The Arc of History ONLY Bends Toward Overcoming

theatlantic |  The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? These are not simple questions to answer, because the nation’s pro-slavery and anti-slavery tendencies are so closely intertwined.

The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619 Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise.

Americans need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who question whether it does.

 Published 400 years after the first Africans were brought to in Virginia, the project asked readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” The special issue of the Times Magazine included essays from the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who argued that sprawl in Atlanta is a consequence of segregation and white flight; the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posited that American countermajoritarianism was shaped by pro-slavery politicians seeking to preserve the peculiar institution; and the journalist Linda Villarosa, who traced racist stereotypes about higher pain tolerance in black people from the 18th century to the present day. The articles that drew the most attention and criticism, though, were Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay chronlicling black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real” and the sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery.

The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”

The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.

This argument is explosive. From abolition to the civil-rights movement, activists have reached back to the rhetoric and documents of the founding era to present their claims to equal citizenship as consonant with the American tradition. The Wilentz letter contends that the 1619 Project’s argument concedes too much to slavery’s defenders, likening it to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun’s assertion that “there is not a word of truth” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase that “all men are created equal.” Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.

Fake News Metastasizing Into Fake History Too?

WaPo | Five historians recently wrote to the New York Times Magazine, asking the architects of its comprehensive 1619 Project, which tells the founding narrative of America through the lens of slavery, to issue several corrections. They argued that assertions in the 1619 package about the motivations that sparked the Revolutionary War and President Abraham Lincoln’s views on black equality were misleading.

“We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project,” wrote the five professors, from Princeton University, Texas State University, Brown University and the City University of New York.

In a lengthy response published online over the weekend, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein addressed each concern from the professors but stood firmly behind the reporting and declined to correct it.

“Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding,” Silverstein wrote. “While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

What IS The 1619 Project?

New York Times Interactive Web Version

If You Want to Go to War..., I'll Take You There!

wsws |  “White privilege,” “wealthy elites,” “mansplainers,” “old white people,” “ivory tower elites.” These are just a few of the epithets hurled at me and the four historians I joined in protesting the flawed and inaccurate history presented in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. A quick pass through Twitter reveals that some historians are “ashamed of,” even “heartbroken by,” our letter to the Times editor. One historian chastised us for criticizing the 1619 Project at a time when our “republic” is so dangerously divided! Really, historians? Is it no longer our right or responsibility to critique works of history, at least not when they’re about a long, ugly episode of our nation’s history? Does history not have to be accurate if the subjects were truly victims, as enslaved Americans surely were? But I digress.

On August 18, 2019, the New York Times released its highly-touted 1619 Project, featuring historical essays and original literary works aimed at “reframing” American history with a new founding date—1619, the year that 20 or more Africans were brought to Virginia—to replace 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. The project offers slavery and its legacies to contemporary American society as the nation’s central defining features. New York Times journalist and project director Nikole Hannah-Jones provides the project’s “intellectual framework,” which posits slavery as the dominant feature of North American settlement, and the American Revolution as a duplicitous movement designed to protect slavery from its abolition by the British Empire. Hannah-Jones urges that we remember Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln first and foremost for their racism rather than their ideals of nationhood. Her assertions on these topics were forcefully critiqued by historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and James Oakes in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), and by Sean Wilentz in the New York Times Review of Books (NYTR). My own criticisms, in an interview with the WSWS, centered on the Project’s historical treatment of class and race. I elaborate here on those remarks.

After reframing the meaning of the American Revolution, Hannah-Jones moves on to the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely touching on American abolitionism and ignoring the free soil movement, though both were seeds of the antislavery Republican Party. In discussing the nation’s wrenching effort to reconstruct itself after the Civil War, she asserts that “blacks worked for the most part. .. alone” to free themselves and push for full rights of citizenship through passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Rightly emphasizing the vigilante white violence that immediately followed the victories of a Republican-dominated Congress, she ignores important exceptions, including the Southern white “Scalawags,” many of whom were nonslaveholders who fought against the Confederacy in the war and participated with blacks and Northern Republicans in passing the Reconstruction Amendments.

Identity Politics When You're Concocting a Hoax? NYTimes1619 Project Some Bullshidt....,

wsws |  Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people” for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.

Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.

You Talk About Identity Politics When That's All You've Got to Sell...,

wsws |  What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same pathology? Ultimately, it’s a race reductionist argument. What the Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an insistence that we can’t ever talk about anything except race. And that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to sell.

If you follow through the logic of disparities discourse, and watch the studies and follow the citations, what you get is a sort of bold announcement of findings, but finding that anybody who has been reading a newspaper over the last 50 or 70 years would assume from the outset: blacks have it worse, and women have it worse, and so on.

It’s in part an expression of a generic pathology of sociology, the most banal expression of academic life. You follow the safe path. You replicate the findings. But it’s not just supposed to be a matter of finding a disparity in and of itself, like differences in the number of days of sunshine in a year. It’s supposed to be a promise that in finding or confirming the disparity in this or that domain that it will bring some kind of mediation of the problem. But the work never calls for that.

Q. You make important points about the way social problems are approached. As an example, we have a scourge of police violence in this country. Over 1,000 Americans are killed each year by police. And the common knowledge, so to speak, is that this is a racial problem. The reality is that the largest number of those killed are white, but blacks are disproportionately killed. But if the position is that this is simply a racial problem, there is no real solution on offer. We have a militarized police force operating under conditions of extreme social inequality, with lots of guns on the streets, with soldiers coming back from serving in neocolonial wars abroad becoming police officers. And all of this is excised in the racialist argument, which if taken at face value, boils down to allegations about racial attitudes among police.

A. Cedric Johnson [3] has made good points on this and I’ve spoken with him at considerable length about the criminal justice system. To overdraw the point, a black Yale graduate who works on Wall Street is no doubt several times more likely to be jacked up by the police on the platform of Metro North than his white counterpart, out of mistaken identity. And that mistaken identity is what we might call racism. But it’s a shorthand. He’s still less likely to be jacked up by the police than the broke white guy in northeast Philadelphia or west Baltimore.

The point of this stress on policing is containing those working-class and poor populations and protecting property holders downtown, and in making shows of force in doing so. I mean the emergence of, or the intensification of, militarized policing in the 1990s and 2000s was directly connected with an increased focus on urban redevelopment directed toward turning central cities into havens for play and leisure. To do this you have to accomplish a couple of things, as Saskia Sassen pointed out almost 30 years ago, in the reconfiguration of the urban political economy in ways that create a basis for upscale consumption, and an industrial reserve army who will work for little enough to make that culture of upscale consumption profitable. Then you have to have the police to protect all of this. It’s really like a tourist economy.

So that’s kind of natural enough and you don’t need to have a devil theory like the crack epidemic to explain it—all of this pointless back-and-forth about how the cultural and political authorities are responding to the opioid crisis compared to how they responded to the crack epidemic. I mean, it’s all beside the point.

“Insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.” Larry Summers

theburningplatform |  Let’s take this one right to the hoop: The Epstein saga may be the biggest, most broadly based scandal in US history. Of course, it has some serious competition, but to use the logic of Peter Dale Scott, the Berkeley professor who cut his teeth studying drug cartels, once in a while you get fleeting images of what lurks in the political pipes down in the basement. Peter called it “deep politics” in 1996, what is now called the deep state or, according to Wikipedia,¹ a Conspiracy of the Loons. Previous peeks into the basement include the collapse of BCCI,² the Panama papers,³ Fast and Furious,⁴ the Iran-Contra scandal,⁵ and, for the nostalgic, a spate of assassinations.⁶ You couldn’t miss the Epstein saga (unless, of course, you are still chained in the basement by one of his friends), but our wokeness is highly variable and, by definition, poorly developed. The Tetris pieces fall slowly at first but quickly by the end. Amazon is already filling up with treatises by those who can type 300 words per minute. My sources are a combination of random news reports, daily searches of the keyword “Epstein” on Twitter, and a few particularly persistent sleuths including Michael Krieger (@Libertyblitz),⁷ Witney Webb (@_whitneywebb),⁸ and articles flying across Zerohedge (@zerohedge). While reading this chapter let’s play Jeopardy—“Alex: I’ll take ‘WTF?’ for $500”—or maybe even Bizarro Bingo wherein you place a ‘✓’ every time something just got really weird.

Jeff had humble roots. After working summers as a farmhand choking the chickens, he was hired to teach math at an elite private girls school in New York City…despite not having a college degree. His new employer was Donald Barr, the father of Bill Barr, our current Attorney General (✓). Soon thereafter, they both moved on to higher callings.¹³ (Bill Barr’s law firm also defended Jeff in a previous brush with the law, forcing Bill to recuse himself from the forthcoming execution prosecution; ✓)¹⁴ Jeff’s job as a high school teacher naturally catapulted him to a few non-descript jobs on Wall Street, allowing him to accrue an estimated billion-dollar nest egg without anybody on Wall Street actually knowing who he was (✓). Leslie Wexner, founder of Victoria’s Secret, is said to be his only client and appears to have given Epstein power of attorney and handed over his $100 million NYC condo to Jeff (✓).¹⁵ In a pay-it-forward moment, Jeff was a seminal investor in the Clinton Global Initiative (last ✓; you are on your own from here.)¹⁶ Harvard and MIT also got millions.¹⁷ A 2003 story in the Harvard Crimson painted Jeff as a mysterious billionaire with a not-for-profit foundation: “Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers.¹⁸ The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations.” The Trilateral Commission? That’s real?

Epstein’s Black Book including over a thousand names published by Gawker in 2015¹⁹ has now been scrutinized.²⁰ Cronies of special note included billionaire Wexner, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Woody Allen, the Duke of York Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Andrew Cuomo, former Prime Minister of Israel and current Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ehud Barak, George Stephanopoulos, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Charlie Rose (who used Epstein as a talent scout for his interns),²¹ financier Ron Perelman, modeling mogul Jean Luc Brunel, ex-labor minister Peter Mandelson, Adnan Khashoggi (arms dealer and brother of the New York Times reporter Jamal Khashoggi who got fed to the camels by the Saudis last year),²² Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (suspected to be the “prime minister” alluded to in released court transcripts),²³ and Mr. Rogers. (Just ✓-ing to see if you are still awake.)

Trump is the Most Transparent President

RCP |  In an interview with Syrian state TV first reported in English by NBC News, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave President Trump a backhanded compliment by calling him the "best" and "most transparent" American president. Assad praised Trump for openly admitting that the U.S. is engaged in military operations in the Mideast for oil interests and that the U.S. tolerates the Saudi government because they buy a lot of weapons from American defense contractors.

"All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique' and 'brilliant' American or Western principles," Assad said. "But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil, and others."

"I'm not going to destroy … the economy of our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia," Trump told reporters on the White House lawn shortly after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi in November 2018. "They’re buying hundreds of billions worth of things from this country. If I say we don’t want to take your business, if I say we’re going to cut it off, they will get the equipment -- military equipment and other things from Russia and China."

"Trump speaks with transparency to say 'We want the oil.' This is the reality of American politics since the Second World War at least," Assad said.

"We have secured the oil and, therefore, a small number of U.S. troops will remain in the area where they have the oil," President Trump said on October 23 when announcing the cease-fire agreement between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.

"What do we want more than a transparent foe?" Assad asked facetiously. 

Did Their Filthy Bidnis, Pulled Out, then DARED YOU TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!!

NYTimes |  Two weeks after Tufts University became the first major university to remove the Sackler name from buildings and programs over the family’s role in the opioid epidemic, members of the family are pushing back. A lawyer for some of the Sacklers argued in a letter to the president of Tufts that the move was unjustified and a violation of agreements made when the school wanted the family’s financial help years ago.

The letter described Tufts’s decision to remove the name as “contrary to basic notions of fairness" and “a breach of the many binding commitments made by the University dating back to 1980 in order to secure the family’s support, including millions of dollars in donations for facilities and critical medical research.”

Institutions that have accepted financial support from the Sacklers have in recent months faced growing cries to distance themselves from the family. 

The forceful response by Sackler family members now may be seen as a signal to other institutions amid a flurry of announcements by major cultural organizations that they would no longer take donations from the family. The response also raised complicated legal questions about what room institutions have to unilaterally remove a donor’s name long after a gift has been accepted.

The lawyer, Robert Cordy, who represents the descendants of two of the brothers who built Purdue Pharma, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, wrote that Tufts chose “to prioritize optics over a fair process.”

Brace Yourself For What Will Come Out My Mouf When I Get Free!!!

blackagendareport |  “When the ruling class believes it is faced with existential threats, they throw bourgeois democracy out the window.”

The catastrophic defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in last week’s elections does, indeed, foreshadow what’s in store for Bernie Sanders if the U.S. ruling class believes the self-styled socialist has a real chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Although the Brexit dispute added deep and unique layers of complexity to the British electoral contest, the sheer magnitude of Labour’s loss to a discredited Conservative Party headed by the Trump-class clown Boris Johnson, is the result of a full-court, every-dirty-trick-and-lie-in-the-book campaign by British corporate media, working hand-in-glove with intelligence circles, the trans-Atlantic military industrial complex, and the pro-corporate wing of the Labour Party (“Blairites”), itself. Sanders faces the same demonic alignment of corporate/media-national security forces in 2020, against an identical “Russiagate” backdrop that has, over the past three years, revealed the fascist face of late stage capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic. 

If anything, Sanders is even more vulnerable than Corbyn, whose grassroots supporters controlled the Labour Party machinery. The Democratic Party is firmly in the hands of corporate servants who are dishonor-bound to bring down the self-styled socialist by any means necessary, to blunt the momentum of the super-majority issues he champions: Medicare for All, Green New Deal, living wage, free higher education, and a steep wealth tax. Together, these measures would spell the death of the austerity “Race to the Bottom” regime that has been imposed over the course of two generations with the collaboration of both corporate parties. The corporate Democrats are, therefore, fully invested in Sanders’ demise, since it is their base that presents the greatest threat to the austerity regime -- not Donald Trump’s race-obsessed deplorables, who threaten only Black, brown and Arab-looking Americans. 

l'affaire Epstein PROVED That Rich People Do Not Care About You - AT ALL!!!

medium |  No, I’m not talking about your cousin who drives a Mercedes, has his own insurance business, and always picks up the tab when you go out for beers. I’m talking about super-rich people: the Walton family, the Koch brothers and, yes, the Trumps. I’m talking about people who continue to make money off the backs of the poor while convincing those same people to remain loyal no matter what. But the truth is they are never going to share or trickle down their money to you — regardless of how white you are, how loyal you are, or how much you support their companies or their politicians.

When a family like the Waltons, worth over $50 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — are fine knowing their employees are collecting food stamps to survive and they do nothing about it, that speaks volumes. It says loud and clear: I don’t fucking care about you!

When Donald Trump was willing to close down and bankrupt multiple small businesses because he couldn’t be bothered to pay his bills, all while living in a gilded penthouse and flying around New York City in a helicopter, that screamed: I don’t fucking care about you!

TicTac UAP's at Tonopeh? Cleavon and Cletus, Y'all Muhuggahs Ain't Never Gettin a Ride...,

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. 

Why Do You Suppose Negroes Were Chosen For Large Scale Human "Trials"?

NIH |  Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed a new and improved viral vector—a virus-based vehicle that delivers therapeutic genes—for use in gene therapy for sickle cell disease. In advanced lab tests using animal models, the new vector was up to 10 times more efficient at incorporating corrective genes into bone marrow stem cells than the conventional vectors currently used, and it had a carrying capacity of up to six times higher, the researchers report.

The development of the vector could make gene therapy for sickle cell disease much more effective and pave the way for wider use of it as a curative approach for the painful, life-threatening blood disorder. Sickle cell disease affects about 100,000 people in the United States and millions worldwide.

“Our new vector is an important breakthrough in the field of gene therapy for sickle cell disease,” said study senior author John Tisdale, M.D., chief of the Cellular and Molecular Therapeutic Branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). “It’s the new kid on the block and represents a substantial improvement in our ability to produce high capacity, high efficiency vectors for treating this devastating disorder.”

Researchers have used virus-based vehicles for years in gene therapy experiments, where they have been very effective at delivering therapeutic genes to bone marrow stem cells in the lab before returning them to the body. But there’s always room for improvement in their design in order to optimize effectiveness, Tisdale noted. He compared the new virus-based vehicle to a new and improved car that is also far easier and cheaper for the factory to produce.

The study was supported by the NHLBI and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), both part of the NIH. It was published online today in Nature Communications.

They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her...,

spectrum.mit |  Ronald Raines ’80 was first drawn to chemistry and biology as an undergraduate at MIT, where he completed a double major, studying enzymes in a chemistry lab on the first floor of the Dreyfus Building.

Some three decades later, he is back in that same building, gesturing excitedly at protein models arrayed in his office along with books and travel mementos. As he discusses his research, the “Brass Rat” class ring on his hand provides a tangible reminder of where he began. And, it’s clear he is just as interested in chemistry and biology as he ever was.

Raines, who joined the MIT faculty in 2017 after a long career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serves as the Firmenich Professor of Chemistry at MIT—a professorship with a distinguished 40-year history. He leads a lab pursuing projects at the interface of both fields that are poised to have a major impact on medicine and society.

“I’ve always liked tangibility, I’ve liked science I could touch, and chemistry and biology are both sciences that I can touch,” Raines explains. “I love projects that span from very fundamental science all the way to a clinical outcome—that’s the goal.”

One such project that has occupied Raines’s lab for the past five years started with a straightforward concept: Proteins are complex molecules that carry out many key tasks in cells, but mutations in the DNA blueprint used to build them may result in dysfunctional proteins—and when these damaged proteins are involved in how cells grow or divide, it can lead to cancer. So, Raines thought, what if you could overcome such cancer-causing mutations by simply replacing dysfunctional proteins with working versions?

Wichita Kansas, Summer of 1982, Omni Magazine, MIND BLOWN!!!!

afrodita | It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the 'Cyberspace Seven,' but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

We waited side by side in front of the simulator console, watching the time display in the screen's left corner. 

"Go for it," I said, when it was time, but Bobby was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an arcade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free games. 

A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid. If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the matrix, he might have seen a surf of flickering shadow roll out of the little yellow pyramid that represented our computer. The program was a mimetic weapon, designed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash-priority override in whatever context it encountered. 

"Congratulations," I heard Bobby say. "We just became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspection probe..." That meant we were clearing fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for Chrome's data base. I couldn't see it yet, but I already knew those walls were waiting. Walls of shadow, walls of ice. Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring.

This year’s gene-write with “ready for space” focus

gpwrite-2019  |  P23. Genetic Engineering of Human Cells for Radiotolerance Craig Westover, Sherry Yang, Sonia Iosim, Deena Najjar, Daniel Butler, Daniela Bezdan, Christopher E. Mason. Weill Cornell, New York, New York, United States Space flight has been documented to produce a number of detrimental physiological effects as a result of cosmic radiation. Space radiation is about 100 times higher than the average effective dose per year from natural radiation on earth and has the ability to produce DNA double stranded breaks leading to increased chromosomal aberrations. The harsh environmental effects of space on organisms have also been studied on the molecular level and as such have shed light on some of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to space induced alterations of cellular functions such as proliferation, differentiation, maturation, and cell survival. Our lab was recently involved in the NASA Twin Project where we analyzed Scott Kelly’s genome, transcriptome, and corresponding epigenetic modifications in response to 1 year of space flight. With this information in mind we are now moving on to genetically engineering HEK293 cells to survive ionizing cosmic radiation.

P28. Detecting evidence of genetic engineering Yuchen Ge, Jitong Cai, Joel S. Bader Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States Detecting evidence of genetic engineering is important for biosecurity, provenance, and intellectual property rights. The need for monitoring and detection is growing with contemplated release of gene drive systems. We describe results of a computational systems designed to detect engineering from DNA sequencing of biological samples, including automated identification of host strains, detection of foreign gene content, and detection of watermarks. Our results demonstrate near perfect identification of foreign gene content in blinded samples, but less ability to detect more subtle engineering associated with watermarks that blend in with natural variation. We describe plans for future improvements.

GP-Write: Quest for the Synthetic Human Genome

cen.acs.org |  In the 15 years since the Human Genome Project was declared finished in 2003, the cost of reading a whole human genome has plummeted to about $1,000. Scientists estimate that writing a full human genome with today’s DNA synthesis technology could cost upward of $100 million. That number was the group’s declared fundraising goal in 2016, but it still doesn’t have centralized funding dedicated to the task. This year, some GP-write participants suggested that patenting the ultrasafe cell line or technologies developed along the way could encourage financial support from investors.

“It may be essential,” said Kristin Neuman, executive director for biotechnology licensing at the patent firm MPEG LA. “Some of the scientists want to see everything open access. Others recognize the importance of intellectual property protection to incentivize private investment,” she observed. During the meeting, Neuman encouraged the group to consider patents for cells and technology developed by the group while still making the ultrasafe cell line available to researchers doing basic science.

GP-write cofounder Nancy Kelley said a systematic fundraising effort will begin soon. “A couple years ago we had a rocky beginning, and we really needed to do some work on straightening out the message,” she said. “I now believe we have something serious to talk about.”

Church added that more than 100 research groups involved in GP-write have their own significant funding. “I don’t think we are underfunded at this point; I think we just need to execute,” he said. Teams can now begin signing up for a chromosome, or part of a chromosome, to recode or help with technology development. “There are plenty of things for people to do today.”

At the end of the GP-write meeting, the group’s goals seemed at once more focused and much broader. Church said the group is not backing down from synthesizing a full human genome and that the ultrasafe cell line gives the consortium an immediate task with a clear payoff. But in the end, the GP-write story may be less about completing a project and more about uniting a multidisciplinary cohort of scientists behind something big.

“Our goals aren’t fixed in stone yet,” Church said. “Hopefully they won’t be fixed in stone even at the finish line.”.

General Kwast in Outer Space

thedrive |  Recently retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast gave a lecture last month that seems to further signal that the next major battlefield will be outer space. While military leadership rattling the space sabers is nothing new, Kwast’s lecture included comments that heavily hint at the possibility that the United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever. Is this mere posturing or could we actually be on the verge of making science fiction a reality?

As we’ve reported previously, there have been hints of radical new technologies under development by the military and, just as in Kwast’s speech, Chinese advances have been cited as the reason why these technologies are needed. China has been rapidly expanding its presence in space in recent years, placing a lander on the far side of the moon in late 2018 in what some say was a push to scout natural resources with which to develop a permanent lunar manufacturing center. China has also been developing “mothership” aircraft from which to rapidly and unpredictably launch spaceplanes and other payloads into space. The country has also launched several eyebrow-raising satellites in recent years which some analysts claim could be used in anti-satellite warfare. Beyond all this, they have been investing heavily in a traditional space program that includes many facets of manned and unmanned space technologies that rivals, and in some ways, exceeds our own. 

 Around the 12:00 mark in the speech, Kwast makes the somewhat bizarre claim that the U.S. currently possesses revolutionary technologies that could render current aerospace capabilities obsolete:

"The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I’ve had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these scientists. This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour."

Kwast’s comment is only one of several curious comments made by military leadership lately and they do seem to claim that we could be on the precipice of a great leap in transportation technology. 

Why the Interest in Eclipses?

mega-what |  The prehistoric people of north-west europe watched the rising and setting positions of sun and moon against the horizon very closely. They developed techniques for fitting the shape of the landscape to celestial cycles. Their monuments were built in places where the earth was in harmony with heaven in a very practical way. 

Lunistice positions on the horizon as measured by the Prehistoric Lunar Calendar are an indirect pointer to the position of the nodes of the lunar orbit and thus to the time of year at which a lunar eclipse may be expected to occur, as measured by the Prehistoric Solar Calendar.

In this schematic diagram:

• The 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle is repre­sented by the outer circle and reads clock­wise. Each of its divisions is centred on the appropriate lunar event and represents a period of 1.16 tropical years, about 14 months.
  
  
• The annual solar cycle is repre­sented by the inner circle and prog­resses anti-clock­wise.
  
  
• During any lunar period, visible lunar eclipses may be expected to occur only in the months centred on the events at either end of the adjoining solar axis.
  
  
• The fact that the "eclipse months" of the Prehistoric Solar Calendar overlap by a quarter-month at each end is an important feature that allows the system to generally produce the correct answer even though the natural cycles do not reconcile neatly.
  
  

Simple really! Observe lunistice rise / set positions to understand the time of year when eclipses can happen. 

Ancient observers, having solved the problem of knowing when a lunar eclipse might occur, would know from experience that there must either be a total eclipse, a partial eclipse or no visible eclipse. Could they have known which was most likely? Not completely impossible for, timing aside, on study of the data it would appear that eclipses occur in semi-regular patterns of fairly short duration. The typical, underlying, pattern seems to be two seasons of non-visible penumbral eclipses followed by two partials, two totals and then two more partials to end the sequence. Occasionally the penumbrals extend to three seasons in a row or reduce to one. The sequence of six visible eclipses sometimes reduces to five and may contain one, two or three totals, though it always begins and ends with a partial. 

The main problem for a naked-eye observer with no theoretical knowledge is that not all visible eclipses can be seen, because they will sometimes occur when the moon is below the horizon. It must be said though that in any sustained period of observation and certainly several times in a human lifetime, eclipses would be observed that had started before the moon rose or were not completed before it set. 

Therefore it would be possible to deduce that eclipses can happen when the moon is below the horizon. It was an essential part of these people's methodology that one can change the time and place of a rise or set by changing one's position on the earth's surface and, if desired, the same event may be observed repeatedly at different times from different places. So, while they could not be certain that an eclipse would actually be visible, they probably had a good idea of what to expect and they certainly knew when to expect it. Their methodology could not predict every eclipse perfectly but the overall pattern was mapped very well and it may be that their observational experience would have given better performance than seems immediately obvious to us. 

Gobekli Tepe and Rapa Nui

starmythworld |  The preceding post discussed George Orwell's powerful depiction of the fact that control over the narrative of history is an extremely important weapon in the arsenal of those who seek to exercise a form of tyrannical mind control over others.

This can be demonstrated to be taking place regarding certain important events in the recent past -- evidenced quite plainly in the reprehensible termination of the teaching career of tenured Professor James Tracy at Florida Atlantic University for his efforts to examine and discuss evidence that undermines the official narrative of certain traumatic events portrayed in the news media in the United States.

However, as that previous post mentions, a parallel can also be drawn to the control over the narrative of humanity's ancient past. Those who have had the temerity over the past hundred or hundred or so years to have discussed the abundant evidence which seems to call into question the conventional outline of the ancient past can attest to the often withering scorn and other forms of social and professional approbation that is unfailingly leveled at any dissenting voices who call into question the official narrative.

And yet, just as in Orwell's masterful 1984, there are many who (like Winston in the novel) have personally seen evidence which completely upends the conventional narrative, and who realize that something is seriously amiss with the official storyline.

The volume of evidence has continued to mount over the past few decades, to the point that it is threatening to collapse the entire edifice upon which the conventional outline of human history has been built.

For instance, as discussed in Graham Hancock's latest work, Magicians of the Gods (which ties together many facets spanning the arc of his many previous explorations and books up to this point), the ancient site often referred to by its Turkish name of Gobekli Tepe has been dated to around 11,600 years before present, based on readings of the material used to fill in around the massive and precisely-planed stone pillars (over two hundred of which appear to have been buried at the massive site, many of them in the range of twenty tons of rock), which means that the pillars themselves are at least that old but may in fact be even older (20). 

Many of these massive and precisely-worked megaliths feature beautiful and graceful artistic relief renderings of stylized animals, many or all of which may represent astronomical constellations (a point Graham Hancock makes in his book). Furthermore, archaeologists studying the site (which has only been under excavation since the late 1990s) admit that, based on their analysis, the finest stonework and artistic work appears to be found on the oldest of the stones, a puzzling piece of information according to the conventional theories of ancient human history.

In fact, conventional views of history are tremendously undermined by the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe. The development of such high and sophisticated skill at stone working, at such a remote period, threatens to completely upend the official narrative which continues to be so confidently taught in schools beginning at the very earliest grades and going through undergraduate and graduate college and university courses (and reinforced by numerous additional "history channel"-style videos and shows for the benefit of those who are no longer exposed to history classes in classroom environments).

It is simply not easy to accumulate the extremely advanced technological, artistic, and engineering skill sets required to erect twenty-ton stone pillars on such a massive scale, and the undeniable evidence showing such abilities at a date that is as far back (or, indeed, much further back) in time from ancient Egypt than ancient Egypt is far back in time from us in the year 2016 is simply a devastating shock to the conventional timeline that proposes very "primitive" subsistence-style wandering in the millennia prior to the first-known civilizations (which themselves appear to have simply "materialized out of nowhere," already possessing incredible engineering and artistic skills, as John Anthony West documents in his essential Serpent in the Sky).

Further, as Graham Hancock also points out in this latest book in his corpus of research and analysis, many of the massive pillars at Gobekli Tepe feature human arms along their sides, with long-fingered hands folded in such a way that the fingertips almost touch -- in a manner which is irrefutably reminiscent of the exact same artistic details on many of the enormous moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

You can see the arms (but not the hands -- those are hidden by the "cow tail" grass near the ground-level, and by the soil itself) along the side of one megalith from Gobekli Tepe in the Wikimedia image here (there are better photographs in Graham Hancock's book). You can see the same stylized arms with nearly-touching fingers in many images of moai available on the web, such as the two shown below (there are even better ones in the book Easter Island: the Mystery Solved by Thor Heyerdahl -- an excellent book and well worth owning, although much as I admire Thor Heyerdahl I must argue that the "mystery" of Rapa Nui is by no means completely "solved" at this point).