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Category Archives: Transhuman News

MASTER CLASS: Eating out doesn’t have to hijack your health – Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Posted: January 24, 2022 at 9:59 am

My family and I have always enjoyed dining out. Whether we are at a two-star pancake house or a five-star restaurant, it is always a memorable occasion.

At the same time, there are drawbacks to dining out. Unknown ingredients, high calorie meals and general over-ordering can create unintended consequences. This week, I will discuss some dining out strategies to help reduce the downside while preserving all the things I love about restaurants.

It's no secret that restaurant meals are, in general, higher in saturated fat, sugar and salt when compared against home-cooked meals. There are certainly exceptions, but by and large restaurant meals are less healthful. So, the first tip for dining out relates to frequency.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that people who dine out twice or more per day showed an increased risk for premature death. The study included 35,084 adults who reported their dietary habits via the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey from 1999-2014.

How many Arkansans dine out two times every day? My guess is not many (especially not lately). But there are lessons to be learned here. We should think about how often we eat out. It's not only healthier to cook at home but one's appreciation for a nice restaurant meal will be greater when it's less frequent. That's just human nature.

The other factor to consider is what to order when dining out. If our frequency is low, I think it's fine to splurge once in a while. But this strategy can backfire in terms of after-meal effects (you know what I mean). I like to find a balance by ordering a main dish that is grilled, roasted or baked. I also try to enjoy vegetables in different forms (soups, salads and side dishes) so that I'm not consuming a lot of starches or high-fat items.

These strategies have allowed me to maintain my enjoyment of dining out with very few negative side-effects. But barbecue is my guilty pleasure and it probably always will be. That's one type of meal that I find difficult to "throttle back," especially with all the great barbecue restaurants throughout the Midwest.

Now that my mouth is watering, it's time to introduce an exercise to help tighten up the midsection. Of course the best "exercise" for reducing excess belly fat is push-aways, as in push away from the table. But the Decline Plank Jack requires total body engagement, so it's a perfect addition to a "day after" routine.

1. Set an aerobics step on the lowest height.

2. Get into the "up" phase of a pushup with both feet on the end of the step.

3. Jump both feet out sideways so they land on the floor.

4. Jump them both back onto the step.

5. Continue this pattern of movement for 12 repetitions, and do two sets.

I know there will be readers who scoff at the notion of bringing any sort of discipline to dining out, especially in these pandemic days, when it's been such a special treat. For some, letting loose is part of the enjoyment. I get that. I just find a lot more enjoyment in sticking to a plan while enjoying a nice meal that I select with my health and longevity in mind. But even I am faced with kryptonite from time to time it's called brisket!

Director of business development and population health solutions for Quest Diagnostics, Matt Parrott began this column 20 years ago at Little Rock. He has a doctorate in education (sport studies), a master's in kinesiology and is certified by the American College of Sports Medicine.

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MASTER CLASS: Eating out doesn't have to hijack your health - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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Global Microbiome Therapies Market 2021 Industry Size, Business Opportunities, Future Trends, Top Key Players and Forecast to 2027 Discovery Sports…

Posted: at 9:59 am

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Global Microbiome Therapies Market 2021 Industry Size, Business Opportunities, Future Trends, Top Key Players and Forecast to 2027 Discovery Sports...

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The Past and Future of Native California – The Nation

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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.

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

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By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) The porn star who catapulted Michael Avenatti to fame four years ago will get a starring role in a New York courtroom when prosecutors try to prove the California lawyer cheated her of $300,000 in book proceeds.

Stormy Daniels Hosts A Party At The Abbey

Stormy Daniels is the key witness in Manhattan federal court at Avenatti's third criminal trial in two years. Opening statements are scheduled for Monday.

Attorney Representing Some Of R. Kelly's Accusers, Michael Avenatti Holds News Conference In Chicago

He was convicted in Manhattan in early 2020 of trying to extort Nike of up to $25 million by threatening to tarnish the sportswear giant's reputation unless it met his demands.

Attorney Michael Avenatti Appears In Court For Hearing In Case Accusing Him Of Stealing Funds From Stormy Daniels

Last year, a mistrial resulted in California on charges he cheated clients there.

These famous actors all began their on-screen careers with uncredited roles in movies and TV.

Actors Who Won Oscars For Their First Movie Roles

These are the battlefields that defined the United States militarys journey from upstart Colonial rebels to an invincible global war machine.

If you bleed Orange, did you know these 11 famous people also bleed orange? The list is pretty incredible actually.

Below on our list you'll be able to see many of the famous names who attended and graduated Syracuse University. Granted, our list is only 11 names. You can find hundreds of names all over the internet. Here's 11 just to get an idea of some of the most notable.

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

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NASA ‘Waste to Base’ Challenge: Sustainable Waste Management Ideas For Mars Mission Now Open | Here’s Everything You Need to Know – Tech Times

Posted: at 9:54 am

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently launched a special challenge for everyone who wants to create innovative ideas about sustainable waste management.

The so-called "Waste to Base" campaign is looking for creative individuals who have interesting ideas to lessen trash, carbon dioxide, and other materials ahead of the upcoming Mars mission.

(Photo : Max Letek from Unsplash)NASA recently launched a special challenge for everyone who wants to create innovative ideas about sustainable waste management.

NASA, together with crowdsourcing site HeroX, announced the start of the "Waste to Base" challenge as part of the sustainability projects of the Red Planet exploration. The space agency is looking for people who have ideas about waste management.

According to the official website ofHeroX, the challenge will tackle all possible ways of converting waste into base materials such as propellants. The organization wrote that they will integrate these methods together so that the upcoming spacecraft launch will only carry the lowest possible mass.

On top of that, HeroX also shared its ideas for waste conversion or management, which fall under four categories namely: Carbon dioxide (CO2) processing, trash, fecal waste, and foam packaging material.

Related Article:NASA's Curiosity Rover Picks up 'Unusual' Carbon on Mars-Is It a Sign of Ancient Life?

According to Space.com, the challenge will welcome every interested participant until March 15. The total price will be $24,000 and some winners would receive $1,000 per head. The announcement of the winner/s will be on April 22.

"The challenge is looking for your ideas for how to convert different waste streams into the propellant, and into useful materials, that can then be made into needed things and cycled through multiple times. While a perfectly efficient cycle is unlikely, ideal solutions will result in little to no waste," the website wrote.

For the eligibility requirements among competitors, you can click this linkfor more details. To sum it up, the aspiring innovator should be 18 years old and above.

Moreover, a person can choose to compete by himself/herself or even join a team with other individuals. As long as their jurisdiction does not fall under the US federal sanctions, they are eligible to join the Mars sustainability mission.

HeroX also added that the novel concepts which will win the competition will be included in the whitepaper. They will be written in the roadmap for "future technology development work," as what NASA's logistics reduction project mentioned in its description.

Currently, NASA has not yet announced the final date for the Mars mission. However, speculations pointed out that the space agency could initiate it in the next decade.

In the meantime, the space agency is focused on bringing astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis project. These programs will help NASA to shape possible design ideas for future Mars exploration.

Meanwhile, SpaceX Elon Musk lamented the idea of declining fertility rates. According to him, this would hinder his plans to build a Mars colony someday, per Tech Times.

At the same time, NASA is also facing a dilemma regarding the astronaut shortage for the upcoming lunar mission.

Read Also: Radian to Develop Single-Stage-to-Orbit Space Plane | Point-to-Point Travel on Earth Possible?

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

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Elon Musk, Artificial Wombs, and the Impending Shortage of Mars Colonists – Reason

Posted: at 9:54 am

Hysterical headlines are proliferating over a Twitter exchange between Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and e-commerce platform Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia musing over possible world population collapse and the desirability of creating synthetic wombs as a solution.

"Rich men suggest synthetic wombs should replace women," warns Insider Paper. Vice grumbles "Cryptocurrency Titans Newly Obsessed With Artificial Wombs." The always reliable Daily Star declares, "Billionaire crypto geeks say they want to replace human mothers with 'synthetic wombs.'"

This ginned up tempest of online moral outrage all began when Musk tweeted he is worried that there may not be enough people wanting to move to his Mars colonies due to a collapsing population here on Earth later in this century. Collapse may be too strong a characterization, but Musk is right that given prevailing global fertility trends world population will most likely peak around the middle of this century and fall back to about the current level by 2100.

Musk's glum observation about the impending shortage of Mars colonists provoked Lavingia to tweet back helpfully suggesting that greater investments in synthetic womb technologywould make having kids much faster, easier, cheaper, and more accessible. Buterin subsequently chimed in with a tweet noting that "synthetic wombs would remove the high burden of pregnancy, significantly reducing the inequality." The convenience of gestating offspring in synthetic wombs would presumably encourage people to have (decant?) more babies, some of whom would grow up to be Mars colonists.

Setting the headline hysterics aside for the moment, how close to perfecting artificial wombs are researchers? Back in 2017, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia reported keeping premature lamb fetuses alive in plastic bags of amniotic fluid for four weeks. While the researchers' aim is a treatment for saving and bringing to term extremely premature human fetuses, this is nevertheless a step toward developing synthetic wombs for human gestatelings.

In March 2021, a team of Israeli researchers reported their success in growing developmentally normal mouse embryos for up to eleven days inside artificial uteruses. This is remarkable because full mouse gestation is around 20 days. In the future, saidPaul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine,"it is not unreasonable that we might have the capacity to develop a human embryo from fertilization to birth entirely outside the uterus."

Concerning Buterin's suggestion that the advent of artificial wombs could level the economic playing field between women and men - and not minimizing the burdens of pregnancy - the main problem is the subsequent unequal division of the labor with respect to child-rearing.

Let's set aside for the time being the social andethical issues that safely gestating human babies in bottles raise. Instead, let's focus on Musk's concerns about how to populate his Martian cities.

"Ectogenesis (artificial womb technology) could yield many benefits on Earth and provide a safe and sustainable way to populate an off-world human colony," argues Australian bioethicist Evie Kendall in her 2021 article "Ectogenesis for Space Exploration." Rather than use synthetic wombs to prevent population collapse here on Earth use them instead to populate Mars. Rocketing eggs and sperm to Mars has got to be a lot cheaper than transporting full-grown humans.

Kendall further explains, "Gestating foetuses in a protected and controlled environment could help prevent damage caused by radiation exposure, nutritional deficits or the impact of microgravity during pregnancy. This method of reproduction would also reduce the risks and burdens to female settlers and avoid losing members of the early settlement workforce to maternal morbidity and mortality."

Of course, Musk will have deal with the problem that many Martians born via synthetic wombs will inevitably be lured by the lush fleshpots of the mother planet into abandoning the rude rigors of colonial life to immigrate to Earth.

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Goats are the GOAT be sure to tell Elon – Real Change News

Posted: at 9:54 am

Cognitive dissonance is making news today. One headline says the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the vaccination mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for large businesses. Another headline says one-in-seven ICU beds in this state are occupied by COVID-19 patients, and Inslee is getting the National Guard to help out at the hospitals. A third headline pops up and says most of the COVID-19 patients being hospitalized are those who havent been vaccinated.

Inslee has also been talking about limiting non-emergency procedures at hospitals. I suppose the National Guard is meant to mitigate that. I have to wonder what he means by non-emergency treatment. Would breaking both arms like I did in 2006 constitute a you can wait situation? Maybe in a month well have enough staff to look at that?

In other dueling news, the past seven years are now being called the hottest in recorded history just as Elon Musk is stepping up the talk about colonizing the moon and Mars.

Im really skeptical about the plans to colonize Mars. My feeling is it may be a ruse to distract the competition while Musk goes about doing what he really wants to do, namely take over all the best contracts available from NASA. Mars is so far, and for what? Wheres the payoff? Earth already has potato farms.

At least Musk is considering having humans spend only short periods of time at a moon colony where most of the work could be done by robots. Any humans planted on Mars are necessarily not going back very soon. Theyll have to sit there literally waiting for the planets to realign.

It will be easy to confine most of the crewed missions to a lunar base to robot maintenance and repairs. Land, bring fresh robots, fix the old ones, go home. Oh, maybe there could be rotating crews monitoring the construction of habitats for later visitors. That would provide people with the experience that would help them build habitats on Mars, should that ever happen.

Ive often said Id rather see colonies built in orbiting space stations, but Im warming to the idea that a lunar base could be a good first step. It will be easier, at the beginning, to get materials from the moon, including water. A lunar base could grow fish and plants and supply orbiting stations with water and fertilizer for habitants, in addition to letting them have some of the excess fish.

We think mainly of colonized space as a way of preserving a remnant of humanity. But with global warming continuing apace, we need to start thinking about preserving fish. I dont mean fermenting and salting. I mean as species. If we can ever colonize the moon with people, theres no reason we cant colonize it with fish. And goats. We need goats so we can have cheese. The moon has to have cheese. There is no point living anywhere that doesnt have fish and cheese, potatoes, vodka, grapes, bread, hummus, olives, rice, seaweed, hominy grits, chickens and eggs for omelets. Also many kinds of peppers. We have to take these matters seriously right now while Musk is still planning a moon colony. Since Musk may very well be a space lizard for all we know, the time to let him know that humans need goats is now. I think he will listen, because I know he smokes pot. So he is part human.

Im not so sure about Jeff Bezos. Bezos I like because hes with me on colonizing orbiting space stations. But other than that Im afraid hes like the T-rex in Jurassic Park: His only interest in goats is as an appetizer before a plate of BBQ elephant.

Bezos has his own ruse similar to Musks involving Mars. Bezos has this totally bonkers idea that he can replace all the polluting factories of Earth with factories orbiting Earth. This will never happen, I say with the confidence of a man who knows hell be long dead before he can be proven wrong. Go on, try to prove me wrong youll die before he does it, too. Bezos will also die before he does it.

The point of building factories in orbit isnt to replace Earths polluting factories. Its to build better factories than the ones on Earth. I think Bezos knows that. Hes also probably thinking he can keep the unions out.

Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at drwes@realchangenews.org.

Read more of the Jan. 19-25, 2022 issue.

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Every Age Gets the Mythology It Deserves – lareviewofbooks

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EVERY AGE GETS the mythology it deserves. Our age, it seems, deserves human spaceflight. The our requires qualification, of course: not everyone is enthralled by humans hurtling into the frigid nothingness of the outer void atop a pillar of exploding gases, and then returning to Earth with a splash (or a billowing parachute) but there is no denying that a vast portion of humanity is indeed gripped by this narrative. It has all the drama that European chroniclers used to ascribe to colonizing other continents, but this time no indigenous people get expropriated or slaughtered. Human spaceflight is a capacious container for the aspirations of mortals.

The outlines of the narrative are much the same in the United States or in Russia, in Cuba or in China, in France or in South Africa, but the heroes and the timing vary. The most frequently encountered version called the Space Race is confined to a dozen years over half a century ago. Its heroes are basically the two-and-a-half dozen American astronauts white, male, and overwhelmingly Protestant who participated in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs of the 1960s and early 1970s. Their story occupies the bulk of Colin Burgesss The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration. When Gene Cernan leaves the Moons surface on December 14, 1972, we are two-thirds of the way through this book, and less than 10 percent of the way through the over 550 people who have been in space. Burgess races through to SpaceX with diminished enthusiasm.

What is a Space Race if there is nobody to race with? Compared with most accounts of this period, Burgess devotes significant attention to the Soviet Union. If you think of a space first that is not about setting a human on the Moon, then the Soviets nabbed the laurels: first artificial satellite, first animal in space, first human in space, first woman in space (also the second, after a significant gap), first multi-person orbit, first spacewalk, first person of African ancestry (the Cuban Arnaldo Tamayo Mndez, 1980), first Asian (Vietnamese pilot Phm Tan, 1980), first Indian (Rakesh Sharma, 1984), first multinational crew, and so on. Burgesss account has somewhat surprising emphases. Yuri Gagarin was the first human in orbit, but his trip gets less attention than that of Alan Shepard, whose suborbital flight is marked as a first only because he was the first American (and he didnt go as high or for nearly as long as Gagarin). You can be sure that Russian-language histories of the same events characterize matters rather differently.

Burgess, who hails from Australia, demonstrates that the appeal of the American version of the Space Race is global (although more common in the Anglophone West). He has written over three dozen books on military, airflight, and space history, and he knows how to spin a tale. This is especially true for the early years when the number of astronauts and cosmonauts is more manageable, allowing him to offer full characterizations. The narrative tightens again when space voyagers are killed, as with the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) Shuttle disasters: the book is dedicated to their memory, as well as the fallen crews of Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, and Soyuz 11. The rest of human spaceflight becomes so routine in Burgesss telling that he rushes through other Shuttle missions in staccato bullet points, making it to privatized spaceflight with pages to spare before concluding. If you are looking for a comprehensive history of human spaceflight, this book will come up short. If you want to revisit the drama of the Space Race, Burgesss account is excellent.

As of January 2018, over 550 people have been in orbit, and somewhat more have reached space. That distinction itself is a matter of American parochialism. NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration consider the boundary of space to be 50 miles (roughly 80 kilometers) up, the line set by Hungarian-born physicist Theodore van Krmn. The rest of the world, and also the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), go metric, and pick their arbitrary point as 100 kilometers (or 62 miles). Regardless of which boundary you choose, 60 of those were women (an additional 12 women have joined their number since 2018). That speaks to a radical asymmetry in who gets to leave Earth, which calls for an explanation and discussion. Burgess doesnt offer one.

For Burgess, the only people who matter in the history of human spaceflight are those who actually travel. This is much like telling the history of an iceberg by focusing on the part above water.

A good example is his treatment of the group of American women pilots who underwent the physical tests for astronaut training at the clinic of William Randolph Lovelace in 1959. The cohort that cleared the tests, later dubbed the Mercury 13 in analogy with the seven male astronauts in the Mercury Program of orbital launches were never permitted to begin the next level of training, ostensibly because none of them met the minimum qualification for spaceflight: logging a significant number of hours piloting a jet. The catch, naturally, is that women were not permitted to fly jets and so could never gain such experience. The debate made it to the floor of Congress, where the sexism on display was egregious even though you knew it was coming. Not least reprehensible in the whole affair was the public testimony of John Glenn one of Burgesss primary heroes that women not being astronauts is a fact of our social order. (You also had to have an engineering degree to be an astronaut, a fact held against the women but not Glenn, who never graduated college.) All of this is well narrated in the 2018 Netflix documentary Mercury 13, directed by Heather Walsh and David Sington. You wont learn much about it in The Greatest Adventure, where it is relegated to parentheses on page 99. Because the women never made it to space, they are not part of the history. Their significance lies in the fact that Soviet General Nikolai Kamanin got wind of the project and rushed Valentina Tereshkova into orbit, making her the first woman in space. The rules about which humans count in human spaceflight is not a matter of great moment to Burgess, although when concerns for diversity prompted the Americans letting a few women, fewer Blacks, and one Asian American into NASAs astronaut program over 100 pages later, he praises it. (Sadly, one of each category would die on the Challenger.)

Likewise, once astronauts land back on Earth, they exit the book, except for when the Soviets used cosmonauts such as Gagarin for propaganda value. When the Soviets cheered their space travelers, it was due to the Soviet propaganda machine; when the Americans did so, it stemmed from pride in the nations space flight programme and the men chosen to fly them. You will not learn from this book about the extensive overseas propaganda trips undertaken by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts, all coordinated by the US Information Agency. For that, you will have to turn to Teasel Muir-Harmonys Operation Moonglow (Basic Books, 2020), which Burgess does not cite.

Much of human spaceflight happens on the ground. The actual content of the training is described only sketchily, however. We learn more about the personalities of the Apollo astronauts than about food, air, and waste disposal in their capsules. (The latter is encompassed by the rare mention of a catheter for the short early flights. Solid waste is literally unmentionable.) And what about the hundreds of people on the ground who make each humans flight possible? Are they not also part of the history of human spaceflight?

A key feature of human spaceflight exceptionally well communicated by Burgess is how dangerous it is. Almost every Soviet and American flight during the Space Race, with the important and almost miraculous exception of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, barely avoided disaster. Gagarin almost lost consciousness on reentry. Alexei Leonovs suit puffed up on the first spacewalk and he had to depressurize his suit in open space in order to fit back into his capsule. Gus Grissom almost sank with his Mercury capsule. Scott Carpenter was almost lost when his capsule couldnt be found in the ocean. And of course there was the near catastrophe of Apollo 13, turned into a tale of bravery and ingenuity (rather than recklessness) through the magic of Ron Howard. Upon reading account after account in Burgesss vivid prose, you cannot help but wonder at the shocking peril that governments put these men (and a few women) through.

Burgess does not wonder. That people overcame the obstacles is proof of the arc of destiny bending heavenward. It is unclear how much the cosmonauts and astronauts knew about the dog and primate precursors who tested the life-support mechanisms of the Soviet and American vehicles, respectively. The dogs, strays recruited from the streets of Moscow under the (quite reasonable) presumption that they could withstand pretty much anything and endowed with charming names based on their appearance or character Little Fox, Blackie, Barker (Laika, who traveled on Sputnik 2), etc. fared pretty well. The Greatest Adventure is wonderful on this topic.

The American monkeys fared less well. Using captured German V-2 rockets, Project Blossom used these apes to test human survivability in space. On June 11, 1948, Blossom 3 launched a rhesus macaque named Albert. Not only did the single parachute fail to inflate, writes Burgess, causing the nose cone to slam back into the ground, but it was later revealed that Albert had probably suffocated before lift-off. His successor, Albert II, survived the launch only to perish in another parachute failure. Albert III died when his V-2 exploded within 30 seconds of lift-off. Albert IV was killed when the parachute system failed again. At the end of their V-2s, the Americans switched to Aerobee rockets. Albert V was another victim of parachute failure, despite months of engineering fixes. Albert VI made it up about 45 miles and landed, despite being thumped pretty hard on the desert floor. Rescue took too long to get to him, though, and he died of heat prostration. The Americans stopped naming the macaques Albert. This book is lavishly illustrated with staged photos of smiling astronauts looking directly into the camera before venturing out into space. I could not help comparing these to the photograph of the first Albert being inserted into his capsule.

Which raises a crucial question, one not seriously discussed in this book: why send humans to space at all? It is much harder (and heavier) to engineer their life support, and so much more wrenching when things fail. For Burgess, there is no debate to be had: the intrepid voyagers realized that space exploration is a human imperative and that it would continue despite the losses. It is worth underscoring that no human has been further than Earth orbit since 1972. Most of our advances in knowledge of the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and more have come from uncrewed probes. But, even so, Burgess maintains that shifting exploration entirely to robots shirks our undeniable destiny, and given the spur of human curiosity to seek and explore, such aspirations are both beckoning and achievable.

I expect many readers of this volume will share Burgesss sense of confidence and destiny. How can we not choose human spaceflight, they might think. Consider Elon Musk, one of todays most visible proponents of human spaceflight and human colonization of Mars. In a livestream in 2021, Musk declared: Going to Mars [] is a long journey, you might not come back alive. But its a glorious adventure, and it will be an amazing experience. [] Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. He is right about the risks, but are they worth taking? One might consult the other Elon Musk, whose company Tesla invests huge resources in automatic vehicles to remove the danger to humans caused by everyday traffic accidents. Defensive driving is clearly not the mythology of the moment.

Michael D. Gordin is a professor in Princetons history department. His latest book is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience.

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The Expanse’s Final Series Is About Ethics in the Face of Mass Suffering – Pajiba Entertainment News

Posted: at 9:54 am

Even though the majority of our distinguished readership are FREAKING NEEEEEEERDS, it is very likely many of you havent gotten around to watching The Expanse, which closed six seasons of a near-perfect run last Friday. Instead of recapping season six or reviewing it, Im going to do like Patrick H. Willems, one of my favorite FilmTubers, and tell you why its awesome.

Adapted from the novels by James S.A. Corey (pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), The Expanse is set in one of the most carefully constructed universes in speculative TV, as even the few logical gaps it has can be filled by the fans without needing convoluted theorizing. Its the 24th Century, humanity has expanded and settled throughout the Solar System aided by efficient fusion-propulsion that makes traveling between the Inner Planets and the Outer Rings as fast as shipping is today. Three blocks have developed in the centuries in-between. Earth, now ruled under a global government of the United Nations, overpopulated, with most of the population living on a sort-of UBI, reeling under the effects of Climate Change but still a superpower. Mars, colonized by scientists and soldiers who have become a semi-authoritarian, militarized but wealthy technocracy, pursuing the dream of terraformation. And finally, the Belt, all the planetoids, moons, and large asteroids settled by millions of the castaways of the castaways who have developed their own cultural and national identity and live having their resources exploited by Mars and the Earth, including the two most important in that environment: Water and air. As the series begins, just as political tensions grow between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, humanity makes First Contact with an alien entity, a quantum-blob known as the Protomolecule that could doom or boost humanitys future. Of course, a bunch of corrupt politicians and trillionaires start tinkering with that shit.

The Expanse, like any great speculative fiction, is about our times. It couldnt be any clearer what the intentions of the writers are because its not even a metaphor, its just a projection of our times 300 years into the future: The Earth embodying the United States and other first world countries, Mars as China or other superpowers built around a single purpose (like the USSR back in the day) and the Belt as the underserved and exploited diversity that is the Developing World. Its not a metaphor without nuances that also reflect our times: Earth/The U.N. is unable to provide for most of its inhabitants more than the bare minimum; Mars is fanatical, paranoid and is built on staggering corruption; and the Belt well the Belters are awesome, but having defined so much of their identity in opposition to the Earth and Mars, they risk sabotaging themselves.

Its not an entirely bleak scenario. For one, it seems that gender and race equality has been achieved, mostly, but the exploitation of humans by humans persists in its base forms: Imperialism and class struggle. Then theres the fact that Mars was settled by competent people who actually want to further humanity instead of our timeline, where the ones attempting it will be a bunch of billionaires and their hangers-on, all of whom will die miserably from calcium deficiency.

Wait, thats a good thing.

Also, you can barely see any pets in Mars and the Belt, so that blows.

The Expanse is a choral narrative that gives us a realistic politics-driven plot, naturalist social commentary, brutal (and accurate) space warfare, and an ensemble cast that deserves more things like this in the future (specially Cara Gee, who actually invented the smoky eyeshadow. OK, she didnt but no one has done it better than her playing Carmina Drummer). In fact, the scientific realism is used as a plot-device that defines the relationship of the characters to their world and their actions: Scarcity, the vacuum of space, time-delays, they are more than a gimmick, for once. This is science-fiction that doesnt fall into the clich of technology progresses but humanity remains the same, something which has been false since agriculture, but we have also experienced ourselves after a decade of social media. One of the main theses of The Expanse is that technology changes everything and it also changes nothing if the exploitation logics remain in place.

Because, with its wonderful collection of characters that are flawed, broken, and sometimes downright chaotic neutral, The Expanse is about empathy. Its ultimately is about ethics and mutual responsibility when facing threats that could bring down a civilization. So of course, The Expanse is about Climate Change, but its not even a metaphor: It is the very effects of the former that drove humanitys expansion through the Solar System. By eschewing the metaphor, The Expanse reminds us that most humanitys problems are of our own making, Climate Change among them.

In only six episodes, the final season of The Expanse somehow manages to drive home a coherent thesis about social ethics while making use of all the plotlines they left dangling. Continuing the story from the previous season, we see the crew of the Rocinante, the UN, Mars, and Carmina Drummers band of Belter pirates trying to put an end to Marco Inaros, a Belter leader waging a fanatical and genocidal war on the Inner Planets. Inaros has caused hundreds of millions of deaths on Earth and Mars by hurtling asteroids covered in stealth materials just to make them feel what Belters have felt. He has become perhaps the greatest monster in human history, and yet, as Drummer says, a person like him was inevitable. Inaros, Osama, every tin-pot tyrant in the Global South they are all the logical byproducts of colonialism and making subalterns out of entire human populations, be it continents or planetoids.

This season is a war story, but its also a story about people running into the limits of redemption and forgiveness, about how sometimes the ethical choice and the strategic choice coincide in a decision that will have a cost, political, monetary or in resources. That decision is the only one that will guarantee everyones survival. It is also about how science and technology could actually save us all. But science and technology alone cannot really improve if they do not include the subaltern; otherwise, they can only expand subjugation.

There is a series that cast a shadow over The Expanse, a shadow under which it never managed to become mainstream, but which ironically helped it become a better piece of media: Game of Thrones. Many comparisons were made between both franchises, mostly deeming the latter as the sci-fi counterpart of the former (more to the point, each chapter of the novels is told from the perspective of a single character), but if GoTs quality collapsed spectacularly in the last three seasons, The Expanse either got better or remained just as good as in the first three. Almost as a taunt, the series epilogue is also set around a negotiation table with all the surviving characters. In the following scenes, The Expanse will have James Holden, an Earther who is ostensibly the lead character of the series, actually showing up as an ally to the Belters. Holden could be considered as a white or white-passing man, who has been the pervasive lead in most of Sci-Fis history. His final act underscores the central point The Expanse has been making since chapter one: Humanity will not progress or survive unless the privileged step up (or aside) for the subalterns.

That is the genius of The Expanse; it actually dares to challenge the colonialist foundations on which human exploitation and, ultimately, Climate Change persist. That tackling existential threats (or any other that we are able to understand) is an ethical decision on how much suffering we are willing to allow, how much are we willing to actually recognize dispossessed humans and countries as subjects of rights. The fact that they managed to deliver this idea on freaking Amazon Prime is a commendable achievement by the writers room.

All of that against the worst possible odds. In a very meta way, the fate of The Expanse as a series reflects its own ideas on how to build a worthy universe out of scant resources: It had a big budget, but not in the scale of extravaganzas such as Foundation or even Star Trek: Discovery. It premiered on the SyFy channel, immediately undermining its reach and respectability in the radar of Peak TV. The final season order was shortened to just six episodes. And yet they delivered spectacle through restrained but valuable use of VFX. Nurturing a small but devoted fanbase that managed to give it a better home, and by writing the best ending possible out of six episodes while leaving enough teasers open for follow-ups.

Just like the original Star Trek through syndication, I hope The Expanse grows in popularity through sustained streaming viewership. We the fans dont need it to become as a massive franchise, but maybe a couple of limited series or film anthologies.

And Hollywood needs to start casting more Cara Gee in everything.

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Originally posted here:
The Expanse's Final Series Is About Ethics in the Face of Mass Suffering - Pajiba Entertainment News

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Twentieth ‘Ten Years Hence’ series discusses the future of space travel – Observer Online

Posted: at 9:54 am

With the advent of developing space companies and recent conversations surrounding the habitability of Earth, this years Ten Years Hence series uncovers profound reflections not only for the business world, but for the entirety of our current generation. Life Beyond Earth is the theme of the 2022 lectures, offered by the Mendoza College of Business. Christian Davenport, staff writer for the Washington Post, launched the first of the seven scheduled talks by sharing insights regarding the commercialization of space.

Author of, The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (2018), Davenport related how the quest for the cosmos is intricately tied to the plight of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

The quickest way to go to space is to become a billionaire, Davenport said. And the richest among us are plowing big parts of their fortune into space.

He further explained his reference to the Space Barons in his books title, we have businesses competing in a way that governments used to, Davenport said.

Ten Years Hence course instructor Professor James ORourke notes that enlightened self-interest is the driving force behind this new space race.

The vision of the space barons is similar, but unique in nature. Both Elon Musk and Jeffery Bezos plan to bridge the largest gap dividing Earth from space: costs. While Elon Musk concerns himself with a backup for humanity, with Mars standing as the best candidate for such an option, Bezos philosophy is to preserve Earth and instead move industry to space.

When he founded Amazon, the resources he needed for the business to succeed were there: the credit card, post office and internet, for instance of course, for space, there is no infrastructure yet, Davenport said. Perhaps we are dawning an era of economic dynamism that creates a whole new market, similar to what the internet did to the world when it was first created.

Leading spectators through history, Davenport elucidated how the aura of hope for space travel now burns even brighter. He recalled the desolation of the Challenger space shuttle explosion and traced the quest to build a reusable, cost-efficient rocket, from events like the historic landing of Space Xs Falcon 9 in 2015 to the Starship launch for orbit scheduled this year.

With a multiplicity of companies such as Boeing, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, along with the ranks of astronauts proliferating, an unprecedented era of space exploration appears to be within reach. NASAs plans to construct a new International Space Station and their recent launching of the James Webb Space Telescope are further accomplishments which cannot be overlooked, as they will continue to enlighten the universes great unknown.

Davenport even touched upon an eventual return to the Moon, remarking that the reason we havent been beyond earth orbit for a while now is because of different, conflicting government administrations. NASAs Artemis project, adequately named after the mythological twin sister of Apollo, endeavors to brave through this feat once more. With the knowledge of there being water on the moon, Davenport noted there is even a potential for it to become a gas station to space.

Apart from the lecture, Davenport noted the importance of discussing these subjects in general, emphasizing his goal to explain the issues of our time to people, including how the government is administering tax funded programs, and place that in a broader historical context; to inform the citizenry of this interesting time we hope to introduce in space, and how it might play a bigger role in peoples lives, he said. We must understand the advantages as well as the ethical challenges related to this.

Professor ORourke added that the series itself is designed to encourage students to ponder about major relevant issues of the near future. In ten years, everyone in the room will need to adapt and/or adopt an intervention strategy for the challenges and opportunities that emerge. These are topics you wont encounter in an accounting or marketing course, and you get the chance to meet interesting, important and smart people along the way.

Interesting people will indeed appear throughout this series, featured among them a NASA Astronaut and U.S. Air Force test pilot, a mission manager for Blue Origin, scientist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and beyond. A full program for this stellar course may be found at the Mendoza College of Business website.

The rest is here:
Twentieth 'Ten Years Hence' series discusses the future of space travel - Observer Online

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Twentieth ‘Ten Years Hence’ series discusses the future of space travel – Observer Online

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