A Sense of Doubt blog post #2559 - "Oh, Life is bigger; It's bigger than you" - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2202.19
"That's me in the corner"
I debated entitling this WEEKLY HODGE PODGE's theme the way I did -- "Oh, Life is bigger; It's bigger than you" -- or "That's me in the corner" both of which are lines from REM's 1991 song "Losing My Religion."
I think I lost my religion several years before 1991, but surely by 1991, I was no longer identifying as either Presbyterian or Christian, and I was pretty angry at many who still did and were insufferable hypocrites. It took man years for me to shed a lot though not all of that anger.
Welcome to the weekly Hodge Podge, which is not weekly, and is not always even bi-weekly, though I try. The last HODGE PODGE was January 29th.
Saturday, January 29, 2022
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2538 - Mass Formation Psychosis isn't real - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2201.29
So, more on the LOSING MY RELIGION thing farther down. Rebecca Watson (of course REBECCA WATSON) made a video about the pandemic causing Christians to lose their faith, not just their in people and the alleged goodness of people but in their religions.
Here's some more tour of the HODGE PODGE.
And so now GOPQ nutballs in Iowa want to put CAMERAS in teachers' class rooms just to make sure that they are not teaching history "wrong," like telling the truth about the history of white supremacy and racism in America.
That's a sign of the end times, for sure.
Thich Nhat Hanh died.
We all need more meditation and Zen practice.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/33191830/nfl-awards-1-million-studies-cannabinoids-effects-pain-management
AND NOW SOME HOT LINKS FROM OPEN CULTURE
https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/the-code-of-charles-dickens-shorthand-has-been-cracked-by-computer-programmers-solving-a-160-year-old-mystery.html
https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/the-fiendishly-complicated-board-game-that-takes-1500-hours-to-play-discover-the-campaign-for-north-africa.html
https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/when-the-levee-breaks-performed-by-john-paul-jones-musicians-around-the-world.html
Hey patrons! Enjoy this video ad-free for a few days! It goes public Wednesday. <3
Transcript:
As we head into year 3 of this global pandemic (current death toll as of this recording is 5.57 million people worldwide), it’s worth pausing to ask this question: how are we all doing? You know, are you doing okay? How are you feeling? Have you lost faith?
I know I’ve lost faith – prior to this pandemic I understood that there was a significant portion of the population who believed fervently in bullshit, but I still had faith in humanity as a whole to band together in times of great trouble. That faith has been officially shaken, as I see many, many more people than even I expected behaving like selfish monsters when it comes to doing the bare minimum to protect the people around us.
But I’m an atheist and a critical thinker so faith was never really my forte anyway. So we turn to the Christians. How’s their faith doing?
According to a new study published this month in the Journal of Religion and Health, not so great! A team of psychologists surveyed nearly 5,000 Germans several times throughout the past two years to gauge their level of spirituality, trust in a higher power, frequency of prayer, trust in their local religious community, overall wellbeing, and stress levels due to COVID-19. They found that as the pandemic wore on, more and more people started losing their faith – not just on the “loss of faith” survey metric but also in regards to how many people identified as Catholic, and how many people prayed regularly. And trust in local religious communities went from “indifferent” at the start of the pandemic (the Germans being fairly secular compared to Americans, I suppose) to “actually they kind of suck” by the time the second wave hit.
And this result wasn’t just because older Germans (who tend to be more religious) were dying from COVID, leaving a more atheistic younger population, as they controlled for age and a slew of other demographics. It also can’t be explained by the fact that churches had to shut down during some waves – yes, a person may naturally become less religious once they stop going to church and realize they don’t really miss it, but this paper also found a drop in faith from people who weren’t affiliated with any church. The “spiritual but not religious” crowd, who already weren’t attending weekly services anywhere, also experienced an equivalent drop in faith in a higher power.
So! Is this surprising? Well, many researchers do tend to think of religious faith as a crutch that people use in times of trouble, when they may not have any other hope, or when they don’t fully understand what’s happening. So with that in mind you may expect people to become more religious during a plague (which some studies suggest did happen in the early months of 2020 when everything was still fresh and new).
But religion isn’t just one monolith, and what many researchers (particularly historians) have noticed is that religiosity depends on a number of factors, including how any one religious institution responds to troubling times.
Take the Black Death, for example: for seven years, from 1346 to 1353, the plague killed 75–200 million people in Europe and the Near East. The two dominant religions at the time were Catholic Christianity in Europe and Islam in the Near East, and each one held enough power to dictate how the general population responded to the plague. This was pre-germ theory, so at the time pretty much everybody just figured the plague was brought on by God, but for different reasons. Muslims generally thought of the plague as a hardship to be endured like a flood or famine, but also as a gift, because the believers who died were ushered into a better world.
Meanwhile, the Christians tended to think of the plague less as a gift and more of a just punishment for sinners. This led to some conflicting thoughts in the good, Godly people who were watching their children and loved ones brutally succumbing to a painful and inevitable death. Was their child evil? Would a “just” God really let that happen?
On a side note, there was also a strong belief amongst Christians that the plague was caused by Jews, who they already hated and regularly accused of murdering their children and poisoning their wells. So, the plague naturally led to a sharp uptick in the murder of innocent Jewish people.
But no amount of praying, repenting, murdering, or hitting oneself with a whip (yes, this is where the flagellants (not to be confused with flagellates) showed up) made the plague stop. So while in the Near East, Muslims saw people dropping dead and thought “yep, that’s Allah’s will, so it goes, nothing to be done about it but wait it out,” in Europe the Christians were throwing everything at the wall but nothing was sticking. Religious leaders told their adherents they could stop the plague by doing X, Y, and Z, but the plague just kept on going.
The Church’s response to the plague helped inspire thinkers like John Wycliffe, not to be confused with thinkers like Wyclef Jean. Wycliffe was a Christian priest who believed the Church doctrine was right that the plague was punishing evil, but wrong about who the evil were: he wrote a treatise saying it was, in fact, the Clergy, who were dying in particularly high numbers. Wycliffe’s thinking on the matter, along with other revolutionaries, led to Christianity effectively splitting at the seams, eventually resulting in the Protestant reformation. Islam, meanwhile, just sort of shrugged and continued to do its thing for a few more centuries.
It’s undeniable that the plague caused a significant drop in Christian faith, or at the very least a redistribution of faith away from established religious institutions. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret wrote in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, “Because the Church could neither explain the plague, nor stop it, its power eroded in the eyes of average Europeans, many of whom turned to mysticism, superstition, or blends of ancient paganism and Catholicism to fill their spiritual needs.”
People didn’t just blindly find comfort in the faith of their parents and grandparents – this great tragedy shook them up and made them reconsider what they truly believed about God and the religious institutions they had blindly followed up until then.
So it’s not shocking that a study would find a similar result today, though the conditions are quite different. During the Black Death, religion stood alone as the way for people to understand and thus deal with what was happening to them. By the 1919 influenza pandemic (which killed 50-100 million people), doctors understood germ theory and were able to offer an alternate explanation: while they may not have known exactly what was happening, they did know enough to offer advice to stop the spread, which meant asking people to wear masks and shutting down public gatherings, including church services.
Some clergy members agreed with the science, while others flagrantly kept their doors open because the problem was clearly an angry God who could only be sated with public prayer, and also because people needed “detachment from the present distress, … comfort and inspiration for further duty … [and] the need of breathing another atmosphere, if only for a brief space.” The result was that a huge number of deaths occurred due to religious services, like in the Spanish city of Zamora where church services not only continued but were amped up, leading the city to become the hardest hit in the country.
I can’t tell you if the 1919 influenza led to a loss of faith, as it coincided with the end of a World War and the beginning of a recession that would lead to the Great Depression. There’s a lot of different factors mixed up in this. But I do suspect that the sudden clash of science and religion during the influenza outbreak did lead in part to the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the US, as many church leaders became committed to putting science (and government “overreach” based on science) back in its place. The Scopes Monkey Trial came just a few years later, paving the way for a very long battle between science and religion.
I think that in this latest pandemic, we’re seeing some of the same things we’ve seen before: some theists feel their religion is in competition with science and with public health measures, leading them to attend services, discredit scientists, and inevitably get sick and die. Other theists see that happening and maybe take a moment to reconsider who they’ve been following and what they’ve been believing all these years, and asking themselves “Is this true?”
I know several people who claim to be Christian, went to church throughout the pandemic despite warnings, and even I as an atheist thought, “Wow, Jesus would hate you. You’re purposely putting people at risk!” And these were people who knew COVID was a real danger, but they were young and healthy and knew their own risk was small, so they went about their lives, despite the fact that Jesus was all about protecting the vulnerable.
If I had been a Christian still when I saw that happen, I would have a hard time figuring out how MY religion was the same as that of the people I was attending church with.
I don’t think this pandemic alone will somehow destroy religious faith – unfortunately I think that superstitious beliefs are just a fact of life for humanity, and therefore so is religion, at least for now and for the next few centuries. But I do hope more people are critically examining the claims made by the leaders of their religious institutions: are they acting in your best interests, or in the best interests of your community? Or are they still in the Middle Ages, whipping themselves and killing innocent people because they think a Jewish wizard is poisoning them?
It's bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
I'm choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool, fool
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up
Consider this the hint of the century
Consider this the slip
That brought me to my knees, failed
What if all these fantasies come
Flailing around
Now I've said too much
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
That was just a dream
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
Try, cry, fly, try
That was just a dream
Just a dream
Just a dream, dream
Vandalized Jackie Robinson plaque set to be displayed at Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33186645/vandalized-jackie-robinson-plaque-set-displayed-negro-leagues-baseball-museum
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A plaque honoring baseball legend Jackie Robinson that was vandalized in Georgia is coming to Kansas City's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum to be put on display.
The sign was erected in 2001 outside the birthplace of Robinson near Cairo, Georgia. Community members there discovered last year that someone had shot the plaque multiple times.
Curator and museum vice president Ray Doswell told the Kansas City Star that displaying the defaced marker is an opportunity to teach the public about Robinson's story and combat hate. Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947 when he became the league's first Black player.
Robinson's hometown replaced the damaged marker, with help from the league, and added another marker at a library last week.
The vandalized marker is slated to go on display around mid-April, after a display case is built and spot secured in the museum, to coincide with the museum's celebration of the 75th anniversary of Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The plaque is expected to be permanently loaned to the Kansas City museum for regular display.
Museum community engagement manager Kiona Sinks said in a tweet that the vandalized marker will "serve as a reminder that the ugliness of America's past persists to this day."
https://brane-space.blogspot.com/2022/02/ottawa-cops-finally-grow-pair-disperse.html
Saturday, February 19, 2022
Ottawa Cops Finally Grow A Pair - Disperse Trucker Terr'ists
“Your time in our city has come to an end and you must leave.”, so said Ottawa interim Police Chief Steve Bell, so bringing to an end the occupation of the Canadian capital, primarily by fascists using trucks (and truckers) as a front and weapon.
"The Ottawa protests have made clear that extreme elements supporting fascism and white nationalism are attracted to the movement,” writes Henry Giroux for Truthout, “and visible in the appearance of neo-Nazi and Confederate flags and an abundance of QAnon logos emblazoned on trucks, signs and stickers. " The key proof? The way Tucker Carlson and the Foxites have rubbed Canadians' noses into what's happening and their own powerlessness to stop it.
Well, let's face it given the fascist occupation the end had to come soon, as Trudeau had already invoked the Emergencies Act and likely told Bell that if he didn't get control of the situation there'd have to be a military intervention. The last thing either wanted. But we know the besieged citizens of Ottawa would have wanted it if the cops continued to sit on their asses and not remove the Rightist pestilence that occupied their city, e.g.
Beleaguered Ottawans losing faith in leaders, want 'siege' to end
Latest reports were that at least 10 trucker pests fearing arrest and damage to their vehicles, opted to drive off after being parked for weeks on the street in front of Canadian legislative buildings. According to one of the departing imps, Anthony Lammers, who had arrived from Hamilton, Ontario:
“It’s over. I think we didn’t really know it last night, but this morning it was apparent that today was the day.”
About damned time I'd say, after you rats nearly wrecked a decent Canadian city and capital of the nation. But evidently vigorous police actions to remove the rigs became too much, at one point police used a crowbar to break open the door of a recreational vehicle that was parked near the edge of the blockade. It had been preventing massive vehicles from being moved. Others had their windows smashed open so the cops could gain driving access.
According to one whining mutt- Tom Marazzo, a former Canadian soldier- who beheld the cops finally acting the part:
“The government declared war on its people,”
The fascist fool or tool actually claimed: "The protesters are being punished for raising questions, for listening to their conscience, and for standing up for yourself.”
No, asshole, your fascist, terror- inflicting imps (not "protesters") had finally used up whatever minor 'good graces' you initially enjoyed by making yourselves a goddamned nuisance: accosting masked nurses on the way to their hospitals shifts, honking horns at all hours of day and night, and letting your weaponized trucks belch effluent (including carbon monoxide) - making many kids sick.
The Canadian government, finally - after nearly 3 weeks, said it was time to bring back order in the city. For three weeks, the unlawful occupation had clogged traffic, frayed residents’ nerves and forced businesses to close. Estimated costs ran up to $40 m a day. The original Ottawa police chief stepped down this week after facing widespread criticism, prompting the appointment of Steve Bell as an interim commander. It was right this happened as the original clown did nothing as the trucker terrorists occupied the capital, e.g.
by Linda McQuaig | February 11, 2022 - 8:13am | permalink
Excerpt:
Residents of the nation’s capital have been subjected to a rare and curious phenomenon that could be dubbed “police docility.” It wasn’t as if police were caught off-guard; convoy organizers had signalled their aggressive intentions.
Before the convoy left B.C., Patrick King, a long-time far-right activist (with no apparent trucking experience), told a Christian talk show that the convoy “plans to shut down Ottawa.”
So Ottawa police had plenty of time to take basic police actions — like putting up concrete barriers — which would have prevented the men in large trucks from driving right up to the Parliament Buildings and the Prime Minister’s Office and deciding that that was a nice place to park.
Maybe the Right's fascist asswits - in Canada and the U.S. - have finally learned their lesson, but I somehow doubt it. Fascist terror seldom dies a peaceful death or just passes in the mists of time. It usually only ends with war (as in WW II) or other bloodshed. We will see.
See Also:
by Sonali Kolhatkar | February 19, 2022 - 8:18am | permalink
Excerpt:
Canadians have a reputation for being polite, nice people. But the high-profile weeks-long civil disobedience actions by some Canadian truckers that began in late January in the capital city of Ottawa has undermined this reputation. Truckers and their allies caused traffic snarls within the city and wreaked havoc along the international supply chains crossing the United States-Canada border.
By many accounts, it seems as though the United States has exported its brand of toxic right-wing extremism across the northern border. Indeed, there are credible reports of Confederate American flags and swastikas being displayed by the Canadian protesters.
Unsurprisingly, the so-called Freedom Convoy has also garnered outsized media attention in the United States, becoming a cause célèbre among domestic conservatives who see it as yet another front in the culture war around which to whip up frenzied hysteria and score political points.
And:
by Bill Berkowitz | February 19, 2022 - 7:20am | permalink
Heading Football and Head Impacts 'Change Blood Patterns in Brain' (theguardian.com)
MicroRNAs are molecules that help to regulate gene expression, through which DNA instructions are converted into products such as proteins, in bodily fluids. The findings suggest that, given the change in levels, they may be able to be used as biomarkers to detect brain injury. Blood samples were taken from players after accidental head impacts in matches and after specifically designed training sessions. Forty-eight of the players, drawn from three teams, took part in a session that included repetitive heading drills from set pieces and similar scenarios; they also undertook one that involved other high-intensity exercise, with no head contact allowed. The results found specific changes in certain microRNA levels whose numbers were unaffected by the other high-intensity exercise.
Almost 500-Mile-Long Lightning Bolt Crossed Three US States (bbc.com)
According to the WMO, both records took place in areas prone to intense storms that produce 'megaflashes,' namely the Great Plains region of the United States and the La Plata basin of South America's southern cone. Previously accepted WMO 'lightning extremes' include a 1975 incident in which 21 people were killed by a single flash of a lightning as they huddled inside a tent in Zimbabwe. In another incident, 469 people were killed when lightning struck the Egyptian town of Dronka in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.
The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their experiences. It wouldn't have been possible to study such a large number of users that way. Instead, a computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. [...] The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources. Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176%).
In acknowledgement of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum. To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets. Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum. This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets.The authors of the study point out that the algorithms "might be influenced by the way different political groups operate," notes The Conversation. "So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter."
KFC's Meatless 'Beyond Fried Chicken' Gets Limited-Time Rollout Across America
Gizmodo looks at "Beyond Fried Chicken," KFC's newest menu option from Beyond Meat, reporting that it's been available in limited U.S. test markets since 2019, until a few weeks ago when KFC announced a "limited-time national rollout" across America.
<...
Ohio Lured Intel's Chip Plant with a $2 Billion Incentive Package
Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state's development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal...
Losses Mount for Startups Racing To Deliver Groceries Fast and Cheap
A venture capital-backed battle is raging in New York City in the burgeoning field of instant delivery. From a report: At least six startups, including Gorillas, Jokr SARL, Getir Perakende Lojistik and Buyk, are vying to win the chance to ferry grocerie...
Florida is So Cold Iguanas are Falling Out of Trees
"The U.S. National Weather Service Miami-South Florida warned the public on Sunday that immobilised iguanas could fall out of trees," reports Reuters, "due to unusual cold temperatures across the region. "Iguanas are cold-blooded. They slow down or bec...
Wikimedia Foundation Urged to Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations
Software engineer Molly White has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 (and also served several terms on the site's Arbitration Committee). White is now a Wikipedia administrator and functionary — and just published an Opinion piece opposing the conti...
Governors Asked To Sign Compact Committing To K-12 CS Expansion
theodp writes: At the 2022 Winter meeting of the National Governors Association (NGA), Arkansas Governor and NGA Chair ASA Hutchinson called on attendees to rally together to advance K-12 computer science education across the country. The pitch was part...
LooksRare Has Reportedly Generated $8B in Ethereum NFT Wash Trading
LooksRare seemingly came out of nowhere to become the biggest rival yet to leading NFT marketplace OpenSea earlier this month, but there's a big asterisk on the astronomical trading figures coming out of the platform. From a report: It's marred by rampa...
Sony Buys 'Destiny' Game Developer Bungie for $3.6 Billion
Sony Group is purchasing Bungie, the U.S. video game developer behind the popular Destiny franchise, for $3.6 billion to bolster its stable of game-making studios. From a report: The deal announced on Monday is the third significant video-game acquisiti...
The New York Times Purchases Wordle
The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures." The newspaper says it'll remain "free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay." From...
Chinese Satellite Observed Grappling Another and Pulling It Out of Orbit
'Anonymous' Hacktivist Martin Gottesfeld Said To Be Held In Solitary Confinement
Apple's AirTags Catch a Moving Van Driver Lying About His Location
Are Major Legal Changes Needed for the Driverless Car Era?
Why Is a Harvard Astrophysicist Working With UFO Buffs?
Not Just the IRS - 20 US Agencies Are Already Set Up For Selfie IDs
YouTube-DL Forks to Continue Supporting Older Versions of Python
Can AI Help Us Reimagine Chess?
'The Dark Side of Cobalt, the Digital Age's Miracle Metal'
A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa's practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 "ghost flights" were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. "We're in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU," says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. "Pointless, polluting 'ghost flights' are just the tip of the iceberg."
Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating — with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.
JWST is now 48 days out from its Christmas Day launch and in the midst of a commissioning process expected to last about six months. The telescope spent the first month unfolding from its launch configuration and trekking out nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth. During the bulk of the remaining time, scientists are focusing on waking and calibrating the observatory's instruments and making the minute adjustments to the telescope's 18 golden mirror segments that are necessary for crisp, clear images of the deep universe. The process is going well, according to NASA.
Still, the telescope has a long way to go, as today's image of HD 84406 shows. [...] HD 84406 is in the constellation Ursa Major, or Big Bear, but is not visible from Earth without a telescope. But it was a perfect early target for Webb because its brightness is steady and the observatory can always spot it, so launch or deployment delays wouldn't affect the plan. Oddly, JWST won't be able to observe HD 84406 later in its tenure; once the telescope is focused, this star will be too bright to look at. Previously, JWST personnel have said that the telescope will be seeing fairly sharply by late April.In addition to the image of HD 84406, NASA also shared a "selfie" image, which Gizmodo and CNN decided to focus on in their reports.
NASA space telescope spots most powerful light ever seen on Jupiter, helps solve 30-year-old mystery
NASA has detected the most energetic light ever seen on Jupiter and, in the process, solved a 30-year-old mystery.
In a new study, researchers using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) space observatory were able to spot the highest-energy light ever seen on Jupiter. The light, which is X-ray radiation, is also the highest-energy light ever seen on a planet in our solar system other than Earth.
But this finding isn't just an incredible observation; it's also helping scientists to understand why NASA's Ulysses sun-studying mission mysteriously saw no X-rays from Jupiter when it flew by the planet in 1992.
This is not the first time that X-rays have been spotted at Jupiter; NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory have both observed low-energy X-rays coming from auroras on the giant planet.
Jupiter's auroras, which occur at the planet's north and south poles, are created by ions coming from the planet's volcanic moon Io that are accelerated by the planet's magnetic field toward the poles. There, the ions interact with Jupiter's atmosphere and release light, creating aurora light shows. NASA's Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, found that electrons from Io also interact with the planet's magnetic field.
Scientists have suspected that these electrons from Io could create even more powerful X-rays than the planet's auroras. With the NuSTAR observations, researchers have confirmed for the first time that Io's electrons are indeed creating high-energy X-rays.
NuSTAR, which launched to space in 2012, is a space-based X-ray telescope that studies the cosmos in high-energy X-rays.
"It's quite challenging for planets to generate X-rays in the range that NuSTAR detects," Kaya Mori, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. "But Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field, and it's spinning very quickly. Those two characteristics mean that the planet's magnetosphere acts like a giant particle accelerator, and that's what makes these higher-energy emissions possible."
By spotting these high-energy X-rays, the researchers in this study may also have solved an ongoing mystery. In 1992, the TK agency's Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 19TK to do TKTK, flew by Jupiter but didn't detect any X-rays of any kind — which has puzzled scientists since.
According to the researchers behind the new study, Ulysses likely didn't spot any X-rays because, due to the mechanism that brings this light about, the X-rays become fainter at higher energies. And so, in Ulysses' detection range, they suspect Jupiter's X-rays were simply too faint to see.
This work was described in a new study published Thursday (Feb. 10) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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February 2, 2022
Good morning. Why are so many part-time workers struggling to find full-time work during a labor shortage? |
|
Wait it out |
Brenda Garcia, who works at a Chipotle in Queens, has a problem that may sound surprising in today’s tight labor market. She is a part-time employee who wants more work, but the restaurant keeps assigning her less than 20 hours a week. |
“It’s not enough for me,” Garcia told my colleague Noam Scheiber. “They’re not giving me a stable job.” |
Garcia is one of millions of Americans who want an established, full-time work schedule and are struggling to find it, as Noam explains in a Times article. As a result, these part-timers struggle with not only low pay but also uncertain shifts that can change at the last minute, disrupting the rest of their lives. The workers can obviously quit, but they often find that the other jobs available to them have similar problems. |
How could this be when the country is in the midst of a labor shortage in which employers are struggling to fill jobs? Because executives at many companies have decided that part-time work is too important to abandon just because the labor market is temporarily tight. |
Part-time work allows companies to hold down labor costs in two crucial ways. First, companies can reduce their benefit costs because part-time workers often do not receive health care and retirement benefits. Second, companies can change staffing levels quickly, to meet demand on a given day or week, rather than having workers sit idle during slower periods. |
“It’s very deeply embedded in employers’ business models,” Noam — who covers workers and the workplace from Chicago — told me. “They’re incredibly reluctant to give it up, even if it means enduring labor shortages and elevated turnover in the short and intermediate term. Basically, they think it makes more economic sense to wait out the current shortages than to fundamentally change their labor model.” |
That may well be a rational decision for individual businesses. The shift toward flexible, part-time and often outsourced work is a major reason that corporate profits have risen in recent decades. After-tax corporate profits have accounted for more than 7 percent of national income in recent years, up from an average of 5.6 percent from the 1950s through the 1970s, according to the Commerce Department. |
If employers shift away from part-time work during a tight labor market like today’s, they worry they will be stuck with higher labor costs for years. “Employers will typically try everything else first — raising wages, offering bonuses and other financial incentives, giving part-timers more hours temporarily,” Noam explains. “All these measures are reversible, and presumably will be reversed once the labor shortages subside.” |
|
The power dynamic |
Companies have been able to insist on so much part-time work largely because they have more negotiating power over workers than in the past. The corporate sector is more consolidated than it was decades ago, leaving the average employer with more resources and the average worker with fewer alternatives in any given industry. |
Workers, for their part, are much less likely to belong to a union than in the past. And union members make more money than similar nonunion workers, as an extensive study of the U.S. economy by economists at Princeton and Columbia has found. Unions effectively shift some of a company’s revenue from profits to wages. Shrinking unions, in turn, have contributed to growing economic inequality. |
One way that unions tend to lift wages is by putting pressure on companies to hire people full time — and threatening to strike if the companies refuse. |
Last month, unionized workers at King Soopers, a supermarket chain mostly in the Denver area and owned by Kroger, went on strike. They made the growth of part-time work a central issue. In the strike’s settlement, Kroger agreed to contract language that will likely lead it to add 1,000 or more full-time jobs over the next three years. A majority of jobs at King Soopers are still part-time, but the settlement has changed the balance. |
“Without a labor union that could organize a strike and provide strike pay, it’s hard to see how most workers could pressure their employers to make a similar change,” Noam said. |
In the short term, a tight labor market will lift wages for many American workers. If it were to persist for years — which is unlikely — it might alter the balance of power between workers and employers. But the more plausible way that balance could change is through government policy. |
The House has passed a bill called the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to form unions, and President Biden supports it. Among other things, the bill would bar companies from requiring employees to attend anti-union meetings and would impose financial penalties on companies that fire workers for trying to organize a union. |
The bill seems stalled in the Senate, where Republicans oppose it. Democrats may try to pass some of the bill’s provisions along party lines in coming months. |
The bottom line |
The increasing inequality of the U.S. economy over the past half-century is unlikely to end because of a temporarily tight labor market. “Labor shortages may be a necessary condition for changing the nature of these jobs,” Noam says, “but they’re generally not a sufficient condition.” |
THE LATEST NEWS |
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| Opinions |
Jailing fewer people can improve public safety, says Emily Bazelon. |
Liberals’ preference for policymaking via unelected bureaucrats is undemocratic, Ross Douthat argues. |
Liz Cheney takes on election lies. Neil Young stands against Covid-19 misinformation. We need similar truth-tellers on climate change, Thomas Friedman writes. |
Want to share The New York Times with your friends and family? Invite them to enjoy unlimited digital access to our journalism with this special offer. |
MORNING READS |
|
Fame: Can Jennifer Lopez save the rom-com? |
Groundhog Day: The big marmots are more social than scientists thought. |
“Super invaders”: These are the rampaging pigs of the Bay Area. |
Books: An 8-year-old wrote a book and hid it on a library shelf. It’s a hit. |
Advice from Wirecutter: Consider an adjustable desk lamp. |
Lives Lived: Alan A. Stone trained as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and taught at Harvard Law School, where he challenged psychiatry’s use in public policy. He died at 92. |
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2022/02/neo-monarchy-and-open-hatred-of.html
Saturday, February 05,
2022
Neo-monarchy and open
hatred of Democracy, redux
I
prepare most of these a bit in advance. So, before diving in, let's blip a few
news items.
*
Here's a fascinating interactive article/map of the geographic features involved in any invasion of Ukraine.
*
Now way-broaden that map! Elsewhere I've pointed to clear signs
that the Ukraine Crisis is about a lot more than Ukraine. As in Fred Pohl's
prescient 1981 novel THE COOL WAR, we may have been in a cryptic tit-for-tat
undercover struggle with Moscow for a year, helping explain Vladimir Putin's
mien of almost-hysteric desperation. Threats to the world's undersea fiber
cables and overhead satellites could portent much more than mere troops 60 km
from Kyiv,
* Read this by Lucian Truscott IV. If the name
sounds familiar, he is scion to a famed Army family with stunning heritage.
(Watch "Patton"!) He is now a commentator on world strategies, but
also, of necessity... politics. And he uses saber slashes of utterly proved
facts.
*
Then vow to counter the SOB's. who Truscott describes -- and I describe below
-- with confident optimism!
== The damned neo-monarchists are back! ==
Anyone skeptical of
the powerful influence of science fiction, even after M. Zuckerberg declared
his goal to make real the world of Snowcrash, should read this article describing how far some of our
neighbors have gone in a campaign converting MAGA into MADE or “Make
America Dead & Exctinct.”
Elsewhere I detail
today’s world-oligarchic putsch, which allies “ex” KGB agents with current
commissars, with mafiosi, casino moguls, petro-sheiks, inheritance brats and
Wall Street parasites in a (so-far) successful campaign to re-ignite the
confederacy and the 250 year American Civil War. But as you read, compare
the unabashed declarations of hatred for democracy and love of
autarchy/monarchy/feudalism to the (admittedly) well-crafted anti-enlightenment
screeds of Orson Scott Card.
Scott’s devotion to
the ubermensch/demigod principle - and spite toward the entire democratic
experiment - pervades nearly all his works (yes, including Ender)
but was made utterly explicit in a 2006 novel Empire, which the ravers cited in The Anti-American Right, by Zach Beauchamp, might
be channeling:
“In a May podcast,
Hillsdale College lecturer and former Trump administration official Michael
Anton chatted with entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — a self-described monarchist who
wants to appoint a Silicon Valley CEO king of America — about their shared
desire to topple what Anton terms the American “regime.”
"During the
episode, Yarvin muses about how an American strongman — whom he alternatively
calls “Caesar” and, more honestly, “Trump” — could seize authoritarian control
of the US government by turning the National Guard and FBI into his personal
stormtroopers. Critic Damon Linker identifies this politics, which meets with
little pushback from Anton, as “broadly coterminous with fascism” — and it’s
hard to see where he’s wrong….”
…”In the American Mind, Claremont’s blog, writer Glenn
Elmers declares that “most people living in the United States today — certainly
more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” If
Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and wage “a sort of
counter-revolution” against these “citizen-aliens,” then “the victory of
progressive tyranny will be assured.”
Of course that is
drooling fantasy, as their mad cult has waged open war not just on minorities
and the powerless, but against every single fact profession -
from science, teaching and journalism to law, medicine, civil service and
universities, in general - all the 30 million or so fellow citizens who are
most dedicated to knowledge, excellence, calm negotiation/deliberation and the
supremacy of truthful fact over rage/emotion.
This includes the
FBI/CIA/Military officer corps - a million men and women who won the Cold War
and the War on Terror and who will capably deal with the latest excrescence of
confederate treason. And hence the mad cult dismisses them as “deep state”
villains…
…but never Vladimir
Putin and his 500 “ex” commissars who smoothly transitioned to classic,
billionaire-feudal boyars with nary a twitch, allied with gambling kingpins,
hedge parasites, mafiosi and murder princes.
You need to be aware
that this is one of the core premises clutched by th oligarchic cabal. They no
longer even try to claim they are scions of Adam Smith (who today would be a
flaming Democrat. See below.) They now dismiss openly the notion of a flat-fair
playing field for creative competition; in fact they avoid that
'c-word' like cancer.
They are now openly calling
for a return to 6000 years of utterly failed, never-once-worked, calamitous
misgovernment by inheritance aristocracy.
And yes, in this
campaign they are aided and abetted by a vast array of fantasy novels
and films proclaiming preference for kings and handsome princes, over
any hint of loyalty to an egalitarian, meritocratic, democratic enlightenment
that gave those 'fantasy' authors and directors everything.
And yes, George, I am
looking at you.
== Back to another
pair of Georges... George F. Will… the “worst American”... and (yes) George III
==
This drift by the US
right into worship of royalty and inherited privilege was for decades
encouraged slyly by commentator George F. Will, who deemed himself the heir of
Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley... and who now acts shocked... shocked!... as
his lifelong campaign against fair comptetition and democracy now becomes explicit.
Okay, I admit to
polemics when I called GFW "The Worst American." My standards were
particular, though... That he is clearly not a stupid or
misled person, but rather one who is both brilliant and well-trained in the
skeptical arts. Moreover, unlike other, barely-sapient shills for aristocracy,
Will is fully aware that nearly all of human history was a cesspit of
malgovernance by owner-cheater-lords and their inheritance brats. And that
delusional oligarchy has been tried and found valueless, compared to the rare,
vivid, fecund, creative and vastly more-just Periclean experiments.
Erudite and educated,
he knows well that Marxism was halted in its tracks not by
Republican-Confederatism, or by Wall Street scions, but by the Rooseveltean
social contract, accomplishing what Marx never imagined -- inviting the
working class into the bourgeoisie and their children into the best schools and
marriages. That experiment in flattenng and widening the playing field has by
far the best track record, under any criterion of human success, including
criteria of creative competition. He knows this...
...as he knows that
the urrent counter-putsch by world oligarchy has one paramount aim -- to
restore the default human condition of deeply-stupid inherited privilege. And
thus, Karl Marx is now risen from his deserved
dustbin-sepulchre, to shamble once again across every university campus and
every roiling favela around the world.
Thus, alas, it is with
utterly open eyes and by deliberate choice that George F. Will
spent decades concocting polysyllabic incantations on behalf of an oligarchic
world-cabal that he knew, full-well, aims for utter destruction of the
civilization and experiment to which GFW owes everything.
And so, when he saw,
at last, what he had wrought, his present-day denunciations of
Confederate/Putinist/Salafist/Scudderite/Trumpian troglodytism and treason were
decades late and a 1775 dollar short... and nothing at all like what we need
from him, even now.
Is George Will waiting
to see any residual glimmers of sanity on the gone-mad US right?
I am sure he will spy
some and leap upon them in joy. And thus evade his one chance at redemption.
Alas.
== Some memic
upheavals have arrived! ==
I oft express despair
that certain ‘obvious” realizations seem never to penetrate even among those
with proved (or credentialed) perspicacity. I could list so many examples… and
did so in both The Transparent Society and Polemical Judo. Still, sometimes I stare in
amazement as obdurate walls finally do come tumbling down!
One I’ve long called
for has been for an end to 140 years of revisionist romantic apologias for the
Confederacy/secessionist treason of the 1860s. From the night riders led by
Nathan B. Forrest to the 1920s KKK-propelled erection of Confed
monuments...
...all the way to
Buster Keaton’s The General and romanticism chics like Gone
With The Wind and Song of the South... urban,
northern, educated, or ethnic Americans seemed cowed into accepting the lie
that this nostalgia wave was all about underdogs restoring a
sense of lost honor and self-respect…
...the same line
issued by the 1920s and 1930s Nazis and swallowed stupidly by France and
Britain, till it was too late.
Elsewhere I’ve dissected and eviscerated these scandalously Orwellian rewrites
of actual history, giving honor to the dishonorable and moral status to the
deeply vile. I’ve shown that the 1860s civil war was unalloyedly the fault of a Southern
feudal lordly caste and that the war actually began in the 1850s, when
squadrons of rapacious southern irregular cavalry went on rampages across
northern states, radicalizing those populations to eventually vote for Lincoln.
(And in another posting I show how the 1860s
‘civil war” was just one phase, of many that began in 1778 and now rages in
phase 8.)
What I did not expect
was for this view to suddenly… almost overnight, it seems… become a radicalized
meme across all of what is now Blue America (which includes almost every part
of the country with a college of university), rejecting (as I called for) every
excuse ever made for the Confederate travesty and calling that oath-breaking
mountain of evil what it was.
The other thing I’ve
asked – for decades – has been a complete re-evaluation of Adam Smith, who
far too long was viewed as a founding father of rapacious greed and oligarchy,
exactly opposite to everything that good and wise man stood
for.
I published articles
in Evonomics and elsewhere, demanding that this
re-evaluation be propelled by a powerful sense of justice, rescuing Smith from
imprisonment by oligarchs who he would (if living) savagely denounce. (And yes,
the same holds for the real, historic “Tea Party” which was part of a
revolution against aristocracy, not civil servants!)
== And re-discovering
the first and greatest Liberal ==
Now, it seems,
re-evaluations of Adam Smith are seen everywhere! Take this excerpt from an
extensive essay on “black radicalism,” by Paul Crider:
“Smith described a
moral system—his Theory of Moral Sentiments—that was constructed
from the bottom-up by moral actors observing what actions and feelings earn
approval and disapproval from others in their society. We imagine ourselves in
the other’s situation and reach for impartiality by reflecting on what an
impartial spectator would judge. This “mirror of society” is inherently
contextual. This avoids the problems of abstract ethical systems, but it means
our moral sense always remains tethered to the social morality around us,
however we may stretch our moral sensibilities by seeking out diverse
perspectives.
“Smith’s political
economy is often pithily summed up as the “system of natural liberty” wherein
each person is left free to pursue their own self-betterment by their own
lights, within the constraints of justice. But equally important for present
purposes is Smith’s attention to historical contingency in shaping
institutions. Anticipating Marx, Smith viewed political and economic
institutions—including property—as functions of the stage of economic
development (on Smith’s stadial schema, these were hunter/gatherer, shepherds,
agriculture, and commercial society). In addition, Smith saw a large role for
governments in provisioning public goods, education, and support for the
arts.
"Smith never
missed an opportunity to point out both the unjust privileges of the rich and
powerful and the tendency of said elites to jealously guard such privileges.
Smith did not develop a concept of distributive justice, but nevertheless evinced
a class consciousness that made him favor taxes that undermined privilege where
possible, as well as every reform that benefited the worker against the
capitalist. Though plainly an egalitarian, Smith was a gradualist rather than a
radical, cautioning against abrupt and dramatic change.”
Wow, but it gets better:
“For a BRL (Black Radical Liberal) using Smith, white supremacy obviously
already constitutes oppression. But as we’ve seen above, racist oppression can
be translated into Smithian terms. And on an expansive conception of the system
of natural liberty, the sovereign is charged with protecting every person from
racist oppression, up to and including corrective justice to end oppressive
racist inequality. Affirmative action to racially desegregate public spaces and
public offices (as advocated by Elizabeth Anderson) and reparations for slavery
and the rolling institutional assaults on Black flourishing and wealth creation
(as described by William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen) are
corrective policies that seem well within the scope of a Black-radicalized
Smithian sovereign.”
Woof. A bit outside my bailiwick, now.
And while I enthusiastically support pragmatic investments
in ending disadvantage for all poor children, it's not helpful to
slap-on deliberately and harmfully provocative labels like
"reparations." Separate the shared, practical goal from your
sanctimony trip, will ya? They are opposites.
Still, it is a cogent and interesting
perspective that I have long (generally) called-for.
Glad to see Adam Smith being welcomed back
where he has always belonged.
On our side.
Study Finds Cannabinoids Prevent COVID-19 Infection (forbes.com)
"Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2," the researchers wrote in an abstract of the study. The study was led by Richard van Breemen, a researcher with Oregon State's Global Hemp Innovation Center in the College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling Institute, in collaboration with scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University. Van Breeman said that the cannabinoids studied are common and readily available. "These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts," van Breemen said, as quoted by local media. "They are not controlled substances like THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and have a good safety profile in humans."
Van Breemen added that CBDA and CBGA blocked the action of emerging variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, saying that "our research showed the hemp compounds were equally effective against variants of SARS-CoV-2, including variant B.1.1.7, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, and variant B.1.351, first detected in South Africa." [...] Although further research is needed, van Breemen noted that study shows the cannabinoids could be developed into drugs to prevent or treat Covid-19. CBDA and CBGA are produced by the hemp plant as precursors to CBD and CBG, which are familiar to many consumers. However, they are different from the acids and are not contained in hemp products." Van Breeman also noted that the research showed the cannabinoids were effective against new variants of the virus, which he said are "one of the primary concerns" in the pandemic for health officials and clinicians.
UPDATE (1/14): Slate points out that "working in a petri dish is a relatively low bar for a drug to clear," Slate points out.
"The conventional wisdom in pharmaceutical sciences holds that, of every 10,000 drugs that shows potential effectiveness, only one will make it to market."
Excess deaths are calculated by looking at previous years' fatalities. In 2019, there were 2.8 million deaths in the US; in 2020, it was approximately 3.3 million. While cause of death can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, and political pressures can lead to miscounting, excess deaths can indicate the broad scope of a health emergency. These figures can reveal the truer toll of Covid -- including deaths directly from infection as well as deaths from the circumstances of the crisis. The global number of excess deaths may be millions higher than the official count of Covid deaths. Excess deaths are also known as untimely or "early" deaths. While the majority of excess deaths in the US occurred among those 65 and older, many of those Americans had many years left to live.
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
Deaths:
Recovered:
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2202.19 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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