Fell on a throw rug yesterday

When I was a child growing up in Greenville, S.C., my grandmama could not afford a blanket. She didn’t complain, and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth — patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack — only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.

Farmers, you seek fair prices, and you are right, but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages. You are right, but your patch of labor is not big enough.

Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity. You are right, but your patch is not big enough. Women, mothers who seek Head Start and day care and prenatal care on the front side of life, relevant jail care and welfare on the back side of life, you are right, but your patch is not big enough.

Students, you seek scholarships. You are right, but your patch is not big enough. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right, but our patch is not big enough. Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right, but your patch is not big enough.

This isn’t a set of individual appeals; it’s a call for collective recognition that stresses the common thread without losing sight of the challenges facing each group. It does not put each group in a silo; it asks people to see one another in their own struggles — a translation of the theological notion of I and thou, tuned for a more democratic and egalitarian politics.

I could go on about Jackson’s campaigns, but I’ll leave it there and end with this: As we navigate this dark time in American politics, McCarthy has given us a reminder — a very useful reminder — that we need not ignore the particular in our fight to dispel the darkness of the present moment. We just can’t let it consume us.

Continues…

It might seem that in the abstract, you can simply appeal to a collective stake in good wages, decent health care, affordable housing and fair conditions of employment. The reality of segmentation and differentiation means, however, that “the abstract class structure does not determine the form working-class politics takes.” Workers may come to egalitarian politics through appeals to nonclass identities; they may be repelled by egalitarian politics by nonclass identities; they might see themselves as workers, but they may define this in nonclass terms.

There’s no ignoring that nonclass identities shape material interests. It is fashionable, in certain circles, to treat transgender rights as a supposedly woke distraction. But discrimination and exclusion are why transgender people are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness in their lives than most other Americans. You can’t attend to the interests of the working class if you aren’t attentive to the conditions of their lives, which are shaped as much by their identities and social positions as they are by their class status. As McCarthy writes, “Working-class people aren’t defined only by the burden of capitalists gaining more and more at their expense; a wide range of things matter to them, too, and some are specific to their sectors of the working class.”

A politician who hopes to build a coalition of working-class voters has no choice but to devise a message and appeal that speaks to the particular but connects to the general — that sees the many ways that working-class people organize themselves and tries to tie those movements and interests into something like a cohesive whole. A native-born store clerk has different needs from an immigrant slaughterhouse worker. But they have a shared interest in a world in which their lives are not shaped by the arbitrary power of their employer. The difficult trick is to connect the two people in ways that neither conflate the particulars of their situations nor obscure their common concerns.

McCarthy highlights Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, as an example of a deft politician who has not sacrificed economic populism for identity politics or vice versa. “Though Mamdani leads with the cost of living and uses plain, sensible language, his platform also includes positions on particular sectors of the working class and the unique problems they face.” I’d like to highlight, as I often do, an older example: Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. In his speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson argued for a politics that takes class and identity seriously, that understands their relationship and interplay, that appeals to common identities and forges responsive solutions. “Politics can be a moral arena where people come together to find common ground,” he said, as he used the metaphor of the quilt to make his point plain.

Somedays, I would spend 4-5 hours at the library, just to figure out one thing.

The culprit? Bacteria that has also infected shellfish - Vibrio pectenicida

As a cis man who’s been uncomfortable with most of masculine culture - I’d love to hear what aspects of masculinity do trans men hope to have in their lives?

It’s a beautiful website.

Were there copyright issues you had to deal with?

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter

This image shows the new filament, which connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. These clusters are visible as bright spots at the bottom and top of the filament (four white dots encircled by color). A mottled band of purple stretches between these bright dots, standing out brightly against the black surrounding sky; this is the filament of X-ray-emitting hot gas that had not been seen before, and contains a chunk of ‘missing’ matter. The purple band comprises data from Suzaku. The astronomers were able to identify and remove any possible ‘contaminating’ sources of X-rays from the filament using XMM-Newton, leaving behind a pure thread of ‘missing’ matter. These sources can be seen here as bright dots studded through—and removed from—the filament’s emission. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton and ISAS/JAXA

Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery.

The astronomers used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and JAXA’s Suzaku X-ray space telescopes to make the discovery.

The work has been published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Over one-third of the ‘normal’ matter in the local universe—the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life—is missing. It hasn’t yet been seen, but it’s needed to make our models of the cosmos work properly.

Said models suggest that this elusive matter might exist in long strings of gas, or filaments, bridging the densest pockets of space. While we’ve spotted filaments before, it’s tricky to make out their properties; they’re typically faint, making it difficult to isolate their light from that of any galaxies, black holes, and other objects lying nearby.

New research is now one of the first to do just this, finding and accurately characterizing a single filament of hot gas stretching between four clusters of galaxies in the nearby universe.

“For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos—something that’s not happened before,” says lead researcher Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “It seems that the simulations were right all along.”

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter A simulation of the ‘cosmic web’, the vast network of threads and filaments that extends throughout the universe. Stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters spring to life in the densest knots of this web, and remain connected by vast threads that stretch out for many millions of light-years. These threads are invisible to the eye, but can be uncovered by telescopes such as ESA’s XMM-Newto. Credit: Illustris Collaboration / Illustris Simulation

XMM-Newton on the case Clocking in at over 10 million degrees, the filament contains around 10 times the mass of the Milky Way and connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. All are part of the Shapley Supercluster, a collection of more than 8,000 galaxies that forms one of the most massive structures in the nearby universe.

The filament stretches diagonally away from us through the supercluster for 23 million light-years, the equivalent of traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times.

Konstantinos and colleagues characterized the filament by combining X-ray observations from XMM-Newton and Suzaku, and digging into optical data from several others.

The two X-ray telescopes were ideal partners. Suzaku mapped the filament’s faint X-ray light over a wide region of space, while XMM-Newton pinpointed very precisely contaminating sources of X-rays—namely, supermassive black holes—lying within the filament.

“Thanks to XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing else,” adds co-author Florian Pacaud of the University of Bonn, Germany. “Our approach was really successful, and reveals that the filament is exactly as we’d expect from our best large-scale simulations of the universe.”

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter This image shows the new filament, which connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. These clusters are visible as bright spots at the bottom and top of the filament (four white dots encircled by color). A mottled band of purple stretches between these bright dots, standing out brightly against the black surrounding sky; this is the filament of X-ray-emitting hot gas that had not been seen before, and contains a chunk of ‘missing’ matter. The purple band comprises data from Suzaku. The astronomers were able to identify and remove any possible ‘contaminating’ sources of X-rays from the filament using XMM-Newton, leaving behind a pure thread of ‘missing’ matter. These sources can be seen here as bright dots studded through—and removed from—the filament’s emission. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton and ISAS/JAXA

Not truly missing As well as revealing a huge and previously unseen thread of matter running through the nearby cosmos, the finding shows how some of the densest and most extreme structures in the universe—galaxy clusters—are connected over colossal distances.

It also sheds light on the very nature of the ‘cosmic web’, the vast, invisible cobweb of filaments that underpins the structure of everything we see around us.

“This research is a great example of collaboration between telescopes, and creates a new benchmark for how to spot the light coming from the faint filaments of the cosmic web,” adds Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist.

“More fundamentally, it reinforces our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations: it seems that the ‘missing’ matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the universe.”

Piecing together an accurate picture of the cosmic web is the domain of ESA’s Euclid mission. Launched in 2023, Euclid is exploring this web’s structure and history.

The mission is also digging deep into the nature of dark matter and energy—neither of which have ever been observed, despite accounting for a whopping 95% of the universe—and working with other dark universe detectives to solve some of the biggest and longest-standing cosmic mysteries

But rich people don’t want climate action, thus it isn’t happening.

OR… people with dementia aren’t able to use smartphones.

Why switching?

Google now reserves the right to “be evil”.

I’ve thought of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process as example of what is encouraged by Crimethinc here and up until now as a wonderful role model.

But today we have the white supremacists who escaped the South African revolution recreating apartheid in the US and can’t help but think it would have been better if one of them had survived.

I forgot what the syllable count is supposed to be. Can you remind me? Are we pretty strict on this here?

Same with the defeat of apartheid in South Africa. They let the monsters live and now fascism is being rebuilt in America.

$659, yikes

Tired of cats. Would love to see some toads.

U

Open the pod bay doors HAL.

I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

D