redshift-13

"Graph: surprise, the class war is real. Illustrated is that capital’s share of national income (GDP) has been rising for five decades as labor’s share has been falling. Oligarchs own the capital stock. Labor owns labor. When payments to capital rise, oligarchs benefit. When payments to labor fall, labor loses. As the graph illustrates, labor has been losing in the US for fifty years. Source: economycharts."

Elect a handful of legislators who call for affordable healthcare, education and housing, and something more than official indifference to climate change, and apparently that means that the communist red guards have commenced their long march through the institutions.

Being able to afford medication without having to skip meals? Surely the American experiment in democratic self-governance is imperiled.

Not having student loan debt until your 50s? -A step on "the dark road of death to communism."

Communism is the new DEI, is the new trans, is the new groomer, is the new LGBTQ, is the new feminism, is the new secular humanism, is the new naughty library book, is the new critical race theory, is the new liberalism, is the new disrespect for the flag, is the new scary thing that signifies scary change and scary difference.

"Multiple Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 14 Palestinians, more than half of them in a drone strike on a funeral procession.

Nine months into its so-called “ceasefire” with Hamas, Israel continues to violate it on a near-daily basis.

Eight people were killed when an Israeli strike targeted a gathering of civilians in the Al-Balata market area of Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Friday, Gaza’s civil defence agency and a hospital said.

At least 20 others were injured, the Al-Awda Hospital added.

Witnesses said the drone targeted Palestinian mourners gathered outside the Ahmad Yassin Mosque as they waited to begin a funeral procession for a Palestinian killed in a separate attack earlier in the day in the same area.

“There is no regard for the ceasefire,” said Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City.

“The people who were participating in the [funeral] procession were coming out of the mosque [when] a drone strike targeted a group of people within the procession itself.”"

...

How the ground-breaking discovery of a new material form in chemistry—matter in a dynamic kinetic state—is helping to explain life’s unique characteristics.

The materialist view of nature has guided scientific thinking since Galileo—reality can be measured, modeled, and explained. Nature is objective. But our everyday life experiences just don’t seem to fit in with that view. Purpose, desire, and consciousness are real, but not objective. How could natural processes have led to such unnatural consequences? The physical nature of living matter, a material form that has totally overwhelmed our planet, remains inexplicably unresolved. Biology, never mind psychology, simply does not make basic physical sense. Until now. In Life’s Chemical Secret, Addy Pross offers at last a scientific explanation for life’s greatest puzzle. Through the discovery of a new dimension in chemical possibility, Pross and his collaborators have opened a new door to understanding life’s fundamental nature. The emergence of cognition, mind, and purpose is now comprehensible through the existence of dynamic kinetic states of matter. Some four billion years after life on earth first appeared, living forms can now understand how the universe was able to discover itself.

ENDORSEMENTS

One of the biggest open questions in science is how living, thinking creatures arise from the evolution of ordinary non-living matter. We all know it can and does happen, but the specific mechanisms remain elusive. Addy Pross has long been a leader in investigating how dynamically stable complex systems can arise in physics and chemistry. Now he turns his attention to the origins of thinking and agency. This is a provocative, important book, aiming squarely at some of the most important issues out there. ~Sean Carroll, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe series

Addy Pross truly identifies Life’s Chemical Secret: Dynamic Kinetic Stability: Persistence. Living systems construct themselves to get on with getting on. Life gets to exist at levels of chemical complexity that physics alone cannot explain. It is time for us to rethink. ~Stuart Kauffman, MacArthur Fellow, author of Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution

You might not have yet heard of Dynamic Kinetic States of matter, but you should learn about them by reading this thought-provoking book, as they may hold the secret to life on Earth and elsewhere…a must read if you want to understand how you came to exist. ~Tim Coulson, University of Oxford, author of A Little History of Everything

Fascinating… Addy carries us gently into a new paradigm for thinking about the chemical basis of life, and in doing so, he re-frames our deepest sense of why things exist and what it means to call something real. ~Steve Grand OBE, Artificial life researcher, author of Creation: Life and How to Make It

In his beautifully written book, Addy Pross makes three major achievements. First, he clearly explains the distinct conceptual issues posed by the physical and the biological sciences. Second, he describes a new field of chemical research that may provide a bridge to merging our understandings of living and non-living matter. And third, he recognizes the areas between the two fields where scientific answers have yet to be found. It takes intellectual courage to write such an honest book. ~James Shapiro, University of Chicago, author of Evolution: A View from the 21st Century

Addy Pross has uncovered the chemical roots of Darwinian theory, thereby opening a novel route connecting biology to physics and chemistry. ~Ada Yonath, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry

...

This is probably old hat to anyone seriously pursuing screenwriting, but I found it quite interesting.

As I wrote about a while back, I read through a screenplay of a relative of mine and sent him a bunch of notes. He found this helpful but he still wanted more feedback. So, he paid a script consultant $350 for an analysis and then $75 to Greenlight Coverage for an a.i. analysis.

He was amazed by the a.i. analysis - its insight, nuance, and length of analysis. And if I'm not mistaken it gave him a list of references to other movie scenes that paralleled his to some extent and which could prove inspirational. He seemed to think that a.i. script analysis might be a death knell for human screenplay consultants.

I can see why that might be the case, but I hope it isn't. For one, I think there's too much knowledge and experience of humanity that a.i.s won't have. Human personality and social experience, or so I assume for the foreseeable future, can't yet be fully algorhythmicized.

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community.  The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers. The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

...

The expansion schemes for Givat Ze’ev, Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Etzion, and Karnei Shomron are just the most prominent plans to have surfaced within real estate events held at places like the Park East synagogue in Brooklyn. They form the spearhead of a broader Israeli strategy to aggressively expand settlements and infrastructure across the West Bank in order to “bury” the prospects for a Palestinian state, in the words of hardline Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. 

...

From the perspective of Palestinian landowners, the battle being waged today is one that is rigged in favor of potential Jewish settlers living in New York over the Palestinians who own the land. “This really isn’t about who owns the land or who can prove ownership. We have entered a battle we know we have already lost,”  Ibrahaim Atallah, the farmer from Beit Iskaria, said.  Pointing to the historical map of Palestine hanging on his wall, he closed our conversation with a quiet grief: “We were displaced in the Nakba of 1948, driven from our land by force. That is the same logic that is taking our land away now.” “They’re using legal avenues, but it all rests on the same logic of force,” Atallah remarked.

...

More at the link.

The agent's wife:

A BROUILLETTE: He'd hit me, choke me. And there was an incident where we had been fighting, and I walked away, and I got in the shower. And he comes in with a gun and points it at me and tells me that he's going to blow my brains all over the bathtub.

A voice recording of the ICE thug himself:

DAVID BROUILLETTE: Do I think that you should have your [expletive] throat cuts or should have had them cut? Yep.

"The search for life outside our solar system has taken another twist as researchers revealed they have discovered an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet 49 light years away that could have liquid water on its surface.

Atmospheres have previously been found around gas giant exoplanets as well as “sub-Neptunes”. There have also been signs of such envelopes around rocky exoplanets that sit outside their star’s habitable zone – a region in which liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface, and hence potentially support life.

But the new discovery is different.

“This is the first actually observationally confirmed atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone outside of our solar system,” said Dr Collin Cherubim, the first author of the study, who until recently was based at Harvard University.

The findings, he added, also marked the first direct identification of an atmospheric species for any rocky exoplanet, whether in a habitable zone or not.

“This is a really exciting discovery because I think it really puts LHS 1140b at the forefront as the best, most promising, exciting laboratory for studying astrobiology and habitability outside of our solar system,” he said.

The planet, LHS 1140b, has a mass 5.6 times that of Earth and its radius is 70% larger. While Cherubim noted it was similar to Earth in some ways – such as its overall composition and temperature – it differs in others: for example it is tidally locked, could have far more water, and probably has a very different atmosphere."

...

The fact of slavery, the lived experience of slavery, and the lasting social and political effects of slavery are all eminently worthy of historical study and public memorialization.

Not if you're among the ranks of the anti DEI right, however. In their view the public retelling of history should revolve around the veneration of historical figures and traditions. The mere mention of slavery, they fear, undermines the authority of tradition, and therefore their political projects in the present. Tradition is the center of their moral and political epistemology, the standard against which truth and goodness is measured. So, when historical truth telling occurs, the golden aura of these traditional narratives dissipates and its halos are dislodged from the heads of their idealized historical exemplars. The political and cultural right ultimately wants a civic, moral and intellectual world of idols toward which everyone is expected to genuflect.

Their solution is to marginalize and censor the rough spots even if this includes, and it does, removing books from libraries, demanding control over school curricula, ending grants for academic research, and forcing the closure of entire academic departments (as with the case of New College in Florida). Their solution, at root, is to suppress rational, critical thought itself. The Christian right's attacks on universities, on science, on academic curricula, and on the secularity of public schools is a manifestation of this fear and hatred of freethought, free inquiry and reason.