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If you want to pinpoint your place in the Universe, start with your cosmic address. You live on Earth->Solar System->Milky Way Galaxy->Local Cluster->Virgo Cluster->Virgo Supercluster->Laniakea. Thanks to new deep sky surveys, astronomers now think all those places are part of an even bigger cosmic structure in the “neighborhood” called The Shapley Concentration.

Astronomers refer to the Shapley Concentration as a “basin of attraction”. That’s a region loaded with mass that acts as an “attractor”. It’s a region containing many clusters and groups of galaxies and comprises the greatest concentration of matter in the local Universe. All those galaxies, plus dark matter, lend their gravitational influence to the Concentration. There are many of these basins in the Universe, including Laniakea. Astronomers are working to survey them more precisely, which should help provide a more precise map of the largest structures in the Universe.

A slice of the Laniakea Supercluster, a local basin of attraction. This structure contains many galaxies and clusters, including our own Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: SDvision interactive visualization software by DP at CEA/Saclay, France.

One group, led by astronomer R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawai’i measured the motions of some 56,000 galaxies to understand these basins and their distribution in space. “Our universe is like a giant web, with galaxies lying along filaments and clustering at nodes where gravitational forces pull them together,” said Tully. “Just as water flows within watersheds, galaxies flow within cosmic basins of attraction. The discovery of these larger basins could fundamentally change our understanding of cosmic structure.”

Cosmic Flows and Mapping Structures

Tully’s team is called CosmicFlows and they study the motions through space of those distant galaxies. The team’s “redshift” surveys revealed a possible shift in the size and scale of our local galactic basin of attraction. We already know that we “live” in Laniakea, which is about 500 million light-years across. However, the motions of other clusters indicate there’s a larger “attractor” directing the cluster flow. The CosmicFlows data suggest that we could be part of the Shapley Concentration, which could be 10 times the volume of Laniakea. It’s about half the volume of the largest structure in space, known as “the Great Wall”, which is a string of galaxies stretching across 1.4 billion light-years.

Several superclusters were revealed by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. This contains the structure known as the “Sloan Great Wall”. Courtesy 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.

The Shapley Concentration was first observed by astronomer Harlow Shapley in the 1930s as a “cloud” in the constellation Centaurus. This supercluster appears along the direction of motion of the Local Group of galaxies (where we live). Because of that, scientists speculated that it could be influencing our galaxy’s peculiar motion. Interestingly, the Virgo Supercluster (and the Local Group and Milky Way Galaxy) appears to be moving toward the Shapley Concentration. The surveys that Tully and others are doing should confirm that motion toward whatever is attracting them.

Exploring Ever-larger Structures in the Universe

Where do these basins of attraction come from? In one sense, they’re as old as the Universe and its cosmic web of matter that Tully references. The seeds for the web and those basins of attraction were planted some 13.8 billion years ago. After the Big Bang, the infant Universe was in a hot dense state. As it expanded and cooled, the density of matter started to fluctuate. There were tiny differences in those density fluctuations. Think of them as the earliest “seeds” of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and even vaster structures that we see in today’s Universe.

This detailed map of the cosmic microwave background is created from seven years worth of data. It shows the “seed” structures of galaxies in the infant Universe. Image Credit: NASA

As astronomers survey the sky, they find evidence for all those different structures. Now, they have to explain them. The idea that the Shapley Concentration is the large basin that our Laniakea belongs to means that current cosmological models don’t quite explain its existence.

“This discovery presents a challenge: our cosmic surveys may not yet be large enough to map the full extent of these immense basins,” said UH astronomer Ehsan Kourkchi. “We are still gazing through giant eyes, but even these eyes may not be big enough to capture the full picture of our universe.”

Measuring the Attractors

The main actor in all these galaxies, clusters, and superclusters, is gravity. The more mass, the more gravity influences motions and matter distribution. For these basins of attraction, Tully’s research team examined their impact on galaxy motions in the region. The basins exert a sort of “tug of war” on galaxies that lie between them. That influences their motions. In particular, redshift surveys like Tully’s team is doing will map the radial motion (along the line of sight), velocities (how fast they’re moving), and other related motions. By mapping the velocities of galaxies throughout our local Universe, the team can define the region of space where each supercluster dominates.

Of course, these motions are tricky to define. That’s why the team does different types of measurements. They aren’t mapping just the luminous material in galaxies. They also have to take into account the inferred existence of dark matter. There are other complications as well. For example, not all galaxies are the same—that is, they differ in their shapes (morphology) and matter density. Astronomers can get around this by measuring something called “galaxy peculiar velocity”. That’s the difference between its actual velocity and the expected “Hubble flow” velocity (which reflects gravitational interactions between galaxies).

The results of the Tully team surveys should provide ever more precise 3D maps of these regions of space. That includes their structures as well as their motions and velocities. Those maps, in turn, should give greater insight into the distribution of all matter (including cold dark matter) throughout the Universe.

For More Information

Identification of Basins of Attraction in the Local Universe (journal)
Identification of Basins of Attraction in the Local Universe (arXiv pdf)
The Shapley Supercluster: the Largest Matter Concentration in the Local Universe (PDF)

The post The Milky Way Might be Part of an Even Larger Structure than Laniakea appeared first on Universe Today.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed magnificent things about the Universe. Using its sophisticated infrared optics, it has peered deeper into space (and farther back in time) than any observatory to date, gathering data on the first galaxies to form in our Universe. It has also obtained spectra from exoplanets, revealing things about the chemical composition of their atmospheres. In addition, Webb has provided some stunning views of objects within our Solar System, like Jupiter and its auroras, Saturn’s rings and moons, and Neptune and its satellites.

Recently, a team led by researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used Webb Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to closely examine the Pluto-Charon system. Their observations detected frozen carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the surface of Pluto’s largest moon for the first time. These discoveries add to what scientists learned about Charon’s chemical inventory from ground-based telescopes and the New Horizons mission. It also reveals more about the chemical composition of the many objects that make up the Kuiper Belt.

The team was led by Silvia Protopapa, a Principal Scientist with the SwRI Department of Space Studies and a co-investigator of the New Horizons mission. She was joined by members from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Florida Space Institute, the Lowell Observatory, the SETI Institute, the Pinhead Institute, the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The paper that details their findings recently appeared in Nature Communications.

The observations were part of Webb’s Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) program 1191, which relied on Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO). Dr. John Stanberry, the program’s Principal Investigator, is an instrument scientist for Webb’s NIRCam at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The team used Webb’s NIRSpec to conduct four observations of the Pluto-Charon system between 2022 and 2023, which provided full coverage of Charon’s northern hemisphere.

Webb spectroscopic measurements revealed signatures of carbon dioxide, which the team compared with laboratory measurements and detailed spectral models of the surface. They concluded that carbon dioxide is present primarily as a surface veneer on a subsurface rich in water ice. As Dr. Protopapa explained in a recent SwRI press release:

“Charon is the only midsized Kuiper Belt object, in the range of 300 to 1,000 miles in diameter, that has been geologically mapped, thanks to the SwRI-led New Horizons mission, which flew by the Pluto system in 2015. Unlike many of the larger objects in the Kuiper Belt, the surface of Charon is not obscured by highly volatile ices such as methane and therefore provides valuable insights into how processes like sunlight exposure and cratering affect these distant bodies.

“Our preferred interpretation is that the upper layer of carbon dioxide originates from the interior and has been exposed to the surface through cratering events. Carbon dioxide is known to be present in regions of the protoplanetary disk from which the Pluto system formed.”

Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Hydrogen peroxide forms when water ice is broken down at the atomic level through exposure to ultraviolet light, charged particles from the Sun (solar wind), and galactic cosmic rays. Its presence on the surface of Charon indicates that the water ice-rich surface is subject to photolysis. This is similar to how exposure to solar radiation causes methane to create tholins, which explains why bodies in the outer Solar System are ruddy in appearance. Said SwRI’s Dr. Ujjwal Raut, leader of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) and second author of the paper:

“Laboratory experiments conducted at SwRI’s CLASSE (Center for Laboratory Astrophysics and Space Science Experiments) facility were instrumental in demonstrating that hydrogen peroxide can form even in mixtures of carbon dioxide and water ice under conditions analogous to those at Charon.”

The team’s findings demonstrate Webb’s ability to uncover complex surface signatures, which can tell astronomers more about the chemical composition, formation, and evolution of bodies in our Solar System and beyond. These same capabilities allow astronomers to characterize exoplanets’ atmospheres to see if they have the necessary ingredients to support life (as we know it).

“The new insights were made possible by the synergy between Webb observations, spectral modeling, and laboratory experiments and are possibly applicable to other similar midsized objects beyond Neptune,” said Protopapa.

Further Reading: SWRI, Nature Communications

The post Webb Detects Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen Perodixe on Pluto’s moon Charon appeared first on Universe Today.

UPDATE: For another splenetic take on scientism, read David Brin’s post, “The dangerous chimera called ‘scientism.” An excerpt:

The crusade to discredit all fact-using professions is an existential threat to us all — a deliberate effort to lobotomize-away any influence by folks who actually know stuff.

One of the core elements of this campaign is to deride modern science as a ‘mere religion’. A religion called “scientism’. That cult incantation – aiming to cancel out all nerds and every kind of ‘expert’ – is promoted in this article.

One raver, denouncing Scientific America’s endorsement of pro-fact candidates, said:

“…worshippers at this new altar seem determined to usher in a new post-modern utopia in which science and religion are fused once again. In that light, they cannot help but endorse Kamala Harris because their consciences won’t allow them to do otherwise. It’s not a choice dictated by science, but by theology.”

Parse it. The fundamental goal is to demean fact-professions by their own standards, by calling them (without any hint of evidence, or irony) mere boffin-lemmings, yelping in unison as they worship the current paradigm and repress dissenting views.

Of course this is the masturbation-incantation of morons who know nothing about how science works, but desperately seek to justify their war against it.

Whenever I hear the word “scientism”, I know that there will follow a discourse about either how science is deficient, or about how “other ways of knowing” are as good as modern science at discerning truths about the universe. The subject of my book Faith versus Fact is in fact a long defense of science (“construed broadly,” as I explain in the book) as the only way to know truths about the universe, so it’s no surprise that I’m wary of the word “scientism” and how it’s used.

If you think that the U.S. has largely been immune to the type of anti-modern-science attitudes pervading New Zealand, you might want to look at the Scientism Workshop that will take place at the University of Chicago next week. This is apparently a part of  The Scientism Project, a multi-university and somewhat multinational consortium of philosophers and historians of science researching scientism, which they define this way:

Scientism, as an epistemic position, is the view that the sciences and their methods are the best (or only) way of obtaining genuine knowledge of reality. As a social ideology, scientism is the view that the sciences alone can be trusted with the task of bringing about social progress. These two aspects of scientism, while distinct, are related: It is by virtue of revealing ‘the way the world really is’ that we acquire the ability to effectively and reliably direct society towards progress.

I am not referring to scientism as a “social ideology,” but concentrating on the first definition. Clearly making social progress requires more than just science, and no scientists would say otherwise. One needs politics, tactics, money, empathy, and so on. But let’s stick with the first definition.

The  Scientism Project is holding a two-day conference next week. It’s across the street from me, and I’m not yet sure if I’ll go. Some of the talks look interesting, some boring, others don’t seem to be very science-dissing, but some make me concerned. The printed summaries of two talks from the last group are below. Here are the dates (The Franke Institute is inside the Regenstein Library at its east end).

Date: 11-12 October 2024.

Time: 9.30 am to 5.30 pm.

Location: Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago.

The Program is given as a whole, with talk summaries; here are two: (I’ve provided links to the speakers. The first in particular is almost identical to what we hear from New Zealand. Bolding in the summaries is mine. I’ve addressed the contentions of the first talk many times with respect to “ways of knowing” of the Māori of New Zealand, and reader will be familiar with my beefs:

“Rethinking Expertise: How Indigenous Science Expands the Limits of Scientism for a Better Understanding of the World and Improved Decision Making”

Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon, Sauyaq Solutions and University of Alaska Fairbanks

Indigenous Sciences (IS) offer distinct ways of knowing derived from Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies, that often seem to stand in contrast to scientism. While scientism elevates scientific methods as the sole valid approach to knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge systems are holistic, integrating spiritual, cultural, ecological, and relational understandings of the world. Scientism focuses on the scientific method that is typically traced to the 16th and 17th centuries, ignoring the Indigenous processes of observation, hypothesis, and experimentation developed millennia ago. In addition to IS offering millennia of the scientific method, IS bring in more comprehensive approaches to science (what in mainstream science may be referred to as systems science or sustainability science) that includes place, culture, and community, recognizing that data cannot be understood without contextualization, and that humans cannot exist without the nonhuman world. IS also contextualize [sic] through relationality, generational knowledge, lived experiences, and oral traditions (nearly all religious texts are also based on oral tradition in dominant society. It is important to note that when scientism makes claims about what is science and what is evidence, it attempts to delegitimize other ways of knowing, engaging in epistemic injustice and intellectual colonialism, and creating a space where decisions can only bemade on what is “evidence” according to scientism. Epistemic pluralism recognizes multiple ways of knowing and creates space to co-produce new knowledge from multiple ways of knowing coming together. IS offers scientism a new way to see the world, through sustainable 7 generations thinking of over 800 years back and 800 years into the future, focusing on the long term instead of the short term. Indigenous approaches also create outcomes recognizing the interconnectedness between all things, removing silos between disciplines, and seeking to benefit future generations. IS exist for practice and life, they are not restricted to those with degrees and the ability to read. It is vital to decolonize scientism so that IS can be seen as both evidence and knowledge in collaborative decision making. ************ “Science-Envy and the Current Science Crisis” Matthew J. Brown, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

One feature of or type of scientism can be described somewhat disparagingly as “science-envy.” Scientism in this sense seeks to take the methods, practices, and results of science as the model or criteria for another field, such as philosophy. But contemporary science is not a worthy object of envy, due to a contemporary crisis in science. This crisis has two parts: internally, there is what we might call a quality control crisis, while externally, there is what we might call a crisis of expertise. Accordingly, fields like philosophy should not take science uncritically as a model or standard for success.

I can’t help defending science here against this calumny. Yes, science is imperfect: there are failures to replicate, and even Nobel Prizes have been given for things that were later shown to be wrong. But every bit of understanding about the universe that we’ve eked out of observation and experiment has come from science construed broadly. Despite the “contemporary crisis” that Dr. Brown touts, we have discovered black holes, gravity waves, mRNA vaccines for covid, golden rice, and, just this week, the structure of the fly brain, including all the neurons and their connections (and in some cases how the brain interacts with the fly body), a discovery that promises to promote huge leaps in understanding one of the great mystery of science: how the brain works. (I’ll write about that soon.)  How dare any tyro say that “science is not a worthy object of envy?”

Check out Surfshark https://surfshark.com/sgu, Quickie with Bob: Lunar Mantle Partially Molten; News Items: Heart Function in Space, Schizophrenia Drug, Wood Vaulting, AI Finds Nazca Lines, LISA Gravitational Telescope; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Religious Skepticism; Science or Fiction

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss474_Paul_Seabright_2024_10_05.mp3 Download MP3

Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics and the University of Toulouse, France. He earned his graduate degrees in economics from the University of Oxford. He was Assistant Director of Research and a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge until 2001. He has also been a consultant to private sector firms, governments and international organizations including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations. He is the author of The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, and his new book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

Shermer and Seabright discuss:

• What is religion?
• The landscape of religious numbers: going up or down, when and where?
• Why Americans are so much more religious than Europeans
• What motivates people to be religious despite (or perhaps because of) its costs?
• Religion provides people with meaning, purpose and community, which secularism alone often fails to deliver
• Religions as platforms, “organisations that facilitate relationships that could not [otherwise] form”
• Other “platforms” in history (markets, marriage broking, international trade)
• Popular explanations for religion pp. 180–181.
• Role(s) of religion in history and society today
• Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives
• Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?
• Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism
• Why some religions are so much more successful than others
• Rituals
• Social Gospel vs. Prosperity Gospel
• Taxes vs. Tithing
• Group selection vs. cultural selection
• Cults and New Religious Movements
• Why most religions fail but why some succeed
• Christianity and violence
• Islam and violence
• When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets be religious?

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Although Biden (and now Harris) have proclaimed an ironclad commitment to Israel’s well-being, they’re acting very wonky about Israel’s behavior.  First they withheld 2000-pound bombs from Israel (you know, the kind that were used on the targeted strike that killed the leader of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah), though the U.S. rations some of these bombs to Israel.

But now the U.S. is trying to tell Israel how to run a war that is an existential thread to Israel’s existence, for the tiny Jewish nation is fighting on seven fronts at once (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank).  But the U.S. has been trying to control how Israel responded to Hamas’s October 7 attack from the very beginning. First Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Gaza City. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Khan Younis. When they did, Biden told Israel in no uncertain terms not to go into Rafah, for that was “crossing a red line.” Kamala Harris backed up Bided then, asserting that she had “studied the maps.”  Israel did go into Rafah and got some hostages, along the way destroying much of Hamas’s military capabilities. All the while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was waffling, especially about negotiations, for he is the lever Biden uses to try to push Israel in his direction. Had the U.S. followed Biden’s wishes, then, Hamas would still be in control of Gaza, and the dangers of another October 7 would remain.

Now that Israel has made pretty short work of Gaza—granted, I don’t know what will happen “the day after”—and Israel is engaged with both Hezbollah and Iran, Biden is still trying to control Israel, telling the country not to do this and not to do that in response to the Iranian ballistic missile attack. “This” is “not going after Iran’s nukes”, and “that” is not going after Iran’s oil and gas fields. The former could possibly scuttle Iran’s nuclear program, while the latter would eliminate Iran’s major domestic source of income. (If I had my way, I’d say “get the nukes,” hard as that may be, for if Israel doesn’t do that, the country is doomed.)

The article from the Times of Israel below just reprises what I said, and what we know, about Biden’s response to Iran’s attack, and the headline tells the tale (click on it to read):

An excerpt:

US President Joe Biden says Israel has not yet decided how it’s going to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile strike.

“If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Biden says during a rare appearance at the White House daily press briefing where one reporter after another asks leading questions goading him to criticize Israel.

Earlier this week, Biden said he opposed Israel targeting Iranian nuclear sites as well.

Asked whether he thinks Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rejecting diplomatic agreements in Gaza and Lebanon to influence the upcoming presidential election, Biden responds, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none, and I think Bibi should remember that.

“As for whether he’s trying to influence the election or I don’t know, but I’m not counting on that,” Biden adds.

Biden says he assumes he will speak to Netanyahu when Israel decides on how it wants to respond to Iran.

Another reporter suggests Biden does not influence Israel. The president rejects the premise, saying he receives regular briefings and that his team is in constant contact with their Israeli counterparts.

“It’s the High Holidays… They’re not going to make a decision immediately. And so, we’re going to wait to see when they want to talk,” he adds.

Pressed again on how Israel should respond to Iran, Biden declines to offer further details. “That’s between me and them.”

Asked if he’s considering imposing sanctions against Iran, the president says the matter is under discussion.

Another reporter asks if there is anything the US can do to prevent an all-out war in the Middle East.

“There’s a lot we are doing. The main thing we can do is try to rally the rest of the world, our allies into participating — like the French are in Lebanon and other places — to tamp this down, but when you have proxies as irrational as Hezbollah and the Houthis and it’s a hard thing to determine,” Biden says.

No attacks on oil facilities, no attacks on bomb-building or uranium-enrichment sites. So what does Biden want Israel to do? All the progress Israel has made in defeating its enemies has involved ignoring Biden’s advice and “orders.” And if Biden really wants to tamp down the war, he should just let Israel respond the way it wants. (Remember none of these seven wars were started by Israel.) Why is he waffling so much, and trying to order Israel how to behave?

Well, there’s the election of course, for an Israeli attack on Iranian oil may drive up the price of gas at the American pump, and the U.S. would blame that on Biden. As for the attack on nukes, Biden may be considering the Muslim vote, for while there are more Jews than Muslims in America, the Muslims tend to live in swing states.

But Malgorzata has another credible theory, which is hers. In her view, Biden is determined to carry on the legacy of Obama, who was strongly invested in “balancing” the Middle East, believing that peace would obtain if the power of Shiite states (e.g., Iran) remained appreciable compared to the power of Sunni states. To maintain this balance of power, then, Obama favored a strong Iran, and that meant largely ignoring Iran’s progressing nuclear program while refusing to put sanctions on Iran. (Trump did put sanctions on Iran, but Biden removed them upon taking office).  Biden has continued Obama’s Middle East strategy since taking office.

So there we have a couple of speculations about why Biden is telling Israel not to retaliate against Iran by going after either oil or nukes.  Of course we don’t know what Biden is really thinking, but what is clear is that Biden is constantly trying to stop Israel from retaliating against attacks from Iran and Gaza, and also asking for a very limited response in Lebanon.  Biden’s “orders” are, in effect, orders to Israel to stop retaliating and, in the end, lose these wars, remaining perpetually subject to Islamist terrorism. Biden sure wouldn’t behave that way if, say, Canada started attacking the U.S. with ballistic missiles.

There is no doubt in my mind that Harris will continue to pressure Israel if she’s elected, except she’ll put the screws on tighter than did Biden.  Apparently the election is a big factor in BIden’s foreign policy towards Israel, and he may have forgotten that most Israelis regard themselves as being in a war for the existence of their country. It’s 1948 all over again.

***********

Oh, I almost forgot. Since I get flak from both sides, here’s a comment that came in yesterday from a peeved reader who doesn’t like me dissing Trump. The reader’s handle on his attempted comment was “Robert Peters,” and his attempted comment (posted here but not at the site) was meant to address this post: “An anonymous post at the Elder of Ziyon site: The Harris/Walz’s (and Biden/Harris’s) abysmal record on Israel, Jews, and the war.” The comment:

Your contention that Trump is mentally ill is utter nonsense and diminishes everything else you have to say.

This made me laugh, because first of all, it seems likely to me that Trump really is mentally ill, at least with a diagnosable pattern of symptoms that fit into narcissistic personality disorder:

Narcissistic personality disorder involves a pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with NPD as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding. This way of thinking and behaving surfaces in every area of the narcissist’s life: from work and friendships to family and love relationships.

People with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely resistant to changing their behavior, even when it’s causing them problems. Their tendency is to turn the blame on to others. What’s more, they are extremely sensitive and react badly to even the slightest criticisms, disagreements, or perceived slights, which they view as personal attacks. For the people in the narcissist’s life, it’s often easier just to go along with their demands to avoid the coldness and rages.

That seems to describe Trump pretty well. Of course I’m not a shrink, and everybody is some sort of mental outlier, but I think my view is reasonable. But beyond that, Mr. Peters is showing his own misguided petulance, saying that because I made one statement about Trump that he dislikes (he seems to be a Trump lover), it therefore “diminishes everything else I have to say.”  Peters, in other words, is being irrational, showing the tendency of many to dismiss everything coming from a person—or a source—that has made one offensive statement.  Too bad for him.

h/t: Norm

For the past ten years, Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) has been investigating star formation, chemical enrichment, migration, and mergers in the Milky Way with the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). Their work is part of the GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) project, an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists from institutes and universities worldwide. These observations have led to the highest spectral resolution multi-dimensional datasets for over a million stars in the Milky Way.

Previous GALAH data releases have led to many significant discoveries about the evolution of the Milky Way, the existence of exoplanets, hidden star clusters, and many more. In the fourth data release (DR4), the GALAH team released the chemical fingerprints (spectra) for almost 1 million stars. This data is the pinnacle of the 10-year project and was released during the 50th anniversary celebration of the AAT. According to the study that accompanied the release, the data will inform decades of research into the formation and evolution of our galaxy.

The study was led by Sven Buder, a research fellow at ASTRO 3D and the Australian National University (ANU). He was joined by an international team of researchers from ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, ASTRO 3D, ACCESS-NRI, the UNSW Data Science Hub, the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Technologies Research Centre, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Stellar Astrophysics Centre, the International Space Science Institute, and multiple universities. The paper describing the data release recently appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

The GALAH survey relies on the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES) working in conjunction with the 2-degree field (2dF) positioner. Both instruments are part of the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) located at the Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales. The 2dF positioner places a fiber at a star’s location in order for the light to pass to the HERMES instrument, which obtains detailed spectra of 392 objects at a time over two degrees of the sky. As Dr. Buder explained in a recent Science in Public news release:

“Our work is focused on collecting as much quality data as we can,” said ASTRO 3D’s Sven Buder, a research fellow at the Australian National University. GALAH has shown us which chemical elements make up the stars of the Milky Way. This dataset now helps further our ability to accurately age the stars in our neighborhood and understand where they came from. This data becomes a powerful tool for astronomers to test new theories and make new scientific discoveries about the Universe.”

The project scientists also rely on data from the Gaia, Kepler, and CoRoT missions, which have gathered optical data on countless stars in our galaxy. The GALAH project aims to determine the ages of these stars via their chemical signatures to get a clearer picture of the assembly of the Milky Way. This will allow astronomers to estimate a timeline of the Galaxy’s chemical and dynamical evolution and to investigate changes in the rate of star formation rate over time.

“We have measured the elements within these stars, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, as well as heavy elements found in our smartphones and electric vehicles,” added Dr. Buder. “This data will help us figure out how these elements are produced in stars, which is fundamental to explaining the origins of the building blocks of life.”

The spectral data consists of the visible spectrum with overlapping barcodes that indicate at which wavelengths light is being absorbed. These are the “chemical fingerprints” of the star, revealing their overall composition. This data will also help astronomers understand how the elements were formed and distributed throughout the Universe, offering hints about cosmic evolution. As if that wasn’t enough, the spectra can also be used for potentially detecting signatures of planetary systems.

The colorful spectra taken at Siding Spring Observatory with the element barcode of the pointer stars alpha Centauri, our Sun, and stars with very little elements. Credit: Sven Buder, ANU/ASTRO 3D

In the past, GALAH data has shown stars that may have consumed planets as the Milky Way developed. Said co-author Professor Daniel Zucker of Macquarie University:

“The GALAH survey has detected signs that some stars may have ‘eaten’ planets that were orbiting them. This can be observed by looking at the chemical composition of the star, as the elements from the consumed planet would show up as markers in the star’s spectrum.”

The GALAH datasets have had a profound impact on the global astronomical community and led to 290 scientific studies to date. The previous data release (DR3) paper covered 300,000 stars and became the most cited work of the year for the journal responsible. With data on almost 1,000,000 stars, the scientific impact of this latest release is expected to be tremendous. The GALAH dataset is also expected to play a vital role in training the next generation of machine-learning tools, which are increasingly important to astronomy.

“We are really looking towards an incredibly exciting period over the next few years where all of these discoveries about what’s happening in our Universe are going to flow from the data that we’ve collected right here in Australia using Australian telescopes and building on Australian research,” said Associate Professor Sarah Martell of UNSW, a key member of the project. Professor Emma Ryan-Weber, the Director of ASTRO 3D, added that the GALAH project is directly aligned with ASTRO 3D’s mission:

“It helps us understand how galaxies build mass over time. The chemical information the research team has gathered is like stellar DNA – we can use it to tell where each star has come from. We can also determine their ages and movements and gain a deeper understanding of how the Milky Way and other galaxies formed and have evolved. What’s more, as the ASTRO 3D mission comes to a close, the GALAH project will leave a lasting legacy of Australian science informing astronomical discoveries about the Universe’s origins and development for decades to come.”

The DR4 release can be found here, while the entire list of GALAH datasets can be found here.

Further Reading: Science in Public

The post The GALAH Fourth Data Release Provides Vital Data on One Million Stars in the Milky Way. appeared first on Universe Today.

The 2024 Presidential Election Survey is a representative (by age, race, sex and educational attainment) sample of 3,023 Americans, collected between September 5, 2024, to September 29, 2024. Substantively, the survey covers timely and controversial topics including: voting intentions and perceptions of election legitimacy, willingness to sever relationships because of political disagreement/support for violence if one’s preferred party loses the election, attitudes towards free speech, mental health, trust in journalism and other U.S. institutions, as well as various questions assessing peoples’ attitudes towards (and understanding of) abortion, immigration, crime, race, climate change, economic, gun control and war-related issues.

For additional information, please feel free to contact the Skeptic Research Center by email: research@skeptic.com.

Methodology

1. Methodological Details—2024 Presidential Election Study

Quick note: two powerful solar flares occurred in the last 72 hours, creating high spikes in the rate of X-rays from the Sun.

Each flare created a coronal mass ejection that could arrive in a couple of days at Earth, potentially creating a geomagnetic storm. Consequently there’s a good probability this weekend, especially Saturday night into Sunday morning (in Europe and the US), of seeing northern and southern lights (auroras). [See this post for some advice as to how to infer whether the storms have started and/or are ongoing.]

An estimated one in five Americans live with chronic pain and current treatment options leave much to be desired. Scientists are now using artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery in advanced pain management. The team's deep-learning framework identified multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs that can be repurposed to select non-addictive, non-opioid options to treat chronic pain.

For years, it seemed MDMA-assisted therapy would revolutionise PTSD treatment. But poor trial design and alleged misconduct ultimately stopped the treatment from receiving government approval

Hurricane Helene hit a quartz mine in North Carolina that is key to global semiconductor production, which could impact the entire tech industry. Here is everything we know so far

Mathematician Tom Crawford explains what P versus NP means – and what makes the problem so fiendishly difficult to solve

Researchers have found that exposing a certain class of particles -- micron-sized beads endowed with a special magnetic sensitivity -- to a rapidly alternating, rotating magnetic field causes them to organize into structures that are direction-dependent or anisotropic. The finding is significant because anisotropy can be manipulated to create new, tunable material structures and properties.

A detector on the International Space Station found signatures of unexpectedly abundant antimatter – which may have been created in clashes of dark matter particles

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

Last night I finished Abigail Shrier‘s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.  In an earlier post I reported that Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, reviewed the book on his Substack site, but the review largely neglected the book’s thesis in favor of reprising Lukianoff’s own ideas published earlier. But he did call Shrier’s book a “masterpiece.”

While I wouldn’t go quite that far—I reserve that word for books like Anna Karenina, the book is, in my view, superb, and should be read by every literate adult, whether or not you have children.  For it offers not only guidelines for parenting, but also explains why young people in society (as well as adolescents, college students, and young adults) are showing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They are emotionally stuck at about age twelve. And that, says Shrier, is due to “bad therapy”: the rise of an American therapy culture in which every child is constantly assessed, supervised, and psychologized by parents, their schools, and doctors.  (It is the schools and doctors, which include therapists, that have convinced parents that their children have psychological problems and need treatment.) The result is that we have one generation (I’d say two or more) that has grown up fragile, solipsistic, afraid to engage with the world, and socially inept.

In Lukianoff and Haidt’s earlier book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), the authors proposed their own explanation for why college students were fragile and ridden with anxiety, producing the current university culture of “safetyism”, in which students’ emotions are prioritized, ensuring that they never feel “unsafe”.  This in turn gave rise to the campus culture we all know: woke, opposed to “hate speech” (i.e., offensive speech), and imbued with a DEI mentality that itself rests on a presumed hierarchy of oppression in which those seen as the most oppressed are the most coddled.

This is no doubt one of the inspirations for Shrier’s book, but, pinning the blame for student dysfunction on well-intentioned parents, Coddling doesn’t really explain why the parents have become that way.  In contrast, Shrier’s book lays some blame on parents, but says that parents themselves been heavily influenced by others, namely school teachers and administrators, doctors, and therapists (amateur and professional), to believe that normal childhood behavior can often be seen as having some dysfunction that requires therapy. And that, in turn, gives rise to schools’ monitoring children’s emotions using “social-emotional learning methods” and to children being sent to therapists who, not knowing what to do, simply affix a diagnostic label to children and often medicate them.  Once “diagnosed,” children carry that label with them for years, in effect becoming their disease.  We thus have a generation replete with kids who believe they have fixable mental issues, and a generation of parents who reinforce this with “gentle parenting” that defers to the children at the same time robbing them of independence.

The other influence on Shrier’s new book is her first one,  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a controversial work that attributed the rapid rise the desire of young women to change gender to “social contagion”.  Shrier endorsed a new form of emotional dysfunction, “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), that, she said, was promoted by social media. And this led doctors, bent on “affirmative therapy” to affirm children’s desire (mostly young women)  to change gender, leading first to hormone therapy via puberty blockers, and later to full transitioning with more hormones and, perhaps, surgery.

While Shrier’s first book had mixed reviews, with the bad ones coming largely from those sympathetic to gender activism, in the end I think she’ll be proven right.  Her idea of ROGD, the most controversial part of the book, may not become a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM, but it’s clear that something happened in the last 15 years to boost the desire of young women to change gender. And I don’t think this is simply that society suddenly allowed those with gender dysphoria to go public.  Rather, the possibility of social contagion, caused by the rapid rise of social media, must partly explain the desire to change gender. There’s no doubt that this has happened in some cases, for I’ve heard testimony to that effect.  But regardless of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, Shrier was certainly correct that the rise of affirmative therapy has been damaging to young people. One need only look at the Cass Review, or the increasing recognition that affirmative therapy is bad therapy, to see that. Further a huge proportion (~80%) of gender-dysphoric adolescents who aren’t treated with that therapy will have their symptoms resolve, most of the children becoming gay (no surgery or meds required) or reverting to heterosexuality.

You can see how the idea of professionals influencing parents to think that their kids are ill has led naturally to the new book, which avoids gender issues in favor of describing how our “therapy culture” is ruining modern parenting. The book is heavily researched, and you’ll be horrified by examples of, for example, how schools have largely put aside their mission of teaching in favor of monitoring the emotional well being of kids.  (Often the parents have no idea what’s actually going on in schools.) Likewise, Shrier interviews therapists of all stripes, showing that many of them simply pathologize kids, dispensing medications after only one or two visits.  Even if only talk therapy is used, this can turn kids into solipsistic ruminators, constantly monitoring their own emotions. And that impedes their growing up.

If this is why are kids “aren’t growing up,” then what is the cure? Shrier advocates a form of old-fashioned parenting, curiously combining authoritative parenting that, at the same time, allows kids a lot more independence.  Instead of parents engaging in intensive discussion with kids who disagree with them, they should simply set up sensible rules for kids to follow (giving them chores, encouraging them to get jobs, and so on), and make the kids adhere to those rules. Shrier’s view is that children really want parental authority (this is why our universities are in loco parentis), and if they don’t get it then they don’t grow up (perhaps this is why one-parent familites produce dysfunctional kids more often.) She makes a strong case for severely limiting kids’ access to “devices” and social media, including banning the use of cellphones during the school day.

At the same time, kids need less safety and more independence. When I was a kid, when I got home from elementary school I hopped on my bike and rode off to see my friends. We had no parental supervision at these times. No longer! This kind of freedom and independence is now seen as parental neglect, and can even be illegal. Yet the lack of parental monitoring, and the need of kids to interact with only their peers, free from adult supervision, is essential, says Shrier, for learning how to negotiate life and with its inevitable burden of sporadic unhappiness and disagreement with others.

I am not a parent, and can vouch only for how much I enjoyed my own freedom as a kid (and yes, I had chores and rules, too).  But Shrier makes a convincing case that the “therapization” of kids is proceeding apace, and that schools are largely to blame (they are ofteb the gateway to professional therapy). In other countries like Japan and India, for instance, kids are sent off to school or to the store on their own at ages as young as five. And kids treated that way grow up fine.  American parents who feel deficient will find considerable solace in this book, as well as finding their own freedom from emotional distress around parenting as well as from obligations to constantly monitor their kids.

As I said, I don’t have kids, but I do recommend the book to parents as a palliative to the many volumes on “gentle parenting”. And, as I said, everyone should read it, really, because it explains what’s happening not only with this generation, but with the one before it: the high-ability but overemotional kids who now write for the New York Times and are the future “progressives” in Congress.

I have but two plaints about Bad Therapy, and they are absolutely trivial. First, Shrier made the decision to use the jargon of the new generation of kids to spice up her writing. The writing is generally engaging and excellent (one of the best features of the book), but sometimes the jargon is grating (I don’t have the book before me, so can’t give an example).  Second, Shrier, who is Jewish, keeps religion out of the discussion, but it slips in at the very end when she claims that hearing her young son’s first piano recital was the moment in her life when she felt “closest to God”, and avers that the sound of her three children’s first cries after birth could be explained only by a miracle (I’m pretty sure she means a divine miracle here).  But who except for a petulant atheist would beef about this stuff?

Child psychologists or schoolteachers may kvetch about this book, but its thesis, documented with over 40 pages of notes and references, makes considerable sense. Get this book and read it.

 

(Image below links to Amazon site):

Here’s Shrier talking about the malign influence of schools on kids’ well-being:

 

 

 

El Niño and La Niña cycles driven by ocean temperatures in the Pacific can influence weather in the North Atlantic 12 months later – a finding that could improve long-range forecasts

CHRISTOPHER RUFO is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. He is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the public policy magazine City Journal. His reporting and activism have inspired a presidential order, a national grassroots movement, and legislation in 22 states. Rufo holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Master’s of Liberal Arts from Harvard University.

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.

YASCHA MOUNK is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Mounk received his BA in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (featured on former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list) and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

Skeptic: Let’s talk about identity politics. Is it really the identity or is it the politics?

Mounk: The great civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, a gay Black political activist—though I’m not sure that he would want to list the adjectives in that order—said that the idea of a homogeneous Black community is the invention of White elites, as well as of certain Black people who want to lead it. I think this describes the situation very well. And this is important because it speaks to our model for political solidarity.

Let’s examine the popular ban on “cultural appropriation.” When I was growing up in Europe, the people who worried about cultural purity and the influence that other groups might have on your culture were on the right. Today, some of these concerns persist on the right, but a lot of them have moved to the left. It’s gotten to the point of absurdity, like left-leaning actors who apologize for voicing or acting in roles that don’t match their identity.

The core example is that of White musicians in the 1950s and 1960s “stealing” the music of Black musicians or being inspired by them, and going on to have big careers while Black musicians didn’t. The injustice in the 1950s and 1960s was not that there was some White jazz saxophonist inspired by Black musicians. The injustice was that Black musicians could not travel freely across America because of racism—they could not stay at some of the hotels in which they performed, they were banned from many concert venues, they wouldn’t be played on many radio stations, and they couldn’t be signed by many record labels. That’s what was unjust about it, not something called “cultural appropriation.” If you get that wrong, you also get wrong how you solve it. The way to solve that injustice is not to make sure that White musicians don’t play jazz music or rock ‘n roll. It’s to make sure that Black musicians and African Americans more broadly overcome the deep discrimination that they faced.

All culture is appropriation. Every element of our cuisine, the way we write, and the technology we use today is an accrual of past cultural appropriation. If we put those forms of mutual cultural influence under general suspicion, not only will we forego amazing cultural and technological innovations in the coming decades and centuries, but we’ll also fundamentally fail to celebrate positive aspects of our societies.

Skeptic: How do you respond to people such as Noam Chomsky, who argues that critiques of identity politics such as your own are exaggerations, that things such as critical race theory are just legal or academic ideas that are not filtering down to grammar schools or up to corporations, and that what you are saying is part of a vast right-wing moral panic?

Mounk: I think that’s a mistake. There are people on the right who brand anything they don’t like critical race theory or claim that teaching kids about slavery is critical race theory. That’s absurd. Of course we should teach American children about the terrible history of racial injustice and slavery in this country. However, as a result, a lot of people on the mainstream left, including smart people like Chomsky, end up saying, “Isn’t critical race theory just speaking critically about race in society?” Or they say it’s an academic theory and first graders aren’t reading the academic articles published by Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

What I worry about is teachers walking into classrooms in the third, second, and first grade and saying, “If you’re Black, go to that classroom; If you’re Asian American, go to that classroom; If you’re Latino, you go to that classroom; and if you’re White, you go to that classroom over there.” I think it’s fine for kids to be uncomfortable at times, because everything we know from social psychology is that how we define ourselves is malleable. However, when they’re told, “This is your in-group and that over there is your out-group,” that can lead to having endless empathy for the “my group” and terrifying disregard for the suffering of the other group.

So, while the aim may be to create White anti-racists, I think it’s much more likely to create White separatists or White supremacists. The other thing I would say is that these ideas not only now inform the norms and the practices of a great many institutions in the United States—important institutions such as schools—they also inform public policy in really worrying ways.

A shocking example of this was when I sat in on a meeting of the ACIP—the key advisory group advising the Centers for Disease Control—on how to roll out vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now we know that by far the best predictor of how seriously sick you will get from COVID is your age. Therefore, nearly every country in the world prioritized the elderly in their distribution. You might also prioritize hospital workers, because in the middle of a pandemic you don’t want the doctors to be sick. But after that, nearly every country started with the over 85s, and then the over 80s, and then the over 75s. And that also made it easier to communicate this to the public.

Well, ACIP said no. We have to care about racial equity. Older Americans are disproportionately White, and therefore it would be unjust to give a vaccine to them first, even though the CDC’s own model shows that deviating from prioritizing the elderly would raise the death toll by between 0.5 to 6.5 percent—in other words, by thousands of human lives. This had disastrous consequences, literally thousands of additional deaths because of identity politics.

Skeptic: You mentioned “identity politics.” How should we think about this term?

Mounk: The way I think about politics, there are two sets of distinctions: between liberal and authoritarian, and between the left and the right. I am a center-left liberal. I joined the German Social Democratic Party at the age of 13. I had to lie about my age to join it because by law you’re only allowed to join when you’re 14. So, I can claim as long an allegiance to the left as anybody my age. In the distinction between liberal and authoritarian, there are those who want to impose their views by force, have no tolerance for people who disagree with them, and see the world as split into the good and the evil. I want a society in which individuals have free speech and the right of free assembly, and the right of free worship. So even if I win a majority, I’m not going to impose my substantive moral views on you. And I recognize that just because you take what I consider the wrong position on some political issue, that doesn’t make you an evil person. That is what defines me as a true “liberal.” I think the liberal versus authoritarian distinction is more important than the left v. right one.

Skeptic: So there’s left-wing authoritarianism, just as there’s right-wing authoritarianism?

Mounk: How can anyone look at the history of the 20th century without recognizing that? Left-wing authoritarianism, which you may have more sympathy for, should also scare you. It’s much easier for people who think they’re doing good in the world to follow into believing that such forms of authoritarianism are for the good of all humanity, and so we are creating paradise on Earth, not just for one group, but for everybody. That can be very appealing. My grandparents, whom I loved and who were deeply decent human beings, were attracted to such ideas for understandable reasons. They grew up in shtetls, living in poverty and being discriminated against. They thought that we should fight for the rights of proletarians. So I have empathy for people who are tempted by that set of ideas, but I’m also aware of how easily they can seduce you in ways that eventually make you complicit in genuine evil.

Skeptic: You often discuss corporations adopting identity politics. Do they really believe this, or do they not want to be bogged down in lawsuits? What is your sense about that?

Mounk: I would say that there’s a real split. There are certainly true believers in Human Resources departments, and some true believers make a good living as diversity consultants. However, there are also some true believers in the elite class, some among CEOs, and so on. At the same time, there are a lot of people who have an incentive to shut up and stay quiet. People who are not that politically motivated just ask themselves, “Is it really worth my while to push back against this? You know, I’m going to be branded as a troublemaker and perhaps somebody will accuse me of being a racist or a bigot. I better just keep my mouth shut.” And there’s an interesting legal incentive for CEOs to go along with some of this, which is that if your company is sued for racial discrimination or sexual harassment, whether you have engaged in industry standard practices to avert those forms of bias constitutes a key defense. So once your competitors offer a deeply divisive diversity training, you have a legal incentive to do that too. If you don’t, a plaintiff might argue that you clearly didn’t care about discrimination.

So, I think that there is an incentive from social sanction—that speaking up against these ideas is perilous, and there is also an incentive from the actual legal system in the United States in terms of how you can defend yourself against lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.

Skeptic: Given how deep this trend is in education, are you worried about the next generation?

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Mounk: Yes. My students are deeply and fundamentally shaped by these ideas. Especially if they went to private schools, or schools in good school districts and affluent liberal-leaning parts of the country, these ideas have been drummed into them from day one. It’s the water that they swim in, and they take much of it for granted.

Skeptic: What can we do about it?

Mounk: Well, the first step is to argue back against these ideas from the moral high ground. And part of that is to argue on the basis of principles that you deeply believe in and that might make the world a better place. Now, there’s a broad range of principles that are compatible with liberalism that you can embrace. Perhaps you have a religious motivation, perhaps you’re a socialist, or perhaps you’re a conservative, all of that is fine. My own conviction is that of a philosophical liberal, as well as someone in the American context that has great admiration for certain movements.

Consider Frederick Douglass. When he was invited to hold a speech commemorating the Fourth of July, he called out his compatriots on the hypocrisy of talking about all men being created equal. He asked, “How can you celebrate that value and pat yourselves on the back when Black people around the country are enslaved right this moment?” However, he didn’t say to rip it all up. And while he recognized that newspapers and magazines said terrible things about Black people at the time, he didn’t reject free speech. He called free speech the dread of tyrants, because he realized that it was what allowed genuine political minorities, people who were very unpopular in their time, to fight for their rights.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.

Yesterday the Sun released a huge solar flare, and it’s heading toward Earth! It’s nothing to worry about since it’s nowhere near as large as the Carrington Event of 1859, but it is large enough to give us some amazing aurora.

Large solar flares happen periodically. Quite literally, because the Sun goes through an 11-year cycle of lower and higher activity. Right now the Sun is near the maximum of a cycle, so we see lots of sunspots and flares. When astronomers first studied the cycle they could only measure the number of sunspots at a given time. Solar flares were largely invisible to early telescopes. But now with orbiting observatories such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, we can capture images of solar flares in real time. Astronomers now categorize the strength of solar flares by the intensity of x-rays they emit, known as their x-class. The categories are numbered by power level, with each category double the previous one. So, for example, an X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1 and half as strong as an X3.

This latest flare is rated as X9, which is much stronger than most solar flares. But stronger events have reached Earth before. In 1989 an X15 event triggered a regional blackout event in Quebec. In November of 2003 the Sun released an X28 solar flare, but most of it missed Earth. The 1859 Carrington Event occurred before astronomers developed the x-class rating, but it’s estimated to have been around X45. So this flare is huge, but it won’t put our electrical infrastructure at serious risk.

What it will provide, however, is an auroral light show. As the charged particles released by the flare reach Earth’s magnetosphere, many of them will be caught by our magnetic field and spiral along the field lines to strike Earth’s atmosphere in the polar regions. The impact will trigger the subtle and beautiful light shows known as aurora. If you happen to live far enough from the equator you might be able to see them in the next few days. To find out your chances, you can check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The post The Sun Unleashes its Strongest Flare This Cycle appeared first on Universe Today.