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Amanda Montañez; Source: “Slaveholder Ancestry and Current Net Worth of Members of the United States Congress,” by Neil K. R. Sehgal and Ashwini R. Sehgal, in PLOS ONE. Published online August 21, 2024
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Education, History
U.S. Senators and Representatives whose family had a history of enslaving others have greater present-day wealth.
Members of the U.S. congress whose ancestors enslaved people have had a higher median net worth than those whose ancestors did not, according to a new analysis published on Wednesday in PLOS ONE.
The analysis used genealogical data published last year by an investigative team at Reuters, which found that in 2021, at least 100 members of Congress were descended from enslavers. This included 8 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans.
This reporting caught the eye of Neil K. R. Sehgal, a Ph.D. student and computational social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He wondered what this unique genealogical data might reveal when combined with other publicly available information about members of Congress—particularly their financial disclosure forms.
“Just the fact that this was available—this detailed genealogical data and these financial disclosures for members of Congress—allowed us to explore this link,” Sehgal says.
The racial wealth gap in the U.S. is staggering. More than one in five white households have a net worth of more than $1 million, whereas more than one in five Black households have zero or negative net worth. This extreme imbalance began with slavery and has been perpetuated by racist policies and practices in housing, education, hiring, voting, and more that prevent many Black Americans from attaining and passing on generational wealth.
Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, Instrumentation, James Webb Space Telescope, Research, SETI
“The Secret Life of the Universe” by Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, the SETI Institute’s chief scientist and Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, is coming out this week, both in the US (August 13, 2024) and in the UK (August 15, 2024). Scriber/Simon & Schuster publishes both editions. Cabrol articulates an overview of where we stand today in our search for life in the universe, what’s coming, and how looking out for life beyond Earth teaches us about our place on our planet.
Here is an excerpt to inspire you:
On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) returned its first images, penetrating the wall of time to show us the universe just a few hundred million years after its formation. In a marvelous cosmic irony, this immersion into the depths of our origins propels us into the future, where a revolution looms large in astronomy, in cosmology, and in astrobiology—the search for life in the universe. JWST comes after a few decades of space and planetary exploration during which we have discovered countless habitable environments in our solar system—for (simple) life as we know it, but also thousands of exoplanets in our galaxy, some of them located in the habitable zone of their parent stars.
We are living in a golden age in astrobiology, the beginning of a fantastic odyssey in which much remains to be written, but where our first steps bring the promise of prodigious discoveries. And these first steps have already transformed our species in one generation in a way that we cannot foresee just yet.
Copernicus taught us long ago that the Earth was neither at the center of the universe nor the center of the solar system, for that matter. We also learned from the work of Harlow Shapley and Henrietta Swan Leavitt that the solar system does not even occupy any particularly prominent place in our galaxy. It is simply tucked away at the inner edge of Orion’s spur in the Milky Way, 27,000 light-years from its center, in a galactic suburb of sorts. Our sun is an average-sized star located in a galaxy propelled at 2.1 million kilometers per hour in a visible universe that counts maybe 125 billion such cosmic islands, give or take a few billion. In this immensity, the Kepler mission taught us that planetary systems are the rule, not the exception.
This is how, in a mere quarter of a century, we found ourselves exploring a universe populated by as many planets as stars. Yet, looking up and far into what seems to be an infinite ocean of possibilities, the only echoes we have received so far from our explorations have been barren planetary landscapes and thundering silence. Could it be that we are the only guests at the universal table? Maybe. As a scientist, I cannot wholly discount this hypothesis, but it seems very unlikely and “an awful waste of space,” and for more than one reason.
Topics: Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Particle Physics
Each week Quanta Magazine explains one of the most important ideas driving modern research. This week, physics staff writer Charlie Wood explains why many researchers are looking to outer space for signs of “new physics.”
Fundamental physics has a problem. Some researchers say the field faces a “nightmare scenario.” Some say it’s “in crisis.” To others it’s merely “stuck.” Whatever word they use, most particle physicists acknowledge that progress has slowed. After a rip-roaring 20th century that saw the discovery of general relativity, quantum theory, and a dozen or so fundamental particles, the first quarter of the 21st century has mainly brought further confirmation of those theories.
Physicists know their hard-won understanding of nature’s laws is incomplete. They don’t know why certain particles have mass, what sort of invisible stuff seems to be holding galaxies together, or what sort of energy is driving the universe’s expansion. But their biggest blind spot is one of scale. Physicists have equations that predict how molecules zig and zag, how atoms split, and how the heart of the atom holds together. They can continue zooming into the sub-sub-subatomic world for quite a while, but eventually — for any event playing out on a stage roughly 10⁻³⁵ meters across — they run out of equations. The universe seems to have rules that tell it what to do in those situations (it follows them during black hole formation, for instance), but physicists are ignorant of these instructions.
Particle physicists have pushed their frontier of ignorance back to this minuscule realm by repeatedly crashing particles closer and closer together, watching what happens, and developing the mathematics to capture the strange and surprising behaviors they witness. This strategy has culminated in Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer ring that can summon the energies needed to collide protons and study nature at 10⁻¹⁹ meters. The international physics community aims to build a next-generation collider — perhaps with a 100-kilometer circumference — this century. But the money, time and technology required to go much further boggles the mind. Numerous clever non-collider experiments are searching for subtle deviations from predictions and could lead to a major discovery any day, but researchers are ultimately facing similar problems as their experiments grow more and more intricate. Particle physicists are approaching a technological and financial wall as they attempt to probe ever deeper layers of reality.
One of the most promising avenues for new discoveries is the detection of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. Researchers have now racked up dozens of chirps originating from cataclysmic crashes between black holes, and they are rapidly developing ways of picking up cosmic clangs indicative of even more dramatic events. Particle physicists are anxiously awaiting the 2030s, when they hope to see a trio of satellites known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) go into operation. If it flies, LISA will be capable of picking up gravitational waves generated during the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, an intense era in cosmic history at the frontier of the known laws of physics. In those early moments, some physicists expect, the universe existed in multiple phases at once — like a pot of boiling water. If so, the bubbling would have set off space-time ripples that LISA will be listening for.
Tech bros (n): someone, usually a man, who works in the digital technology industry, especially in the United States, and is sometimes thought to not have good social skills and to be too confident about their own ability. Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. (E.g., Nazi Germany)
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristics of that person. (E.g., economics, education level, skillset)
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. (E.g., authoritarian governments who destroy their countries, financial meltdowns, etc.)
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal with and (or) to associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. (E.g., downplaying their impact, giving them the benefit of the doubt)
A stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager. (E.g., Bandits act typically in self-interest. Stupid people don’t consider collateral damage, even to themselves.)
Call it “Dunning-Kruger” on steroids. The lead description on Amazon is ominous:
An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world
Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world’s most powerful boardrooms to your local bar.
It is human stupidity.
I apply stupidity not to intelligence, but to behavior that, once achieving arguable success in an area of life, it thus empowers said person to feel they have a right, and in their mind, a duty, to pontificate on other areas of life that they have no experience in, or clue.
In 1862, a famous Irish physicist and mathematician, Lord Kelvin, estimated that Earth was between 20-million and 400-million years old. While that is an enormous span of time, even an age of 400 million years would make the planet quite young in relation to the rest of the universe. Lord Kelvin based his conclusion on a calculation of how long it would have taken Earth to cool if it had begun as a molten mass. While his estimate was wrong by a significant margin, his technique of drawing conclusions based on observations and calculations was an accurate scientific method.How Did Scientists Calculate the Age of Earth? NatGeo Education
Suffice to say, Lord Kelvin, for whom the Kelvin scale in Thermodynamics is named for reflecting a “complete absence of thermal energy,” was WAY out over his skis!
Lord Kelvin, God bless him, exhibited the logical fallacy called “appeal to authority.” He appealed to the fact that he was a superstar in thermodynamics (KNIGHTED, for crying out loud), so he had to be right! The geologists, ahem, the people who study the structure and composition of the Earth, in his mind, were wrong.
So, the “bros” (and most of them are male), have the unfortunate habit of assuming after they conquered the hill in Silicon Valley, became “new money” millionaires and billionaires, they have a right, and an obligation to pontificate on matters in society they have no experience in, or clue. The bros might spread misinformation online on a platform they bought that is arguably failing to attract other customers, and might sue those who have left. They might use their leverage to turn over precedents in our nation’s highest court. They are Einstein in their areas of expertise, but Fredo in all others. They are over their skis. They read the Cliff Notes to Atlas Shrugged, and forgot that Ayn Rand ended up on the collectivist scheme she railed against in her latter years: Social Security. For the bros, the government is daddy bailing them out of a jam of their creation usually, and everyone else isn’t “special,” or daddy’s favorite: they are. And they want what they want, damn the economy, the environment, and the planet. He who dies last with the gold wins.
The “bros” should study earnestly the real and fictional outcomes of Boesky and Gekko.
Power with a twist: Twisted ropes made from single-walled carbon nanotubes could store enough energy to power sensors within the human body while avoiding the chemical hazards associated with batteries. (Courtesy: Shigenori UTSUMI)
Mechanical watches and clockwork toys might seem like relics of a bygone age, but scientists in the US and Japan are bringing this old-fashioned form of energy storage into the modern era. By making single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) into ropes and twisting them like the string on an overworked yo-yo, Katsumi Kaneko, Sanjeev Kumar Ujjain and colleagues showed that they can store twice as much energy per unit mass as the best commercial lithium-ion batteries. The nanotube ropes are also stable at a wide range of temperatures, and the team say they could be safer than batteries for powering devices such as medical sensors.
SWCNTs are made from sheets of pure carbon just one atom thick that have been rolled into a straw-like tube. They are impressively tough – five times stiffer and 100 times stronger than steel – and earlier theoretical studies by team member David Tománek and others suggested that twisting them could be a viable means of storing large amounts of energy in a compact, lightweight system.
Antiferromagnetically ordered particles are represented by red and blue spheres in this artist’s impression. The particles are in an array of optical traps. Credit: Chen Lei
Experiments on the Fermi–Hubbard model can now be made much larger, more uniform, and more quantitative.
A universal quantum computer—capable of crunching the numbers of any complex problem posed to it—is still a work in progress. But for specific problems in quantum physics, there’s a more direct approach to quantum simulation: Design a system that captures the physics you want to study, and then watch what it does. One of the systems most widely studied that way is the Fermi–Hubbard model (FHM), in which spin-up and spin-down fermions can hop among discrete sites in a lattice. Originally conceived as a stripped-down description of electrons in a solid, the FHM has attracted attention for its possible connection to the mysterious physics of high-temperature superconductivity.
Stripped down though it may be, the FHM defies solution, either analytical or numerical, except in the simplest cases, so researchers have taken to studying it experimentally. In 2017 Harvard University’s Markus Greiner and colleagues made a splash when they observed antiferromagnetic order—a checkerboard pattern of up and down spins—in their FHM experiment consisting of fermionic atoms in a 2D lattice of 80 optical traps. (See Physics Today, August 2017, page 17.) The high-temperature-superconductor phase diagram has an antiferromagnetic phase near the superconducting one, so the achievement promised more exciting results to come. But the small size of the experiment limited the observations the researchers could make.
Figure 1. The Vadret da Tschierva glacier in 1935 (top) and in 2022 (bottom).Photos courtesy of swisstopo, L. Hösli, G. Carcanade, M. Huss, VAW-ETHZ.
Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Fluid Mechanics, Global Warming, Meteorology, Research
Glaciers—dynamic masses of ice descending from the mountain tops—have always been fascinating to humankind. They intrinsically belong to the high-alpine environment. Countless photographs immortalize their bright white beauty and the power they radiate. Glaciers have been depicted on oil and parchment for centuries, as if trying to capture their transience. They are constantly moving; under the influence of gravity, the ice generated at high elevation flows downwards and shapes tremendous glacier tongues that are speckled with deep fissures known as crevasses. Sometimes the openings to these crevasses are hidden by a light dusting of snow; subsequently, mountaineers need a lot of experience to accurately judge their exposure to the ice.
Even though glaciers are not living things, they are not lifeless. For many mountain regions worldwide, glaciers function similarly to lungs: They absorb snow in wintertime and “breathe” out water during hot summer days. This glacier water is urgently needed, especially in dry periods.
Glaciers consequently have a relevance that goes far beyond the mountain peaks where they reside. A reduction in meltwater from glaciers would be painful for nature and the global economy: irrigation of fields would be restricted, the temperature and mineralization of rivers would change, and during periods of drought, serious bottlenecks could come into existence for the drinking water supply and for shipping on rivers. In addition, melting glacial ice contributes to sea-level rise and therefore directly or indirectly affects billions of people living near the coast.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their majestic appearance, glaciers can also pose an immediate threat. Glaciers can produce floods and ice avalanches that endanger villages in the valleys. Together with permafrost, glaciers also stabilize mountain flanks and therefore reduce the potential for rock falls and landslides—a role that is becoming increasingly lost.
The so-called “eternal” ice of glaciers tells a long and dynamic story. During the Ice Age, ice sheets covered a large part of the North American continent, as well as Europe. The last time this happened was around 20,000 years ago—a blink of the eye from a geological perspective. Since then, the climate has changed, due both to natural factors and to anthropogenic influences—human-caused factors—which have massively accelerated over the past 100 years (Marzeion et al., 2014). As a result, the glaciers are still present, but they are getting smaller every year.
The completed VIPER rover awaits one of two fates: be sent to the Moon by an organization other than NASA or be cannibalized for its parts and instruments. Credit: NASA
“Boldly going” has budget constraints, but all is not lost. “Plan B” is at the link below.
The VIPER rover was meant to be a key scouting mission ahead of NASA’s Artemis program, collecting crucial information about water-ice reserves at the lunar south pole.
To the shock of the lunar science community, on July 17, NASA cancelled the much-anticipated Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission, which was expected to prospect for water ice on the Moon — a critical resource for future explorers.
VIPER was one of the highest profile missions in NASA’s ongoing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which that is sending robotic missions to the Moon in support of future Artemis crews. Artemis targets landing near the lunar south pole, where the shallow angle of the Sun means many craters lie in permanent shadow. Scientists know that these craters contain water ice, which could be used as drinking water for astronauts and as a resource for rocket fuel and energy production. But we don’t know how much ice is there, nor how easy it will be to extract. VIPER’s mission was to answer those questions — and its cancellation deprives the Artemis program of critical data.
Equally shocking to the science community is that $450 million have already been spent designing and building VIPER and its suite of instruments. The completed VIPER only needed to pass its environmental tests, to ensure it could survive in the Moon’s incredibly harsh, perpetually shadowed polar regions. The rover, and the Astrobiotics Griffin lunar lander that was to deposit VIPER near the south pole, were scheduled to launch in September 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
NASA has said it is open to handing VIPER over to another organization to fly it to the Moon — if it comes at no additional cost to NASA. If no takers emerge, current plans call for the dismantling of VIPER and cannibalizing its instruments for possible use in future missions.
NASA’s explanation for VIPER’s cancellation is that COVID-induced supply chain issues with both the rover and its Griffin lander escalated mission costs and have delayed its anticipated launch by two years. By cancelling the project, after already spending nearly half a billion dollars, NASA says it will save $84 million. At the same time, NASA will pay Astrobiotics $323 million to complete the Griffin lander and fly it to the Moon without VIPER. At this time, plans call for landing a “mass simulator,” or a dead weight, that will return no science data about the Moon.
Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.
The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,” already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.
There has been high praise for the House Impeachment Managers: Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, Sylvia Garcia, Jason Crow, Hakeem Jeffries; especially its leader, Adam Schiff. My fraternity brother, House Manager Hakeem Jeffries probably accomplished the first hip hop Biggie Smalls’ mic drop rebuttal in impeachment history. I’m sure it completely went over Jay Sekulow’s head.
Sadly, facts don’t matter to fascists.
Belief in pseudoscience extended across the Nazi high command, from the Führer’s search for ‘death rays’ to Goebbels reading Nostradamus in bed.
This is a dense and scholarly book about one of the pulpiest subjects of the past 70 years – the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult, which has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction (Captain America: Civil War, Hellboy, Wolfenstein, the Indiana Jones series, Iron Sky, The Keep and countless others) and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience with runes and swastikas on the covers.
As it turns out, though, even this sober, academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.
Here are a few of them. In the 1930s, Hitler made extensive notes on a book called Magic: Theory, History, Practice and underlined passages such as “He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world“. In 1934, the year after he was appointed chancellor of Germany, he hired a dowser to go over the Reich Chancellery in search of “death rays” that might damage staff in the building. He and Himmler held frequent conversations about “the World Empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the catastrophe of the moons falling to Earth” and about a discredited pseudoscience called Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, which taught that the cosmos was made of ice and which they saw as a “Germanic” counterbalance to the “Jewish” theory of relativity.
The spectacle of televised debates ignores one key fact: the television was invented September 27, 1927 by Philo Taylor Farnsworth. Fast forward 33 years to the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon. I’ve heard that people listening to the debate by radio thought Nixon was victorious, because he had knowledge that Kennedy did not have. However, Kennedy “looked good,” he was young, tan, and Nixon was nursing an infection. It was the first instance of style over substance. Had Nixon won, there might not have been a Civil Rights Act, a Voting Rights Act, a Fair Housing Act, a Vietnam conflict, or Watergate.
In recent memory, John Kerry bested George W. Bush in every debate, as well as did Al Gore prior to him, and Hillary mopped the floor with orange bone spurs. The election at this time, is “baked in.” It will depend on which side gets its base out. Corporate debates are superfluous to democracy, and useless theater. If we copy anything from Great Britain, we should have a shorter campaign period.
If Biden wins (and historian Allan Lichtman thinks he will – he’s predicted 9 of 10 of the last presidential elections accurately), we have to think about who will represent the party and win in 2028. His “thirteen keys model” goes in the garbage if Biden is forced off the ticket. The twice-impeached, instigator of the insurrection, 88-count indicted, 34-count convicted (sentencing September 18th), adjudicated fraudster and rapist has not been asked to leave the ticket in all seriousness, nor is his personality cult likely to do so. This ageism-on-steroids was started by publications like the New York Times, and unlike the propaganda we’ve been sold about news outlets, they are more concerned with the bottom-line than holding power accountable, and they are loathe to print retractions admitting mistakes.
We have a few seconds to breathe after this election cycle, if we’re successful, to start thinking about 2028: whichever party controls the White House will be in charge of the 2030 Census, meaning the drawing of congressional districts. The party in power gets to draw congressional districts, i.e., the incumbents get to PICK their voters, which doesn’t sound like how democracy is supposed to work! Fairness would be an AI algorithm that draws congressional maps with no respect to party, making the lawmakers actually speak to their constituents and have to WORK for every vote. I am fighting for democracy because, we haven’t achieved it yet. The Founding Fathers are lionized, mythologized, and apotheosized as wise men, and they were. William Hogeland, historian, writes “The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding,” that though Lin Manuel Miranda had us jamming to the hip hop play with its diverse cast, Hamilton was antidemocracy, except for the ruling class in America that he was engineering, who, like their descendants, had an aversion to paying taxes.
Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo—banking, public debt, manufacturing—for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison—and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class.
If you’re wondering why lawmakers seem older than you would like, or why after an election that showed a plurality of voters voting for another outcome, gerrymandering is the answer. Case-in-point: North Carolina GOP lost the popular vote in 2018, but gained seats in the house, to now a veto-proof majority. That is gerrymandering, that is the Census. My biggest criticism of the Democratic Party is they are great tacticians, and poor strategists. I hope they’re gaming this out, because both National Committees (D&R) did the citizenry a disservice by running primary dog-and-pony shows in 2016, 2020, and 2024, each with diverse voices, diverse opinions, and DIVERSITY, only to end up with two old white guys in the mold of George Washington, so that Barack Obama can be seen as a one-off fluke. Heaven help us if a woman or another person of color can run the country as effectively as the 43 other white males that preceded the first black president, and it seems the oligarchy is determined that that will be the last deviation from their preferred “norm.”
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, December 19, 1776 (pamphlet), December 24, 1776 (read to Washington’s troops before crossing the Delaware for the Battle of Trenton)
The (not) Supreme Court by a 6-3 vote impowered a king, destroyed the “rule of law” and enacted a tenet of Project 2025 that Taraji P. Henson on the BET awards got to be the most searched term on the Internet. I placed it here for you to read it.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said, in front of a backdrop advertising the Heritage Foundation. You only have to read the forward – the abstract, or preamble if you will – to the 920-page document. Kevin D. Roberts list his terminal academic credentials as PhD in History from UT Austin. His threat wasn’t even trying to be subtle, or coy. Like William Luther Pierce, a PhD in Physics and author of the Neo-Nazi Turner Diaries that inspired Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, having a PhD doesn’t make you moral, ethical, or intelligent.
I’m tired too. But psychopaths don’t take holidays, and not only democracy, but the planet will be impacted by the next election, and who wields now, god-like powers. My prediction is that the Insurrection Act will be invoked by the next president, either to quell another cosplay/Civil War/January 6 redux, or to imprison citizens, “disappear them” by deportation, or into American Gulags like Gitmo and black sites we thankfully have never heard of.
We are in a modern American Crisis, and the future will be shaped by what we do, win, or lose, in the next few months. We are not voting for a candidate, we are voting for Democracy, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Those words should matter.
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Human Rights
Sixty years ago today, I was a month and twelve days from my second birthday. Sixty years ago today, my world was changed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, ninety-nine years after the surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, and the cessation of the insurrection known by the Orwellian name: “Civil War.”
A year prior, my parents would see four little black girls murdered by Klansmen on her 38th birthday (September 15, 1963), only exacerbated by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), which propelled his then Vice President into the presidency. The year prior to that, barely on the planet, the “Missiles of October” threatened my brief existence as nuclear weapons had been staged off the coast of Florida by Russia in Cuba (October 14, 1962). The sixties may have given us the utopian vision of Star Trek, but it was not the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” as the Fifth Dimension sang joyfully.
The project to dismantle American democracy started today as well.
The 9-0 vote on Brown vs. Board of Education was untenable at the time for Southern Dixiecrats, who wanted it as a ballot initiative, because they knew they had the votes to defeat it, and “put things back in proper order,” the hierarchy of the chattel enslavement of kidnapped humans, and Jim Crow. The parties “flipflopped” as Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the next year, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, migrating to the Republican Party, all willing to absorb southern racists with the slick, Hollywood line a B-Movie Actor gave them as mantra: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.” After the Powell Memo that set the framework for the first decades-long lurch to fascism, “The Gipper” was born, the first of three avatar presidents, that made you feel nostalgic for halcyon days that have never existed, all of them always preceded by memos, the Project for a New American Century, and the frightening, dystopian document Project 2025.
It was always going to come to this.
My letter to the president after the “Supreme Court” decision establishing a monarch:
The Revolutionary War was fought to get out of the authoritarian rule of a tyrant, King George of England. This “Supreme Court” is neither. It is broken, and I will be voting for you, working to elect Josh Stein in North Carolina, and donating to both campaigns. I feel passionate about the successes of this administration, and we’re so close to addressing climate change. Mr. President, please consider something that goes against the grain and your respect for institutions: stack the court. Propose that if re-elected, you will rebalance the high court, which is clearly activist, out-of-touch, and out of control. This convicted felon, this adjudicated rapist CANNOT regain political power, or else we will be a byword, a proverb, an oxymoron. If the U.S. falls, so will every democracy across the globe, which is the goal of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, a kleptocracy masquerading as a state. The extinction-level event for the dinosaurs was a meteor off the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t see the human species continuing if this cretin gets back into the Oval Office. The United States is an essential nation. Thank you.
My biggest critique of the Democratic Party is they lack strategic vision. The evisceration of Roe vs. Wade was a decades-long strategy that the DNC treated as a political football. The party had since the 1973 7 Republican – 2 Democratic justices’ decision to codify women’s bodily autonomy into law, but it was too useful a political football, so no one tried. Meanwhile, the republicans are following no rules, other that the grasp and maintenance of power, call it class warfare, white supremacy, it doesn’t matter.
The Dred Scott Decision by Chief Justice Robert B. Taney is credited for the impetus of the “Civil War,” resulting in about 622,000 countrymen dead from both sides, only surpassed by the ineptitude of the tyrant who botched the Coronavirus response, who Chief Justice John Roberts just gave dictatorial powers to if he were to return to office January 20, 2025.
For maintenance of a toxic social hierarchy, may history list John Roberts as our last Chief Justice, the one who destroyed our republic, and democracy worldwide.
The sixth mass extinction event clearly will not need meteors, just incompetent, pious jurists who think themselves gods.
Physics and Nano 