Category Archives: New Utopia

Few things are harder than hurling a robot into space and sticking the landing. On the morning of July 4, 1997, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., were hoping to beat the odds and land a spacecraft successfully on the Red Planet.

Twenty-five years ago that little robot, a six-wheeled rover named Sojourner, made it becoming the first in a string of rovers built and operated by NASA to explore Mars. Four more NASA rovers, each more capable and complex than the last, have surveyed the Red Planet. The one named Curiosity marked its 10th year of cruising around on August 5. Another, named Perseverance, is busy collecting rocks that future robots are supposed to retrieve and bring back to Earth. China recently got into the Mars exploring game, landing its own rover, Zhurong, last year.

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Other Mars spacecraft have done amazing science from a standstill, such as the twin Viking landers in the 1970s that were the first to photograph the Martian surface up close and the InSight probe that has been listening for Marsquakes shaking the planets innards (SN Online: 2/24/20). But the ability to rove turns a robot into an interplanetary field geologist, able to explore the landscape and piece together clues to its history. Mobility, says Kirsten Siebach, a planetary scientist at Rice University in Houston, makes it a journey of discovery.

Each of the Mars rovers has gone to a different place on the planet, enabling scientists to build a broad understanding of how Mars evolved over time. The rovers revealed that Mars contained water, and other life-friendly conditions, for much of its history. That work set the stage for Perseverances ongoing hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Each rover is also a reflection of the humans who designed and built and drove it. Perseverance carries on one of its wheels a symbol of Mars rover tracks twisted into the double helix shape of DNA. Thats to remind us, whatever this rover is, its of human origin, says Jennifer Trosper, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab, or JPL, who has worked on all five NASA rovers. It is us on Mars, and kind of our creation.

Sojourner, that first rover, was born in an era when engineers werent sure if they even could get a robot to work on Mars. In the early 1990s, then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was pushing the agency to do things faster, better and cheaper a catchphrase that engineers would mock by saying only two of those three things were possible at the same time. NASA had no experience with interplanetary rovers. Only the Soviet Union had operated rovers on the moon in 1970 and 1973.

JPL began developing a Mars rover anyway. Named after the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the basic machine was the size of a microwave oven. Engineers were limited in where they could send it; they needed a large flat region on Mars because handling a precision landing near mountains or canyons was beyond their abilities. NASA chose Ares Vallis, a broad outflow channel from an ancient flood, and the mission landed there successfully.

Sojourner spent nearly three months poking around the landscape. It was slow going. Mission controllers had to communicate with Sojourner constantly, telling it where to roll and then assessing whether it had gotten there safely. They made mistakes: One time they uploaded a sequence of computer commands that mistakenly told the rover to shut itself down. They recovered from that stumble and many others, learning to quickly fix problems and move forward.

Although Sojourner was a test mission to show that a rover could work, it managed to do some science with its one X-ray spectrometer. The little machine analyzed the chemical makeup of 15 Martian rocks and tested the friction of the Martian soil.

After surviving 11 weeks beyond its planned one-week lifetime, Sojourner ultimately grew too cold to operate. Trosper was in mission control when the rover died on September 27, 1997. You build these things, and even if theyre well beyond their lifetime, you just cant let go very easily, because theyre part of you, she says.

In 1998 and 1999, NASA hurled a pair of spacecraft at Mars; one was supposed to orbit the planet and another was supposed to land near one of the poles. Both failed. Stung from the disappointment, NASA decided to build a rover plus a backup for its next attempt.

Thus were born the twins Spirit and Opportunity. Each the size of a golf cart, they were a major step up from Sojourner. Each had a robotic arm, a crucial development in rover evolution that enabled the machines to do increasingly sophisticated science. The two had beefed-up cameras, three spectrometers and a tool that could grind into rocks to reveal the texture beneath the surface.

But there were a lot of bugs to work out. Spirit and Opportunity launched several weeks apart in 2003. Spirit got to Mars first, and on its 18th Martian day on the surface it froze up and started sending error messages. It took mission controllers days to sort out the problem an overloaded flash-memory system all while Opportunity was barreling toward Mars. Ultimately, engineers fixed the problem, and Opportunity landed safely on the opposite side of the planet from Spirit.

Both rovers lasted years beyond their expected three-month lifetimes. And both did far more Martian science than anticipated.

Spirit broke one of its wheels early on and had to drive backward, dragging the broken wheel behind it. But the rover found plenty to do near its landing site of Gusev crater, home to a classic Mars landscape of dust, rock and hills. Spirit found rocks that appeared to have been altered by water long ago and later spotted a pair of iron-rich meteorites. The rover ultimately perished in 2010, stuck in a sand-filled pit. Mission controllers tried to extract it in an effort dubbed Free Spirit, but salts had precipitated around the sand grains, making them particularly slippery.

Opportunity, in contrast, became the Energizer Bunny of rovers, exploring constantly and refusing to die. Immediately after landing in Meridiani Planum, Opportunity had scientists abuzz.

The images that the rover first sent back were just so different from any other images wed seen of the Martian surface, says Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist at JPL. Instead of these really dusty volcanic plains, there was just this dark sand and this really bright bedrock. And that was just so captivating and inspiring.

Right at its landing site, Opportunity spotted the first definitive evidence of past liquid water on Mars, a much-anticipated and huge discovery (SN: 3/27/04, p. 195). The rover went on to find evidence of liquid water at different times in the Martian past. After years of driving, the rover reached a crater called Endeavour and stepped into a totally new world, Fraeman says. The rocks at Endeavour were hundreds of millions of years older than others studied on Mars. They contained evidence of different types of ancient water chemistry.

Opportunity ultimately drove farther than any rover on any extraterrestrial world, breaking a Soviet rovers lunar record. In 2015, Opportunity passed 26.2 miles (42.2 km) on its odometer; mission controllers celebrated by putting a marathon medal onto a mock-up of the rover and driving it through a finish line ribbon at JPL. Opportunity finally died in 2019 after an intense dust storm obscured the sun, cutting off solar power, a must-have for the rover to recharge its batteries (SN: 3/16/19, p. 7).

The twin rovers were a huge advance over Sojourner. But the next rover was an entirely different beast.

By the mid-2000s, NASA had decided it needed to go big on Mars, with a megarover the size of a sports utility vehicle. The one-ton Curiosity was so heavy that its engineers had to come up with an entirely new way to land on Mars. The sky crane system used retro-rockets to hover above the Martian surface and slowly lower the rover to the ground.

Against all odds, in August 2012, Curiosity landed safely near Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer-high pile of sediment within the 154-kilometer-wide Gale crater (SN: 8/25/12, p. 5). Unlike the first three Mars rovers, which were solar-powered, Curiosity runs on energy produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium. That allows the rover to travel farther and faster, and to power a suite of sophisticated science instruments, including two chemical laboratories.

Curiosity introduced a new way of exploring Mars. When the rover arrives in a new area, it looks around with its cameras, then zaps interesting rocks with its laser to identify which ones are worth a closer look. Once up close, the rover stretches out its robotic arm and does science, including drilling into rocks to see what they are made of.

When Curiosity arrived near the base of Mount Sharp, it immediately spotted rounded pebbles shaped by a once-flowing river, the first closeup look at an ancient river on Mars. Then mission controllers sent the rover rolling away from the mountain, toward an area in the crater known as Yellowknife Bay. There Curiosity discovered evidence of an ancient lake that created life-friendly conditions for potentially many thousands of years.

Curiosity then headed back toward the foothills of Mount Sharp. Along the way, the rover discovered a range of organic molecules in many different rocks, hinting at environments that had been habitable for millions to tens of millions of years. It sniffed methane gas sporadically wafting within Gale crater, a still-unexplained mystery that could result from geologic reactions, though methane on Earth can be formed by living organisms (SN: 7/7/18, p. 8). The rover measured radiation levels across the surface helpful for future astronauts wholl need to gauge their exposure and observed dust devils, clouds and eclipses in the Martian atmosphere and night sky.

Weve encountered so many unexpectedly rich things, says Ashwin Vasavada of JPL, the missions project scientist. Im just glad a place like this existed.

Ten years into its mission, Curiosity still trundles on, making new discoveries as it climbs the foothills of Mount Sharp. It recently departed a clay-rich environment and is now entering one that is heavier in sulfates, a transition that may reflect a major shift in the Martian climate billions of years ago.

In the course of driving more than 28 kilometers, Curiosity has weathered major glitches, including one that shuttered its drilling system for over a year. And its wheels have been banged up more than earthbound tests had predicted. The rover will continue to roll until some unknown failure kills it or its plutonium power wanes, perhaps five years from now.

NASAs first four rovers set the stage for the most capable and agile rover ever to visit Mars: Perseverance. Trosper likens the evolution of the machines to the growth of children. We have a preschooler in Sojourner, and then your happy-go-lucky teenagers in Spirit and Opportunity, she says. Curiosity is certainly a young adult thats able to do a lot of things on her own, and Perseverance is kind of that high-powered midcareer [person] able to do pretty much anything you ask with really no questions.

Perseverance is basically a copy of Curiosity built from its spare parts, but with one major modification: a system for drilling, collecting and storing slender cores of rock. Perseverances job is to collect samples of Martian rock for future missions to bring to Earth, in what would be the first robotic sample return from Mars. That would allow scientists to do sophisticated analyses of Martian rocks in their earthbound labs. It feels, even more than previous missions, that we are doing this for the next generation, Siebach says.

The rover is working fast. Compared with Curiositys leisurely exploration of Gale crater, Perseverance has been zooming around its landing site, the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero crater, since its February 2021 arrival. It has collected 10 rock cores and is already eyeing where to put them down on the surface for future missions to pick up. Were going to bring samples back from a diversity of locations, says mission project scientist Kenneth Farley of Caltech. And so we keep to a schedule.

Perseverance went to Jezero to study an ancient river delta, which contains layers of sediment that may harbor evidence of ancient Martian life. But the rover slightly missed its target, landing on the other side of a set of impassable sand dunes. So it spent most of its first year exploring the crater floor, which turned out to be made of igneous rocks (SN: 9/11/21, p. 32). The rocks had cooled from molten magma and were not the sedimentary rocks that many had expected.

Scientists back on Earth will be able to precisely date the age of the igneous rocks, based on the radioactive decay of chemical elements within them, providing the first direct evidence for the age of rocks from a particular place on Mars.

Once it finished exploring the crater floor in March, the rover drove quickly toward the delta. Each successive NASA rover has had greater skills in autonomous driving, able to identify hazards, steer around them and keep going without needing constant instructions from mission control.

Perseverance has a separate computer processor to run calculations for autonomous navigation, allowing it to move faster than Curiosity. (It took Curiosity two and a half years to travel 10 kilometers; Perseverance traveled that far in a little over a year.) The rover drives pretty much every minute that we can give it, Farley says.

In April, Perseverance set a Martian driving record, traveling nearly five kilometers in just 30 Martian days. If all goes well, it will make some trips up and down the delta, then travel to Jezero craters rim and out onto the ancient plains beyond.

Perseverance has a sidekick, Ingenuity, the first helicopter to visit another world. The nimble flier, only half a meter tall, succeeded beyond its designers wildest dreams. The helicopter made 29 flights in its first 16 months when it was only supposed to make five in one month. It has scouted paths ahead and scientific targets for the rover (SN Online: 4/19/22). Future rovers are almost certain to carry a little buddy like this.

While the United States has led in Mars rover exploration, it is not the only player on the scene. In May 2021, China became the second nation to successfully place a rover on Mars. Its Zhurong rover, named after a mythological fire god, has been exploring part of a large basin in the planets northern hemisphere known as Utopia Planitia.

The landing site lies near a geologic boundary that may be an ancient Martian shoreline. Compared with the other Mars rover locations, Zhurongs landing site is billions of years younger, so we are investigating a different world on Mars, says Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen who has collaborated with Zhurong scientists.

In many ways, Zhurong resembles Spirit and Opportunity, in size as well as mobility. It carries cameras, a laser spectrometer for studying rocks and ground-penetrating radar to probe underground soil structures (SN Online: 5/19/21).

After landing, Zhurong snapped pictures of its rock-strewn surroundings and headed south to explore a variety of geologic terrains, including mysterious cones that could be mud volcanoes and ridges that look like windblown dunes. The rovers initial findings include that the Martian soil at Utopia Planitia is similar to some desert sands on Earth and that water had been present there perhaps as recently as 700 million years ago.

In May, mission controllers switched Zhurong into dormant mode for the Martian winter and hope it wakes up at the end of the season, in December. It has already traveled nearly two kilometers across the surface, farther than the meager 100 meters that Sojourner managed. (To be fair, Sojourner had to keep circling its lander because it relied on that lander to communicate with Earth.)

From Sojourner to Zhurong, the Mars rovers show what humankind can accomplish on another planet. Future rovers might include the European Space Agencys ExoMars, although its 2022 launch was postponed after Russia attacked Ukraine (SN: 3/26/22, p. 6). Europe terminated all research collaborations with Russia after the invasion, including launching ExoMars on a Russian rocket.

Vasavada remembers his sense of awe at the Curiosity launch in 2011: Standing there in Florida, watching this rocket blasting off and feeling it in your chest and knowing that theres this incredibly fragile complex machine hurtling on the end of this rocket. It just gave me this full impression that here we are, humans, blasting these things off into space, he says. Were little tiny human beings sending these things to another planet.

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How Mars rovers have evolved in 25 years of exploring the Red Planet - Science News Magazine

One of the most remarkable occurrences in recent Irish economic history is how quickly the Irish labour market recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic. As recently as January there were still restrictions on aspects of the Irish economy, but now just a few months on we effectively have full employment.

f course, Ireland was at full employment before the pandemic commenced, yet the sheer speed of the recovery has been astounding.

While data shows that pubs, hotels and restaurants have recovered the least, normally there would be even more extensive scarring after such a tumultuous event, yet here we are.

Most European countries recovered in a similar fashion, but by no means all. Unemployment in Spain still stands at 12.6pc, in Greece its 12.3pc, in France 7.2pc, and in Italy 8.1pc.

Clearly there are structural issues at play in these countries and many of them have been buffeted by stagflationary headwinds as a result. Spain is not just grappling with a sapping unemployment problem, but in June it was also dealing with inflation of 10.2pc, while in Greece inflation is running at an eye-watering 12pc.

The ability of a society to absorb such punitive price rises is heavily influenced by the level of employment and, on that front at least, Ireland currently sits in a comfortable position. Nobody likes to see their real wages falling, but its substantially less painful if you keep your job.

Now that full employment has been reached it prompts one obvious question. Who is getting the jobs?

For many years asking such a question ran into a brick wall of local politics. During and after the economic crash it seemed every TD and councillor worth their clientelist salt proclaimed their area to be an unemployment blackspot, woefully neglected by the State agencies and central Government.

While local political representatives have a duty and a right to represent their constituents, much of the commentary was preposterously overblown, particularly when certain politicians claimed their area was not just neglected, but uniquely so.

One variation on the theme was that Dublin was hoovering up jobs at the expense of other regions, that we had lopsided job growth, that all roads led to Dublin, and if they didnt lead to Dublin, well then they led to Cork and, at a stretch, Limerick.

Much of this commentary was based on reductively seeking out job and site visit numbers for foreign-owned companies, rather than factoring in all ownership forms, which might produce a more balanced and less polemical picture.

But looking at the current job market and the data on who doesnt have a job, rather than who does, its obvious that there isnt much fertile territory for those trying to manufacture a political conspiracy.

For example, June live register data show there were just shy of 187,000 people signing on. Dublin had 26pc of this group, broadly in line with Dublins share of national population overall.

The Midlands, meanwhile, had 7pc of the jobless, again broadly in line with its national demographic distribution. The Border region, which has acquired a reputation as a tough region to create jobs due to its proximity to competitor Northern Ireland, has a slightly higher proportion of jobless than its portion of national population, but not hugely so. Such a prosaic picture emerges even more strongly when all the components of job creation are included and more selective accounts are ignored.

This is because the area where the lopsided jobs theory gets its greatest airing is in connection with foreign direct investment. Here thinking over recent years has become slightly surreal at times. For example, in recent weeks one local newspaper in Co Louth suggested that State agencies were failing in their mission to the county by not splitting evenly all the foreign derived jobs between Dundalk and Drogheda. The idea that State agencies, and the assorted companies involved, should work towards splitting jobs 50:50 between two towns is truly in the realm of the fantastical and betrays some of the outmoded and parochial thinking that arguably damages some towns more than helps them.

Much of this thinking has deep historical roots. In the early days of foreign direct investment in the 50s and 60s foreign-owned factories would as if from the sky land in a Midlands or Border town. Few then, and it seems now, ever had to ask why the factory was coming in the first place. As a result, a sort of employment cargo cult developed.

It seems few believe its worthwhile, or important, to create a compelling narrative about why their town would be the ideal host for an expanding enterprise, domestic or foreign. One reason such narratives are needed more than ever is because the idea of a physical office itself is being actively questioned around the world and, in a full employment landscape, its possible towns and cities with surplus labour will carry an advantage.

In any case, the most recent data on foreign direct investment and regional locations actually undermines the idea that certain regions are progressively falling behind or being deliberately neglected. For example, the recently published IDA annual report shows that Dublin has not been the biggest winner from inward investment over recent years in employment growth terms at all. That accolade went to the Midlands which grew foreign company employment by 9.6pc over the last five years, with Dublin stuck back on 8.6pc. Admittedly the figures for the Midlands are from a low base, but they certainly do not speak of deliberate neglect or lack of effort.

Other regions however are continuing to face a difficulty with the Border region only growing its foreign-company jobs by 2.7pc over five years. But looks again can be deceiving. Northwest region was the best performer in terms of domestic employment growth via Enterprise Ireland companies in 2021, ahead of Dublin and the Munster region for example.

Dublin certainly remains the cockpit for foreign investment with over 40pc of employment overall, but its worth remembering that foreign-owned corporations are not the main sector of the economy when measured by employment. For example, just 32pc of domestic Enterprise Ireland-backed firms are located in Dublin with a vibrant 68pc outside the capital.

Ultimately death by data point serves nobody and is of almost zero interest to anyone coming to Ireland to make an investment. I know this from the direct exposure I had to decision makers from overseas companies when I worked at IDA Ireland several years ago. This was made clear on several occasions.

What many towns could usefully try to do is create a new narrative that talks less about the unfairness of a competing location winning all the investment, and more about the persuasive reasons someone should invest in their town, city orregion. Also never forget the reach of Google. When a region tells the world its an economic blackspot without much of a demographic or commercial future, its should be no surprise when the outside world starts to believe it.

Original post:

Local clamour for FDI jobs ignores the reality of our employment utopia - Independent.ie

A new 4 million investment will deliver a second phase of the LawtechUK programme, supporting modernisation through the development of new technology like machine learning and data analytics tools.

This will help ensure the UK retains its competitive global edge, create jobs and boost access to legal services for individuals and businesses through technology.

LawtechUK is a government-backed initiative, launched in 2019, with an initial 2 million investment to transform the UK legal sector through technology, providing resources, programmes and courses to promote new ways of delivering and accessing legal services via digital solutions.

Justice Minister Lord Bellamy QC said:

A thriving lawtech sector will help ensure the UK continues as a world-leading legal services centre and attracts the very best talent.

This investment will support the market to develop the technology it needs to drive modernisation and deliver first-class legal services.

The LawtechUK programme has been delivered by growth platform Tech Nation in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and the LawtechUK Panel, a board of industry experts.

The previous funding for Tech Nation has already seen results like the launch of the Lawtech Sandbox a research and development programme for UK entrepreneurs and start-ups to test and develop products or services looking to address the legal needs of businesses and society.

One start-up to benefit from the sandbox is Legal Utopia, an app designed to help people understand their legal issues and access lawyers.

Director of LawtechUK Alexandra Lennox said:

Technology has the potential to transform business and peoples experience of law, meet unmet legal needs and support professionals to deliver the next generation of legal services.

We have seen great progress towards this future since LawtechUKs inception and this next phase of funding will build on those important foundations, helping cement the UKs position as a global hub for technology and law.

Lawtech Amplified Global also participated in the Sandbox.

Founder of Amplified Global Minesh Patel said:

Accelerators, incubators and sandboxes are a lifeline for start-ups bringing novel solutions into the market. Its fantastic to hear about the next series of MoJ funding, which will enable pioneering solutions to push the boundaries within the legal space.

Without the Lawtech Sandbox, an organisation of our size and stage would have found it really difficult to be working, or even engaging, with a telecoms giant and the cross section of stakeholders and regulators that we did.

The LawtechUK programme has rapidly accelerated our growth and helped us to get the product to market quicker than we could have ever imagined.

LawtechUK aims to improve understanding and awareness of legal technology and has produced a free online learning and research hub as well as a website to allow the sharing of experiences of remote alternatives to traditional court hearings.

The investment will also continue to support and promote the work of the LawtechUKs Jurisdiction Taskforce to ensure English law keeps pace with technological developments - helping the UK to maintain its place as an international hub for emerging technologies. This builds on previous work to increase market understanding of smarter contracts and digital assets by showcasing real life examples of where these technologies are being used.

Tech Nation will continue to deliver the LawtechUK programme until December 2023. Details of a competitive process to award the next stage of funding will be announced in the autumn. The new provider will deliver the programme from January 2023 to March 2025.

See more here:

Further investment in digital transformation of UK's legal sector - GOV.UK

The internet concluded, and Snopes has half-heartedly acquiesced, to the idea that the fictional but beloved cartoon character George Jetson of TV's "The Jetsons" was born earlier this week, on July 31, 2022. George J. Jetson, a digital index operator at the fictional Spacely's Space Sprockets company (valued by Forbes at over a billion dollars) was the patriarch of the Jetsons, the eponymous and ubiquitous Hanna-Barbara cartoon that aired around 70 episodes on television intermittently between 1962 and 1989. The show was set 100 years in the future in a space-age 2062.

Despite its relative paucity of episodes, the show arguably had a huge cultural impact that spanned generations of Saturday morning sugary cereal munching kids and future engineers, even though it was initially cancelled after just one season.

2 View gallery

The Jetsons' robot maid Rosy with Astro

(Credit: meunierd / Shutterstock)

What stands out about the Jetsons was that unlike much of the science fiction canon, the show didnt create a future that was dystopian, like Black Mirror, or utopian, like Star Trek. Rather the Jetsons presented the future that mirrored a society that was familiar during the second half of the twentieth century, just with amazing technology, much like Hanna Barbaras other cartoon hit, the Flintstones, albeit set in the stone age.

Part of that Star Trek utopia coincidentally also had a milestone this week with the passing of Nichelle Nichols, aka Lt. Uhura, who was a member of the multi-racial, multi-gender Star Trek bridge. Like the Jetsons influence on innovation, Nichols impact from the show has been credited with helping draw the first US woman astronaut Sally Ride and the first black woman astronaut Mae Jemison to the [NASA astronaut] program.

While the technologies presented in both Star Trek and the Jetsons tended towards the helpful and the useful for humanity, in reality many innovative technologies are inherently double-edged swords, capable of doing both good and evil. To wit, also this past week, the UN's chief administrative officer, secretary-general, Antnio Guterres announced that humanity was just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.

Nuclear power which is one of the cleanest and safest forms of energy, is also the destructive force in over 13,000 weapons held in arsenals around the world. Arguably, this association between the good and the bad of nuclear energy has also led to laws and decisions to decommission many of Europes nuclear power plants. The bad timing of which coincided with Russias war with Ukraine and the resulting power crunch felt by many European nations that could have turned to locally produced nuclear energy rather than rising uncertainties related to natural gas from Russia.

However, we need not necessarily look down into the Minuteman ICBM silos to see danger to humanity from various forms of innovation. This past week also saw reporting on two separate incidents where space debris from a Chinese Rocket and a SpaceX rocket landed in Indonesia and Malaysia and Australia respectively. Given these and a growing number of uncontrolled rockets falling back to Earth, a new study in Nature Astronomy has shown an increasing chance of someone getting killed from a rocket from above over the next ten years. Space debris continues to be a non-trivial problem in space exploration. Space debris is so endemic that researchers have even recently proposed that we can spot other planets hosting intelligent life by looking for their orbiting space debris fields.

Many non-governmental organizations have aimed to tackle this issue. For example, the EPFL Space Center (eSpace) just launched a Space Sustainability Rating system, a tiered scoring system that recognizes efforts and incentivizes sustainable building and operation practices, such as the mitigation of space debris.

Still, space debris remains such an intractable issue because every space mission leaves a signature debris field relating to any of the numerous steps involved in getting a payload into space, and we currently lack both the international incentive and enforcement structures to meaningfully curtail this problem, although some countries do have relevant national laws and regulations.

To wit, the just published McGill Manuel on International Law Applicable to Military Uses of Outer Space a comprehensive multinational six year project to clarify international law as it relates to the military use of outer space sets out in rule 129: International law does not contain explicit rights and obligations regarding the creation of space debris. However, to the extent necessary to comply with other rules of international law, States and international organizations shall limit the creation of space debris when carrying on space activities, including military space activities.

Prof. Dov Greenbaum is the director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at the Harry Radzyner Law School, at Reichman University.

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Re-meet George Jetson: Innovation inspiration goes back to the future - CTech

July was spent at home reading and working on the new essay collection, and at the very end flying to Albuquerque for Mythcon, where very excitingly my novel Or What You Will won the Mythopoeic Award! (I never expect to win awards, Im so thrilled to be nominated for them and on the ballot next to such great books, so its always an exciting surprise on the occasions when I do win.) I had a great time at Mythcon, seeing people, through masks, but seeing people, and having conversations. Before that,I read 21 books, and some of them were great and some of them were not. The good ones make up for all the others, and Im glad I get to burble to you about the excellent ones and warn you off the terrible ones!

The Plus One Pact,Portia MacIntosh (2020)Funny romance novel in which two people meet, become friends and then roommates while pretending to be dating to provide plus ones for awkward family events, and then inevitably end up realising they are perfect for each other. Fun, funny, cheering, but perhaps a little predictable.

The Grand Turk, John Freely(2007)Biography of Mehmet II, by the same man who wrote the biography of Mehmets son Cem that I read in April. Mehmet II was the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople, he was a complex, interesting man who had himself painted by Venetian Renaissance painters and who was interested in Greek and Roman antiquity as well as Islam. The book is solid, good on facts and places and times, but not lively. I have yet to find a lively book about the Ottomans.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis (1955)He was an odd duck, Lewis, and this is a deeply odd book. It had a strangely compelling quality; once I started it I raced through. Lewis writes about his childhood and early manhood with deep observation and sympathy, but from the perspective of an intellectual historyno, thats not fair. A spiritual history? Hes focusing on the moments when he experienced what he calls joy, the rush that went through him when he read the words Baldur the beautiful is dead and which he found elusive and hard to recapture. He had a very strange childhood, and a terrible school experience, and he was in fact a very peculiar person. It may be because I read the Narnia books early and often, but I feel there are some ways I resonate to him very deeply, and others where he seems completely alien. Hes never less than interesting, and hes honest and coy in weird and unexpected ways. I really like the parts of this where hes trying to dissect what joy is and how it isnt lust and how he figured out the difference. Its fascinating that he hated the trenches of WWI less than boarding school because at least he wasnt supposed to pretend to like it. Glad Ive read it.

Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell (2020)This is a story about an imaginary band in the sixties, and its perfect. It is structured in the form of albums, with side one and side two, and the point-of-view character as the person who wrote the track that is the chapter. It is a direct sequel to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Its got this thing going on where the three main characters are all quirky strongly drawn people, and its doing a great thing with pacing. Im not especially interested in the sixties or rock music (though I was charmed to meet Leonard Cohen in the lift of the Chelsea Hotel), but I loved this book for its sharpness, its observation, the things its thinking about and connecting up delightfully. Writing this now and thinking of the moments of this book, I want to read it again straight away. This is as good as the best of the other Mitchell I have read, absolutely compelling. ForgetCloud Atlas. Read The Thousand Autumns and then read this.

Mappings, Vikram Seth (1980)Delightful early poetry collection from Seth as he was finding his voice, lovely poems about trying to work out who he is and where he wants to be, unsure of everything but his powerful scansion. I loved this, and was sorry it was so short.

The Company, K.J. Parker(2008)This was Parkers first book as Parker rather than Holt. The events of this book add up to more futility than most of his later ones, but theres plenty of the fantasy of logistics that I want. Sadly there are some women, who behave very strangely. Mr Holt is alive, and its possible that at some point I could meet him and say, look, really, women, were people, we do things for the same reasons men do, not for the kinds of mysterious reasons you think, really. But I suspect he wouldnt be able to hear me, that perhaps the pitch of my voice would be inaudible to him. Some of his men are pretty peculiar too, especially in this book. Dont start here, even though he did. But having said that, technical details of gold panning, farming disasters theres a lot going for it.

Something Fabulous, Alexis Hall (2022)A gay regency romance with twins, by an author whose contemporary romances I enjoyed, how could I not love this? Good question, and one thats hard to answer. I didnt love it, it failed to convince me. Unlike K. J. Charles Society of Gentlemen books, this wasnt a version of the Regency that I could suspend my disbelief in. At best I was smiling where I was supposed to be laughing, and often I was rolling my eyes. Disappointing.

Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey, Jennifer Walker (2013)This is a biography of Elizabeth von Arnimwhose actual name was Mary Beauchamp, who married Count von Arnim and who used both Elizabeth and von Arnim as names but never together. Walker talks about Elizabeth the author persona as Marys creation and mask. She had a very interesting life, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, and wrote a number of books I esteem highly. This is a good biography, well written and thoughtful. It seems to be Walkers first book. Ill watch out for more by her.

Love the One Youre With, Emily Giffin(2008)I have enjoyed a lot of Giffin but I hated this one. The thing that sometimes annoys me about her work is the slavering love of wealthAmerican unexamined brand-name suburban wealth. This is a book about settling, and its in favour. Skip it.

Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman, Eighteenth Century Icon, Angelica Goodden(2005)Interesting contrast with the von Arnim bio, because I already knew von Arnims books well but picked this up after seeing one self-portrait of Kauffmans in an exhibition at the Uffizi last year. So when Walker delved into the books alongside the life, that was really interesting, but when Goodden did the same with art history detail I was tempted to skim. Kauffman was absolutely dedicated to her art, despite doing a self-portrait where she depicts herself choosing between art and music. Her father was a painter, she got the best art education she could (though people claimed she suffered from not having done anatomy and life drawing), and successfully managed her work and image to support herself entirely by her own production in several different countries, all of which considered and still consider her a local, or adoptive local, artist.

The Blue Sapphire,D.E. Stevenson(1963)I think this is the only book Ive ever read where speculation in shares goes well. Charming romance that feels as if its set much earlier than the publication date. It begins in London and continues in Scotland. It has good found family and growing upbut a young woman not knowing what she wants to do and getting a job in a hat shop seems more 1933 than 1963. Still, I suppose there are still hat shops today, and certainly uncles, and maybe even sapphire prospectors, who knows?

Enough Rope, Dorothy Parker(1926)Delightful well-turned collection of Dorothy Parkers poetry, free from Project Gutenberg, containing all the poems of hers I already knew and many I did not. Very much one note, that note being And I am Marie of Romania, but as its a note otherwise utterly missing from English poetry Ill take it and giggle.

The School at the Chalet, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer(1925)Re-read. After reading that disappointing modern school story last month, it occurred to me to look at what might be available as ebooks and this was. This is in the special category of re-reads that are things I read as a kid and havent revisited. There are lots of Chalet School books, this is the first. Madge and her close female friend Mademoiselle set up a school in a chalet in Austria so that Madges invalid but madcap sister Jo and Mademoiselles niece Simone can live healthily while being educated in English, French, and German, and other pupils will pay for rent and food. They acquire other pupils with ease, and proceed to have school adventures in the Austrian Tyrol. In 1925. I remember impending war forcing them out of Austria and then Italy in later volumes.

Theres a thing about a book like this where its gripping even though theres no actual suspense. There was one moment where I was reading fervently with tears in my eyes when something interrupted me and as I picked the book up again I thought a) I have read this before, b) its a kids book, the character will survive, c) the peril is entirely implausible, and d) I really, really cared nevertheless and wanted to get back to it and let all the things I was supposed to be doing go hang. Id happily re-read all the other volumes if they were available.

Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch(2011)Second in the Rivers of London series, just as gripping as the first which I read in April, and dealing well with both having a new adventure and the consequences of the first book. Great voice. Great worldbuilding, consistent with first book and widening implications and scope. Good characters. Slightly too much blood and horror, just about where its worth it, but I can already see how much more I will enjoy re-reading braced. Ill definitely keep reading this series. Start at the beginning, though.

Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries, Martin Edwards(2021)Ive read a bunch of these British Library Crime Classics themed Golden Age of Mystery short story collections, and I always enjoy them. They often, as here, have one Sherlock Holmes story and a bunch of things by other writers. It was fun seeing what animals Edwards managed to findjust one nobbled racehorse! My favourite was a jackdaw. Its also a good way of finding new-to-me mystery writers. This isnt the best in the series, but I enjoyed it anyway.

London With Love, Sarra Manning(2022)I love Manning, everything except last years lacklustre book about the dog. This one was excellenta romance that begins in 1987 with sixteen-year-olds and comes forward in time to the day last year that Britain allowed people out of their bubbles to meet up with people again. Most of the chapters take place a couple of years apart. All of them feature stations on the London Underground or New York subway. All of them feature our protagonist Jenny/Jen/Jennifer as she reinvents herself and grows up, and her friend Nick as he finally also grows up. This is such a great lifetime book, and such a great London book, and the history of the time as it affects the people living through it. I couldnt stop thinking about it. Its also the first time Ive seen the pandemic in a romance novel, though I doubt it will be the last. (Manning was writing this in lockdown. I am in awe.) This is the kind of romance that many people would enjoy and deserves to be more widely read.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco(1980)Re-read. I read it when I was in university, and its funny, I no longer think its weird to have a book set in a monastery, or about the questions of knowledge and pride and heresy. I didnt understand this book properly when I was eighteen. I still found parts of it slow and hard going, and it certainly is very peculiar. It has the form of a mystery, but thats just the thread to open it up to the wider questions Eco is interested in examining. Weird, fascinating novel.

Wedding Bells At Villa Limoncello, Daisy James(2019)Do you want a romance novel set in Italy? Did you actually want the forty-eight romance novels set in Italy Ive read since March 2020? (I just counted.) Maybe you didnt. Youve been very patient. I didnt know I did. This is not a good book. Its not terrible. Ill be reading the sequels, indeed Ive already bought them. But this one is absolutely classictheres an unhappy person, and she goes to Italy, and everything gets fixed, just because its beautiful and there is good food and Italian people and therefore suddenly everything is therefore fine. However, I didnt read this book in 2020 because it contains a dead sister, and thats a hard subject for me. But now I did read it, and it was fun.

The Memory Theater, Karin Tidbeck(2021)Brilliant novel that takes ideas about fairyland and ideas about other worlds and pulls off a terrific fantasy. Tidbeck is a Swedish writer who writes in both Swedish and English; this is an English original, with very delicate, precise use of language that reminded me of Angela Carter. Theres fairyland, theres Sweden, theres a theatre troupe, theres a girl whose mother is a mountain and a truly conscienceless villain. Unforgettable. This is the kind of European fantasy we need more of.

Saplings, Noel Streatfeild(1945)Re-read. Streatfeild is known for her childrens books. This is not one. This is a book where she takes her ability to write brilliantly from childrens POV and also from the POV of adults and gives us a book about how WWII destroyed a family even though only one person in it is killed. Its really good, and absolutely compelling, but also a tragedy. But its written just like her childrens books, which makes reading it an experience more comparable to L.M. MontgomerysRilla of Ingleside than anything else I can think of.

The Bookseller of Florence, Ross King(2021)Delightful, readable biography of Vespasiano da Bisticci, bookseller and producer of manuscripts. If you are interested in the history of books, in the Renaissance classical revival, in Florence in the fifteenth century, in Marsilio Ficino, you want to read this. Kings best book sinceBrunelleschis Dome and full of useful fascinating information. Absolutely splendid, loved it to bits, and I think almost anyone would, because he assumes an intelligent reader without much background knowledge.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. Shes published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and fifteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her novel Lent was published by Tor in May 2019, and her most recent novel, Or What You Will, was released in July 2020. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.

Read more here:

Jo Walton's Reading List: July 2022 - tor.com

News Analysis

As former President Donald Trump warned about an economy thats on the verge of not just a recession, but a full-blown depression, the country should prepare for a rapid slowdown in employment, say experts.

Falling labor force participation, along with inflation, could provide the double whammy that creates an economic crisis this fall, they say.

Historic inflation, on top of the lingering effects of COVID-19 policies, has contributed to a sense of pessimism among many in America.

Democrats have relied on this self-inflicted crisis to pass unprecedented, socialist policies, the critics said.

Those policies, some critics told The Epoch Times, have served to set up the country for further crisis.

One critic worries that such a crisis will provide progressives with their latest excuse to force the country to the far-left before the November election in an attempt to buoy their electoral hopes.

Much of what they are doing is trying to mobilize their radical base and keep it mobilized for the November election, conservative business consultant and political commentator Craig Huey told The Epoch Times about Democratic economic policies.

In order to keep their voters mobilized, Democrats have come to rely on a crisis atmosphere, said Huey.

So an economic crisis, with people losing their jobs, while contrary to normal political wisdom for a party in the White House, is what is driving Democrat strategy under President Joe Biden, said Huey.

Its an ideological driven-bureaucracy that needs to drive ideological voters to the polls, Huey said about the strategy.

Similarly, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said that the Democrats are fully aware of the harm that Biden and the Democrats are doing to the economy by inflationary spending that discourages working.

For too long, the Left has pushed irresponsible, job-killing socialist policies, paired with reckless spending and tax hikes, causing higher inflation and a staggering $30 trillion in debt, said Scott in a statement to The Epoch Times.

Scott said that one consequence of Bidens policies is a labor force participation rate that is shockingly low already.

The rate at which able-bodied Americans have remained in the labor force has sagged from a post-COVID-19 high of 62.4 percent in March to 62.2 percent in July.

The decline, some argue, has diminished the gloss from the 20 percent in labor force gains the economy has made since Biden was inaugurated and the country generally gave up on COVID-19 lockdowns.

And while the employment report last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) added 372,000 jobs, the BLS household survey showed that, in fact, 315,000 fewer people had jobs in July versus June, as 353,000 people permanently left the labor force.

Jobs came in red hot for July with another 535,000 jobs added, but another 63,000 people left the labor force. Since March of this year, there are 168,000 fewer Americans with jobs according to the BLS household survey, despite the fact that month after month the BLS reports big job gains.

Its a trend that has coincided with accelerating inflation.

On Aug. 1, industry data reported by Reuters from the private employment specialist Homebase said that hours for workers declined by 12 percent in July for small business workers tracked by their company.

Earlier this week there were further signs of a cooling job market.

The BLS reported on Aug. 2 that the number of job openings decreased by about 600,000 jobs month-over-month to 10.7 million openings. Thats down from a record high of 11.9 million job openings set in March.

Fox News Charles Payne called it the biggest non-Covid19 related swoon in job openings on record, while Forbes detailed plans by major corporations to slash more jobs.

Professor Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, told The Epoch Times that its an open question about how badly the Federal Reserve wants inflation to get to its target rate of 2 percent.

He likens todays economy to the 1980s under Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, who brought inflation down from 14 percent to 3.2 percent by bringing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent.

I dont know that they are willing to keep interests so high to get inflation to 2 percent, said Morici.

Morici said that it might take an unemployment rate of 9 percent to get inflation much below 4 percent.

This is a very different economy than the pre-COVID-19 economy, said Morici.

The economy, under the Democrats vision, is willing to pay extra costs to transition to a green economy by not using oil and gas and generally paying more for labor.

It means a lot of capital is badly used, added Morici.

But Morici feels that Democrats dont want to precipitate a crisis for one simple reason: He thinks that establishment figures, including members of the Federal Reserves Open Market Committee, will do what they can to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

Thats the last thing that they want to happen, Morici concluded.

The implication is that the Federal Reserve will try not to allow unemployment to go up too much, less it improve Trumps chances to win the presidency, said Morici.

The House progressive caucus has said that disadvantaged, lower-paid, and Black and Latino workers are disproportionately harmed, by rising interest rates, pleading with central bankers to keep interest rate hikes to a minimum saying the burden of high costs is not borne equally.

With wage growth declining in recent months, our countrys lowest-paid, most vulnerable workers have endured too much already to be sacrificed in pursuit of severe rate hikes that have far too often triggered recessions, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the progressive caucus.

The Federal Reserve, however, has responded to talk from economists, the stock markets, and politicians that the central bankers might not be that serious about the 2 percent inflation target by publicly reiterating that they will continue to raise interest rates until inflation moderates.

While the Federal Reserve has talked about a soft landing where they raise interest rates without a recession as they try to combat inflation, Bill Dudley, the former president of the New York Federal Reserve acknowledged recently that at this point inflation is so high that they have to push up the unemployment rate to bring inflation down.

And the Federal Reserve has made clear this week that theyll keep at higher interest rates until they get inflation back to 2 percent, even while politicians and the stock market fret about employment.

Our intentions are really about making sure that people recognize that we are not completed with our fight against high inflation because these prints of 9.1 percent [inflation] are harming American families, harming businesses trying to figure out how to do their business and expand and we are committed to getting that back down to something closer to 2% which is our price stability target, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told reporters on a conference call on Aug. 3.

The result is increasing classical tension between Federal Reserve policy that favors higher interest rates in an inflationary environmentand the consequent unemployment that will be created by higher interest ratesand the politicians who want to keep inflationary spending going.

The tension is likely to come to a head at some point.

Its time for Republicans and Democrats in Washington to wake up and stop endorsing reckless, inflation-fueling spending that is crushing American families, Scott told The Epoch Times.

Scott asserted that despite the inflationary pressure that Bidens policies have created, he has done nothing to reverse course and instead has expanded those policies in response.

Democrats only answer is another wasteful, tax hiking proposal that will kill more jobs and raise costs on families, especially our seniors, who are already struggling, said Scott.

And until the classic tension between inflationary spending and the unemployment it will create is resolved, the crisis atmosphere will, at the very least, continue, if not almost certainly expand, critics said.

In part, the crisis could continue because Democrats see rising prices and unemployment as the way by which they can continue expand government control over Americans if not over elections, Huey noted.

But the Biden administration and the left appear to be perfectly fine with inflicting this pain on Americans, experts at conservative think thank The Heritage Foundation argued in a recent commentary, saying that the Democrats Inflation Reduction Act and other Democrat policies do the opposite of what the policies titles imply.

In fact, rising energy prices are not unintended consequences of their policies, but rather the envisioned outcomes, the commentary continued.

The same could be true of unemployment if it serves the best interest of the far-left, warned Huey.

Obviously they know that when there is a crisis they can gain power and control, they can expand the scope of government over the lives of individuals, Huey said of Democrats.

They are so ideologically committed to the creation of a socialist utopia that the reality of economics means nothing to them in their quest to retain and expand power, Huey added.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.

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John Ransom is a freelance reporter covering U.S. news for The Epoch Times with offices in Washington, D.C., and Asia.

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Left Will Exploit Economic Crisis to Further Progressive Agenda, Observer Says - The Epoch Times

OPINION: The unattractive do not earn as much as those blessed with pleasant features. I reflect on this as I look at the ageing, wrinkled and aesthetically challenged face that stares blankly back at me in the mirror while giving my yellowing teeth a perfunctory scrub.

It is a face that only a puppy could love; and then merely because I secretly feed her treats.

Life isnt fair but it is no longer solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. When the challenge for a society moves from starvation to combating obesity we are moving up the hierarchy of needs.

READ MORE:* The unreal prospect of unteaching racism* Mori, Pacific in public sector 'significantly' less likely to earn six figures* Black Lives Matter protests are about more than statues for New Zealand

To live in New Zealand today is to live in one of the wealthiest countries in all of human history; where even a plain fellow like myself can earn a pleasant living despite my self-evident physical deficiencies.

Should the divergence in my opportunities relative to the comelier in appearance be something that the state should focus its attention?

Perhaps not; but the wandering eye of those whose salaries depend on finding and solving the great social problems of our age have identified something that they believe warrants investigation. Those with a Pacific heritage earn less than their Pakeha co-workers and neighbours.

Why? The Human Rights Commission, as fine as any government agency you will find, took it upon itself to study this very issue. They paid for a report. It was as awful as youd expect it to be.

To give the report its due, there was an analysis that found Pacific workers didnt obtain the same degree of education as Pakeha and worked in lower-paid industries. Once this was controlled for, only around a third of the pay discrepancy could be explained.

However, a degree in education was considered the equivalent to a degree in dentistry and the fact that someone who pursues a career as a teacher earns less than a dentist is considered to be unexplained.

Four reasons were provided; unobserved differences, ethnic preferences in the non-pecuniary elements of jobs, discrimination and unconscious bias. It is a consistent theme of such research that the reason for some perceived negative outcome is racism, greed or Roger Douglas.

This research provides further evidence about what weve long suspected the bulk of the Pacific Pay Gap cant be explained and is at least partly due to invisible barriers like racism, unconscious bias and workplace discriminatory practices declares Saunoamaalii Karanina Sumeo, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF

Alice Olynsma, a healthcare assistant at Ballarat Rest Home, says care and support workers deserve fair pay. (First published May 23, 2022)

It is astounding, but unsurprising, that researchers assume that those who employ staff are racist when there is no evidence from which to form this view. The gaps in their data are, literally, unexplained. Racism is an unambiguous moral wrong. It is a crime. To ascribe this sin to an entire class of New Zealanders because your analysis is deficient is, if I am being polite, disappointing.

It is also easy to disprove. You can be solvent, or you can be racist, but in business it is very difficult to be both. If the assumption behind these sorts of reports is valid; that Pacific people are being paid less than Pakeha while producing the same level of output, then I could make more profit by hiring Pacifica candidates and paying them less than I pay non-Pacific workers.

My racism would need to be intense to leave that profit on the table and if I was such a terrible person, the business owner down the road would out-compete me and I would be forced to rely on my writing to pay the bills.

A grim prospect for all concerned.

Society is complex. People make different decisions and pursue differing lifestyles. The fact that I am spending time writing this column rather than engaging in more productive and better paid work is a decision that will lead me receiving a lower income.

If your priority is community and family rather than wealth accumulation your lifes achievements will differ. Some prefer to die with seven children rather than seven houses and that isnt a bad thing and nor is it a problem that needs addressing.

The analysis of the pay gap between different population groups isnt something that is being done for academic curiosity. The Human Rights Commission is conducting the Pacific Pay Gap Inquiry to better understand why the Pacific Pay Gap exists and how it can be closed.

One of the ideas floated is mandated pay transparency; forcing firms to publish salaries by gender and race. The law of unintended consequences will ensure this will reduce employment opportunities for low qualified women and minorities and increase them for inadequate white men.

More intervention will be introduced to correct for these failures in a never-ending cycle of regression.

Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century philosopher, popularised the idea that the legitimacy of the sovereign rests on the willingness of individuals to surrender some of their freedoms in order to avoid a war of all against all; a collective social contract.

It is an elegant solution to the question of legitimacy of the states monopoly on the use of force; but where is the philosophical foundation that permits the sovereign to use that power to manufacture a utopia?

We have accepted as given that the Crown has not only the right but an obligation to embark on social engineering programmes to produce a society that confirms to the preferences of the cultural elite even if it defies the wishes and customs of the population.

Cultural change on the level envisioned cannot be achieved without Draconian intervention into the minutia of our economy and society and an unwavering certainty by those in power that the escalating costs are a necessary price to achieve their Arcadia.

Their ignorance is only matched by their determination and the lack of any willingness to confront these cultural commissars means their ambitions will be translated into policy with the inevitable, and now unavoidable, perverse outcomes.

See the rest here:

Are we too quick to pull the racism card? - Stuff

In 1860, a ship named the Clotilda surreptitiously slipped into the Mobile River Delta in Alabama carrying an illicit cargo of 110 enslaved Africans. While slavery was not illegal in the United States at the time, importing slaves into the country had been outlawed in 1808. To destroy evidence of the crime, the owners of the ship quickly had it burned and then distributed the Africans among themselves to work their plantations. Twelve years later, long after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, 32 of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Clotilda returned to the western banks of the Mobile River. Close to where they first set foot on this nations soil, they founded the community of Africatown, a place where they could maintain their culture and language in an otherwise foreign and hostile land. It was among the first towns established by African Americans.

Today, Africatown (also known as Africatown USA or Plateau) has been incorporated into the Mobile metropolitan area. Aside from a mural of the Clotilda on a retaining wall and a plaque at a local cemetery, there is little that signals the neighborhoods connection to this history. As with so many African American communities, Africatown has become blighted through industrial pollution and disinvestment. Abandoned and dilapidated houses and businesses define much of the built environment. A paper mill located there in the 1920s but shuttered in the early 2000s, and in the 1980s much of the land that the town occupied was seized for the construction of the Cochrane Bridge. From a peak of 21,000 residents in the early 20th century, when the paper mill was operating, the population has dwindled to approximately 2,000, about 100 of whom are thought to be direct descendants of Clotilda passengers. Despite decades of organizing and advocacy to improve these conditions, there has been little cause for hope. Now, however, it seems that the very slave ship that started it all might be the key to a brighter future for Africatown.

In 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that the remains of the Clotilda had been found in the Mobile River Delta. The discovery sent a ripple of excitement through Africatown. Residents quickly mobilized to establish the importance of their role in the evolving narrative surrounding the illegal slave ship. The culmination of this has been the launch of The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, which aims to imbue the area with programs and architecture that demonstrate its rich, complex history.

The idea competition is one of the many ways the residents of Africatown are harnessing the power of their cultural legacy to uplift the blighted community. M.O.V.E. (Making Opportunities Viable for Everyone) Mobile~Gulf Coast Community Development Corporation commissioned designer, writer, and activist Renee Kemp-Rotan to help achieve its goal of making sure that Africatown interprets and controls its own narrative, with the huge economic opportunity it now represents because of the Clotilda. What began as a design for a museum honoring the history of one of the few African-owned settlements in America evolved into a complete creative placemaking of the Africatown/Prichard/Mobile area, steeped in the unique history that shaped it. After extensive community engagement, four sites were selected to host a total of 16 venues, each with distinct programs that honor and interpret the history of Africatown while designing for a hopeful and prosperous future for the community.

Each site selected for the competition is part of a greater whole, dubbed the Africatown Cultural Mile. The goal of the cultural mile is to provide the area with economic stimulation and a cultural heritage. We are asking designers to redefine Africatown so that it could be known and admired as a world-class cultural heritage and creative destination system, with the story of a resilient Black people at its heart, said Vickii Howell, president and CEO of M.O.V.E.

According to The Architectural League of New Yorks American Roundtable report on Africatown (also led by Kemp-Rotan and Howell), when Mobile annexed the community in the 1960s there were hopes that the city would take responsibility for its new neighborhood and halt the industrial sprawl and pollution that have plagued the area and cause high levels of cancer and autoimmune disease. Instead, the City of Mobile rezoned much of the neighborhood, shrinking its residential footprint, and opened aboveground waste storage facilities in the vicinity. The community fought back, culminating in a lawsuit against International Paper and a redrafting of the zoning code.

The design competition encompasses this more-recent history as much as it does the origins of Africatown. The competition sites stitch together the long, intricate history of the area, including the Josephine Allen public housing complex (demolished by the City of Mobile in 2019), parts of the industrial waterfront, and the cemetery where the original African founders were laid to rest. You can connect to all of this history by land and water, said Kemp-Rotan. Thats what the competition is really aboutcultural tourism as an economic development engine with really cool architecture.

The winning proposals will be picked by a jury of 16 designers, historians, and local residents. The results will be compiled in a book and given to the community to provide design inspiration and guide the redevelopment of Africatown into a thriving community. Kemp-Rotan adamantly advocates for a community-scale Afrocentric utopia that embraces the entirety of African architecture and celebrates its role in the legacy of Black spaces. Most of the stuff written about Africatown has been written about the boat and the past and the history, she said. Nobodys really talking about what the future of this place is going to become. Those wishing to participate must register by September 19. Designs must be submitted by January 19, 2023, and the winning proposals will be announced on March 19 of that year. The winning teams will be invited to Mobile for the first annual International Conference on African Monument Design and Heritage Tourism on Juneteenth (June 19) 2023.

Alaina Griffin is a regular contributor to AN.

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A design idea competition seeks to turn the troubled history of Africatown through heritage tourism - The Architect's Newspaper

When the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors on July 15, the city lost one of its oldest and most important cultural institutions. The 148-year-old art school on the northeast slope of Russian Hill had been struggling for years, plagued by declining enrollment and financial woes. Yet for decades, the school known as the California School of Fine Arts until 1961 was a major force, not just on the Bay Area art scene, but on the national one. The artists and movements associated with the institution include Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Manuel Neri, the Bay Area Figurative School, the funk movement, and too many others to list.

But the most crucial period in the schools long history, when it transformed itself from a moribund finishing school for debutantes into a white-hot center of artistic experimentation and a force to be reckoned with in modern art, took place in just five years, from 1946 to 1950. During that time, the school played a significant role in the development of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. And remarkably, it was a bunch of World War II veterans who made that development possible.

In 1945, few expected the California School of Fine Arts to even survive, let alone become a center of cutting-edge art. Founded in 1874, the CSFA was a typical fine-arts college of its era, attracting large numbers of female students who wanted to acquire accomplishments to make themselves more marriageable. In the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Candida Smith writes in Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California, it had the reputation of having the most conservative curriculum in the state, with a faculty that steadfastly clung to the beaux-arts academic tradition.

The Great Depression and World War II hit the school hard, and by the 1940s it was on life support. Enrollment plunged, and in 1942 the schools director quit because there was no money to pay his salary. Most of the faculty soon followed. In 1944, the board of trustees considered closing the dying school and selling off the real estate.

At that moment, salvation appeared in the form of 32-year-old Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. MacAgy offered to run the school, on the condition that he be allowed to revise the curriculum and hire faculty as he saw fit. The board agreed, and MacAgy was appointed director on July 1, 1945. It was a momentous hiring.

MacAgy and his then-wife, Jermanyne, who was acting director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, quickly became the most important champions of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Jermanyne MacAgy staged the first Jackson Pollock exhibition in San Francisco in 1942, following that with one-artist shows by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.

The last question: After benches were installed in Golden Gate Park around 1880, what supposed crisis erupted?

Answer: An epidemic of hugging.

This week's question: What San Francisco intersection was known in the late 19th century as "Cape Horn," and why?

For his part, Douglas MacAgy set about remaking the staid CSFA into a center of artistic experimentation. To make up the core of the new painting faculty, he hired four painters he had met as curator Edward Corbett, David Park, Hassel Smith and Clay Spohn. The next year, he hired Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still. In 1948, he added Richard Diebenkorn. Ansel Adams was brought in to head the photography department, with Minor White as principal instructor. MacAgy engaged Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhardt, Man Ray and Salvador Dali to teach, and even tried to convince Marcel Duchamp to come out of retirement and join the faculty.

MacAgy swept out the cobwebs at the venerable school. He got rid of its old pedagogy, which stipulated that students had to take courses in a prescribed order. He ordered that the studios be kept open 24 hours a day, so that students could work whenever they wanted. He brought in jazz musicians and poetry readings. And symbolically, he hung a curtain over the Rivera mural in the schools exhibition hall.

MacAgy was not only a passionate believer in artistic modernism, he was also sure that his avant-garde vision would attract students. As Smith writes, MacAgy was convinced that only by making the school the center for the most advanced thinking in the visual arts would it be able to survive.

This remarkably idealistic plan Jackson Pollock as a business model? would probably have crashed and burned, had it not been for perhaps the most unusual crop of new students in the history of liberal arts education in the United States: a flood of military veterans.

What led more than two million U.S. veterans between 1945 and 1956 to put down their M-1s and start studying Abstract Expressionism, or Samuel Beckett, or Karl Marx, was an epochal piece of legislation: the GI Bill of Rights. Passed by Congress in 1944, the GI Bill offered generous educational and other benefits to returning World War II veterans. Congress did not stipulate what type of education veterans would receive; in fact, it voted down a plan that would have restricted benefits to courses of study focused on employable skills. Neither politicians nor educators expected that the veterans would prefer a liberal arts education over professional training and certainly not that they would pour into art schools.

But in that era, when the military was a true cross-section of America, they did. As Smith notes, a 1946 UCLA survey found that veterans were more likely to take humanities courses than non-veterans. Veterans were driven far less by practical concerns than non-veterans: 44% of veterans in a 1946 survey of 25 institutions of higher learning said their principal aim in returning to school was self-improvement, compared to only 12% of non-veterans. The veterans also got better grades than the non-veterans.

Thanks to the GI Bill, veterans swelled the ranks of liberal arts colleges and proportionally, still more of them enrolled in art schools. As Smith points out, between 1946 and 1952, the percentage of veterans who were full-time students at the five most important art schools in California the CSFA, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and three in Los Angeles was never less than 70%. At CSFA, veterans in 1947 and 1948 made up 74% of full-time students; in 1949, a staggering 87%.

The first veterans began enrolling in fall 1945; by the following spring term, enrollment had grown to 1,017 full- and part-time students, 350% greater than in 1944, and far greater than the schools previous high in 1929. Registration and school income increased every year through 1949.

It was a unique cohort. Smith calls it a special group of students, those veterans who, for absolutely no practical reason, turned to art when they were given the opportunity to achieve their educational dreams. When they entered the CSFA, they threw themselves into the world of art. They devoured the intense, demanding, at times quasi-religious courses offered by Still, Smith and others. And they saved the school.

In the years to come, the CSFA evolved. Still and other faculty members departed. MacAgy resigned in 1950. Abstract Expressionism was followed by the Bay Area figurative movement, which was followed by funk, which was followed by pop, and on and on, in a pattern of change as old as art itself.

The long run of the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, came to an end this year. But while mourning that loss, its worth remembering the five unique years when the schools modern era began driven by brilliant artists and administrators of vision, and by a bunch of veterans who wanted to expand their lives.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. His most recent book is Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.

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How veterans and avant-garde art saved the California School of Fine Arts - San Francisco Chronicle

Taking the mic at the Local Progress national meet-up at the Colorado Convention Center on August 5, Denver City Councilmember Robin Kniechhighlighted some regressive moments in Colorado's recent history with the progressive politicians, advocates and government workers who'd gathered there.

"In 1992, Colorado was dubbed the 'Hate State' because our voters passed a measure prohibiting anti-discrimination ordinances for gay and lesbian individuals. Now, it was overturned by the Supreme Court, but our divided state government also passed laws targeting immigrants, excluding them from government. And we have also had we still have a quasi-right-to-work state that's anti-labor," Kniech recalled.

But then she began to talk about more contemporary progressive victories in Denver and the state: earmarking significant city dollars for affordable housing, enacting a minimum wage in Denver and across Colorado, and giving undocumented immigrants the right to access unemployment benefits.

After two years of Zoom meetings, the return of the Local Progress convention to an in-person format was an opportunity for progressives such as Kniech to share what they've accomplished with people who'd flown in from across the country, including Teresa Mosqueda with the Seattle City Council, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union.

Local Progress, which was founded in 2012, describes itself as a "movement of local elected officials advancing a racial and economic justice agenda through all levels of local government." The organization has a network of over 1,300 local elected officials in 48 states; over 200 people showed up for the three-day convention in Denver, including 24 from Colorado.

The August 5 session focusing on "abusive state preemption" came on the second day of the gathering, and was the only one open to the press.

During Colorado's "Hate State" days, local municipalities were preempted by the state from establishing anti-discrimination ordinances related to LGBTQ individuals. But while that preemption went away when the amendment was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, local officials have had to battle against many other measures over the past few decades.

"We were preempted from local minimum wages, inclusionary housing, lots of other things," said Kniech, who'd lobbied for the convention to come to Denver during her last year as an at-large council rep.

In 1999, Colorado passed a minimum wage preemption law that prevented municipalities from enacting their own minimum wage levels. In 2019, however, the Colorado Legislature repealed that law. Led by Kniech, Denver City Council soon approved a new minimum wage, which hit $15.87 per hour in 2022. Starting next year, the city's minimum wage will increase in line with the Consumer Price Index.

Joe Neguse, the Democratic representing Colorado's 2nd Congressional District, was at the event, and praised Kniech for leading Denver's efforts to increase the minimum wage.

"That does not happen. It does not happen without Robin Kniech," Neguse said.

Lizeth Chacon, the founder of the Colorado People's Alliance who recently transitioned to a job as co-executive director of the Workers Defense Project in Texas, discussed the 2016 campaign to raise the minimum wage statewide through a ballot initiative. That effort ultimately resulted in the minimum wage hitting $12 in Colorado at the start of 2020.

"We were really clear that $12 an hour was not enough. We also knew that $15 was not going to do in a state like Colorado," Chacon said. "We made a commitment that we actually needed to continue the fight."

That led to a "big preemption fight" in the Colorado Legislature that lasted three years, until lawmakers passed the preemption repeal bill in 2019. "Local elected officials really shifted the narrative of this campaign," Chacon said, noting that they were able to say what their cities and counties needed.

Many of the elected officials at the conference work in blue cities in red states, where preemption fights are heating up. The issue of abortion, for example, will continue to be a major battle for some states and municipalities.

Throughout the years, state preemption has been used to prevent progressive achievements, according to Courtnee Melton-Fant, an assistant professor in the Division of Health Systems Management and Policy at the University of Memphis. "Its being used to maintain the tool thats already there," Melton-Fant said of state preemption being employed to maintain homophobia and racism.

Jamie Torres, who just became president of Denver City Council, told Local Progress members of her sponsorship of a land acknowledgment that's now read at council meetings.

"It would be a disservice, it would be offensive, for these words to be left to symbolism. They have to spur action, or we should not say them. After adopting this acknowledgment, we were able to convert Denver's annual bison public auction to an annual bison donation program, exclusively to tribes re-establishing their bison herds throughout the country," Torres added, noting that she's witnessed two transfers of nearly fifty bison through the program.

But while progressives have enjoyed successes in Denver, Torres and Kniech acknowledged that the city still has issues.

"Denver is not utopia. Police use of force, housing-price increases and displacement, homelessness these challenges are as bad as theyve ever been," Kniech said. "We have a lot of work to do. And we have a lot to learn from all of you."

As the session wrapped, Smalls, the keynote speaker for the Local Progress convention, offered one major takeaway.

"We all have to be Davids versus Goliaths," said the man who stood up to Amazon.

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Local Progress Convention Brings Progressive Politicians Together in Denver | Westword - Westword