Category Archives: Moon Colonization

In the summer of 2021, I spent a week in northwest Montana. It was easy to forget there was a pandemic going on. People were zip-lining, hiking, whitewater rafting. The family who lived next to the house that we rented invited ustotal strangersinto their home for drinks (sans masks), and all of our children played together a bit each day. At the end of our trip, we saw a beat-up truck with a wonderful bumper sticker: Safety Third. We laughed at what seemed to be a perfect summation of the carefree attitude that allowed the rugged sort of liberty we had seen in Montana.

Seven months later, much of the nation remains in the grips of authoritarian overreach. The draconian policies that have been implemented to shut down the virus have failed. In fact, it has been obvious for the better part of a year that the virus cant be shut down. By now, it should be clear to everyone that the pandemic is being leveraged by the media, corporate entities, government, and the medical establishment to justify more regulatory insanity, imposing control over the minutiae of daily life.

So far, this power grab has gone largely uncontested. In less-densely populated states like Montana, citizens retain a good deal of individual liberty, and large states like Texas and Florida have protected personal freedom. But most of this is thanks to the election of conservative-minded officials, rather than any organized popular resistance. Indeed, the publicdemonstrations against Covid tyranny in Europe and Canada have dwarfed any American opposition in terms of size and frequency. This should be a source of embarrassment for a nation with such a rich history of liberty and civic engagement.

Why, then, have Americans been reluctant to push back against the abuses of power that have unfolded since the onset of the pandemic? Sadly, the answer seems to be not so much fear as safety. An obsessive concern for safety is a particular kind of fear: It is a generalized apprehension of the world and the different ways it threatens our comfort and well-being. That so many Americans are so worried about their own safety and that of othersdue to an illness that over 99 percent of people will survive and fully recover fromspeaks poorly of any free nation. But it is especially unbecoming for Americans, because we have never been a safe people.

But who are we? I can hear the leftist scolds singing in my imagination. Thats not who we are! was a favorite phrase of Barack Obama, albeit one that was always deployed cynically. For him, we betrayed our identity when (and only when) the public expressed distaste for the policy whims of the progressive left. But since those halcyon days of Obama ended, it has become fashionableto pretend that the American polity is so diverse that its impossible to make any generalizations about our collective identity. Fortunately, thats false. We have many shared characteristics as a people. And safety has never been a defining concern of any Americanswhoever they are and whatever their heritage.

The native Americans who were here before European colonization: Were they concerned with safety above all else? Many tribes were seasonally nomadic in response to the various abuses and calamities inflicted by nature. Other tribes maintained great warrior traditions. In their time, war was not a matter of pressing a button from the safety of a remote computer, as it is today. It was a noble, hand-to-hand test of strength and courage on behalf of your community. When the Europeans arrived, the native people fought valiantly and doggedly to save their families, homes, and way of life from a powerful and technologically superior foe. These are not the behaviors of people consumed with worry about safety.

The early European colonists to America did not sail across the ocean because they wanted to kill Indians. And most didnt undertake such a dangerous journey because they expected to get rich. Anyone concerned with greater comfort, stability, and even wealth would have been better off staying in Europe in the 17th century. But their monarchs did not allow free practice of religion. The New England colonists were people of such great faith that they would leave their ancestral homes and risk deathincluding the death of their childrento go on a sea voyage that might end in utter destruction. In the best case scenario, the pilgrims would arrive safely on the shore of an unknown, inhospitable land, where they would need to begin the monumental work of building a new society from the ground up. These are not the behaviors of people paralyzed by fears about safety.

What about the African peoples sold into slavery and brought across the ocean in conditions that undermined every shred of human dignity? For centuries, those people endured the inhumanity of chattel slavery: No one can call the condition of the American slave safe. Runaways werent looking for safety, either. They sought liberty. The journey to freedom could be deadly, and even when it was successful, there was precious little safety to be had in the north: There was hatred and violence toward black people there, too. Thats to say nothing of the risks and hardships they faced in procuring their own food, their own land, and their own work in a new region of the country. And when discrimination and abuse endured for a full century after emancipation, black Americans protested and resisted this treatment, again risking life and limb. These were not people obsessed with safety.

What about the people who pushed further west? The Americans who set out into uncharted lands, crossing the continent in a wagon train at the pace of an ox? They embarked on that trek in full knowledge of the threat of serious illness, of attacks from hostile Indians, of winter so severe that they might simply freeze or starve to death along the way. They took these risks on the assumption that they were heading west to a better placenot a safer place, but one with a greater promise of human flourishing. The same can be said of the Asians who came to a land with a tongue that couldnt be more different from their own, but who nevertheless thrived even as they worked to exhaustion building a network of railroads.

The great waves of immigrants who came from Europe in the 19th century? Those people were not coming here for entitlements: Unlike today, there were no promises of debt forgiveness, or free schooling, or workers compensation, or welfare payments, or universal health care. They left their families and homes for the possibility of prosperity and liberty. They got on the boats with the understanding that securing these benefits would depend on their own effort and hard work. They knew it wouldnt be safe. But they werent looking for safety.

We were the first nation to send people to the moon. We have more turnover in our upper class than most countries the world over. Fortunes are lost and made and lost again in the pursuit of innovation and progress. Thats not what happens to people who play it safe. The actions of the everyday Americans aboard Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, saved countless lives on the ground. Storming a cockpit full of murderous terrorists is not the behavior of people preoccupied with safety.

The American character is defined by three things that unite all the different groups of people who make up our nation: mobility, risk-taking, and optimism. Were movers and we always have been. A fearful people do not move the way Americans do. Safety demands that we take coverthat we stay in one place. But we keep moving. Even in our darkest times, we maintain our optimism. That optimism is evidenced by our risk-taking: People who believe that things cant or wont get better dont make the calculated risks that Americans make.

All of this begs the question: Are we still the same people as we were? Are we still a mobile people with hope for the future? People who live our lives as though we are masters of circumstance rather than its victims?

Quarantines and lockdowns, especially for a virus as commonly survivable as Covid-19, are decidedly un-American. They undermine our natural inclinations for mobility and free movement. The idea that everyone must take an unproven, fast-tracked vaccine, not merely for their own safety, but for the safety of others, is one more manifestation of this monomania. Required masking continues, despite the limited evidence that cloth masks reduce transmission in any significant way. One cannot deny the absurdity of regulations that ask restaurant patrons to cover their faces long enough to walk to a table, only to unmask after being seated. The demand for vaccine boosters represents a whole new level of fear over safety. The vaccine offers great protection, we are told. It is, ofcourse, safe and effectivebut not effective enough to live your life without fear, in a way that becomes the American spirit. Better get another booster. Just to be safe.

We are now entering our third year of pandemic insanity. Many of the measures that were taken in early 2020 were justifiable because we faced a novel virus about which we knew very little. We can no longer claim that kind of ignorance. Covid-19, generally speaking, is not a deadly virus. Nevertheless, we have sacrificed immensely to try to keep Americans safe. We have done the lockdowns. We have done the masking. We have done the contact-tracing. We have done the double-masking. We have done the vaccines. We have done the boosters. We have done the public shaming. We have asked people for their papers. We have made their employers comply. Weve done it all. And Covid is still here. The fact is, it will always be here. Covid won. But we dont have to become a defeated people.

The question now is how we will respond. Will we be Americans worthy of the name? Or will we live in fear, compromising everythingindeed, compromising who we areto ensure that everyone is just a little safer? Are we willing to make those sacrifices? Are we willing to demand them of our children? For how much longer? And for how long will we allow our government to make such decisions for us?

Americans must now make a choice. Its not merely a choice about how we want to live. Its a choice about who we want to be. Those who fetishize safety posture themselves as virtuous people; they pretend that their concerns are an expression of a deep, abiding care for others. But this is a lie. Ultimately, safetyismwhere the avoidance of harm becomes a way of inhabiting the worldis a radical form of self-regard. To elevate safety to the status of an idol reveals a fear of life; it conceals a pathological mindset where worry and uncertainty become a controlling presence. It is solipsistic navel-gazing, a decadent wallowing in anxiety and self-pity.

The dehumanizing aspects of safetyism are disguised by endless platitudes about the well-being of others. But insisting upon others compliance so that you can live a safer life (after all, we can never be entirely safe) is ultimately an expression of personal weakness. It is a betrayal of the national character. Taken to the scale of society at large, safetyism threatens the dignity of our people. The time has come for a collective embrace of riskthe inherent risk that is the price of freedom in an uncertain world. The time has come to reclaim our dignity, to become again who we areand who Americans have always been. Safety third.

Adam Ellwangeris a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. He is the author ofMetanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, available in paperback this April. You can follow him on Twitter@DoctorEllwanger.

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Safety Third: Covid-19 and the American Character - The American Conservative

Every child of the 90s remembersCool Runnings, the 1993 sports comedy movie about an underdog team of Jamaican bobsledders who train to compete at the Winter Olympics. The movie, which was directed by Jon Turteltaub and starred Leon Robinson, Doug E. Doug, and John Candy, was loosely based on the real 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, which overcame enormous obstacles (like, yknow, the fact that there isnt exactly a whole lot of snow or ice on the tropical island of Jamaica) to compete at the Olympics.

Since 1988, Jamaica has returned to bobsled several times, and competed in both mens and womens events. But its been over 20 years since Jamaica competed in the four-man bobsled event. At the just-started 2022 Beijing Olympics, though, a new four-man Jamaican bobsled team is ready to compete. 2022 also marks the first time Jamaica has competed in three different bobsled events at a single Olympics:four-man bobsled, two-man and the new womens monobob event.

Olympics.comhas the full story, including an interview with team pilotShanwayne Stephens. (The other team members are Ashley Watson,Matthew Wekpe,Nimroy Turgott, andRolando Reid.) He says the crew is out to prove were more than just a movie, adding:

We want to show we're actually fierce competitors and we're out there to put on a really good performance at the Games ... we were completely locked down over COVID and we wanted to make sure that we were 100 percent prepared to be able to qualify. So we had to come up with creative ways of getting the training done. So myself and Nimroy, we were locked down in my house together, so we decided to go out and push my fiance's Mini up and down the street.

If you want to follow along with Stephens and the rest of the Jamaican bobsled teams journey in Beijing, Stephensfrequently updates his Instagram account.

The Jamaican Olympic team has an Instagram account full of pictures as well.

Heres Stephens and Turgott talking about the team onThe Today Show:

You can watch the Winter Olympics on NBC, USA Network,as well as streaming on Peacock.

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Jamaican Bobsled Team Returns to the Olympics - ScreenCrush

Home Motors Toyota Lunar Cruiser: Off-Roading on the Moon

Complete with living quarters, workstations, and cutting-edge scientific instruments, the Lunar Cruiser could be the key for lunar and ultimately, Martian colonization.

On Friday, Jan. 28, Toyota and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) greenlighted the Lunar Cruiser project. After years of research and testing, engineers have started developing the advanced Land Cruiser-inspired rover, which Toyota expects to launch at the end of this decade.

Successful deployment on Mars is the ultimate goal, company officials say.

The Lunar Cruiser, whose name borrows from Toyotas perennially popular SUV, should be a live-in laboratory on wheels. Van life meets Star Trek, really. According to project lead Takao Sato, the vehicle will provide a space where people can safely live, work, and communicate with others while on the moon. If all goes according to script, Toyota should get there by 2040.

The projects been in the works for a while now some digging around in the Toyota press room unearthed a March 2019 announcement of the automakers collaboration with JAXA.But that release merely announced the two organizations agreement to consider the possibility of collaborating on international space exploration.

The pair entered into a joint research agreement to work on a manned pressurized lunar rover in June 2019.

A press release from August 2020 stated that the research involved the use of simulations to confirm power and heat dissipation performance while driving, the manufacture and assessment of prototype tires, and the use of virtual reality and full-scale models to consider the layout of equipment in the cabin.

The same statement revealed that JAXA and Toyota met with officials from various industries to discuss the vehicles potential as a starting point for lunar colonization.

Toyota brought in Gitai Japan Inc. for help developing the Lunar Cruisers peripheral robotic arm, which will provide essential collection, inspection, and maintenance services. A grappling-like structure at the arms end will allow operators to alternate between a set of specialized tools.

Although additional specifics about the Cruisers architecture are still under wraps, Fridays announcement, revealed bythe AP, seems like a concrete declaration from JAXA and Toyota.

We see space as an area for our once-in-a-century transformation, Sato stated. By going to space, we may be able to develop telecommunications and other technology that will prove valuable to human life.

For updates, follow Toyota Motor Corp. and JAXAon Twitter.

No, we won't get the Land Cruiser 300 in North America, but we will get the 2023 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro. While the previous Sequoia didn't get us very excited, this one does! Read more

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Toyota Lunar Cruiser: Off-Roading on the Moon - GearJunkie

Release date: January 11

The Stolen may be forced to learn their captors' language, follow their beliefs, and work their labor, but they keep their own tongue, culture, and empathy alive. This is the story of a 19th century plantation, where we meet a cast of characters full of love, sorrow, anger, and hope. There's William, who falls for Margaret, which makes Cato remember his own love who was sold off without warning. And there's their eccentric and tyrannical owner, Cannonball Greene, who rules their lives with a cruel hand. When a mysterious preacher arrives spouting independence and freedom, the Stolen must decide: trust this stranger or stay with the devil they know?

Why you should read it:This slim novel packs a gut-wrenching punch, managing to display the effortless cruelty of life on a plantation with the gentle caress of each character's humanity.

Get it fromBookshopor from a bookstore near you via Indiebound.

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16 Historical Fiction Books Coming Out In 2022 That Are 100% Worth Picking Up - BuzzFeed

Imagine unexpectedly seeing something so luminous light up the vacuum of space that you couldnt possibly doubt it was there until it completely vanished.

While most of the planet was on lockdown at the height of the pandemic, radio astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker stumbled upon a cosmic flash that seemingly came out of nowhere. She and her colleagues remotely zapped speculation back and forth as they tried to figure out what the thing was. Supernova? Zombie star? Aliens? After supernovas and extraterrestrial superstructures were ruled out, they became suspicious of stars that had gone undead.

The monster was hiding in observations from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). Its radio antennas measure polarization, or the extent to which the vibrations of a wave, like radio waves, are going in one direction. After correcting for anything that was in the way, Hurley-Walker and her team, who recently published a study in Nature, found that the pulses were very polarized and linear no matter what angle they were viewed from and lasted up to a minute. But what could have been giving them off?

The MWA observed with a time resolution of 0.5 seconds, so that defines the smallest features we can see in the pulses, she told SYFY WIRE. "But since the pulses last for 30 to 60 seconds, that is quite a lot of resolution. They are sometimes smooth, and sometimes very spiky.

Zombies onscreen are pretty straightforward. Zombie stars, not so much. There are several forms that the cores of dead stars can take. Neutron stars and white dwarfs are cores that remain after the collapse of low-mass (white dwarfs) or high-mass (neutron stars) stars. Pulsars, which are all neutron stars (though the opposite is not always true) form when the cores of massive collapsed stars spin upward and superfast, which compresses their magnetic fields. These highly magnetized stars spew so much energy that they create radio emissions.

Hurley-Walker and her team are not ruling a white dwarf or pulsar out, but there is one type of stellar zombie they are especially focused on. Magnetars are neutron stars with the most powerful magnetic fields ever. These extreme objects behave like highly magnetized pulsars that vomit out gargantuan amounts of energy, including radio emissions, but wear themselves out in a few months. They end up too sluggish to produce radio waves anymore and become undetectable. This is why it is possible the source could be an ultra-long period magnetar.

Story continues

There's a mystery as to how our source could be so slow but also magnetic enough to produce radio emission, since neutron star magnetic fields should also decay, Hurley-Walker said. That's why theorists thought that ultra-long period magnetars would exist, but be invisible.

There is always a chance for false positives, which can be set off by everything from TV signals to satellites. That doesnt seem to be what is going on here. Because pulsars and magnetars burn their energy so fast, invisible ones should be scattered all over the Milky Way. This could be one of many dead things. Ultra-long period magnetars are theoretical objects that should rotate more slowly than most magnetars, which could explain the longer pulses, but are also invisible. What was completely unexpected was how bright this thing was if that is what it is.

I think that the evidence points toward an ultra-long period magnetar, in which case, the magnetic field only stayed twisted for some time, and after it relaxed, the radio emission ceased, said Hurley-Walker.

There is also a chance the disappearing flash could have come from a white dwarf pulsar, whose dark spots (sunspots) produced really curved magnetic fields that gave off radio emissions for a while. Whatever it is still has astronomers baffled. Its not aliens, but the truth is out there.

Resident Alien Season 2

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The mystery of the disappearing flash in space - Yahoo Entertainment

The occupation of Alcatraz, San Francisco, 1969. (Soloman Kargin / Getty Images)

Driving down international boulevard, East Oaklands main inner-city thoroughfare, its hard to miss the Intertribal Friendship House. With its mural-rimmed courtyard featuring larger-than-life portraits of Natives, both famous and unknown, the community center, which some call the urban rez, stands apart from its surroundings in Oaklands Little Saigon. And like pretty much everything involving Indigenous Americans, its been here a while. Books in Review

Founded in 1955, the Intertribal Friendship House is one of the oldest urban Indigenous community organizations in the United States. Youd think that in a city and region that gave birth to the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and the United Farmworkers, people would know about institutions like this. The Oakland-born Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange, after all, set a whole chapter of his novel There There, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, at an Indian center no doubt inspired by Intertribal. But I cant tell you how many Oaklanders Ive met who are shocked to learn that their city has one of the oldest and most significant urban Indian populations in the United States, that theres a whole Native community center just a few blocks from the citys downtown, and that the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz, which began in 1969more or less the Indigenous rights movements equivalent of the Montgomery bus boycottwas organized in Oakland and the Bay Area.

After visiting her childhood home in the East Bay, which she found so completely transformed that it was unrecognizable to her, Gertrude Stein famously wrote that there is no there there. That turn of phrase is so overused that its origin sometimes get lost. But what Stein was commenting on in 1933the transformation of ones home place until its goneis an apt description of how settler colonialism uprooted and remade Indigenous lands throughout North America and, in particular, California. Im not a California Indianthe imperfect term for Indigenous peoples from what is now called the Golden Statebut I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. I remember running around the Intertribal Friendship House with a bunch of other snot-nosed Native kids back when the nonprofit was borderline insolvent and the community garden was little more than a sandbox and jungle gym waiting to give you tetanus. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread. When we moved to Oakland, my dad, an artist, used to show his work at a friends contemporary Native art gallery in San Francisco. (It closed decades ago.) In the spring and summer, I spent most weekends at powwows: intertribal celebrations of song and dance, held across the state in high school gymnasiums and blingy Vegas-size casinos. In the fall, there were Big Times, California Indian ceremonies held in semi-subterranean roundhouses that went on all night, celebrating the harvest, the change of seasons, and the persistence of once-outlawed cultures on tiny reservations and rancherias, like that of our Miwok friends in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Tuolumne. In the winter, we would drive back up to Tuolumne and hit the slopes with those same Miwoks at a family ski hill in the Stanislaus National Forest, a low-budget altLake Tahoe called Dodge Ridge. A good fraction of the ski patrol and ski team there was Miwok.

The struggles that protected, threatened, and animated these enclaves were almost always apparent. At the Intertribal Friendship House, gray-haired elders swapped stories about the days of their radical youth spent fighting for our rights on Alcatraz Island. After drum and dance practice on Thursday nights, we would gather around the All Nations drum and sing the American Indian Movements song (Way-ha-way-hi-ya-ho-way-oh-way-ya-hey-oh). Homeless Natives, whom we all knew by name and by relation as aunties, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathersin an Indian way more often than a biological onewere always welcome, greeted with a handshake or a hug, a pot of coffee, a warm meal, and some walking-around money. At local powwows we started with gourd society protocols from Oklahoma, Aztec dances from south of the border, victory songs from when the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho kicked Custers ass at the Little Bighorn, and prayers in languages that the government and church tried to yank from our grandparents tongues. At Tuolomne, there were uncles haunted by nightmares of Vietnamese jungles and Gold Rush massacres who still carried on the old arts and ways. Long before the historians became revisionists and liberal politicians took an interest in social justice, we honored and carried forward what had come beforewhat California was designed to dislodge from our minds and the land. There may not have been a there there. But we were still here.

In recent years, Californians have begun to reexamine the history of the Golden State and, in particular, the plight of California Indians. In 2015, during his visit to the United States, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who hobbled into Alta California with an ulcerated leg and asthmatic lungs in 1769, founding nine missions between San Diego and San Francisco. Serras sainthood sparked controversy. Some California Indians descended from Indigenous peoples evangelized at Serras missions met with the pope and played roles in his canonization mass. Others effaced, decapitated, and toppled statues of the missionary who, in their eyes, engineered the enslavement, genocide, and assimilation of the states First Peoples. Amid the racial justice uprisings that swept the nation in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Serra statues fell in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Scholars and schools are shedding new light on some of the darkest and most easily forgotten parts of Californias colonial past. In 2016, Benjamin Madley, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, published An American Genocide, which showed that Californias treatment of Indigenous peoples in the first few decades of US rule constituted an attempted final solution to settler colonialisms pesky wild Indian problem. The book won multiple awards, pushing a long-simmering debate in California and American history toward a conclusion that had always been maintained by California Indians but was eschewed by the academy. In 2017, the California Department of Education removed from its curriculum the requirement for all fourth graders to build a model mission. (When they had me do mine, I made a not-so-subtle statement by building the crosses in the graveyard taller than the church.) In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an official apology to Native people for the states history of wrongdoing and established a Truth and Healing Council that aims to reconcile the state with its tribes. Its called a genocide, Newsom said at a ceremony to consecrate the council. Thats what it was: a genocide. No other way to describe it. And thats the way it needs to be described in the history books. Im sorry on behalf of the State of California. Im sorry that weve had generationsyour kids and grandkids, your ancestorsthat had to suffer through the indignities, lack of capacity and empathy and understanding, their lives lost, their lives diminished, and the incapacity of the rest of us to fully grasp the magnitude of what we in the state did to your ancestors. In some parts of California, local people, organizations, and governments have tried to make things right by returning land, with parts of Big Sur, Inyo County, and Eureka going back to the tribes from whom they were taken.

We Are the Land, a new history of California by Damon Akins and William Bauer Jr., aims to continue this project of decolonization, self-determination, and repair, chronicling the centuries-long efforts of Indigenous peoples to hold on to the places their Creators made and their forebears toiled and fought to protect against waves of Spanish, Russian, Mexican, and American colonization that crested in genocide. Across 10 chronological chapters, Akins and Bauer narrate the Indigenous history of the state through various contested spaces: sites of creation, shores and waterways where California Indians discovered European explorers, Catholic missions where they worked and were baptized, the extractive frontiers of competing imperial powers, the blood-drenched goldfields, the casinos that transformed some of these communities into power players in state politics, and the hardscrabble reservations, rancherias, allotments, ghettos, universities, and bars where California Indians and relocated American Indian activists forged the modern Native rights movement. Each chapter is separated by a short place study, interpreting locations like San Diego, Sacramento, Ukiah, the Ishi Wilderness, Los Angeles, the East Bay, as well as Yuma, Ariz., and Rome, Italy, through the histories of the Indigenous. But ultimately the stories Akins and Bauer gather in this survey are about the Natives themselves, offering a compassionate reading of a people who have, even in some of the best revisionist studies, remained the other on the periphery. The details and voices of California Indians lives that the authors amplify from oral histories, primary documents, and secondary sources draw out the drama and recast the history of the 31st state from the perspectives of its First Peoples. Current Issue

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In Akins and Bauers retelling, California was an abundant, diverse, and even magical place before it was invaded. There were hundreds of thousands of Natives, perhaps even more than a million, speaking more than 100 languages, making the region one of the most populous and diverse north of the Rio Grande. The stories Indigenous peoples told narrated the creation of their world and rooted them in their homelands. The Luiseo in what is now Southern California, for example, maintain that an ancestor named Nahachish roamed the land poor and hungry, bestowing names on the places he visited: Picha Awanga (whitish stomach) for the place where he was fed whitish mush, a reservation now known as Pechanga; Pala (water) for the canyon where he quenched his thirst, now a reservation known as Pala. The Maidu in the northeastern part of the state say that after raising the sun and the moon and naming the stars, Earth Maker created a tree on which 12 kinds of acorns grew. Many, like the Esselen on the central coast, told stories about the trickster Coyote, who gave the people nets, bows, and arrows and taught them how to live off the fat of the land and sea: the seaweed, abalone, mussels, rabbits, deer, elk, and, of course, acorns (there are 15 species that grow in the state, and the nut was a staple for many tribes). The Pohonichi Miwok and many others also honor Coyote, who in their narration stole fire from Turtle and gave it to humanity.

Many of these stories, bridging spiritual and physical worlds, were accompanied by song, dance, and ceremony. In what is now the southeastern part of the state, Chemehuevis walked the 1,000-mile-long Salt Song Trail, measuring its distance, recounting their history, and marking their ties to the Mojave Desert through rhythm and lyric. In the Siskiyou Mountains in the northwest, Yuroks, Karuks, and Tolowas danced as part of their various World Renewal ceremonies every year. And when they fought, they sang and told stories about that, too. The Kumeyaay, from the area that is now San Diego, sang bad songs about their enemies, naming their dead, mocking their looks, and generally talking shit about their hunting, gathering, and fishing game. (North Americas first rap beefs may have actually been West Coast.)

When Indigenous peoples discovered European sojourners like the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcn and the English pirate Sir Francis Drake on their shores in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, their encounters were often sporadic and awkward. In 1540, for example, Alarcn foolishly decided to ascend the Colorado River from its mouth in the Gulf of California. The Colorado, which rushed red with sediment, was almost impassable for his little worm-infested ships. As the Spanish fought the current upriver, they came upon Cocopah villages. Each meeting offered an opportunity for the Indigenous and the interlopers to apprehendand misapprehendeach other. At the first village, the Cocopah and the Spanish exchanged gifts. A Cocopah shapai axany (or leader) gave Alarcn a staff adorned with shells, which Alarcn reciprocated with beads and other things, according to his log. At the second encounter, Alarcn gave the Cocopah some trifles and fired off his harquebus, a primitive gun, startling his hosts and leading to his swift dismissal. Further upriver, Cocopahs prepared ceremonial arbors for Alarcns arrival, which the Spaniard misinterpreted as traps set for an ambush. While some of these greetings ended in misunderstanding, others included moments of genuine exchange. The Cocopah greeted Alarcn with blessings of cornmeal, cornbread, and corn cakessacred foods and giftsand he in turn gave them Christian crosses, some made from sticks and paper so that the Cocopah could wear them around their necks. At one village, Alarcn built a big crucifix from timber, which the local Cocopah planted at the center of their town. Alarcn continued as far upriver as the Cocopahs would guide him until his broken ships forced him to turn around. A few months later, Alarcns countryman Capt. Melchior Diaz marched into Cocopah lands with about 80 men, a herd of sheep, and an itchy trigger finger. When a dog chased after his herd, Diaz went after the animal on horseback with a lance. He chucked his weapon, missed the pooch, failed to rein in his horse, and wound up impaling himself in the groin, dying a few days later.

Although the Europeans first acts in the Indigenous world were often impotent, their return in the 18th century stirred up big trouble. Beginning with the establishment of Mission San Diego de Alcal in Kumeyaay territory in 1769, European settlementsand especially Spanish missionsdisrupted the balance of power between various tribes and empires as well as between the human and other-than-human world in California. This rupture began at the missions and rippled out across entire regions. In 1776, for example, Fathers Francisco Palou and Pedro Benito Cambn led a group of Indigenous peoples, a herd of cattle, and a train of mules onto the peninsula homelands of the Yelamu to build a chapel and shelter that became Mission San Francisco de Ass. Their presence, which offered new military allies and trading partners for the Yelamu, threatened more distant Ohlone speakers like the Esselen to the south. The Esselen promptly raided Yelamu villages, forcing the first San Franciscans to flee across the Golden Gate in tule rafts. Once established, missions became focal points of Spanish colonization and, in particular, the policy of reduccin, whereby Indigenous peoples were separated from their communities and families and coerced through what the historian James Sandos has described as spiritual debt peonage into various forms of dirty, hard, and unfree labor.

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Between 1769 and 1800, these missions played a leading role in cutting the Indigenous population on Californias coast in half. In 1806, for example, a measles outbreak infected some 800 Indigenous people in San Francisco, killing 337. With such high death rates at the missions, the Spanish raided inland Indigenous communities to sustain the workforce and population of their settlements. Missionaries in San Francisco, for example, looked across the Bay, attacking and kidnapping members of the Huchiun villages in what is now Berkeley, Oakland, and Pleasanton. While the missions were deadly, brutal, and authoritarian places, they also offered new forms of work and faith for the Natives. At Mission San Francisco, some women expressed interest in becoming monjas (nuns). And as in other Spanish Catholic colonial institutions, the missions did not wholly stamp out Indigenous practices. In 1816, the German Russian artist Louis Choris visited San Francisco and painted scenes of Ohlone peoplesome in Spanish dress, others in traditional regalia, and still others in a mix of the twoparticipating in Indigenous gambling games and dances in courtyards shaded by crosses and mission walls. Across the Golden Gate, the Indigenous combined Pomo, Miwok, and Catholic rituals near a shoreline shell mound that, in the 1880s, would be occupied by Chinese shrimp fishermen from Canton. (Its now a state park called China Camp.) What they could not procure from the missions via trade, Native populations sometimes took by force. South and east of what became China Camp, Miwoks and Yokuts raided Spanish settlements for horses and other livestock, which they used as mounts, food sources, and trade goods. As Spanish power waned and the Mexican period began in the early 1800s, Indigenous horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and fugitives took advantage of provincial, poorly funded, and weakly guarded settlements. Akins and Bauer share the tale of one Esselen outlaw, a man named Gonzalo, who ran away from Mission Soledad and was eventually captured and sentenced to die. Shackled and waiting for execution, he cut off his own heels without even a whimper and fled inland, where he joined a group of Indigenous insurgents led by the Coast Miwok warrior Lupugeyun. At the height of their spree, Lupugeyun, Gonzalo, and their crew could have given Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang a run for their money. They stuck up Bay Area missionaries and rancheros for five years until fate and the Mexican authorities caught up with them in 1824.

Americans typically date the beginning of their reign in California to January 24, 1848, when John Sutter struck gold on the American River. But this story of migration and sudden fortune, like so many other tales of the United States pioneering origins, directs attention away from the actions that actually yoked the Golden State to the Union, namely an expansionary war against Mexico and a genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Akins and Bauer put the Indigenous side of this history back at the center of these events. After his discovery, Sutter claimed to have legally leased several miles of goldfields from a group of Nisenan. As it turned out, the Nisenan with whom Sutter made a contract didnt actually live in the immediate area of the find, and in any event, the lease was illegal because according to the Supreme Courts 1823 ruling in Johnson v. MIntosh, only the federal governmentnot private citizenscould acquire land from Native Americans. Nonetheless, when miners first descended on Sutters find along the American River in 1848, about half were Indigenous. And many were women, who repurposed their traditional baskets to pan for gold. (The coil and weave of the fibers were apparently well suited for snagging gold flakes.) Others, like the Yokuts ruffian Jos Jess, abandoned lives as horse thieves for more lucrative extractive vocations.

Indigenous minersand especially the womenwere vulnerable to the violence, exploitation, outright enslavement, and bitter racism of the goldfields. In primary documents, Akins and Bauer come across American settlers bragging about the ways they took advantage of Indians: trading cheap goods like handkerchiefs for tin cups full of gold, exchanging various goods for gold of equal weight, using lead slugs called diggers ounces to cheat Native miners when they went to cash in on their work. (The term digger was a racial slur that referred to Indigenous root-digging practices and intentionally rhymed with another epithet.)

Dehumanization wrought mass violence almost immediately. In 1849, a group of prospectors from Oregon arrived at the site of Sutters gold strike and tried to rape some Nisenan women. After the Nisenan exacted retribution by murdering seven Oregonians, the miners went on a killing spree, slaughtering more than 100 Nisenans in around a month. Other California Indians soon began to fear the goldfields and fight back against their exploitation. When, in 1850, American ranchers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone threatened to ship a group of Eastern Pomo slaves off to Sutters Mill, the workers turned on and killed their captors. The US military responded swiftly. Brevet Maj. Gen. Persifor F. Smith ordered 75 soldiers to, in the words of Capt. John B. Frisbie, exterminate if possible the rebels. When, at a place now known as Bloody Island on Clear Lake, the Pomo leader Ge-Wi-Lih attempted to negotiate peace, the soldiers opened fire. The Pomos who survived the first hail of bullets jumped in the lake and attempted to swim to safety. Ashore, another group of soldiers shot everyone they could. In what remains the largest massacre in US history, the Army killed as many as 800 Indians.

California lawmakers soon formalized these acts of ethnic cleansing into what the historian Benjamin Madley has described as a killing machine. In 1850, the California Legislature passed the Indian Act, which effectively legalized Indigenous slavery by allowing settlers to take Indigenous vagrants, fugitives, and debtors captive. In the first decade of US rule, Californians subjugated as many as 20,000 Indians, including 4,000 children, as farm hands, domestic servants, and sex slaves. State-sponsored militias received more than $1 million from the state in the 1850s and 60s, and between 1846 and 1873, they murdered 9,492 to 16,094 Indigenous peoples, according to Madley. Elected officials praised these murders as a pedagogic killing that taught the Natives a lesson. In one such slaughter in 1853, between 450 and 500 Tolowas were murdered in cold blood in the middle of the night at a Smith River village called Yontocket, which means Center of the World in the Tolowa language. The Tolowa had gathered there to celebrate their biannual World Renewal ceremony. Two Tolowa men escaped by jumping into a slough and swimming to safety. The next day, I imagine, they would have seen or at least smelled the Americans burning the bodies of their kin. Between 1848 and 1860, the California Indian population collapsed, falling from an estimated 150,000 to just 30,000.

While the state of California set in motion policies to extirpate the Natives, the US Senate dispatched Oliver Wozencraft, George Barbour, and Redick McKee to negotiate treaties with tribes primarily residing along mining frontiers from northwestern California through the Cascades and Sierra Nevada. (Coastal tribes, whose territories were claimed via land grants from Spanish and Mexican rancherias, were largely ignored.) Negotiations loosely followed Indigenous protocols not unlike the Big Time celebrations still held by many California Indians today: Feasts were prepared, gifts exchanged, speeches made, songs and dances performed, and sovereign parties to the treaties were often addressed as though they were entering into kin-based relationships. When the political theater didnt meet cultural expectations, tribes sometimes called off the meetings. Upon learning that the Americans had brought jackets only for their chiefs and no clothes or blankets for anyone else, the Maidu picked up and left on the spot. With violent militias preying on Indigenous communities, many tribes and leaders were reluctant even to meet with the treaty party. Some, like the Miwok leader Cipriano, served as go-betweens, connecting skeptical and fearful Miwoks with US officials, translating between Miwok and English, and selecting safe meeting places where Miwok leaders faced minimal risk of ambush or capture.

Cipriano and other Miwok leaders met with federal representatives at Horrs Ferry on the Tuolumne River on February 14, 1851. After much persuasion and promises of reward, according to the source Akins and Bauer cite, Cipriano spent the better part of the next month persuading Miwok holdouts to meet with Wozencraft, Barbour, and McKee to negotiate a treaty. Indigenous figures like Cipriano played pivotal roles in the negotiation of 18 treaties that would have reserved 7.5 million acres of land for interior tribes. But in a secret session in 1852, the US Senate rejected the treaties, buried the documents in legislative archives, and prohibited their publication. In a new plan modeled on the mission system, the United States attempted to round up and confine all California Indians to just five reservations. During the Civil War, this number was cut to three. After the war, it became four.

As California Indians were displaced and dispossessed in the late 1800s and early 1900sthe decades roughly coinciding with Gertrude Steins lifesettlers and industrialists transformed their homelands. Dams erected in mountains and foothills altered the flow of rivers; irrigation networks drained deltas and wetlands. In 1858, armed citizens relocated Yokuts from Tulare Lake, the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes, on which the tribe had relied for water and food for more than 10,000 years. By the 1870s agriculture had turned the lake putrid and salty. It was gonewiped off the map entirely aside from a few small wetlands and occasional floodingby 1900. That year, the California Indian population would reach its nadir, numbering fewer than 16,000 in the US Census.

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In a political, cultural, and even environmental sense, California was perhaps the most hostile state in the union for Indigenous peoples. And yet at many turns in the 20th century, colonial systems unwittingly laid the groundwork for their own undoing. In the early years of the 1900s, Charles Kelsey, a San Jose attorney hired by the Northern California Indian Association, found references to the secret treaties signed by California Indians. During Theodore Roosevelts 1903 visit to San Jose, the NCIA presented the president with these documents and pressed him on the issue of California Indian land rights. Working with California Senator Thomas Bard, the NCIA and the Indian Rights Association found the treaties in the Senate archives and introduced a motion to print them. Kelsey was appointed to investigate. Across the state, Indians organized themselves. It took them more than two decades to get their day in court, but in 1928 Congress passed an act enabling the Indians of Californiaa new legal term defined as all Indigenous peoples residing in the state in 1852to sue the federal government for lost treaty lands.

In 1928, California Indians won their case. But the government did not give these lands back, nor did it significantly compensate tribes for their losses. After the deduction of offsets for government expenditures incurred in the provision of services for tribes, the total awarded in the case was just slightly more than $5 million. A new lawsuit that focused on dispossessed Indigenous lands not covered by the treaties was launched in 1946. California Indians eventually won that case as well, and in 1972 California Indians received a paltry $700 each for their losses.

By the time that case was settled, California Indians had new in-state Indigenous allies: Native Americans who had relocated from reservations across the country to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. In 1969, a diverse coalition of urban Indians, Native student activists, and Indians who came from outside the state occupied the former federal prison of Alcatraz Island, bringing national attention to Native treaty rights and pressuring the federal government to embrace a new era of Indian policy based on self-determination rather than termination. Since Ronald Reagan signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, California Indians have been among the biggest winners of this sea change. (Here, Akins and Bauer miss a notable irony: The Alcatraz occupation began, in part, because a developer wanted to build a casino on the island.) Today, the Pechanga Band of Luiseo Indians employ more than 50,000 people in Southern California. In 2006, each Pechanga citizen received $40,000 in gaming revenue every month. Some California Indiansa small minority of the states Indigenous population, to be sureare getting the better end of the bargain in this new gold rush.

Akins and Bauer end their survey in 2019, when the City of Eureka returned just over 200 acres on Indian Island to the Wiyot Tribe, the third in a series of repatriations that have brought 95 percent of the island back into tribal ownership, marking a remarkable turnaround for the Wiyot and the city. In 1860, settlers murdered hundreds of Wiyots, mostly women and children, with hatchets, axes, and clubs at Indian Island. After the massacre, Wiyots on the mainland came to the island to search for survivors. They found an old woman stuck in the mud singing her mourning song and an infant crying in his dead mothers arms. The baby, Jerry James, survived. His people were moved onto the Round Valley Reservation in Mendocino County. In 1961, the federal government terminated the legal existence of the tribe. The year after that, the last fluent Wiyot speaker, a woman named Della Prince, died. Even though their sovereign legal status and language were gone, the Wiyot were not. In 1970, Jerry Jamess grandson Albert James started pushing for the tribe to reclaim Indian Island. The movement resulted in the renaming of the island from Gunther Islanda name that honored the settler who claimed the place after the massacreto Indian Island. The effort helped the tribe regain federal recognition in a 1981 Supreme Court case. It also likely marked the first time in US history that a municipality returned land to a tribe without being prompted to do so by a lawsuit and was yet another example of the California Indian comeback, a resurgence that is, in turn, transforming the state.

We Are the Land ends on this more hopeful note, telling a story of colonization followed by one of decolonization: a history of the foisting of successive and often bloody regimes imposed over and against Indigenous resistance and then the long and ongoing efforts of Indigenous peoples to reclaim their lands from outsiders. But I wonder what gets lost by viewing the recent history of California Indians as a reoccupation and return, as Akins and Bauer describe itfor, as the authors themselves show, Natives never left, and their influences shaped and continue to shape the California that many of us love. You wouldnt have Hollywood without westerns, for example, and while you wouldnt have westerns without John Wayne, you also wouldnt have them without Natives on set. The Lakota leader and actor Luther Standing Bear had roles in over a dozen films, starting with Ramona in 1916. He founded the War Paint Club (later the Indian Actors Association), which pushed for more accurate portrayals of Native Americans. Around the time Standing Bear first appeared on-screen, the Indigenous sport of surfing, invented by Native Hawaiians, arrived on the sandy beaches of Southern California. And if youll indulge me: I even think Indians influenced Californias best NBA teamnot the Los Angeles Lakers but the Golden State Warriors, who play a fast-paced game reminiscent of rez ballthe run-and-gun style favored on Indian reservations. After all, the Warriors coach, Steve Kerr, is a student of Phil Jackson, who grew up in Montana and has spoken about the influence of the nearby Fort Peck Reservation.

Indian Californias most lasting legacies, however, are political, social, and environmental, found in traditions of place-based resistance and in the proud and enduring spirit of Indigenous empowerment. These currents have not only carried First Peoples through the genocidal abyss but also continue to shape Indigenous, anti-colonial, and progressive politics. Akins and Bauers research reinstates many forgotten moments to the rich historical record of this intergenerational struggle. They write of Ipai defending their fisheries and exacting tribute from Spanish sailors in San Diego Bay in the 1500s and 1600s; of the coordinated Chumash and Yokuts revolt in 1824, when the Natives burned Mission Santa Ins to the ground, forced the garrison at Mission La Purisima to surrender, and captured Mission Santa Barbara; of the cunning guerrilla war waged by Kientpoos and 150 Modoc against the US military in 1872 and 73; of the Luiseos and Cupeos, who went on strike at Pala in 1913 to regain control of their land; of the La Jolla and Rincon Indians, who sued the Southern Sierras Power Company for trespassing in 1925; of the basket maker Mabel McKay, the last Dreamer of the Pomo people, who, when asked in 1934 by a Sacramento Union journalist what Pomos do, responded wryly, Just live; of the Native activists at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley who joined with other students of color in the Third World Strikes in 1968, helping found the first ethnic studies departments in the country; of the Ohlone activist Corrina Gould and the land protectors who lit a sacred fire and camped out for months in 2011 until they won protection of a burial site called Sogorea Te; and of much else. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to know that this place is full of magic, Gould explained at a panel I organized at the San Francisco Library in 2019. Theres movements that have come out of the Bay Area, like the takeover of Alcatraz, the American Indian Movement, Indians of All Tribes, the Brown Berets, the Black Panthersall kinds of technology and ideas have come out of here.

In the broadest sense, Native California has played an outsize role in the ongoing fight for a more pluralistic and egalitarian society, a role it is already reprising in the era of climate change. As record-breaking wildfires continue to ravage California and the West, more and more policy makers are considering reinstating long-outlawed Indigenous land management practices like controlled burns. Whether Californians realize it or not, they will likely embrace more, not less, of the governance systems and lifeways of Indigenous peoples in the coming years as they adapt to a rapidly warming world.

Its our responsibility to take care of this place in such a way, Gould said back in 2019. But taking care of this place is not just for us to do. There are thousands of people that live in our lands now, and so now that you live in our lands, it is also your responsibility. Because this land also takes care of you. Those prayers that our ancestors put down for thousands of years also take care of you and your family.

Link:
The Past and Future of Native California - The Nation

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) The porn star who catapulted Michael Avenatti to fame four years ago will get a starring role in a New York courtroom when prosecutors try to prove the California lawyer cheated her of $300,000 in book proceeds.

Stormy Daniels Hosts A Party At The Abbey

Stormy Daniels is the key witness in Manhattan federal court at Avenatti's third criminal trial in two years. Opening statements are scheduled for Monday.

Attorney Representing Some Of R. Kelly's Accusers, Michael Avenatti Holds News Conference In Chicago

He was convicted in Manhattan in early 2020 of trying to extort Nike of up to $25 million by threatening to tarnish the sportswear giant's reputation unless it met his demands.

Attorney Michael Avenatti Appears In Court For Hearing In Case Accusing Him Of Stealing Funds From Stormy Daniels

Last year, a mistrial resulted in California on charges he cheated clients there.

These famous actors all began their on-screen careers with uncredited roles in movies and TV.

Actors Who Won Oscars For Their First Movie Roles

These are the battlefields that defined the United States militarys journey from upstart Colonial rebels to an invincible global war machine.

If you bleed Orange, did you know these 11 famous people also bleed orange? The list is pretty incredible actually.

Below on our list you'll be able to see many of the famous names who attended and graduated Syracuse University. Granted, our list is only 11 names. You can find hundreds of names all over the internet. Here's 11 just to get an idea of some of the most notable.

Let's see what the Catskill Game Farm looks like in 2022.

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Once Allies, Stormy Daniels and Avenatti Face Off at Trial - WIBX AM 950

The magnetic field of the Moon is very weak in comparison to that of the Earth; the major difference is the Moon does not have a dipolar magnetic field currently (as would be generated by a geodynamo in its core), so that the magnetization present is varied (see picture) and its origin is almost entirely crustal in location; so it's difficult to compare as a percentage to Earth. But, one experiment discovered that lunar rocks formed 1 - 2.5 billion years ago were created in a field of about 5 microtesla, compared to present day Earth's 50 T.[1] During the Apollo program several magnetic field strength readings were taken with readings ranging from a low of 6 (6nT) at the Apollo 15 site to a maximum of 313 (0.31T) at the Apollo 16 site,[2] note these readings were recorded in gammas() a now outdated unit of magnetic flux density equivalent to 1nT.

One hypothesis holds that the crustal magnetizations were acquired early in lunar history when a geodynamo was still operating. An analysis of magnetized moon rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts showed that the Moon must have had a strong (above 110 T)[3] magnetic field at least 4.25 billion years ago, which then fell to 20 T level in the 3.6 - 3.1 billion years BP period.[4] The small size of the lunar core, however, is a potential obstacle to promoting that hypothesis to the status of theory. However, single silicate grains with magnetic inclusions from Apollo rocks formed at 3.9, 3.6, 3.3, and 3.2 billion years ago have been shown to be capable of recording strong magnetic fields but do not.[5] This supports the alternative hypothesis that the Moon never had a long-lasting core dynamo, consistent with the lack of energy needed to sustain a field.[6]

It is possible that on an airless body such as the Moon, transient magnetic fields could be generated during large impact events. In particular, study of Apollo impact glass associated with a young, 2 million-year-old crater has yielded a strong magnetization comparable in strength to Earth's magnetic field[5]. This magnetization could not have originated in the lunar core, but is instead consistent with predictions from fields associated with impact plasmas[5].[7] These observations have led to the hypothesis that prior reports of high paleofield strengths from Apollo samples record impacts, not a core dynamo[5,6]. Importantly, the lack of a long-lasting lunar dynamo and paleomagnetosphere should have allowed 3He, water, and other volatile resources acquired from solar winds and Earths magnetosphere over some 4 billion years to accumulate in lunar soils [5,6].

It has also been noted that the largest crustal magnetizations appear to be located near the antipodes of the giant impact basins. It has been proposed that such a phenomenon could result from the free expansion of an impact-generated plasma cloud around the Moon in the presence of an ambient magnetic field.[8] For example, the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft mapped a "mini-magnetosphere" at the Crisium antipode on the Moon's far side, using its Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument. The mini-magnetosphere is 360km across at the surface and is surrounded by a 300-km-thick region of enhanced plasma flux that results from the solar wind flowing around the mini-magnetosphere.[9]

There is growing evidence that fine particles of moondust might actually float, ejected from the lunar surface by electrostatic repulsion. This could create a temporary nighttime "atmosphere" of dust. The moondust atmosphere might also gather itself into a sort of diaphanous wind. Drawn by differences in global charge accumulation, floating dust would naturally fly from the strongly negative nightside to the weakly negative dayside. This "dust storm" effect would be strongest at the Moon's terminator. Much of these details are still speculative, but the Lunar Prospector spacecraft detected changes in the lunar nightside voltage during magnetotail crossings, jumping from -200 V to -1000 V. Further characterization was done by the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer orbiter in late 2013.[10][11]

The plasma sheet is a very dynamic structure, in a constant state of motion, so as the Moon orbits through the magnetotail the plasma sheet can sweep across it many times with encounters lasting anywhere from minutes to hours or even days.[12]

In the Space Odyssey series by Arthur C. Clarke, a monolith is found on the Moon near the crater Tycho by its unnaturally powerful magnetic field and named Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 (TMA-1).[13]

View original post here:
Magnetic field of the Moon - Wikipedia

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Alan Marshall, Lecturer in Environmental Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Mahidol University

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon Inc and the richest man on Earth, has just launched the third mission of his space tourism business,NS-19. His space company, Blue Origin, sent four more multimillionaire customers into space along with two "space celebrity" guests: Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut, plus Michael Strahan, an American Football Hall-of-Famer turned TV presenter.

Space tourism is just the beginning of Bezoss grand projectto colonize the entire solar system. Such space colonization, he suggests, will fuel global prosperity by opening upboundless resources including crucial metals and massive amounts of solar and nuclear energy. All of which can make useful products for people back on Earth.

Such grand ideas of extraterrestrial colonization are hardly new. Not long after Indonesia gained independence in the 1940s, the nascent Space Age set in motion calls for anew wave of colonization directed outwards into space.

In photos: Blue Origin's 1st New Shepard passenger launch with Jeff Bezos

Although the symbolism of space colonization is rather distasteful to those peoples who suffered at the hands of past colonialism, at least the extraterrestrial solar system is not occupied by indigenous people who might have their territories invaded and conquered. However, like colonialism of old, Bezoss space colonization plans heavily depend on resource extraction and unfair and abusive labor practices, as we shall see below.

Presently, resource extraction beyond Earth is likely illegal.The Outer Space Treaty, signed by Indonesia on the day it was first presented in the United Nations Assembly in January 1967, states the bodies of the solar system are the "Common Heritage of Mankind." In other words, humanity as a whole owns the solar system in a shared fashion. It cannot be claimed by one person, or one country, or one company.

Therefore, Jeff Bezos should ask the rest of us for permission to set up extractive industries beyond the Earth.

After NASA had planted the U.S. flag on the moon and sent robotic probes to other planets, space entrepreneurs started seeing a problem with the Common Heritage of Mankind idea. "How can we make a profit from space," they thought, "if we have to just 'share' space resources with the whole of mankind?"

They then promoted a twisted interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty, which asserted that any resources extracted from extraterrestrial objects become the property of the extractor. Under such an interpretation, Bezos can claim any extraterrestrial material he might load onto his spaceship.

This situation would echo historical colonial endeavors on Earth where corporations like theDutch East India Companywere granted licenses to extract and sell resources that did not really belong to them.

In the late 1970s, the prospect ofspace imperialismprompted some ex-colonial states in the developing world, like the Philippines and Pakistan, to draft a better treaty that would more clearly denote that the extraterrestrial solar system belongs to all the world.

This new Moon Treaty also declared that space resources could only be used with global consent and should be fairly shared somehow. The trouble is, though, space-capable nations, like the U.S. and Russia, refused to sign up to this treaty when it was first presented to the United Nations in 1979. And space industrialists like Bezos lobby against it.

This lobbying seems to have worked. US President Donald Trump issued anexecutive order in 2020condemning the "Common Heritage of Mankind" principle in the Moon Treaty.

The Moon Treaty is an excellent pathway for all humanity to have a vested interest in the solar system. For millennia, all cultures worldwide gazed upon the moon and planets in the sky as constant cosmic fixtures, imbibing them into their folklore and spirituality and making them part of their arts and sciences. The moon and the planets belong to all of us. The Moon Treaty enshrines this in law and makes all humans stakeholders in the future of the solar system.

If Bezos colonizes the solar system, though, he will keep it for himself. I say this because his record of sharing stuff on Earth is woeful.

Despite being the richest man on Earth, Bezos ranks as one of the mostmiserly philanthropistsalive today. He is only happy to give stuff away (like Strahan's seat on the NS-19 flight) if it helps him promote his agenda.

Bezos also assiduouslyavoids paying taxesin America and around the world. As well,he exploitshis global Amazon workforce with low-paid, insecure and dangerous jobs. Each worker competes with one another in Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest fashion to fulfil unrealistic production targets.

During the NS-19 space mission, many dozens of Amazon workers lay trapped and fighting for their lives under acollapsed Amazon factory. Bezos, in the meantime, wascelebrating the missionwith his space passengers.

It seems as though Bezos can afford to fund his space business because he pays so few taxes and cares so little for his employees. If Bezos does colonize space, it will likely be achieved in the same fashion; by exploiting space workers and without sharing the benefits of space extraction by paying taxes at a fair rate.

Bezoss first joyride into space, in July 2021, so enraged many progressive leaders around the world they called for new "space taxes" so some public good might come from space tourism.

Space exploration fans should also encourage Bezos to pay his fair share of taxes in nations across the world so democratically elected representatives can discuss and decide how to invest in more inclusive non-colonialist forms of space development.

Given his space colonization plans, I would like to go further and encourage governments around the world to sign up to the Moon Treaty, so colonialism is not repeated on a solar system scale in the future.

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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The solar system belongs to us all, not just Jeff Bezos - Space.com

The hope of the new year is the same hope of any science fiction or fantasy novel please, mighty powers above, get us through this catastrophe in one piece. With the start of New Normal Year 3, many of us are looking for an unwritten road map.

Luckily, few heroes conquer evil alone, so its totally okay to look to others for inspiration. And yes, Im talking about books.

2022 promises us pandemic delivery drivers protecting monsters, magical thieves trying to make good while bartending, and powerful women bargaining with ancient magical beings on their own terms. Whether youre returning to the fantastical worlds you love through highly anticipated sequels (and endings) or discovering something brand new with a fresh take, here are 26 fantasy and science fiction books to watch for in 2022, so far.

Jan. 4, 2022

The Fallen Star, part of Lucasfilms High Republic initiative, arrives as a follow-up to 2021s Star Wars: Light of the Jedi and The Rising Storm. The book is the beginning of the end for Phase 1 of the new batch of storytelling, wrapping up the saga of Jedi and the evil Nihil before the series jumps backward in time. In this title, the High Republic continues to defend against the Nihil marauders and their leader, Marchion Ro. In the threequel, Ros planning a bold attack, making use of a terrifying weapon that can wrestle the Force from Jedi.

Jan. 11, 2022

The 16th novel in the magical alternate history Elemental Masters series follows Annie Oakley, sharpshooter and performer, as she tours through Germany with Buffalo Bills Wild West Show. When Bill hires a local sharpshooter as a part of the act, Annie learns that she isnt just a crack shot shes a magician. She, her husband Frank, and the German sharpshooter Giselle, team up together to hunt the monsters that follow the show, threatening performers and locals alike. Annies got her gun, and its filled with silver bullets.

Jan. 18, 2022

Return to Okorafors award-winning fantasy world in this follow-up to Akata Witch and Akata Warrior. Sunny Nwazue continues to strike a balance in her life, whether thats between America and Nigeria or her life as a Leopard Person and a good daughter. Now, armed with all shes learned so far, Sunny must go on a dangerous mission to find a hidden object one that will change her forever.

Jan. 18, 2022

In 2030, a grieving archeologist discovers the remains of a girl killed by an ancient virus. As the permafrost lessens, the Arctic Plague is unleashed, forcing humanity to reshape everything about their lives. How High We Go in the Dark spans centuries and planets to tell the story of human resiliency through the eyes of a cynical theme park worker who falls in love, a heartbroken scientist who teaches a pig to talk, and a widowed painter who seeks a new home in space with her granddaughter.

Jan. 25, 2022

Goliath is set in 2050 Earth, where the privileged have fled to colonies, cannibalizing the remaining neighborhoods brick-by-brick to build reminders of their old homes in space. Those left behind have to navigate collapsing infrastructure, barely surviving. Featuring a space dweller looking to settle in New Haven, a group of laborers attempting to save Earths cities, and a marshall trying to solve a kidnapping, Tochi Onyebuchi weaves together multiple disparate narratives within this very real fictional world.

Feb. 15, 2022

Described as an African Game of Thrones, Marlon James first Dark Star book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, told the story of Sogolon the Moon Witch and Tracker as they battled to find a missing boy across a mythical landscape. Now, the highly anticipated sequel presents Sogolons version of events how she triumphed and failed in her search for the boy, how she challenged Aesi, the powerful chancellor to the king, leading to a century-long feud. More than just a retelling with a new lens, Moon Witch, Spider King is an indomitable woman fighting to tell her own story.

Feb. 15, 2022

From the co-author of The Expanse comes a brand new epic fantasy trilogy set in the ancient, bloody city of Kithamar. When Alys, a thief from the slums of Longhill, sets out to find her brothers killer, she uncovers an intrigue as deep as the roots of Kithamar itself one that just may change everything.

Feb. 15, 2022

The companion novel to Akwaeke Emezis young adult novel Pet introduces us to Bitter, a young painter attending the haven-like Eucalyptus school. Outside the school walls, the city of Lucille is filled with protests against deep-set injustices. Tempted to stay out of the fray, Bitter finds herself pulled in multiple directions by friends who want more for their world, a new romance, and her art.

March 1, 2022

When Olivia Prior receives a mysterious invite to her late parents manor, Gallant, she finds the first place in her life that feels like home. Unfortunately, it is a home that is trying to drive her out her cousin is hostile and there are ghouls in the halls. After stumbling through a seam in a shadow that leads her to a place where the ghouls are fully-formed and a dark presence reigns, Olivia must decide if she will protect her world from the Master of the House or join him.

March 15, 2022

For the first time, The Expanses numerous novellas each of which tells a focused story set in the world of the towering space opera will be collected into a single volume. Memorys Legion will include: Drive, The Butcher of Anderson Station, The Churn, Gods of Risk, The Vital Abyss, Strange Dogs, Auberon, and a new release, Memorys Legion.

March 15, 2022

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Interdependency trilogy comes a brand new standalone novel. Jamie Gray is a delivery driver in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when a chance delivery connects him to an old acquaintance with a wild job protecting monster dinosaurs called Kaiju in an alternate dimension. But Jamie and his new team at the Kaiju Preservation Society arent the only ones who can enter the Kaijus territory, and careless opposing forces may cause millions back on Jamies Earth to die.

April 5, 2022

The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel is back with another human-centered science fiction novel this time telling the story of a plague, interwoven through the lives of several characters, set across time and space. 18-year-old Edwin St. Andrew is an exile, traveling the Atlantic on a steamship. Olive Llewllyn is traveling through Earth on a book tour, though she is from the second moon colony, to promote her best-selling pandemic novel. And a detective in Night City, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, is investigating the North American wilderness, where he finds mysteries that might upend their entire way of life.

April 19, 2022

In the sequel to 2020s epic fantasy Black Sun, Roanhorse takes readers back to the shattered city of Tova where strange alliances form under the threat of gathering enemies. Sea captain Xiala finds herself allied with the Prince of Knives while the now living avatars Serapio and Naranpa struggle for free will within their new identities. A new order is rising and all must learn to navigate a world with living legends.

April 19, 2022

Janelle Mone is already a multi-hyphenate. In 2018, the Grammy Award nominated artist released her excellent album Dirty Computer, which was accompanied by a science fiction visual album, which she called an emotion picture. The Memory Librarian is a collection of short speculative fiction, from Black women and Black non-binary writers.

April 26, 2022

If you would rather watch a princess kill a prince than marry one, T. Kingfishers latest is for you. In order to save her sister from the abusive prince shes been married off to, Marra must complete three seemingly impossible tasks. But of course, building a dog of bones and sewing a cloak of nettles is only the beginning. With a cast of strange companions she meets along the way a reluctant fairy godmother, a grave witch, and her familiar, a disgraced knight Marra must find the courage to overthrow the crown and save her sister.

May 3, 2022

Having enthralled young adult readers for decades, Holly Black makes the much anticipated leap to adult dark fantasy with Book of Night. Follow Charlie Halls straight path through the crooked magical underbelly of the Berkshires while she tries to make up for past mistakes. Formerly a magical thief and lock-pick, Charlie is a dive bartender hoping to keep herself and her sister Posey out of trouble. But Poseys boyfriend is keeping secrets and when Charlies past catches up with her, shes thrown back into the chaotic and dangerous world she tried to leave behind.

May 3, 2022

Jump back into Tchaikovskys space opera with Eyes of the Void, the follow up to last years Shards of Earth. The planet-killing Architects have returned threatening life across the galaxy, and throwing human colonies into disarray. Only the Intermediaries, who can communicate with the Architects and who helped avoid catastrophe 80 years ago stand between humanity and complete annihilation. Idris, an Intermediary who attempted to start a new life, may hold the key to saving humanity. But it will come at the cost of plunging into unspace: the terrifying, chilling frontier that has broken other minds.

May 10, 2022

Luli Wei is desperate to be a star, but not so desperate shell play a maid. Trying to make it in pre-Code Hollywood, Luli knows how cutthroat the industry is to people who look like her. So when she discovers that Hollywood is run on a system of ancient magic and blood bargains, shell do whatever it takes for the steep price of fame. Written by Nghi Vo, author of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Siren Queen is a fantastical exploration of an outsider finding success on her own terms.

June 7, 2022

Joey and Rudra are two very different people. She is the Reality Controller for South Asias fastest rising celebrity who also happens to be her ex. He is a wealthy recluse estranged from his family, seeking refuge in video games and his immigrant neighbors lives. As each continues to make the best decision they can in a world of lesser evils, they quickly become enmeshed in multiple conspiracies. Resistance, for these two contrasting heroes, will look vastly different to each. The City Inside is a near-future epic set in Delhi that offers hope in the face of mounting anxieties about the government, the environment, and our world at large.

June 21, 2022

The final installment in the epic silkpunk fantasy series by Ken Liu has arrived. Beginning immediately after the events of The Veiled Throne, readers land back in the middle of two wars, following familiar characters as they enter their final act.

Princess Thra wrestles with her ancestral dream as she runs across the continent from Lyucu pursuers, asking herself how to conquer the unconquerable. In the city of Dara, Empress Jia, Prince Phyro, and Pkyu Tanvanaki must navigate changing visions of the future while struggling against the genocidal Lyucu. On both sides of the Wall of Storms, mortals hearts will determine the fate of two empires on the brink.

July 12, 2022

Readers return to Panga with Sibling Dex and Mosscap as they explore the villages and cities of the moon they call home in the follow up to Becky Chambers solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built. The monk and the robot continue their quest for answers, learning more about one anothers cultures, while making new friends and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. This meditative series continues Chambers reputation for writing contemplative but hopeful books.

July 12, 2022

The sequel to AC Wises adult, feminist retelling of Peter Pan, Hooked follows Captain James Hook, the immortal pirate, 22 years after his escape from Neverland. James discovers that Peter Pans monster has found him again, this time in London, but a chance encounter with Wendy Darling gives James the help he needs to vanquish Pans monster even if he must return to playing the villain for a final time.

Aug. 16, 2022

Tasha Suri brings readers a new entry in the Burning Kingdoms trilogy with The Oleander Sword. Malini is the rightful empress of Parijatdvipa, but even with a prophecy and an army by her side, deposing her brother will not be easy. Priya, thrice born priestess, Elder of Ahiranya, wants to see Parijatdvipa rid of its poisonous rule and the plague eating away at all living things across the country. Both Malini and Priya chose divergent paths, and although their intertwined souls will bring them back together to save their kingdom, the cost will be great.

Aug. 23, 2022

In the mid-1800s, Babel is the worlds center for translation and magic, including silver working, where lost translations are given meaning via enchanted silver bars. Hosting this center has made the British empire unparalleled in their quest for continued colonization. When Robin Smith, a Chinese orphan raised in Britain, joins Babel as a translator, he wrestles with serving the organization and betraying his motherland. He is caught between Babel and the Hermes Society, an organization aiming to stop imperial expansion. Soon, Robin will have to decide which side he will take.

September 13, 2022

Muir is back with another installment of her sharp-witted, queer, gothic, space-set necromancer series. Theres nothing else like it and nothing quite as acidic and propulsive. In Nona the Ninth, Nona just wants to live a normal life but the last Cohort facility is hemmed in by Blood of Eden forces, and Nona might have to be the weapon that saves them from the Nine Houses.

Sept. 27, 2022

The conclusion to Noviks Scholomance trilogy takes El out of the deadly magic schools halls, and into the wider world. But the celebration is short lived though she, and her friends, saved most of the schools students during their mad dash to escape the maw-mouths, she must return to save the one who remains locked in. Noviks version of magical education is deadly, thrilling, and violent and this final book will bring it all to a close.

Correction: This story previously stated the new Star Wars: The High Republic book was The Rising Storm. The list has been updated with the correct info.

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The big new science fiction and fantasy books coming out in 2022 - Polygon