Through most of 2008 this was a parody site. Sometimes there's humor now, sometimes I'm serious.
Thursday, August 06, 2020
Back on Mars again
We're doing science again. Why? I like WSWS. I didn't realize they did a report July 31t on the missions to Mars. Don Barrett (WSWS) reports:
With yesterday’s launch of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, the three Mars missions being attempted in this year’s “window” of efficient access to the red planet are off successfully. Perseverance joins the Chinese Tianwen-1 orbiter/lander/rover mission, launched on July 23, and the United Arab Emirates/US Hope orbiter, launched July 19.
Mars presents favorable circumstances about every 26 months for missions from the Earth. This is the same interval as between “oppositions,” where the two planets reach their closest approaches, Mars in a near line outwards from the Sun to the Earth. Launch windows occur about two months before the close approaches, with travel time about 8.5 months before spacecraft reach Mars.
It has been 60 years since the first exploited launch window, in 1960, saw a pair of Soviet spacecraft sent on their way. Around 50 missions have used the 27 subsequent launch windows until the present one. Only in the last two decades have successes overtaken failures: more than half of attempts to reach Mars to date have failed.
Prior to the spacecraft age, each Martian opposition was the source of intense Earth-based telescopic exploration. Even at these close approaches, however, Mars is 150 times the distance of our own Moon, and the features easily visible through a telescope on the Moon, its mountain chains and craters, were invisible from Earth-bound telescopes. As a result, much of what we now know about Mars is the product of the past 60 years of “up close” exploration with our robotic probes.
What was known within the first century after Galileo turned the telescope into an astronomer’s instrument was that Mars had bright white spots that appeared at its poles, correctly interpreted as icy polar caps (that the ice is substantially carbon dioxide would not be suspected until much later). While several wealthy amateurs in the late 19th century would begin several decades of feverish promotion of the idea that Mars had a system of “canals,” supposedly visible through the telescope and representing signs of a civilization, sober scientists deployed new technologies as they became available and, laboring largely in public obscurity, laid the groundwork for the Mars science of today.
Thus by the turn of the 20th century the astronomical spectroscope suggested a closer similarity of Mars to the Moon rather than the Earth, 1920s measurements of radiated heat showed very cold (-85C–7C) surface temperatures, and 1930s measurements showed that oxygen, if present, could not be more than one percent of Earth levels. An early 1970s measurement from a high-flying plane, above most of Earth’s atmosphere, also recorded the signature of chemically-bound water on the Martian surface, suggesting a different and wetter past.
I liked that article. I like the sixty years section and, by the way, we had something similar when we wrote a science article for THIRD "" and I meant to note that here. I am just typing away, no writer here. But C.I. brought that and other facts into the piece we did and I told her at the time, "I wish I thought to look up things like that."
Thursday, August 6, 2020. Oh, look, one of those 'trusted' voices on
Iraq -- one who, of course, got everything wrong -- is back again to
tell us all how great things are going in Iraq.
Yesterday
afternoon, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL published a ridiculous piece of
garbage by Sam Gollob and Michael O'Hanlon. The piece is entitled "At Long Last, Iraq Is Getting Back On Track" -- and that title tells you everything you need to know.
You'd
think THE JOURNAL would avoid this sort of garbage if only to protect
whatever's left of their name. It's not a great paper by any means but
their opinion section has long harmed their image and allowed a lot of
partisan Democrats to attack them for anything and everything, whether
they did it or not.
Look at the hideous Paul
Greengrass. If the #MeToo movements was going to start removing
directors from positions of power, you would have thought Greengrass
would have been an early starting point. But his actions on the set
remain as non-criticized as the garbage he churns out. For our
purposes, we're looking at the hideous movie THE GREEN ZONE.
The
flick completely ignored its source material (Rajiv Chandrasekaran's
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY) to film a lie. In the bad and boring
movie, facts are tossed aside so that the lie can be told: It was that
bad WALL STREET JOURNAL that lied us into Iraq. Amy Ryan plays the bad
reporter whose work features every baseless claim -- presented as fact
-- that the Bully Boy Bush administration made. And her character works
for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
The character, as
anyone watching the film knows, is based on Judith Miller who was the
star reporter for THE NEW YORK TIMES. It also cribs from a bad front
page story that Chris Hedges wrote for THE NEW YORK TIMES. But somehow,
history gets rewritten in this bad movie so that the big offender was .
. . a reporter for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Two
things on the above, first off: Chris Hedges. I like Chris. I'm not
his press agent. It's not my job to get him good press. We regularly
highlight his work on RT and will continue to do so; however, that
doesn't mean that we lie about what took place. We are right now
talking about pre-war Iraq press coverage. The character Amy Ryan plays
speaks with an anonymous source supplied to her by the government and
publishes lies given to her from him. You can't talk about that and not
talk about what Chris Hedges did unless you are more committed to
advancing Chris Hedges than to telling the truth. The first front page
'report' linking 9/11 to Iraq -- falsely linking -- appeared weeks after
9/11 -- Chris Hedges had the byline, it ran on the front page of THE
NEW YORK TIMES. Not one claim in that article stands up today. The
government set Chris up with that 'insider' because they wanted their
lies told to the world as fact. Chris made it happen.
I
don't hate Chris. I like Chris. But if we're talking about the press
lies that got us into war with Iraq, Chris' report is part of those
lies. Yes, Chris went on to speak out against the war and suffered
professionally for doing so. And that's part of Chris' story as well.
But this isn't the "Chris Hedges snapshot." It's the "Iraq snapshot."
And we're not going to use Judith Miller as our daily pinata the way so
many others have. Judith Miller printed a lot of lies and she believed
them all. She was gung-hu in Iraq, once the war started, and trying to
commandeer troops to find those WMDs that she honestly -- and foolishly
-- believed were in Iraq. We have held Judith Miller accountable for
what she did and will continue to do so. We will not, however, present
the lie that it was just her and we will not pretend that no one else
needs to be held accountable. To this day, my problem with Chris, he
has not been accountable. He will admit that his front page report is
nonsense. And after his main source was outed, he did agree with MOTHER
JONES that the Iraqi exile had been a source. But, as we have long
pointed out, the article claimed two sources. If the source lied --
Chris says they did, and I believe him -- then you have been burned by
your source and you do not have to protect them.
We
knew Judith Miller's source was Scooter Libby. We noted that in 2004.
Long before the court case. When Judith elected to go to jail rather
than betray her source, that was fine, we applauded her for that. But
Scooter didn't burn Judith. (He just told her Valerie Plame was a CIA
agent.) Chris was burned and he should have long ago exposed the other
source and written at length about how that interview came to be --
everyone he knew at the paper that promoted the story as news, everyone
in the administration that was part of providing the paper with the
sources.
We called out someone who we
highlighted in a video yesterday. I don't even want to say her name.
She deserved to be called out for what we called her out for. Saying
every US servicemember who went to Vietnam was a War Criminal was an
outrageous and offensive statement. The political leaders who sent them
to Vietnam? They're all War Criminals. But the service members who
were lied to and who were sent there are not War Criminals unless they
were raping or murdering children or . . . In the Iraq War, Steven D.
Green is a War Criminal -- he plotted and took part in the gang rape of
Abeer and he murdered her, her sister and her parents. The Americans at
Abu Ghraib -- unless they were whistle blowers -- were War Criminals.
But every American that served in Iraq is not a War Criminal. The
political leaders who sent them to Iraq and keep them in Iraq are War
Criminals.
My job is not to be a press agent
for anyone. My job is to explain to the best of my ability what is
happening and what happened. Most of us say something that deserves
calling out from time to time -- including me. And if I'm covering
something and it's applicable, we're going to call them out.
Second:
At this late date why is anyone treating Michael O'Hanlon as someone to
listen to? How many times can you be wrong about Iraq and still have
the press treat your loony opinions as worth listening to.
Iraq
is not back on track anymore than the 'surge' brought political
stability to Iraq, anymore than Iraq had WMDs (they didn't) or even of
the other positions O'Hanlon has argued over the years. The only
consistent aspect to his public statements about Iraq? That they have
been wrong over and over.
Iraq is in the midst
of a pandemic -- like the rest of the world. Their economy is in
tatters. They have (still) the issue of the lack of electricity and
potable water. In fact, IOM Iraq Tweeted this morning:
All the crises he inherited have deepened. The coronavirus pandemic,
already alarming when Kadhimi was sworn in, has since only grown more
frightening, forcing him to announce fresh lockdowns.
The Iraqi economy, having suffered extensive collateral damage from
the oil war, has weakened. Powerful, Iran-backed militias have grown
more brazen. Corruption, already ingrained in the body politic, seems to
have metastasised across every aspect of the state.
Even the weather has been worse than expected. Iraq is now
wilting in the hottest summer ever recorded, with temperatures nearing
52 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) in Baghdad and 53C (127F) in Basra
last week.
The heat threatens to bring the protests against electricity and
water shortages — a summer fixture in the Iraqi political calendar — to a
fever pitch. Some demonstrations in Baghdad have already boiled over
into clashes with security forces: Two protesters were killed last
Monday.
On the protesters, how telling that the
same week the world learned of the kidnapping and torture of 16-year-old
Hamid Saeed by Iraqi forces, O'Hanlon would show up to insist that Iraq
was back on track. How telling and how typical. Mina Aldbroubi of THE NATIONAL Tweets:
INDIA BLOOMS notes another rocket attack on the Green Zone yesterday. But, hey, O'Hanlon says back on track!
In last Saturday's "Kadhimi wants to push back elections longer than necessary,"
we noted that Mustafa al-Kadhimi has announced early elections. They
will take place, he said, in June of 2021. As we noted, Iraq does not
need that long to prepare for parliamentary elections. They have done
it in much less time -- look at the fall of 2009 and all the hand
wringing that it would delay elections yet they still took place in
March of 2010. Jasper Hamann (MOROCCO WORLD NEWS) writes:
The
political blocs that stand to lose in new elections will have sufficient
incentive to try to stall them. Nahrain University Political Science
Professor Yaseen al-Bakri told
Al Monitor that “they want the current parliamentary term to be
completed and avoid going to early elections because they are well aware
of the little chances they have in the early elections.”
Stalling
the electoral process could be as easy as hampering progress towards
the establishment of a new electoral law. While parliament has passed
the law, it has not sent the law to the president for approval because
of disagreements between parliament’s rival factions.
Who are these unnamed political blocs?
And does he mean stall in Parliament?
The
stall has traditionally come from one of Iraq's vice presidents -- they
have multiple vice presidents. Often, it is over something like the
issue of the displaced and the refugees and are provisions made to allow
them to vote?
The law is not sent to the
president, it's sent to the the three presidencies. That includes the
Vice Presidents. I really think something has happened in the last
years. Either out of ignorance or out of a desire to elevate the office
of the president of Iraq, journalists keep pretending that the highest
position in Iraq is the president. The presidency was given to the
Kurds. It is a ceremonial position. If it had true power, you can be
sure that Shi'ite majority Iraq would never have given the post to the
Kurds.
News out of Kurdistan this morning is of the death of a prominent political figure. RUDAW reports:
A prominent Kurdish nationalist from Iran has died in Sulaimani on Thursday after a battle with COVID-19.
Jalil Gadani, a long-time member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of
Iran (KDPI), passed away at Hiwa hospital in the Kurdistan Region’s
eastern city on Thursday after being in intensive care for almost a
week, according to an official statement published by the group on Thursday.
Gadani, who has been involved in Kurdish Iranian politics for more than
six decades, split from the KDPI in 2006 with a number of senior members
to form the splinter group called Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP-Iran). He held senior positions in both parties for decades.
"Jalil Gadani was a book that was written over a 60 years period, my condolences to the Kurdish people," said Facebook user Hassan Ahmed.
On Sunday, Iraqi security forces detained a Kurdistan 24 team that was covering a clash between Kurdish villagers and several Arab families in the disputed Kirkuk province.
The incident occurred in the Guli Tapa village in southern parts of Kirkuk, where a confrontation ensued over land-ownership disputes. Shortly after, a Kurdistan 24 media team, made up of a reporter and a cameraman, arrived on the scene.
Local
Kurds in Daquq district, where Guli Tapa is located, claimed that the
Iraqi Federal Police had supported Arab families coming and attempting
to take over lands Kurds own.
Upon arrival, "we were detained by a unit of Iraq's Federal Police
for three hours in a window-tinted car," said Soran Kamaran, Kurdistan
24's reporter in Kirkuk province. Kurdistan 24 cameraman Nawzad Mohammad
was accompanying Kamaran.
"We were told [by the security forces] that they do not allow such
incidents to be reported," Kamaran said. He added that the police unit
also confiscated their equipment and still hold on to them.
There are entire generations of kids in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya who have known nothing but war their entire lives. They've grown up with PTSD, anxiety, depression because of Obama. No one talks about the toll on their mental health. Are they not human? Don't they matter?
