The slippery science of Olympic curling: we still don’t know how it works
The Conversation
February 15, 2022

South Korea's 'Garlic Girls' won curling silver at Pyeongchang Winter Olympics (AFP / WANG Zhao)

Australia’s first ever Olympic curling team scored an historic win but missed the medal podium at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. It was a remarkable performance for a team lacking any dedicated curling facilities at home.

And that’s important, because it is the special properties of curling ice that allow the heavy curling stones to glide and curve in ways that seem to defy physics. In fact, scientists are still not sure what puts the “curl” in curling.
Chess on ice

Curling’s origins date back to 16th-century Scotland, making it one of the world’s oldest team sports. Like golf – invented around the same time in the same part of the world – curling seems both amusingly pointless and deceptively simple to the untrained eye.

It has been called “chess on ice”, although to many Australians it most resembles frozen lawn bowls. Athletes take turns sliding circular 20-kilogram granite stones along the ice toward the centre of a horizontal target 28 metres away. Teams are awarded points for getting their stones closest to the centre of the target, or “house”.

Slippery science

The slippery science behind curling starts with the ice itself. Curling ice must be perfectly flat – far flatter than a typical ice hockey rink – and is sprayed with droplets of water before each game to produce a pebbled surface. This minimises the contact area between the ice and the heavy curling stone.

Curling stones also have a concave lower surface – like the bottom of a beer bottle – that further reduces the contact area between the stone and the ice. The effect is to increase the pressure at the base of the stone, partially melting the ice and reducing friction in a similar way to how ice skates work.

Uniquely among Olympic sports, curling players can change the path of the stone after it has been “thrown”. This is achieved by vigorously sweeping the ice in front of the stone with special brooms that warm the ice and reduce friction, allowing the stone to travel farther and straighter along its path.

Deciding when, where, and how hard to sweep has a big influence on the stone’s trajectory; so naturally it is accompanied by a great deal of enthusiastic yelling.

Give it a spin

By adding a small amount of spin, skilled players can make their stone “curl” along a curving path to block an opponent’s stone or knock it out of the way. Even a small amount of rotation can deflect the path of the curling stone by as much as a metre and a half. How exactly the curling stone does this is something of a puzzle.

Let’s start with a (literal) tabletop experiment. Slide an upturned glass along a table, adding a little spin as it leaves your hand. With a little practice (and perhaps a few replacement glasses) you will be able to make the glass trace a curving path across the table, deflecting to the left when you spin it clockwise or to the right when you spin it anticlockwise.

The reason for this is explained by a branch of science called tribology, which studies the effect of friction on moving and sliding objects.

As the glass spins, it rubs against the table top, generating friction that tries to slow down the rotation of the glass. The friction forces are directed opposite to the direction of motion: for a clockwise-rotating glass, friction will be directed to the left at the front of the glass and to the right at the back of the glass.

When the spinning glass slides across the table, it leans forward slightly in the direction of travel, pushing the front lip of the glass down a little harder on the table than the trailing lip. The extra pressure generates extra friction at the front compared to the back. The resulting imbalance of friction forces causes the glass to deflect in the direction of stronger friction – to the left in the case of a clockwise-rotating glass.

A twist in the tale

But curling stones behave in exactly the opposite way: a clockwise rotation causes the stone to deflect to the right, not the left. For a long time, scientists assumed this was because of an effect called asymmetrical friction.

The theory goes like this: like a glass pushed across a table, a curling stone leans forward slightly. The extra pressure at the front of the stone partially melts the ice at the leading edge, creating a thin film of water that reduces the friction at the front of stone compared with the back.

The curling stone will still deflect in the direction of stronger friction. But in this case, it is the trailing edge that wins, resulting in a deflection to the right rather than the left, for a clockwise-rotating stone.
Scratch that

Like many theories, this explanation was widely accepted until someone got around to actually testing it. In 2012, a team at Uppsala University in Sweden made detailed calculations of the friction forces acting on a sliding stone.

The problem they found is that curling stones rotate quite slowly, only completing a couple of turns before coming to a stop. This spin is far too small to cause a sideways deflection of a metre or more. Even odder, more rotation does not lead to more curl – in fact, spin a stone too hard and it won’t curl at all. Asymmetrical friction cannot explain such behaviour.

The researchers used an electron microscope to look more closely at the ice under a curling stone. They discovered that the front edge of the stone leaves behind miniscule scratches on the ice in the direction of rotation. These scratches act as a guide for the back edge of the stone, causing the stone to deflect in the direction of rotation.


Curling stones make microscopic scratches in the pebbled surface of the ice - and according to one theory, these scratches deflect the stone’s path to the left or right.
H. Nyberg, et al., Wear (2013)

The Swedish team then showed that, using this “scratch-guide” mechanism, they could “steer” the sliding stones by adding artificial scratches to the ice in different directions. In one experiment, a stone was made to travel along a zigzag path by laying down scratches in alternating directions.

Their findings ignited a minor controversy in the admittedly niche world of curling physics.

Competing theories have been proposed, including the pivot-slide model, the evaporation-abrasion model, and the snowplow model.

In 2020, a Japanese team attempted to clear things up by systematically testing each theory in a curling hall using sophisticated motion-tracking equipment, a laser scanning microscope, and some sheets of sandpaper to modify the surface of the curling stone.

However, no clear winner emerged. When it comes to the science of curling, it appears we are just scratching the surface.

Shane Keating, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Oceanography, UNSW Sydney

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

Like the truck-machines in ‘Mad Max,’ the ‘freedom convoy’ relies on access to fuel
The Conversation
February 15, 2022

A protester walks in front of parked trucks as demonstrators continue to protest the vaccine mandates implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on February 8, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada 

Dave Chan AFP

The media has been inundated by images of the ‘freedom convoy’ that began converging on Ottawa on Jan. 28. The convoy reflects our continued inability to find a middle ground when it comes to debates surrounding COVID-19 mandates and proposed vaccine passports.

The visuals produced by the ‘freedom convoy’ — loud, honking semi trucks and a party atmosphere — is eerily similar to the monstrous machines that rumble through the desolate landscapes in the 2015 Australian movie Mad Max: Fury Road. As a popular culture researcher, I am interested in how this similarity prompts a consideration of what continues to fuel, so to speak, these ongoing debates.

The movie trailer for ‘Mad Max: Fury Road.’



War boys and trucks

Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth film in George Miller’s franchise, after Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

Fury Road follows Max (Tom Hardy), Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and a group of women who are used as breeding stock as they flee across a desert wasteland in search of a rumoured paradise-like haven. Defeated, they must ultimately return to the Citadel, from which they originally escaped. They are relentlessly chased by the Citadel’s dictator, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his band of War Boys.

Immortan Joe controls access to both water and fuel. He urges his citizens not to become addicted to water, in case “it will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.” Immortan Joe understands restraint in a world of limited resources, and he restricts access to both the water and the fuel. And in contradiction, Immortan Joe and his War Boys consume fuel excessively for most of the film.

Much of the film comprises car chase scenes typical of the Mad Max franchise, but the film ultimately ends with the characters returning to the Citadel, rendering the chase scenes relatively redundant. Fury Road gives us a glimpse into a world of dwindling fuel stocks where the only pastime is to, ironically, engage in excessive and futile car chases.

In the film, vehicles occupy a special place due to limited fuel supplies and the subsequent death of automobile manufacturing. The vehicles in the film mutate into monstrous machine hybrids. Rather than adopt alternative forms of energy or transportation, the survivors in the film create ever more dangerous vehicles — “Frankenbeasts” — and revere them.

What the Mad Max franchise — and Fury Road in particular — really gives us is a warning about our over-reliance on fossil fuels.



The vehicles in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’ are cobbled together from many different car and truck parts.
(Warner Bros)

Freedom to drive

Petroculture refers to the ways in which our lives revolve around fuel, not just in our cars and pipelines and generators, but seeping into all aspects of our very existence. As such, we have trouble imagining a world that is beyond fuel — post-apocalyptic films embody this limitation.

When the ‘freedom convoy’ set their sights on Ottawa, even though the protest was ostensibly in response to COVID-19 mandates, part of their plight resides in threats to petroculture.

The protest was sparked by the recent announcement that truckers require proof of vaccination to cross the U.S.-Canada border. This limitation to the open road suggests that the “freedom” within the ‘freedom convoy’ is really about the privilege to drive — perhaps across a borderless, unregulated landscape similar to the one in Fury Road.

Fuel supplies to the truckers have been seized and Ottawa police warned that anyone caught bringing in fuel would be arrested, and an oil tanker was removed. In targeting the fuel, the Ottawa police reinforce the threats to petroculture, and arguably, their tactics would not be successful without the already strong reliance on fuel that dominates our country.


A police member stands in front of trucks blocking a street in downtown Ottawa.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle

The most valuable commodity

In the first film in the Mad Max franchise, Max becomes “the fastest thing on the road” after the deaths of his wife and son. He drives a souped-up 1973 Ford XB Falcon, a car which was manufactured almost exclusively by Ford Australia.

In Mad Max 2, fuel has become one of the most valuable commodities, and characters kill each other to keep their vehicles on the road. One of the movie’s plots revolves around the transport of fuel in a fuel tanker.

In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the car chases are relegated to the final scenes of the film and involve a stolen power generator, revealing the franchise’s focus on the procurement and protection of fuel sources.

The success of Mad Max and its impact on popular popular culture occurred during moments when petroculture is threatened. The first three films were released hot on the heels of the 1970s energy crisis, at a time when American car chase films also reached their apex.

During a time when Americans experienced fuel shortages and hikes in gas prices, car chase films provided the opportunity to hit the open road. However, there was also outrage as American truckers went on strikes, chanting, “More gas! More gas!”

Fuel for disruption

Furiosa, a prequel to the franchise starring Anya Taylor-Joy as young Furiosa, is set to be released in 2024.

It is interesting that after nine years, the franchise is being resurrected. What is it about today that calls for a revival? Is it a nostalgia for the open road without borders and mandates? Is it the possibility that due to petroculture, climate change becomes more difficult to address? After all, the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max is a climate crisis nightmare.

The Mad Max franchise is an extension of our anxieties surrounding our reliance on fossil fuels. This is also reflected in petroculture’s support of the ‘freedom convoy’ and its ability to disrupt our lives. What fuels the occupation is quite literally, fuel.

Krista Collier-Jarvis, PhD Candidate in English, Dalhousie University

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

Charlie Sykes piles on the mockery of Josh Hawley's 'made in China' insurrection coffee mug

Sarah K. Burris
February 15, 2022

Conservative Charlie Skyes piled on the mockery of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who is promoting the image of him taken by Francis Chung pumping his fist in the air in solidarity with Jan. 6 attackers. The report of the mug broke Monday, but now it's being discovered that Hawley's insurrection mug isn't even American-made.



Bulwark chief Charlie Skyes put in his morning newsletter a photo from U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) showing the bottom of the mug.

"When I saw folks in 'Hartzler for Senate' T-Shirts that were made in the Dominican Republic frantically taking Josh Hawley's 'Made in China' stickers off his coffee mugs before Saturday breakfast I knew the jig was up," Long tweeted showing the sticker on the bottom of the mug.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) was called out for campaign t-shirts that were made in the Dominican Republic. Hawley has endorsed her for the GOP Senate primary race.

Sen. Hawley Embraces Jan. 6 'Fist Pump' Photo, Sells Merchandise

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., gestures toward a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.  (Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico via AP Images)

By Luca Cacciatore    |   Monday, 14 February 2022 08:48 PMComment|

The team of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has turned a controversial photo showing the senator fist pump protestors outside of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, into a coffee mug, a tweet from New York Times journalist Shane Goldmacher revealed.

The $20 mug, available by donating to Hawley through WinRed, is made of ceramic and features the phrase "Show-Me Strong!" in all upper-case.

"Liberals are so easily triggered, and this new mug is really whipping the left into a frenzy! Josh isn't scared – he's show-me strong! This Made in America mug is the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!" the message accompanying the promotion reads.

The promotion then details how buying the mug will support Hawley's 2024 re-election campaign.

Although some have speculated the photo could hurt Hawley, who has been floated as a future presidential contender, the Missouri senator has embraced the photo in a clear sign of appealing to the Republican Party base, The Hill reported.

Hawley had previously defended his fist pump to protesters and challenged the idea of lumping together protestors outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to rioters who breached the building later in the day.

"That was as I was entering the House chamber the morning of the 6th," Hawley told The Washington Post Live in April of last year. "Those were demonstrators who were out there on the plaza, on the far end of the plaza ... standing behind barricades, waving American flags."

Morning Joe slams Josh Hawley for

 supporting Canadian 'insurrectionists'

after fueling Jan. 6 riot

Travis Gettys
February 15, 2022

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and John Heilemann trashed Republican senators who have thrown their lot with Canadian insurrectionists.

A group of truckers and assorted right-wing extremists have shut down parts of Ottawa and a border crossing into the U.S. as part of their protest against vaccine mandates, and GOP senators and conservative media figures have expressed their support for the increasingly costly demonstration -- and the "Morning Joe" panelists were appalled.

"This group of truckers in Canada, which is a G7 country, huge American ally, a trillion dollars in trade across the border, their stated objective, however implausible, is to overthrow the Canadian government -- that's what they're saying," Heilemann said. "They're insurrectionists. When in the past have Republican politicians in the United States Senate stood up and declared their allegiance to an out-front declared insurrectionist group trying to throw the duly elected government of an American ally?"

"I point it out not because the guys are going to overthrow the government of Canada, but the sympathy with insurrectionists is a thing in the Republican Party," Heilemann added.

Scarborough said the right had become the things they most despised.

"The right is having its hippie moment," Scarborough said. "They are attacking institutions, they are supporting insurrections against the government, they're saying that the United States military -- they hate the military. They're saying the military is taking helicopters from Afghanistan and they're coming to America to kill Trump supporters. They're saying that the FBI, that the FBI is scurrilous and they're going to kick down doors and they're going to arrest people and drag them off for being Trump voters. They're saying all of this stuff. They are saying that nobody at any university can be trusted. I mean, why don't they just take over the president's office at Columbia University. This is a carbon-copy cutout of what we conservatives reacted against in the '60s. This is what created Ronald Reagan and now we've gone a full circle."

Scarborough singled out Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) for raising campaign funds selling mugs with the infamous image of himself holding up his fist in solidarity with the U.S. Capitol rioters.

"When you turn around to the other side does it have American flags bashing cops' brains in?" Scarborough said. "He's proud of that and proud of that day when cops got their brains bashed in by American flags. Many thought they were going to die and two committed suicide after because of the trauma and horror of that day."

How poisonous mercury gets from coal-fired power plants into the fish you eat
The Conversation
February 15, 2022

Fresh Water Fish (Screen Shot)

People fishing along the banks of the White River as it winds through Indianapolis sometimes pass by ominous signs warning about eating the fish they catch.

One of the risks they could face is mercury poisoning.

Mercury is a neurotoxic metal that can cause irreparable harm to human health – especially the brain development of young children. It is tied to lower IQ and results in decreased earning potential, as well as higher health costs. Lost productivity from mercury alone was calculated in 2005 to reach almost $9 billion per year.

One way mercury gets into river fish is with the gases that rise up the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency has had a rule since 2012 limiting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. But the Trump administration stopped enforcing it, arguing that the costs to industry outweighed the health benefit.

Now, the Biden administration is moving to reassert it.

I study mercury and its sources as a biogeochemist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Before the EPA’s original mercury rule went into effect, my students and I launched a project to track how Indianapolis-area power plants were increasing mercury in the rivers and soil.

Mercury bioaccumulates in the food chain

The risks from eating a fish from a river downwind from a coal-burning power plant depends on both the type of fish caught and the age and condition of the person consuming it.

Mercury is a bioaccumulative toxin, meaning that it increasingly concentrates in the flesh of organisms as it makes its way up the food chain.



Mercury accumulates as it moves up the food chain.
doug4537 via Getty Images


The mercury emitted from coal-burning power plants falls onto soils and washes into waterways. There, the moderately benign mercury is transformed by bacteria into a toxic organic form called methylmercury.

Each bacterium might contain only one unit of toxic methylmercury, but a worm chewing through sediment and eating 1,000 of those bacteria now contains 1,000 doses of mercury. The catfish that eats the worm then get more doses, and so on up the food chain to humans.

In this way, top-level predator fishes, such as smallmouth bass, walleye, largemouth bass, lake trout and Northern pike, typically contain the highest amounts of mercury in aquatic ecosystems. On average, one of these fish contains enough to make eating only one serving of them per month dangerous for the developing fetuses of pregnant women and for children.

How coal plant mercury rains down

In our study, we wanted to answer a simple question: Did the local coal-burning power plants, known to be major emitters of toxic mercury, have an impact on the local environment?

The obvious answer seems to be yes, they do. But in fact, quite a bit of research – and coal industry advertising – noted that mercury is a “global pollutant” and could not necessarily be traced to a local source. A recurring argument is that mercury deposited on the landscape came from coal-burning power plants in China, so why regulate local emissions if others were still burning coal?

That justification was based on the unique chemistry of this element. It is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and when heated just to a moderate level, will evaporate into mercury vapor. Thus, when coal is burned in a power plant, the mercury that is present in it is released through the smokestacks as a gas and dilutes as it travels. Low levels of mercury also occur naturally.

Although this argument was technically true, we found it obscured the bigger picture.


People sometimes fish along the White River where it flows through Indianapolis.
alexeys via Getty Images

We found the overwhelming source of mercury was within sight of the White River fishermen – a large coal-burning power plant on the edge of the city.

This power plant emitted vaporous mercury at the time, though it has since switched to natural gas. We found that much of the plant’s mercury rapidly reacted with other atmospheric constituents and water vapor to “wash out” over the city. It was raining down mercury on the landscape.

Traveling by air and water, miles from the source

Mercury emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants can fall from the atmosphere with rain, mist or chemical reactions. Several studies have shown elevated levels of mercury in soils and plants near power plants, with much of the mercury falling within about 9 miles (15 kilometers) of the smokestack.

When we surveyed hundreds of surface soils ranging from about 1 to 31 miles (2 to 50 km) from the coal-fired power plant, then the single largest emitter of mercury in central Indiana, we were shocked. We found a clear “plume” of elevated mercury in Indianapolis, with much higher values near the power plant tailing off to almost background values 31 miles downwind.

The White River flows from the northeast to the southwest through Indianapolis, opposite the wind patterns. When we sampled sediments from most of its course through central Indiana, we found that mercury levels started low well upstream of Indianapolis, but increased substantially as the river flowed through downtown, apparently accumulating deposited mercury along its flow path.

We also found high levels well downstream of the city. Thus a fisherman out in the countryside, far away from the city, was still at significant risk of catching, and eating, high-mercury fish.

The region’s fish advisories still recommend sharply limiting the amount of fish eaten from the White River. In Indianapolis, for example, pregnant women are advised to avoid eating some fish from the river altogether.
Reviving the MATS rule

The EPA announced the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule in 2011 to deal with the exact health risk Indianapolis was facing.

The rule stipulated that mercury sources had to be sharply reduced. For coal-fired power plants, this meant either installing costly mercury-capturing filters in the smokestacks or converting to another energy source. Many converted to natural gas, which reduces the mercury risk but still contributes to health problems and global warming.

The MATS rule helped tilt the national energy playing field away from coal, until the Trump Administration attempted to weaken the rule in 2020 to try to bolster the declining U.S. coal industry. The administration rescinded a “supplemental finding” that determined it is “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury from power plants.

On Jan. 31, 2022, the Biden Administration moved to reaffirm that supplemental finding and effectively restore the standards.


More than a quarter of U.S. coal-fired power plants currently operating were scheduled as of 2021 to be retired by 2035.
EIA

Some economists have calculated the net cost of the MATS rule to the U.S. electricity sector to be about $9.6 billion per year. This is roughly equal to the earlier estimates of productivity loss from the harm mercury emissions cause.

To a public health expert, this math problem is a no-brainer, and I am pleased to see the rule back in place, protecting the health of generations of future Americans.

Gabriel Filippelli, Chancellor's Professor of Earth Sciences and Executive Director, Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, IUPUI

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

Here's when Republicans shifted from being anti- to pro-terrorism
Amanda Marcotte,

 Salon
February 14, 2022

Ammon Bundy, leader of the armed anti-government militia at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters near Burns, Oregon, January 5, 2016 (AFP Photo/Rob Kerr

In the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, the Washington Post published a disturbing piece that hinted at how everyday Republicans had come to embrace the politics of terrorism. In Oklahoma City, the Post noted, the memory of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing has become a flashpoint, as both Republican politicians and ordinary citizens bully anyone who tries to draw a line between Timothy McVeigh's crime and Donald Trump-incited storming of the Capitol. The link is obvious, however. Both crimes were committed by white nationalists who refuse to accept a multiracial democracy — but woe on those who say as much in Oklahoma. When Oklahoma's Department of Education shared information from the bombing memorial linking McVeigh's attack with the domestic terror attack on the Capitol, their Facebook page was flooded with vitriol.

"How in the world is this even remotely the same as the Oklahoma bombing??!!!" one teacher wrote. Another derided the education department as the "Oklahoma Dept of Socialist Indoctrination." An angry dad clashed with other parents who argued that McVeigh's radicalism and the anti-government rhetoric at the Capitol were "the very definition of the same context."

One angry Oklahoman even shared the right-wing slogan about the "tree of liberty" needing to be "refreshed" with "blood" in the comments, seemingly unaware that the same phrase was on the T-shirt that McVeigh wore the day he murdered 168 people.

This incoherent insistence on treating McVeigh's insurrectionist violence as somehow different than the Capitol rioters illustrates an ugly shift that's happened in Republican politics since 1995. Back then, most Republicans rejected the view that a white nationalist is entitled to commit violence to protest democratic outcomes he doesn't like. Now, McVeigh's ideology is the mainstream view in GOP politics. Sure, they rarely come right out and say it. But this insistence on minimizing the Capitol riot and continuing support for the man who instigated it — Donald Trump — speaks loudly enough. And ugliness in Oklahoma City in the days after the 2021 insurrection demonstrated that this pro-insurrection view was fixed on the right within days, if not hours, of the event itself.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

We see this, as well, in the celebratory attitude that right-wing media — especially Fox News — is taking towards the Ottawa trucker blockade.

As Zack Beauchamp of Vox notes, the uprising that brought that part of the Canada-U.S. border to a standstill and has terrorized the city of Ottawa "is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated." It's a group of right-wingers who "are angry because they have lost" and are trying to gain by force what they cannot through democratic means. And yet, it's become a cause célèbre on Fox News, causing comically overwrought claims like it's "the single most successful human rights protest in a generation."

Fox News doesn't like the blockade despite its widespread unpopularity — they support it because it's unpopular.

As with the January 6 insurrection, the trucker tantrum is viewed by right-wing media as a model for how the embittered white conservative majority can impose its will without getting public support. Both the insurrection and the trucker tantrum are a far-right minority expressing a belief that they're entitled to rule, no matter what. And while the Ottawa demonstration has so far not been as violent as the January 6 insurrection, it is still about using force — by taking the economy hostage and intimidating the residents with the threat of violence — to obtain what conservatives cannot gain fairly.

This shift from being anti- to pro-terrorism among Republicans can really be traced back to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and his sons' subsequent 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That's when a group of far-right extremists, led by brothers Ryan and Ammon Bundy, seized control of a visitor's center at an Oregon national wildlife refuge, spouting a bunch of incoherent demands that amounted to a belief that a democratically elected government had no right to pass laws restricting the right of white men to wreak as much environmental damage as they damn well pleased. The fight quite literally started because the occupiers didn't believe the government had a right to convict two men who had set fire to federal lands to protest not being allowed to graze their cattle there.

RELATED: How the fringe ideology of anti-government cranks is becoming the GOP mainstream

The occupiers were domestic terrorists, trying to obtain through violence what they couldn't through fair engagement in politics. But while Republicans formally condemned the violence, they were also tripping over each other to validate the asinine complaints of the occupiers. Multiple GOP congressmen even drew on arguments that came from fringe authoritarian writers who believe in things like turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Even more troublingly, the occupiers were found "not guilty" at their trial, suggesting that by October of 2016, enough Republicans were pro-terrorism enough to make it impossible to put together a jury to convict in a case that should have been a slam dunk. So that Trump was able to cobble together enough votes the next month to win the electoral college should not, in retrospect, have been a surprise.

The Department of Justice under Barack Obama had been slow and cautious in its response to the occupation, fearing another debacle like the Branch Davidian fire in Waco, TX in 1993. Instead of storming in, they let the occupiers feel safe enough to actually leave the property for a media event, where they were then easily captured on an open highway. It was a decision heavily criticized at the time, with lots of people rightfully pointing out that people of color who commit acts of terrorism don't get the kid glove treatment. Others, including myself, defended the feds, arguing that the fact that only one person died in the process justified the strategy. Now I'm beginning to doubt that view.

RELATED: Why voters don't blame Republicans for the Capitol riot — no GOP leaders have been arrested yet

It may be that Democrats just need to get stiffer spines when dealing with right-wing bullies and terrorists, even when doing so means the right will react with violence. As Brian Beutler of Crooked Media argued in his newsletter last week, it's reasonable to worry that the utter failure of the Department of Justice to arrest Trump or his allies for their many crimes "is driven by fear" of a violent backlash. Certainly, Trump has been using intimidation recently, promising pardons for people who commit violence for him and demanding ugly reactions from his followers if he does face a consequence.

But this failure of nerve on the part of Democratic leadership is going to screw us all over in the long run. As Beutler argues, the system "can't function if one side gets a hostage-taker's veto over the rules of fair play," and without imposing real consequences for crime and violence, "he public will just grow desensitized to right-wing tactics or, worse," even start to sympathize with the hostage-takers and violent terrorists.

We see this in the shift in GOP circles from 1995, when McVeigh's villainy was indisputable, to our modern time, when people who share McVeigh's views and stormed the Capitol are described by the Republican National Committee as merely engaging in "legitimate political discourse." The RNC did walk that lie back a little bit, but notably only for the people who got arrested. That only underscores the validity of Beutler's argument: Consequences matter when it comes to public opinion.

The ongoing failure of Democrats to bring the hammer down on the ringleaders of the coup signals strongly to the public that the coup was no big deal — and indeed, opens the door to arguing that the coup was justified. Republicans are walking right through that door right now.

NEWS OF THE ROYALS

Prince Andrew settles lawsuit with his rape accuser
Sky Palma
February 15, 2022

Shutterstock

According to a report from The New York Times, Prince Andrew has settled a lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre, the woman who had accused him of raping her when she was under 18-years-old and allegedly trafficked by Andrew's friend, the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The amount paid out to Giuffre has remained confidential. Andrew also “intends to make a substantial donation” to a charity “in support of victims’ rights,” the parties said in a joint statement.

"The deal comes just weeks before Andrew was scheduled to sit for a deposition, in which he would have been questioned under oath by Ms. Giuffre’s lawyers. Andrew did not admit to any of Ms. Giuffre’s accusations against him in the statement announcing the settlement," NYT's reported stated. "The lawsuit by Ms. Giuffre, one of the most prominent of Mr. Epstein’s accusers, had cast a shadow over the royals at a time when Queen Elizabeth, the 95-year-old British monarch, was marking her 70th year on the throne. Andrew was forced to relinquish his military titles and royal charities, no longer was to use the title 'His Royal Highness,' and was 'not to undertake any public duties,' Buckingham Palace said in a statement last month."

Read the full report over at The New York Times.

HIS OWN GRNDR

Top Trump donor Peter Thiel funds right-wing dating app after investing in Rumble
David Edwards
February 15, 2022

Gage Skidmore.


Peter Thiel, one of former President Donald Trump's top donors in 2016, is reportedly funding "The Right Stuff," a dating app that targets conservatives.

Axios revealed on Tuesday that Thiel had injected $1.5 million into the company creating the app, which is expected to launch this summer.

Trump political aide John McEntee was said to be behind the app.

"We’re excited to launch The Right Stuff dating app this summer. Conservatives deserve an easy way to connect," he said.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Thiel has invested in Rumble, a conservative alternative to YouTube.

"Conservatives have been aggressively building their own apps, phones, cryptocurrencies and publishing houses in an attempt to circumvent what they see as an increasingly liberal internet and media ecosystem," Axios noted.

Sandy Hook families settle with gunmaker over school massacre
Agence France-Presse
February 15, 2022

Composite of Sandy Hook victims

The families of nine victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting have reached a settlement with Remington, the maker of the rifle used in the massacre, according to US court documents released Tuesday.

Twenty-six children and teachers were shot dead at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut by 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza, who then killed himself.

A “settlement agreement has been executed between the parties,” the notice from lawyers for the families said.

US media reported that the settlement amount was $73 million. AFP is seeking comment from both Remington and the plaintiff’s lawyers.

The lawsuit had alleged that Remington and the other two defendants are culpable because they knowingly marketed a military grade weapon that is "grossly unsuited" for civilian use yet had become the gun most used in mass shootings.

The plaintiffs alleged that the gun was marketed immorally and unscrupulously, sold on its war-fighting capabilities to civilians.

Marketing, they alleged, popularized the AR-15 in combat and mass shooting-type situations through the type of violent video games that Lanza was known to play.

They specifically cited Remington’s marketing of high-capacity magazines, which have only combat utility, for use with the gun.

Last year a US judge ruled in favor of parents who sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for saying that the massacre at the school was a hoax.

In the shooting, 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six staff members were killed. Earlier, Lanza had also killed his mother at their Newtown home.

British Museum exhibition traces rise and fall of Stonehenge

Agence France-Presse
February 15, 2022

The exhibition includes the gold and bronze Nebra Sky Disc, the world's oldest surviving map of the stars

 Daniel LEAL AFP

A new exhibition on the Stonehenge stone circle in southern England sheds new light on its 4,500-year history, linking its declining influence to the Bronze Age population's discovery of metal working.


Opening Thursday at the British Museum in London, the exhibition called "The World of Stonehenge" traces the development of the UNESCO-protected site -- two concentric circles of huge stone blocks and lintels.

According to Celtic legends of the Middle Ages, the circle was magically created by the mythical magician Merlin.

Construction at the site was started during the Neolithic era by hunter-gatherers without metal tools and continued into the Bronze Age as metal working became widely established.

European metal workers arrived during the early Bronze Age, gradually superseding the local Neolithic population.


"Within a couple of hundred years, those people from Europe replaced the previous population by almost 95 percent," Neil Wilkin, the exhibition's curator, said.

As their culture and beliefs became dominant, Stonehenge lost its original purpose and became used as a cemetery, he added.

The exhibition shows numerous tombs from the time, as well as objects such as large gold necklaces made in France around 2300 BC.

The Nebra Sky Disc, the world's oldest surviving map of the stars, smelted in gold and bronze in 1600 BC in present-day Germany, is also featured.

Altogether there are more than 430 objects from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland at the exhibition, which runs to July 17.

The British Museum also displays 14 wooden poles that were preserved for millennia under the sand of a beach in Norfolk, eastern England, until their discovery in 1998.

These are the remains of a wooden circle called Seahenge, on loan to the museum for the first time.

The 4,000-year-old circle once featured 54 oak piles arranged in a circle 6.6 meters in diameter, with a huge upturned tree in the centre, its roots facing skywards.

This circle would have been used for rituals in a similar way to Stonehenge, but was built five centuries later (2049 BC), using metal axes typical of the Bronze Age, said Wilkin, as the tradition of building such circles dwindled away.

"Seahenge is one of the last monuments of its type built in Britain. It's the very end of a long tradition that spans 1,000 years," he noted.

© 2022 AFP

Cook Islands confirms first coronavirus case — two years into pandemic

PAULINA FIROZI AND JENNIFER HASSAN

• THE WASHINGTON POST

 • FEBRUARY 14, 2022

The south shoreline of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, which detected its first case of coronavirus on Feb. 13, 2022. 

(Walter Nicklin/for The Washington Post)

The Cook Islands, one of the few places left in the world that had not reported any coronavirus infections, detected its first case on Sunday.

Prime Minister Mark Brown said in a briefing Sunday that the individual who tested positive arrived in Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, on Thursday. The person was tested Sunday after learning that a family member who was a close contact had tested positive in New Zealand the day before. The individual was asymptomatic and was isolating and under observation Sunday at private holiday accommodations, Brown said.

The remote South Pacific nation had been bracing for a potential spate of infections in recent days. Officials announced Saturday that a traveler tested positive for the omicron variant upon returning to New Zealand last week after eight days on the islands — although Brown said the case confirmed Sunday was “not connected” to that visitor.

The individual who was confirmed positive Sunday was “traveling with two others, and they will all remain in isolation until they no longer test positive for COVID-19,” Brown said. Officials did not explicitly say whether the two others had been tested. It was “helpful,” Brown added, that the individual had been staying in private accommodations rather than at a resort or hotel.

The person who tested positive is vaccinated, the prime minister said, and had tested negative before boarding a flight from New Zealand. Officials had begun contact-tracing efforts to track the person’s movements since arriving in Rarotonga and to determine potential close contacts

The islands restarted air travel last month after maintaining strict limits since the start of the pandemic. The Cook Islands government declared on Jan. 13 that the “reopening of borders allows for two-way quarantine-free travel from New Zealand.”

The sandy islands are a self-governing parliamentary democracy but coordinate with New Zealand on international affairs.

“Every step we have taken has led us to the point today where we remain COVID-19 free,” Brown said in a November statement. He said the closure has taken a mental and financial toll and that “keeping our borders closed indefinitely was no longer a viable option.”

It is “futile” to believe that any place can entirely avoid the virus, said David Freedman, president-elect of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

He noted that travelers to the Cook Islands must still go through New Zealand — which has had some of the world’s most stringent pandemic restrictions and measures.

“And it still got in,” Freedman said. He added: “You can use measures, you can delay, and if there’s a new variant that’s potentially dangerous, you can get ready for the variant ... [but] you’re never going to keep it out.”

Instead of travel restrictions, Lin Chen, director of the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., underlined the importance at this stage of the pandemic of masking, rigorous testing and the continued push for vaccinations and boosters. She added that the confirmed Cook Islands case shows “that the pandemic is not over, and that we need to continue taking precautions when traveling.”

“If we can test rigorously and have plans or policies to have an infected person be quarantined or isolated depending on vaccination status,” she said, “that might allow us to start to go toward normalization.”

The government has hailed its vaccination rate, with the prime minister calling it a “factor that is in our favor as it slows the spread of transmission.” According to the nation’s Health Ministry, 98 percent of the population age 12 and older has received at least a first vaccine dose, with 96 percent having received two doses and 67 percent getting a booster shot.

Until now, the nation of about 17,000 people had been one of fewer than a dozen regions, countries, territories or areas with zero reported coronavirus cases, according to the World Health Organization’s coronavirus tracker.

“I understand that some of you may feel frightened or anxious, but please rest assured that all branches of our government are working together to deal with this situation to protect us all,” Brown said during his Sunday briefing. “We have expected this virus, we have prepared for it, and we are ready to fight it.”