DShomshak

That reminds me of how Daniel Patrick Moynihan defined the difference between liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives, he said, believe that culture sets the limits of politics. Liberals believe that politics can change culture. I see evidence for both. Optimally, they act as contraries to each curb the excesses of the other: Conservatives to remind liberals that humans are not infinitely malleable, and liberals to point out injustices in the status quo and insist that they can be corrected. At worst they become negations: Conservatives become reactionary apologists for privilege and injustice, while liberals try to burn down the social order because it's social order. One irony is that -- at least according to one conservative political strategist I heard on All Things Considered -- many American conservatives believe they're losing the culture war or have already lost. So now they are trying to get their way through raw political dominance. Blocking Merrick Garland, a judge everyone said had no political ideology, from the Supreme Court was emblematic: An admission that the conservative agenda does *not* emerge naturally from just following the Constitution. Dean Shomshak

Just to be clear, I haven't read the book myself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan cited it in a book of his essays about the politics of ethnicity. Moynihan was a sociologiest before he had a political career himself. Right now I'm reading The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, by Salena Zito and Brad Todd. Their thesis: Trump's election was not a fluke of one man's charisma and a deplorable electorate, it's the coming together of several large groups that feel alienated from the political establishment and especially by those bad ol' out-of-touch coastal elites. Yes, I suspect their purpose is polemical as much as reportorial: their listing of Red-looded and Blue Collared, Perot-istas, Rough Rebounders, Girl Gun Power, Rotary Reliables, King Cyrus Christians, and Silent Suburban Moms leaves out the Hard-Core Bigots that we saw a great deal of during the election. But I have only just started reading. I'll see if their case studies of Trump voters includes the racial anxiety that was found by, say, National Geographic's recent examination of a Pennsylvania town's Trump voters. Dean Shomshak

RDU Neil: Your theory is pretty much what a sociologist found and described in his book called, IIRC, Caste and Class in a Southern Town.. This was in, like, the 1920s? (Super-slow internet connection makes it hard to look things up and check the details, sorry. I expect Wikipedia could give you the summary.) Dean Shomshak

I use A Dictionary of Political Thought by Roger Scruton, but that's basically it. Scruton notes the term is "often used rather vaguely," especially through confusion between "country" and "nation state."The Japanese and Hungarians are nations that have nation-states. The Navaho and Welsh are nations that don't. Depending on how you count them, the UK holds at least two nations, maybe 4 or more. Whereas the German people are a nation that was divided into two nation-states, East and West. (Though what about Austria?) And indeed, the American people have never been a nation. I am told that in 1776, half the citizenry spoke German, not English. There were multiple Christian sects. And that's leaving out all the black people. We've become steadily more diverse ever since. "Nationalism" is the political theory that the legal mechanisms of government are insufficient to create loyalty among citizens; the state should be uilt on the foundations of a nation and its primordial, emotional attachments. Except that's a shifty doctrine. An Economist article on resurgent nationalism noted that at the time Italy was unified, only a small percentage of people spoke the dialect we now recognize as Italian. In fact, one of the founders remarked that having created the Italian state, they now needed to create Italians. I 'll dig out the article and provide a citation, if anyone wants. Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that. One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking. Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too. This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved. Dean Shomshak

My slow connection doesn't let me edit. Final sentence of last post should say that I hope *Evangelicals realize* that in backing Trump for the sake of anti-abortion judges, they sold their souls to the Devil. Dean Shomshak

Just heard on All Things Considered that numerous religious groups are in fact objecting. That the US Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks in favor of refugees is perhaps not surprising, but even the Southern Baptists are objecting to Jeff Sessions quoting scripture to justify his policy. A fellow who was actually one of Trump's Evangelical advisors called it "grotesque." We can only hope that in backing Trump for the sake of appointing anti-abortion judges, they sold their souls to the Devil. Dean Shomshak

I... truly do not know how to react to Old Man's post. Laugh, cry, or just confused? But it was an incredibly successful summit for Trump, at least for what matters to him. He was, again, the center of world attention. He got to make nice with someone as autocratic as he clearly wants to be -- fie on the rules-based international order, telling him what he can an cannot do! And if Kim fulfills any promise or makes any concession, however tiny and strategically meaningless, Trump can point to it and bray, "Where's my Nobel Peace Prize?" Which he is not going to get, because a) he won't really have done anything to make the world more peaceful, and b) Europe's intelligentsia hates him. But that's part of the benefit! It's one more grievance he nurse, and his base with him. Dean Shomshak

Other people seem to have the technobabble well in hand, but in case you want something more descriptive, I'll add a few. Monopole Crystals. A monopole is a flaw in space-time. Its most distinctive feature is that it has a magnetic field with only a north or south pole, which is otherwise impossible. Call ing it a subatomic particle is shifty nomenclature because it's a lot more massive than any atom could be. The crystal is to hold the particle in place so you can do things with it. Also because proper comic-book super-science must include crystals. Bose-Einstein Concensate Vortex. Cool a gas of atoms to near Absolute Zero and the atoms "smear out" and interpenetrate because of Quantum Mechanics weirdness. Fun fact: A Bose-Einstein Condensate slows the passage of light a lot. Set the quantum gas spinning, and a beam of light can be trapped inside -- its speed reduced to ZERO. Since the speed of light is intimately tied to Space and Time, a comic-book scientist should be able to do things with it. Muonic Matter. The muon particle is identical to the electron, except a lot more massive. If you could replace some of the electrons in atoms with muons, their orbits would be much tighter, resulting in smaller atoms, denser materials, and -- so it is predicted by those who predict such things -- vastly increased magnetic properties. Muonic Iron would be just the thing to build a Hyper-Magnetic Generator. Strange Matter is even better for technobabble. The atomic nuclei of ordinary atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of "up" and "down" quarks. But there are other sorts of quarks! The next pair are called Strong and Charm. Atoms that include particles made from these quarks are Strange Matter or Charmed Matter. In addition to being very dense their properties would be, well, strange. (Or charming?) Make up anything you want, here. Like, there might be completely new forces never before seen. Just don't forget to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Whenever the Third Doctor had a techno-problem, this solved it. (Because the actor Jon Pertwee put his foot down and said he was only going to learn one technobabble phrase, and good for him.) Dean Shomshak

The May, 2018 issue of Scientific American had an article about the new field of "Multimessenger" astronomy -- observing an event using neutrinos and gravitational waves as well as electromagnetic radiation. So far there are only a few examples, but they've already been significant. Supernova 1987A, first detected when its neutrino pulse registered on every neutrino detector in the world, revealed that even though supernovae can outshine a galaxy in visible light they emit even more of their energy in neutrinos. While the recent observation of two colliding neutron stars, observed in light and gravitational waves, has already disproven a number of alternative theories of gravity. Dean Shomshak

Today's BBC World Service had an interesting story about a small town in eastern Tennessee where ICE just rounded up 97 of the undocumented, mostly workers at the town's meat-packing plant. This is Trump country. (He got something like 75% of the vote.) Nevertheless, many townsfolk are shocked and angry. The local minister is preaching sermons about loving all people regardless of native language or place of birth. See, the people arrested were their neighbors and an important part of their economy. And what about all those children who now lack parents? Townsfolk have taken them in, but are fuming that you *just don't do that to kids.* "Zero Tolerance" stopped being a narrative when it affected real people they actually knew. Dean Shomshak

One hopes, anyway... Dean Shomshak

I'll have to think a bit longer before I vote. But some options (including the origins) are not exclusive: It could be, for instance, a mad scientist who is being influenced by Marduk. Speaking of Marduk: The mixed-up city look suggests an obvious connection to Babylon, the City of Man. But I'm not necessarily going there with my vote. Dean Shomshak

The May 19, 2018 issue of the Economist has an article about how astronomers are using the GAIA dataset to try solving a fairly significant puzzle in astrophysics: the rate at which the universe expands. Astronomers have two ways to measure this... and the measurements do not match. One method works directly from the Cosmic Microwave Background. The other uses a "ladder" of inferences: -- Nearby stars can have their distance measured by parallax. -- Within that range are bright, pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. Conveniently, a Cepheid's period correlates rather precisely with its absolute brightness. So, Cepheids can be used to find the distance to nearby galaxies. (Near in a cosmic sense, anyway.) -- In those galaxies, astronomers see supernovae; and because they know the distance to the galaxies, they can tell that a certain kind of supernova always has a certain brightness. So, by watching for these supernovae, astronomers can measure the distance to galaxies out hundreds of millions of light-years. -- And by measuring how fast those galaxies recede at a given distance, they infer the rate at which the universe expands. The two methods do not give the same result. They differ by about 6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. (IIRC. I don't have the article in front of me.) Oops. Many astronomers hoped the problem was in the long chain of inference from parallax to Cepheids to supernovae. Every measurement has a margin of error, after all, and the errors at one link in the chain will increase the errors of later stages. It was hoped that GAIA, by supplying more accurate measurements to more stars than were ever measured before, would adjust the brightness scale for Cepheids -- and this correction would adjust the distances to galaxies and make the measurements of cosmic expansion match. Nope. They still don't match. From this, astronomers conclude that something is going on they do not understand, and it's probably pretty important. More research needed. Dean Shomshak

The April 28, 2018 issue of The Economist has a nice little article about the just-released dataset from the GAIA star-mapping mission. Dean Shomshak

Technical query: Can the capsule's aperture stretch wide enough to hold large objects, or is the aperture fixed and anything placed in the capsule must be narrow enough to fit through the opening? Dean Shomshak

A recent NOVA episode gave quite a thorough explanation for it all, accessible to non-scientists. (Including a recreation of the 1840 experiment that showed that CO2 absorbs infrared.). EDIT: The title was, "Decoding the Climate Machine." Or maybe "Decoding the Weather Machine." I watched it again, and both titles appeared on screen. Short version is that any "skepticism" about humans causing climate change requires several areas of very well established science to be wrong, in ways that could be detected in a community college science lab. Plus a conspiracy so vast and baroque that it dwarfs the Illuminati, Trilateralists, Freemasons and Antarctic Space Nazis put together. ADDENDUM: "But how do we know the CO2 comes from fossil fuels?" Cancer addressed this, but the only other known phenomenon -- at least, the only one I've heard of -- that might pump that much CO2 into the atmosphere that quickly is a flood basalt event, like the ones that created the Deccan Traps or the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington. And I think we'd notice a few million square miles of fresh, glowing lava. SECOND ADDENDUM: Also, note what Cancer said before: The magnetic field is weakening on a timescale of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Climate change is, measurably, happening on a scale of decades to centuries -- a thousand times faster. Dean Shomshak

Elizabeth Tasker, The Planet Factory This book on exoplanets is very good. Science writer Elizabeth Tasker supplies an overview of exoplanet research from the first detections to more-or-less now. The best thing about this book, though, is that it isn't just a "book of marvels" (i.e., "Planets orbiting a pulsar? Golly!") or even a statement of current knowledge and theory. Tasker chronicles how theories of planet formation change with each new discovery, describing the explanations and theories that didn't pan out as well as the current best guesses, and she doesn't shy away from admitting the areas of controversy and phenomena yet to be understood. It's a look at science as ongoing process. But there are still many marvels. Anyone designing planets for their SF game will find lots of inspiration for bizarre and memorable worlds. Dean Shomshak

Then again, it might be more useful to BDH if we examine existing settings that mix space opera with super-powers. How do they set the balance between tropes and elements? I’m not that familiar with the obvious paradigmatic cases, Legion of Super-Heroes and Green Lantern; I’ll leave those for other people. Instead, I’ll look outside comic books, at the Lensman series by E. E. Smith. The Lensman books pretty clearly privilege space opera over superheroes. Or, at least they have clearly separated areas of applicability. The Lensmen have super-powers, but these are limited to telepathic effects. Their powers don’t obviate the need for space armor and blasters, let alone starships or the ridiculously powerful star system-scale weapons such as sunbeams and planetary nutcrackers. (Look 'em up.) OTOH, mortal technology cannot perform telepathic effects — and those effects can scale up to galactic levels, until the final battle is a telepathic assault by the entire Lensman corps against an entire species of Pure Evil... which even the mightiest technological weapons of the setting could not do. Does anyone else have examples of how settings juxtapose space opera and superheroics? Dean Shomshak

Hey, I finally thought of something relevant! (And have a chance to post it.) A few things, in fact. There's been a bit of talk about “Supers Vs. Starships.” I see two possible solutions to this issue, one general and one specific. If I understand the perceived conflict, the question is: How can supers matter in a setting where space battleships carry weapons of tremendous power? One shot from a battleship’s main laser or bogon torpedoes or whatever, and a hero or villain becomes ionized vapor. One suggested solution is that high-end supers are so powerful that even the most powerful mundane-tech weapons might not kill them, so the sort of institutions that build space battleships don’t even try. I don’t like this proposal. Either you’re pruning back the SF in order to protect supers, or you’re pushing the power of supers so high that you make all other beings mere set decoration. Or pets. You can tell a story in which only a handful of the people in the universe matter — they are the gods, and everyone else just tries to cope with their conflicts and tantrums, a la Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness — and those can be great stories, but in many ways you are short-changing the space opera side. I’d suggest that it’s less a matter of power differential and more one of where weapons systems can go. You can see this even in mundane modern warfare such as Afghanistan: Tank guns can turn humans into gobbets of charred meat, but you can’t carry tank guns on house-to-house searches for insurgents. Much less battleship main guns or even heavier weapons. Or as one pundit observed during the Kosovo conflict, a jet plane armed with the biggest, smartest bombs can’t do diddly to stop one man cutting another man’s throat in a ditch. Heavy weapons are only useful in certain kinds of fights, against certain kinds of enemies. That will be the same in a space opera/superhero hybrid setting. The reason Superboy hasn’t been killed by a space battleship is not that he’s more powerful: It’s that you can’t easily get a space battleship in a position where it can get a clear shot. And Superboy won’t be just hovering there in space like a dummy waiting for the big gun to fire. Battleships are great for shooting at other battleships, or at cities or other big targets. They are not so good for shooting at small, highly mobile targets. For that, you send out the TIE fighters (or appropriate setting analog). Who are agents. Procede as with any other battle between supers and agents. The second reason is specific to the superhero genre. The above argument doesn’t rule out building a special battleship with the maneuverability and targeting to take on Superboy… but for the same price, a government can fund a project to create an Omega Crystal — the greatest, yet most compact, power source known to galactic science! — and use it to power a battlesuit, or a robot, or something, that can engage with Superboy directly and, you hope, win. Or find a telepath you hope is loyal and enhance him with ultra-advanced psychotronic brain implants. Or cyber-enhance your greatest commando. (Continue list indefinitely.) In short, create another super with appropriate space-opera trappings. From a story POV, the advantage of these two related approaches is that you aren’t forbidding any stories in advance. Maybe someday you’ll want to do Superboy Vs. Battleship, and make each a credible threat to the other. You just need to work a little harder to set up the situation. Maybe Prince Evillo decides he *will* pay for a battleship mobile enough, with weapons accurate enough, that it can fight Superboy. Or maybe the Dark Circle lures Superboy into a trap where a battleship can shoot at him, and the challenge is to escape the trap. Dean Shomshak

The March, 2018 issue of Scientific American has an article about the TESS and CHEOPS planet-hunting space telescope missions. Dean Shomshak

A few days back, the BBC asked an American teacher's thoughts about Trump's proposal of arming teachers. This teacher happened to be a former Marine (I don't remember the weapons in which she claimed expertise, sorry). She gave an eloquent and reasoned explanation of why this was a Very Bad Idea. Sure, you can find one person to support any conceivable POV. But this is not the only military or former military or police person I've heard who was dubious that the solution to gun violence was more guns. Dean Shomshak

Finishing what I started before, the only social/political system that provably *doesn't* self-destruct is the hunter/gatherer band, which was humanity's (and pre-humanity's) sole form of social organization for at least a million years. On the one hand, this system owed much of its stability to the external constraint of next to no technology. Once somebody figures out agriculture, you get atom bombs in a comparative eyeblink. At least, we did. I suspect (though I have no expert opinion to back me up here) that we are subtly gene-programmed with attitudes adapted for hunter/gatherer life in small bands, and the further we get from that lifestyle, the more unstable our societies become. Take away the physical and social technologies built to support them, and society quickly regresses to the primordial mode of tiny communities, all intensely suspicious of each other and prone to attack each other at the drop of a hat. See the Central African Republic, Congo or the rest of that neighborhood, for instance. Shifting gears to Istvatha V'han: One of the more subtly creepy moments in Brave New World is where the World Controller explains that experiments have been made to create a better society with greater human dignity... but they all failed. The Brave New World, with all its horrifying inequities, is the best that humanity can ever achieve -- or at least, it is the only system found that keeps humanity contented and at peace with itself. Contnentment, he admits, might not sound like a very inspiring goal. But you might feel differently when anthrax bombs are falling around you. Istvatha V'han could easily make a similar argument. Having traveled through multitudes of universes, seeing multitudes of societies at every level of developments, she has seen what works and what doesn't. And authoritarian, imperial rules has the best track record for keeping the largest number of people living in peace and prosperity for the longest period of time. It's just basic untilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest umber. PCs are unlikely to be in a position to challenge her based on their own experiences. I hope at some point to contribute something actually relevant. Dean Shomshak

I don't have tome to read the thread (and don't know when I ever will, so I don't know how relevant this is to, well, anything. But Aristotle, back when he invented political analysis, saw that every political system contains the seeds of its own downfall. All possible political systems, he said, fall in 3 categories: 1) Monarchy: one person rules. 2) Oligarchy/aristocracy: A small group rules (small relative to the total population, anyway). 3) Democracy: Every citizen rules. (Leaving aside how you define "citizen," which can make the system Not Democratic At All by modern standards.) Monarchy is good because authority is clear and decision-making swift... if the monarch is competent and dutiful. But no matter how good a monarch is, there's no guarantee that successors will be competent, too. Eventually, you get a monarch who is stupid, evil, lazy, or otherwise damaging. Get enough, and the system collapses. Oligarchy is good because the weight isn't all on one person. But the ruling junta members will eventually fight each other as they try to seize sole power and become a monarch. Their infighting will tear society apart and the system collapses. Democracy is good because any policy has the support of a majority of citizens, there's a bigger pool of talent and ideas. It has the strongest connection to the populace. But people are easily swayed by demagogues and lack the discipline and self-control to see the big picture and the long-term benefits of short-term privation. They do dumb, self-indulgent things, vote in a tyrant, or otherwise cause the system to collapse. So every society is screwed, right? Well, maybe not. Aristotle concluded that the way to avoid each mode's inevitable self-destruction is to have all three modes at once. If the monarch is bad, he can be curbed by the oligarchs or the people; if the oligarchic power-brokers start infighting too much, the people and the monarch can knock their heads togather; if the people are led astray by a demagogic tyrant, the oligarchs can withdraw the support of key institutions or the monarch can chop the demagogue's head off. Which is how modern democratic republics operate, notably including the USA. (The Founding Fathers had classical educations; they knew their Aristotle.) Mixed government still isn't a sure-fire key to avoiding political self-destruction, but it does provide some checks against simple forms of self-destruction -- if the populace has the sense to stick with it. Dean Shomshak

Recommended reading: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder is a historian of 20th century central and eastern Europe... which means, chiefly, Nazism, Communism and miscellaneous fascisms. In brief, his argument is that brutal despotisms follow a fairly consistent playbook in seizing power. Knowing the playbook might help one avoid fresh tyrannies, and resist them when they happen anyway. And yes, he is thinking of Donald Trump. It's a short book, but pointed. For an example, one lesson is, "Defend institutions." Would-be tyrants rarely start out with the power to commit atrocities; they achieve it gradually by breaking and subverting the civil service and private groups to their will. And here's Trump, trying to break the FBI. "Be a patriot" discusses the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Snyder also provides a brief (page and a half) list of Trump's unpatriotic acts, from mocking and insulting war heroes and their families, to placing Russia-beholden people in his campaign and administration. (More than half a page of one-sentence examples right there. As Snyder puts it, the point is not that Russia and the U.S. must be enemies. They don't. The point is that "As a patriot, you serve your own country.") A few of the lessons actually relate to our favorite hobby and these forums: "Maintain a private life" and "Learn from people in other countries." Tyrannies try to make everything about them, to butt in on every activity. It's important not to let them, keeping parts of your life and associations they don't touch. And contact with people in other countries helps one resist the closed fantasy-world that tyrants use to keep people docile, scared and confused. If worst comes to worst... it's good to have friends abroad to whom one can flee. I certainly hope the American people do not let the Trump regime get that awful, but I would like to thank the non-US posters for the outside perspective they provide. Dean Shomshak