Category Archives: Moon Colonization

by Kok Bayraq

According to arecent report, Chamath Palihapitiyas misleading statements on an investment was one of the causes for his Clover Health Investments stock going from the moon to rock-bottom in the last six months. He tried to hide the fact that the U.S. Justice Department has been investigating the company on at least 12 issues. According to the report, Chamath Palihapitiya misled investors on critical issues, and he has become notorious on Wall Street. Elsewhere, he is known as a minority shareholder of the Golden State Warriors, San Franciscos NBA basketball team.

The damage Chamath did to investors with his dubious initiatives is being evaluated. But what would be the damage from his irresponsiblestatementthat Nobody cares about Uyghurs, and his attempt to hide Chinas genocide against Uyghurs bysayinghe is not even sure that China is a dictatorship?

Many people were angered by the inhumanity of the statements, the way it ignored American values, and they were also concerned about its impact on the Uyghur people, who are suffering from genocide.

Because more than 3 million Uyghurs are detained in the so-called transformation through education camps and the entire region has become an open prison at the moment, they may not have an opportunity to enjoy Chamaths outspokenness and sincerity to express the ugly truth. Only Uyghurs in exile, including activists, may be affected by the statement in some way.

Given Chamaths family and financial background and some traditional economic philosophy of Uyghur people, it seems Uyghurs are in a position to overcome such negative statements.This point can also unravel the mystery of how failures and disasters can actually strengthen oppressed people. Lets look at the matter according to the way the Uyghur people think.

TheUyghurs have a proverb: Let the rich mans son speak, even though he is a dumb. It is generally argued that in matters of (social) justice, a reliable speaker should be selected from those who are not deceived by money and are not afraid of threats. Put simply, the children of wealthypeople tend to bestable, flexible, able to make independent decisions, and lessself-centered than others.

There is something unique in this proverb: it refers to the rich mansson, not the rich man himself. Thephilosophybehind this is that wealth, no matter how great, cannot satiate the first generation of the family to whom it belongs; only the second or third generation can be satiated. This is reminiscent of Victor Hugos statement about the bourgeoisie: Yesterday it was appetite, today it is plenitude, and tomorrow it will be satiety.

Chamath is the son of an immigrant, not a rich mans son, who escaped from poverty and human rights violations. The Uyghur people do not expect justice and fairness from the Chamaths of this world and are not surprised by the irresponsible statements they made.

Another proverb points to the same idea: When evaluating a rich man, dont ask how much money he has; just ask when he got it. Uyghurs believe that if a rich man has risen out of extreme poverty, satiety may not occur until the third or fourth generation. The first generations are not able to act like rich people even though they try to do so.

The idea was accurate: inhis next comment, Chamath even tried to correct his wrong statements, saying, In re-listening to this weeks podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy. I acknowledge that entirely. But it was still not good enough. He added, To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.

Even many Chinese would admit that, the official propaganda notwithstanding, their country cannot be compared with the United States in terms of human rights. China raises the issue of human rights in the United States only when clashing with the U.S. in the diplomatic field.

Some have claimed that Chamath wasat least being honest about the reality, and the effect in the end was the same as that of people who say the genocide is terrible but do nothing. There is a big difference betweenthe two.Those who say theUyghur genocideis terrible, even if only by word of mouth, havea basic human quality: a sense of shame! A sense of shame prevents people from siding with the oppressor against the oppressed, at least in some cases. Uyghurs believe that stating the hard and ugly truth that no one cares about Uyghurs is not sincerity; its absolute shamelessness! And it supports the killer by giving encouragement!

Of course, people who worship money have been unwelcome in every culture and at all times in humanhistory. So the Uyghur people may hate Chamathand be disgusted that he flattered China to keep his interest in Chinas big market, but many would not be offended.

How can oppressed people be so realistic about the friends and enemies around them?

The trait might have stemmed from the glorious past of the Uyghurs, who lived thousands of years independently outside the Great Wall of China, and it might have originated from the tragic colonization of the past seventy yearsunder the communist Chinese state. It might also be learned from the tragedies they experienced as victims of international relations. The political past and reality have taught Uyghurs to be realistic in international relations, and not to place too much hope and expectation in billionaires, celebrities, and even scholars.

That is why the Uyghur people have not lost their hope to humanity when Thailand sent 100 Uyghur refugees back to China in 2015. Uyghurs did not question their religious beliefs when 5,000 Uyghur students were evicted from Islamic al-Azhar University in 2016, including some of them handed over to Chinese police in Egypt, and the Islamic scholars in the university said nothing about this tragedy so that they wouldnt lose the investment China had made in the university.

Also, Uyghurs have not wavered in their faith, even though Islamic Cooperationissued a statement supporting Chinas Uyghur policy in 2018, and all Muslim states except Turkey and Albania sided with China against the Western countries who criticized Chinas human rights violations in 2019.

What might have caused thespiritual strengthening of the Uyghurs, which was among the causes that led the CCP to take urgent actiongenocideagainst them? Uyghurs believe that to be Uyghur is not a choice; it is a fate designated by God, so the genocide is a form of war not against the Uyghurs only but also against the will of God.

Uyghurs believe that God will win, China will fail at this war. The end of the genocide is a matter of time. If the rich mans sonsthe Western countriesdo not betray the Uyghurs, the genocide will not last long.

So the Uyghur people, at least the Uyghur activists abroad voicing for their people, would not really care about Chamath.

Read the original here:
Uyghurs and Billionaires: Chamath Palihapitiya's Problems with the Truth - Bitter Winter

Earth's natural satellite as depicted in science fiction works

The Moon has appeared in fiction as a setting since at least classical antiquity. Throughout most of literary history, a significant portion of works depicting lunar voyages has been satirical in nature. From the late 1800s onwards, science fiction has successively focused largely on the themes of life on the Moon, first Moon landings, and lunar colonization.

The Moon has been a setting in fiction since at least the works of the ancient Greek writers Antonius Diogenes and Lucian of Samosata; the former's Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule has been lost and the latter's True History from the second century CE is a satire of fanciful travellers' tales.[1][2] It was not until Johannes Kepler's novel Somnium was posthumously released in 1634 that the subject of travelling to the Moon was given a serious treatment in fiction.[1][2][3] Building on Kepler's thoughts, and similar speculations by Francis Bacon on flying to the Moon in his 1627 work Sylva sylvarum, Francis Godwin expanded on the idea in the 1638 novel The Man in the Moone.[4] Across the centuries that followed, numerous authors penned serious or satirical works depicting voyages to the Moon, including Cyrano de Bergerac's novel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon which was posthumously released in 1657, Daniel Defoe's 1705 novel The Consolidator, Edgar Allan Poe's 1835 short story "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", the 1835 newspaper series called the "Great Moon Hoax" by Richard Adams Locke, Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, and H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.[1][5][6] George Griffith's 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space takes place on the Moon and is perhaps the first depiction of a space suit in fiction.[7] The first science fiction film, Georges Mlis' Le voyage dans la lune from 1902, depicts a lunar voyage.[2][5]

By the latter part of the 1800s, it was clear that the Moon was devoid of life, making depictions of lunar lifeforms and societies lack credibility. A number of authors circumvent this by placing lunar life underneath the Moon's surface, including Wells in the aforementioned The First Men in the Moon and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1926 novel The Moon Maid. Others confine lunar life to the past, either depicting the remnants of a lunar civilization that has since gone extinct as in W. S. Lach-Szyrma's 18871893 series "Letters from the Planets", Edgar Fawcett's 1895 novel The Ghost of Guy Thyrle, and the aforementioned A Honeymoon in Space, or by time travelling to the past to encounter lunar life as in the 1932 short story "The Moon Era" by Jack Williamson. Some works also place lunar life solely on the far side of the Moon.[1][3][5] In the 1977 novel Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan, an ancient human skeleton in a spacesuit is found on the Moon, leading to the discovery that humanity did not originate on Earth.[1][2][5]

The life that has been depicted on the Moon varies in size from the intelligent mollusks of Raymond Z. Gallun's 1931 short story "The Lunar Chrysalis" to the giants of Godwins' aforementioned The Man in the Moone.[2][3] The "Great Moon Hoax" features bat-like humanoids, which according to its author Richard Adams Locke was meant to satirize the then-popular belief that the Moon was home to advanced civilizations.[8] The earliest depiction of life on the Moon in Lucian's True History included three-headed horse-vultures and vegetable birds.[9][10] The near side of the Moon in Kepler's Somnium is inhabited by the earliest human-like lunar life in fiction, whereas the far side is inhabited by serpentine creatures. Based on exobiological considerations, Kepler provided both with adaptations to the month-long cycle of day and night on the Moon.[11][12][13] The 1938 short story "Magician of Dream Valley" by Raymond Z. Gallun portrays energy-based life on the Moon, as does the 1960 short story "The Trouble with Tycho" by Clifford D. Simak.[14] The titular mission of the 2011 film Apollo 18 is a secret project to investigate alien life in the form of lunar rocks.[15][16]

Following the end of World War II, several literary works appeared depicting science fiction authors' visions of the first Moon landing. Among these were Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 short story "The Man Who Sold the Moon" about an entrepreneur seeking to finance the endeavor, Lester del Rey's 1956 novel Mission to the Moon, and Pierre Boulle's 1964 novel Garden on the Moon where the first Moon landing is by Japan and intentionally a one-way trip such that no method of returning astronauts to Earth needs to be devised. One of the last such stories was William F. Temple's 1966 novel Shoot at the Moon; following the actual first Moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, stories of fictional first Moon landings fell out of favour to be replaced by stories of lunar colonization.[1][3][5]

Fictional first Moon landings also appeared in film in this era. Examples include the 1950 film Destination Moon which envisions the first Moon landing as a private sector venture[5][17][18] and the 1968 film Countdown which reuses the idea of getting to the Moon more quickly by not waiting until a return trip is feasible from Garden on the Moon.[3][17][19]

Colonization of the Moon is depicted in Murray Leinster's 1950s Joe Kenmore series starting with the novel Space Platform, Larry Niven's 1980 novel The Patchwork Girl, and Roger MacBride Allen's 1988 novel Farside Cannon, among others.[1][2] Lunar colonies are sometimes humanity's last refuge when the Earth is no longer habitable, as in Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth" where the Earth has succumbed to nuclear holocaust and Stephen Baxter's 1998 novel Moonseed where the Earth is destroyed by an alien nanotechnology from the Moon itself.[2][3][20] The Moon is terraformed in a handful of works including the 1991 novel Reunion by John Gribbin and Marcus Chown.[1][3]

The residents of lunar colonies often seek independence from Earth. The 1931 novel The Birth of a New Republic by Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer adapts the story of the American Revolutionary War to the lunar surface. In Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the prisoners of a penal colony on the Moon revolt. In the 1997 novel Moonwar by Ben Bova, the proposition is rejected by Earth on the grounds that the Moon is not self-sufficient but relies on resources imported from Earth.[3][21] Lunar colonies are also used as military bases in several works. Heinlein's 1947 novel Rocket Ship Galileoupon which the aforementioned Destination Moon was loosely baseddepicts the discovery of a secret Nazi German colony on the Moon upon the arrival of what was thitherto thought to be the first crewed lunar landing. Leinster's 1957 novel City on the Moon portrays a US nuclear missile base on the Moon which functions as a deterrent, as does Allen Steele's 1996 alternate history novel The Tranquility Alternative.[21][22][23]

The social structure and governance of fictional lunar colonies varies. Heinlein's aforementioned The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls portray lunar societies based on libertarian ideals such as laissez-faire capitalism,[21][24] while the 1992 novel Steel Beach by John Varley depicts a post-scarcity society where the central authority guarantees both jobs for all who wish to work and access to necessities such as air, food, and heating.[21] In Nancy Holder's 19982000 novel trilogy starting with The Six Families, organized crime families vie for control.[2] The Moon is a tourist destination in Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust.[21] The first permanent lunar colony contends with social ills such as drug addiction in the 1973 short story "Luna 1" by Ernest H. Taves,[14] and the 1957 short story "The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller Jr. provides a rare example of considering the possible effects of the Moon's lower gravity on human reproduction and child development.[25] The lunar colony in the 1991 novel Lunar Descent by Allen Steele is inhabited by manual labourers engaged in space mining to extract resources from the lunar surface.[21]

Read the original here:
Moon in science fiction - Wikipedia

Introduction

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's Moon is the only place beyond Earth where humans have set foot, so far.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610.

In Latin, the Moon is called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side the hemisphere we never see from Earth the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full Moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new Moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust.

The Moons core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moons near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different composition and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration, but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water thats coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASAs Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moons southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

The Moon has no rings.

Earth's Moon has no moons of its own.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

Read more here:
In Depth | Earth's Moon NASA Solar System Exploration

In the summer of 2021, I spent a week in northwest Montana. It was easy to forget there was a pandemic going on. People were zip-lining, hiking, whitewater rafting. The family who lived next to the house that we rented invited ustotal strangersinto their home for drinks (sans masks), and all of our children played together a bit each day. At the end of our trip, we saw a beat-up truck with a wonderful bumper sticker: Safety Third. We laughed at what seemed to be a perfect summation of the carefree attitude that allowed the rugged sort of liberty we had seen in Montana.

Seven months later, much of the nation remains in the grips of authoritarian overreach. The draconian policies that have been implemented to shut down the virus have failed. In fact, it has been obvious for the better part of a year that the virus cant be shut down. By now, it should be clear to everyone that the pandemic is being leveraged by the media, corporate entities, government, and the medical establishment to justify more regulatory insanity, imposing control over the minutiae of daily life.

So far, this power grab has gone largely uncontested. In less-densely populated states like Montana, citizens retain a good deal of individual liberty, and large states like Texas and Florida have protected personal freedom. But most of this is thanks to the election of conservative-minded officials, rather than any organized popular resistance. Indeed, the publicdemonstrations against Covid tyranny in Europe and Canada have dwarfed any American opposition in terms of size and frequency. This should be a source of embarrassment for a nation with such a rich history of liberty and civic engagement.

Why, then, have Americans been reluctant to push back against the abuses of power that have unfolded since the onset of the pandemic? Sadly, the answer seems to be not so much fear as safety. An obsessive concern for safety is a particular kind of fear: It is a generalized apprehension of the world and the different ways it threatens our comfort and well-being. That so many Americans are so worried about their own safety and that of othersdue to an illness that over 99 percent of people will survive and fully recover fromspeaks poorly of any free nation. But it is especially unbecoming for Americans, because we have never been a safe people.

But who are we? I can hear the leftist scolds singing in my imagination. Thats not who we are! was a favorite phrase of Barack Obama, albeit one that was always deployed cynically. For him, we betrayed our identity when (and only when) the public expressed distaste for the policy whims of the progressive left. But since those halcyon days of Obama ended, it has become fashionableto pretend that the American polity is so diverse that its impossible to make any generalizations about our collective identity. Fortunately, thats false. We have many shared characteristics as a people. And safety has never been a defining concern of any Americanswhoever they are and whatever their heritage.

The native Americans who were here before European colonization: Were they concerned with safety above all else? Many tribes were seasonally nomadic in response to the various abuses and calamities inflicted by nature. Other tribes maintained great warrior traditions. In their time, war was not a matter of pressing a button from the safety of a remote computer, as it is today. It was a noble, hand-to-hand test of strength and courage on behalf of your community. When the Europeans arrived, the native people fought valiantly and doggedly to save their families, homes, and way of life from a powerful and technologically superior foe. These are not the behaviors of people consumed with worry about safety.

The early European colonists to America did not sail across the ocean because they wanted to kill Indians. And most didnt undertake such a dangerous journey because they expected to get rich. Anyone concerned with greater comfort, stability, and even wealth would have been better off staying in Europe in the 17th century. But their monarchs did not allow free practice of religion. The New England colonists were people of such great faith that they would leave their ancestral homes and risk deathincluding the death of their childrento go on a sea voyage that might end in utter destruction. In the best case scenario, the pilgrims would arrive safely on the shore of an unknown, inhospitable land, where they would need to begin the monumental work of building a new society from the ground up. These are not the behaviors of people paralyzed by fears about safety.

What about the African peoples sold into slavery and brought across the ocean in conditions that undermined every shred of human dignity? For centuries, those people endured the inhumanity of chattel slavery: No one can call the condition of the American slave safe. Runaways werent looking for safety, either. They sought liberty. The journey to freedom could be deadly, and even when it was successful, there was precious little safety to be had in the north: There was hatred and violence toward black people there, too. Thats to say nothing of the risks and hardships they faced in procuring their own food, their own land, and their own work in a new region of the country. And when discrimination and abuse endured for a full century after emancipation, black Americans protested and resisted this treatment, again risking life and limb. These were not people obsessed with safety.

What about the people who pushed further west? The Americans who set out into uncharted lands, crossing the continent in a wagon train at the pace of an ox? They embarked on that trek in full knowledge of the threat of serious illness, of attacks from hostile Indians, of winter so severe that they might simply freeze or starve to death along the way. They took these risks on the assumption that they were heading west to a better placenot a safer place, but one with a greater promise of human flourishing. The same can be said of the Asians who came to a land with a tongue that couldnt be more different from their own, but who nevertheless thrived even as they worked to exhaustion building a network of railroads.

The great waves of immigrants who came from Europe in the 19th century? Those people were not coming here for entitlements: Unlike today, there were no promises of debt forgiveness, or free schooling, or workers compensation, or welfare payments, or universal health care. They left their families and homes for the possibility of prosperity and liberty. They got on the boats with the understanding that securing these benefits would depend on their own effort and hard work. They knew it wouldnt be safe. But they werent looking for safety.

We were the first nation to send people to the moon. We have more turnover in our upper class than most countries the world over. Fortunes are lost and made and lost again in the pursuit of innovation and progress. Thats not what happens to people who play it safe. The actions of the everyday Americans aboard Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, saved countless lives on the ground. Storming a cockpit full of murderous terrorists is not the behavior of people preoccupied with safety.

The American character is defined by three things that unite all the different groups of people who make up our nation: mobility, risk-taking, and optimism. Were movers and we always have been. A fearful people do not move the way Americans do. Safety demands that we take coverthat we stay in one place. But we keep moving. Even in our darkest times, we maintain our optimism. That optimism is evidenced by our risk-taking: People who believe that things cant or wont get better dont make the calculated risks that Americans make.

All of this begs the question: Are we still the same people as we were? Are we still a mobile people with hope for the future? People who live our lives as though we are masters of circumstance rather than its victims?

Quarantines and lockdowns, especially for a virus as commonly survivable as Covid-19, are decidedly un-American. They undermine our natural inclinations for mobility and free movement. The idea that everyone must take an unproven, fast-tracked vaccine, not merely for their own safety, but for the safety of others, is one more manifestation of this monomania. Required masking continues, despite the limited evidence that cloth masks reduce transmission in any significant way. One cannot deny the absurdity of regulations that ask restaurant patrons to cover their faces long enough to walk to a table, only to unmask after being seated. The demand for vaccine boosters represents a whole new level of fear over safety. The vaccine offers great protection, we are told. It is, ofcourse, safe and effectivebut not effective enough to live your life without fear, in a way that becomes the American spirit. Better get another booster. Just to be safe.

We are now entering our third year of pandemic insanity. Many of the measures that were taken in early 2020 were justifiable because we faced a novel virus about which we knew very little. We can no longer claim that kind of ignorance. Covid-19, generally speaking, is not a deadly virus. Nevertheless, we have sacrificed immensely to try to keep Americans safe. We have done the lockdowns. We have done the masking. We have done the contact-tracing. We have done the double-masking. We have done the vaccines. We have done the boosters. We have done the public shaming. We have asked people for their papers. We have made their employers comply. Weve done it all. And Covid is still here. The fact is, it will always be here. Covid won. But we dont have to become a defeated people.

The question now is how we will respond. Will we be Americans worthy of the name? Or will we live in fear, compromising everythingindeed, compromising who we areto ensure that everyone is just a little safer? Are we willing to make those sacrifices? Are we willing to demand them of our children? For how much longer? And for how long will we allow our government to make such decisions for us?

Americans must now make a choice. Its not merely a choice about how we want to live. Its a choice about who we want to be. Those who fetishize safety posture themselves as virtuous people; they pretend that their concerns are an expression of a deep, abiding care for others. But this is a lie. Ultimately, safetyismwhere the avoidance of harm becomes a way of inhabiting the worldis a radical form of self-regard. To elevate safety to the status of an idol reveals a fear of life; it conceals a pathological mindset where worry and uncertainty become a controlling presence. It is solipsistic navel-gazing, a decadent wallowing in anxiety and self-pity.

The dehumanizing aspects of safetyism are disguised by endless platitudes about the well-being of others. But insisting upon others compliance so that you can live a safer life (after all, we can never be entirely safe) is ultimately an expression of personal weakness. It is a betrayal of the national character. Taken to the scale of society at large, safetyism threatens the dignity of our people. The time has come for a collective embrace of riskthe inherent risk that is the price of freedom in an uncertain world. The time has come to reclaim our dignity, to become again who we areand who Americans have always been. Safety third.

Adam Ellwangeris a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. He is the author ofMetanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, available in paperback this April. You can follow him on Twitter@DoctorEllwanger.

Read more here:
Safety Third: Covid-19 and the American Character - The American Conservative

Every child of the 90s remembersCool Runnings, the 1993 sports comedy movie about an underdog team of Jamaican bobsledders who train to compete at the Winter Olympics. The movie, which was directed by Jon Turteltaub and starred Leon Robinson, Doug E. Doug, and John Candy, was loosely based on the real 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, which overcame enormous obstacles (like, yknow, the fact that there isnt exactly a whole lot of snow or ice on the tropical island of Jamaica) to compete at the Olympics.

Since 1988, Jamaica has returned to bobsled several times, and competed in both mens and womens events. But its been over 20 years since Jamaica competed in the four-man bobsled event. At the just-started 2022 Beijing Olympics, though, a new four-man Jamaican bobsled team is ready to compete. 2022 also marks the first time Jamaica has competed in three different bobsled events at a single Olympics:four-man bobsled, two-man and the new womens monobob event.

Olympics.comhas the full story, including an interview with team pilotShanwayne Stephens. (The other team members are Ashley Watson,Matthew Wekpe,Nimroy Turgott, andRolando Reid.) He says the crew is out to prove were more than just a movie, adding:

We want to show we're actually fierce competitors and we're out there to put on a really good performance at the Games ... we were completely locked down over COVID and we wanted to make sure that we were 100 percent prepared to be able to qualify. So we had to come up with creative ways of getting the training done. So myself and Nimroy, we were locked down in my house together, so we decided to go out and push my fiance's Mini up and down the street.

If you want to follow along with Stephens and the rest of the Jamaican bobsled teams journey in Beijing, Stephensfrequently updates his Instagram account.

The Jamaican Olympic team has an Instagram account full of pictures as well.

Heres Stephens and Turgott talking about the team onThe Today Show:

You can watch the Winter Olympics on NBC, USA Network,as well as streaming on Peacock.

Original post:
Jamaican Bobsled Team Returns to the Olympics - ScreenCrush

Home Motors Toyota Lunar Cruiser: Off-Roading on the Moon

Complete with living quarters, workstations, and cutting-edge scientific instruments, the Lunar Cruiser could be the key for lunar and ultimately, Martian colonization.

On Friday, Jan. 28, Toyota and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) greenlighted the Lunar Cruiser project. After years of research and testing, engineers have started developing the advanced Land Cruiser-inspired rover, which Toyota expects to launch at the end of this decade.

Successful deployment on Mars is the ultimate goal, company officials say.

The Lunar Cruiser, whose name borrows from Toyotas perennially popular SUV, should be a live-in laboratory on wheels. Van life meets Star Trek, really. According to project lead Takao Sato, the vehicle will provide a space where people can safely live, work, and communicate with others while on the moon. If all goes according to script, Toyota should get there by 2040.

The projects been in the works for a while now some digging around in the Toyota press room unearthed a March 2019 announcement of the automakers collaboration with JAXA.But that release merely announced the two organizations agreement to consider the possibility of collaborating on international space exploration.

The pair entered into a joint research agreement to work on a manned pressurized lunar rover in June 2019.

A press release from August 2020 stated that the research involved the use of simulations to confirm power and heat dissipation performance while driving, the manufacture and assessment of prototype tires, and the use of virtual reality and full-scale models to consider the layout of equipment in the cabin.

The same statement revealed that JAXA and Toyota met with officials from various industries to discuss the vehicles potential as a starting point for lunar colonization.

Toyota brought in Gitai Japan Inc. for help developing the Lunar Cruisers peripheral robotic arm, which will provide essential collection, inspection, and maintenance services. A grappling-like structure at the arms end will allow operators to alternate between a set of specialized tools.

Although additional specifics about the Cruisers architecture are still under wraps, Fridays announcement, revealed bythe AP, seems like a concrete declaration from JAXA and Toyota.

We see space as an area for our once-in-a-century transformation, Sato stated. By going to space, we may be able to develop telecommunications and other technology that will prove valuable to human life.

For updates, follow Toyota Motor Corp. and JAXAon Twitter.

No, we won't get the Land Cruiser 300 in North America, but we will get the 2023 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro. While the previous Sequoia didn't get us very excited, this one does! Read more

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Toyota Lunar Cruiser: Off-Roading on the Moon - GearJunkie

Release date: January 11

The Stolen may be forced to learn their captors' language, follow their beliefs, and work their labor, but they keep their own tongue, culture, and empathy alive. This is the story of a 19th century plantation, where we meet a cast of characters full of love, sorrow, anger, and hope. There's William, who falls for Margaret, which makes Cato remember his own love who was sold off without warning. And there's their eccentric and tyrannical owner, Cannonball Greene, who rules their lives with a cruel hand. When a mysterious preacher arrives spouting independence and freedom, the Stolen must decide: trust this stranger or stay with the devil they know?

Why you should read it:This slim novel packs a gut-wrenching punch, managing to display the effortless cruelty of life on a plantation with the gentle caress of each character's humanity.

Get it fromBookshopor from a bookstore near you via Indiebound.

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16 Historical Fiction Books Coming Out In 2022 That Are 100% Worth Picking Up - BuzzFeed

Imagine unexpectedly seeing something so luminous light up the vacuum of space that you couldnt possibly doubt it was there until it completely vanished.

While most of the planet was on lockdown at the height of the pandemic, radio astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker stumbled upon a cosmic flash that seemingly came out of nowhere. She and her colleagues remotely zapped speculation back and forth as they tried to figure out what the thing was. Supernova? Zombie star? Aliens? After supernovas and extraterrestrial superstructures were ruled out, they became suspicious of stars that had gone undead.

The monster was hiding in observations from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). Its radio antennas measure polarization, or the extent to which the vibrations of a wave, like radio waves, are going in one direction. After correcting for anything that was in the way, Hurley-Walker and her team, who recently published a study in Nature, found that the pulses were very polarized and linear no matter what angle they were viewed from and lasted up to a minute. But what could have been giving them off?

The MWA observed with a time resolution of 0.5 seconds, so that defines the smallest features we can see in the pulses, she told SYFY WIRE. "But since the pulses last for 30 to 60 seconds, that is quite a lot of resolution. They are sometimes smooth, and sometimes very spiky.

Zombies onscreen are pretty straightforward. Zombie stars, not so much. There are several forms that the cores of dead stars can take. Neutron stars and white dwarfs are cores that remain after the collapse of low-mass (white dwarfs) or high-mass (neutron stars) stars. Pulsars, which are all neutron stars (though the opposite is not always true) form when the cores of massive collapsed stars spin upward and superfast, which compresses their magnetic fields. These highly magnetized stars spew so much energy that they create radio emissions.

Hurley-Walker and her team are not ruling a white dwarf or pulsar out, but there is one type of stellar zombie they are especially focused on. Magnetars are neutron stars with the most powerful magnetic fields ever. These extreme objects behave like highly magnetized pulsars that vomit out gargantuan amounts of energy, including radio emissions, but wear themselves out in a few months. They end up too sluggish to produce radio waves anymore and become undetectable. This is why it is possible the source could be an ultra-long period magnetar.

Story continues

There's a mystery as to how our source could be so slow but also magnetic enough to produce radio emission, since neutron star magnetic fields should also decay, Hurley-Walker said. That's why theorists thought that ultra-long period magnetars would exist, but be invisible.

There is always a chance for false positives, which can be set off by everything from TV signals to satellites. That doesnt seem to be what is going on here. Because pulsars and magnetars burn their energy so fast, invisible ones should be scattered all over the Milky Way. This could be one of many dead things. Ultra-long period magnetars are theoretical objects that should rotate more slowly than most magnetars, which could explain the longer pulses, but are also invisible. What was completely unexpected was how bright this thing was if that is what it is.

I think that the evidence points toward an ultra-long period magnetar, in which case, the magnetic field only stayed twisted for some time, and after it relaxed, the radio emission ceased, said Hurley-Walker.

There is also a chance the disappearing flash could have come from a white dwarf pulsar, whose dark spots (sunspots) produced really curved magnetic fields that gave off radio emissions for a while. Whatever it is still has astronomers baffled. Its not aliens, but the truth is out there.

Resident Alien Season 2

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The mystery of the disappearing flash in space - Yahoo Entertainment

The occupation of Alcatraz, San Francisco, 1969. (Soloman Kargin / Getty Images)

Driving down international boulevard, East Oaklands main inner-city thoroughfare, its hard to miss the Intertribal Friendship House. With its mural-rimmed courtyard featuring larger-than-life portraits of Natives, both famous and unknown, the community center, which some call the urban rez, stands apart from its surroundings in Oaklands Little Saigon. And like pretty much everything involving Indigenous Americans, its been here a while. Books in Review

Founded in 1955, the Intertribal Friendship House is one of the oldest urban Indigenous community organizations in the United States. Youd think that in a city and region that gave birth to the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and the United Farmworkers, people would know about institutions like this. The Oakland-born Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange, after all, set a whole chapter of his novel There There, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, at an Indian center no doubt inspired by Intertribal. But I cant tell you how many Oaklanders Ive met who are shocked to learn that their city has one of the oldest and most significant urban Indian populations in the United States, that theres a whole Native community center just a few blocks from the citys downtown, and that the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz, which began in 1969more or less the Indigenous rights movements equivalent of the Montgomery bus boycottwas organized in Oakland and the Bay Area.

After visiting her childhood home in the East Bay, which she found so completely transformed that it was unrecognizable to her, Gertrude Stein famously wrote that there is no there there. That turn of phrase is so overused that its origin sometimes get lost. But what Stein was commenting on in 1933the transformation of ones home place until its goneis an apt description of how settler colonialism uprooted and remade Indigenous lands throughout North America and, in particular, California. Im not a California Indianthe imperfect term for Indigenous peoples from what is now called the Golden Statebut I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. I remember running around the Intertribal Friendship House with a bunch of other snot-nosed Native kids back when the nonprofit was borderline insolvent and the community garden was little more than a sandbox and jungle gym waiting to give you tetanus. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread. When we moved to Oakland, my dad, an artist, used to show his work at a friends contemporary Native art gallery in San Francisco. (It closed decades ago.) In the spring and summer, I spent most weekends at powwows: intertribal celebrations of song and dance, held across the state in high school gymnasiums and blingy Vegas-size casinos. In the fall, there were Big Times, California Indian ceremonies held in semi-subterranean roundhouses that went on all night, celebrating the harvest, the change of seasons, and the persistence of once-outlawed cultures on tiny reservations and rancherias, like that of our Miwok friends in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Tuolumne. In the winter, we would drive back up to Tuolumne and hit the slopes with those same Miwoks at a family ski hill in the Stanislaus National Forest, a low-budget altLake Tahoe called Dodge Ridge. A good fraction of the ski patrol and ski team there was Miwok.

The struggles that protected, threatened, and animated these enclaves were almost always apparent. At the Intertribal Friendship House, gray-haired elders swapped stories about the days of their radical youth spent fighting for our rights on Alcatraz Island. After drum and dance practice on Thursday nights, we would gather around the All Nations drum and sing the American Indian Movements song (Way-ha-way-hi-ya-ho-way-oh-way-ya-hey-oh). Homeless Natives, whom we all knew by name and by relation as aunties, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathersin an Indian way more often than a biological onewere always welcome, greeted with a handshake or a hug, a pot of coffee, a warm meal, and some walking-around money. At local powwows we started with gourd society protocols from Oklahoma, Aztec dances from south of the border, victory songs from when the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho kicked Custers ass at the Little Bighorn, and prayers in languages that the government and church tried to yank from our grandparents tongues. At Tuolomne, there were uncles haunted by nightmares of Vietnamese jungles and Gold Rush massacres who still carried on the old arts and ways. Long before the historians became revisionists and liberal politicians took an interest in social justice, we honored and carried forward what had come beforewhat California was designed to dislodge from our minds and the land. There may not have been a there there. But we were still here.

In recent years, Californians have begun to reexamine the history of the Golden State and, in particular, the plight of California Indians. In 2015, during his visit to the United States, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who hobbled into Alta California with an ulcerated leg and asthmatic lungs in 1769, founding nine missions between San Diego and San Francisco. Serras sainthood sparked controversy. Some California Indians descended from Indigenous peoples evangelized at Serras missions met with the pope and played roles in his canonization mass. Others effaced, decapitated, and toppled statues of the missionary who, in their eyes, engineered the enslavement, genocide, and assimilation of the states First Peoples. Amid the racial justice uprisings that swept the nation in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Serra statues fell in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Scholars and schools are shedding new light on some of the darkest and most easily forgotten parts of Californias colonial past. In 2016, Benjamin Madley, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, published An American Genocide, which showed that Californias treatment of Indigenous peoples in the first few decades of US rule constituted an attempted final solution to settler colonialisms pesky wild Indian problem. The book won multiple awards, pushing a long-simmering debate in California and American history toward a conclusion that had always been maintained by California Indians but was eschewed by the academy. In 2017, the California Department of Education removed from its curriculum the requirement for all fourth graders to build a model mission. (When they had me do mine, I made a not-so-subtle statement by building the crosses in the graveyard taller than the church.) In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an official apology to Native people for the states history of wrongdoing and established a Truth and Healing Council that aims to reconcile the state with its tribes. Its called a genocide, Newsom said at a ceremony to consecrate the council. Thats what it was: a genocide. No other way to describe it. And thats the way it needs to be described in the history books. Im sorry on behalf of the State of California. Im sorry that weve had generationsyour kids and grandkids, your ancestorsthat had to suffer through the indignities, lack of capacity and empathy and understanding, their lives lost, their lives diminished, and the incapacity of the rest of us to fully grasp the magnitude of what we in the state did to your ancestors. In some parts of California, local people, organizations, and governments have tried to make things right by returning land, with parts of Big Sur, Inyo County, and Eureka going back to the tribes from whom they were taken.

We Are the Land, a new history of California by Damon Akins and William Bauer Jr., aims to continue this project of decolonization, self-determination, and repair, chronicling the centuries-long efforts of Indigenous peoples to hold on to the places their Creators made and their forebears toiled and fought to protect against waves of Spanish, Russian, Mexican, and American colonization that crested in genocide. Across 10 chronological chapters, Akins and Bauer narrate the Indigenous history of the state through various contested spaces: sites of creation, shores and waterways where California Indians discovered European explorers, Catholic missions where they worked and were baptized, the extractive frontiers of competing imperial powers, the blood-drenched goldfields, the casinos that transformed some of these communities into power players in state politics, and the hardscrabble reservations, rancherias, allotments, ghettos, universities, and bars where California Indians and relocated American Indian activists forged the modern Native rights movement. Each chapter is separated by a short place study, interpreting locations like San Diego, Sacramento, Ukiah, the Ishi Wilderness, Los Angeles, the East Bay, as well as Yuma, Ariz., and Rome, Italy, through the histories of the Indigenous. But ultimately the stories Akins and Bauer gather in this survey are about the Natives themselves, offering a compassionate reading of a people who have, even in some of the best revisionist studies, remained the other on the periphery. The details and voices of California Indians lives that the authors amplify from oral histories, primary documents, and secondary sources draw out the drama and recast the history of the 31st state from the perspectives of its First Peoples. Current Issue

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In Akins and Bauers retelling, California was an abundant, diverse, and even magical place before it was invaded. There were hundreds of thousands of Natives, perhaps even more than a million, speaking more than 100 languages, making the region one of the most populous and diverse north of the Rio Grande. The stories Indigenous peoples told narrated the creation of their world and rooted them in their homelands. The Luiseo in what is now Southern California, for example, maintain that an ancestor named Nahachish roamed the land poor and hungry, bestowing names on the places he visited: Picha Awanga (whitish stomach) for the place where he was fed whitish mush, a reservation now known as Pechanga; Pala (water) for the canyon where he quenched his thirst, now a reservation known as Pala. The Maidu in the northeastern part of the state say that after raising the sun and the moon and naming the stars, Earth Maker created a tree on which 12 kinds of acorns grew. Many, like the Esselen on the central coast, told stories about the trickster Coyote, who gave the people nets, bows, and arrows and taught them how to live off the fat of the land and sea: the seaweed, abalone, mussels, rabbits, deer, elk, and, of course, acorns (there are 15 species that grow in the state, and the nut was a staple for many tribes). The Pohonichi Miwok and many others also honor Coyote, who in their narration stole fire from Turtle and gave it to humanity.

Many of these stories, bridging spiritual and physical worlds, were accompanied by song, dance, and ceremony. In what is now the southeastern part of the state, Chemehuevis walked the 1,000-mile-long Salt Song Trail, measuring its distance, recounting their history, and marking their ties to the Mojave Desert through rhythm and lyric. In the Siskiyou Mountains in the northwest, Yuroks, Karuks, and Tolowas danced as part of their various World Renewal ceremonies every year. And when they fought, they sang and told stories about that, too. The Kumeyaay, from the area that is now San Diego, sang bad songs about their enemies, naming their dead, mocking their looks, and generally talking shit about their hunting, gathering, and fishing game. (North Americas first rap beefs may have actually been West Coast.)

When Indigenous peoples discovered European sojourners like the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcn and the English pirate Sir Francis Drake on their shores in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, their encounters were often sporadic and awkward. In 1540, for example, Alarcn foolishly decided to ascend the Colorado River from its mouth in the Gulf of California. The Colorado, which rushed red with sediment, was almost impassable for his little worm-infested ships. As the Spanish fought the current upriver, they came upon Cocopah villages. Each meeting offered an opportunity for the Indigenous and the interlopers to apprehendand misapprehendeach other. At the first village, the Cocopah and the Spanish exchanged gifts. A Cocopah shapai axany (or leader) gave Alarcn a staff adorned with shells, which Alarcn reciprocated with beads and other things, according to his log. At the second encounter, Alarcn gave the Cocopah some trifles and fired off his harquebus, a primitive gun, startling his hosts and leading to his swift dismissal. Further upriver, Cocopahs prepared ceremonial arbors for Alarcns arrival, which the Spaniard misinterpreted as traps set for an ambush. While some of these greetings ended in misunderstanding, others included moments of genuine exchange. The Cocopah greeted Alarcn with blessings of cornmeal, cornbread, and corn cakessacred foods and giftsand he in turn gave them Christian crosses, some made from sticks and paper so that the Cocopah could wear them around their necks. At one village, Alarcn built a big crucifix from timber, which the local Cocopah planted at the center of their town. Alarcn continued as far upriver as the Cocopahs would guide him until his broken ships forced him to turn around. A few months later, Alarcns countryman Capt. Melchior Diaz marched into Cocopah lands with about 80 men, a herd of sheep, and an itchy trigger finger. When a dog chased after his herd, Diaz went after the animal on horseback with a lance. He chucked his weapon, missed the pooch, failed to rein in his horse, and wound up impaling himself in the groin, dying a few days later.

Although the Europeans first acts in the Indigenous world were often impotent, their return in the 18th century stirred up big trouble. Beginning with the establishment of Mission San Diego de Alcal in Kumeyaay territory in 1769, European settlementsand especially Spanish missionsdisrupted the balance of power between various tribes and empires as well as between the human and other-than-human world in California. This rupture began at the missions and rippled out across entire regions. In 1776, for example, Fathers Francisco Palou and Pedro Benito Cambn led a group of Indigenous peoples, a herd of cattle, and a train of mules onto the peninsula homelands of the Yelamu to build a chapel and shelter that became Mission San Francisco de Ass. Their presence, which offered new military allies and trading partners for the Yelamu, threatened more distant Ohlone speakers like the Esselen to the south. The Esselen promptly raided Yelamu villages, forcing the first San Franciscans to flee across the Golden Gate in tule rafts. Once established, missions became focal points of Spanish colonization and, in particular, the policy of reduccin, whereby Indigenous peoples were separated from their communities and families and coerced through what the historian James Sandos has described as spiritual debt peonage into various forms of dirty, hard, and unfree labor.

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Between 1769 and 1800, these missions played a leading role in cutting the Indigenous population on Californias coast in half. In 1806, for example, a measles outbreak infected some 800 Indigenous people in San Francisco, killing 337. With such high death rates at the missions, the Spanish raided inland Indigenous communities to sustain the workforce and population of their settlements. Missionaries in San Francisco, for example, looked across the Bay, attacking and kidnapping members of the Huchiun villages in what is now Berkeley, Oakland, and Pleasanton. While the missions were deadly, brutal, and authoritarian places, they also offered new forms of work and faith for the Natives. At Mission San Francisco, some women expressed interest in becoming monjas (nuns). And as in other Spanish Catholic colonial institutions, the missions did not wholly stamp out Indigenous practices. In 1816, the German Russian artist Louis Choris visited San Francisco and painted scenes of Ohlone peoplesome in Spanish dress, others in traditional regalia, and still others in a mix of the twoparticipating in Indigenous gambling games and dances in courtyards shaded by crosses and mission walls. Across the Golden Gate, the Indigenous combined Pomo, Miwok, and Catholic rituals near a shoreline shell mound that, in the 1880s, would be occupied by Chinese shrimp fishermen from Canton. (Its now a state park called China Camp.) What they could not procure from the missions via trade, Native populations sometimes took by force. South and east of what became China Camp, Miwoks and Yokuts raided Spanish settlements for horses and other livestock, which they used as mounts, food sources, and trade goods. As Spanish power waned and the Mexican period began in the early 1800s, Indigenous horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and fugitives took advantage of provincial, poorly funded, and weakly guarded settlements. Akins and Bauer share the tale of one Esselen outlaw, a man named Gonzalo, who ran away from Mission Soledad and was eventually captured and sentenced to die. Shackled and waiting for execution, he cut off his own heels without even a whimper and fled inland, where he joined a group of Indigenous insurgents led by the Coast Miwok warrior Lupugeyun. At the height of their spree, Lupugeyun, Gonzalo, and their crew could have given Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang a run for their money. They stuck up Bay Area missionaries and rancheros for five years until fate and the Mexican authorities caught up with them in 1824.

Americans typically date the beginning of their reign in California to January 24, 1848, when John Sutter struck gold on the American River. But this story of migration and sudden fortune, like so many other tales of the United States pioneering origins, directs attention away from the actions that actually yoked the Golden State to the Union, namely an expansionary war against Mexico and a genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Akins and Bauer put the Indigenous side of this history back at the center of these events. After his discovery, Sutter claimed to have legally leased several miles of goldfields from a group of Nisenan. As it turned out, the Nisenan with whom Sutter made a contract didnt actually live in the immediate area of the find, and in any event, the lease was illegal because according to the Supreme Courts 1823 ruling in Johnson v. MIntosh, only the federal governmentnot private citizenscould acquire land from Native Americans. Nonetheless, when miners first descended on Sutters find along the American River in 1848, about half were Indigenous. And many were women, who repurposed their traditional baskets to pan for gold. (The coil and weave of the fibers were apparently well suited for snagging gold flakes.) Others, like the Yokuts ruffian Jos Jess, abandoned lives as horse thieves for more lucrative extractive vocations.

Indigenous minersand especially the womenwere vulnerable to the violence, exploitation, outright enslavement, and bitter racism of the goldfields. In primary documents, Akins and Bauer come across American settlers bragging about the ways they took advantage of Indians: trading cheap goods like handkerchiefs for tin cups full of gold, exchanging various goods for gold of equal weight, using lead slugs called diggers ounces to cheat Native miners when they went to cash in on their work. (The term digger was a racial slur that referred to Indigenous root-digging practices and intentionally rhymed with another epithet.)

Dehumanization wrought mass violence almost immediately. In 1849, a group of prospectors from Oregon arrived at the site of Sutters gold strike and tried to rape some Nisenan women. After the Nisenan exacted retribution by murdering seven Oregonians, the miners went on a killing spree, slaughtering more than 100 Nisenans in around a month. Other California Indians soon began to fear the goldfields and fight back against their exploitation. When, in 1850, American ranchers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone threatened to ship a group of Eastern Pomo slaves off to Sutters Mill, the workers turned on and killed their captors. The US military responded swiftly. Brevet Maj. Gen. Persifor F. Smith ordered 75 soldiers to, in the words of Capt. John B. Frisbie, exterminate if possible the rebels. When, at a place now known as Bloody Island on Clear Lake, the Pomo leader Ge-Wi-Lih attempted to negotiate peace, the soldiers opened fire. The Pomos who survived the first hail of bullets jumped in the lake and attempted to swim to safety. Ashore, another group of soldiers shot everyone they could. In what remains the largest massacre in US history, the Army killed as many as 800 Indians.

California lawmakers soon formalized these acts of ethnic cleansing into what the historian Benjamin Madley has described as a killing machine. In 1850, the California Legislature passed the Indian Act, which effectively legalized Indigenous slavery by allowing settlers to take Indigenous vagrants, fugitives, and debtors captive. In the first decade of US rule, Californians subjugated as many as 20,000 Indians, including 4,000 children, as farm hands, domestic servants, and sex slaves. State-sponsored militias received more than $1 million from the state in the 1850s and 60s, and between 1846 and 1873, they murdered 9,492 to 16,094 Indigenous peoples, according to Madley. Elected officials praised these murders as a pedagogic killing that taught the Natives a lesson. In one such slaughter in 1853, between 450 and 500 Tolowas were murdered in cold blood in the middle of the night at a Smith River village called Yontocket, which means Center of the World in the Tolowa language. The Tolowa had gathered there to celebrate their biannual World Renewal ceremony. Two Tolowa men escaped by jumping into a slough and swimming to safety. The next day, I imagine, they would have seen or at least smelled the Americans burning the bodies of their kin. Between 1848 and 1860, the California Indian population collapsed, falling from an estimated 150,000 to just 30,000.

While the state of California set in motion policies to extirpate the Natives, the US Senate dispatched Oliver Wozencraft, George Barbour, and Redick McKee to negotiate treaties with tribes primarily residing along mining frontiers from northwestern California through the Cascades and Sierra Nevada. (Coastal tribes, whose territories were claimed via land grants from Spanish and Mexican rancherias, were largely ignored.) Negotiations loosely followed Indigenous protocols not unlike the Big Time celebrations still held by many California Indians today: Feasts were prepared, gifts exchanged, speeches made, songs and dances performed, and sovereign parties to the treaties were often addressed as though they were entering into kin-based relationships. When the political theater didnt meet cultural expectations, tribes sometimes called off the meetings. Upon learning that the Americans had brought jackets only for their chiefs and no clothes or blankets for anyone else, the Maidu picked up and left on the spot. With violent militias preying on Indigenous communities, many tribes and leaders were reluctant even to meet with the treaty party. Some, like the Miwok leader Cipriano, served as go-betweens, connecting skeptical and fearful Miwoks with US officials, translating between Miwok and English, and selecting safe meeting places where Miwok leaders faced minimal risk of ambush or capture.

Cipriano and other Miwok leaders met with federal representatives at Horrs Ferry on the Tuolumne River on February 14, 1851. After much persuasion and promises of reward, according to the source Akins and Bauer cite, Cipriano spent the better part of the next month persuading Miwok holdouts to meet with Wozencraft, Barbour, and McKee to negotiate a treaty. Indigenous figures like Cipriano played pivotal roles in the negotiation of 18 treaties that would have reserved 7.5 million acres of land for interior tribes. But in a secret session in 1852, the US Senate rejected the treaties, buried the documents in legislative archives, and prohibited their publication. In a new plan modeled on the mission system, the United States attempted to round up and confine all California Indians to just five reservations. During the Civil War, this number was cut to three. After the war, it became four.

As California Indians were displaced and dispossessed in the late 1800s and early 1900sthe decades roughly coinciding with Gertrude Steins lifesettlers and industrialists transformed their homelands. Dams erected in mountains and foothills altered the flow of rivers; irrigation networks drained deltas and wetlands. In 1858, armed citizens relocated Yokuts from Tulare Lake, the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes, on which the tribe had relied for water and food for more than 10,000 years. By the 1870s agriculture had turned the lake putrid and salty. It was gonewiped off the map entirely aside from a few small wetlands and occasional floodingby 1900. That year, the California Indian population would reach its nadir, numbering fewer than 16,000 in the US Census.

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In a political, cultural, and even environmental sense, California was perhaps the most hostile state in the union for Indigenous peoples. And yet at many turns in the 20th century, colonial systems unwittingly laid the groundwork for their own undoing. In the early years of the 1900s, Charles Kelsey, a San Jose attorney hired by the Northern California Indian Association, found references to the secret treaties signed by California Indians. During Theodore Roosevelts 1903 visit to San Jose, the NCIA presented the president with these documents and pressed him on the issue of California Indian land rights. Working with California Senator Thomas Bard, the NCIA and the Indian Rights Association found the treaties in the Senate archives and introduced a motion to print them. Kelsey was appointed to investigate. Across the state, Indians organized themselves. It took them more than two decades to get their day in court, but in 1928 Congress passed an act enabling the Indians of Californiaa new legal term defined as all Indigenous peoples residing in the state in 1852to sue the federal government for lost treaty lands.

In 1928, California Indians won their case. But the government did not give these lands back, nor did it significantly compensate tribes for their losses. After the deduction of offsets for government expenditures incurred in the provision of services for tribes, the total awarded in the case was just slightly more than $5 million. A new lawsuit that focused on dispossessed Indigenous lands not covered by the treaties was launched in 1946. California Indians eventually won that case as well, and in 1972 California Indians received a paltry $700 each for their losses.

By the time that case was settled, California Indians had new in-state Indigenous allies: Native Americans who had relocated from reservations across the country to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. In 1969, a diverse coalition of urban Indians, Native student activists, and Indians who came from outside the state occupied the former federal prison of Alcatraz Island, bringing national attention to Native treaty rights and pressuring the federal government to embrace a new era of Indian policy based on self-determination rather than termination. Since Ronald Reagan signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, California Indians have been among the biggest winners of this sea change. (Here, Akins and Bauer miss a notable irony: The Alcatraz occupation began, in part, because a developer wanted to build a casino on the island.) Today, the Pechanga Band of Luiseo Indians employ more than 50,000 people in Southern California. In 2006, each Pechanga citizen received $40,000 in gaming revenue every month. Some California Indiansa small minority of the states Indigenous population, to be sureare getting the better end of the bargain in this new gold rush.

Akins and Bauer end their survey in 2019, when the City of Eureka returned just over 200 acres on Indian Island to the Wiyot Tribe, the third in a series of repatriations that have brought 95 percent of the island back into tribal ownership, marking a remarkable turnaround for the Wiyot and the city. In 1860, settlers murdered hundreds of Wiyots, mostly women and children, with hatchets, axes, and clubs at Indian Island. After the massacre, Wiyots on the mainland came to the island to search for survivors. They found an old woman stuck in the mud singing her mourning song and an infant crying in his dead mothers arms. The baby, Jerry James, survived. His people were moved onto the Round Valley Reservation in Mendocino County. In 1961, the federal government terminated the legal existence of the tribe. The year after that, the last fluent Wiyot speaker, a woman named Della Prince, died. Even though their sovereign legal status and language were gone, the Wiyot were not. In 1970, Jerry Jamess grandson Albert James started pushing for the tribe to reclaim Indian Island. The movement resulted in the renaming of the island from Gunther Islanda name that honored the settler who claimed the place after the massacreto Indian Island. The effort helped the tribe regain federal recognition in a 1981 Supreme Court case. It also likely marked the first time in US history that a municipality returned land to a tribe without being prompted to do so by a lawsuit and was yet another example of the California Indian comeback, a resurgence that is, in turn, transforming the state.

We Are the Land ends on this more hopeful note, telling a story of colonization followed by one of decolonization: a history of the foisting of successive and often bloody regimes imposed over and against Indigenous resistance and then the long and ongoing efforts of Indigenous peoples to reclaim their lands from outsiders. But I wonder what gets lost by viewing the recent history of California Indians as a reoccupation and return, as Akins and Bauer describe itfor, as the authors themselves show, Natives never left, and their influences shaped and continue to shape the California that many of us love. You wouldnt have Hollywood without westerns, for example, and while you wouldnt have westerns without John Wayne, you also wouldnt have them without Natives on set. The Lakota leader and actor Luther Standing Bear had roles in over a dozen films, starting with Ramona in 1916. He founded the War Paint Club (later the Indian Actors Association), which pushed for more accurate portrayals of Native Americans. Around the time Standing Bear first appeared on-screen, the Indigenous sport of surfing, invented by Native Hawaiians, arrived on the sandy beaches of Southern California. And if youll indulge me: I even think Indians influenced Californias best NBA teamnot the Los Angeles Lakers but the Golden State Warriors, who play a fast-paced game reminiscent of rez ballthe run-and-gun style favored on Indian reservations. After all, the Warriors coach, Steve Kerr, is a student of Phil Jackson, who grew up in Montana and has spoken about the influence of the nearby Fort Peck Reservation.

Indian Californias most lasting legacies, however, are political, social, and environmental, found in traditions of place-based resistance and in the proud and enduring spirit of Indigenous empowerment. These currents have not only carried First Peoples through the genocidal abyss but also continue to shape Indigenous, anti-colonial, and progressive politics. Akins and Bauers research reinstates many forgotten moments to the rich historical record of this intergenerational struggle. They write of Ipai defending their fisheries and exacting tribute from Spanish sailors in San Diego Bay in the 1500s and 1600s; of the coordinated Chumash and Yokuts revolt in 1824, when the Natives burned Mission Santa Ins to the ground, forced the garrison at Mission La Purisima to surrender, and captured Mission Santa Barbara; of the cunning guerrilla war waged by Kientpoos and 150 Modoc against the US military in 1872 and 73; of the Luiseos and Cupeos, who went on strike at Pala in 1913 to regain control of their land; of the La Jolla and Rincon Indians, who sued the Southern Sierras Power Company for trespassing in 1925; of the basket maker Mabel McKay, the last Dreamer of the Pomo people, who, when asked in 1934 by a Sacramento Union journalist what Pomos do, responded wryly, Just live; of the Native activists at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley who joined with other students of color in the Third World Strikes in 1968, helping found the first ethnic studies departments in the country; of the Ohlone activist Corrina Gould and the land protectors who lit a sacred fire and camped out for months in 2011 until they won protection of a burial site called Sogorea Te; and of much else. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to know that this place is full of magic, Gould explained at a panel I organized at the San Francisco Library in 2019. Theres movements that have come out of the Bay Area, like the takeover of Alcatraz, the American Indian Movement, Indians of All Tribes, the Brown Berets, the Black Panthersall kinds of technology and ideas have come out of here.

In the broadest sense, Native California has played an outsize role in the ongoing fight for a more pluralistic and egalitarian society, a role it is already reprising in the era of climate change. As record-breaking wildfires continue to ravage California and the West, more and more policy makers are considering reinstating long-outlawed Indigenous land management practices like controlled burns. Whether Californians realize it or not, they will likely embrace more, not less, of the governance systems and lifeways of Indigenous peoples in the coming years as they adapt to a rapidly warming world.

Its our responsibility to take care of this place in such a way, Gould said back in 2019. But taking care of this place is not just for us to do. There are thousands of people that live in our lands now, and so now that you live in our lands, it is also your responsibility. Because this land also takes care of you. Those prayers that our ancestors put down for thousands of years also take care of you and your family.

Link:
The Past and Future of Native California - The Nation

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

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Let's see what the Catskill Game Farm looks like in 2022.

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Once Allies, Stormy Daniels and Avenatti Face Off at Trial - WIBX AM 950