Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Theories abound over mystery metal monolith found in Utah

Structure compared to monolith featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey while John McCracken gallerist says object is not sculptor’s work

The metal monolith found in a remote part of Utah.
The metal monolith found in a remote part of Utah. Photograph: Utah Department of Public Safety/Reuters
 in New York
@holpuch

A giant, metal mystery slab has captured the attention of millions, as people speculate over how such a structure came to be in a remote part of southern Utah.

The object was first spotted last week by a helicopter pilot and wildlife officers who were flying above the rugged area to conduct an annual count of bighorn sheep for the state. It immediately drew comparisons to the monolith featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as inviting suggestions it could be the work of extraterrestrials.

The helicopter pilot, Bret Hutchings, had the opportunity to see the big metal slab up close and guessed it was probably the work of an artist and between 10ft and 12ft high (about 3 metres).

“I’m assuming it’s some new wave artist or something or, you know, somebody that was a big 2001: A Space Odyssey fan,” Hutchings told local news station, KSLTV, which first reported on the slab.

The work was compared to those of many minimalist sculptors, including artist John McCracken, who died in 2011. His gallerist, David Zwirner, told the Guardian the mystery object was not one of his works.

“While this is not a work by the late American artist John McCracken, we suspect it is a work by a fellow artist paying homage to McCracken,” a David Zwirner spokesperson said.

One thing that is known is that without authorization, it is illegal to install structures or art on federally managed public lands, according to Utah’s department of public safety (DPS). This is true, “no matter what planet you’re from”, the agency said in a statement.

The agency said it does not plan to reveal is the exact location of the object. “It is in a very remote area and if individuals were to attempt to visit the area, there is a significant possibility they may become stranded and require rescue,” DPS said.

That did not stop Reddit users from identifying its likely whereabouts, as well as discussing theories about the ways the object could have got there and why.

In zoomed in photos of the structure, Reddit users noted there were lines by its base which suggested a rock saw had been used to put it in the ground and that it appeared to be held together with screws, dispelling the theory it could be one large hunk of metal.

The structure also caused controversy in the geography world, which took issue with Utah’s government using the word “monolith” to describe the object.

A monolith is technically a geographic feature made of stone, while this slab appears to be made of metal. Merriam Webster’s dictionary, however, allows for a looser interpretation of monolith as “a massive structure” and it is the word used to describe the structure director Stanley Kubrick made famous in 2001: A Space Odyssey.














Helicopter pilot finds 'strange' monolith in remote part of Utah

State employee spotted mysterious metal structure amid red rocks while counting bighorn sheep

'This is wild': state employees find mysterious monolith in Utah desert – video

A mysterious monolith has been discovered in a remote part of Utah, after being spotted by state employees counting sheep from a helicopter.

The structure, estimated at between 10ft and 12ft high (about 3 metres), appeared to be planted in the ground. It was made from some sort of metal, its shine in sharp contrast to the enormous red rocks which surrounded it.

Utah’s highway patrol shared images of both the sheep and the monolith.

The helicopter pilot, Bret Hutchings, told local news channel KSLTV: “That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying.”

Hutchings was flying for the Utah department of public safety, which was helping wildlife resource officers count bighorn sheep in the south of the state.

“One of the biologists is the one who spotted it and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it,” Hutchings said. “He was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And he’s like, ‘There’s this thing back there – we’ve got to go look at it!’”

Hutchings said the object looked manmade and appeared to have been firmly planted in the ground, not dropped from the sky.

“I’m assuming it’s some new wave artist or something or, you know, somebody that was a big 2001: A Space Odyssey fan,” Hutchings said.

The monolith and its setting resembled a famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, in which a group of apes encounter a giant slab.

The somewhat monkey-like behaviour of two crew members, dressed in sci-fi costume-like overalls, who found themselves compelled to climbed onto each other’s shoulders in an apparent effort to see over the top of the rectangular cuboid, only added to the impression.

“We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it,” Hutchings said.

Bighorn sheep live in some of Utah’s most rugged and remote areas and survive in hostile climate conditions. Fearing amateur explorers might get stuck in the wilderness while seeking out the monolith, the flight crew have not revealed its exact location.

Some observers compared the monolith to the plank sculptures by artist John McCracken, who lived in New Mexico and New York until his death in 2011. McCracken’s gallerist, David Zwirner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Artist Liam Sharp summed up the people’s fascination with the discovery in 270 characters or less, putting into the portal the words, “I love this. I imagine it’s an art piece, but what if it isn’t”.

SEE

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How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key
Bernie Sanders

A segment of working-class people in our country still believes Donald Trump defends their interests. We must win them over

Tue 24 Nov 2020 19.17 GMT

As the count currently stands, nearly 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. With this vote against the authoritarian bigotry of Donald Trump, the world can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

But the election results did also reveal something that should be a cause for concern. Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, increasing his support in many distressed communities – where unemployment and poverty are high, healthcare and childcare are inadequate, and people are hurting the most


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For a president who lies all the time, perhaps Donald Trump’s most outlandish lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country.

The truth is that Trump put more billionaires into his administration than any president in history; he appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Relations Labor Board (NLRB) and he gave huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations while proposing massive cuts to education, housing and nutrition programs. Trump has tried to throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare they have and has produced budgets that called for tens of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security.


‘Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on.’ Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Yet, a certain segment of the working class in our country still believe Donald Trump is on their side.

Why is that?

At a time when millions of Americans are living in fear and anxiety, have lost their jobs because of unfair trade agreements and are earning no more in real dollars than 47 years ago, he was perceived by his supporters to be a tough guy and a “fighter”. He seems to be fighting almost everyone, every day.

He declared himself an enemy of “the swamp” not only attacking Democrats, but Republicans who were not 100% in lockstep with him and even members of his own administration, whom he declared part of the “deep state.” He attacks the leaders of countries who have been our long-standing allies, as well as governors and mayors and our independent judiciary. He blasts the media as an “enemy of the people” and is ruthless in his non-stop attacks against the immigrant community, outspoken women, the African American community, the gay community, Muslims and protesters.

He uses racism, xenophobia and paranoia to convince a vast swath of the American people that he was concerned about their needs, when nothing could be further from the truth. His only interest, from day one, has been Donald Trump.

Joe Biden will be sworn in as president on 20 January and Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House. Depending upon what happens in Georgia’s special elections, it is unclear which party will control the US Senate.

Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it clear whose side they are on

But one thing is clear. If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.

And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.

If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.

Joe Biden ran for president on a strong pro working-class agenda. Now we must fight to put that agenda into action and vigorously oppose those who stands in its way.

Which Side Are You On? was a folk song written by Florence Reece, the wife of an organizer with the United Mine Workers when the union went on strike in Kentucky in 1931. Democrats need to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on.


One side is for ending starvation wages and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. One side is not.

One side is for expanding unions. One side is not.

One side is for creating millions of good paying jobs by combating climate change and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. One side is not.

One side is for expanding healthcare. One side is not.

One side is for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. One side is not.

One side is for paid family and medical leave. One side is not.

One side is for universal pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America. One side is not.

One side is for expanding social security. One side is not.

One side is for making public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families, and eliminating student debt. One side is not.

One side is for ending a broken and racist criminal justice system, and investing in our young people in jobs and education. One side is not.

One side is for reforming and making our immigration system fair and humane. One side is not.

Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on, and who is on the other side. That’s not only good public policy to strengthen our country. It’s how to win elections in the future.




Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont


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Brexit stems from a civil war in capitalism – we are all just collateral damage

To one sort of capitalist, the insecurity and chaos that Brexit will bring is horrifying. To the other, is it highly profitable
Rupert Murdoch, pictured in Washington DC in 2013. Photograph: Bloomberg

George Monbiot THE GUARDIAN
Tue 24 Nov 2020 

Where there is chaos, the government will multiply it. Where people are pushed to the brink, it will shove them over. Boris Johnson ignored the pleas of businesses and politicians across the UK – especially in Northern Ireland – to extend the Brexit transition process. Never mind the pandemic, never mind unemployment, poverty and insecurity – nothing must prevent our experiment in unassisted flight. We will leap from the white cliffs on 1 January, come what may.

Perhaps, after so much macho bluster, the government will take the last of its last chances and strike a deal this week. If so, with scarcely any time for refinement, the agreement is likely to be rushed and bodged. In any event, pain will follow. Disruption at the border is likely to be felt across the nation.

So it is worth repeating the big question: why are we doing this to ourselves? I believe the answer is that Brexit is the outcome of a civil war within capitalism.

Broadly speaking, there are two dominant forms of capitalist enterprise. The first could be described as housetrained capitalism. It seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can coexist with a tame and feeble form of democracy.

The second could be described as warlord capitalism. This sees all restraints on accumulation – including taxes, regulations and the public ownership of essential services – as illegitimate. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of profit-making. Its justifying ideology was formulated by Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. These books sweep away social complexity and other people’s interests. They fetishise something they call “liberty”, which turns out to mean total freedom for plutocrats, at society’s expense.

In unguarded moments, the warlords and their supporters go all the way. Hayek, for example, on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile, said he preferred a “liberal dictatorship” to “a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, confessed: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Last month, Mike Lee, senior Republican senator for Utah, claimed that “democracy isn’t the objective” of the US political system, “liberty, peace, and prosperity are”.

Brexit represents an astonishing opportunity for warlord capitalism. It is a chance not just to rip up specific rules, which it overtly aims to do, but also to tear down the uneasy truce between capitalism and democracy under which public protections in general are created and enforced. In Steve Bannon’s words, it enables “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is not a threat but an opportunity for money’s warlords. Peter Hargreaves, the billionaire who donated £3.2m to the Leave.EU campaign, explained that after Brexit: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.”

The chaos it is likely to cause will be used as its own justification: times are tough, so we must slash regulations and liberate business to make us rich again. Johnson’s government will seek to use a no-deal or thin-deal Brexit to destroy at least some of the constraints on the most brutal forms of capitalism.

Housetrained capitalists are horrified by Brexit. Not only does it dampen economic activity in general, but it threatens to destroy the market advantage for businesses that play by the rules. Without regulatory constraints, the warlords would wipe them out. Like other august institutions of capital, the Confederation of British Industry warned that leaving Europe would cause a major economic shock. In response to these concerns, Johnson, while he was foreign secretary, made a remark that might previously have seemed unthinkable, coming from the mouth of a senior Conservative, “fuck business”.

Johnson’s government is what warlord money buys. It could be seen as the perfect expression of the Pollution Paradox, a concept that I think is essential to understanding our politics. What this means is that the dirtier or more damaging an enterprise is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, political funding comes to be dominated by the most harmful companies and oligarchs, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.

It isn’t just about pollution. Damaging enterprises with an interest in buying political results include banks developing exotic financial instruments; property developers who resent the planning laws; junk food companies; bosses seeking to destroy employment rights; and plutocrats hoping to avoid tax. It’s why we’ll never have a healthy democracy without a radical reform of campaign finance.

Understood in this light, Brexit is scarcely about the UK at all. Oligarchs who have shown great interest in the subject tend to have weak or incomplete ties to this country. According to Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU, the campaign was assisted by the US billionaire Robert Mercer. By far the biggest individual donors to the Brexit party are Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand, and Jeremy Hosking, who has businesses listed in Dublin and Delaware. The newspaper owners who went to such lengths to make Brexit happen are domiciled offshore. For people like Rupert Murdoch, I believe, the UK is a beachhead among the richest and most powerful nations. Turning Chile or Indonesia into a giant free port is one thing. The UK is a much bigger prize.

None of this is what we were told we were voting for. I see Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflaging cloud of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – that appears to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements. Throughout this saga, the media has reported the smokescreen, not the manoeuvres.

This, perhaps, was the remain campaign’s greatest failure. It largely refrained from calling out the oligarchs whose money helped to persuade us to leave the EU. Any such charge would have rebounded on a campaign funded by the likes of David Sainsbury, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. When Dominic Cummings and others in the leave campaign claimed they were fighting “the elites”, they were partly right. In terms of funding, this was a battle between competing elites. So the remainers, fatally compromised by the money they had taken, instead became locked in a culture war they were bound to lose, confronting xenophobia with bromides about the benefits of integration. They failed to strike at the heart of the matter.

Brexit, treading on the heels of the pandemic, is likely to harm the lives and freedoms of millions of people in the UK. But it’s not about us. We are just caught in the crossfire of capitalism’s civil war.




• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Lockerbie bombing: facts 'cherrypicked' to convict Megrahi, court told

Appeal court hears Scottish judges who jailed Libyan relied on unreliable witnesses
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in 2009. He was the only person convicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Photograph: Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images


Severin Carrell Scotland editor THE GUARDIAN
Tue 24 Nov 2020

The judges who convicted a Libyan for the Lockerbie bombing reached an unjustified verdict by cherrypicking facts from a mass of conflicting evidence, an appeal court has been told.

Claire Mitchell QC, an advocate acting for the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, accused the Scottish judges who jailed him nearly 20 years ago of taking a “broad-brush approach” to contradictory claims from unreliable witnesses.

“The court has read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified,” Mitchell told five Scottish appeal judges on Tuesday. None of the most significant evidence against Megrahi met the “baseline of quality” needed for a conviction, she said.

She was addressing the court on the opening day of a posthumous appeal against Megrahi’s conviction for planting the bomb which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.


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It was the worst terrorist attack in UK history, killing all 259 passengers and crew on the flight from Heathrow to New York, as well as 11 townspeople.

Megrahi was the only person convicted for the bombing, by a specially-convened Scottish court sitting without a jury in the Netherlands from May 2000 until January 2001. He immediately lodged an appeal, insisting he was innocent.

Five years after losing that appeal, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruled in 2007 his conviction could be unsafe, returning it to court. In 2009, Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and abandoned his case after winning compassionate early release. He died at home in Tripoli in 2012.

In May 2020 the SCCRC ordered a fresh appeal on behalf of Megrahi’s family, which is being held this week in a virtual hearing chaired by Lord Carloway, the lord justice general and Scotland’s most senior judge.

Mitchell said his conviction hinged on the original court’s decision to rely on the uncorroborated claims of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who alleged several years after the attack that Megrahi had bought 12 items of clothing found in the Samsonite suitcase holding the bomb.

She listed a series of inconsistencies in Gauci’s testimonies and in the trial court’s decision to fix the date of that purchase as 7 December rather than 23 November, an alternative date which the evidence also pointed to.

That date was central to Megrahi’s conviction. The senior Libyan intelligence officer was only in Malta on 7 December but was not in Malta on 23 November.

Gauci had initially repeatedly identified an Egyptian terrorist called Abu Talb as the man who bought the clothes, only to identify Megrahi later. He also first recalled the purchaser being four inches taller and nearly 30 years older than Megrahi.

Gauci claimed it rained when the purchaser left his shop; the nearby airport’s meteorologist said he did not believe it rained on 7 December. It did, however, rain on 23 November. Gauci also gave contradictory evidence about whether the town’s Christmas lights were lit on 7 December or not.

“As things stand, we have someone who cannot remember dates and is hopelessly muddled,” Mitchell said. She told the judges “the evidence was so inconsistent, so riddled with inaccuracies, that no jury could have held that the date of purchase was 7 December. [It] simply didn’t bear the weight put upon it.”

Further, there was no evidence the suitcase bomb began its unaccompanied journey on a KLM flight from Malta to Frankfurt, as the prosecution claimed, before being inserted on a Pan Am feeder flight to Heathrow.

The UK and Scottish governments are contesting the appeal, and the hearing will hear later evidence that the US government secretly paid Gauci and his brother a total of $3m for their testimony – a fact withheld from the original trial.
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UN: Brazil needs urgent reforms to combat racism after beating of black man

Days of protests erupted after video last week showed a black man being punched in the face and head by a white security guard
A man raises his fist during a protest against the death of Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas in Porto Alegre, Brazil on Monday. Photograph: Silvio Avila/AFP/Getty Images

Agence France-Presse in Geneva
Tue 24 Nov 2020 

The UN has said that the deadly beating of a black man by white guards in Brazil exemplified “structural racism”, and called for an independent investigation and urgent reforms in the country.

Several days of protest erupted in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, after video footage last week showed 40-year-old welder Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas being punched in the face and head by a supermarket security guard while another guard held him.

Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman with the UN rights office, told reporters during a virtual briefing in Geneva that his killing was “an extreme but sadly all too common example of the violence suffered by Black people in Brazil”.

“It offers a stark illustration of the persistent structural discrimination and racism people of African descent face,” she said.

She said government officials had a responsibility to acknowledge the underlying problem of persisting racism as the first essential step towards solving it.

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, has downplayed structural racism there, where around 55% of its population of 212 million identifies as black or mixed-race.

Bolsonaro has insisted he himself is “colour blind”, while his vice-president, Hamilton Mourao, also caused an outcry Friday when he said “there is no racism” in Brazil.

Shamdasani however insisted that “structural racism, discrimination and violence people of African descent face in Brazil is documented by official data”.

She pointed to statistics showing that “the number of Afro-Brazilian victims of homicide is disproportionately higher than other groups.

“Black Brazilians endure structural and institutional racism, exclusion, marginalisation and violence, with, in many cases, lethal consequences,” she said.


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“Afro-Brazilians are excluded and almost invisible from decision-making structures and institutions.”

Acknowledging that Brazil had opened an investigation into Freitas’s death, Shamdasani called for the probe to be “prompt, thorough, independent, impartial and transparent”, and insisted it should “examine if racial bias played a role”.

The UN rights office, she said, was also urging Brazilian authorities to “investigate any allegations of unnecessary and disproportionate use of force against people protesting peacefully following Silveira Freitas’s death and hold those responsible to account”.

More broadly, she said, there was an urgent need for Brazil to reform its laws, institutions and policies to address “deeply engrained racial stereotypes”.
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