bloomberg | A major new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide and
global warming lowers the odds on worst-case climate change scenarios
while also ruling out the most optimistic estimates nations have been
counting on as they attempt to implement the Paris Agreement.
A
group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming
is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate, even
if there’s less reason to anticipate a totally uninhabitable Earth in
coming centuries. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics,
narrows the answer to a question that’s as old as climate science
itself: How much would the planet warm if humanity doubled the amount of
CO₂ in the atmosphere?
That number, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” is typically
expressed as a range. The scientists behind this new study have narrowed
the climate-sensitivity window to between 2.6° Celsius and 3.9°C.
That’s smaller than the current range accepted by the United
Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has for
almost a decade used a spread between 1.5°C to 4.5°C—a reading of
climate sensitivity that has changed little since the first major U.S.
climate science assessment in 1979. Improving these estimates is “sort
of the holy grail of climate science,” says Zeke Hausfather, director of
climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the study’s
authors.
Climate
sensitivity is one of the most iconic numbers in climate science, but
it’s not necessarily intuitive. The range isn’t a projection; it’s more
like a speed limit that influences projections. “It informs all the
other things—like 2100 warming projections, for example—that depend on
the sensitivity of our models, and our scenarios,” Hausfather says.
What gave the authors confidence is that three independent
lines of evidence—the modern temperature record, geological evidence,
and the latest Earth systems models—all agreed on the same answer. Kate
Marvel, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and Columbia University’s applied math and physics department,
also contributed to the new paper. She answered questions for Bloomberg
Green about the scope and meaning of the new work.
What is “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” and why is it so important?
It's
basically answering this question: How hot is it going to get? People
are sometimes really surprised. They’re like, “You guys have one job
like, why do you not know this?”
The number one determinant in how
hot it's going to get is what people are going to do. If we gleefully
burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, it's going to get very hot. If
we get extremely serious about mitigating climate change—cutting our
emissions, moving off fossil fuels, changing a lot about our way of
life—that will have a different impact on the climate. As a physical
scientist, “What are we going to do?” is totally above my pay grade.
unz |Let’s
assume that the events of the last five months are neither random nor
unexpected. Let’s say they’re part of an ingenious plan to transform
American democracy into a lockdown police state controlled by criminal
elites and their puppet governors. And let’s say the media’s role is to
fan the flames of mass hysteria by sensationalizing every gory detail,
every ominous prediction and every slightest uptick in the death toll in
order to exert greater control over the population. And let’s say the
media used their power to craft a message of terror they’d repeat over
and over again until finally, there was just one frightening storyline
ringing-out from every soapbox and bullhorn, one group of governors from
the same political party implementing the same destructive policies,
and one small group of infectious disease experts –all incestuously
related– issuing edicts in the form of “professional advice.”
Could such a thing happen in America?
What’s
most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which
the elected government was circumvented by public health experts
(connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of
genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet,
the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from
the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest
are too vast to list. Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns
were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat
governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and
arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid
close physical contact with other humans. All of this was done in the
name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact
that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or
scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic
anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about
power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy
into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to
bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild
infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a
permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the
power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal
intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely
banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the
basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years,
and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the
individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state
of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.
On
top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone
with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is
happening, but very few do. Why is that?
Fear.
Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically
intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right
beneath their noses. Check out this clip from an article titled “When
Will the Madness End?”:
“What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population…
The public is adopting a personality disorder … paranoid delusions, and
irrational fear. … It can happen with anything but here we see a primal
fear of disease turning into mass panic….
….
Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality,
and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.…..We
find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object,
and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. ..…
…This
is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear.
This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done
nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.” (“When Will the Madness End?“, AIER)
We’re
not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting
that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes.
(although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that
scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every
crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda. In
fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take
place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the
giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings
that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a
crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total
control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to
normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a
new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be
controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental,
the management of the crisis certainly is not.
ourfiniteworld | It seems like a reset of an economy should work like a reset of your
computer: Turn it off and turn it back on again; most problems should be
fixed. However, it doesn’t really work that way. Let’s look at a few of
the misunderstandings that lead people to believe that the world
economy can move to a Green Energy future.
[1] The economy isn’t really like a computer that can be
switched on and off; it is more comparable to a human body that is dead,
once it is switched off.
A computer is something that is made by humans. There is a beginning
and an end to the process of making it. The computer works because
energy in the form of electrical current flows through it. We can turn
the electricity off and back on again. Somehow, almost like magic,
software issues are resolved, and the system works better after the
reset than before.
Even though the economy looks like something made by humans, it really is extremely different. In physics terms, it is a “dissipative structure.” It is able to “grow” only because of energy consumption, such as oil to power trucks and electricity to power machines.
The system is self-organizing in the sense that new businesses are
formed based on the resources available and the apparent market for
products made using these resources. Old businesses disappear when their
products are no longer needed. Customers make decisions regarding what
to buy based on their incomes, the amount of debt available to them, and
the choice of goods available in the marketplace.
There are many other dissipative structures. Hurricanes and tornadoes
are dissipative structures. So are stars. Plants and animals are
dissipative structures. Ecosystems of all kinds are dissipative
structures. All of these things grow for a time and eventually collapse.
If their energy source is taken away, they fail quite quickly. The
energy source for humans is food of various types; for plants it is
generally sunlight.
Thinking that we can switch the economy off and on again comes close
to assuming that we can resurrect human beings after they die. Perhaps
this is possible in a religious sense. But assuming that we can do this
with an economy requires a huge leap of faith.
thelocal.se | Published every two years, the WWF Living Planet Report
documents the state of the Earth, including its biodiversity,
ecosystems, the demand on natural resources and what that means for
humans and wildlife.
And the 2016 edition shows that Swedes are currently living lifestyles that would require the equivalent of four Earths to sustain – 4.2 to be precise.
Sweden ranks alongside the likes of the USA, UAE and Canada as one of
the worst countries in the report when it comes to its consumption
footprint, which the WWF defines as the area used to support a defined
population's consumption.
The footprint, measured in global hectares, includes the area needed to
produce the materials a country consumes, and the area needed to absorb
its carbon dioxide emissions.
According to the study, Sweden consumes the equivalent of 7.3 global
hectares per capita. For perspective, nearby Germany consumes 5.3,
Tanzania consumes 1.3, and the USA consumes 8.2.
The WWF highlighted Sweden as being a big importer of consumer goods
produced by fossil fuels, particularly from China. The Nordic nation has
high indirect carbon dioxide emissions as a result.
“Sweden and Swedes are very good at many things and we have come far in
our conversion of energy production even if there is still a lot left
to do. We have advanced technology, knowledge and understanding of
sustainability issues, but we don't speak a lot about the impact of
consumption of items which are produced in an unsustainable way,”
Swedish WWF CEO Håkan Wirtén told news agency TT.
In order to improve its sustainability, the WWF recommended that the
Swedish government should bring in a target to reduce consumption-based
emissions, work out a strategy to halve Sweden's meat consumption, and
ban the sale of newly produced cars which run on fossil fuels by 2025 if
possible.
“A big part of the Swedish footprint comes from transport. The
government should set a target for consumption-based emissions so that
we can actually start to measure the emissions we cause in other ways
through our imports,” the WWF's Wirtén said.
According to the WWF, Sweden's consumption footprint can be broken down
as 32 percent on food, 29 percent on travel, 18 percent on goods, 12
percent on accommodation and nine percent on services.
technologyreview | “The traditional forms of living a good life were going to be
destroyed,” writes Lear. “But there was spiritual backing for the
thought that new good forms of living would arise for the Crow, if only
they would adhere to the virtues of the chickadee.”
Today the
Crow—just like the Sioux, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, and numerous other
native peoples— live in communities that struggle with poverty,
suicide, and unemployment. But these communities are also home to poets,
historians, singers, dancers, and thinkers committed to indigenous
cultural flourishing. The point here is not to glamorize indigenous
closeness to “nature,” or to indulge a naive longing for lost
hunter-warrior values, but to ask what we might learn from courageous
and intelligent people who survived cultural and ecological catastrophe.
Like Plenty Coups, we face the destruction of our conceptual reality.
Catastrophic levels of global warming are practically inevitable at
this point, and one way or another this will bring about the end of life
as we know it.
So we have to confront two distinct challenges.
The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate
change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas
emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is
whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world
we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have
already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward,
and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of
knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form
of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in
the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”
It
is not clear that we moderns possess the psychological and spiritual
resources to meet this challenge. Coming to terms with the situation as
it stands has already proved the struggle of a generation, and the
outcome still remains obscure. Successfully answering this existential
challenge may not even matter at all unless we immediately see
substantial reductions in global carbon emissions: recent research
suggests that at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 1,200 parts
per million, which we are on track to hit sometime in the next century,
changes in atmospheric turbulence may dissipate clouds that reflect
sunlight from the subtropics, adding as much as 8 °C warming on top of
the more than 4 °C warming already expected by that point. That much
warming, that quickly—12 °C within a hundred years—would be such an
abrupt and radical environmental shift that it’s difficult to imagine a
large, warm-blooded mammalian apex predator like Homo sapiens
surviving in significant numbers. Such a crisis could create a
population bottleneck like other, prehistoric bottlenecks, as many
billions of people die, or it could mean the end of our species. There’s
no real way to know what will happen except by looking at roughly
similar catastrophes in the past, which have left the Earth a graveyard
of failed species. We burn some of them to drive our cars.
Nevertheless,
the fact that our situation offers no good prospects does not absolve
us of the obligation to find a way forward. Our apocalypse is happening
day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this
truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of
future human flourishing—to live with radical hope. Despite decades of
failure, a disheartening track record, ongoing paralysis, a social order
geared toward consumption and distraction, and the strong possibility
that our great-grandchildren may be the last generation of humans ever
to live on planet Earth, we must go on. We have no choice.
influencewatch | The Project’s mission was to raise awareness for ocean conservation
efforts. Maxwell spoke at a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations event
about the issue. [8] She also spoke at events at the United Nations in 2013 and 2014. [9][10] She also gave a TED Talk. [11][12]
These high-profile events dovetailed with Maxwell’s and the Project’s
high-profile partnerships. The Project’s effort to hold the United
Nations to sustainable promises made regarding the ocean were praised
and backed by the Clinton Global Initiative. [13][14]
Maxwell authored a 2015 op-ed for the Project’s newsletter, “The
Daily Catch,” which theorized the moment the oceans “failed” due to
environmental harm. [15]
Archives of The Daily Catch were live as of August 17, 2019. TerraMar
Project’s director of development Brian Yurasitis’ LinkedIn profile
shows that the Project had several projects as part of its mission. [16]
One project was the “How I sea” campaign, which collected stories from
environmentalists and others who took photos of the ocean around the
world. [17]
The #NoMoreButts initiative was the Project’s effort to create more
opportunities for smokers to dispose of cigarette butts in an
environmentally friendly fashion. [18]
Ghislaine Maxwell
Maxwell is the daughter of controversial British media magnate Robert
Maxwell, who was implicated in mishandling the pension fund of the Daily Mirror after his death in 1991. [19]
After Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York following her father’s
death, she became widely known for her high-end social connections with
U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, ex-boyfriend Jeffrey
Epstein, British royalty, and others. [20][21] She attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. [22]
Despite decades in the public eye, she became a very private person
in 2016. That year, she sold her $15 million home and largely
disappeared from the public. [23]
After Epstein’s death, Maxwell became a notable figure amid
allegations that she was involved in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking
scheme. A federal court ordered the release of 2,000 pages of documents
related to a 2015 lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s accusers; the woman
alleged that Maxwell had solicited her to perform sex acts for Epstein
as a 16-year-old. Maxwell denied the allegations and has not been
criminally charged for these alleged acts as of early July 2020. [24]
Maxwell reportedly has settled lawsuits with two women who claimed she
was involved in Epstein’s exploitation without admitting guilt. [25][26]
Maxwell has been involved in many public projects and efforts. She
co-hosted a launch party for the publishing platform Ideapod in 2013. [27][28]
In July 2020, federal prosecutors secured an indictment of Maxwell on
charges related to conspiracy in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of
underage girls; she was arrested and faced trial as of early July.[29]
prospect | Pelosi rolled back student debt relief
in the HEROES Act after learning that it would cost $100 billion more
than expected. This was a $3.2 trillion messaging bill not designed to
become law, yet an additional 3 percent cost was considered
unacceptable. Pelosi also declined
to add “automatic stabilizers” that would maintain expanded benefits
until economic stress dissipated, blaming a Congressional Budget Office
scoring quirk that made the cost appear artificially larger.
So with over 30 million out of work, the important thing to Pelosi
was that her pie-in-the-sky, going-nowhere bill was “reasonable,” based
on some ineffable standard of reason. It matches the worldview of a
Democratic leader who, just two years ago, made a lugubrious elegy
on the House floor after the death of Pete Peterson, who bankrolled the
deficit hysteria industry for decades and relentlessly targeted Social
Security for cuts. (Ball does reveal that Pelosi told Obama during his
“grand bargain” talks that she would support his aims, “even if it meant
agreeing to entitlement cuts.”)
Devotion to deficit hawkery in normal times is unwise policy. It’s
downright fatal during an economic crisis, where relief could be yanked
away from needy families prematurely simply because of an unwillingness
to challenge CBO’s scoring model. But here we finally see the contours
of Pelosi’s governing framework, not just on the budget, but on
everything.
Pelosi believes that the nation’s resources are scarce, and what
sadly passes for the modern welfare state must be protected at all
costs, rather than raised to greater heights. The goal is, at best, a
less bad world than Republicans want. It’s a defensive crouch dating back to Pelosi’s initial entry into Congress under President Reagan, and it has dominated her thinking ever since.
Progressives who dream too big are to be sat in a corner, and
anti-government conservatives are to be bargained with and mollified.
Official Washington’s approval is craved. Pelosi hosts an annual ideas
conference at her own vineyard for a group of elite donors. That’s who
gets to scale the fortress she has built around her desiccated
ambitions. Her thoughts today on activism date back to something she
said during her first campaign: “Someday they will realize just how
insignificant they are.”
Pelosi demands total control; you can argue that she never groomed a
successor for this purpose, to keep everyone reliant on her. She finds
this to be the best method to gain leverage over the legislative
process. But to what end is this leverage employed? Pelosi fights
intensely to obtain power, but she seems to consider power so fragile
and fleeting that it shouldn’t be used for very much.
tomdispatch | This society has long suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: we look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit. The wreckage
of this pandemic moment is a bitter reminder of this affliction, as
well as a signpost suggesting how we must emerge from this crisis a just
and more equitable nation. With a possible depression ahead and more
social unrest on the rise, isn’t it time to stop vindicating the wealthiest people
in this country and look instead to leadership from those who were
living in a depression before Covid-19 even hit and already organizing
and protesting?
Here’s a story from a long-ago moment that's still relevant. Two
months before his assassination in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
travelled to Chicago, to enlist the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) -- the predecessor to the National Union of my day -- into the Poor People’s Campaign. As he walked into a conference room at a downtown Chicago YMCA, Dr. King encountered more than 30 welfare rights leaders seated strategically on the other side of an exceedingly large table. One of his advisers later noted that the women’s reception of the southern civil rights leader was a “grand piece of psychological warfare.”
Representing more than 30,000 welfare-receiving, dues-paying members, they had not come to passively listen to the famed leader.
They wanted to know his position on the recent passage of anti-welfare
legislation and quickly made that clear, pelting him with questions. Dr.
King felt out of his element. Eventually, Johnnie Tillmon,
the national chairwoman of the NWRO, stepped in. “You know, Dr. King,”
she said, “if you don’t know about these questions, you should just say
you don’t know and then we could go on with this meeting.”
To this, Dr. King replied, “We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.”
That day, Dr. King would learn much about the long struggle those women had waged for dignity in the workplace and the home. They taught him that programs of social uplift should be a permanent right and that the welfare system of the mid-twentieth century, much like our own, was structured as a public charity that callously differentiated
between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. They introduced him to
policy proposals that were generations ahead of their time, including a
demand for a Guaranteed Adequate Annual Income, or what many now call a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Four months into the Covid-19 crisis, with this country already afloat on a sea of inequality
that would have been unimaginable even to those women in 1968, a sea
change in public opinion may be underway when it comes to what’s
necessary and possible. Ideas that only a few years ago would have been
considered unimaginable like universal healthcare, guaranteed affordable housing, and debt relief
are now breaking into the mainstream. Don’t think, however, that such
policy positions, like the idea of a UBI, have materialized on Capitol
Hill and in Beltway think tanks out of thin air. They are, at least in
part, the result of long-term agitating, educating, and organizing led
by the poor themselves.
Those of us in the welfare rights movement always saw our work as the kindling for a wildfire of organizing by the poor and dispossessed. Our projects of survival,
like Tent City, were not just about housing and feeding people. They
were also about securing the lives of those committed to building the
kind of movement necessary to transform society. Projects organized around immediate needs also became bases of operation for policy analysis and future plans.
NationalReview | U.S. government agencies including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health dole out more than $150 billion
in research grants each year. University scientists rely on that money
to fund their labs. Because grants can make or break a career,
professors spend an inordinate amount of time navigating the funding
labyrinth. A 2007 study
found that researchers spend 42 percent of their time writing grant
proposals and ensuring compliance with the conditions of the grants they
receive. Stringent regulations on everything from affirmative action to
animal welfare place a needless burden on scientists, reducing their
productivity. Since any given proposal has a 20 percent chance of being
approved, researchers devote 170 days to proposal-writing for every grant they’re awarded.
In addition to the administrative burden, American funding programs
push researchers toward low-risk, low-reward studies. Since papers are
evaluated by the number of citations they generate, professors tend to
focus on questions that guarantee a meaningful result, rather than
taking risks on novel research that might fail. Though the latter is
more likely to deliver high gains in the long run, delayed recognition
of breakthrough research means that scientists in new fields may have to
wait years before they see results, which reduces their ability to
attract funding in the interim. A 2016 paper
found that “funding decisions which rely on traditional bibliometric
indicators . . . may be biased against ‘high risk/high gain’ novel
research.” As a result, American scientists tinker at the margins of
existing research but rarely attempt breakthroughs. This partially
explains the general slowdown of scientific progress over the past few decades.
Enter China. In 2008, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) announced the
Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), which was designed to recruit 2,000
high-quality foreign professionals within five to ten years. By 2017,
the program had lured 7,000 foreigners — more than triple its target. As
part of a broad push to achieve global technological supremacy, China
has committed 15 percent of its GDP — equivalent to $2.1 trillion in
2019 — to human-capital development.
The TTP doesn’t require grant applications or regulatory compliance,
either. Faced with a choice between a Byzantine funding apparatus at
home and instant cash from China, more than 3,000 university researchers
have opted for the latter. In return for that money, the CCP requires
its researchers to turn over intellectual property to which they have
access, as well as to sign agreements preventing them from disclosing
the results of work conducted under Chinese patronage. Some scientists
have concluded that those stipulations are worthwhile. And in a perverse
sense, it is true that the Chinese system provides a great deal of
academic freedom: no applications, no progress reports, no environmental
standards. In a few cases, TTP-linked academics have even opened
“shadow labs” in China that conduct research identical to what they are
doing domestically. The effect is a wholesale transfer of American
intellectual capital and property to our largest geostrategic foe.
iai | In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid
1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever
since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained
unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been
experimentally confirmed later. The last to-be-confirmed particle was
the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. But all
shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity,
dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known
for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were
then.
The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has
changed, but physicists have not changed their methods. As physics has
progressed, the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by
experiment. Technological advances have not kept size and expenses
manageable. This is why, in physics today, we have collaborations of
thousands of people operating machines that cost billions of dollars.
With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly
unlikely. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that
would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never
materializes. It’s a vicious cycle: Costly experiments result in lack of
progress. Lack of progress increases the costs of further experiment.
This cycle must eventually lead into a dead end when experiments become
simply too expensive to remain affordable. A $40 billion particle
collider is such a dead end.
The only way to avoid being sucked
into this vicious cycle is to choose carefully which hypothesis to put
to the test. But physicists still operate by the “just look” idea like
this was the 19th century. They do not think about which hypotheses are
promising because their education has not taught them to do so. Such
self-reflection would require knowledge of the philosophy and sociology
of science, and those are subjects physicists merely make dismissive
jokes about. They believe they are too intelligent to have to think
about what they are doing.
The consequence has been that
experiments in the foundations of physics past the 1970s have only
confirmed the already existing theories. None found evidence of anything
beyond what we already know.
But theoretical physicists did
not learn the lesson and still ignore the philosophy and sociology of
science. I encounter this dismissive behavior personally pretty much
every time I try to explain to a cosmologist or particle physicists that
we need smarter ways to share information and make decisions in large,
like-minded communities. If they react at all, they are insulted if I
point out that social reinforcement – aka group-think – befalls us all,
unless we actively take measures to prevent it.
thedrive | Tonopah Test Range Airport, located along the northern edge of the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range,
may not get all the pop culture attention that nearby Area 51 gets, but
in many ways, it is just as fascinating. It was born out of a program
that saw American fighter pilots secretly flying captured MiGs against their fellow aviators.
Not long after that program spun-up, the remote installation was
greatly expanded to house the F-117 Nighthawk force during the early and
deeply classified part of its career. It has since housed the semi-mothballed F-117 fleet following its official retirement more than a decade ago. It was also the original home of RQ-170 Sentinel. Today, the high-security base continues to support a number of secretive programs, as well as testing at the nearby range. Now, highly unusual activity around a dozen hangars at the shadowy installation has been caught on satellite.
The
image in question was snapped at around 10:15 AM local time on December
6th, 2019 by one of Planet Labs' PlanetScope satellites that image the
vast majority of the earth daily. The three-meter resolution image shows
the front row of the southern-most 'canyon' of hangars,
which were originally built for the F-117 program, with seemingly
identical craft sitting in front or at least protruding out of the
hangars. These are also the hangars that appear to house at least one secretive aircraft,
which has been spotted peeking out in multiple prior satellite images
in the past. But the December 6th image is unique in that we could not
find a similar phenomenon after checking hundreds of similar images that
span months of time.
It appears that some program was uniquely
active that day with a small fleet that makes up the contents of those
hangars being involved.
technologyreview |Izpisúa Belmonte believes epigenetic
reprogramming may prove to be an “elixir of life” that will extend human
life span significantly. Life expectancy has increased more than
twofold in the developed world over the past two centuries. Thanks to
childhood vaccines, seat belts, and so on, more people than ever reach
natural old age. But there is a limit to how long anyone lives, which
Izpisúa Belmonte says is because our bodies wear down through inevitable
decay and deterioration. “Aging,” he writes, “is nothing other than
molecular aberrations that occur at the cellular level.” It is, he says,
a war with entropy that no individual has ever won.
But each generation
brings new possibilities, as the epigenome gets reset during
reproduction when a new embryo is formed. Cloning takes advantage of
reprogramming, too: a calf cloned from an adult bull contains the same
DNA as the parent, just refreshed. In both cases, the offspring is born
without the accumulated “aberrations” that Izpisúa Belmonte refers to.
What
Izpisúa Belmonte is proposing is to go one step better still, and
reverse aging-related aberrations without having to create a new
individual. Among these are changes to our epigenetic marks—chemical
groups called histones and methylation marks, which wrap around a cell’s
DNA and function as on/off switches for genes. The accumulation of
these changes causes the cells to function less efficiently as we get
older, and some scientists, Izpisúa Belmonte included, think they could
be part of why we age in the first place. If so, then reversing these
epigenetic changes through reprogramming may enable us to turn back
aging itself.
Izpisúa Belmonte cautions
that epigenetic tweaks won’t “make you live forever,” but they might
delay your expiration date. As he sees it, there is no reason to think
we cannot extend human life span by another 30 to 50 years, at least. “I
think the kid that will be living to 130 is already with us,” Izpisúa
Belmonte says. “He has already been born. I’m convinced.”
energy.gov | NNSA and the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) joined forces to address a unique challenge:
developing a power source able to support deep space travel and outlast
existing fuel sources. NNSA came through with the technical expertise required to achieve this goal.
“The
relationship between NNSA and NASA is a ‘win-win’ partnership,” said
Patrick Cahalane, NNSA’s Principal Deputy Associate Administrator for
Safety, Infrastructure and Operations. “NASA gets a prototype
demonstration for a kilowatt-range fission power source, and NNSA gets a
benchmark-quality experiment that provides new nuclear data in support
of our Nuclear Criticality Safety Program.”
The experiment, nicknamed KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY), was part of NASA’s larger Kilopower project. KRUSTY was designed to test a prototype fission reactor coupled to a Stirling engine. Stirling technology is efficient, doesn’t require significant maintenance, and does not degrade in performance over time.
Researchers
designed and performed initial testing of the KRUSTY reactor design
using a surrogate, or non-fissile, reactor core and resistive heating
elements. Experts from NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex manufactured the uranium reactor core, which was delivered to the NCERC in the fall of 2017.
Guardian | When affluent urban men in plaid flannel shirts let their hair grow
wild and unkempt across their face and necks to affect a laborer’s style
for doing laptop work in coffee shops, I think of my dad immaculately
trimming his beard every morning before dawn to work on a construction
site. The men closest to me took meticulous care with their appearance
whenever they had the chance.
Mom, too, presented herself like her main job was to be photographed,
when it was more likely to sort the inventory in the stockroom of a
retail store. Her outfits were ensembles cobbled together from Wichita
mall sale racks, but she always managed to look stylish. My favorite was
a champagne-colored silk pantsuit that was cut loose and baggy. She
wore it with a scarf that had big, lush roses on it like the satiny
wallpaper she had glued and smoothed across our hallway. She had married
a farm boy but had no interest in plaid shirts.
For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious
attitude, but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from
the forces of culture that would commodify it. That place meant long
stretches of near-solitude broken up by long drives on highways to enter
society and then exit again.
Owning a small bit of the countryside brought my father deep
satisfaction. The state had seized some of his dad’s farmland through
eminent domain in the 1960s to dig the reservoir and move water east in
underground tunnels for the people of Wichita. Sometimes Dad would park
his truck on the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop that ran along the
lake dam and take my brother and me up the long, steep concrete steps to
look at what would have been his and then our small inheritance, now
literally underwater. We couldn’t use the water ourselves; it was for
Wichitans to access by turning on a faucet. We thus had dug a private
well right next to a giant reservoir on what once was our land. It’s an
old story: pushing poor rural communities out of the way to tap natural
resources for cities.
Witnessing this as a child had affected Dad deeply, and he shared
Grandpa’s attitude toward the value of land: “They don’t make any more
of it.” He had plans to buy the bit of land north of the house and build
an addition when my brother and I were older and needed more room.
Mom was less sure of these plans.
Some evenings, I’d watch her curl and tease her dark hair at the
vanity mirror that my dad had built next to their master-suite bathroom.
She smelled of hair spray and Calvin Klein Obsession perfume. She left
in the darkness and turned her car wheels from our dirt road on to the
highway for Wichita.
When Mom went to a George Strait concert at the small Cowboy Club in
Wichita, when Strait was newly famous, Dad sat at the stereo next to our
brick fireplace, listening to a radio broadcast of the show on a
country station. George would pick a woman from the audience to join him
on stage, the man on the radio said. Dad held his breath, worried that
Mom would be picked and swept away by a handsome celebrity in tight
Wranglers and a cowboy hat. The men I knew more often wore ball caps
stained through by the salt of their foreheads.
Dad didn’t even like country music. Too sad, he said.
In college, I began to understand the depth of the
rift that is economic inequality. Roughly speaking, on one side of the
rift was the place I was from – laborers, workers, people filled with
distrust for the systems that had been ignoring and even spurning them
for a couple decades. On the other side were the people who run those
systems – basically, people with college funds who end up living in
cities or moving to one of the expensive coasts. It’s much messier than
that, of course. But before arriving on campus, I hadn’t understood the
extent of my family’s poverty – “wealth” previously having been
represented to me by a friend whose dad was our small town’s postmaster
and whose mom went to the Wichita mall every weekend.
Even at a midwestern state university, my background – agricultural
work, manual labor, rural poverty, teen pregnancies, domestic chaos,
pervasive addiction – seemed like a faraway story to the people I met.
Most of them were from tidy neighborhoods in Wichita, Kansas
City, the greater Chicago area. They used a different sort of English
and had different politics. They were appalled that I had grown up with
conservative ideas about government and Catholic doctrine against
abortion. I was appalled that they didn’t know where their food came
from or even seem to care since it had always just appeared on their
plates when they wanted it.
There was no language for whatever I represented on campus.
Scholarships and student organizations existed to boost kids from
disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities, international students
and the LGBTQ community. I was none of those things, and professors and
other students often assumed from looking at me or hearing me speak that
I was a middle-class kid with parents sending me money.
Counterpunch | Well, the harsh truth about the integrity and fortitude of
billionaires is finally out in the open for all to see, and the results
are repugnant: Billionaires are gutless, chicken-hearted cowards. The
proof is found in the pudding as several Silicon Valley billionaires
purchase massive underground bunkers built in Murchison, Texas shipped
to New Zealand, where the bunkers are buried in secret underground
nests.
All of which begs this question: What’s with capitalism/capitalists?
As soon as things turn sour, they turn south with tails between their
legs and hightail it out of Dodge. However, they feast on and love
steady, easy, orderly avenues (markets) to riches, but as soon as things
heat up a bit, they turn tail and run.
History proves it time and again, for example, FDR rescued
capitalism, literally rescued it, from certain demise by instituting
social welfare programs for all of the citizens as capitalists fled
and/or jumped off buildings.
Then during the 2008 financial meltdown capitalists were found curled
up in the corners of rooms as all hell broke lose. Taxpayers, “Everyday
Joes,” had to bail them out with $700B in public funds, and even more
after that. All public funds! Taxpayers, average Americans, bailed them
out!
Capitalists can’t take the heat as well as gritty American industrial
workers that ended up bailing them out of the “jam of the century.” As
explained by Allen Sinai chief global economist for Decision Economics,
Inc, discussing Milton ‘laissez-faire’ Friedman’s free-market dogma vis a
vis the 2008 economic meltdown: “The free market is not geared to take
care of the casualties, because there’s no profit motive.”
The chicken-hearts from Silicon Valley already have Gulfstream G550s
($70M each) readied at a Nevada airstrip for the quickie escape journey
to NZ.
Guardian | Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such
repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also
began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually
harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an
aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar
workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the
end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and
physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and
boxers.
It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and
Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope
that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in
the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports,
which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century,
became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of
mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative
empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the
playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.'
But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more
intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque
economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many
fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into
hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the
calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as
individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be
honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of
physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with
strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of
gender difference reached non-western societies.
European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their
virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and
patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the
west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls
“internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded
guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to
man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon:
how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and
Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th
century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the
creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the
nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda,
Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika
Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly
flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical
imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the
first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”,
as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity,
wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during
fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy
into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,”
declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe
members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against
the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of
mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture
across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and
technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger
number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine
certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and
forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of
neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine
identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of
the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often
futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine
women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to
degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is
supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
thinkprogress | On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice
Department has formed a task force to implement religious liberty
guidance it introduced last year. Sessions made the announcement during
a “Religious Liberty Summit” at Justice Department headquarters.
When the guidance was issued
in October, saying that the government can’t punish anyone for acting
or not acting “in accordance with one’s religious beliefs,” civil rights
organizations worried
it could be used to excuse individuals and groups who refuse to provide
services to people in the LGBTQ community and people who want
reproductive care. Indeed, Sessions specifically mentioned LGBTQ rights
and reproductive rights in his announcement of the task force.
“We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives,” Sessions said on
Monday. “We’ve seen U.S. senators ask judicial and executive branch
nominees about dogma—even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a
religious test for public office. We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so
bravely by Jack Phillips.”
Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake artist
who told a same-sex couple he would not make them a wedding cake
because it is against his religious beliefs in the U.S. Supreme Court
case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. In
his critique of senators’ questions for judicial and executive branch
nominees, Sessions may be referring to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) questioning then HUD Secretary nominee Ben Carson about whether he supported LGBTQ rights or senators asking judicial nominee Wendy Vitter about her past anti-reproductive rights actions.
ChicagoTribune | “We have a sense of urgency about this project (and) when we started,
we wanted the public to know we would break ground as soon as
possible,” said Michael Strautmanis, the vice president for civic
engagement for the foundation. “But we also knew there were some things
that were not in our control. We insist on going through the process
with integrity and without rushing.”
Before the presidential center can be built, the federal government
will review its impact on Jackson Park, which is on the National
Register of Historic Places, and evaluate the project’s environmental
effects. Any impact that the review highlights will have to be resolved
before construction can be allowed.
There have already been two
public federal review meetings. A third was scheduled in June, but then
it was delayed until July. Now it has been delayed until late summer,
according to the city of Chicago’s website.
The federal review
process has to be conducted because of Jackson Park’s historic status
and because it involved closing and expanding major streets.
The
news of the delay comes just a day after activists gathered on the South
Side at a meeting to discuss placing a community benefits agreement
proposition on the February ballot.
“We have a new window of opportunity before the next
election to protect the most vulnerable people in our community,” said
Parrish Brown, an activist with the Black Youth Project 100 Chicago
Chapter, in a written statement. “We’re gathering to make sure Mayor
(Rahm) Emanuel and the local aldermen do the right thing, or we’ll have
to elect people who will.”
The coalition wants an ordinance that
would require that 30 percent of all newly constructed housing near the
presidential center be set aside as affordable housing. They want a
property tax freeze for the longtime homeowners closest to the site and
an independent monitor to make sure local residents are hired to work on
the project. In addition, they are now calling for a community trust
fund and support for the neighborhood schools.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...