Monthly Archives: August 2016

Fredrik deBoer remarks on the recent evolutions of Star Trek:

I saw the new Star Trek movie. When I tell you that it’s all punching and shooting, I’m really not exaggerating. It’s all punching and shooting. And as far as punching and shooting summer action movies goes, it’s OK. It has an ending that’s like two 13 year old boys talking about what a good ending would be via text message, but it isn’t completely soulless, which is better than you can say for most franchise movies.

But Star Trek isn’t about punching or shooting.  It’s contemplative. It’s about actual moral conflict and ambiguity. It’s optimistic about the prospect of peace and the ability to solve problems nonviolently. It lets stories develop slowly. It’s about exploration and diplomacy far more than its about combat. And, look, yes, the old Onion joke – “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’” – I get it. You have to make concessions to the box office. But I don’t understand the point of turning Star Trek into a punching and shooting franchise, which is what all of these movies have been. I mean, I do understand. It’s the fact that our culture industry is a human centipede that has to keep passing predigested excrement from one host body to the next, so every preexisting “IP” has to have all of its value sucked out until there’s only a dry husk remaining. But it just doesn’t work, fundamentally, to turn Star Trek into Punch Quest. There are other problems with the movies – I just don’t buy Kirk and Spock’s friendship, the actors don’t have chemistry – but on a basic level they suffer from trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

And I’ve been more or less lukewarm on all the later Star Trek movies as well. Here’s the thing about the initial series, why it seems to hold up so well – it’s not really about the wonder of the future, the joys of going toe to toe with Klingons or Romulans, or getting sucked into giant cones of destruction, or any of the veneer of those episodes.

At its heart, its enduring attraction is about the moral questions it raises, as Fredrik notes. Just a couple of examples:

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” brings to the fore the question of how uploading our consciousness to a computer will change us – can we even hope to be stable personalities in such a scenario?

“Balance of Terror” examines the impact of unthinking hostility can have on two civilizations, and what impact an unexpected link between the two can potentially have.

“The Doomsday Machine” examines a problem we’re really beginning to seriously wrestle with only today – automated weaponry and its worst consequences.

Hopefully, thousands of other people have made this same point, but it seems as if Hollywood doesn’t get it. A good story isn’t merely a sequence of actions, or even a logical sequence of action / reaction with big flashy lights.  A good story raises a serious question, even a moral dilemma, and tries to play out the consequences of decisions made in light of the question. This is what really fascinates us the most, from The Odyssey to E.T. to Blade Runner. A memorable story contains that nugget of some compelling question and tries to answer it. You can see that in historical dramas, Superman cartoons, and other memorable stories.

And, to tell the truth, I can barely remember the recent Star Trek movies. Vulcan is eaten by a black hole. Yeah. Uh, who cares? Maybe this is why, for all that the Spock replacement is good, and ya gotta love the McCoy replacement’s accent, there’s no real chemistry, and no real future for the future. Where’s the interesting dilemma?

Punch Quest, yeah!  Yeah. yeah.

yeah.

The ongoing exploration of Ceres has passed into “extended mission” territory, reports Marc Rayman on Planetary.org:

Following the conclusion of the prime mission, the adventurer began its “extended mission” of performing more Ceres observations without missing a beat. We described in April some of what Dawn can do as it continues investigating many of the mysteries there. Dawn’s extension allows for even better measurements with the gamma ray and neutron detector of the nuclear radiation emanating from Ceres. This is like taking a longer exposure of the very faint nuclear glow, yielding a brighter, sharper picture that reveals more about the atomic constituents down to about a yard (meter) underground. The spacecraft is taking more stereo photos, continuing to improve the topographical map it created from four times higher. Scientists also are taking advantage of this opportunity to study more geological features with the visible and infrared mapping spectrometers, providing important insight into Ceres’ mineralogical inventory.

Gotta love the picture.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA

Marc says the white spots are sodium carbonate.

Sometimes you wish for a better camera.

A Citroën nesting in a parking ramp today.

Too bad I didn’t get a good focus.

The City of St. Anthony, provider of police to the City of Falcon Heights where the Philando Castile shooting took place, has issued a press release describing police training here. I quote without commentary:

What has happened here hurts us all, yet we also realize that it has created both the need and the opportunity for a broader conversation about law enforcement. We need to talk about who serves our community and how we can all make sure they are as prepared as possible to react and respond in the right way at the right time. St. Anthony has a very strong history of bringing together dedicated officers with the broad training that continues to make our cities safe. Our officers go far beyond what Minnesota requires in terms of training and  professional development to continually seek out ways to not only be better prepared to react to situations, but to have the experience to be able to proactively connect with the communities. It is part of the cultural foundation of our department but is something we know needs to be continually shared with the community at this important time.

Yes, we’re Fringing, but due to the ephemeral nature of the Fringe shows, we have no plans to post reviews here.

But we will say that, so far, this Fringe’s shows are above average. We’ve seen two “Mehs”, four “Oh that was good”, and three “Wow!” or between those last two categories. No abysmal failures.

This report from Leslie Salzillo @ The Daily Kos is heartbreaking:

New York volunteer Firefighter Kenneth Walker received a threatening letter on Monday telling him to resign form the North Tonawanda fire department or “regret it.” The short letter made clear it was mean to be read as a hate-filled racist attack. Walker who has been volunteering for two years is the only black volunteer at the department. He found the threatening letter in his mailbox at home.

On Wednesday, only two days later, Walker’s home was burned down while the family was out. No one hurt physically, but they lost their two cats and all of their possessions. The fear and psychological damage cannot be underestimated. [sic]

Leslie clearly wants to blame it on the Trump campaign:

Racism has existed in America for centuries, but there is no doubt that we are seeing a new surge ever since Republican nominee Donald Trump began his campaign in 2015. The candidate seems to legitimize hatred, racism, mysogyny [sic], and xenophobia… He brings out the darkest of souls while being praised by the likes of KKK and white supremacists.

HuffPo reports the neighbor might be responsible:

North Tonawanda police arrested [neighbor Matthew] Jurado within 24 hours of the blaze, the North Tonawanda Times reports. They claimed that Jurado admitted to starting the fire, but he said it wasn’t racially motivated and that he did not write the threatening letter.

Regardless of whether or not this guy torched the house for racial reasons or for something else, this is an opportunity for Trump, if he & his advisors can see it. He should dip into his wallet and make Walker whole again.

Why? Because it’s a message to two communities. First, it’s a message to the racist community that Donald Trump has no room for such attitudes in his campaign. By helping out where he can, he raises consciousness about his support for all races in the American dream.

Second, the same message goes to the independents who will help decide the upcoming election. While the racist community should be discouraged at the rejection, for the independents it’s a positive message of generosity and display of the sort of attitudes which advance America – not cause it to self-destruct.

I would be extremely surprised if Trump even discussed the opportunity, much less took advantage of it. He comes from the private sector and has made it abundantly clear the Wealth is King, not good citizenship or a belief in justice and rewarding those who make sacrifices.

Continuing this thread, Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare discloses a fascinating discussion he had with some national security professionals with respect to the current election:

Over drinks the other evening, I played a parlor game with several of my companions: I asked each to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how nervous he or she was about a Donald Trump presidency, figuring into the calculation both the likelihood of the event and the magnitude of the disaster it would pose. The mean was around 7 or 8—with most people rating the event completely terrifying but the probability low. The complacent outlier rated the matter only a 4. The alarmed outlier, however, was a career Justice Department lawyer, who insisted—against the rules—of rating the matter a 14.

His explanation, which has two distinct elements, bears some reflection.

First off, he argued, the mere fact that Trump has come this far shows something deep and ugly. Even if he now loses and loses big, he has already shown that something very like a Trump presidency is possible. Even with all his craziness, his malevolence, and his self-destructive narcissism, Trump is polling around 40 percent of the electorate. That means that someone a little more polished, a little less evidently unhinged, and a little less committed to offending large swaths of the electorate could plausibly win a federal presidential election. That was something we didn’t know about America as recently as last year. As my interlocutor put it, even if Trump loses, “the sheen is off America for me.”

Well worth a read. It goes on to address some of the issues having to do with separation of powers and how the two party system, until recently, has acted as a filter on the unfit gaining high office. While some might argue the point with regard to Nixon and Reagan, in the former case Nixon certainly had accomplishments to his name, such as opening up China and terminating the Vietnam War, while Reagan had a lot of supporting actors and a temperament not prone to crazed violence.

But I wish Benjamin had addressed another possible restraint on a lunatic in power: civil disobedience by those who implement operationality. The Executive, while unitary in concept and ideal, is really composed of a collection of men and women obeying the lawful orders of the person at the top. The key here is the word lawful.

What if the lunatic issues unlawful orders? Former CIA Directory Michael Hayden has already suggested that the military won’t obey unlawful orders. But the military is different from the general Executive branch in that, while it’s under the orders of the Executive, it is not replaced by new Administrations, while the personnel of the Executive branch is always, if only in part, replaced with new people as selected by the President and his surrogates. If a lunatic President selects other lunatics – and by lunatic I really simply mean “someone whose views are substantially different from ours concerning the nature of reality” – that share the outre views, then how will illegal orders be resisted?

Benjamin comes to a rather gloomy conclusion:

But I fear that the explanation may turn out to lie in that broader weathering and atrophying of our systems of restraint on power. We have a legislature that no longer functions in basic areas, after all. Congress chooses not to make immigration policy or pass budgets on time or authorize uses of force overseas. All of this serves, in the aggregate, to lessen restraints on the power to the president, who ends up acting on his own as a result. That migration of power from the legislature to the executive puts an ever-greater premium on the wisdom and judgment of the President, whoever he or she may be. Yet it also now seems to coincide with—at least in this instance—failures of party institutions to control the gateways to that ever-increasing power. In other words, we may be seeing a simultaneous degradation of our political institutions in which the failures of the legislature increase the power of the presidency, while the failures of the parties increase its susceptibility to stupidity, demagoguery, even insanity.

The drone of the Evils of Big Government may have brought us to this cliff, and pointing at high tax rates and curbs on the ability to pollute will hold little water when people begin to arbitrarily disappear – and the atmospheric radiation levels skyrocket because the Great Leader chose to shoot off a few nuclear weapons just to teach the world a lesson.

This, perhaps, may turn out to be the great failure of the Republic. Remember, for all that we call the USA a democracy, the United States is actually a Republic, in which we choose representatives to manage and implement our government wisely, and by which we insulate the vast majority of the population from the puzzlements of government, and, to the obverse, insulate the government from the degrading forces of the insular, parochial, and tribal. Perhaps even Republics will fail under the determined assaults of those who find thinking in the large too tiring, those who embrace ideologies, rather than reality; they’d rather pollute the landscape as did their forefathers; destroy their enemies as did their forefathers; and hate as did their forefathers.

Ignoring the problem that the new, terrible forces at hands are boomerangs – the energies are so great that we can destroy ourselves by continuing our old ways.

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) is a movie of beautiful images: desert vistas highlight those ships of the sands, camels, traveling in a moonlit night, conveying the iconic three kings about their duties; great stone cities, every bit of rough, decaying mortar embodying the future of the Roman Empire, dust caking the feet of their inhabitants; river flats holding in their many-fingered hands the men and women who must wash the clothing of their families and listen to the teachings and prophecies of the God-men.

And the latter abound, as this is the story of Jesus Christ, played by a splendid Max von Sydow, an actor who does more with his eyes than some actors do with their entire careers. The cast is studded with contemporary and future stars, from the legendary John Wayne, as a Roman centurion with a single line of dialog, to David McCallum, soon to star in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as Judas Iscariot, to Telly Savalas as Pilate.

Individual performances are often superb, as characters, mostly male, are given the time and panoramas to inhabit their roles. Some might find the performances leaden, but I thought them subtle and nuanced. Judas is a man clearly tormented by his choices, if they are in fact choices for him to make; Jesus’ human side comes through clearly as Sydow’s performances exhibits his self-doubts; Claude Rains, in his final performance, as King Herod, a King being shivered to splinters by the forces of change swirling about him, is impressive in his brief screen time. Dialog is delivered mostly at leisure, giving the audience time to contemplate the meaning and the motivations; there is no patter, nor the hurried spittle we often see in today’s cinema offerings.

And yet, for all this, the movie is somewhat leaden. The beautiful delivery of the dialog shelters, but does not obscure, that much of it is cribbed from the Bible – and depends on the knowledge of the viewer to hang together. For the non-believer there’s little resonance. Indeed, perhaps the most compelling are the yells of “Crucify him!” vs “Free him!” from the crowd when Pilate offers the mob the choice of which criminal to free.

Nor is the story particularly compelling. What motivates the despair which would cause the people to embrace a faith? I watched this movie over the course of at least a month, maybe two, so it was merely a casual thing to do; I didn’t find I had to watch it, unlike, say (and I recognize the incongruity) Pacific Rim, which must be finished once it is started.

And, not to push disbelief too far, but a comparison may prove the point. In the latter movie, we’re faced with situations we can see ourselves in, even if we’re not precisely facing monsters, with overwhelming odds, despair, and foolishness of others all playing their part. It’s not as easy to learn from The Greatest Story Every Told. Those of us who fall under the common definition of sane have no illusion that we’ll ever be the Son of God, so the decisions he makes – if they are not part of some predestined plan – have little applicability to us. Peter cowers from recognition; Judas betrays the one he loves for silver. The situations are not those to learn from, and the story, I fear, is opaque.

And why so few people of color? Sidney Poitier puts in a fine five minutes – but it’s the Middle East, dammit! Not Minnesota in January!

After Atlanta we flew into Traverse City (TVC) and rested at my Arts Editor’s mother’s home. Her home is out in the hinterlands, so we took some pictures. Today is about grass.

Perhaps a repetitive subject.

Treehugger.com’s Melissa Breyer reports on the latest real-world problem caused by climate change – anthrax:

The latest horror-story-plotline come to life? “Anthrax spewing zombie deer,” as Bloomberg News describes them, have emerged from thawing permafrost in northern Siberia, sparking an outbreak of the rare and deadly bacterial disease.

The outbreak has occurred on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia, a region that hasn’t seen anthrax since 1941. The Arctic Siberian district has faced temperatures ranging from 77F to 95F for a month or so; officials believe that the heat melted permafrost and exposed an infected reindeer carcass. Although many of us may be more familiar with anthrax as an agent used in warfare, it is a natural disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis and can survive in the environment for a century or more by forming spores. In the Sakha Republic, just east of the region where the outbreak occurred, there are some 200 burial grounds of animals that died from anthrax in the past.

Having surveyed the BBC, Bloomberg News, and Siberian Times reports, it’s not clear how they may have ruled out deliberate release of spores, much like the United States suffered in 2001. The locals are understandably nervous as they appear to have an active venison industry, with exports to Germany, Sweden, Finland and the UK, according to the Siberian Times. All the sources view this as a predictable outcome of climate change.

From around town. First, a monster assimilating a building.

Next, a monster on a wall.

I’m sure there’s a monster lurking in this MARTA station.

A lovely landscape. There used to be a monster here.

Another.

Certified monster-free.

One more. You pick.

Which, on a more serious note, symbolizes Atlanta, at least from the MARTA – rough patches interspersed with well-off patches. A little depressing, I think.

Downright Fiery.

Courtesy Climate Reanalyzer.

Today we noticed our front yard coleus is doing particularly well.

Lovely, unexpected colors, and a not a hint of decomposition.

Ingersoll & Jacoby (the biographer) on separation of Church & State¹:

Ingersoll decried the public religiosity required of politicians in a statement that is just as applicable today as it was then.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the centre of the earth; he weighs nothing himself , but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are Catholics with Protestant proclivities, or Christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to do their own thinking.

A candidate’s religious outlook, in Ingersoll’s opinion, should be an entirely private matter. “If we were in a storm at sea,” he said, “with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism.” Ingersoll felt that the churches of his day were becoming politicized and correctly predicted that it would not be long until religious institutions would “divide as  sharply upon political, as upon theological questions.”

To expand on Ingersoll’s first point, we see this even today as the most publicly devout politicians find themselves caught up in scandals of one sort or another. In truth, those who chase power may assume any shape that advantages them in the great race for political power; and those who are consumed with power have no requirement of great morality, merely the appearance of same². By informally requiring some sort of religiosity, our subjects are permitted to don a cloak that obscures their true nature. Not that in the absence of this religious requirement that they won’t find another cloak, yet this one, I fear, is more potent than most as most devout people are, by the nature of this requirement, ill-suited for detecting the devout-seeming devil in their midst.

The second point leaves me somewhat ambivalent. To my mind, arguing via analogy requires an effective analogy, and while governing may involve tremendous flashes of light and booming, terror-riding demons on occasion, in truth governing and saving a ship in a storm are hardly analogous situations. I think it’s entirely certain that many folks will want to know about a candidate’s religious views in the mistaken belief that a candidate’s views of the supernatural and the afterlife will somehow affect his views on truly issues pertinent to government. Just having to write that sentence compels me to giggle, so, despite the poor analogy, in end I must agree with Ingersoll: a candidate’s religious views should not be of importance to the mature citizen of the United States. Indeed, I vividly recall a television interviewer with a woman during, I think, the 2004 elections, in which she stated that she believed God had selected Bush to be President; in view of the catastrophes of the Bush Administration, both before and after, we can only conclude that God hated, and perhaps still hates, the social conservatives who voted for him and the others caught up in scandal. It’s the only logical conclusion. If the United States is to remain strong, cooler, secular heads must prevail over those who insist on using the prism of religiosity when viewing the policies of government; the aberrations introduced by this prism are, on the evidence, terrible.

¹The Great Agnostic, p 150-152. Misspellings and poor grammar are most likely my fault due to manual transcription.
²Consider Livingston, DeLay, Cunningham, Ney, Foley, Hastert (thanks to Steve Benen). Many more, too tiresome to list here, could be added.

The Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA, is a large, old cemetery, full of CSA vets, mausoleums, and some pithy epitaphs. We took a few pictures….

Some beautiful carving. Not sure how old.

Makes me wonder how much was spent on this final structure …

Someone liked gargoyles.

The mate is a little forward.

Love the cactus. Cacti. Porcupine plants.

A series of “beds” on the right attracted my attention.

So I took two pictures.

Evidently I was fascinated.

And a Roman Via-like path beckoned us along as the heat chased us through the cemetery. After this we hurriedly left, walked to the nearby Daddy Dz’s and had some excellent BBQ. Both the cemetery and the BBQ joint are recommended.

Perhaps the most amazing part of our viewing of The Incredible Melting Man (1977) is that my Arts Editor and I actually managed to watch the whole wretched thing. Let’s make this simple: take all the facets of the movie and rate them on a scale of 0 through 9. Set them all to 0.

The audio is good, give it an 6.

Same for the cinematography, call it a 6 for adequate work.

We have to give the acting a 4, primarily because of the efforts of the antagonist’s actor, as well as an elderly couple who played an old woman and her lover, ridiculously in love with each other, who had an easy, kitchy chemistry. I found their arguments over whether or not they should steal oranges and lemons from an orchard to be charming. All the rest of the acting? 0! So the average is 4.

And makeup gets an 8. It was, for the era, really quite macabre, a creepy, gelatinous mess that was, if not convincing, enough to make your skin crawl – right before you, too, started melting.

Everything else was terrible.

Normally I do not read other reviews when writing my own, but this time I couldn’t help but wonder how this amateur effort possibly made it out of any self-respecting studio, and, according to Wikipedia, the producers messed with the show:

The screenplay was originally intended as a parody of horror films, but comedic scenes were edited out during production and new horror scenes added. [Director] Sachs claims that the producers decided during shooting that a straight horror film would be more financially successful, and that the film suffered as a result.

And yet …

The film was commercially successful …

A reader continues the thread:

I wonder if molybdenum is used to strengthen some metal parts — it’s commonly used for that in steel.

I noticed that, but why would a smartphone need reinforced steel?

Treehugger‘s Lloyd Alter reports that the first prototype of the Transit Elevated Bus has has been released on schedule:

Originally conceived by American architect Lester Walker 45 years ago, there is in fact some logic to it; the right-of-way already exists, and instead of having a bus stuck in traffic, the straddling bus can fly right over it. When we showed a model of it earlier this year, we noted that the designer promised a working one by August.

And here we are in August, and there they are, running a real full size straddle bus down a thousand foot test track. It is officially known as a Transit Elevated Bus (TEB), will consist of four cars each being about 22 meters [72′] long, 7.8 meters wide [25.6′] and 4.8 meters [15.74′] high, and can hold 1200 people.

The video is fun to watch and spawns some thoughts, such as what happens when an unaware motorist is overtaken by the elevated bus and panics? OK, no big surprise: he crashes and possibly damages a vehicle containing up to 1200 people. Then there’s the tracks themselves, which may be optional, which will need installation and will result in death and dismemberment if someone gets in the way – which is also true of trains.

Straddling bus is completely powered by municipal electricity and solar energy system. In terms of electricity, the setting is called relay direct current electrification. The bus itself is electrical conductor, two rails built on top to allow the charging post to run along with the bus, the next charging post will be on the rails before the earlier one leaves, that is why we call it relay charging. It is new invention, not available yet in other places.

The last of the ABG pictures, with no particular theme. First, if you’ve never seen okra out in the field, here it is:

A random stone path.

A lovely atmospheric from the tropics:

These are fun!

And we come to an end of our walking tour of ABG, having swilled an elegant lunch at the on-site Linton’s, walked until we could walk no more, and endured sad self-doubt about the Atlanta bus system.

As we remain stubbornly nation-oriented (yeah, the blue helmets aren’t invading anytime soon), the Internet brings tough questions about crimes in which the Internet may contain important evidence. The Obama Administration recently brought forth suggested legislation, and Jennifer Daskal and Andrew K. Woods of Just Security (via Lawfare) cover it:

Enter the draft legislation.  The legislation would permit the President to enter into agreements with foreign countries whereby US firms would no longer be prohibited, as a matter of US law, from responding to local law enforcement demands for emails and other communications in the investigation of serious crime.  Importantly, the legislation sets numerous human rights and privacy-protective restrictions on what these agreements would look like.   These agreements would only be permitted with foreign governments that afford “robust substantive and procedural protections for privacy and civil liberties” —a determination that takes into account, among other things, compliance with human rights obligations and respect for the principle of non-discrimination.

Moreover, the orders issued pursuant to the agreement must meet numerous requirements—including that the requests be tailored to a specific account, person, or device, of limited duration, and based on articulable and credible suspicion.  The requests must be overseen by a judge or other independent authority, may not be used to infringe freedom of speech, and are subject to a strict prohibition on the dissemination of non-relevant information unless necessary to protect against the threat of death or serious bodily harm.  These requirements apply at the request level—that is, each request by the foreign country must meet these standards.

Later:

This is, in sum, a remarkable effort by the administration to lay out, in great detail, a set of baseline privacy protections that apply to law enforcement access to data. Imagine, for a moment, that countries around the world implemented these requirements. We would see a significant enhancement of privacy protections globally.

The whole article is worth a quick read. Judging from the summary presented, this seems like a careful, workmanlike approach to the problem. In their judgment, it’s not perfect – but that’s for legislators to fix.

I can’t help but wonder if Trump and Clinton have – or will – endorse what appears to be thoughtful, careful legislative initiative.

A reader has a question about their smartphone:

So what parts are in my smartphone?

If your phone uses Lithium-ion batteries, the lithium will be the same as astronomers search for in the spectrum of stars, in particular TZO stars.

Molybdenum, another such target for astronomers, is also used in your phone, and may be in short supply, as noted by TechTimes last year. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t state how it’s used. Other articles tend to indicate it’s used in manufacturing circuit boards, but in the end I’m not sure I can make the case for molybdenum being actually in your phone.

I do not see any application for the third metal used, rubidium. However, I’m fairly sure more than just these three are produced by TZO-specific nuclear reactions, and the production of the higher members of the periodic table (above iron, IIRC) have always required exotic conditions, such as supernovas and the like.

The July/August 2016 issue of Discover Magazine has an apparently paper-only issue on astromical Thorne–Żytkow objects (TZOs), of which I’d never heard. From Wikipedia:

A Thorne–Żytkow object is formed when a neutron star collides with a star, typically a red giant or supergiant. The colliding objects can simply be wandering stars. This is only likely to occur in extremely crowded globular clusters. Alternatively, the neutron star could form in abinary system after one of the two stars went supernova. Because no supernova is perfectly symmetric, and because the binding energy of the binary changes with the mass lost in the supernova, the neutron star will be left with some velocity relative to its original orbit. This kick may cause its new orbit to intersect with its companion, or, if its companion is a main-sequence star, it may be engulfed when its companion evolves into a red giant.

I boggle at the thought. And now some in the astronomy community believe the star known as HV 2112 may be the first known example of these objects. SciNews covered the initial announcement more than two years ago here.

When they took a close look at the subtle lines in the spectrum of HV 2112, they found that it contained excess rubidium, lithium and molybdenum.

Past research has shown that normal stellar processes can create each of these elements. But high abundances of all three of these at the temperatures typical of red supergiants is a unique signature of TZOs.

“I am extremely happy that observational confirmation of our theoretical prediction has started to emerge,” said Dr Zytkow from the University of Cambridge, who is a co-author of the paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters (arXiv.org version).

Look at your smartphone. Odds are that some of its components were first created within a TZO.

Is it a world-wide movement towards autocratic rule? Here in the United States we’ve seen the candidacy of Donald Trump supported (currently) by an impressive (or frightening), as documented by a CNN Poll as being 42% (+/- 3.5%). Vladimir Putin continues has dominated a nominally democratic Russia for nearly 20 years. In Turkey, President Erdogan is cracking down on dissidents after an attempted military coup, although some question whether Erdogan is strengthening or weakening his position.

And in Israel, a historically strong democracy, question marks are starting to pop up regarding the behavior of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ben Caspit reports for AL Monitor:

In the last seven years, Netanyahu has inched closer to autocratic rule than any other Israeli leader. He fortified his rulership and has consolidated several key government ministries under his wing. In addition to the premiership, Netanyahu also serves as foreign minister, communications minister, economy minister and regional development minister, in addition to other functions. Though the Communications Ministry is seen as an underfunded and small ministry, Netanyahu has no intentions of ever relinquishing it. …

Culture Minister Miri Regev did not hide the Likud’s aspiration to control the corporation. “It’s inconceivable that we’ll establish a corporation that we won’t control. What’s the point?” she asked. “We put down the money and theybroadcast whatever they want?” Minister of Internal Security Gilad Erdan, who initiated the establishment of the corporation about two years ago, tried to give Regev a lesson in democracy. But he seemed to be talking to a wall. Additional ministers attacked the establishment of the corporation and argued that there were not enough Likud supporters among the journalists in the corporation’s ranks. Others claimed that Naftali Bennett, the head of Orthodox Zionist HaBayit HaYehudi, has control over some of the journalists since they are “skullcap wearers” (Orthodox Jews). At this stage, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Bennett’s party, lost her cool. She banged on the table and blasted the Likud ministers, saying, “Stop it already with your lies! Learn to control [yourselves] and stop complaining. … You have your own newspaper, what are you whining about?”

The weakening of the free, neutral, independent press is worrisome; the reported behavior of the Likud ministers is horrifying. But it’s also edifying in that it recalls that one of the tools in discovering the activities of the forces of, well, let’s say the power-mad, those who adhere to rigid, tangible orthodoxies rather than the processes of democracy, have become aware that the light shined upon their activities by a free press are a discouragement to their activities and objectives. Their attacks on the free press are a signal event in the degradation of the body politic, and should be viewed with concern, and responded to forcefully, by those who believe that it’s better to have a democracy than a power-made dictator, no matter how scary the rest of the world appears.

After all, we didn’t need Donald Trump to defeat the Nazis; we were just fine with FDR and the Congress, Churchill and Parliament, and all the rest of our allies. Yes, the USSR was run by Stalin – but, alone, they would have failed.