Dire straits

We are in dire straits as per in an in-depth article presented by the NYTimes titled Rising From the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm.

The ocean’s dominant feature, extending up to two miles deep and as much as 1,200 miles wide, is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, by far the largest current in the world. It is the world’s climate engine, and it has kept the world from warming even more by drawing deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, much of which has been submerged for hundreds of years, and pulling it to the surface. There, it exchanges heat and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere before being dispatched again on its eternal round trip.

Without this action, which scientists call upwelling, the world would be even hotter than it has become as a result of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

“From no perspective is there any place more important than the Southern Ocean,” said Joellen L. Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. “There’s nothing like it on Planet Earth.”

Alarming says it all.

As the world warms, Dr. Russell and others say, the unceasing winds that drive the upwelling are getting stronger. That could have the effect of releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by bringing to the surface more of the deep water that has held this carbon locked away for centuries.

In addition, the Southern Ocean is getting warmer, and that has another important climate effect. Some of this upwelling water, which is already relatively warm, flows beneath ice shelves on the Antarctic coast that help keep the continent’s vast, thick ice sheets from reaching the sea more quickly.

 

In effect, “Antarctica is melting from the bottom,” said Henri Drake, an oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Read the entire piece. The stunning interactive graphics will show why earth's in dire straits without issue.

Up close & personal :)

 

This JunoCam image shows two of Jupiter's large rotating storms, captured on Juno’s 38th perijove pass, on Nov. 29, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC BY

Stunning says it all regarding this pix of Jove, up close and personal. To your truly, this is the most impressive shot Juno's taken to date. Stellar without issue. As a bonus, us rubes get a chance to "listen" to Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. Not bad, not bad at all. :)

Radio emissions collected during Juno’s June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede are presented here, both visually and in sound. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ of Iowa

An audio track collected during Jupiter mission’s Ganymede flyby offers a dramatic ride-along. It is one of the highlights mission scientists shared in a briefing at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth’s oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio has debuted a 50-second audio track generated from data collected during the mission’s close flyby of the Jovian moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021. Juno’s Waves instrument, which tunes in to electric and magnetic radio waves produced in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, collected the data on those emissions. Their frequency was then shifted into the audio range to make the audio track.

“This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades,” said Bolton. “If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede's magnetosphere.”

It gets better.

Left to right: A phytoplankton bloom in the Norwegian Sea, and turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter images provided by NASA’s Juno spacecraft have given oceanographers the raw materials to study the rich turbulence at the gas giant’s poles and the physical forces that drive large cyclones on Jupiter. Credit: NASA OBPG OB.DAAC/GSFC/Aqua/MODIS. Image processing: Gerald Eichstadt CC BY

Seems Jupiter's atmosphere is similar, in some ways, to earth's oceans.

“When I saw the richness of the turbulence around the Jovian cyclones, with all the filaments and smaller eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around eddies,” said Siegelman. “These are especially evident in high-resolution satellite images of vortices in Earth’s oceans that are revealed by plankton blooms that act as tracers of the flow.”

Arthur C. Clarke would be proud. :)

Tough says it all :)

Parker, the little probe checking out the sun, defines toughness to the nth degree. As often said, science, when done well, never disappoints. :)

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made history by becoming the first spacecraft to have “touched the Sun” earlier this year, the agency has now confirmed.

The tiny probe made its way through the star’s upper atmosphere, taking important readings of its surroundings.

It even took the time to capture tons of images during its amazing stunt, which scientists stitched together for an incredible video with the Milky Way peeking out behind a stream of highly energized particles — an unprecedentedly close and fascinating look at our star.

Parker Solar Probe is in the 10th of 24 planned, progressively closer orbits around the Sun. the spacecraft, built and operated at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, launched on Aug. 12, 2018. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Blazing along at space-record speeds that would get it from Earth to the Moon in under an hour, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its 10th close approach to the Sun on Nov. 21, coming within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the solar surface.

Parker Solar Probe is in the 10th of 24 planned, progressively closer orbits around the Sun. the spacecraft, built and operated at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, launched on Aug. 12, 2018. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

The close approach (known as perihelion), also at a record distance, occurred at 4:25 a.m. EST (8:25 UTC), with Parker Solar Probe moving 364,660 miles per hour (586,864 kilometers per hour). The milestone also marked the midway point in the mission’s 10th solar encounter, which began Nov. 16 and continues through Nov. 26.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is speeding in toward the Sun after a swing past Venus on Oct. 16, 2021, successfully using the planet’s gravity to shape its path for its next closest approach to our star. This was the fifth of seven planned Venus gravity assists. The flyby reduced Parker Solar Probe’s orbital speed by about 6,040 miles per hour (9,720 kilometers per hour), and set it up for its 10th close pass (or perihelion) by the Sun, on Nov. 21, 2021. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

With luck ...

The headquarters of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Conn. Under the crush of thousands of lawsuits, Purdue filed for bankruptcy restructuring in September 2019, which automatically put a hold on all the claims against it.Credit...Frank Franklin II/Associated Press

With luck, the Sacklers will lose everything as payback for 500,000 people losing their lives to Perdue Farma's OxiCodin, one of the most addictive drugs known to man. 

A federal judge on Thursday evening unraveled a painstakingly negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma and thousands of state, local and tribal governments that had sued the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin for the company’s role in the opioids epidemic, saying that the plan was flawed in one critical area.

The judge, Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases.

With luck ...

An end around

Lifting the restrictions on mifepristone would make medication abortion more accessible, but in 19 states that have already banned telemedicine visits for abortion pills, women would probably need to travel to states that allow it.Credit...Jeff Roberson/The Associated Press

As often said, Tech never sleeps and, on rare occasions, government actually does the right thing in leverage tech for the public good, this time for women's right to choose.

The federal government on Thursday permanently lifted a major restriction on access to abortion pills. It will allow patients to receive the medication by mail instead of requiring them to obtain the pills in person from specially certified health providers.

The decision, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes as the Supreme Court is considering whether to roll back abortion rights or even overturn its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal nationwide.

The F.D.A.’s action means that medication abortion, an increasingly common method authorized in the United States for pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation, will become more available to women who find it difficult to travel to an abortion provider or prefer to terminate a pregnancy in their homes. It allows patients to have a telemedicine appointment with a provider who can prescribe abortion pills and send them to the patient by mail.

Of course red states will try to counter this but as stated before, tech never sleeps, right?

On the brink ...

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

As George Carlin said ... The Real Owners don't want people capable of critical thinking because if people were, the shit would hit the fan in terms of knowing how our so-called leaders have betrayed us in ways boggling the mind. Consider facts like the environment's collapsing thanks to rampant capitalism and overt lies perpetrated by the likes of Exxon, the ultra rich and big corporations not paying their taxes thanks to off-shore tax havens and a tax code comprising of 70,000+ pages and ... the ongoing privatization of government services with particular emphasis given to the control of water, events one and all, showing, in part, how the US is rapidly unraveling as we move further into the 21st century. Cyberpunk, circa 2021, equipped with appropriate modifications, has arrived but in this case, politics becomes intimately involved whereas in the formal cyberpunk lexicon, politics was but an afterthought in depicting a dystopian future of our own making.

To whit.

Where is the president in Blade Runner?

Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.

But while Blade Runner’s once-distant future of November 2019 feels resonant in so many ways—vast corporate power, persistent surveillance, life in a time of constant crisis—it misses the actual 2019’s most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.

Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.

Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re not that far off from the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.

Carlin was right.

The wolf inside

Protesters hold placards during the demonstration. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers gathered at Indiana University's Sample Gates to protest against mandatory Covid vaccinations IU is requiring for students, staff and faculty during the upcoming fall semester. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Jung was right, the reality distortion field known as mass delusion is alive and well in the land of the brave and home of the free. Adding stupidity to the mix also helps, right?

In 2020, 34 percent of Republicans and independents who lean to the right surveyed by Pew Research Center agreed that it was "probably" or "definitely true" that powerful people intentionally planned the COVID-19 outbreak. Eighteen percent of Democrats and left-leaners agreed, too. That same year, results from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that approximately three-quarters of Republicans did not trust the 2020 presidential election results.

"Carl Jung noted that 'the wolf inside' man was far more a threat to human existence than external forces," Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of "Joy From Fear," told Salon. "When mental forces become so toxic as to harm our overall well-being on an individual and collective level a 'psychic epidemic' can result."

Indeed, Jung himself warned that modern society was prone to collapse due to a pandemic of "delusional ideas."

"Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness," Jung wrote. "Our much vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of 'unreal' thoughts."

Notably, Jung believed that the United States was particularly prone to society-breaking delusions.

Birds aren't real

 

Peter McIndoe, the 23-year-old creator of the Birds Aren't Real movement, with his van in Fayetteville, Ark.Credit...Rana Young for The New York Times

When reading this blurb, your's truly keeps thinking about the nooze or better yet, Dada as Marcel Duchamp, and significant others thumbed their nose at the world with funny and insightful art for the ages. Think Camus about absurdity or Moliere about hypocrisy and one sees why McIndoe, and others, have something significant to say about misinformation writ large in the age of the net.

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920–21

Dada artists, group photograph, 1920, Paris. From left to right, Back row: Louis Aragon, Theodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Clément Pansaers, Emmanuel Fay (cut off). Second row: Paul Dermée, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Front row: Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton

Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York.

What Birds Aren’t Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.

Duchamp would get Birds aren't real in a nanosecond. :)

State of America/rev II

The state of America today