Carina Nebula

Dear Commons Community,

The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).  The telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data were released during a televised broadcast at 10:30 a.m. yesterday from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. As stated at NASA’s website, “these listed targets below represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations.”

Here is appropriate commentary about Webb and space exploration that quotes Carl Sagan.

Congratulations NASA, ESA, and CSA!

Tony 

Southern Ring Nebula

Stephan’s Quintet

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I watched the three-hour January 6^th Congressional Hearing and I could not believe President Trump’s associates and other lowlifes who were highlighted as the key actors in planning the insurrection.  The fact that Trump came to depend on the likes of Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani for advice on how to proceed with his “big lie”  was disgraceful enough but to then hear the voices of the leaders of the militant, right-wing groups bent on anarchy was too much to bear.   

A presidential tweet that some saw as a “call to arms.” An “unhinged” meeting in the White House. Violent extremists planning to storm the Capitol as President Donald Trump pushed lies about election fraud.

At its seventh hearing, the House Jan. 6 panel on Tuesday showed further evidence that Trump was told, repeatedly, that his claims of fraud were false — but that he continued to push them anyway. And at the same time, he turned to the widest possible audience on Twitter, calling his supporters, some of them violent, to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to not only protest but “be wild” as Congress certified President Joe Biden’s victory.  

Below are takeaways courtesy of the Associated Press.

God save America should Trump ever come close to the White House again!

Tony

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‘A CALL TO ACTION … A CALL TO ARMS’

A major focus of the hearing was Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet about a “big protest” at the coming joint session of Congress: “Be there, will be wild!”

Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic member of the panel, said the tweet “served as a call to action and in some cases as a call to arms.” She said the president “called for backup” as he argued that Vice President Mike Pence and other Republicans didn’t have enough courage to try to block Biden’s certification as he presided over the joint session.

The tweet “electrified and galvanized” Trump’s supporters, said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, another Democratic committee member, especially “the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other far-right racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight.”

The committee showed a montage of videos and social media posts after the tweet as supporters reacted and planned trips to Washington, some of them using violent rhetoric and talking about killing police officers.

AN ‘UNHINGED’ MEETING

The committee spliced together video clips from interviews to describe a chaotic meeting on Dec. 18, in the hours before Trump’s tweet, in almost minute-to-minute fashion.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified live before the panel two weeks ago, called the meeting between White House aides and informal advisers pushing the fraud claims “unhinged” in a text that evening to another Trump aide. Other aides described “screaming” and profanity in the meeting as the advisers floated wild theories of election fraud with no evidence to back them up, and as White House lawyers aggressively pushed back.

The video clips included testimony from lawyer Sidney Powell, who had pushed some of the wildest theories, including of breached voting machines and hacked thermostats that she somehow tied to the false claims of fraud.

White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, one of the aides who pushed back, said the theories were “nuts” and “it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there.”

The aides described a chaotic six hours of back and forth, starting with Trump talking to a group of the informal advisers with no White House aides present. Both Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Powell said in interviews that Cipollone rushed in to disrupt the gathering. Powell said sarcastically that she thought Cipollone set a new “ground speed record” getting there.

Cipollone, who sat with the committee for a private interview last week after a subpoena, said he didn’t think the group was giving Trump good advice and said he and the other White House lawyers just kept asking them, “where is the evidence?” But they did not receive any good answers, he said.

Hours later, at 1:42 a.m., Trump sent the tweet urging supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6.

A RIOTER, AND A FORMER OATH KEEPER

Two witnesses were in the hearing room for testimony — a rioter who has pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol and a former Oath Keeper who described his experiences with the group.

Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last month to a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct and is scheduled to be sentenced in September, said he was in Washington on Jan. 6 at the behest of Trump, and that he left the Capitol when Trump — after several hours — told them in a tweet to leave. “Basically we were just following what the president said,” Ayres said.

He said his arrest less than a month later “changed my life, not for the better” and it makes him angry that he hung on Trump’s every word, and that some people are still doing that. Asked by Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney if he still believes the election was stolen, Ayres said, “Not so much now.”

Jason Van Tatenhove, a former ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes who left the group years before the insurrection, said the group is a “violent militia.”

“I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths and what it was going to be was an armed revolution,” he said. “I mean, people died that day … This could have been the spark that started a new civil war.”

Rhodes and other members of the Oath Keepers, along with another far-right group, the Proud Boys, have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the most serious cases the Justice Department has brought so far in the Jan. 6 attack.

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE

The committee revealed that Trump planned for days to have his supporters march to the Capitol — and that he would join them.

The panel showed a draft tweet, undated and never sent, that said “Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!” And they showed texts and email exchanges between planners and White House aides about a secret plan for the march.

“This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court” after Trump’s rally, wrote one of the rally’s organizers, Kylie Kremer, to a Trump confidant. “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.” People will try to “sabotage” it if they found out, she said.

Murphy said the president’s call for the march at his rally was “not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy decided upon, in advance, by the president.”

Hutchinson’s testimony last month also focused on Trump’s desire to march with the protesters, and his anger at security officials who would not let him go.

The committee examined Trump’s speech at the rally that morning and some of his ad-libs about Vice President Mike Pence that were not in the original drafts of the speech. In the end, he would mention the vice president eight times, telling the crowd that he hoped Pence would “do the right thing” and try and block Biden’s certification at the joint session of Congress.

IGNORED ADVICE AND STAFF REGRETS

As they have at several hearings, the committee lawmakers showed video testimony from White House aides who said they did not believe there was widespread fraud in the election and had told the president that. Several aides said they were firmly convinced Biden’s victory was a done deal after the states certified the electors on Dec. 14 and after dozens of Trump’s campaign lawsuits failed in court.

Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, said it was her sentiment that the election was over after Dec. 14 and “probably prior as well.” Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said she planned for life after the White House at that point. Eugene Scalia, Trump’s labor secretary, said he told the president in a call that it was time to say that Biden had won.

And there were regrets afterward. In one text exchange revealed by the panel, former Trump campaign aide Brad Parscale wrote to aide Katrina Pierson: “This week I feel guilty for helping him win,” and “If I was Trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone.”

“It wasn’t the rhetoric,” Pierson responded.

“Katrina,” wrote Parscale, who still participates in a weekly strategy call with Trump aides. “Yes it was.”

WITNESS TAMPERING?

At the end of the hearing, Cheney revealed some new information: Trump had tried to call a future witness, and the committee had alerted the Justice Department about the call.

The witness did not take the call, according to Cheney. She did not identify the witness but said it was someone the public has not yet heard from.

The committee has previously said that people in Trump’s orbit have contacted witnesses in ways that could reflect or at least create the appearance of inappropriate influence.

Dear Commons Community,

As augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) technology continues to improve for education applications, colleges and universities are beginning to experiment with the “metaversity” concept to improve remote student engagement and provide more experiential learning opportunities.

According to a recent news release, 10 universities are getting set to launch their own metaversities this fall to provide students and professors with a “digital twin” replica campus in which to attend courses, using a Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset provided through a partnership with VictoryXR and Meta.

The announcement said students at Morehouse College in Georgia, the University of Kansas School of Nursing, New Mexico State University, South Dakota State University, Florida A&M University, West Virginia University, Southwestern Oregon Community College, California State University, Alabama A&M University and University of Maryland Global Campus will be able to use the technology to attend courses synchronously from anywhere.VictoryXR CEO Steve Grubbs said students will use their VR headsets to enter their school’s twin metacampus, or virtual campus, with other students and professors for classroom activities such as learning more about human anatomy through a virtual cadaver lab, taking history field trips or astronomy lessons on a starship, among other examples.

“It is persistent — meaning it’s always there. You put on your headset and your metaversity is right there,” Grubbs said of the metaversity concept. “And it is immersive and experiential, meaning that you learn kinesthetically in a metaversity as opposed to Zoom learning, which is not kinesthetic. You’re not going to tear apart a car engine in Zoom, but you will in a metaversity.

                                                                       Courtesy of University of Maryland Global Campus

“It’s a digital twin, so it looks exactly like the real thing — to the paint, the glass, etc.,” he later added. “You’re going to get the campus quad, and you’ll have five to seven buildings and the interior of two to three buildings. That’s generally where universities will start with their digital twin.”According to Grubbs, the launch of the 10 metaversities comes after VictoryXR first piloted the concept with Morehouse College, followed by further pilots at Fisk University and American High School. The method has so far been met with a positive response from students and professors.

“More than any learning innovation I have been involved with, Morehouse in the metaverse has made the biggest difference for the students I teach,” Muhsinah Morris, assistant professor at Morehouse College, said in a public statement.

Grubbs said the recent move to test out the concept has been driven largely by a decline in on-campus enrollment across higher education, as well as improvements to Meta’s AR/VR technology making it more feasible.

“If you’re a remote learner, you have two choices, Zoom or a metaversity, and there’s no question what students prefer,” he said. “Universities have to meet those students where they’re at … If universities are going to be successful [with upcoming generations], they have to think about their approach, and one of the solutions is the metaversity.

“Those who ignore this new learning method do so at the risk of their own enrollment,” he later added. “Here’s the bottom line — remote learning is growing, and there’s fierce competition for those remote learners because now they can learn from anywhere.”

Another thing driving the new concept, Grubbs said, is its cost-effectiveness. For instance, he said, VictoryXR’s virtual cadaver lab is “dramatically” less expensive than maintaining and managing a real cadaver lab for anatomy courses.

“In the cadaver lab, the professor can hand each student their own human heart to hold, and then that student can expand that human heart until it’s 8 feet tall and step inside and learn about ventricles and cavities,” he said, noting current capabilities.

Perhaps the biggest driver, according to Grubbs, is schools’ willingness to try something new in the wake of the digital surge caused by COVID-19, which forced many students into online learning.

“It was, ‘Who is willing to dip their toes into the water and try something revolutionary that’s never been done before in the history of the world?’ That’s not a big list,” he said. “Thank God that Morehouse College had some professors who were willing to say, ‘OK, our students aren’t loving Zoom, so let’s try something they will love.’”

We will have to wait and see how successful AR/VR will be.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, The New York Times released its first poll of the 2022 midterm cycle.  And one of the main messages was that Americans are dissatisfied with the leading candidates from both parties. “This felt like a poll from 2016, not from 2020,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, stated, where voters in general feel the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Here are some takeaways courtesy of Times reporter David Leonhardt.

The poll included a question about whether people would vote for Biden or Trump in 2024 if the two ended up being the nominees again. The question did not present any options other than Biden and Trump — yet 10 percent of respondents volunteered that they did not plan to support either one. The share was even higher among voters under 35 and lower among older voters.

This level of dissatisfaction is a reflection of the huge, dueling weaknesses of the two parties.

The Democratic Party has two core problems. First, Biden’s job approval rating is only 33 percent (similar to Trump’s worst ratings during his presidency), partly because of frustration over inflation and the continuing disruptions to daily life stemming from the pandemic. Second, Democrats’ priorities appear out of step with those of most Americans.

Congressional Democrats have spent much of the past year bickering, with a small number of moderates blocking legislation that would reduce drug prices, address climate change and take other popular steps. Many Democrats — both politicians and voters, especially on the party’s left flank — also seem more focused on divisive cultural issues than on most Americans’ everyday concerns, like inflation.

“The left has a set of priorities that is just different from the rest of the country’s,” Nate said. “Liberals care more about abortion and guns than about the economy. Conservative concerns are much more in line with the rest of the country.”

On the other hand, Nate points out, “Republicans have serious problems of their own.”

Trump remains the party’s dominant figure — and he is roughly as unpopular as Biden. The two men’s personal favorability ratings are identical in the Times poll: 39 percent. Many voters, including independents and a noticeable minority of Republicans, are offended by the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in them.

Republicans also face some vulnerabilities from the recent Supreme Court decisions. The court has issued aggressive rulings, including overturning Roe v. Wade, that take policy to the right of public opinion on some of the same issues where many Democrats are to the left of it.

All of this leads to a remarkable combination of findings from the poll. Biden looks like the weakest incumbent president in decades; 61 percent of Democrats said they hoped somebody else would be the party’s 2024 nominee, with most of them citing either Biden’s age or performance. Yet, when all voters were asked to choose between Biden and Trump in a hypothetical matchup, Biden nonetheless held a small lead over Trump, 44 percent to 41 percent.

Other polls — by YouGov and Harris, for example — suggest Biden would fare better against Trump than Vice President Kamala Harris would. These comparisons are a reminder that Biden won the nomination in 2020 for a reason: He is one of the few nationally prominent Democrats who doesn’t seem too liberal to many swing voters. Biden, in short, is a wounded incumbent in a party without obviously stronger alternatives.

There is still a long time between now and the 2024 election. Perhaps Biden’s standing will improve, or another Democrat such as Gavin Newsom, Stacey Abrams or Senator Raphael Warnock will emerge as a possibility. Perhaps Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence or Glenn Youngkin will defeat Trump for the nomination. Perhaps Biden or Trump (or both) will choose not to run.

The level of voter dissatisfaction also raises the possibility that a third-party candidate could attract enough support to influence the outcome, Nate adds.

For now, though, each party’s biggest strength appears to be the weakness of its opponent.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times had an article yesterday reviewing the debate between Britain and Greece over the question of returning the Elgin Marbles to Athens.  One possible solution is to duplicate the marbles using the latest robotic technology (see video above).  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“Few cultural disputes inflame British passions more than the disposition of the Parthenon Marbles. Public debate about the statuary has raged since the early 1800s, when the sculptures and bas-reliefs, which date from 447 B.C. to 432 B.C., were stripped from the Parthenon and other Classical Greek temples on the Acropolis of Athens by agents of Thomas Bruce, a Scottish statesman and seventh earl of Elgin. The marbles were purchased — some say looted — by Elgin during his time as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, the occupying power; they have resided in the British Museum since 1817.

Greek campaigners have repeatedly called on Britain to repatriate the works, arguing that the Turks were a foreign force acting against the will of the people they had invaded. The works, commonly known as the Elgin marbles, would instead be exhibited in Athens, in a purpose-built museum at the foot of the Acropolis. In May, the country’s culture minister, the archaeologist Lina Mendoni, said in a statement to the Guardian, “Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft.”

But officials at the British Museum have staunchly rejected the requests. Backed by a succession of British governments, the museum has justified retaining the marbles on the grounds that Lord Elgin acquired them legitimately; it claims that taking the relics to London helped to safeguard them from neglect and the corrosive effects of Athens’ acid rain and that they are part of a shared heritage, and thus transcend cultural boundaries.

“We are open to exploring any potential loan,” a British Museum spokesperson said, “with formal acknowledgment of the lender’s title to objects and a commitment to return objects a standard precondition.” But Greece will neither acknowledge the lender’s title to the objects, nor will it abide by the “standard precondition.”

Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and a British Museum trustee, is on the fence about the marbles. “I see the good arguments for returning them and also the good arguments for keeping them,” Dr. Beard said. In her book, “The Parthenon,” published in 2002, she wrote that the temple has come to stand for deracination, dismemberment, desire and loss.’

“For me,” she has said, “the Parthenon sculptures raise some of the biggest questions of cultural property, ownership and where works of art ‘belong.’”

Roger Michel, executive director of the Institute of Digital Archaeology, believes the long-running dust-up can be resolved with the help of 3-D machining. His University of Oxford-based research consortium has developed a robot with the ability to create faithful copies of large historical objects. In 2016, in Trafalgar Square in London, the organization unveiled a two-thirds scale model, made of Egyptian marble, of a Syrian monument called the Monumental Arch of Palmyra, also known as the Arch of Triumph. The original was built by the Romans and was thought to be two millenniums old, but it was destroyed by Islamic State fighters in 2015.”

And so the debate goes on!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News dedicated a segment yesterday to complaining that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation makes visitors feel bad by educating them on true aspects of American history.

“Fox & Friends” weekend hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy and Pete Hegseth brought up an article published in the New York Post Saturday that accused the Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the Founding Father of “going woke” and offering visitors “a harangue on the horrors of slavery.”

Jefferson owned more than 600 people in his lifetime, including 400 who were enslaved at Monticello. The estate is owned by the nonprofit Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which works to preserve its history and educate people about the third American president.

According to Hegseth, Monticello is now all about “how terrible Thomas Jefferson was because he was a slave owner” and presents a “one-sided point of view that makes Thomas Jefferson a bad guy in his own home.”

Campos-Duffy complained that there is a sign in the museum that questions if Jefferson’s line in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” is being lived up to in the U.S. today.

She also took issue with an internationally bestselling anti-racism book for sale in the gift shop.

“All of these sort of books that are damning of America and suggesting that we’re still a racist country are for sale in the gift shop,” she added.

In another segment, Campos-Duffy argued that there were slaves throughout human history but people shouldn’t be “ashamed” of leaders who owned them.

“I get that. It’s a terrible history we should talk about, but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way,” she said.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has owned and restored Monticello since 1923, and provides resources on many aspects of Jefferson’s life and writings, with a vision to “bring history forward into national and global dialogues.”

In response to the New York Post’s article, a Monticello spokesperson said: “Our goal is to present an honest, inclusive history of Monticello in all its aspects as well as Jefferson’s contributions to the founding of the country,”

Fox News can’t stand the truth!

Tony

Michelle Goldberg

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for The New York Times, who writes on gender and politics. In recent weeks, she has written a series of columns grappling with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but also considering the broader atmosphere that created so much despair on the left. What can feminists — and Democrats more broadly — learn from anti-abortion organizers? How has the women’s movement changed in the half-century since Roe, and where can the movement go after this loss? Has feminism moved too far away from its early focus on organizing and into the turbulent waters of online discourse? Has it become a victim of its own success? 

During an interview with Ezra Klein, she responds to these and other questions  about the way young people feel about feminism, about heterosexual relationships, how the widespread embrace of feminism defanged its politics, why the anti-abortion movement is so good at recruiting and retaining activists — and what the left can learn from them, how today’s backlash against women compares to that of the Reagan years, why nonprofits on the left are in such extreme turmoil, why a social movement’s obsession with “cringe” can be its downfall, how “safe spaces” on the left started to feel unsafe, why feminism doesn’t always serve poor women, whether the #MeToo movement was overly dismissive of “due process,” how progressives could improve the way they talk about the family and more.

She provides interesting insights to these questions!

A full transcript of the interview is available here.

Tony

Sen. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., talks with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., as they arrive to attend a ceremony to award the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Dear Commons Community,

Liz Cheney, the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who has attacked President Donald Trump relentlessly for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, watched President  Medal of Freedom Ceremony from the front row on Thursday.

Cheney accepted a White House invitation. Her congressional office said she attended because of a longtime friendship with former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., one of 17 recipients of the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and a fellow citizen of the Cowboy State.

“Senator Al Simpson is a principled leader and his service to Wyoming and our nation is unmatched,” Cheney said in a tweet. “He is most deserving of this honor and I am honored to call him friend.”

It’s typically unheard of for a Republican lawmaker in the middle of a bruising primary fight to be seen at a high-profile White House event of a Democratic president. But Cheney, vice chair of the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, is an exception.As she seeks a fourth-term to represent Wyoming’s sole seat in Congress, Cheney is at odds with most of the Republican Party – and a sudden hero to many liberals – warning last week that “Republicans cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”

Cheney sat next to Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz, D-Fla., former chairwoman of the Democratic Party, in the front row which was reserved for elected officials.

Before the East Room ceremony got underway, Cheney chatted with former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the one-time vice presidential running mate of Al Gore who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush and Cheney’s father, Dick Cheney.

In her primary election, Liz Cheney could benefit from the support of Democrats. Simpson, who served as a U.S. senator in Wyoming from 1979 to 1997, told USA TODAY last year that he believes Wyoming Democrats crossing over and voting in the GOP primary could lead to a Liz Cheney victory.

But Cheney, who has burned connections with many Republicans, faces an uphill fight to win the party’s nomination again in the heavily Republican state against Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman. Several polls have shown Hagerman ahead significantly over Cheney and Trump carried Wyoming in the 2020 election with 70% of the vote.

Cheney is an American heroine for putting our country over her party and deserves respect from Democrats as well as Republicans!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk’s  $44 billion bid to buy Twitter is about to collapse — after the Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board yesterday saying he is terminating the acquisition.