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Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Tools for Mars are being developed in preparation for colonization – Big Think

Posted: September 18, 2020 at 1:04 am

Although many places in the world are currently preoccupied by the COVID19 pandemic, most infectious disease experts believe that a pandemic is unlikely to end the human race. The Black Death of the 14th century was probably the worst case in history. It eliminated onethird of Europe's population, which ironically, lead to higher wagesdue to a lack of workers, a distrust of authorities who could not protect the people against the disease, and a reinvestment in humanity, all of which lead to the Renaissance.

If anything is to end the human race, it'll be climate change. The iconic Doomsday Clock was moved ahead from two minutes to 100 seconds to midnight, in January of this year. The clock has been moved ahead each year for the last four years. What's more, this is the closest it's ever been to midnight since its inception in 1947.

We've got about a decade to turn things around before the damage becomes irreversible. The situation is so disheartening, that at least one group of scientists speculates the reason we don't see a universe replete with alien civilizations is that it's hard for species to survive the climate change advances in technology inevitably cause.

Will data do us in?

If we do get lucky enough to survive and steer clear of any other likely, apocalyptic scenario, say a thermonuclear war, the eruption of a supervolcano or an enormous asteroid slamming into the Earth, we'll have about five billion years until the sun runs out of fuel. But between now and the death of our sun, there's another issue scientists weren't even aware of, until now. Information itself could thwart humankind. It isn't data per se but storing it. As societies increasingly rely on digital information and there's more and more of it, we'll one day reach a point where the number of bits being stored will outnumber the atoms that make up our planet. That's according to theoretical physicist and Senior Lecturer Melvin Vopson at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. A peerreviewed paper on his theory, called "The Information Catastrophe," was recently published in the journal AIP Advances.

"Currently, we produce 1021 digital bits of information annually on Earth," Vopson begins. This is based on an IBM estimate that humans produce 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes daily. With an assumed 20 percent growth rate, the number of bits we produce will outnumber the entirety of atoms on the planet in around 350 years. In a press release, Vopson said, "We are literally changing the planet bit by bit, and it is an invisible crisis."

There are a lot of variables to consider. For instance, the number of bits produced each year, data storage capacity, energy production and the size of the bit compared to the atom (mass distribution). There are humancentered factors too, such as population growth and the rate of access to information technology in developing countries. "If we assume a more realistic growth rates of 5%, 20%, and 50%," the paper states, "the total number of bits created will equal the total number of atoms on Earth after 1,200 years, 340 years, and 150 years, respectively."

It could be worse than predicted

In the most severe case, the 150year scenario, it would take approximately 130 years until all the power generated on Earth is sucked up by digital data creation and storage. In this version, by 2245, digital information's mass would equal half that of the Earth's. IBM states that 90 percent of the digital information we have today was only produced in the last ten years. "The growth of digital information seems truly unstoppable," Vopson said.

What's more, he believes his rates are conservative. He told me via email: "If we look only at the magnetic data storage density, it doubled every year for over 50 years." Not only might the generation of data increase at a faster clip, the estimate uses the thermodynamic energy limit for bit creation. This is the ideal case, the maximum possible efficiency, which we are miles away from, meaning the issue may arrive far sooner.

Dr. Vopson did offer one solution, using "nonmaterial media" to store information. He does not hold out hope for this, however. "I am more optimistic about the energy aspects as we will most likely master better ways of extracting energy from fusion (and) solar PVs to close to 100% efficiency." Quantum computing wouldn't be the answer, as quantum bits or qbits (bits in quantum superposition states) don't store data. Instead, storage happens using digital bits and classical computing.

Besides this theory, Vopson is the progenitor of the massenergyinformation equivalence, which states that information is an essential building block of the universe and it has mass. In this theory mass, energy, and information are all interconnected. Dark matter doesn't exist. Instead, the "missing" matter in the universe is the mass information itself contains.

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Tools for Mars are being developed in preparation for colonization - Big Think

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NASA confirms the Suns new solar cycle; Moon and Mars missions will have to adapt – Teslarati

Posted: at 1:04 am

NASA just announced that our Sun began a new solar cycle this year its 25th to be exact after reaching a solar minimum in December 2019. Solar weather activity is now expected to increase for the next five years until reaching a maximum in July 2025. With several space missions planned during that time frame for both the Moon and Mars, the Artemis program, in particular, involving astronauts on board, extra preparation and consideration will have to be made to weigh the impact of the increasing radiation events.

Space weather predictions arecritical for supporting Artemis program spacecraft and astronauts, NASAs announcement detailed. Surveying this space environment is the first step to understanding and mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.

Solar activity is tracked by agencies around the world by counting the number of sunspots (black spots) that appear on the Sun. Each one is an indicator of some type of high-energy activity such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections, and their appearance means a large amount of Sun material has been ejected into space. This material can cause disruptions on Earth, in orbit, or on anything in the deep space region nearby our star. Satellites in particular have to cope with solar interruptions frequently, although algorithms and engineering tend to mitigate much notice from a consumer standpoint.

While the Artemis mission will certainly have to take on the new challenge of a Sun thats becoming more and more active as time goes on, solar cycles arent something new to NASAs human spaceflight program.

As we emerge from solar minimum and approach Cycle 25s maximum, it is important to remember solar activity never stops; it changes form as the pendulum swings, explained Lika Guhathakurta, solar scientist at the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the solar cycle announcement. There is no bad weather, just bad preparation Space weather is what it is our job is to prepare, added Jake Bleacher, chief scientist for NASAs Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at the agencys Headquarters.

When astronauts are orbiting the Earth, our planets magnetic field protects them from being directly hit by the majority of solar ejections; however, once outside that protective bubble and on their way to another deep space or lunar destination, things can be very dangerous. Radiation issues are often discussed when it comes to human space exploration, but scientists dont seem to be short of ideas on how to handle it.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, for example, has proposed passengers en route to Mars using water as shielding. During a solar flare event, all on board would move to a part of the Starship where the liquid was being stored and essentially use it like a basement during bad weather. Given that SpaceX plans to deal with radiation in the longer term via Mars colonization, there may be plenty of other developments coming from the rocket launch (and landing) company in the near future.

Aside from the scientists watching and studying the Suns solar activity, the European Space Agency currently has a space probe in orbit around our star. The spacecraft has been sending back the closest pictures of the Sun weve ever seen, and a few new features have been observed such as campfires. The probes overall mission involves studying and understanding the Suns solar cycles and hopefully make space weather prediction akin to the kind of meteorology we have on Earth.

Just because its a below-average solar cycle, doesnt mean there is no risk of extreme space weather, Doug Biesecker, panel co-chair and solar physicist at NOAAs Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado, commented. The Suns impact on our daily lives is real and is there. SWPC is staffed 24/7, 365 days a year because the Sun is always capable of giving us something to forecast.

NASA held a live-streamed conference discussing the solar cycle announcement which you can watch below:

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Life on Venus? Carl Sagan predicted it in 1967. He may be right. – Mashable

Posted: at 1:04 am

Millions of space nerds reacted with joy Monday to a study showing the atmosphere of Venus contains phosphine, a chemical byproduct of biological life. But none would have been more thrilled or less surprised by the discovery than the late, great Carl Sagan who said this day might come more than 50 years ago.

Now best remembered as the presenter of the most-viewed-ever PBS series Cosmos, the author of the book behind the movie Contact, and the guy who put gold disks of Earth music on NASA's Voyager missions, Sagan actually got his start studying our closest two planets. He became an astronomer after being inspired as a kid by Edgar Rice Burroughs' space fantasies, set on Mars and Venus.

But as Cosmos fans know, Sagan's starry-eyed sci-fi hopes never beat his hard-edged science. He shot down one early "proof" of life on Mars. He predicted the surface of Venus would be insanely hot even before NASA's first Venus probe in 1962, which he worked on, confirmed it. And he was the first scientist to see Venus' hellscape as the result of a runaway greenhouse effect one he knew could point the way to Earth's climate-changed future.

So it was all the more surprising when Sagan co-authored a paper proposing we might still one day find microbial life above our sister planet. "If small amounts of minerals are stirred up to the clouds from the surface, it is by no means difficult to imagine an indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus," he wrote in Nature in 1967 two years before NASA landed on the moon. "While the surface conditions of Venus make the hypothesis of life there implausible, the clouds of Venus are a different story altogether."

As Sagan pointed out, a high carbon-dioxide atmosphere was no obstacle. Up at the 50km (31-mile) layer, at the top of Venus' clouds, conditions are actually hospitable and almost Earth-like. Organisms could thrive in the upper reaches the same way bacteria thrives around superheated, CO2-rich vents at Yellowstone. Add sunlight and water vapor to CO2, he said, and you have the recipe for that building block of life, photosynthesis.

"Sagan's work on Venus was formative, though few today remember his impact," says Darby Dyar, the chair of NASAs Venus Exploration Advisory Group. "His idea was prescient, and still makes sense today: between the hellish surface conditions on present-day Venus and the near-vacuum of outer space must be a temperate region where life could live on."

Just 11 years after Sagan made his prediction, another Venus probe discovered methane in the atmosphere which could be considered a predictor of the presence of organic material. Scientists like Sagan were cautious about the discovery; no one could prove methane meant life beyond a reasonable doubt. (We also found it on Mars in 2018, and have yet to explain that). Still, no one ever gave a reasonable alternative for why the methane might be hanging around on Venus.

Sagan died in 1996, in the midst of a criminally long dry spell for NASA Venus exploration. But his idea lived on. In 2013, we discovered vast amounts of microbes alive in the clouds above Earth. More than 300 varieties, to the surprise of the scientists collecting them microbes are actually less dense at lower altitudes. In 2016, NASA models showed that Venus once had oceans, for at least 2 billion years. That backed up a theory by planetary expert David Grinspoon, who suggests microbial life migrated to the clouds when conditions got too tough for life on the surface a billion years ago.

Call them the original climate refugees.

The science didn't stop, even when we only used Earth-based telescopes to do it. We've found evidence for active volcanos on the surface, which would "stir up minerals" into the atmosphere just like Sagan suggested. In 2018, another study of the Venus atmosphere turned up mysterious "dark patches" that scientists speculated could be evidence of microbial life vast quantities of it. How much? We'd need more study to find out. "I came to that paper out of frustration," co-author Sanjay Limaye told me last year. "We haven't been looking for organisms [on Venus]. Why not?"

Why not indeed. As I wrote earlier this year, Venus was unfairly shunted aside for Mars in NASA's budgetary priorities. Even though Venus is closer and more Earth-like, Mars had a surface we could stand on, which was an easier sell to our 20th century "space colonization" mindset.

But the more we look at Venus, the more we need to rethink what exploration looks like.

Quietly, inside and outside NASA, a "Venus community" grew that wanted to explore its clouds and started begging for scraps of budget. Its most exciting moment until now came in 2015, when NASA unveiled a concept mission called HAVOC a Zeppelin, basically, that you didn't need to fill with helium or hydrogen. Just regular old Earth air would float atop Venus' dense atmosphere. Tear the balloon's fabric, and the high pressure could actually keep the air from escaping for weeks.

As you might expect, the Venus community was abuzz with excitement over the phosphine discovery Monday. Not least because the NASA administrator had just tweeted the magic words: time to prioritize Venus.

There is, of course, caution in spades. Phosphine is also found in the vast, churning gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn. But to explain why it would be present on a rocky planet as small as Venus if it isn't because of life, scientists say, you'd have to propose some geological process we don't yet know about.

"The exciting discovery of phosphine in the Venus atmosphere just reinforces the growing body of evidence that Venus is a likely, perhaps the most likely, other place in our solar system where life might now or in the past have existed," says NASA's Dyar. "Venus holds the keys to our understanding of the evolution of rocky planets as homes for life.

"This finding may be the first of many to come as NASA and other countries renew a Venus exploration program."

Currently the ESA, the Russian space agency and NASA all have Venus probe plans in the works that could arrive this decade; the phosphine announcement could well move launch dates up. If and when the next probes find more evidence of life above the solar system's most mysterious planet, we'll be one step closer to confirming Carl Sagan's legacy as a visionary Venutian genius.

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Diamond worlds unlike anything in our Solar System are entirely possible. We just havent found them yet – RT

Posted: at 1:04 am

As an extra incentive to get humanitys colonization capabilities up to scratch, researchers have revealed that not only are worlds made mostly of diamonds possible, they are in fact quite probable (not to mention profitable).

With private space companies slowly but surely gaining a foothold in low-Earth orbit, amid plans to take humans to the moon and Mars in the next decade, the potential plunder available farther afield looks increasingly promising.

Researchers at Arizona State University have recently published a paper in which they detail the circumstances necessary for these so-called diamond world exoplanets to arise, as well as a proof-of-concept experiment.

"These exoplanets are unlike anything in our Solar System," says geophysicist Harrison Allen-Sutter of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Their research is based on the idea that not all stars are created equal, and the chemical composition of the planets in a given star system are largely dictated by that of their star.

According to current estimates, between 12 and 17 percent of planetary systems might inhabit the space around carbon-rich stars, a promising precursor for diamond worlds.

Scientists and researchers have already confirmed the existence of carbide planets, made primarily of carbon and a handful of other elements, but they have to encounter the hypothesized silicon carbide (aka 'diamond') planets with just a hint of water to oxidize and convert the carbide to its constituent silicon and carbon.

Allen-Sutter and his team are making the case that, with enough heat, pressure and a dash of water, these silicon carbide worlds could be covered in diamonds. To prove their point, the researchers used a diamond anvil cell, subjecting test materials to extraordinarily high pressures.

They immersed samples of silicon carbide in water and then squeezed the hell out of them at a pressure of around 50 gigapascal, or 500,000 times the Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. Adding insult to injury, the team then blasted the squeezed samples with lasers to heat them up.

They conducted 18 runs of this experiment and, as predicted, the silicon carbide samples broke down and converted into silica and diamonds. So the theorized diamond worlds are entirely feasible, we just need to find them.

For those tempted to search the cosmos for these diamond worlds, the sweet spot would be planets with a temperature of 2,500 Kelvin (2,226 degrees Celsius, 4040 degrees, Fahrenheit), a high-pressure atmosphere and the presence of water on top of a mostly silicon carbide rock, a somewhat tall order, but worth it to find a diamond in the galactic rough.

The researchers warn budding interplanetary treasure-hunters that these worlds would not be remotely hospitable for miners, as their atmospheres would be toxic to all life as we know it. So interstellar Indiana Joneses would need some pretty beefy machinery to extract the riches from these extraordinary planets.

In the meantime, upcoming missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help identify both these diamond worlds as well as a plethora of other interesting planets and potential treasure troves of alien life.

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Globe Book Club: With his wry observations on life, Thomas King educates and entertains – The Globe and Mail

Posted: at 1:04 am

Join The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 7:30 p.m. for a livestream conversation between Margaret Atwood and Thomas King. Readers without a Facebook account will be able to view the conversation on the Globes website.

Sept. 23: Margaret Atwood returns to host the Globe's book club with guest Thomas King, the author of Indians on Vacation, The Inconvenient Indian, and Obsidian. Join Atwood and King for a livestream

Everybodys read Tom King. The raccoon that lives under my house has read Tom King.

First of all, let me start off by confessing that Im a huge Tom King fan. By that I dont mean Im a physically imposing fan, but merely a reader who appreciates his talents. As a developing author, I hoped to grow up to be much like him again, not specifically a 6-foot-5 half-Greek, half-Cherokee, American-turned-Canadian photographer and former moustache grower. Instead, I wanted to stand in his shadow or beside it, using the written word and humour to showcase the multifaceted environments of the Indigenous community. In that journey, I still have far to go.

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But first, lets go back to just after Time Immemorial. In 1986, the Contemporary Indigenous Literary renaissance began. By that I mean an explosion of written and published material that sprang forth from our community and took Canada by storm. Before that, there had been the occasional book that would grab the attention of the Canadian literati briefly before they would return to their Margarets. I speak of influential texts such as Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, Prison of Grass by Howard Adams and Bobbie Lee: Indian Rebel by Lee Maracle.

Globe Book Club: Margaret Atwood announces her pick for Sept. 23 online event

Then a play called The Rez Sisters set the theatre community on fire. Written by an unknown playwright Tomson Highway in an unconventional theatre space the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto the play was about seven Anishnawbe women from a reserve on Manitoulin Island who want to travel to Toronto to participate in the worlds largest bingo game. This innocuous storyline won the 1987 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, and was shortlisted for the Governor Generals Award the following year. The number of remounts of The Rez Sisters must be approaching triple digits by now.

In my opinion (and we know what thats worth), that simple play opened the doors for many of us who followed in the publishing game. It was a catalyst of sorts. It showed the Canadian public the versatility and talent that existed within our Indigenous communities, and most importantly, that we could tell our stories in a way anyone could enjoy. Within a decade, writers such as Jeanette Armstrong, Basil Johnston, Ruby Slipperjack, Marilyn Dumont, Daniel David Moses et al. were on their way to becoming a substantial presence in the larger Canadian literary world.

This big bang of modern Indigenous storytelling had, and in many ways still does have, an objective. It could be said it was born from the effects of colonization and its prime focus was to record and detail the repercussions of said colonization. In the epigraph to the published version of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Highway writes: Before the healing can take place, the poison must be exposed.

And exposed it was.

During this renaissance period, most of the plays and novels coming out of the Indigenous community had three general storyline variations. They consisted primarily of a historical narrative, a victim narrative, or stories dealing with the byproducts of what I call post-contact stress disorder. In short, they were gloomy, dark, angry, and dealt with oppression, depression and suppression. As the saying goes, when an oppressed people get their voice back, chances are they will talk about being oppressed. And Native people had a long history of oppression to talk about. So the writing became cathartic on a personal and cultural level.

As a result, I remember talking with several people at different times who would tell me they were reluctant to see any more Native plays or read Native books because they were tired of being depressed. The literature had begun to develop a reputation.

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By this time, Thomas King had relocated to Canada from America and soon began pumping out novels and non-fiction using his own style. What was of particular interest was the unique flavour of his storytelling. It bucked the trend.

Kings first book, Medicine River, was an interesting departure. Published in 1989, it wove together tales of various southern Alberta First Nation people into a cohesive tale of returning home, finding home and accepting those colourful people that make up home. Told from the perspective of Will, an expat returning to Medicine River for a few days to attend his mothers funeral, the reader is transported to a joyous and lovable town bordering on a large Alberta reserve.

What makes this novel so unique for the time is that it didnt dwell on many of the stereotypes usually associated with Indigenous literature. King refused to allow his characters to be victims in the way many previous Native authors had focused on. His characters had flaws, but alcoholism, homelessness, drug addiction and sexual abuse were not de rigueur. Yet, his characters were centred in a very Indigenous context. They were not polemics for the evils of Canadianization. Instead, the book (and those that followed) was a celebration of the humour and frequently quirky aspects of small-town life. And the novel was highly successful CBC turned it into a made-for-TV-movie in 1993.

Inconvenient Indian, Michelle Latimer's documentary adaptation of Thomas King's award-winning book, premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

Courtesy of TIFF

Over the following years, Kings literary output included the award-winning Green Grass, Running Water, The Truth About Stories, Truth and Bright Water and The Inconvenient Indian (for which I constantly tease him, referring to it as The Incontinent Indian) and a host of other amazing fiction and non-fiction. Of course, this includes perhaps the most popular of his creations, and one of the most beloved of Canadian comedy shows, the radio series The Dead Dog Caf Comedy Hour.

The beauty of Kings writing is that, like all good authors, it seems effortless. Like those words always have and always should be in that specific order on the page, and that was the way the great literary gods planned it.

This was not long after I wandered into the field of Indigenous literature and woke up one morning to discover I was a playwright and later a journalist, filmmaker and novelist. In fact, Tom King and I have an ongoing contest of sorts, around who can write in the most mediums. So far, we are tied. He has never yet had a play produced, and I still have not yet slain the book-of-poetry dragon.

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As any academic will tell you, literature is not static. It grows and evolves, like everything else under creation. Indigenous writing is no different. Perhaps some of that healing has been accomplished. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, curiosity has been developing in our writing community toward the concept of genre fiction. While Indigenous literature may itself be considered a unique genre in itself, many in the last decade or two have let their interests wander further afield to areas not usually hunted by our writers.

Daniel Heath Justice, a noted academic from the University of Alberta, has to be one of the more adventurous of our writers, having published an Indigenous fantasy trilogy back in the mid-2000s, full of elves, magic and swords The Way of Thorn and Thunder, Wyrewood and Dreyd. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, publisher of Kegedonce Press, compiled and edited a collection of international Indigenous erotica called Without Reservation in 2003.

More recently, theres been an explosion in the popularity of science fiction. Cherie Dimaline took the Canadian youth market by storm when she wrote The Marrow Thieves three years ago. The dystopian tale has Native people being hunted and harvested for their dream-inducing bone marrow. Next came Waubgeshig Rice with his equally popular Moon of the Crusted Snow, another dystopian story about life on a small northern reserve that loses contact with the rest of the world.

I myself have written a collection of science fiction short stories, Take Us to Your Chief and Other Stories, as well as a vampire novel called The Night Wanderer. Im currently working on a horror novel. Indigenous people seem to be colonizing mainstream Canadian publishing.

As usual, my buddy Tom is no different. When hes not pumping out award-winning fiction or non-fiction, he can be found neck deep in one of his favourite past-times: writing detective murder mysteries. DreadfulWater, The Red Power Murders, Obsidian and a few others have established his presence in that genre. And true fans will notice theres a lot of autobiography in Toms writing, shown by the fact that the detective in these novels, the delightfully named Thumps DreadfulWater, is an American Cherokee photographer who discovers hes diabetic. Tom was once a professional photographer and still is.

That biographical tendency also shows up in Tom Kings most recent book, Indians on Vacation (just long-listed for the Giller Prize). Protagonist Bird Mavrias, a Cherokee-Greek writer-photographer expat, meets a woman, Mimi, who will be his wife. They move to Canada and end up in Guelph, Ont. Anybody who knows Tom and his work will notice more than a smidge of familiarity in that character. Less like Toms real life, the two characters, into their golden years, end up tracking down Mimis great-uncle, who disappeared into Europe 100 years ago with a precious medicine bundle belonging to the family.

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Indians on Vacation has his usual wry observations on life, interesting witticisms and spot-on perceptions of white life from the Indigenous perspective, all the while taking you on a curious journey.

I like reading Tom King because he does, succinctly and cleverly, what all good writers should do he educates, illuminates and entertains with every paragraph.

But like I said Im a fan.

Editors note: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect title for Howard Adams novel.

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HBOs Lovecraft Country Thrives on Fear and Comments on Power – Observer

Posted: August 10, 2020 at 4:44 pm

Stories are like people, Jonathan Majors Atticus Tic Freeman says early on in the first episode of HBOs Lovecraft Country. Even when they arent perfect, you just try to cherish them and overlook their flaws. Yeah, but the flaws are still there, hes answered.

Point and counterpoint.

At a time when narratives centered on Black Americans feel more relevant and important than ever, Lovecraft Countrydebuting Sunday, August 16is distinctly displaced from time in a good way. In the five episodes provided to critics, the series careens through the past and present to collide head on with the future. At no point, however, are our most glaring flaws glossed over. Lovecraft Country is about the reclamation of power through the unearthing of buried truths.

Based on Matt Ruffs 2016 novel of the same name, Lovecraft Countryoverseen by showrunner Misha Green (Underground, Sons of Anarchy)is nominally about Atticus, his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), and his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollet

) as they embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of Tics missing father (played by The Wires Michael K. Williams). But that public synopsis barely covers a fraction of the storys true scope and intention.

Its a family drama that asks what we are willing to do for our freedom while questioning what freedom truly means. All the while, this tale is draped in the trappings of supernatural horror. Eat your heart out, Stephen King.

Littered with literary references from H.P. Lovecraft and John Carter to Dracula and The Count of Monte Cristo, Lovecraft Country is an unabashed celebration of genre. The pilot, directed by White Boy Rick filmmaker Yann Demange, begins with a surreal fever dream of war where the battlefield is overtaken by UFOs, the cosmic entity Cthulhu and a baseball bat-swinging Jackie Robinson. Its all sorts of crazy weird that often feels like one of the old pulp serials our protagonist Tic loves to thumb through.

As a show partly inspired by Lovecrafts works, the series fittingly wrestles with racism and prejudice, an often-overlooked pockmark on the writers legacy. His deplorable views seep their ways into the shows surrounding characters and societal structures in both historically accurate and otherworldly ways.

Our sense of reality is composed entirely on assumptions, the show posits in its first episode. So what happens when those assumptions are proven to be false? When confronted with the impossible, how do we respond?

I thought the world was one way and then I find out it isnt and its terrifying, Smolletts fierce Letitia LetiLewis says in the third episode. But I wont live in fear.

Yet fear is what Lovecraft Country thrives on. Every exchange is coded in sub-text, every hint at danger stinging as more of a threat. White privilege of the era masks a secret society with an insatiable hunger to consume and control, which stands as a parallel to colonization and systematic racism throughout history. Lovecraft Country is packed with symbolism and metaphors to be decoded and deconstructed within the atmospheric world of terror Green has created.

The show features nods to 1980s adventure movies such as The Goonies, Cronenbergian body horror and classic 1930s monster movies. But while exciting and satisfying to die-hard genre fans, the series runs the risk of fragmenting itself too severely.

Early episodes cover the road trip from hell before giving way to a haunted house nightmare and then a horror-filled version of a National Treasure-like hunt for a mysterious MacGuffin. Serialized elements strewn across what can be considered somewhat self-contained stories. Individually, they hold the power to thrill, terrify, and entertain. But Im left wondering how, or if, these pieces can come together over the back half of the season, even as this quasi-episodic structure is the creature of design.

What drew me to adapting the book for TV, as opposed to film, was the chance to do a Goonies-style episode, then sci-fi, then mystery, then a ghost story; go bananas and reclaim all of those storytelling styles for characters whove typically died at the beginning of those stories, Green said in a recent interview.

While Lovecraft Country wastes no time delving into its specific brand of supernatural storytellingremember that gonzo opening scene?it could benefit from a touch of patience when doling out these genre elements. Sorcery, exorcisms, monsters and ghouls are introduced perhaps a bit too casually before racing to the next plot point. At times, its dizzying, especially when youre left feeling in need of a bit more explanation and background on key elements of this ambitious tale. It excitedly embraces what has become the dominant form of storytelling in mainstream entertainment, sometimes too overeagerly.

What helps to keep all the chaos controlledaside from standout performances from Majors and Smollettis a vibrant soundtrack that is nothing less than scintillating. Lovecraft Country is a full-sensory experience featuring a mix of 1950s era music, hip-hop, spoken word poetry, and found audio. Where else can you hear period appropriate crooning, voice over from the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson story, Ntozake Shanges 1975 poem For Colored Girls, Gil Scott-Herons poem Whitey on the Moon and Cardi B? Its musical metamorphosis with distinct cultural identity at its center.

Lovecraft Country looks to reclaim the genre space for creators and performers not typically invited to the party. In that way, it has echoes of Get Out, the feature directorial debut of Jordan Peele, who also happens to serve as an executive producer alongside J.J. Abrams. In doing so, it becomes a melting pot of creative influences, inspirations, and homages. A serialized pseudo-anthology playing the greatest genre hits of the last century.

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Gaze up tonight and remember the moon landing – Lynchburg News and Advance

Posted: July 21, 2020 at 12:08 pm

If all goes well, another Virginian will touch Mars indirectly first. On July 30, NASA is set to launch a robotic rover to Mars. Its name, Perseverance, was submitted by Alexander Mather, a 7th-grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Fairfax County. If it lands safely in February, Perseverance will search for signs of past microbial life on the red planet, something Cardman likely has a special interest in.

The real question about when humans return to the moon, and go onto Mars, isnt a technological one, but a political one. Are we willing to pay for it?

Our record for sustained funding science is spotty at best. Trump has been gung-ho about space, but Congress hasnt necessarily shared that enthusiasm. The 2024 goal seems driven entirely by politics. Of course, so was Kennedys goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the 60s, just a slightly different kind of politics. We know Trump is keen to meet that 2024 deadline; would a President Biden feel the same way? No clue, but since Kennedy, Democrats have been more interested in spending money on earth, not off it.

Its unclear whether that 2024 deadline can be met. The website Axios recently quoted one of the nations space policy experts, John Logsdon, of George Washington University, as saying: I think basically, making 2024 would be a miracle. Axios then proceeded to list all the reasons why basically delays in funding and testing.

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Gaze up tonight and remember the moon landing - Lynchburg News and Advance

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NASA ties up with JAXA to build a rover for astronauts on the moon – Blasting News United States

Posted: at 12:08 pm

The American Space Agency, NASA has decided to link up with Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency JAXA to build a moon rover for the movement of astronauts on the alien planet. JAXA designed one such vehicle with Toyota in 2019 and it impressed NASA. The vehicle runs on Renewable Energy like solar power, which would be the most probable source of energy for missions to other planets. It has already proven its usefulness on Mars where Curiosity has been operating 24X7 for nearly five years. Another lander on Mars is InSight, which is a later addition. These robotic applications depend on solar power and JAXAs vehicle could join the inventory of NASA.

The Firstpost says NASA took a decision to join hands with JAXA to set the stage for a permanent human presence on the Moon. The two sides have formalized an agreement. It will ensure the involvement of JAXA to the Lunar Gateway, apart from exploration in orbit and on the lunar surface. Perhaps NASA will put its earlier plans on the backburner. Those related to inflatable tents and underground bases. JAXA could also be involved in other activities of the Artemis mission. This mission is for Americans to revisit the Moon by 2024 and land the first woman there.

America sent the first man to the Moon half a century back and it now wants to repeat the performance with a woman.

NASA has changed its strategy. Instead of going it alone, it wants to collaborate with commercial and international partners. The intention is to establish sustainable exploration by the end of the decade.

The first target of NASA is the Moon followed by Mars by 2033. It wanted to use pressurized surface vehicles for use by astronauts in the Artemis mission. However, Toyota was on course to develop a mobile home that could operate on the Moon in consultation with JAXA. That impressed NASA. The Japanese space agency announced last year that the vehicle was a two-seater but it could probably accommodate more after modifications.

There is no clarification on that aspect.

Firstpost quotes NASA engineer Mark Kirasich saying, "This thing is the coolest element Ive ever seen for people. It's like an RV for the Moon. We are going to try and develop this jointly with JAXA, as a Japanese contribution to our plan." He said this while laying out the plans the agency had for conducting activities on the lunar surface. Obviously, renewable energy and artificial intelligence would play vital roles. Any work related to outer space and colonization of distant planets is a cost-intensive affair.

Hence, a joint venture between NASA and JAXA would be economical. This is a plus point in its favor.

According to Republic World, the American space agency is fine-tuning its Artemis program. The agency NASA plans to land the first woman and a man to the moon by 2024. It needs a vehicle that will take care of the movements of astronauts on the alien surface. They will live and work inside while traveling across the moon. The six-wheeler vehicle will be self-driven and depend on solar power. NASA is relying on outsiders to chip in with their expertise on important cost-intensive projects. It has announced the names of three companies that could design and develop human landing systems (HLS) for its Artemis program.

NASA will select one of these for its lunar mission. Incidentally, SpaceX is one of the companies entrusted with the work and it is already providing its spacecraft for movement of astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company, owned by Elon Musk, has established the concept of reusable rockets to introduce economy in space research.

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NASA ties up with JAXA to build a rover for astronauts on the moon - Blasting News United States

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More than 1,000 senior US police officers have visited Israel. Here’s what they learn from Israel’s police force and why it’s controversial. – JTA…

Posted: at 12:08 pm

(JTA) In June, as protests against aggressive and abusive policing in the United States took hold, so did a false accusation about a group of programs that sends American police chiefs to learn from their counterparts in Israel.

The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyds neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services, a British actress told a newspaperin one illustrative incident. A member of the British Parliament was demoted for sharing the story laudingly on social media.

Over the past couple of months, the accusation has popped up elsewhere. Its the latest version of a claim that has circulated in anti-Zionist circles for years that U.S. police delegations to Israel serve to import brutal and militarized policing to the U.S.

The organizations running the trips say that beyond being false the trips do not teach physical, on-the-ground tactics such as chokeholds the claim that Israel encourages American police brutality is an anti-Semitic canard.

These types of instances existed long before any of these professional leadership exchanges happened, and are part and parcel of the history of the U.S., said George Selim, senior vice president of programs at the Anti-Defamation League, which runs police delegations to Israel, regarding American police brutality. Seeking to link Israel as a state to U.S. police misconduct is a bizarre excuse for the centuries-long history of racism and injustice that has been part of American history, really since our founding.

The main organization opposing the delegations has been Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, an anti-Zionist group that published a 2018 report calling the trips a Deadly Exchange. The report says they normalize the violent repression of communities and movements the government defines as threatening.

Based on the report, JVP has campaigned for an end to police delegations to Israel, and has succeeded in banning them and other international police exchanges in Durham, North Carolina. It also has successfully pressured two New England police officials to withdraw from delegations.

Now JVP is seeking to temper the anti-Israel criticism tied to recent protests of police brutality. In a June update to its Deadly Exchange campaign, JVP said that Suggesting that Israel is the start or source of American police violence or racism shifts the blame from the United States to Israel and furthers an antisemitic ideology.

But JVP is still campaigning against the trips not, they say, as the driver of police abuse in the United States but because the group says such exchanges allow police forces from two countries with histories of racial discrimination and allegations of oppressive policing to swap strategies.

On these trips its about sharing and swapping ideas and tactics, but thats not to say that the mission from the United States officials wasnt there to begin with, said Stefanie Fox, JVPs executive director. Its like, oh great, then lets adapt this and adopt this to the practice were already trying to do of surveillance and of suppression of protest and of racial profiling.

Trip organizers and participants, however, say thats a fundamental mischaracterization of the trips. They say the trips, which are far from unique among international police exchanges, expose participants to a variety of policing practices in Israel, from surveillance systems to models for community policing in minority communities. The itineraries, they add, mostly consist of lectures, meetings and tours.

What we do is focus on management and policy issues, not training, not specific tactical training, said Steven Pomerantz, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, a conservative think tank that runs some of the delegations. Theres no shooting, theres no wrestling, theres no chokeholds. Thats just not what this is about. Its about the constituent parts of successful law enforcement [and] counterterrorism responsibilities in local policing.

Tammy Gillies, the Anti-Defamation Leagues San Diego regional director, meets with Palestinian police officials in Jericho during a 2019 delegation. (Courtesy of the ADL)

A focus on counterterrorism in a post-9/11 world

The delegations to Israel began in the 1990s and ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The sponsoring organizations and their Israeli partners frame the trips as an opportunity for American police to learn from a country and police force with many decades of experience protecting civilian populations from attack.

There was a lot of interest, and still is, in understanding the Israeli approach to terrorism and counterterrorism, said Robbie Friedmann, who runs the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a program at Georgia State University that takes senior police officers on delegations to Israel and elsewhere. Delegations learn about the need to provide balance between fighting terror and providing services, so that if someone gets their apartment burglarized, they know thats something the Israel Police will take care of.

More than 1,000 participants, mostly senior law enforcement officials, have gone on the trips, which are primarily provided by Friedmanns program, the ADL and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Each organization has taken several hundred police officials to Israel, a small fraction of the leaders of the approximately 18,000 police departments in the United States. The trips are generally privately funded and are free for participants, though none of the organizations would share the exact sources of the funding or the costs of the trip.

Israel is far from the only country to host a delegation of police officials from abroad. Foreign police officers come to the United States to see how police forces here operate, and countries across the world also host delegations. Friedmanns group has run tours in countries throughout Europe and South America, as well as in China, Australia and elsewhere.

And the trips are just one example of a whole industry of delegations to Israel. Jewish organizations regularly offer Israel trips to politicians, community activists, celebrities, students, business executives and an array of others. As with those trips, part of the goal of the police delegations is to acquaint the participants with Israel and give them a favorable view of the country.

The main goal of the trips, across the groups that organize them, is to share Israeli expertise in counterterrorism. Organizers say the trips are about observation, policy and systems, not about doing active-duty training or teaching American officers physical maneuvers.

In Israel in general, confronted with the kind of threats they are, theyre still very resilient, said Lou Dekmar, the chief of police of LaGrange, Georgia, and the past president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, who has been on several delegations to Israel. How important it is, when there is a crime or an attack, to quickly address it, process it and reintroduce a state of normalcy.

But American officials do get to see their Israeli counterparts in action. The field of counterterrorism in Israel covers a range of topics, from responding to a terror attack in real time to gathering intelligence to policing mass protests. In addition to the Israel Police, some of the trips meet with the Border Police, which patrols the border with the West Bank, as well as the Israel Security Service, or Shin Bet, and the army.

Some trips take officers on a tour of Israels surveillance system in eastern Jerusalem, as well as study how to clear the scene of a terror attack so that normal life can resume. The excursions emphasize efficient sharing of intelligence between the Israeli military and police, as well as the importance of having defined procedures in place at West Bank border crossings for Palestinians who enter Israel. Delegations also visit Israels National Police Academy, where they view training in action.

A 2019 itinerary from the ADL, for example, had the delegation observe security procedures at Ben Gurion Airport, a West Bank checkpoint and eastern Jerusalem, in addition to visiting the Gaza border and the Palestinian police. The delegation also visited Israels Police Academy and other Israeli police institutions, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and Christian and Jewish religious sites.

Chief Janet Moon of the Peachtree City, Georgia, Police Department, who visited Israel with Friedmanns institute in 2015, remembers watching training on how police officers shoot at a moving vehicle.

No matter where you go in the world, law enforcement is law enforcement, she said. They have the same challenges with budgeting, resource allocation, community policing. And theyve been dealing with terrorism a lot longer than we have.

The Deadly Exchange campaign: Expos or anti-Semitism?

An interest in counterterrorism is not the only thing that Israeli and American police have in common. As in the United States, minorities in Israel have long complained of mistreatment from law enforcement, though in the case of Israels Arab minority, one recent protest movement called for more policing in Arab cities.

Israel Police officers also have been accused of profiling both Arab and Ethiopian Israelis, and recent years have seen large protests by the Ethiopian community against police brutality.

For participants in these programs, the extensive itineraries and opportunities for observation are seen as a benefit because Israeli and U.S. police face similar challenges regarding crowd control, detection of terror threats, airport security and patrolling diverse populations. But to critics of the trips, who already oppose much of how Israel and America practice policing, the combination of the two is damning.

Militarized, racist, violent policing in this country, rooted in centuries of colonization and slavery and warmaking here in the U.S., alongside Israeli occupation and the brutality enacted against Palestinians there theres no good sense in which those governments should be trading and cross training and developing relationships with one another, the JVPs Fox said.

Her groups Deadly Exchange report claims that the trips goals include justifying racial profiling and suppressing public protests through use of force.

The report cites some examples of American policing practices that came from Israel. It notes that the Atlanta Police Departments camera surveillance system is modeled after Jerusalems, following a 2008 police delegation to Israel, for example, and cites testimony by the administrator of the Department of Homeland Securitys Transportation Security Administration in 2016 that said Israeli training and Israels airport security practices have informed those of his agency.

But more often, the report notes general links between American and Israeli policing practices without showing that controversial practices in the United States were learned in Israel or created with Israeli participation. In one section, discussions of Israeli crowd control are portrayed as technical know-how based in disregard for the right of Palestinians to oppose the Israeli occupation. The report also suggests that a Jewish lawmaker in New York who lobbied for racial profiling was influenced by Israels example, when in fact he did not link his support for Israel to that proposal and had not participated in police exchanges.

Trip organizers say that the Deadly Exchange reports claims amount to bigotry.

To me this is a libel, following a long string of libels in Jewish history, JINSAs Pomerantz said. This is kind of the same thing, that the Jews are responsible for whats happening in minority communities in America at the hands of the police. Its just another one of those libels.

Palestinian activists and their allies point back to accusations of Israeli police misconduct as the core reason that they say the trips shouldnt be happening. Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American scholar, says he is routinely profiled when he returns to Israel, where his extended family still lives and where he was born.

Yes, our police need to get better here in the United States, said Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. But do they really need to be training in a place and with forces where racial profiling is a value, where racial profiling is actually central to the ethos of the security system?

Hundreds of demonstrators in Haifa protest the recent Israeli police killing of an unarmed autistic Palestinian man, June 2, 2020. Protesters in Israel and the United States have sought to link police violence in both countries. (Mati Milstein/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

What the trip participants bring home

The delegations do broach uncomfortable topics, organizers say. When it comes to racial profiling, for example, the Georgia State programs Friedmann said, We receive briefings based on the policies, and that participants learn about the process for filing complaints.

Whats important is not to suggest that Israel is a perfect society, he said. But it is a society based on the rule of law, and if an officer is behaving egregiously, it will be handled.

Similarly, Selim said, the ADL trips naturally discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including on its visits to Palestinian police in the West Bank and to an Israeli border crossing. He said those portions of the trip are especially valuable for participants from border cities in the United States.

Its impossible to talk about policing and security in Israel without talking about the conflict, he said. When there are police executives from Southern California or from Texas or from Arizona, New Mexico, that have joined the delegation in the past two decades, these are in many instances border cities and border towns on the Mexican border.

He added, Issues of cross-border dialogue, engagement, holistic community policing in those cities is very real for them. So to see that in an international context is very helpful for a comparative sense of what works, what doesnt.

In addition to discussing counterterrorism, the trips also show Israels efforts at community policing in Arab-Israeli cities. Micky Rosenfeld, the spokesperson for the Israel Police, said the police have opened new police stations in Arab-Israeli areas and increased their efforts to recruit Arab police officers.

The situation in America is complicated in the same way that the situation [in Israel] is also complicated, he said. Building an ongoing relationship with the community is something that takes time, and it has to come both from the community and law enforcement.

Both Moon and Dekmar say they have been influenced by Israels approach to community policing. Dekmar noticed that the Israel Police has started recruiting Arab-Israeli cadets as early as high school to increase the chances that theyll become officers. He says he began identifying and engaging minority high-schoolers as candidates to serve in his Georgia department as well.

That was a direct result of the experience I saw in Israel, Dekmar said. A recognition that if youre going to recruit from minority populations, you need to start developing relationships younger.

The police chiefs have also implemented procedures or technologies they saw in Israel in their home departments. Moon installed a geo-location system in her 911 call center similar to one she saw in Israel. Dekmar said he adopted an Israeli mentality of conducting training more improvisationally, with less complex equipment.

[I] recognize that this is a very complicated situation that doesnt necessarily lend itself to good guys and bad guys, Dekmar said. It lends itself to an understanding of different cultures placed in a position that potentially could clash at any time.

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More than 1,000 senior US police officers have visited Israel. Here's what they learn from Israel's police force and why it's controversial. - JTA...

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1,000 US police officers learned from Israel visit, why its controversial – The Jerusalem Post

Posted: at 12:08 pm

In June, as protests against aggressive and abusive policing in the United States took hold, so did a false accusation about a group of programs that sends American police chiefs to learn from their counterparts in Israel.

The organizations running the trips say that beyond being false the trips do not teach physical, on-the-ground tactics such as chokeholds the claim that Israel encourages American police brutality is an antisemitic canard.

These types of instances existed long before any of these professional leadership exchanges happened, and are part and parcel of the history of the US, said George Selim, senior vice president of programs at the Anti-Defamation League, which runs police delegations to Israel, regarding American police brutality. Seeking to link Israel as a state to US police misconduct is a bizarre excuse for the centuries-long history of racism and injustice that has been part of American history, really since our founding.

The main organization opposing the delegations has been Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, an anti-Zionist group that published a 2018 report calling the trips a Deadly Exchange. The report says they normalize the violent repression of communities and movements the government defines as threatening.

Based on the report, JVP has campaigned for an end to police delegations to Israel, and has succeeded in banning them and other international police exchanges in Durham, North Carolina. It also has successfully pressured two New England police officials to withdraw from delegations.

Now JVP is seeking to temper the anti-Israel criticism tied to recent protests of police brutality. In a June update to its Deadly Exchange campaign, JVP said that Suggesting that Israel is the start or source of American police violence or racism shifts the blame from the United States to Israel and furthers an antisemitic ideology.

But JVP is still campaigning against the trips not, they say, as the driver of police abuse in the United States but because the group says such exchanges allow police forces from two countries with histories of racial discrimination and allegations of oppressive policing to swap strategies.

On these trips its about sharing and swapping ideas and tactics, but thats not to say that the mission from the United States officials wasnt there to begin with, said Stefanie Fox, JVPs executive director. Its like, oh great, then lets adapt this and adopt this to the practice were already trying to do of surveillance and of suppression of protest and of racial profiling.

Trip organizers and participants, however, say thats a fundamental mischaracterization of the trips. They say the trips, which are far from unique among international police exchanges, expose participants to a variety of policing practices in Israel, from surveillance systems to models for community policing in minority communities. The itineraries, they add, mostly consist of lectures, meetings and tours.

What we do is focus on management and policy issues, not training, not specific tactical training, said Steven Pomerantz, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, a conservative think tank that runs some of the delegations. Theres no shooting, theres no wrestling, theres no chokeholds. Thats just not what this is about. Its about the constituent parts of successful law enforcement [and] counterterrorism responsibilities in local policing.

A focus on counterterrorism in a post-9/11 world

The delegations to Israel began in the 1990s and ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The sponsoring organizations and their Israeli partners frame the trips as an opportunity for American police to learn from a country and police force with many decades of experience protecting civilian populations from attack.

There was a lot of interest, and still is, in understanding the Israeli approach to terrorism and counterterrorism, said Robbie Friedmann, who runs the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a program at Georgia State University that takes senior police officers on delegations to Israel and elsewhere. Delegations learn about the need to provide balance between fighting terror and providing services, so that if someone gets their apartment burglarized, they know thats something the Israel Police will take care of.

More than 1,000 participants, mostly senior law enforcement officials, have gone on the trips, which are primarily provided by Friedmanns program, the ADL and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Each organization has taken several hundred police officials to Israel, a small fraction of the leaders of the approximately 18,000 police departments in the United States. The trips are generally privately funded and are free for participants, though none of the organizations would share the exact sources of the funding or the costs of the trip.

Israel is far from the only country to host a delegation of police officials from abroad. Foreign police officers come to the United States to see how police forces here operate, and countries across the world also host delegations. Friedmanns group has run tours in countries throughout Europe and South America, as well as in China, Australia and elsewhere.

And the trips are just one example of a whole industry of delegations to Israel. Jewish organizations regularly offer Israel trips to politicians, community activists, celebrities, students, business executives and an array of others. As with those trips, part of the goal of the police delegations is to acquaint the participants with Israel and give them a favorable view of the country.

The main goal of the trips, across the groups that organize them, is to share Israeli expertise in counterterrorism. Organizers say the trips are about observation, policy and systems, not about doing active-duty training or teaching American officers physical maneuvers.

In Israel in general, confronted with the kind of threats they are, theyre still very resilient, said Lou Dekmar, the chief of police of LaGrange, Georgia, and the past president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, who has been on several delegations to Israel. How important it is, when there is a crime or an attack, to quickly address it, process it and reintroduce a state of normalcy.

But American officials do get to see their Israeli counterparts in action. The field of counterterrorism in Israel covers a range of topics, from responding to a terror attack in real time to gathering intelligence to policing mass protests. In addition to the Israel Police, some of the trips meet with the Border Police, which patrols the border with the West Bank, as well as the Israel Security Service, or Shin Bet, and the army.

Some trips take officers on a tour of Israels surveillance system in eastern Jerusalem, as well as study how to clear the scene of a terror attack so that normal life can resume. The excursions emphasize efficient sharing of intelligence between the Israeli military and police, as well as the importance of having defined procedures in place at West Bank border crossings for Palestinians who enter Israel. Delegations also visit Israels National Police Academy, where they view training in action.

A 2019 itinerary from the ADL, for example, had the delegation observe security procedures at Ben Gurion Airport, a West Bank checkpoint and eastern Jerusalem, in addition to visiting the Gaza border and the Palestinian police. The delegation also visited Israels Police Academy and other Israeli police institutions, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and Christian and Jewish religious sites.

Chief Janet Moon of the Peachtree City, Georgia, Police Department, who visited Israel with Friedmanns institute in 2015, remembers watching training on how police officers shoot at a moving vehicle.

No matter where you go in the world, law enforcement is law enforcement, she said. They have the same challenges with budgeting, resource allocation, community policing. And theyve been dealing with terrorism a lot longer than we have.

The Deadly Exchange campaign: Expos or antisemitism?

An interest in counterterrorism is not the only thing that Israeli and American police have in common. As in the United States, minorities in Israel have long complained of mistreatment from law enforcement, though in the case of Israels Arab minority, one recent protest movement called for more policing in Arab cities.

Israel Police officers also have been accused of profiling both Arab and Ethiopian Israelis, and recent years have seen large protests by the Ethiopian community against police brutality.

For participants in these programs, the extensive itineraries and opportunities for observation are seen as a benefit because Israeli and US police face similar challenges regarding crowd control, detection of terror threats, airport security and patrolling diverse populations. But to critics of the trips, who already oppose much of how Israel and America practice policing, the combination of the two is damning.

Militarized, racist, violent policing in this country, rooted in centuries of colonization and slavery and warmaking here in the US, alongside Israeli occupation and the brutality enacted against Palestinians there theres no good sense in which those governments should be trading and cross training and developing relationships with one another, the JVPs Fox said.

Her groups Deadly Exchange report claims that the trips goals include justifying racial profiling and suppressing public protests through use of force.

The report cites some examples of American policing practices that came from Israel. It notes that the Atlanta Police Departments camera surveillance system is modeled after Jerusalems, following a 2008 police delegation to Israel, for example, and cites testimony by the administrator of the Department of Homeland Securitys Transportation Security Administration in 2016 that said Israeli training and Israels airport security practices have informed those of his agency.

But more often, the report notes general links between American and Israeli policing practices without showing that controversial practices in the United States were learned in Israel or created with Israeli participation. In one section, discussions of Israeli crowd control are portrayed as technical know-how based in disregard for the right of Palestinians to oppose the Israeli occupation. The report also suggests that a Jewish lawmaker in New York who lobbied for racial profiling was influenced by Israels example, when in fact he did not link his support for Israel to that proposal and had not participated in police exchanges.

Trip organizers say that the Deadly Exchange reports claims amount to bigotry.

To me this is a libel, following a long string of libels in Jewish history, JINSAs Pomerantz said. This is kind of the same thing, that the Jews are responsible for whats happening in minority communities in America at the hands of the police. Its just another one of those libels.

Palestinian activists and their allies point back to accusations of Israeli police misconduct as the core reason that they say the trips shouldnt be happening. Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American scholar, says he is routinely profiled when he returns to Israel, where his extended family still lives and where he was born.

Yes, our police need to get better here in the United States, said Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. But do they really need to be training in a place and with forces where racial profiling is a value, where racial profiling is actually central to the ethos of the security system?

What the trip participants bring home

The delegations do broach uncomfortable topics, organizers say. When it comes to racial profiling, for example, the Georgia State programs Friedmann said, We receive briefings based on the policies, and that participants learn about the process for filing complaints.

Whats important is not to suggest that Israel is a perfect society, he said. But it is a society based on the rule of law, and if an officer is behaving egregiously, it will be handled.

Similarly, Selim said, the ADL trips naturally discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including on its visits to Palestinian police in the West Bank and to an Israeli border crossing. He said those portions of the trip are especially valuable for participants from border cities in the United States.

Its impossible to talk about policing and security in Israel without talking about the conflict, he said. When there are police executives from Southern California or from Texas or from Arizona, New Mexico, that have joined the delegation in the past two decades, these are in many instances border cities and border towns on the Mexican border.

He added, Issues of cross-border dialogue, engagement, holistic community policing in those cities is very real for them. So to see that in an international context is very helpful for a comparative sense of what works, what doesnt.

In addition to discussing counterterrorism, the trips also show Israels efforts at community policing in Arab-Israeli cities. Micky Rosenfeld, the spokesperson for the Israel Police, said the police have opened new police stations in Arab-Israeli areas and increased their efforts to recruit Arab police officers.

The situation in America is complicated in the same way that the situation [in Israel] is also complicated, he said. Building an ongoing relationship with the community is something that takes time, and it has to come both from the community and law enforcement.

Both Moon and Dekmar say they have been influenced by Israels approach to community policing. Dekmar noticed that the Israel Police has started recruiting Arab-Israeli cadets as early as high school to increase the chances that theyll become officers. He says he began identifying and engaging minority high-schoolers as candidates to serve in his Georgia department as well.

That was a direct result of the experience I saw in Israel, Dekmar said. A recognition that if youre going to recruit from minority populations, you need to start developing relationships younger.

The police chiefs have also implemented procedures or technologies they saw in Israel in their home departments. Moon installed a geo-location system in her 911 call center similar to one she saw in Israel. Dekmar said he adopted an Israeli mentality of conducting training more improvisationally, with less complex equipment.

[I] recognize that this is a very complicated situation that doesnt necessarily lend itself to good guys and bad guys, Dekmar said. It lends itself to an understanding of different cultures placed in a position that potentially could clash at any time.

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1,000 US police officers learned from Israel visit, why its controversial - The Jerusalem Post

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