SPACE

Virgin Galactic set for final spaceflight before two-year pause

Agence France-Presse
June 8, 2024 

Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson speaks at a press conference at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on November 1, 2014 (AFP Photo/Josh Edelson)

Virgin Galactic is poised on Saturday for its last spaceflight before heading into a two-year pause on commercial operations to upgrade its fleet, as the company seeks to finally turn a profit.

The "Galactic 07" mission is scheduled to begin at around 8:30 am Mountain Time (1430 GMT) from the company's base in Spaceport, New Mexico, a spokesman said.

A huge carrier plane takes off from a runway, gains altitude for around 50 minutes, and then releases from under its wings a spaceplane that soars at supersonic speed to the edge of space, where passengers can enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness and admire the Earth's curve.

On board will be two pilots and four private astronauts. One of them is Tuva Atasever, a Turkish space agency astronaut whose seat was contracted through another space company, Axiom, while the names of the other three will likely be disclosed afterwards.

It will be the seventh commercial flight for the company founded in 2004 by British tycoon Richard Branson, in an emerging suborbital tourism market where its main competitor is Blue Origin, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

It will also be the final flight for its current spaceplane called VSS Unity, which it intends to replace with two next-generation "Delta class" ships, currently under construction in Arizona, with test flights due in 2025 before commercial operations in 2026.

The future of the company is at stake as it seeks at long last to get into the black. Virgin is burning through cash, losing more than $100 million in each of the past two quarters, with its reserves standing at $867 million at the end of March.

It also laid off 185 people, or 18 percent of its workforce, late last year. Its shares are currently trading at 85 cents, down from $55 in 2021, the year Branson himself flew, garnering global headlines.

While similar in appearance to Unity, the Delta ships will carry six passengers, compared to the current four. Seat prices will be set at $600,000 and up to 125 flights are projected per year, the company says, hoping to turn around its fortunes.

Some are skeptical, however.

"Virgin Galactic investors can look forward to owning a stock generating essentially zero revenue for the next 18 to 30 months -- and that's if everything goes as planned, and the Delta program doesn't get delayed," The Motley Fool wrote in a note to investors this week.

Blue Origin, which launches on a small suborbital rocket, resumed crewed flights in May after its own hiatus of nearly two years, though it experienced an anomaly with one of the three landing parachutes failing to fully inflate, which could delay the next mission.

U.S., Germany double down on space exploration

Future collaborations include gravity studies, information sharing on Earth-surface changes and national threat assessments regarding possible hostile uses of space

By Ehren Wynder


Germany played a critical role in developing the propulsion modules for the Orion spacecraft, which will carry the first crewed mission in NASA's Artemis Program in late 2024. File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo


June 7 (UPI) -- U.S. and German officials this week met in Berlin to discuss ongoing and future collaborations in space exploration and Earth science.

Leaders at the inaugural U.S.-Germany Space Dialogue highlighted a shared commitment to continue ongoing cooperation in space exploration and research, including through NASA's Artemis campaign.

The Artemis campaign is a series of missions with the robust goal of returning to and establishing a long-term presence on the moon with the help of international partners.

Germany has played a critical role in developing the propulsion modules for Artemis' Orion crew spacecraft, which will be used to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon, according to a memo from the State Department.

The White House last December said the United States plans to land an international astronaut on the moon by 2030.

Earth-gravity study

The United States and Germany also highlighted an agreement between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to continue gravity field measurements through the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment-Continuity, or GRACE-C mission.

The GRACE-C, which is projected to launch no earlier than 2028, involves a pair of satellites flying one behind the other in polar orbit to measure how Earth's gravity changes from place to place due to shifting ice, water and land masses.

According to NASA, different mass distribution on the Earth's surface -- such as mass loss from melting ice sheets -- leads to slight variations in gravitational pull, which researchers can track by measuring the change in travel distance between the two GRACE-C satellites.

Researchers hope the data from this mission will yield new insights into how climate change affects the water cycle.

The United States and Germany have been partnering on climate research since the launch of the first GRACE mission in 2002, and the GRACE-C mission is a continuation of that effort.

Representatives for both countries this week also shared information on respective national space policies, such as Germany's Space Strategy and upcoming Space Security Strategy and the United States' Space Priorities Framework.

Both sides expressed a desire to continue cooperation in areas such as addressing climate change, national security as it pertains to space, information sharing and commercial space cooperation.

Nuclear weapons, satellites in space

The United States and Germany shared their commitment to promote compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which includes a prohibition on the placing of objects carrying nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Earth's orbit.

President Joe Biden has emphasized increased cooperation with allied countries, including Germany, on space activities and information sharing "for mutual benefit in response to growing space and counterspace threats and to protect U.S. forces from hostile uses of space."

Both countries also discussed a range of programs that use satellites to help monitor weather patterns, support agriculture and infrastructure planning, respond to disasters and provide telecommunications services.

Sharing Landsat Next info

The two countries also expressed an intent to partner on NASA's Landsat Next Mission, which will provide the most up-to-date observational data of changes to the Earth's surface.

Landsat Next will be able to capture fast-changing processes such as crop growth, floods and algae blooms. The United States and Germany hope to share this data to support economic development, environmental management and to combat climate change on a global scale.

More than two-dozen private American and German space companies also were part of a discussion to highlight existing public-private partnerships in their respective countries and explore more opportunities for cooperation in the commercial space sector.

The next U.S.-Germany Space Dialogue will be held in the United States at a yet-to-be-determined date, according to the State Department.

'Nicely done!' Boeing Starliner astronauts welcomed to ISS at last

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Boeing Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (both in blue) go aboard the International Space Station Thursday and are welcomed by the ISS crew. Photo screenshot courtesy of NASA

June 6 (UPI) -- Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were welcomed aboard the International Space Station Thursday at 3:45 p.m. following a successful 1:34 p.m. EDT docking.

Williams floated into the space station first, joyously greeting the space station crew. Wilmore floated in shortly afterward.

The astronauts hugged the ISS crew as they entered from the Starliner spacecraft.

Boeing said in a statement on X, "Slow and steady. Ground controllers will carefully equalize and monitor Starliner's pressure to match the space station."
Boeing welcomed Wilmore and Williams to the ISS, congratulating them.

"Butch and Suni nicely done! Welcome back to the ISS!, " Boeing Space posted on X.

Wilmore replied, "Outstanding. Great place to be. We're looking forward to staying here for a couple of weeks and getting things done in Starliner that we need to get done. We're on station, ready to work."

There are two American-crewed spacecraft docked at ISS now -- SpaceX's Dragon was there when Starliner arrived.

The spacecraft docked within the second docking window Thursday. It experienced a thruster malfunction with the B1 A3 thruster, so it was shut down while others were used to control the spacecraft as it docked.

At about 10 meters away a planned hold was implemented to perform the final line-up for docking.

During the docking, both the ISS and Starliner were traveling at 17,000 mph. But the docking maneuvers were conducted very slowly, making it seem as though the ISS and spacecraft were suspended in space.

Throughout the docking process,the astronauts were in radio communication with ground crews at Starliner Mission Control & International Space Station Mission Control.

As the spacecraft docked, they also were in communication with the ISS.

An automated system on Starliner docked the spacecraft, but at times the astronauts took manual control.

At 1:06 p.m., darkness inhibited the visual camera images but Lidar and infrared cameras continued to capture data of the docking.

The docking approach was livestreamed on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency's website.

NASA said the Starliner and crew will remain at the space station for about a week.

NASA said three new helium leaks were found in Starliner. A helium leak caused one of the several delays Starliner experienced before successfully launching the ISS mission.

"One of these was previously discussed before flight along with a management plan, and the other two are new since the spacecraft arrived in orbit," a NASA statement said. "Two of the affected helium valves have been closed and the spacecraft remains stable."

NASA said that to monitor and manage these leaks, the three helium manifolds have been isolated. They have all been reopened prior to a Starliner height adjust burn, called NHPC and all affected manifolds will stay open during docking operations.

The astronauts will spend about eight days at the ISS.

The Starliner crewed mission launched Wednesday from Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Two previous launch efforts were scrubbed.

When it launched ULA said in a statement that Wilmore and Williams' names "now join Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Cooper as American astronauts to launch into space atop Atlas rockets."

Boeing Starliner crew aboard ISS after challenging docking

Agence France-Presse
June 7, 2024 

Astronaut Suni Williams, seen on the right, performed a short dance to celebrate her third arrival on the ISS (Handout)

A Boeing Starliner capsule carrying its first ever astronauts docked with the International Space Station on Thursday after overcoming unexpected challenges arising from thruster malfunctions and helium leaks.

The spaceship dubbed "Calypso" rendezvoused with the orbital lab at 1:34 pm ET (1734 GMT) over the southern Indian Ocean, allowing crewmates Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to enter a while later.

"We're ready to get to work," declared Wilmore, while Williams performed a little dance to celebrate the arrival, the third stay aboard the ISS for both of the ex-Navy test pilots.

Docking was delayed by more than an hour after some of Starliner's thrusters that provide fine maneuvering initially failed to kick in, forcing the astronauts to perform a "hot fire" to activate them.

"I would say Starliner made us work a little harder to get docked," Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, later told reporters, explaining that ground teams now had to work to understand the issues that had emerged during flight.

Wilmore and Williams are the first crew to fly Starliner, which Boeing and NASA are hoping to certify for regular rides to the ISS -- a role SpaceX has been fulfilling for the past four years.

The spaceship blasted off from Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Altas V rocket on Wednesday following years of delays and safety scares -- as well as two recently aborted launch attempts that came as astronauts were already strapped in and ready to go.

- Leaks and thruster problems -

Prior to launch, it was known that there was one helium leak affecting Starliner.

While non-combustible, the helium provides pressure to the propulsion system. But it was determined the leak was too small to cause much of an impact.

During the flight, however, two more leaks emerged, and another was discovered after docking for a total of four.

That makes it more likely that a common issue is at play, rather than a one-off fault like a bad rubber seal.

Engineering teams believe there is more than enough helium left in reserve, and Starliner won't leak anymore while docked to the ISS.

But the issue will have to be monitored and further studied in other Starliners under construction at Boeing's factory, said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Program.

And while four of the five thrusters that failed were subsequently revived, it's not fully understood what triggered the fault in the first place, said Stich.

Teething issues with new spaceships aren't uncommon, he stressed. The Space Shuttle program in its early days faced its share of problems, as did SpaceX's Dragon program in the early 2010s, when that vessel was a cargo-only spaceship.

- Select club of spaceships -

Starliner is just the sixth type of US-built spaceship to fly NASA astronauts, following the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the Space Shuttle from 1981 to 2011, and SpaceX's Crew Dragon from 2020.

The United States was left reliant on Russian Soyuz rockets to go to the ISS between 2011 and 2020.

Boeing's program faced setbacks ranging from a software bug that put the spaceship on a bad trajectory on its first uncrewed test, to the discovery that the cabin was filled with flammable electrical tape after the second.

A successful mission would help dispel the bitter taste left by the years of safety scares and delays, and provide Boeing a much-needed reprieve from the intense safety concerns surrounding its passenger jets.

During their roughly weeklong stay on the orbital outpost, Wilmore and Williams will continue to evaluate the spacecraft systems, including simulating whether the ship can be used as a safe haven in the event of an emergency on the ISS.

After undocking, Starliner will reenter the atmosphere, with the crew experiencing 3.5G as they slow down from 17,500 miles (28,000 kilometers) per hour to a gentle parachute- and airbag-assisted touchdown in the western United States.

Stealth gas contracts awarded amid high-profile crewed Starliner mission

 The Boeing Starliner docks with the International Space Station

 on Thursday. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo

June 7 (UPI) -- NASA has awarded key contracts to a half dozen companies that will supply liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen in support of operations at agency centers and facilities across the United States for the next five years, the space agency announced Thursday.

While not the most high-profile element of the space program, scientists would be unable to perform the work they need to without access to large amounts of critical gasses.

"The commodities will support current and future aerospace flight, simulation, research, development, testing and other operations at the following NASA centers and facilities," the administration said in a statement.

NASA will use almost 657 tons, or nearly 30.4 million gallons, of liquid nitrogen for pressurizing, cooling and other functions, and 243,000 tons, or about 2.1 million gallons, of liquid oxygen, which is mostly used as an oxidizer in cryogenic engines.

Air Products and Chemicals Inc. of Allentown, Pa., and Linde Inc. of Danbury, Conn., were among the biggest contract winners, bringing in $36.9 million and $42.2 million, respectively. Messer LLC, of Bridgewater, N.J., was the biggest winner at $62.3 million.

Airgas USA with locations in Georgia and Oklahoma were also awarded close to $10 million dollars between the two sites.

While much more low profile, the announcement of the gas contracts came against the backdrop of much bigger space news Thursday.

The Boeing Starliner spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Thursday afternoon after Wednesday launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The launch had been scrubbed numerous times and the craft was forced to stand down before docking due to some technical issues.

"As Starliner began its approach to the space station, five reaction control system thrusters failed off during flight," the NASA Starliner mission website said.

"Mission teams performed a series of hot-fire tests which re-enabled four of the thrusters while the crew manually piloted the spacecraft at the station's 200-meter hold point."

Eventually, the Starliner docked with the ISS and shortly after that, the Starship astronauts made their way through an open hatch into the orbital and were greeted by resident crew members already on board. This was the first crewed flight for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.

SpaceX's fourth Starship test flight successfully completes re-entry, splashdown


SpaceX's Starship completed its fourth test launch from Texas on Thursday, successfully completing re-entry and splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Screen capture/SpaceX/X

June 6 (UPI) -- SpaceX's massive Starship made it through re-entry and the ship's first landing burn, taking another step in its fourth test flight.

The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean after taking off from Texas about an hour earlier.

It appeared to surpass the third test run, where the Starship broke up during re-entry. NASA is counting on SpaceX to use the Starship for future Moon and Mars trips.

After splashdown, It was unclear how much of the ship survived the fiery re-entry. One camera SpaceX was monitoring cracked and became partially covered with debris as the Starship returned to Earth, to applauds from the SpaceX headquarters.

SpaceX will need some time to gather data collected from the flight but it appeared to be a clear advancement in the evolution of the Starship.

"Despite the loss of many titles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean," SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on X. "Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic achievement."



Starship launched at the SpaceX Starbase near Boca Chica Beach in Texas on Thursday morning, where all the test flights have taken off from. The first two test flights, using a new Super Heavy rocket booster with 33 Raptor engines ended with the rocket failing.

The first launch was criticized because it caused significant damage to the launch pad, with debris left outside the testing area.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and demanded SpaceX conduct 63 corrective actions that included a redesign of hardware to prevent leaks and fires, fortifying the launch pad, testing safety systems, and applying other charge-control practices.

Planet-forming disks around very low-mass stars are different

JWST discovers a large variety of carbon-rich gases that serve as ingredients for future planets around a very low-mass star

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR ASTRONOMY

 

IMAGE: 

ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF A PROTOPLANETARY DISK AROUND A VERY LOW-MASS STAR. IT DEPICTS A SELECTION OF HYDROCARBON MOLECULES (METHANE, CH4; ETHANE, C2H6; ETHYLENE, C2H2; DIACETYLENE, C4H2; PROPYNE, C3H4; BENZENE, C6H6) DETECTED IN THE DISK AROUND ISO-CHAI 147.

view more 

CREDIT: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / MPIA

Planets form in disks of gas and dust, orbiting young stars. The MIRI Mid-INfrared Disk Survey (MINDS), led by Thomas Henning from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, aims to establish a representative disk sample. By exploring their chemistry and physical properties with MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the collaboration links those disks to the properties of planets potentially forming there. In a new study, a team of researchers explored the vicinity of a very low-mass star of 0.11 solar masses (known as ISO-ChaI 147), whose results appear in the journal Science.

JWST opens a new window to the chemistry of planet-forming disks

“These observations are not possible from Earth because the relevant gas emissions are absorbed by its atmosphere,” explained lead author Aditya Arabhavi of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “Previously, we could only identify acetylene (C2H2) emission from this object. However, JWST’s higher sensitivity and the spectral resolution of its instruments allowed us to detect weak emission from less abundant molecules.”

The MINDS collaboration found gas at temperatures around 300 Kelvin (ca. 30 degrees Celsius), strongly enriched with carbon-bearing molecules but lacking oxygen-rich species. “This is profoundly different from the composition we see in disks around solar-type stars, where oxygen-bearing molecules such as water and carbon dioxide dominate,” added team member Inga Kamp, University of Groningen.

One striking example of an oxygen-rich disk is the one of PDS 70, where the MINDS program recently found large amounts of water vapour. Considering earlier observations, astronomers deduce that disks around very low-mass stars evolve differently than those around more massive stars such as the Sun, with potential implications for finding rocky planets with Earth-like characteristics there. Since the environments in such disks set the conditions in which new planets form, any such planet may be rocky but quite unlike Earth in other aspects.

What does it mean for rocky planets orbiting very low-mass stars?

The amount of material and its distribution across those disks limits the number and sizes of planets the disk can supply with the necessary material. Consequently, observations indicate that rocky planets with sizes similar to Earth form more efficiently than Jupiter-like gas giants in the disks around very low-mass stars, the most common stars in the Universe. As a result, very low-mass stars host the majority of terrestrial planets by far.

“Many primary atmospheres of those planets will probably be dominated by hydrocarbon compounds and not so much by oxygen-rich gases such as water and carbon dioxide,” Thomas Henning pointed out. “We showed in an earlier study that the transport of carbon-rich gas into the zone where terrestrial planets usually form happens faster and is more efficient in those disks than the ones of more massive stars.”

Although it seems clear that disks around very low-mass stars contain more carbon than oxygen, the mechanism for this imbalance is still unknown. The disk composition is the result of either carbon enrichment or the reduction of oxygen. If the carbon is enriched, the cause is probably solid particles in the disk, whose carbon is vaporised and released into the gaseous component of the disk. The dust grains, stripped of their original carbon, eventually form rocky planetary bodies. Those planets would be carbon-poor, as is Earth. Still, carbon-based chemistry would likely dominate at least their primary atmospheres provided by disk gas. Therefore, very low-mass stars may not offer the best environments for finding planets akin to Earth.

JWST discovers a wealth of organic molecules

To identify the disk gases, the team used MIRI’s spectrograph to decompose the infrared radiation received from the disk into signatures of small wavelength ranges – similar to sunlight being split into a rainbow. This way, the team isolated a wealth of individual signatures attributed to various molecules.

As a result, the observed disk contains the richest hydrocarbon chemistry seen to date in a protoplanetary disk, consisting of 13 carbon-bearing molecules up to benzene (C6H6). They include the first extrasolar ethane (C2H6) detection, the largest fully-saturated hydrocarbon detected outside the Solar System. The team also successfully detected ethylene (C2H4), propyne (C3H4), and the methyl radical CH3 for the first time in a protoplanetary disk. In contrast, the data contained no hint of water or carbon monoxide in the disk.

Sharpening the view of disks around very low-mass stars

Next, the science team intends to expand their study to a larger sample of such disks around very low-mass stars to develop their understanding of how common such exotic carbon-rich terrestrial planet-forming regions are. “Expanding our study will also allow us to understand better how these molecules can form,” Thomas Henning explained. “Several features in the data are also still unidentified, warranting additional spectroscopy to interpret our observations fully.”

Background information

The study was funded in the framework of the ERC Advanced Grant “Origins – From Planet-Forming Disks to Giant Planets” (Grant ID: 832428, PI: Thomas Henning, DOI: 10.3030/832428).

The MPIA scientists involved in this study are Thomas Henning, Matthias Samland, Giulia Perotti, Jeroen Bouwman, Silvia Scheithauer, Riccardo Franceschi, Jürgen Schreiber, and Kamber Schwartz.

Other researchers include Aditya Arabhavi (University of Groningen, the Netherlands [Groningen]), Inga Kamp (Groningen), Ewine van Dishoeck (Leiden University, the Netherlands and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany), Valentin Christiaens (University of Liege, Belgium), and Agnes Perrin (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique/IPSL CNRS, Palaiseau, France).

The MIRI consortium consists of the ESA member states Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The national science organisations fund the consortium’s work – in Germany, the Max Planck Society (MPG) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The participating German institutions are the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, the University of Cologne, and Hensoldt AG in Oberkochen, formerly Carl Zeiss Optronics.

JWST is the world’s premier space science observatory. It is an international program led by NASA jointly with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

Logo of the MINDS Project

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adi8147 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Abundant hydrocarbons in the disk around a very-low-mass star

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Jun-2024

How right-wing media turned racism into a machine that generates billions a year

Thom Hartmann
June 9, 2024 

Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash

The politically cancerous pattern of using racism for political gain and financial profit dates back to the earliest days of our republic, but now, amplified by Donald Trump, is again increasingly in our faces.

Black workers at a General Mills plant in Georgia are suing over white management allegedly sanctioning a “Good Ole Boys” club that uses Confederate symbols and open racism to intimidate and cow them.

A producer on The Apprentice show is — now that his NDA has expired — telling the story of Trump’s casual and repeated use of the N-word, questioning whether Americans would ever “buy a n— winning” the show’s faux business competition.

The GOP and rightwing hate media have turned racism into both a political weapon and a machine to generate billions in annual profits. Today’s “school choice” movement, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and the MAGA movement all have the same roots.

America’s media and the GOP try to pretend that the primary animating force of Trump’s MAGA movement isn’t race, but it absolutely is. And it’s been both politically and financially profitable for those willing to join him.

When, in 1954, the then-moderate-dominated Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling and said that public schools must integrate, the response from the right was swift and certain. By the end of that decade public schools across the South had closed, leaving private school or no school as the only option. It continued into the 60s.

Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, shut down all their public schools from 1959 to 1963. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, that school district closed the all-Black Summerton High School in 1966 to avoid integration, so white parents sent their children to a newly-built private segregated school instead.

Jerry Falwell opened an all-white “Christian” private school, one of hundreds across the country, and Bob Jones University proudly continued to admit only white students.

That an anti-racist Supreme Court decision also kicked off today’s modern conservative movement. In 1957, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an infamous editorial for his National Review magazine titled “Why the South Must Prevail” in which he argued that segregation must continue because Black people, he said, are incapable of participating in “civilization.”

“The central question that emerges,” Buckley wrote, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?

“The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

“It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. …

“NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the [Black] majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by [White] civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical [Black] majority.”

Oil baron Fred Koch, the father of Koch brothers Charles and David, helped fund the 1958 startup of the John Birch Society, whose major project in that era was placing billboards all across American proclaiming that Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the majority opinion in Brown v Board, must be impeached.

As the brilliant new documentary Bad Faith details, in the run-up to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan the anti-integration movement needed a new non-racial issue to publicly blur their racism while bringing together the nation’s bigots into a “Christian” voting bloc.

Even though Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation as California governor, George HW Bush and his wife were both big supporters of Planned Parenthood, and Jerry Falwell and the racist all-white-school evangelical movement had been pro-choice right up until 1978, they collectively picked abortion as the non-racial hook on which to hang their political activism and organizing.

After all, abortion was then most often used by middle-class white women and was thus, they noted, “depriving the nation of large numbers of white babies.”

The so-called Moral Majority movement (and its successor, the Tea Party movement) were heavily funded by oil billionaires (including Fred’s sons) after Reagan, Falwell, et al, committed to broadening their agenda to include deregulation of monopolies and the fossil fuel industry, along with massive tax cuts.

Thus was born the modern-day alliance between the morbidly rich, polluting and monopolistic industries, and white supremacists that has taken over the GOP and calls itself MAGA.

But, as the fascist governments of the 1930s showed in Europe, for a movement to seize control of a government it must not only have rich donors but also requires a powerful media arm.


To accomplish this, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch (the son of media mogul and notorious racist Sir Keith Murdoch) in 1985 so he could legally purchase US media properties; Fox “News” was launched here the following year, as Reagan ordered the FCC to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting; Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done within his own nation was the influence of Rupert Murdoch.

Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added,

“Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:
“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.
“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.
“Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”

Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its most recent political creation, President Donald Trump, even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs.

Fox and Murdoch’s power come, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.
“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former Australian Prime Minister Rudd writes, “who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.
“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”

When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6th coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th — while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:
“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox did.

That white backlash to the Brown v Board decision is still alive and well in America, and was amplified by the election of Barack Obama as president: it led straight to Trump’s racist birtherism and the flowering of his 2015 candidacy. Fox and rightwing media have exploited that reaction and relentlessly used it to enrich themselves in the modern day.

It’s also the foundation of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy, which is being endlessly promoted across the rightwing hate media spectrum. Tucker Carlson and other heirs to William F. Buckley Jr. — along with the MAGA contingent within the GOP — continue to promote his and Sir Keith Murdoch’s message of white superiority, albeit shrouded in more acceptable language for today’s audiences.

This is how Rupert Murdoch succeeded in reinventing American politics in the image of his own paranoid, xenophobic, and arguably racist worldview, just as Rudd documents he did to Australia and the United Kingdom.

Fox “News” led the charge to amplify Trump’s racist “birther” claims against President Obama, positioning him to run in 2016; without their help he never would have become president and done the damage that he has to this country.

“Banishing from polite company” is a phrase from a different era, but it’s time to ask if Fox has grown to such destructive dimensions that our government’s press rooms should stop recognizing them as a legitimate “news” organization and our military should reconsider rightwing media’s impact on our troops.

On average, every cable-connected household in America is paying two dollars a month to Fox “News” via their cable company fees. A growing movement, https://www.nofoxfee.com/ is trying to change this.

To continue with Rudd’s metaphor, if our media and body politic are infected with a cancer — driven by white grievance and an unending thirst for profits, regardless of the damage it does — it’s our responsibility as Americans to call it out and isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the other democracies of the world.

Trump hides the worst scandal in American history in plain sight

Jason Sattler, Alternet
June 9, 2024 

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (AFP)

It’s been nearly two weeks since Donald Trump echoed his 2016 public request for Vladimir Putin’s help in winning a presidential election, and the press remains determined to ignore it.

The convicted felon, presumptive GOP nominee and wannabe dictator instructed the dictator of Russia to continue holding Wall St. Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich hostage until the election.

This treachery echoes the successful effort by the Reagan campaign to “torpedo” the release of the American hostages held in Iran before the 1980 election while burying Trump’s failure to attempt to arrange for the release of Paul Whelan, an American imprisoned in Russia when Trump was in power.


This media’s abdication of any attempt to tell the story of how the Russia attack on the 2016 election has helped bring America to the brink of fascism is one of the main reasons I’m helping Marcy Wheeler put together her Ball of Thread podcast.

The concerted effort to ignore Trump's begging for Putin's help in this specific instance goes along with the media’s general surrender on the connections between Trump and Russia. It was almost absent in the debate about supporting Ukraine and in the more than half-year delay in that aid that has given Russia an advantage in that war that Putin never would have had otherwise.

You can watch the first episode below. Given the stakes of November's election, it’s the kind of journalism any serious publication should be doing.

But you don’t have to be CSI: Moscow to connect the dots of what’s going on here. The GOP is signaling its support for Putin over Ukraine and NATO. And Putin is responding by demonstrating his impunity at home, in Ukraine and against America’s NATO ally Finland.

Putin trollingly suggested in mid-February that he would prefer Biden to Trump. But only because Trump’s anti-NATO statements had gotten so apparent that they might get in the way of Russia’s more subtle efforts to help him.

Instead, the press obsessed over far more critical issues, like Joe Biden being one summer Olympics older than Donald Trump.

When there was a scandal of this magnitude in the last century, the press became obsessed with questions like the one Brian Beutler keeps asking: “What did Republicans know, and when did they know it?”

But there are several reasons the press refuses to ask these questions now:

Trump paralyzed the press with a single word

“Donald Trump and his MAGA legions have spent years shock-training reporters not to bring up anything else about Russian disinformation programs aimed at helping Donald Trump,” Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall explained. Most of this training has come from one word – “hoax.” Since 2017, Trump has used that word and the mocking phrase “Russia, Russia, Russia” to mock any suggestion of a conspiracy between him and Putin. No one should believe the “deep state” conspiracy theory that there’s anything to him begging Russia to hack Hillary Clinton (which it did), his son seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, and Trump himself siding with Putin over American intelligence in Helsinki. All you have to do is repeat the magic H-word. That and a constant torrent of death threats seem to have successfully trained the press not to get too wise about Trump and Russia.

Democrats don’t see advantage in focusing on Russia

Evidence suggests that Special Counsel Robert Mueller expected his report to be taken as a referral for an impeachment. Instead, Trump’s pick to cover up the Russia scandal, Attorney General Bill Barr, showed the power of framing with a memo that gutted the overwhelming betrayal, illegality and obstruction Mueller’s team discovered. With the media battle lost before it began, Democrats essentially moved on. They’d decide their midterm wins over health care and opposing hugely unpopular things like Trump’s corporate tax cuts were far safer bets. Because as obvious as Trump’s alignment with Putin was, the details remain murky. And almost as soon as the Russian investigations retreated, Trump began the high crimes that led to his first impeachment, which coincidentally involved the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, dealing with three Ukrainians now indicted for treason over their connections to Russia. And the press utterly failed to connect those crimes with the Russia attack, something we will make clear in Ball of Thread.

Putin's propaganda has infected our body politic

You probably have never heard about Russia's connection to Trump's first impeachment. And I don’t blame you if you haven’t! Almost no one has the time or mental RAM to keep track of all the entanglements and obfuscations that cloud the obviousness of Trump and the GOP’s growing alliance with Putin. Marcy has documented nearly every step of this story, as it happens, telling her readers what most of the public won’t know until historians have time to suss through the details if we still have historians in the future. She, almost solely, has documented the “corrupt and complex machinations” of Barr to not only spoil all the Russia investigations he inherited, which were finally killed off by pardons, but also defend Trump from his first impeachment by making the Department of Justice a willing recipient of the Russian lies being trafficked through Giuliani. Marcy spends much of her day raging at the people who have gotten the details of this abstruse Ball of Thread wrong, including me. Because if she doesn’t, literally no one else will.

The way that the Republican Party led by Donald Trump has embraced Vladimir Putin, one of the worst people alive and possibly the greatest thief of his people’s wealth ever to live, is a scandal so catastrophic that it almost sounds ridiculous when you describe it accurately. And nearly everyone who has the power to convey the essential details of this ominous and growing threat has given up on their responsibility.

The reasons for this range from cowardice to excessive “savviness” and outright complicity.

But it’s important to discuss it anywhere else we can, not just because we are patriots disgusted by this betrayal of our country and decency itself, but also because it shows the power of framing and repetition— two skills that Trump is better at than almost any American politician.

Like Putin, his greatest strength is capitalizing on our weaknesses and capturing the brains of people who should know better.

Trump fan's attempt to explain what happened in Nazi Germany leaves historian stunned

Tom Boggioni
June 8, 2024

Melissa Poghossian (MSNBC sctreenshot)

A Yale University historian was both baffled and amused by a follower of Donald Trump who spoke with NBC this week and attempted to share her knowledge about Nazi-era Germany.

During an appearance with MSNBC host Ali Velshi, historian Joanne Freeman was shown the clip of the woman identified as Melissa Poghossian that had Freeman struggling to control laughing at the MAGA fan.

In the clip, Poghossian first stated, "I don't want to see what happened in Germany years ago happen here in this country," and then was pressed, "What do you mean what happened in Germany?" to which she replied, "All of the things that started World War II. Just witch hunts and brainwashing people."

ALSO READ: Inside the 'irregular warfare' campaign fascists are conducting against America

Asked by host Velshi to weigh in, Freeman started by shaking her head and remarking, "That is part of the ongoing campaign of lies and now threats."

"Think about the degree to which that woman has absolutely no understanding of what happened with the Nazis and World War II, right?" she continued while laughing. "Brainwashing and — the words she is throwing out are words of the Trump campaign and have nothing to do with Germany. We see that a lot with the word fascism being tossed around with no meaning at all. People have a sense it is a bad word so we will throw it out and we will attach Democrats to it."

"It is part of this ongoing firehose of lies," she stated. "The problem at this point is — again, it is rhetoric and also a promise. It is kind of a win-win for Trump because, on the one hand, he is saying bluntly this campaign is about me and my ego, right? 'I want power. People have done bad things to me,' he is using that to fuel the emotion of his supporters because his whole campaign, that is all it is, hate and rage and fear and that is what he keeps drumming up."

Watch below or at the link.

MSNBC 06 08 2024 10 08 22youtu.be

ARKANSAS

'We won’t be intimidated': Activists balk after right-wingers publish AR canvasser list

Tess Vrbin, Arkansas Advocate
June 9, 2024 

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Supporters of a proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment that would allow a limited right to abortion denounced a conservative advocacy group’s publication of a list of paid canvassers, calling the move an intimidation tactic.

The right-wing Family Council posted Thursday on its website a list of 79 people that the Arkansans for Limited Government ballot question committee is paying to collect signatures from across the state. The committee needs 90,704 signatures from registered voters by July 5 for the proposed amendment to appear on the November ballot.

The Family Council obtained the list of paid canvassers and their home cities via an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request, according to the post. Ballot question committees do not have to submit lists of unpaid or volunteer canvassers to the state.

AFLG released a statement Friday in response to the post.

“The canvassers working tirelessly to collect petitions in support of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment are proud of the work they are doing to promote reproductive liberty in the state and to engage in direct democracy — they aren’t hiding,” the group stated. “But when the Family Council releases lists of their names and whereabouts to their network of anti-choice protestors who vehemently, and sometimes violently, disagree with our work, it puts our team at great risk for harassment, stalking, and other dangers. The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated.”

Other states’ ballot successes provide model for Arkansas abortion initiative

The Family Council’s post is the second instance of alleged intimidation of abortion amendment supporters in less than two weeks.

On May 30, canvasser Veronica McClane filmed an interaction between herself and Little Rock police, in which Officer Christopher Tollette told her that both Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission did not want her and others canvassing at the intersection of 9th and State streets.

Tollette told McClane that canvassers could be arrested for obstructing traffic. The canvassers told reporters they were not blocking traffic but instead sought the attention of drivers from a public sidewalk. The Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, located at the 9th and Broadway intersection, attracted a slow-moving line of cars with a free food giveaway on May 30.

Mark Edwards, the Little Rock Police Department’s spokesman, told reporters that Sanders had nothing to do with the officers’ presence and that Tollette misspoke when he mentioned her.

Edwards also said the police arrived because a Martin Luther King Jr. Commission member claimed to have overheard a canvasser trying to coerce someone into signing the petition.

The proposed amendment

The Arkansas Abortion Amendment would not allow government entities to “prohibit, penalize, delay or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization.” The proposal would also permit abortion services in cases of rape, incest, a fatal fetal anomaly or to “protect the pregnant female’s life or physical health,” and it would nullify any of the state’s existing “provisions of the Constitution, statutes and common law” that conflict with it.

The Family Council claims this measure would allow “thousands of elective abortions in Arkansas every year” and “permit abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in many cases” because of its health provisions despite the 18-week limit.

The proposed amendment would alter Amendment 68 to the state Constitution, which currently states that Arkansas policy “is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the Federal Constitution,” by adding “and the Constitution of the State of Arkansas” at the end.

Arkansas Legislature saw wide range of maternal and reproductive health legislation in 2023

Amendment 68 states, “No public funds will be used to pay for any abortion, except to save the mother’s life.” The proposed amendment would not alter this statement, contrary to the Family Council’s claim in Thursday’s post.

Abortion has been illegal in Arkansas, with a narrow exception to save the pregnant person’s life, since June 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion a federally recognized right.

Democratic state lawmakers introduced bills during the 2023 legislative session that would have created exceptions to the abortion ban for fatal fetal anomalies, child victims of incest and threats to the health of the pregnant person. Republican lawmakers voted down all three proposals in committee.

The anti-abortion Arkansas Right to Life has been leading a “Decline to Sign” campaign encouraging voters not to sign petitions for the amendment. McClane said last week that opponents of the proposed amendment have attended AFLG’s signing events in protest, which she said amounts to harassment.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions:

info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and Twitter.

Conservative admits Trump’s policies 'would result in price spikes' for most Americans

Carl Gibson,

 AlterNet
June 8, 2024 

One plank of former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign is lowering prices for gas and groceries, which remains a top concern of most American voters. But at least one economic expert is doubtful that Trump's policies would do anything to make goods more affordable — in fact, he says prices will likely jump even higher under a second Trump administration.

Trump has argued that he plans to "knock the hell out of the inflation" if sent back to the White House, mainly through a combination of extending his tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, gutting regulations and slashing government spending. Most of the regulations he has run on eliminating are ones President Joe Biden put in place on extractive industries. Trump has also campaigned on repealing subsidies for the renewable energy industry like those in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

But according to the New York Times, Michael Strain — who is the director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute — said all signs point to higher prices if the policies Trump is running on become reality.

"I think we can say with a lot of confidence that President Trump’s trade policies and immigration policies would result in price spikes," Strain said.

Strain pointed to the former president's promises to deport millions of immigrants and impose massive new double-digit tariffs on imported goods as reason to believe higher prices are likely if Trump is president again. He said many of the products Americans buy that line the shelves of big box retailers like Walmart and Target are imported from China and that those high tariffs would be passed down to consumers in the form of higher sticker prices.

Additionally, Strain said rounding up, detaining and deporting millions of immigrants would "cause a severe supply shock to the labor market," as many industries including agriculture, manufacturing, construction and educational and health services rely heavily on immigrant labor. He said that if jobs predominantly done by immigrants — many of whom work for very low wages with no benefits — suddenly became vacant, employers would have significant difficulty getting native-born Americans to fill those roles. Unemployment is still fairly low at approximately 4%, and Strain said Americans would almost certainly pass up those low-wage jobs for work that pays better, and that the plentiful job market would allow them that choice.

"Basic economics say the result would be higher prices, as production falls and labor costs go up. For example, if farmers could not find enough workers to pick all their crops, there would be a smaller supply of produce and it would get more expensive," wrote Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan. "And businesses would be forced to offer higher wages to attract or retain workers — passing on some of their higher costs to consumers."

Trump has baselessly claimed that the Biden administration is choking the oil industry, and has promised to open up protected lands to oil and gas drilling if he wins in November. But under Biden's watch, domestic oil production has hit new record highs that outpaced even Trump's record. And conservative economist N. Greg Mankiw, who worked in George W. Bush's White House, said Trump's vow to issue new oil drilling leases on federally owned land would have a minimal impact on prices.

"Since it’s a global market for oil, that effect would be fairly muted," Mankiw told the Times.

The May 2024 jobs report showed the economy added more than 270,000 jobs last month alone, outpacing economists projections of approximately 187,000. Wages are also continuing to outpace inflation, meaning that even when accounting for prices going up, Americans still have more money in their pocket on average.

Click here to read the Times' report in full (subscription required).

Gaza war protesters slam Biden in ‘red line’ rally at White House

Agence France-Presse
June 8, 2024 


Thousands of Gaza war protesters held a “red line” rally near the White House on Saturday, voicing anger at what they said is US President Joe Biden’s tolerance of Israel’s bloody military campaign against Hamas.

Chanting “From DC to Palestine, we are the red line,” the demonstrators held a long banner scribbled with the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, as the fighting enters its ninth month.

Biden has faced criticism for playing a balancing act on key ally Israel’s actions in the conflict.

The White House said in May that a deadly Israeli strike on Rafah did not cross a “red line” that Biden had seemingly set two months earlier when asked about a potential invasion of the southern Gazan city.

“I no longer believe any of the words that Joe Biden says,” said protester 25-year-old Zaid Mahdawi from Virginia, whose parents are Palestinian.

“This ‘red line’ in his rhetoric is rubbish… it shows his hypocrisy and his cowardice,” Mahdawi told AFP.

Nursing assistant Tala McKinney, 25, said: “I think we all hope it’s going to stop soon but clearly our president is not living up to the words he is speaking to our country. It’s outrageous.”

The protesters — almost all wearing red clothing — held Palestinian flags and signs saying “Biden’s red line was a lie” and “Bombing children is not self-defense.”

The White House stepped up security with an additional anti-scale perimeter fence ahead of the demonstration, which saw chartered buses ferrying in people from as far afield as Maine and Florida.


Five months from his election battle with Republican candidate Donald Trump, Biden is facing pressure to hang onto Muslim and young voters, blocs seen as crucial to his reelection bid.

“It’s very disappointing to have a president who doesn’t follow through with their word… I will be voting for a third party,” said McKinney.

Records of Pompeii’s survivors discovered

The Conversation
June 9, 2024 

The fresco was uncovered in what experts think was a tavern frequented by gladiators PRESS OFFICE OF THE POMPEI ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK/AFP / Handout

On Aug. 24, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air. As the ash and rock fell to Earth, it buried the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

According to most modern accounts, the story pretty much ends there: Both cities were wiped out, their people frozen in time.

It only picks up with the rediscovery of the cities and the excavations that started in earnest in the 1740s.

But recent research has shifted the narrative. The story of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is no longer one about annihilation; it also includes the stories of those who survived the eruption and went on to rebuild their lives.

The search for survivors and their stories has dominated the past decade of my archaeological fieldwork, as I’ve tried to figure out who might have escaped the eruption. Some of my findings are featured in an episode of the new PBS documentary, “Pompeii: The New Dig.”

‘Pompeii: The New Dig’ highlights recent discoveries that have helped historians better understand life before and after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Making it out alive

Pompeii and Herculaneum were two wealthy cities on the coast of Italy just south of Naples. Pompeii was a community of about 30,000 people that hosted thriving industry and active political and financial networks. Herculaneum, with a population of about 5,000, had an active fishing fleet and a number of marble workshops. Both economies supported the villas of wealthy Romans in the surrounding countryside.

In popular culture, the eruption is usually depicted as an apocalyptic event with no survivors: In episodes of the TV series “Doctor Who” and “Loki,” everyone in Pompeii and Herculaneum dies.

But the evidence that people could have escaped was always there.

The eruption itself continued for over 18 hours. The human remains found in each city account for only a fraction of their populations, and many objects you might have expected to have remained and be preserved in ash are missing: Carts and horses are gone from stables, ships missing from docks, and strongboxes cleaned out of money and jewelry.

All of this suggests that many – if not most – of the people in the cities could have escaped if they fled early enough.

Some archaeologists have always assumed that some people escaped. But searching for them has never been a priority.

 

So I created a methodology to determine if survivors could be found. I took Roman names unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum – such as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius – and searched for people with those names who lived in surrounding communities in the period after the eruption. I also looked for additional evidence, such as improved infrastructure in neighboring communities to accommodate migrants.

After eight years of scouring databases of tens of thousands of Roman inscriptions on places ranging from walls to tombstones, I found evidence of over 200 survivors in 12 cities. These municipalities are primarily in the general area of Pompeii. But they tended to be north of Mount Vesuvius, outside the zone of the greatest destruction.

It seems as though most survivors stayed as close as they could to Pompeii. They preferred to settle with other survivors, and they relied on social and economic networks from their original cities as they resettled.

Some migrants prosper

Some of the families that escaped apparently went on to thrive in their new communities.

The Caltilius family resettled in Ostia – what was then a major port city to the north of Pompeii, 18 miles from Rome. There, they founded a temple to the Egyptian deity Serapis. Serapis, who wore a basket of grain on his head to symbolize the bounty of the earth, was popular in harbor cities like Ostia dominated by the grain trade. Those cities also built a grand, expensive tomb complex decorated with inscriptions and large portraits of family members.

Members of the Caltilius family married into another family of escapees, the Munatiuses. Together, they created a wealthy, successful extended family.
Some of the survivors resettled in Ostia, a port city north of Pompeii. DEA Picture Library/Getty Images

The second-busiest port city in Roman Italy, Puteoli – what’s known as Pozzuoli today – also welcomed survivors from Pompeii. The family of Aulus Umbricius, who was a merchant of garum, a popular fermented fish sauce, resettled there. After reviving the family garum business, Aulus and his wife named their first child born in their adopted city Puteolanus, or “the Puteolanean.”

Others fall on hard times

Not all the survivors of the eruption were wealthy or went on to find success in their new communities. Some had already been poor to begin with. Others seemed to have lost their family fortunes, perhaps in the eruption itself.

Fabia Secundina from Pompeii – apparently named for her grandfather, a wealthy wine merchant – also ended up in Puteoli. There, she married a gladiator, Aquarius the retiarius, who died at the age of 25, leaving her in dire financial straits.

Three other very poor families from Pompeii – the Avianii, Atilii and Masuri families – survived and settled in a small, poorer community called Nuceria, which goes by Nocera today and is about 10 miles (16.1 kilometers) east of Pompeii.

According to a tombstone that still exists, the Masuri family took in a boy named Avianius Felicio as a foster son. Notably, in the 160 years of Roman Pompeii, there was no evidence of any foster children, and extended families usually took in orphaned children. For this reason, it’s likely that Felicio didn’t have any surviving family members.

This small example illustrates the larger pattern of the generosity of migrants – even impoverished ones – toward other survivors and their new communities. They didn’t just take care of each other; they also donated to the religious and civic institutions of their new homes.

For example, the Vibidia family had lived in Herculaneum. Before it was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius, they had given lavishly to help fund various institutions, including a new temple of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility.

One female family member who survived the eruption appears to have continued the family’s tradition: Once settled in her new community, Beneventum, she donated a very small, poorly made altar to Venus on public land given by the local city council.

How would survivors be treated today?

While the survivors resettled and built lives in their new communities, government played a role as well.

The emperors in Rome invested heavily in the region, rebuilding properties damaged by the eruption and building new infrastructure for displaced populations, including roads, water systems, amphitheaters and temples.

This model for post-disaster recovery can be a lesson for today. The costs of funding the recovery never seems to have been debated. Survivors were not isolated into camps, nor were they forced to live indefinitely in tent cities. There’s no evidence that they encountered discrimination in their new communities.

Instead, all signs indicate that communities welcomed the survivors. Many of them went on to open their own businesses and hold positions in local governments. And the government responded by ensuring that the new populations and their communities had the resources and infrastructure to rebuild their lives.

Steven L. Tuck, Professor of Classics, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.