Avi Loeb found what he was looking for

You were expecting little green men?

Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.

From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.

Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”

“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.

The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.

Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.

So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.

What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.

The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.

I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.

But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.

In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.

From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.

It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”

Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!

Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)

Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.

By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.

It’s Not Just Summer: Winter Heatwave Scorching South America

As you all know, 2023 has been off the charts, in terms of the global temperature. There have been record-breaking heatwaves and fires all over the northern hemisphere, but we’ve had the predictable chorus of “it’s always hot in the summer”. I don’t expect to persuade any of those people – they’re either wholly detached from reality, or they are being paid to help usher humanity to extinction. They are, however, a useful rhetorical device, and thanks to decades of relentless propaganda, there are still some who are uncertain about the facts of global warming, so in response to that bad-faith argument, I would like to direct your attention south of the Equator, to South America, which is currently in its winter, and has also been undergoing a record-breaking heatwave. From August 3rd:

Now should be South America’s bleak midwinter, but several parts of the continent are experiencing an extraordinary unseasonal heatwave that scientists believe offers a disturbing glimpse of a future of extreme weather.

Argentina’s riverside capital, Buenos Aires, this week recorded its hottest 1 August in 117 years.

Cindy Fernández, a weather bureau spokesperson, said her country was facing “a year of extreme heat”.

“Winter temperatures are way off the scale – not only in the central region where Buenos Aires is but also in the northern regions bordering Bolivia and Paraguay where temperatures reached between 37C (98.6F) and 39C (102.2F) this week.”

Hundreds of miles to the west, in Chile, temperatures rose even higher, towards 40C.

“July was the planet’s hottest month since records began and the Andes are now experiencing their own thermal ordeal,” announced the Santiago-based newspaper La Tercera. “Although we’re in winter, Chile is living through a little hell of its very own.”

Raúl Cordero, a climate expert from the University of Santiago, told the newspaper that as far as temperatures and rainfall were concerned, “Chile’s winter is disappearing”.

“It’s not surprising that temperature records are being set all over the world. Climate change ensures these records are broken more and more frequently,” Cordero said.

Parts of Paraguay, Bolivia and southern Brazil have also been baking in what extreme weather-watcher Maximiliano Herrera called “brutal” temperatures of almost 39C. “For at least five more days there won’t be any relief and we can’t rule out some 40s,” Herrera predicted on Twitter where he claimed the unusual winter heat was “rewriting all climatic books”.

“We are used to the heat in Paraguay, but the weather now makes it so hot we don’t leave the house,” said Ariel Mendoza, a 32-year-old car salesman in Paraguay’s capital Asunción, as the mercury there rose to 33C on Thursday.

Five years ago, winter in Paraguay made for chilly days, Mendoza pointed out. “But now it’s 30C-35C [86F-95F] in the winter due to climate change.”

In a stunning turn of events, turning up the temperature of the whole planet, turns up the temperature of the whole planet. The heatwave isn’t over, either. Here’s a lovely map from just a few days ago:

The image is a heat map of South America, showing a deep red over Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, parts of Equador and Columbia. The Andes can be seen as a green stripe hugging the west coast, and turning blue towards the southern tip of the continent. Urugay and Argentina show green, outside the heat dome. Two markers show temperatures of 45C/113F in Villamontes, Bolivia on August 22nd, and 41.9C/107.42F in Vueva Asuncion, Paraguay on August 23.

The image is a heat map of South America, showing a deep red over Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, parts of Equador and Columbia. The Andes can be seen as a green stripe hugging the west coast, and turning blue towards the southern tip of the continent. Urugay and Argentina show green, outside the heat dome. Two markers show temperatures of 45°C/113°F in Villamontes, Bolivia on August 22nd, and 41.9°C/107.42°F in Vueva Asunción, Paraguay on August 23.

The running theme of this century will be that nowhere is safe. This isn’t because we didn’t already know that. It’s been clear for decades that a global rise in temperatures was happening, and that nowhere would be safe from the harm that would cause. Unfortunately, thanks to the corruption and propaganda I mentioned earlier, a lot of people still haven’t really internalized what is happening to our world.

Apparently, they needed to actually see it happen, to actually believe it, and so here we are.

I don’t really blame people who have been duped on this issue, so much as those who have spent and earned fortunes in duping them. Even so, it’s hard not to be angry at those who have spent decades fighting to make this world, with all its horrors, come to be, because they were so afraid of communism, or so hateful of minorities, that they could not see the bigger picture.

It is not just summer. It is global warming, and it is everywhere.

NLRB Decision Is a Major Win for Workers’ Rights

I make no secret of my distaste for Biden on this blog. He’s done a lot during his career in politics to make the US – and the world in general – a worse place to live, and a lot of what he does seems to be in service of that damnable project. That said, despite things like his approval of the Willow Project, his refusal to do anything to oust Trump’s poison pill of a Postmaster General, and his opposition to any kind of universal healthcare system, his presidency has actually done some things to make life better for ordinary USians. I don’t know whether his boast of being “the most progressive president in history” has merit, but if it does, that’s largely because it’s a very low bar to clear.

I think it’s essential to shine a light on his failures – especially those relating to the climate – but today we’re talking about something for which we can genuinely thank Biden. Reuters teased a new era of worker-friendly governance from the NLRB last December, and it looks like we are seeing that now:

Following the NLRB’s decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, when workers ask an employer to voluntarily recognize a union as their bargaining representative, the company can voluntarily do so and begin good-faith negotiations.

Alternatively, the company may file a petition seeking an election, and as long as it does not commit unfair labor practices, one will be held. However, if a company does engage in such violations—or refuses to voluntarily recognize a union and fails to file a petition—the NLRB will now order the employer to recognize and bargain with the union without an election.

In other words, “union-busting just got a lot harder,” More Perfect Union said on social media. “This brings the board’s position closer to the old Joy Silk doctrine, which held that if a majority of workers signed union cards, there didn’t need to be an election at all and bosses just had to recognize the union and bargain in good faith.”

The Joy Silk doctrine came from a 1949 NLRB decision and was replaced by the Gissel doctrine in a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case.

As VICE reported Friday:

NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo earlier this year demanding that the board revive Joy Silk, something that labor activists have been fighting for since it was overturned. The Cemex decision issued on Friday is a partial step in that direction.

“What this new decision does is, it’s a compromise,” said Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “It’s not a return to ‘card check,'” the unionization process in the 1930s and ’40s that said if a majority of workers signed cards stating they wanted a union, the company was obligated to recognize and bargain with them—which Joy Silk had upheld.

“If there’s intense illegal union-busting, as is very often the case, the NLRB can force the employers to immediately recognize the union rather than have to go through another union election,” Blanc said. “But it’s far short of what many union organizers were hoping for. By not making ‘card check’ the norm, [it] still opens up the process to all sorts of legal appeals and delays, which is ultimately one of the main tactics of employers—to delay the union first and then hold things up in endless appeals. This unfortunately doesn’t avoid that dynamic, but it does get the NLRB more powers to require employers to recognize unions, and that should be at least a partial deterrent on employers’ willingness to break the law.”

Brishen Rogers, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said on the social media platform X that “Cemex may be the most important NLRB decision in a generation.”

It is “hard to say if it will survive review,” Rogers added. “But labor and the state can use it to change power alignments right now through organizing—which in turn would *help* it survive review.”

This is good news. I’ve come to believe that widespread unionization is the most direct path to the kind of organized labor power we would need to carry out a general strike, to force more drastic action on things like climate change, healthcare, and wealth inequality. This decision will make that a whole lot easier.

Even so, I think we should not forget Biden’s decision to break the rail strike back in December. He ended up getting rail workers some sick leave (less than they need), but I think it’s important to note that he wanted that to happen on his terms, not on the workers’ terms. The Democrats do not want systemic change, and won’t back even a nonviolent revolution. What they will do, is make that far easier to accomplish than it would be under the Christian fascist regime that the GOP wants to impose.

It is important for workers to take advantage of this NLRB and build power, and given the wave of union interest we’ve seen recently, I think they will. This is an opportunity that is unlikely to last forever, given the nature of US politics, and so I think we should expect another turn against unions and workers’ rights within the next decade. The stronger workers get before that happens, the more they will be able to resist the attack when it comes, and oust politicians who’re trying to take away the peoples’ power.

Video: More Perfect Union Takes a Look at Protesting in France and the United States

I follow More Perfect Union on Twitter and Bluesky, but I haven’t gotten around to watching much of their content on Youtube. I’m slowly changing that now, and I wanted to share this one addressing the question of why the US doesn’t protest the way France does. It’s a good look at the subject, and I think you should check it out!

Unrelated, for those who care to know, I’m not going to post on weekends going forward.

 

When thieves fall out, the prosecution wins

One of the tactics that prosecutors use against defendants is to try and pressure lpeople to testify against their bosses. If that fails, then they charge them with offenses and use that to pressure them to turn against one another in exchange for a favorable plea deal. This works particularly well against low-level people who may not have the resources to pay for expensive attorney and for whom the prospect of any jail time would be alarming. They may well wonder why they should take the fall for doing the bidding of others.

The Georgia case with its 18 defendants in addition to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) provides plenty of opportunities for such negotiations and it looks like the process the process has already started.
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Men’s superior brains give them an edge, I guess

I’m not all clear on the logic here, but trans women have been banned from chess competitions.

The world’s leading chess federation voted this week to bar transgender women from its women’s competitions.

Federation Internationale des Echecs, or FIDE, acts as the governing body of all international chess competition. In a ruling approved Monday, the organization said that a competitor who changes their gender may gain competitive advantages.

No one has come out to say what those competitive advantages might be. More cc of brain tissue? Should we break out the calipers and ban people with cranial capacities larger than 1500cc? Let’s teach those big headed freaks a lesson.

Fox News is brave enough to say it, though. They consulted super brain scientist Riley Gaines about the matter, because real scientists would just snort and tell them to fuck off. Gaines, whose sole claim to fame is that she tied with a trans woman for 5th place at a swim meet, and made a huge stink about it, was asked whether she agrees with this discrimination. Of course she did. Maybe she can explain the biological reasoning behind it?

No, she can’t. What is that argument about brain size and ability anyway? I need one that wasn’t debunked a hundred years ago.

Elon Musk gets the Ronan Farrow treatment

Light up another one, Elon

Whoa. Cautious, fair, thorough…Ronan Farrow reviews Elon Musk’s life. Imagine an angel of utmost probity assessing his soul at the doorway to heaven, nodding kindly as he summarizes each decade, and then, sadly, pulling the lever that drops him into a blood-drenched flaming tunnel to Hell. It’s so satisfying.

Here’s a short sample.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

See what I mean? Farrow doesn’t pass judgement, he just calmly describes Musk’s appalling history of imposing his awful ignorance on everyone around him.

Read the rest. You won’t enjoy it, but much respect to the writer’s skill.

Not the greatest idea in counter-programming

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to take great pleasure in tormenting the Republican party, the very organization that he seeks to become the presidential nominee of. He refuses to commit to attending the first Republican National Committee (RNC) debate debate among the primary contenders to he held this coming Wednesday the 23rd from 9:00pm-11:00pm Eastern time on Fox News or whether, if he does decide to take part, whether he will sign the pledge to support the eventual nominee, whoever that is. At present, eight people have met the donor and polls threshold (Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, SSAT, Mike Pence, and Chris Christie) and only the first five have signed the pledge. Late news has businessman Perry Johnson (who?) also qualifying for the debate.

It is clear that SSAT has nothing but contempt for the GOP as am independent political entity and thinks that he, as an individual, is the only one that matters and that the GOP’s role is to merely support him. He may well be right in that judgment.

There has been speculation that he will skip the debate but since he is loath to give up the spotlight, yesterday comes reports that he may agree to an interview with Tucker Carlson at the same time as the debate, as a form of counter-programming. Typically, he just drops this as a possibility, not really committing to it, and is likely to be ambivalent right up until almost the last moment, thus keeping everyone off-balance.
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Montana Court Upholds Right to Clean and Healthful Environment.

Growing up, I was exposed to a great deal of U.S. patriotism, in the form of songs, fictionalized propaganda like Little House on the Prairie, and Fourth of July parades. After 9/11, it all became much more about the US armed forces (which is actually very appropriate, given US history), but what sticks with me is the focus on the landscape. The landscape was a revelation for the Europeans who created the United States, despite the fact that they murdered the people who had shaped and maintained that landscape, and set about trying to turn it into a version of the European terrain they’d left behind by clear-cutting, straightening rivers, building cities and monoculture farms, and wiping out species they viewed as bad. Still, much of the landscape remains beautiful, and a lot of American pride remains tied to that beauty. It’s not surprising, then, that the state constitution of Montana, home of Yellowstone National Park (along with Idaho and Wyoming) guarantees a right to a “clean and healthful environment”. The only problem is that, as with democracy, this noble principle is incompatible with capitalism, so oil companies have largely had their way.

Until now.

In Held v. State of Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that rights of the plaintiffs—who range in age from 5 to 22— have been violated by the Montana Environmental Policy Act because the law has prevented the state from assessing the climate impacts of mining projects.

Fossil fuel emissions including Montana’s “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in heating the planet and causing pollution, Seeley said in the nation’s first ruling on a constitutional, youth-led lawsuit regarding the climate.

Because the Montana Constitution guarantees residents a “clean and healthful environment,” the state’s environmental policy law violates the document, said Seeley.

“This is HUGE,” said meteorologist Eric Holthaus.

It is huge. The cynical part of me says I’ll believe it when I see real change from it, but this is absolutely a win, not just because of changes to policy in Montana because of it, but because this lawsuit is far from alone, and this ruling sets a precedent that will be very helpful going forward:

As Common Dreams reported last month, lawsuits around the world have emerged as a key driver of climate action as a wide range of plaintiffs—from children in the U.S. to senior citizens in Switzerland—have argued that their human rights have been violated by the companies and lawmakers that have promoted fossil fuel production despite scientific evidence of the danger it poses.

Out of approximately 2,200 worldwide climate cases, about three-quarters have been filed in the United States, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center, and the number of legal challenges has more than doubled since 2017.

The outcome of the Montana case could “open up the floodgates for more climate lawsuits,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media.

I talk a lot about the ways in which our government and “justice” system are corrupt and illegitimate, but there is no questioning their power, and there are many within those institutions who take them seriously. I think it’ll be some time before we can actually see the material effects of this ruling, but it seems like this isn’t just going to go away.

This is also one reason why it’s better to have the corrupt, illegitimate system we know, than the corrupt, illegitimate system that the fascists running the GOP intend to create, if they manage to finish destroying the laws and institutions that protect what democracy we do have, and that protect the working classes from absolute rule by capitalists. Workplace and community organizing remain essential, but it’s a very good thing that people are fighting for change in the courts, as well. In my more cynical moments, I tend to view court cases and electoral campaigns as the things we have to do to demonstrate the need for action outside the official channels. It’s nice to have a reminder that it really is fighting this battle on all fronts, because there is victory to be found.