Nawal El Saadawi, trailblazing Egyptian writer, dies aged 89

Egypt’s trailblazing writer Nawal El Saadawi died MARCH 22 at the age of 89, after a lifetime spent fighting for women’s rights and equality.

Clea Skopeliti and agencies 5 days ago

© Photograph: David Degner/Getty Images El Saadawi established and led the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, as well as co-founding the Arab Association for Human Rights.


The feminist author of more than 55 books first spotlighted the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) with The Hidden Face of Eve in 1980. A trained doctor, El Saadawi also campaigned against women wearing the veil, polygamy and inequality in Islamic inheritance rights between men and women.

She died in a Cairo hospital after a long battle against illness.

Born in October 1931 in a village in the Nile delta, north of Cairo, El Saadawi studied medicine at Cairo University and New York’s Columbia University. The novelist, who wrote regularly for Egyptian newspapers, also worked as a psychiatrist and university lecturer.

One of the leading feminists of her generation, El Saadawi’s 1972 book Women and Sex unleashed a backlash of criticism and condemnation from Egypt’s political and religious establishment, resulting in the activist losing her job at the health ministry.

She was jailed for two months in 1981 by the late president Anwar Sadat during a wide political crackdown in which several intellectuals were detained. While imprisoned, El Saadawi wrote about her experience in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, writing on a roll of toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil smuggled in by a fellow prisoner.

The writer became a target of Islamist militants, with her name on death lists that included Egyptian Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1994 was stabbed in an attempt on his life.

“This refusal to criticise religion … This is not liberalism. This is censorship,” she said.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2009, she said: “I regret none of my 47 books. If I started my life again I would write the same books. They are all very relevant even today: the issues of gender, class, colonialism (although of course that was British and is now American), female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, capitalism, sexual rape and economic rape.”

After undergoing female genital mutilation at the age of six, and seeing the damage it could do during her work as a village doctor, she campaigned against the practice.

“Since I was a child that deep wound left in my body has never healed,” she wrote in an autobiography.

El Saadawi also established and led the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, as well as co-founding the Arab Association for Human Rights.

El Saadawi moved to North Carolina’s Duke University in 1993 due to death threats. After returning to Egypt, she ran for president in 2005 but abandoned her campaign after accusing security forces of not allowing her to hold rallies.

In 2007, she was condemned by Egypt’s highest Sunni Muslim authority, Al-Azhar, for her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting – in which God is questioned by Jewish, Muslim and Christian prophets and finally quits.

Her views resulted in her facing several legal challenges, including allegations of apostasy from Islamists.

Despite challenges from authorities, the writer said in 2010 that she was motivated to keep going by the daily letters she received from people who say their lives have been changed by her writing. “A young man came to me in Cairo with his new bride. He said, I want to introduce my wife to you and thank you. Your books have made me a better man. Because of them I wanted to marry not a slave, but a free woman.”

In 2005, El Saadawi was awarded the Inana International Prize in Belgium, a year after she received the North-South prize from the Council of Europe. In 2020, Time Magazine named her on their 100 Women of the Year list.

Egypt’s culture minister, Inas Abdel-Dayem, mourned El Saadawi’s passing, saying her writings had given rise to a great intellectual movement.

El Saadawi married three times, and is survived by a daughter and a son.

 CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M CRYPTOCURRENCY

Binance Suffers From $2.4 Million TurtleDex Exit Heist

CryptocurrencyMar 21, 2021 

• Binance Smart Chain project TurtleDex pulls the rug on its users and steals $2.4 million.
• 
  
• TurtleDex drained the liquidity funds on Ape Swap and Pancake Swap and turned their pot to ETH

TurtleDex, a decentralized finance (DeFi) file storage on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), is believed to have pulled an exit scam yesterday. As a result, more than $2.4 million fund was drained from trading pools on major BSC DeFi exchanges like Ape Swap and Pancake Swap.

TurtleDex was launched on March 15, promoting itself as a DeFi storage platform to help users save data and files securely online. Its pre-sale that day increased 9000 BNB tokens, or about $2.4 million, in just two hours.

TurtleDex drained the liquidity funds on Ape Swap and Pancake Swap and turned their pot to ETH. Furthermore, the ETH digital asset was transferred to Binance wallets, according to Etherscan.

The alleged heist was first to be flagged up by Twitter user @DefiStalker. Also Jetfuel.Finance, a yield farming platform that tied-up with TurtleDex, showed its shock and confusion at the rug pull on Twitter.

All eyes are on Binance to lessen the loss to investors’ pockets. So far, there has been no word, but a tweet from company head, CZ, earlier this week explains that “We actually help with a few rugs pulls recently too.” Moreover, the Binance Smart Chain is a semi-closed ecosystem. It means that Binance leads the various entry and exit points to the Smart Chain. Consequently, this guarantees hard to get funds off the Smart Chain without passing under the monitoring of Binance’s central control.

This article first published on coinquora.com

Continue reading on CoinQuora

HISTORY

Coverage of Bay Area Anti-Asian Violence Is Missing a Key Element

Understanding the complex historical interplay between Black and Asian communities can help us avoid simplistic narratives today.

BY REBECCA ONION

MARCH 19, 2021

San Francisco police officers on a foot patrol in Chinatown on Thursday. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images


In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed announced this week that the city’s police would patrol predominantly Asian neighborhoods more frequently, following the killings of eight people at spas in Atlanta. Tuesday’s events in Georgia have ratcheted up anxieties in the Asian American communities in the Bay Area, following a full year of crimes against community members, including a string of assaults of Asian American elders—most recently, septuagenarian Pak Ho, who was robbed and killed near Lake Merritt last week.

Some (not all) of the video evidence of anti-Asian attacks in the Bay Area has featured Black perpetrators. I spoke with Claire Jean Kim, a professor of political science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine, who has previously written a book about Black-Korean community relations in New York City and is finishing up a new one: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World. I asked Kim to give some historical context for the Bay Area attacks and to critique how the media has been doing in covering the racial dimensions of these crimes.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rebecca Onion: When it comes to understanding the history of the overlap or interplay between Black and Asian American communities in the Bay Area, what are the important events people should know about?

Claire Jean Kim: Well, of course, it’s good to remember that both communities are diverse—especially Asian American communities in San Francisco, that consist of a lot of national origin groups, some people who’ve been there for generations and some who are recent immigrants.

If we go back to the late 1800s, we see large numbers of Chinese immigrants coming to San Francisco. That was the original Chinatown. Then, following the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882, there were large numbers of Japanese immigrants coming into San Francisco. Both groups are really so concentrated in San Francisco, and in California, that the origins of the Asian American story are in San Francisco.

Asian American immigrants were subjected to various kinds of persecution, a lot of which are recorded in the constitutional law books you read in law school, because some things that white San Franciscans did to persecute the Chinese—and the Japanese immigrants after them—were very creative! The groups were often segregated—the Chinese kept in Chinatown, Japanese immigrants in what became Little Tokyo—and kept out of white neighborhoods, often by racial covenants that also kept out Black people.

A turning point was during World War II. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. And for the first time, San Francisco acquired a larger Black population—until World War II, the Black population in San Francisco was small, but during the war, because of the defense industries and the shipyards, there was enough work to draw Black workers from across other areas of the country, so the Black population really swelled.


At that point something important happened, which is that they started doing public housing in San Francisco, and they segregated Black people in particular public housing projects, away from others. At the same time, Asian Americans—I’ll focus on Chinese and Japanese Americans—started to see the barriers they used to face in moving into white neighborhoods start to fall. Part of this was the Cold War, since the United States was trying to present itself on the world stage, in its competition with the Soviet Union, as having “solved” its race problem, and one way to do that was to say, Oh, we’re letting Asian Americans into white neighborhoods. In San Francisco, examples might be the Richmond District and the Sunset District, which used to be all white and now have a plurality or maybe even a majority Asian American population.

So there was a differentiation in treatment, in terms of residential segregation, which of course leads to differentiation in housing value and intergenerational wealth and educational equality. And Asian Americans began to see better occupational mobility. They were let into more jobs that used to be closed off to them, and remained closed to Black people.

The Bay Area was a hot spot for student activism and Black Power activism in the ’60s and ’70s. How did the area’s Asian American populations react, or participate, in those movements?

There was an Asian American movement that emerged in the late ’60s, and that was the first time people started using the term Asian American. A whole pan-ethnic racial identity emerged as a result of this movement.

The activists were very inspired by two things: the Vietnam War—they understood imperialism in Asia in a different way than other Americans who were talking about it. And they were inspired by the Black Power movement. A lot of Americans don’t know it, but many Asian American activist groups at the time were actually revolutionary socialist groups; some of them modeled themselves directly after the Black Panthers. The Red Guard, which started out in San Francisco’s Chinatown, were sort of directly nurtured or mentored into being by the Black Panther Party, and had a 10-point platform that was almost the same as the Black Panthers’. Some things were different, but if you look at the two documents side by side, you really start to see how much influence the Black Panthers had on the Asian American movement.

An event to remember is the Third World Liberation Front strike, at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. At both places, activists of different communities of color pushed for the foundation of ethnic studies at the schools, and there were really intense protests with the police using tear gas and violence and the students risking a lot, but they did eventually win!

There were always tensions when Asian Americans worked in solidarity, in coalitions with other groups of color, because there was a sort of an elephant in the room, which was this recognized fact that Asian Americans were sort of doing better in American society than the other groups. More occupational mobility, more people in the middle class.

What were the legacies of that activism, in the Bay Area?

One aftereffect of that activism is the founding of the field of Asian American studies. I think it also created a lot of race consciousness in a lot of Asian Americans who went on to other fields like law and politics and took some of the movement ideals along with them. If you look at Asian American advocacy groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice or Asian Law Caucus, which is in the Bay Area, these groups were founded by people who came out of the movement.

But when you look at the ’70s and ’80s, you start seeing the growth of mass incarceration, which of course disproportionately affects Black Americans. It’s not that it doesn’t affect Asian Americans or white people, but to a lesser degree. So that’s another factor here.

And in California, specifically, I’ve been looking in my work at the way affirmative action debates in the 1990s affected these relationships. I’ve been writing about a lawsuit called Brian Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District, from 1994, brought by a number of Chinese American plaintiffs. This case was a precursor to the Harvard affirmative action case being reviewed by the Supreme Court now [Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College].

The Brian Ho case involved Lowell High School, which is a public magnet high school—extremely prestigious and hard to get into, sent a lot of students to Ivy League schools. The argument was that Lowell High was discriminating against Asian Americans, because they had a formula they applied to try to have a certain number of students from different race or ethnic groups, and it ended up meaning that Chinese American students had to have higher admissions scores because so many applied. And Chinese American parents brought the lawsuit and settled with the school district. They removed that differential admission score system, and Black and Latinx enrollment in Lowell plummeted.

I want to point out, because this is important, that actually the differential score system to get into Lowell was benefiting other groups of Asian Americans that weren’t that well represented. But the Chinese Americans who brought the suit called their group “the Asian American Legal Foundation,” because they wanted to make it look like they were fighting for all Asian Americans. Chinese American groups could be politically conservative; they might lean Republican, and they generally were not superrich, but middle-class, upper-middle-class, lawyers, accountants, people like that. The same kinds of groups now backing the suit against Harvard.

Your first book was about Black-Korean conflict in New York City. If you were to make a comparison between the history of Asian American and Black community relations in the Bay Area versus other cities in the United States, what would that comparison look like?

One obvious difference is that the Asian American demographic is so much larger in the Bay Area. In San Francisco it’s 30 percent, or maybe even higher; a very large number of those people are Chinese American. So there’s a greater consciousness, greater political power, and a history of persecution. That history really shapes the viewpoint, not just of Chinese Americans in the Bay Area, but of Asian Americans everywhere. What happened in San Francisco to the Chinese, and in California to the Chinese and Japanese, is imprinted on people’s brains.

I wanted to ask, when you look at the media coverage of violence against Asian Americans, especially maybe when it looks like the perpetrator was Black, how do you think the media is doing, handling it? Especially with a string of violent events like these, where the perpetrators have been both white and Black, it seems like the media is fairly unequipped to analyze the racial dynamics involved.


I’ve talked to many reporters in recent weeks about the attacks on Asian Americans since COVID began. And it’s hard, because it’s not like there aren’t good journalists who mean well and are high-quality. But a lot of times, producing stories on quick news cycles, the media relies on accepted frameworks of thought, settled interpretations of things, to analyze events, and that’s true when it comes to race as much as anything else.

In this case, one of those settled ideas has to do with playing up Asian-Black conflicts. One of the perpetrators in these Bay Area attacks was caught on video, and was Black, and reporter after reporter was asking me—are Black people going after Asians? These were Asian American reporters I was talking with. And I kept asking them, What’s the evidence? Are there other videos? There was a rush to judgment about these cases all being about Black people going after Asians, and when you think about the tendency in American society to criminalize Black people, it’s a problem to reach for that frame and apply it before the evidence warrants it.

And if you use that frame, you make it an Asian-Black thing, you’re focusing on the two groups and taking attention away from the larger structures of power in which they’re embedded—not just racial structures, but also capitalism. Think about the relationship between Korean merchants buying a liquor store in Compton, and their Black customers. This is about capitalism, the way it creates divisions between groups and deems certain people disposable.

What we see in the United States are these periodic attacks on Asian Americans, always related to something else going on in the world. In this case it’s COVID. In the 1980s, it was U.S.-Japan trade relations. In the 1870s, it was a regional depression in the West and Southwest, and white workers turned against Chinese American workers. So there’s always been some kind of larger economic, political cause for these upsurges in anti-Asian violence. I think that’s different from what we see with anti-Black violence. Violence against Black people in this country is continuous, structural; violence against Asians is more periodic, contingent on events.

This is not to minimize what happens to Asian Americans! When you are harmed by an assailant because of anti-Asian racism, it doesn’t matter to you whether the violence was contingent or continuous or whatever. I’m not minimizing it. Clearly during COVID-19 something really alarming and troubling is happening.

But I think it’s important, when looking at violence against Asian Americans, not to lose that context. When Asian Americans understandably feel fear and anger and sorrow about these attacks on our own communities, I think we also have to ask ourselves, Are we fighting for Black lives as hard as we’re fighting for our own? It’s in moments like this that it’s really difficult to remember, because we’re afraid and upset. But to remember that we are advantaged, compared to Black people, is what it takes to be a good ally—even though it can be very hard, at times like these. But I think these are the moments when it’s the most important to do it.

RACISM IN AMERICA

Even if the anti-Asian American violence in the US is not a hate crime, there is racism behind it

Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.

Pawan Dhingra, The Conversation
Mar 22, 2021 · 

People gather at a rally to demand safety and protection of Asian communities in the aftermath of the March 16 shootings in Atlanta. | Oliver Douliery / AFP


In the United States, over the past year, attacks on Asian Americans have increased more than 150% over the previous year, including the March 16 murders of eight people, including six Asian American women, in Atlanta.

Some of these attacks may be classified as hate crimes. But whether they meet that legal definition or not, they all fit a long history of viewing Asian Americans in particular ways that make discrimination and violence against them more likely.

I have researched and taught on Asian America for 20 years, including on the pernicious effects of stereotypes and attacks on individuals. Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.

Much remains unknown about the attacks in Atlanta, but the man charged with the murders has said he did not have a racial prejudice against people of Asian descent. Rather, he has claimed he has a sexual addiction. But that statement indicates that he assumed these women were prostitutes, whether that is true or not.

This assumption, and the resulting violence, is just one of many that Asian Americans have suffered through the years.

A police officer hands out information leaflets advising how to report on hate crimes, at a park in Chinatown, New York City, following the shootings in Atlanta.

History of prejudice

The presupposed connection between Asian women and sex dates back almost 150 years: In 1875, the US Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively barred Chinese women from immigrating, because it was impossible to tell if they were travelling “for lewd and immoral purposes,” including “for purposes of prostitution”. The assumption that all Chinese women were of questionable moral character placed the burden on the women themselves to somehow prove they were not prostitutes before being allowed to immigrate.


The United States military contributed to this conception of Asian women as hypersexualized. During the wars in the Philippines at the start of the 19th century, and during the mid-20th-century wars in Korea and Vietnam, servicemen took advantage of women who had turned to sex work in response to their lives being wrecked by war.

In the 1960s, the US government brokered a deal with Thailand to be a “rest and relaxation” center for military personnel fighting in Vietnam. That bolstered what became the foundations of Thailand’s modern-day sex tourism industry, which attracts men from the United States and Europe.

This association of Asian women with men’s sexual fantasies has permeated popular culture, such as a scene in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick movie Full Metal Jacket in which a Vietnamese woman entices two servicemen by saying, “Me love you long time,” and regular themes in the animated comedy Family Guy. This makes Asian women more desirable to sex traffickers, brought over to serve male desires in spas and massage parlours such as the ones attacked in Atlanta.

This history of the sexualization of Asian women, shaped by the US military and patriarchy, creates the backdrop to the Atlanta shootings. It helped create the conditions for the Asian spas and massage parlours to be there in the first place. It presents Asian American women as submissive, responsive agents of sexual temptation.

Race and gender inform what happened, and the public response to it, whether the alleged shooter articulates racist motives or not.
Perceptions matter

Other crimes against Asian Americans may also lack clear evidence of racial bias, but still echo anti-Asian American stereotypes.

For instance, many elderly Asian Americans have been shoved to the ground in recent weeks, and Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old man, died in one such incident in February in San Francisco.

The public defender representing the accused perpetrator in Ratanapakdee’s death denies that race motivated the crime. But that is different from saying race was not a factor at all.

Practically all Asian Americans, but elderly men in particular, are often viewed as nonaggressive, meek and unable or unwilling to fight back, in contrast to men of other races. They are easy targets.

Not always crime

Other anti-Asian American racism is not criminal at all, but still fits with the nation’s racist history. As Covid-19 spread across the US, Asian-owned restaurants and stores were the first to experience declining revenue, even though most of the earliest cases in the U.S. came from Europe.

There is a long history of suspecting Asian Americans of carrying disease into the US, which made it seem natural for people to avoid Asian American-owned businesses. US President Donald Trump’s repeated public declarations that the “Kung Flu” virus came from China reinforced those feelings.

This race-based and erroneous assumption has resulted in Asian Americans having among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, though they had among the lowest before the pandemic.

It defies logic to claim that race is not relevant in attacks on Asian Americans unless the perpetrator actively references it. Research has found that most Americans assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as being overweight.

Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being “forever foreigners” in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.

Pawan Dhingra is a Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Amherst College.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Ring-Wing Comedians Are Right-Wing Media
By Seth Simons | March 22, 2021  

Image is a screencap from Steven Crowder's You

This article was originally published on Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. Subscribe here to get posts like this in your inbox.

Last week Media Matters reported on a series of racist jokes Steven Crowder and his co-hosts made about Black farmers during a critique of the American Rescue Plan on his show Louder with Crowder. “I thought the last thing they would want to do is be farmers,” said Dave Landau, who recently joined the show from Compound Media, where he was Anthony Cumia’s sidekick. “Wasn’t that a big problem for hundreds of years?” YouTube removed the episode, telling The Verge it violated the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policy. This incident came barely a week after Crowder earned a similar wave of condemnation for racist jokes about Meghan Markle.

Crowder, a stand-up comic turned Fox News contributor turned streamer, is part of an ecosystem of entertainers who make a living telling racist jokes on YouTube. He is a rare example of someone in this cohort widely recognized for what he is: a conservative pundit. These people are more commonly described as comedians, a classification that confers many privileges, namely the ability to make those racist jokes free of mainstream scrutiny. What I would like to propose today is that we start recognizing these comedians as part and parcel of the right-wing media apparatus poisoning American life.


This apparatus is vast and multifaceted. It encompasses traditional media like Fox News and the New York Post, digital publications like The Federalist and The Daily Caller, and multimedia platforms like The Daily Wire and Blaze Media, the latter of which is home to Crowder, Glenn Beck, and Dave Rubin. Elsewhere in the landscape you’ll find Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, Jesse Kelly, and Charlie Kirk. They traffic in bigotry and fear under the guise of truth and reason, painting themselves as victims of persecution even as they commandeer rabid fan bases against their enemies. Their particular ideologies, audiences, and reach may vary (slightly) by person, but they all serve the same function: to uphold and enforce white supremacy.

A great many comedians use all these same tactics toward the same ends. They evade criticism because they are comedians, which is taken to mean they are not serious: not that they don’t believe their own words, but that their speech exists in a mystical realm of non-meaning where words have no power other than to evoke laughter. They’re not politicians, the logic goes. They’re not cable news pundits. Their audiences aren’t going out in the streets and committing crimes on their behalf. It doesn’t matter what they say; it doesn’t matter that people listen and agree. To critique them is to embark on the fool’s errand of taking unserious people seriously.


This attitude is difficult to reconcile with the fact that no conservative commentator is a serious person. Tucker Carlson’s ravings are no more grounded in reality than Steven Crowder’s or Tim Dillon’s. There is very little about the conservative movement writ large that can be described as serious, nor about the politicians leading it, who increasingly seem to view themselves as performersfirst and lawmakers second. The conservative media machine is so dangerous precisely because it’s pure fantasy. Its effect has been to detach millions of people from the real world and render them immune to reason. The few who launder their role in this project through artistic practice are just as dangerous as those who do it openly.

The unseriousness of their practice never seems to stop them from engaging in serious discourse anyhow. Last month Andrew Schulz, who in his debut Netflix special blamed the pandemic on China, argued in a lengthy podcast segment that China is seeking to overtake the U.S. as a world power, at which point it will suppress American culture. He said China has taken advantage of American greed to become a major manufacturing center for American companies, and that the Chinese government is buying up controlling interests in American companies so it can censor criticism of China. The U.S. was able to become such a world power, he continued, because it exported its popular culture to other countries, culture that celebrates the core American value of freedom. Chinese citizens don’t get to consume American media—barring the occasional censored export, like 10 or so movies each year edited by the Chinese government “to fit into the communist standards”—and as a result “they don’t know what freedom is, so they don’t know what they’re missing.” Whereas Trump took a tough stance on China, Biden and the Democrats are bending over to appease it because they know its era of dominance is fast approaching; they wish to enter that era on good terms. “I don’t have enough data to back up that claim,” Schulz concluded, “but it seems like that.” His Patreon currently brings in $94,800 per month.


This is a small sample of the bigotry Schulz peddles as a matter of course. In an episode earlier this month he again suggested China is to blame for the pandemic and mocked Jeremy Lin for “snitching” on teammates who called him “coronavirus.” In a January segment he argued that Biden nominated Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services so his administration could deflect all criticism of its health policy as transphobic. (Schulz didn’t seem to know Levine hasn’t been confirmed or that he had the position wrong, referring to her as “Health secretary.” He also appears to call her a transphobic slur early in the segment, although most of the word is censored so I can’t be certain.) These are political opinions. The man is commenting on politics. They all are: Nick DiPaolo, Tim Dillon, Legion of Skanks, Sam Tripoli, Yannis Pappas, Kurt Metzger, nearly everyone on Compound Media, the list goes on. Some are more prone than others to refract their political analyses through culture war bugbears, but their analyses are political all the same. The only thing differentiating them from your average Fox News contributor is that they’ll get very upset if you attach them in any way to the ideologies they openly hold. (In his Netflix special’s credits, Schulz thanked Federalist publisher Ben Domenech and libertarian pundit Matt Welch.)


Comedy is the art of calling things what they are. It may seem pedantic to classify a relatively small cohort of comedians as extensions of right-wing media, but we must see them clearly if we are to treat them properly. They are not truth-tellers nor rebels nor crusaders for free speech; they are liars, pawns, and crusaders for the ideologies contained in their speech, which they have always made freely. Their bigotry is not a matter of aesthetic taste, as their defenders are wont to insist, nor are their ideas worthy of debate. (Fascists are always challenging you to defeat them in battles of ideas, as if they have not already been defeated in numerous actual battles.) They are simply mouthpieces for the most powerful forces in our lives, a job so banal it almost circles back around to being funny that they think success makes them special.

It doesn’t. They’re not. They’re really terribly boring. It’s a huge drag to have to pay them any mind. But we cannot fight back the forces they represent without meeting them at every turn with contempt and scorn; without treating thosewhoplatform them and those who share their platforms as participants in an avowedly white supremacistproject; and without doing everything else in our power as comedy consumers or workers to toss the whole lot of them from the public square.


It’s unpleasant business, deplatforming bigots. The alternative is much worse.

Seth Simons is the writer of Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in the comedy industry. He’s on Twitter @sasimons.

 

Oil and natural gas production emit more methane than previously thought

Research finds EPA underestimates methane emissions from oil and gas production

HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES

Research News

 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is underestimating methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, according to new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in its latest inventory.

The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The research team, led by Joannes Maasakkers, a former graduate student at SEAS, developed a method to trace and map total emissions from satellite data to their source on the ground.

"This is the first country-wide evaluation of the emissions that the EPA reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC)," said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his collaborators, including Daniel Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from different sources in the US. That level of detail was used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere.

In this paper, the researchers compared those simulations to satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace the path of emissions from the atmosphere back to the ground and identify areas across the US where the observations and simulations didn't match up.

"When we look at emissions from space, we can only see how total emissions from an area should be scaled up or down, but we don't know the source responsible for those emissions," said Maasakkers. "Because we spent so much time with the EPA figuring out where these different emissions occur, we could use our transport model to go back and figure out what sources are responsible for those under- or over-estimations in the national total."

The biggest discrepancy was in emissions from oil and natural gas production.

The EPA calculates emission based on processes and equipment. For example, the EPA estimates that a gas pump emits a certain amount of methane, multiplies that by how many pumps are operating across the country, and estimates total emissions from gas pumps.

"That method makes it really hard to get estimates for individual facilities because it is hard to take into account every possible source of emission," said Maasakkers. "We know that a relatively small number of facilities make up most of the emissions and so there are clearly facilities that are producing more emissions than we would expect from these overall estimates."

The researchers hope that future work will provide more clarity on exactly where these emissions are coming from and how they are changing.

"We plan to continue to monitor U.S. emissions of methane using new high-resolution satellite observations, and to work with the EPA to improve emission inventories," said Jacob.

"It's important to understand these emissions better but we shouldn't wait until we fully understand these emissions to start trying to reduce them," said Maasakkers. "There are already a lot of things that we know we can do to reduce emissions."

###

This paper was co-authored by Daniel Jacob, Melissa Sulprizio, Tia R. Scarpelli, Hannah Nesser, Jianxiong Sheng, Yuzhong Zhang, Xiao Lu, A. Anthony Bloom, Kevin Bowman, John Worden, and Robert Parker.

The research was funded by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program.

Researchers harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF RESEARCHERS, LED BY HUANYU "LARRY " CHENG, DOROTHY QUIGGLE CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROFESSOR IN THE PENN STATE DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND MECHANICS, HAS DEVELOPED A STRETCHABLE ANTENNA... view more 

CREDIT: LARRY CHENG, PENN STATE

From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices.

The researchers recently published their method inMaterials Today Physics.

According to Cheng, current energy sources for wearable health-monitoring devices have their place in powering sensor devices, but each has its setbacks. Solar power, for example, can only harvest energy when exposed to the sun. A self-powered triboelectric device can only harvest energy when the body is in motion.

"We don't want to replace any of these current power sources," Cheng said. "We are trying to provide additional, consistent energy."

The researchers developed a stretchable wideband dipole antenna system capable of wirelessly transmitting data that is collected from health-monitoring sensors. The system consists of two stretchable metal antennas integrated onto conductive graphene material with a metal coating. The wideband design of the system allows it to retain its frequency functions even when stretched, bent and twisted. This system is then connected to a stretchable rectifying circuit, creating a rectified antenna, or "rectenna," capable of converting energy from electromagnetic waves into electricity. This electricity that can be used to power wireless devices or to charge energy storage devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors.

This rectenna can convert radio, or electromagnetic, waves from the ambient environment into energy to power the sensing modules on the device, which track temperature, hydration and pulse oxygen level. Compared to other sources, less energy is produced, but the system can generate power continuously -- a significant advantage, according to Cheng.

"We are utilizing the energy that already surrounds us -- radio waves are everywhere, all the time," Cheng said. "If we don't use this energy found in the ambient environment, it is simply wasted. We can harvest this energy and rectify it into power."

Cheng said that this technology is a building block for him and his team. Combining it with their novel wireless transmissible data device will provide a critical component that will work with the team's existing sensor modules.

"Our next steps will be exploring miniaturized versions of these circuits and working on developing the stretchability of the rectifier," Cheng said. "This is a platform where we can easily combine and apply this technology with other modules that we have created in the past. It is easily extended or adapted for other applications, and we plan to explore those opportunities."

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This paper is co-authored by Jia Zhu, who earned a doctoral degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; Zhihui Hu, former visiting professor in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State and current associate professor at Wuhan University of Technology in China; Chaoyun Song, assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland; Ning Yi, who earned a doctoral degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; Zhaozheng Yu, who earned a master's degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2019; Zhendong Liu, former visiting graduate student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State; Shangbin Liu, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State; Mengjun Wang, associate professor in the School of Electronics and Information?Engineering at Hebei University of Technology in China; Michael Gregory Dexheimer, who earned a master's degree in engineering science and mechanics from Penn State in 2020; and Jian Yang, professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State.

Support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health; and Penn State.

 

Turning wood into plastic

A research team, led by YSE professor Yuan Yao and Liangbing Hu from the University of Maryland, has created a high-quality bioplastic from wood byproducts that they hope can solve one of the world's most pressing environmental issues

YALE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Research News

 

Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky -- the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.

A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows a high mechanical strength, stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. It can also be recycled or safely biodegraded in the natural environment, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact when compared with petroleum-based plastics and other biodegradable plastics.

"There are many people who have tried to develop these kinds of polymers in plastic, but the mechanical strands are not good enough to replace the plastics we currently use, which are made mostly from fossil fuels," says Yao. "We've developed a straightforward and simple manufacturing process that generates biomass-based plastics from wood, but also plastic that delivers good mechanical properties as well."

To create the slurry mixture, the researchers used a wood powder -- a processing residue usually discarded as waste in lumber mills -- and deconstructed the loose, porous structure of the powder with a biodegradable and recyclable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The resulting mixture, which features nanoscale entanglement and hydrogen bonding between the regenerated lignin and cellulose micro/nanofibrils, has a high solid content and high viscosity, which can be casted and rolled without breaking.

Yao then led a comprehensive life cycle assessment to test the environmental impacts of the bioplastic against commons plastics. Sheets of the bioplastic were buried in soil, fracturing after two weeks and completely degrading after three months; additionally, researchers say the bioplastic can be broken back down into the slurry by mechanical stirring, which also allows for the DES to be recovered and reused.

"That, to me, is what really makes this plastic good: It can all be recycled or biodegraded," says Yao. "We've minimized all of the materials and the waste going into nature."

The bioplastic has numerous applications, says Liangbing Hu, a professor at the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper. It can be molded into a film that can be used in plastic bags and packaging -- one of the major uses of plastic and causes of waste production. Hu also says that because the bioplastic can be molded into different shapes, it has potential for use in automobile manufacturing, as well.

One area the research team continues to investigate is the potential impact on forests if the manufacturing of this bioplastic is scaled up. While the process currently uses wood byproducts in manufacturing, the researchers say they are keenly aware that large-scale production could require usage of massive amounts of wood, which could have far-reaching implications on forests, land management, ecosystems and climate change, to name a few.

Yao says the research team has already begun working with a forest ecologist to create forest simulation models, linking the growth cycle of forests with the manufacturing process. She also sees an opportunity to collaborate with people who work in forest-related fields at YSE -- an uncommon convenience.

"It's not often an engineer can walk down the hall and talk to a forester," says Yao.

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These birds flock in mesmerizing swarms of thousands—but why is still a mystery.

Melanie Haiken 

3/27/2021

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop As a falcon streaks across the evening sky the flocks sometimes form tightly packed “ribbons”.

It’s a mesmerizing sight: Thousands of birds move in unison through the evening sky, whirling and swooping as if performing a highly synchronized ballet.

When they finally descend to their treetop roost, the beating of their iridescent wings creates such a rush of sound that the noise earned the phenomenon its unusual name: a murmuration of starlings.

The term is unique to European, or common starlings, one of the world’s most abundant—and adaptable—birds. Native to the United Kingdom as well as Europe, starlings have become invasive species throughout the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, and many other countries where, over centuries, they were introduced either by accident or on purpose. In the late 1890s, a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts released about a hundred European starlings into New York City’s Central Park, hoping to populate the area with every bird mentioned in the playwright’s works.

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop This is a starling’s point of view from inside the flock as a falcon attacks from above.

Though starlings can be a nuisance and a threat to native birds, their murmurations are breathtaking spectacles that often draw crowds to watch.

In the Northern Hemisphere, murmurations begin in fall and winter as the birds take rest stops of up to six weeks on their southern migrations. During this time, starlings may venture up to 60 miles a day from their roosting trees to feast on seeds, bugs, and larvae, then come back together to create murmurations that can last as long as 45 minutes. (Learn more about the epic journeys of migrating birds.)© Photograph by Nick Dunlop When starlings are feeding on the ground and a falcon approaches at high speed the flocks rise quickly into the air and compress into ever changing shapes, which can intimidate a closer attack. The luckiest starlings are typically the ones in the middle.

Of course, birds moving in flocks is not a new behavior, and ornithologists have long studied it. But no other bird species flies together with the same coordination or complex patterns as European starlings, whose murmurations have been counted in numbers of up to 750,000 individuals.

What’s more, though starlings are such a ubiquitous bird, very little is known about why they murmurate.

“The bottom line is, I’ve been studying this thing for 50 years, and I still don’t know,” says ornithologist Frank Heppner, professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, who did some of the earliest studies of starling behavior in the 1960s.

Birds of a feather

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop This immature falcon has captured a starling and is trying to dispatch it quickly with a bite to the neck. This image also shows the starling’s fight for survival as it fights off the falcons bite with its own beak.

University of Rome physicist Andrea Cavagna has spent the past 16 years studying how starlings synchronize their movements with such precision and grace. To do so, he has created sophisticated 3-D models of the starling flocks that swirl over Piazza dei Cinquecento in Rome, where the starling population has doubled over the past decade to about a million birds.

© Photograph by Nick Dunlop As a falcon approaches at high speed, the starlings turn in tight formation to avoid capture.

Together with his research partner Irene Giardina, Cavagna operates three synchronized, high-speed cameras on the roof of the Palazzo Massimo during the starlings’ winter migration.

“Every winter we have been up there in the cold and rain night after night,” says Cavagna. “It’s just us and the statues.”

Using the video footage they capture, Cavagna and his colleagues reconstruct the positioning and velocity of a flock’s individual birds into computer models.

Their recreations reveal that starlings maintain their fluid formations via a mechanism known as scale-free behavioral correlation, in which each bird positions itself next to approximately seven other birds, coordinating its movements to create an overlapping synchronicity. (Read more about animals that swarm.)

Cavagna suggests thinking of the phenomenon as like driving on a freeway: “You interact with a fixed number of cars, maybe the one in front, the one behind, and one or two on each side, but you’re not interacting with the cars 50 meters away so you’re not distracted by them.” (It helps, he notes, that European starlings have the advantage of lateral eyesight, giving them a field of vision that extends almost all the way around their bodies.

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© Photograph by Nick Dunlop Taken near a nightly roost site, starling flocks will often stay high in the sky when they feel threatened by an aerial predator, whether it be a falcon or a hawk. These widely changing shapes can be quite beautiful, especially when combined with dramatic evening light. Once they feel out of danger, they drop quickly to trees below.

Although each bird is interacting with its nearby neighbors, every bird’s movements affects and is affected by the entire group, allowing information to travel across the flock at a constant speed. The result is collective decision making so agile that a signal to turn, usually initiated by a bird on the outskirts, can flash through a flock of 400 birds in half a second—a speed of 90 miles per hour.
Sky dancers

The various shapes and patterns the birds create during murmurations have picturesque names: vacuole, cordon, flash expansion.

Perhaps most fascinating in appearance are the dark bands that radiate through a cloud of starlings like a moving stream, says Charlotte Hemelrijk, professor of evolutionary life sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

These “agitation waves” look from the ground as if the starlings are drawing together more densely. But actually they are visible when the birds bank upward, tilting to show a larger area of their wing to observers below. In other words, in addition to clocking the surrounding seven birds, they’re playing follow the leader. “Our latest models show that they are copying the behavior of the nearest bird, causing the motion to roll through the flock,” Hemelrijk says. (Read why birds matter, and are worth protecting.)

Hemelrijk has also found evidence that these patterns serve to confuse predators, such as hawks and other birds of prey, and make it more difficult for them to pick off stragglers. Using sophisticated computer modeling, Hemelrijk has documented patterns of collective escape specifically tied to the movements of a predatory hawk or falcon.
Mysterious murmurations

Why European starlings circle the sky in such gigantic flocks for so long is a much more perplexing question.

The most common explanation—sometimes known as the “safer together” hypothesis—is that the swarms are a protective response against predators. But Heppner and Cavagna say that defies logic; they point out that the birds could simply return directly to their roosts, rather than amassing into huge formations and spiraling across the sky.

“You would think they would want to minimize flying time, but instead they go through this spectacular display for half an hour to 45 minutes, burning up energy at a ferocious rate,” Heppner says.

“And meanwhile they’re actually attracting predators. it’s like they’re saying, We’re here, we’re here. You have to ask yourself, how did a mechanism like this evolve?”

Another possible explanation, sometimes called the “warmer together” theory, suggests that murmurations function to advertise a roosting site, attracting greater numbers of birds to the flock to conserve body heat.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, researchers from the University of Gloucester and the Royal Society of Biology compiled data from more than 3,000 murmurations, data that volunteers in 23 countries collected in 2014 and 2015. The results, published in 2017, showed no correlation between temperature and murmuration size, leaving little support for the warmth hypothesis.

The study also reported the presence of a hawk, falcon, or other bird of prey in just under a third of the murmurations, offering some support for the predation theory—yet leaving unexplained why the birds join together in such lengthy performances.
An act of pure beauty?

On one characteristic of the starlings, though, researchers are in agreement: the birds are remarkably intelligent. When Heppner kept starlings in captivity for his research, he says, “they were so good at picking the locks on their cages, we had to put padlocks on them.”

With the birds’ brain power in mind, is it possible that murmurations are simply their conscious expression of a sheer joy of movement? (Read more about animals that “dance.”)

“In the absence of a predator, I do think it’s possible to see these displays as a sort of dancing,” says the University of Groningen’s Hemelrijk.

“We don’t want to attribute too much intention, but they’re certainly very excited. They do this for a very long time sometimes,” she says, “when they could just go to sleep.”

EU experts  SHILLS to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

By Kate Abnett

3/27/2021

© Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann FILE PHOTO: 

Night view shows Electricite de France nuclear power plant near Fessenheim

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Experts tasked with assessing whether the European Union should label nuclear power as a green investment will say that the fuel qualifies as sustainable, according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The European Commission is attempting to finish its sustainable finance taxonomy, which will decide which economic activities can be labelled as a sustainable investment in the EU, based on whether they meet strict environmental criteria.

Brussels' expert advisors last year split over whether nuclear power deserved a green label, recognising that while it produces very low planet-warming CO2 emissions, more analysis was needed on the environmental impact of radioactive waste disposal.

The Commission asked the Joint Research Centre (JRC), its scientific expert arm, to report on the issue.

A draft of the JRC report, seen by Reuters and due to be published next week, said nuclear deserves a green label.

"The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies," it said.

Storage of nuclear waste in deep geologic formations is deemed "appropriate and safe", it said, citing countries including France and Finland in the advanced stages of developing such sites.

Two expert committees will scrutinise the JRC's findings for three months, before the Commission takes a final decision.

The Commission declined to comment on the draft document.

EU countries are split over nuclear. France, Hungary and five other countries this month urged the Commission to support nuclear in policies including the taxonomy.

Other states including Austria, and some environmental groups, oppose the fuel, pointing to its hazardous waste and the delays and spiralling costs of recent projects.

"The nuclear industry is desperate for funds as nuclear power is too expensive and new projects are evaporating," said Greenpeace EU policy adviser Silvia Pastorelli.

EU countries are also split over how the taxonomy should treat investments in natural gas.

After a plan to exclude gas faced pushback from pro-gas countries, the Commission this month drafted plans to label some gas as sustainable - splintering countries between those who support the fuel as an alternative to more-polluting coal, and those who say new gas plants risk locking in emissions for decades, thwarting climate goals.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett, editing by Louise Heavens)