and grandchildren. This rule by royalty is what Europeans left Europe for. Jordan himself is worried.

We used to have two Americas based on a social construct of race. We now have two Americas based on logic, and illogic, reality and nonreality, fact, and fiction. The purveyor of 73% of election misinformation on the planet was suspended from social media after a filmed, live insurrection on January 6, 2021, that he encouraged, where people died, excrement spread at the Capitol. But, those were “crisis actors,” Black Lives Matter, or Antifa (again, which means anti-fascist, and I can’t imagine anyone but a fascist having a problem with that). He has now been re-platformed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Misinformation is their business model, and the bottom line is far more important than citizenship and a federal republic. The College Board, in a move of abject cowardice, dumbed down the African American AP curriculum, piloted at 60 high schools, and released stripped down nationwide because it hurt the feelings of the High Potentate of DeSantis-Stan!

This is probably what a “Collapse of Reality Itself” looks like.

And it didn’t take 500 years, rabid procreation, or a nuclear holocaust to get there.

Planet Video…

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Exoplanets, Space Exploration

In 2008, HR8799 was the first extrasolar planetary system ever directly imaged. Now, the famed system stars in its very own video.

Using observations collected over the past 12 years, Northwestern University astrophysicist Jason Wang has assembled a stunning time-lapse video of the family of four planets — each more massive than Jupiter — orbiting their star. The video gives viewers an unprecedented glimpse into planetary motion. 

“It’s usually difficult to see planets in orbit,” Wang said. “For example, it isn’t apparent that Jupiter or Mars orbit our sun because we live in the same system and don’t have a top-down view. Astronomical events either happen too quickly or too slowly to capture in a movie. But this video shows planets moving on a human time scale. I hope it enables people to enjoy something wondrous.”

An expert in exoplanet imaging, Wang is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).

Watch distant worlds dance around their sun, Amanda Morris, Northwestern University

Small Steps, Large Changes…

A vertical shock tube at Los Alamos National Laboratory is used for turbulence studies. Sulfur hexafluoride is injected at the top of the 5.3-meter tube and allowed to mix with air. The waste is ejected into the environment through the blue hose at the tube tower’s lower left; in the fiscal year 2021, such emissions made up some 16% of the lab’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The inset shows a snapshot of the mixing after a shock has crossed the gas interface; the darker gas is SF6, and the lighter one is air. The intensities yield density values.

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Global Warming, Research

Reducing air travel, improving energy efficiency in infrastructure, and installing solar panels are among the obvious actions that individual researchers and their institutions can implement to reduce their carbon footprint. But they can take many other small and large steps, too, from reducing the use of single-use plastics and other consumables and turning off unused instruments to exploiting waste heat and siting computing facilities where they are powered by renewable energy. On a systemic level, measures can encourage behaviors to reduce carbon emissions; for example, valuing in-person invited job talks and remote ones equally could lead to less air travel by scientists.

So far, the steps that scientists are taking to reduce their carbon footprint are largely grassroots, notes Hannah Johnson, a technician in the imaging group at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht and a member of Green Labs Netherlands, a volunteer organization that promotes sustainable science practices. The same goes for the time and effort they put in for the cause. One of the challenges, she says, is to get top-down support from institutions, funding agencies, and other national and international scientific bodies.

At some point, governments are likely to make laws that support climate sustainability, says Astrid Eichhorn, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark whose research is in quantum gravity and who is active on the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities committee for climate sustainability. “We are in a situation to be proactive and change in ways that do not compromise the quality of our research or our collaborations,” she says. “We should take that opportunity now and not wait for external regulations.”

Suppose humanity manages to limit emissions worldwide to 300 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). In that case, there is an 83% chance of not exceeding the 1.5 °C temperature rise above preindustrial levels set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report. That emissions cap translates to a budget of 1.2 tons of CO2e per person annually through 2050. Estimates for the average emissions by researchers across scientific fields are much higher and range widely in part because of differing and incomplete accounting approaches, says Eichhorn. She cites values from 7 to 18 tons a year for European scientists.

Scientists take steps in the lab toward climate sustainability, Toni Feder, Physics Today

Reimagining ET…

Life on other planets might not look like any beings we’re used to on Earth. It may even be unrecognizable at first to scientists searching for it. Credit: William Hand

Topics: Astrobiology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Planetary Science, SETI, Space Exploration

Sarah Stewart Johnson was a college sophomore when she first stood atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. Its dried lava surface differed from the eroded, tree-draped mountains of her home state of Kentucky. Johnson wandered away from the other young researchers she was with and toward a distant ridge of the 13,800-foot summit. Looking down, she turned over a rock with the toe of her boot. To her surprise, a tiny fern lived underneath it, sprouting from ash and cinder cones. “It felt like it stood for all of us, huddled under that rock, existing against the odds,” Johnson says.

Her true epiphany, though, wasn’t about the hardiness of life on Earth or the hardships of being human: It was about aliens. Even if a landscape seemed strange and harsh from a human perspective, other kinds of life might find it quite comfortable. The thought opened up the cosmic real estate and the variety of life she imagined might be beyond Earth’s atmosphere. “It was on that trip that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” Johnson says.

Later, Johnson became a professional at looking. As an astronomy postdoc at Harvard University in the late 2000s and early 2010s, she investigated how astronomers might use genetic sequencing—detecting and identifying DNA and RNA—to find evidence of aliens. Johnson found the work exciting (the future alien genome project!), but it also made her wonder: What if extraterrestrial life didn’t have DNA or RNA or other nucleic acids? What if their cells got instructions in some other biochemical way?

As an outlet for heretical thoughts like this, Johnson started writing in style too lyrical and philosophical for scientific journals. Her typed musings would later turn into the 2020 popular science book The Sirens of Mars. Inside its pages, she probed the idea that other planets were truly other. So their inhabitants might be very different, at a fundamental and chemical level, from anything in this world. “Even places that seem familiar—like Mars, a place that we think we know intimately—can completely throw us for a loop,” she says. “What if that’s the life case?”

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It, Sarah Scoles, Scientific American

Outcomes, Language and Syntax…

Credit: michaelmjc/Getty Images (chalkboard); Scientific American (words and design)

Topics: Biofuels, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

Climate change is already disrupting the lives of billions of people. What was once considered a problem for the future is raging all around us right now. This reality has helped convince a majority of the public that we must act to limit suffering. In an August 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans said they had experienced at least one heat wave, flood, drought, or wildfire in the past year. Among those people, more than 80 percent said climate change had contributed. In another 2022 poll, 77 percent of Americans who said they had been affected by extreme weather in the past five years saw climate change as a major crisis.

Yet the response is not meeting the urgency of the crisis. A transition to clean energy is underway, but it is happening too slowly to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The U.S. government finally took long-delayed action by passing the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, much more progress is needed, and it is hampered by entrenched politics. The partisan divide largely stems from conservatives’ perception that climate change solutions will involve big government controlling people’s choices and imposing sacrifices. Research shows that Republicans’ skepticism about climate change is largely attributable to a conflict between ideological values and often-discussed solutions, particularly government regulations. A 2019 study on Climatic Change found that political and ideological polarization on climate change is particularly acute in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

One thing we can all do to ease this gridlock is to alter the language and messages we use about climate change. The words we use and the stories we tell matter. Transforming the way we talk about climate change can engage people and build the political will needed to implement policies strong enough to confront the crisis with the urgency required.

To inspire people, we need to tell a story not of sacrifice and deprivation but of opportunity and improvement in our lives, health, and well-being—a story of humans flourishing in a post-fossil-fuel age.

The Right Words Are Crucial to Solving Climate Change, Susan Joy Hassol, Scientific American