Today's Nerd Thing

The first permanent tools - the ones that were more than strictly ad hoc and disposable - probably predate our human ancestors.

"It is a testament to how difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge on a planet of tooth and claw."

How Great I Art

Happy to brag about something that probably has way less to do with me being awesome, and way more to do with bots on the prowl.

But I'll always take an opportunity to pat myself on the back. Cuz, hey - it only took me 14 years to get to 1,000,000 views.

Anyway, a big fat THANK YOU to all the real people.

Yay Nerds

I just fuckin' love me some nerds.

Imagine what the world could be like if what these guys are doing took priority over the utter bullshit ambitions of way too many asshole politicians.

The asteroid Bennu

A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth

The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.

On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.

The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.

“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.

Scientists who were working on the mission endured many twists and turns, including a seven-year struggle to get the project greenlit by NASA. Their perseverance paid off as OSIRIS-REX became the first American spacecraft to retrieve material from an asteroid, bringing back a staggering amount of matter from space for scientists around the world to study. But the victorious final act means so much more for the OSIRIS-REX team members, many of whom “grew up on this mission,” according to Dr. Lauretta.

“A little bit of us is on that spacecraft,” said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at the news conference. “And a little bit of us is coming home with it.”

Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, is currently many millions of miles from our planet. Like other asteroids in the solar system, it is a geological relic of the protoplanetary disk — a swirling mix of gas and dust that eventually coalesced into planets — that surrounded our sun billions of years ago. One theory is that small worlds like Bennu once seeded Earth with the prebiotic ingredients needed to form life.

But it is difficult to test this idea using meteorites, pieces of asteroids that reach Earth’s surface, which are heated by the atmosphere and are then contaminated by microbes on the ground, Dr. Lauretta said. Instead, many scientists turn their eyes (and their instruments) to space.

This is not the first chunk of an asteroid brought back to Earth. In 2010, the Hayabusa mission, led by the Japanese space agency JAXA, managed, in spite of technical troubles, to recover less than a milligram of material from a near-Earth asteroid named Itokawa. A decade later, a follow-up mission, Hayabusa2, retrieved a few grams of space rock from Ryugu. With that sample, scientists have found evidence suggesting that asteroids had delivered water to the early Earth, and discovered the presence of uracil — a building block of RNA, a molecule that helps form proteins.

OSIRIS-REX’s delivery will provide an abundant new stock of space rock. The team anticipates about half a pound of unsullied asteroid dirt. Shogo Tachibana, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo who led the Hayabusa2 sample analysis and is now a co-investigator on OSIRIS-REX, has “no idea” whether Bennu will be anything like Ryugu — but it’s what he is most looking forward to finding out.

From the beginning, the mission was a marathon. American scientists had long dreamed of fetching dust from an asteroid, and in 2004, a group submitted an application for what would become OSIRIS-REX. But NASA returned the project with the lowest ranking: Category 4, or “thanks, but no thanks,” Dr. Lauretta said. “The first proposal just bombed.”

The team tried again in 2007. This time, it scored a ranking of Category 1 — but failed to snag funding because the budget was too large.

The third time was the charm. NASA selected the project in 2011. “So that began our real journey,” said Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist at Rowan University who joined OSIRIS-REX 15 years ago. The team spent another half-decade “making sure all our little ducks were in a row,” he said, including designing and building the spacecraft, mapping the trek to Bennu and plotting the science campaign.

OSIRIS-REX launched in 2016, embarking on a roundabout series of fuel-efficient loops before arriving at Bennu on Dec. 3, 2018.

ImageA view looking into the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab, which has shiny white walls and a shiny light gray floor, and a metal working station that is sealed off with gloves.
The OSIRIS-REX Curation Lab, where samples will be processed, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.Credit...Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Despite the meticulous planning, the mission repeatedly faced the unexpected. “I call Bennu the trickster,” Dr. Lauretta said endearingly. “Because it has challenged us constantly on this program.”

Mission specialists expected Bennu’s surface to consist of smooth, sandy seas of fine particles. But as the asteroid came into focus, they found it was rocky and rough, with boulders, some 10 stories tall, sprinkled throughout. That made finding a place where the spacecraft could safely retrieve a sample from the surface riskier.

Engineers were troubleshooting that problem when Bennu threw them another loop: It was spewing rubble into space. That was “really exciting scientifically,” said Sandy Freund, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin. But “from an engineering standpoint,” the discovery posed a new problem.

The mission scientists frantically churned out calculations to make sure OSIRIS-REX was safe from being struck by the asteroid’s gravelly plumes. The operations team swiftly wrote new navigation software that could compensate for the rugged terrain on Bennu.

The next big hurdle was to select a sample site: a place where the spacecraft could safely fill its canister with fine grain regolith. That was made more difficult by the uneven ground of Bennu. Photos of the asteroid revealed some sandy regions on the surface — but only inside bowl-shaped craters. “We got to get inside one of those,” Dr. Lauretta said, to the distress of the operations team. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The margin for error was small. Touch down wrong, and the spacecraft may have faced a fate like Hayabusa, which crash-landed on its asteroid. Or worse: OSIRIS-REX comes down on a slope and runs into what Dr. Lauretta calls “the banana peel scenario,” where it slips and falls into a crater.

“And then it’s all over,” he said.

After two years of surveying the asteroid, the mission team chose a spot it named Nightingale, near the asteroid’s north pole. In October 2020, OSIRIS-REX punched the surface of Bennu using a tool that was supposed to bounce off Bennu like a pogo stick.

But it did not exactly bounce as planned. Dr. Connolly recalled that he was shocked at how deep the instrument penetrated into the asteroid — about one and a half feet.

“We thought it would be a little more firm,” he said. “But it turns out gravity is basically the only thing that’s holding it together.”

The blow excavated a 30-foot-wide crater and blasted dusty debris into space — an unintentional experiment that revealed some properties of Bennu’s subsurface.

The surprises didn’t end there. When the team checked to make sure it had collected a large enough sample, it found the chamber overflowing with regolith.

“We had overachieved,” Ms. Freund said. “It was wedged open and leaking into space.” Every movement of the spacecraft led to greater loss of Bennu’s dust, like the way salt comes out of a shaker.

The team immediately halted all planned maneuvers to prevent losing any more of its precious cargo. Instead, the crew rushed to stow what remained in the leaky chamber within the return capsule.

Six months later, OSIRIS-REX captured one last look at Nightingale and then began the two-year journey back to Earth. “It was definitely an adventure,” Dr. Lauretta said.

In the days leading up to the sample’s plunge into Earth’s atmosphere, Dr. Lauretta was having trouble sleeping. He tried to push away “all of the doom scenarios” like what happened with NASA’s Genesis, a probe that grabbed plasma from the solar wind to bring back to Earth. In 2004, it crashed into a Utah desert when the parachute for its return capsule failed to deploy. (Despite the rough landing, researchers were able to recover and analyze the sample.)

“And that felt like a gut punch then,” Dr. Lauretta said while squeezing a stress ball shaped like the OSIRIS-REX capsule. Approaching the latest sample return was “unlike anything I’ve ever felt before,” he added. “I feel like there’s an electric wire at the base of my spine, just tingling.”

Michael Puzio, an engineering major at North Carolina State University, also felt “a bit terrified” leading up to the sample’s return. In third grade, Mr. Puzio won a contest to name the asteroid Bennu. It ignited in him a love of space and a dream to be an astronaut.

“But I think it’s in good hands,” Mr. Puzio added. The mission team “is pretty good at math, so I’ve heard.”

At 2 a.m. local time on Sunday morning, the OSIRIS-REX command team in Littleton, Colo., evaluated the landing conditions and held a go-or-no-go poll on the capsule drop. The team voted go and OSIRIS-REX released the capsule at 4:42 a.m.

Four hours later, it entered Earth’s atmosphere. The first parachute inflated 19 miles above the surface; a second was deployed just minutes later, slowing the cargo’s speed to 11 miles per hour.

For Dr. Lauretta, the safe return is both a professional achievement and a personal one: Michael Drake, the former principal investigator of OSIRIS-REX, died only five months after the mission was funded. “You need to be the one that finishes the dream,” Dr. Lauretta said Dr. Drake told him. “And so I did.”

The capsule and its contents are headed to a temporary clean room near the Utah landing site and then will be transferred to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Scientists plan to crack open the canister on Tuesday, and get a small amount of the material into the lab for what Dr. Connolly calls a “quick look” analysis. In October, the sample team will reveal the first results to the world, including Bennu’s composition and how it compares with material brought back from the asteroids studied by the Japanese missions.

Dr. Connolly struggled to express what it meant to him that the mission had come back to Earth.

“I feel like a little kid again,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be able to tell the story that these rocks contain.”

Scientists will spend the next two years conducting a more robust investigation of the asteroid. Small portions of the sample will be handed off to JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency for their own analyses.

Up to 75 percent of Bennu’s regolith will remain in storage so that scientists in the future can “work on the sample with new techniques that we don’t even know exist yet,” Dr. Connolly said.

The OSIRIS-REX mission may have come to an end, but the spacecraft remains fully operational in space. It will next visit Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid that was once seen as a major threat to crash into Earth. More recent measurements determined that the asteroid will pass by Earth in 2029, within one-tenth of the distance to the moon.

The new project is named OSIRIS-APEX, where APEX means Apophis Explorer, and may provide information for mitigating more hazardous encounters with asteroids.

The leader of OSIRIS-APEX will be Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, a former student of Dr. Lauretta’s who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. It is another example of how the journey to Bennu and back has, from the project’s conception, raised a generation of scientists in the field.

“I’ve been working on some incarnation of this mission basically my entire adult life,” Dr. DellaGiustina said. She added that while she was “super stoked” about OSIRIS-REX’s return, “for me, it’s definitely not the last hurrah.”

When Autocrats Get Nervous

Generally, there are 2 main reasons for a country to get belligerent.

1. Feeling big and bad, they start throwing their weight around to take advantage of their strength
2. Feeling not so big and bad, they start throwing their weight around to cover up their weakness

Putin's aggression towards Ukraine seems to have been a manifestation of #1 above - mistaken to be sure, because he was apparently unaware of the enormous corruption that has been hollowing out the Russian military (as well as the economy) for 30 years. Which is tragically laughable given the fact that Putin is about as corrupt as they come, but somehow he trusted the colonels and generals (who were busily selling all the tank engines on the black market) when they told him everything was peachy, and don't worry, boss - we'll knock over Kyiv in about a week?

China's been getting all frisky too. We've been thinking their aggressive posturing is because of their strength as well, but we're becoming aware of some very serious problems there. ie: work force demographics due to a dramatic decline in their population growth, they've way over-built both commercial and residential spaces, and they're seeing a near collapse in consumer spending and capital investment.

So, sometimes the assholes are assholes because they need territory or population or resources.

Sometimes the assholes are assholes because they need to hide their asshole-ishness behind some make-believe shit.

And - of course - sometimes the assholes are assholes just because they're assholes.

Blasting Bullhorns and Water Cannons, Chinese Ships Wall Off the Sea

The Chinese military base on Mischief Reef, off the Philippine island of Palawan, loomed in front of our boat, obvious even in the predawn dark.

Radar domes, used for military surveillance, floated like nimbus clouds. Lights pointed to a runway made for fighter jets, backed by warehouses perfect for surface-to-air missiles. More than 900 miles from the Chinese mainland, in an area of the South China Sea that an international tribunal has unequivocally determined does not belong to China, cellphones pinged with a message: “Welcome to China.”

The world’s most brazen maritime militarization is gaining muscle in waters through which one-third of global ocean trade passes. Here, on underwater reefs that are known as the Dangerous Ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., has fortified an archipelago of forward operating bases that have branded these waters as China’s despite having no international legal grounding. China’s coast guard, navy and a fleet of fishing trawlers harnessed into a militia are confronting other vessels, civilian and military alike.

The mounting Chinese military presence in waters that were long dominated by the U.S. fleet is sharpening the possibility of a showdown between superpowers at a moment when relations between them have greatly worsened. And as Beijing challenges a Western-driven security order that stood for nearly eight decades, regional countries are increasingly questioning the strength of the American commitment to the Pacific.

While the United States makes no territorial claims to the South China Sea, it maintains defense pacts with Asian partners, including the Philippines, that could compel American soldiers to these waters. Just as anxiety over nearby Taiwan has focused attention on the deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing, the South China Sea provides yet another stage for a contest in which neither side wants to betray weakness. Complicating matters, Chinese diplomats and military officers are engaging less at a time when open communication could help defuse tensions.

China’s arming of the South China Sea has also forced Southeast Asian fishermen — from nations like the Philippines that Chinese diplomats have referred to as “small countries” — to abandon the fishing grounds they have depended on for generations. It is putting tremendous pressure on those governments.

“I told the Chinese, ‘Your leadership talks about shared prosperity, but what you are doing cannot make it more plain that you think we are just stupid people who can be fooled and bullied,’” said Clarita Carlos, who until January served as the national security adviser of the Philippines. “The interconnected oceans should be our common heritage, and we should be working with marine scientists from every nation to fight the real enemy: climate change.”

“Instead,” she added, “the Chinese are building military bases on artificial islands and bringing guns to the sea.”

During a four-day sail through a collection of rocks, reefs and islets called the Spratlys that are within the Dangerous Ground, New York Times journalists saw the extent to which China’s projection of power has transformed this contested part of the Pacific Ocean. Not since the United States embarked on its own campaign of far-flung militarization more than a century ago, leading its armed forces toward a position of Pacific primacy, has the security landscape shifted so significantly.

A P.L.A. Navy tugboat lingering in the vicinity had failed to stop us, perhaps because of the early-morning hour. But as we approached the Chinese military base, the tugboat, about 2.5 times the size of our vessel, churned water to reach us, turning on its floodlights and blasting its horn repeatedly. Over the radio, we were told that we had intruded into Chinese territorial waters.

Our boat was Philippine-flagged, and an international tribunal convened by the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in 2016 that Mischief Reef was part of the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf of the Philippines. China has ignored that ruling. In a radio exchange, we said we were allowed to sail through these waters.

The P.L.A. tugboat responded with more barrages of its horn, a sonic assault so piercing that we felt it in our bodies. Then, with its floodlights nearly blinding us, the P.L.A. tugboat rushed at our vessel, swiping within 20 meters of our much smaller boat. This was a clear breach of international maritime protocol, maritime experts said.

As dawn broke, we could see both the fortifications on Mischief Reef and an array of Chinese vessels closing in from different directions: half a dozen maritime militia boats and a recently commissioned navy corvette designed to carry anti-ship missiles. The navy tugboat stayed near, too.

On other occasions, Chinese coast guard and militia vessels have rammed, doused with water cannons and sunk civilian boats in the South China Sea. In 2019, for instance, 22 Filipino fishermen were left to float amid the wreckage of their boat for six hours after a Chinese militia vessel struck them.

Danger extends overhead. In May, a Chinese fighter jet sliced past the nose of a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane flying through international air space over the South China Sea, echoing an incident last December when a Chinese fighter came within 20 feet of an American plane.

Zhou Bo, a retired P.L.A. colonel who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said that claimant nations and the United States — which conducts regular air and sea patrols in the South China Sea — should accept Beijing’s contention that this is Chinese turf.

“The U.S. should stop or decrease its operations there,” he said. “But since it is impossible, so the danger will grow. A stronger P.L.A. can only be more resolute in defending China’s sovereignty and national interests.”

Mr. Zhou added that he thought the risk of a conflict between the United States and China was higher in the South China Sea than in the Taiwan Strait, another theater of geopolitical friction.

Frictions in the South China Sea are greatest in places where Southeast Asian countries have defied the Chinese mandate that the waterway, scooped out on Chinese maps with a dashed line, belongs to Beijing. In waters close to Vietnam and Malaysia, Chinese vessels have disrupted attempts to explore and develop oil and natural gas fields. The Chinese coast guard has forcibly prevented its Indonesian counterpart from arresting Chinese fishermen operating well within Indonesian waters.

Chinese forces frequently harass Philippine coast guard boats trying to access a tiny contingent of Philippine marines stationed on Second Thomas Shoal, which, like nearby Mischief Reef, also lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. (Control over such a zone gives a country the rights to all resources within it, although foreign flagged boats are allowed free passage through most of the waters.)

In February, a Chinese coast guard ship directed a military-grade laser at a Philippine coast guard boat trying to resupply the marines at Second Thomas, temporarily blinding some sailors, according to the Philippine side. The Chinese coast guard has also unleashed high-intensity water cannons at the resupply boats, as recently as last month. In both cases, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the Philippine vessels were violating Chinese territorial sovereignty, forcing the Chinese to intervene.

As we left Mischief Reef, with Chinese vessels still shadowing us, we saw just how lopsided the contest is at Second Thomas. In 1997, the Philippines, outmanned and underfunded, beached a World War II era navy ship on the shoal, creating a makeshift base from which its soldiers could defend Philippine waters.

With the marooned navy ship in the distance, we watched as the same Philippine coast guard vessel that had been targeted by the military laser was flanked by a pair of Chinese coast guard ships more than double its length. The radio crackled with verbal jousting.

“Since you have disregarded our warning,” a Chinese coast guardsman said, “we will take further necessary measures in accordance with the law, and any consequences entailed will be borne by you.”

“We will deliver food and other essentials to our people,” the Philippine side answered.

The Philippine boat barely made it through to resupply the marine base. Every week brings such a David and Goliath showdown, and the chance for a dangerous miscalculation.

“The Chinese are flouting the maritime rules of engagement and intentionally violating the good rules of conduct,” said Gregory B. Poling, the director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re making foreign vessels veer, sometimes at the last moment. One day, a foreign vessel is not going to veer off. And then what?”

Despite its lack of territorial claims in the South China Sea, the American Seventh Fleet regularly cruises these waters to ensure freedom of navigation for all nations, according to the U.S. Navy. (Beijing contends that the presence of American military ships, particularly patrols near Chinese-controlled bases, inflames tensions.) And security pacts bind the American military to several Asian countries. The Philippines, which was once an American colony, is tied to the United States in a mutual defense treaty that Vice President Kamala Harris said last year would extend to “an armed attack on the Philippine armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the South China Sea.”

This month, U.S. and Philippine warships sailed together in the South China Sea, and the two navies plan a joint patrol later this year.

American support has not always been so full-throated. In 2012, Chinese vessels occupied Scarborough Shoal, off the coast of the Philippines’ most populous island, even after the United States thought it had brokered a deal for both the Philippines and China to withdraw from the reef to cool tensions. Despite the Chinese incursion, American forces did not defend the shoal. Chinese boats have essentially controlled Scarborough ever since.

Around the same time, China began constructing what it said were “typhoon shelters” for fishermen on several South China Sea reefs it controlled. Then Chinese dredgers began piling sand on the atolls. Airstrips and barracks appeared. In 2015, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, stood in the White House Rose Garden and said that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the Spratlys, despite satellite evidence that China was doing just that.

“The U.S. response was pretty much limited to statements that they opposed it, but not much more,” said M. Taylor Fravel, the director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of books on China’s defense strategy and territorial disputes, noting that the development of the P.L.A.’s South China Sea military bases was done in three phases from 2014-2016. “It’s reasonable to speculate that a much harder response to the first wave would have prevented the next two waves.”

The 2016 tribunal ruling that dismissed China’s “historical claims” over most of the South China Sea came just as the Philippines was ushering in a new president, Rodrigo Duterte, who made close ties with China a signature of his six years in power. Mr. Duterte ignored the tribunal ruling, even though it favored his country. Since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office last year, his administration has spoken out against the Chinese presence in the South China Sea. Mr. Marcos has also granted the United States access to a handful of military bases on Philippine soil and is allowing for the building of others.

After we left Second Thomas Shoal, we sailed toward the Philippine island of Palawan, home to nearly a million people. Green hills rose on the horizon as we neared Sabina Shoal, a rich fishing ground for centuries. In recent years, the Chinese have placed buoys here. The Philippine coast guard has removed them.

Right on Sabina Shoal, where delicate coral once thrived, we saw boats arranged in a defensive formation. Ropes tied some of the vessels together. Chinese flags flew. Men bantered over the radio in a southern Chinese dialect. No fishing nets were in evidence.

China has said that such trawlers are commercial fishing vessels, and a Chinese appetite for seafood has created the world’s largest fishing fleet. But these South China Sea boats, experts say, rarely fish. Instead, they act as a maritime militia, swarming contested waters and unoccupied reefs for days or even months. They have steel hulls and advanced satellites, and some have rammed smaller Southeast Asian fishing boats. If a storm descends, they shelter at Chinese naval bases, like those built on Mischief, Fiery Cross and Subi reefs, satellite imagery shows.

We could see empty Chinese instant noodle packets floating in the water. We heard the Philippine coast guard over the radio, urging the Chinese boats to leave Sabina. There was no response. The Philippine entreaties faded.

Today's Tweext

Part of what angers me so much about this age is how utterly puerile the villains are…Musk, Trump? These guys would get laughed out of any room full of serious men at any point in history that didn’t involve social media. A digital menace. Binary & banal. We can stop them.🙏

— NoelCaslerComedy🌙 (@caslernoel) September 23, 2023

Cognitive Deficit

... ain't what it used to be (?)

Because Of Course

The Anti-Truth Gang is vehemently opposed to efforts (being made by normal people) to show the world what a collection of thuggish assholes they are.

"In a word, they're scum - with my apologies to scum." --George Conley

Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks

An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. Physicians told The Post that they had planned to use the grants to fund projects on noncontroversial topics such as nutritional guidelines and not just politically charged issues such as vaccinations that have been the focus of the conservative allegations.

NIH officials sent a memo in July to some employees, warning them not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.

“If the question relates in any way to misinformation or disinformation, please do not respond,” read the guidance email, sent in July after a Louisiana judge blocked many federal agencies from communicating with social media companies. NIH declined to comment on whether the guidance was lifted in light of a September appeals court ruling, which significantly narrowed the initial court order.

“In the name of protecting free speech, the scientific community is not allowed to speak,” said Dean Schillinger, a health communication scientist who planned to apply to the NIH program to collaborate with a Tagalog-language newspaper to share accurate health information with Filipinos. “Science is being halted in its tracks.”

Academics and government scientists say the campaign also is successfully throttling the years-long effort to study online falsehoods, which grew after Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election caught both social media sites and politicians unawares.

Interviews with more than two dozen professors, government officials, physicians, nonprofits and research funders, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their internal deliberations freely, describe an escalating campaign emerging as online propaganda is rising.

Social media platforms have pulled back on moderating content even as evidence mounts that Russia and China have intensified covert influence campaigns; next week, the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard will release a study that found 12 major media accounts from Russia, China and Iran saw the number of likes and reposts on X nearly double after Musk removed labels calling them government-affiliated. Advances in generative artificial intelligence have opened the door to potential widespread voter manipulation. Meanwhile, public health officials are grappling with medical misinformation, as the United States heads into the fall and winter virus season.

Conservatives have long complained that social media platforms stifle their views, but the efforts to limit moderation have intensified in the past year.

The most high-profile effort, a lawsuit known as Missouri v. Biden, is now before the Supreme Court, where the Biden administration seeks to have the high court block a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that found the White House, FBI and top federal health officials likely violated the First Amendment by improperly influencing tech companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on the coronavirus and elections. That ruling was narrower than a district court’s finding that also barred government officials from working with academic groups, including the Stanford Internet Observatory. But the Biden Justice Department argues the injunction still contradicts certain First Amendment principles, including that the president is entitled to use his bully pulpit to persuade American companies “to act in ways that the President believes would advance the public interest.”

“The university is deeply concerned about ongoing efforts to chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research in the areas of misinformation — both at Stanford and across academia,” Stanford Assistant Vice President Dee Mostofi told The Post. “Stanford believes strongly in academic freedom and the right of the faculty to choose the research they wish to pursue. The Stanford Internet Observatory is continuing its critical research on the important problem of misinformation.”

Jordan has issued subpoenas and demands for researchers’ communications with the government and social media platforms as part of a larger congressional probe into the Biden administration’s alleged collusion with Big Tech.

“This effort is clearly intended to deter researchers from pursuing these studies and penalize them for their findings,” Jen Jones, the program director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that promotes scientific research, said in a statement.

Disinformation scholars, many of whom tracked both covid-19 and 2020 election-rigging conspiracies, also have faced an onslaught of public records requests and lawsuits from conservative sympathizers echoing Jordan’s probe. Billionaire Elon Musk’s X has sued a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing it of improperly accessing large amounts of data through someone else’s license — a practice that researchers say is common. Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation is representing the founder of the conspiracy-spreading website, the Gateway Pundit, in a May lawsuit alleging researchers at Stanford, the University of Washington and other organizations conspired with the government to restrict speech. The case is ongoing.

Nadgey Louis-Charles, a spokeswoman for the House Judiciary Committee that Jordan chairs, said the Jordan-led investigation is focused on “the federal government’s involvement in speech censorship, and the investigation’s purpose is to inform legislative solutions for how to protect free speech.”

“The Committee sends letters only to entities with a connection to the federal government in the context of moderating speech online,” she said. “No entity receives a letter from the Committee without a written explanation of the entity’s connection to the federal government.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) in a statement said the federal government “silenced” information because “it didn’t fit their narrative.”

“Missouri v. Biden is the most important First Amendment case in a generation, which is why we’re taking it to the nation’s highest court,” he said.

Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation

‘A serious threat to the integrity of science’

In September 2022, an NIH council greenlit a $150 million program to fund research on how to best communicate health issues to the public. Administrators had planned the initiative for months, convening a strategy workshop with top tech and advertising executives, academics, faith leaders and physicians.

“We know there’s a lot of inaccurate health information out there,” said Bill Klein, the associate director of the National Cancer Institute’s Behavioral Research Program at a meeting approving the program. He showed a slide of headlines about how online misinformation hampered the response to the covid-19 pandemic, as well as other public health issues, including gun violence and HIV treatment.

The program was intended to address topics vulnerable to online rumors, including nutrition, tobacco, mental health and cancer screenings such as mammograms, according to three people who attended a planning workshop.

Yet in early summer 2023, NIH officials contacted some researchers with the news that the grant program had been canceled. NIH appended a cryptic notice to its website in June, saying the program was on “pause” so that the agency could “reconsider its scope and aims” amid a heated regulatory environment.

Schillinger and Rich Barron, the CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine, warned that the decision posed “a serious threat to the integrity of science and to its successful translation” in a July article in the JAMA. In an interview with The Post, Barron noted that there are limited sources of funding for health misinformation research.

A nonprofit fights GOP allegations that it supported a ‘censorship regime’

NIH declined requests for an interview about the decision to halt the program, but spokesperson Renate Myles confirmed in an email that the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit played into the decision. Myles said a number of other lawsuits played a role but declined to name them.

Myles said the litigation was just one factor and that budgetary projections and consideration of ongoing work also contributed to the decision. She said that an initial approval of a concept does not guarantee it will be funded and that NIH currently funds health communication research. The agency does not officially release numbers about funding in the area, but she said a working group estimated that NIH spent $760 million over five years.

“NIH recognizes the critical importance of health communications science in building trust in public health information and continues to fund this important area of research,” she said.

NIH and other public health agencies have also sought to limit their employees’ communications with social media platforms amid the litigation, according to internal agency emails viewed by The Post that were sent in July after a Louisiana judge blocked many federal agencies from communicating with social media companies.

In one instance, an NIH communications official told some employees not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies — even if they impersonated government health officials or encouraged self-harm, according to a July email viewed by The Post. The employees were told they could not respond to questions about a disease area or clinical trial if it did “relate in any way to misinformation or disinformation.”

The Election Integrity Partnership may also curtail its scope following lawsuits questioning the validity of its work, including the Missouri v. Biden case.

Led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the coalition of researchers was formed in the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign to alert tech companies in real time about viral election-related conspiracies on their platforms. The posts, for example, falsely claimed Dominion Voting Systems’ software switched votes in favor of President Biden, an allegation that also was at the center of a defamation case that Fox News settled for $787 million.

In March 2021, the group released a nearly 300-page report documenting how false election fraud claims rippled across the internet, coalescing into the #StopTheSteal movement that fomented the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. In its final report, the coalition noted that Meta, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and YouTube labeled, removed or suppressed just over a third of the posts the researchers flagged.

But by 2022, the partnership was engulfed in controversy. Right-wing media outlets, advocacy groups and influencers such as the Foundation for Freedom Online, Just the News and far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec argued that the Election Integrity Partnership was part of a coalition with government and industry working to censor Americans’ speech online. Jordan has sent several legal demands to see the coalition’s internal communications with the government and social media platforms and hauled them into Congress to testify about their work.

Louis-Charles, the Judiciary Committee spokeswoman, said in a statement that the universities involved with EIP “played a unique role in the censorship industrial complex given their extensive, direct contacts with federal government agencies.”

Election deniers take aim at group that helps states maintain voter rolls

The probe prompted members of the Election Integrity Partnership to reevaluate their participation in the coalition altogether. Stanford Internet Observatory founder Alex Stamos, whose group helps lead the coalition, told Jordan’s staff earlier this year that he would have to talk with Stanford’s leadership about the university’s continued involvement, according to a partial transcript filed in court.

“Since this investigation has cost the university now approaching seven [figure] legal fees, it’s been pretty successful I think in discouraging us from making it worthwhile for us to do a study in 2024,” Stamos said.

Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, declined to elaborate on specific plans to monitor the upcoming presidential race but said her group aims to put together a “similar coalition … to rapidly address harmful false rumors about the 2024 election.”

Another participant in the Election Integrity Partnership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the group was “looking at ways to do our work completely in the open” to avoid allegations that direct communications with the platforms are a part of a censorship apparatus.

The researchers have been encouraged by the recent ruling in the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in the Missouri v. Biden litigation, which struck down a July 4 injunction that barred government officials from collaborating or coordinating with the Election Integrity Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory and other similar groups.

‘Naughty & Nice List’

In recent weeks, Jordan has sent a new round of record requests to at least two recipients of grants from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The program, one of many run by the independent agency to promote research, awards funding to groups creating tools or techniques to mitigate misinformation, such as software for journalists to identify misinformation trending online.

George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley and the conservative advocacy group The Foundation for Freedom Online wrote separate reports portraying the program as an effort by the Biden administration to censor or blacklist American citizens online. Afterward, Jordan requested grant recipients’ communications with the White House, technology companies and government agencies, according to two of the people.

Turley said in a statement that “free speech is a core value of higher education” and that he is concerned that universities are using partnerships with the government to silence some users.

“If universities are supporting efforts to regulate or censor speech, there should be both clarity and transparency on this relationship. In past years, academics have demanded such transparency in other areas of partnership with the government, including military research,” Turley said. “Free speech values should be of equal concern to every institution of higher learning.”

Some NSF grant recipients who have not received requests from Jordan’s committee say they are facing a barrage of online threats over their work, which has prompted some to buy services that make it harder to find their addresses, such as DeleteMe.

Hacks/Hackers, a nonprofit coalition of journalists and technologists, received an NSF grant to develop tools to help people share accurate information about controversial topics, such as vaccine efficacy. The group has faced political scrutiny from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who tweeted they had received $5 million from President Biden to create “a naughty & nice list to police the content posted by family & friends” with her usual slogan “MakeEmSqueal.”

Trump’s ‘big lie’ fueled a new generation of social media influencers

Connie Moon Sehat, a researcher-at-large for the group, said she and other researchers have faced online attacks including threats to reveal personal information and veiled death threats. She says members of her team are at times under high levels of stress and having ongoing conversations about how to elevate accurate information on social media, as some platforms become increasingly toxic.

“We are double- and triple-checking what we write, above what we used to, to try to communicate our good intentions — in the face of efforts that willfully misconstrue our work and desire to serve the public,” Sehat said. “And I worry more broadly that we researchers may self-censor our inquiry, or that some will drop out altogether, to stay safe.”

As Jordan’s probe expands, some university lawyers have urged academics to hold on to their records and be prepared to receive subpoenas from the committee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The probe has sparked a wave of fear among university academics, prompting several to take a lower profile to avoid the scrutiny. Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University, recently left her role as chief technologist at the Justice Department’s antitrust division. She said she tailored her job search to only private universities that are not subject to public records laws.

“I knew that because of the way our field is being attacked that the cost of the work I do is a lot higher at a public institution,” she said. “I just didn’t want to pay that cost, and that’s why I only applied to private universities.”

The left-leaning nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology argued in a Thursday report that the disinformation field is facing a dual threat: Social media platforms have become less responsive to concerns from researchers about misinformation while the political and regulatory backlash against the scholarship has eroded the relationships between academics, nonprofits and industry.

“The more efforts to recast counter-election-disinformation as censorship succeed, the more difficult it will become for governments and others to work with researchers in the field,” wrote the nonprofit, which receives some of its funding from tech corporations, including Google and Meta.

The scrutiny has caught the academic community by surprise, as non-faculty staff and researchers debate how to protect themselves from new legal threats. When Dannagal Young, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, alerted university lawyers that she’d been asked to talk with Democratic congressional staffers about potentially testifying before Jordan’s subcommittee, she felt her preparation was lacking.

While the lawyers were eager to help, according to Young, they spent more time prepping her on how to discuss President Biden’s relationship to the school than they did on what kinds of questions she might be asked on Capitol Hill.

“I don’t think university lawyers are prepared to navigate that kind of politically motivated space,” she said. The University of Delaware didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Many academics, independent scholars and philanthropic funders are discussing how to collectively defend the disinformation research field. One proposal would create a group to gather donations into a central fund to pay for crisis communications and — most critically — legal support if one of them gets sued or subpoenaed in a private case or by Congress. The money could also fund cybersecurity counseling to ward off hackers and stalkers and perhaps physical security as well.

“There is this growing sense that there need to be resources to allow for freedom of thought and academic independence,” said one longtime philanthropy grant maker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

University academics are also mulling ways to rebrand their work to attract less controversy. One leader in a university disinformation research center said scholars have discussed using more generic terms to describe their work such as “information integrity” or “civic participation online.” Those terms “have less of a bite to them,” said a person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on the private discussions. Similar conversations are occurring within public health agencies, another person said.

“This whole area of research has become radioactive,” the person said.

It's Complicated

Geopolitics is a giant life-or-death poker game. There are 195 players, they're all cheating, and they all know they're all cheating.

There's no way that I can keep a lot of it straight, so I have to rely on finding people who know way more than I do. That's not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out who to listen to and who to discount or dismiss altogether.

I've posted at least one of his YouTube commentaries before, and I'm thinking this Peter Zeihan guy is a fair-to-good bet. He talks a good game anyway. We'll see.

Today's Reddit

Ro Khanna - D CA17

1. Ban all PAC and Lobby donations to congressional campaigns
2. Ban members from stock trading and becoming lobbyists
3. Term limits for Congress
4. Term limits for SCOTUS
5. Ethics code for SCOTUS

Please!!
byu/Saltyk917 inBreakingPointsNews

Give the people's government back to the people.

What We're Doin'

All the big-time "critters are wonderful - we need to treat them better" are pissin' in the wind.

And maybe I missed something, but whre the fuck is the Colorado media on this one? Why am I seeing this in LA Times and USA Today, and not in the local papers?

So, yes - some times, humans are a fucking pestilence.

Bear euthanized after intestines blocked by paper towels, food wrappers, other human waste

Colorado Parks and Wildlife authorities euthanized a sick male black bear earlier this month in Telluride after the animal was suffering from "severe intestinal blockage" caused by eating human trash.

The 400-pound bear was showing signs of infection and could not digest food, CPW Area Wildlife Manager Rachel Sralla said a news release. Wildlife authorities founds items such as paper towels, disinfectant wipes and food wrappers in the bear.

“It all comes back to trash, which we talk about too often when it comes to bear conflicts in Colorado. The reason we had to put this bear down was to end its suffering that was caused by eating indigestible trash,” Sralla added.

CPW first received a report of a sick of injured bear near the river trail in Telluride on Sept. 9, the release says. Officers observed the bear and noticed it "acted feverish and had puffy eyes and discharge coming from its eyes and mouth."

Officers also determined the bear likely had severe abdominal pain, as the bear "displayed a humped position while walking and was reluctant to move," according to the release.

The decision to euthanize the bear was based on the behavior and condition of the bear, as well as to prevent the bear from suffering any further, CPW said. Officers conducted a full filed necropsy on the bear.

“The removal of the stomach and intestines showed that the bear was starving due to a plug of paper towels, disinfectant wipes, napkins, parts of plastic sacks and wax paper food wrappers in the pylorus,” said CPW District Wildlife Manager Mark Caddy in the release.

“This plug was accompanied by French fries, green beans, onions and peanuts. The small and large intestines were empty of matter. The intestines were enlarged due to bacteria in the beginning stages of decomposition, but we opened them up in several locations and found no digested food matter,” Caddy added.

“Telluride has an ordinance to address bear in trash issues,” Sralla said. “We need the community to follow that ordinance to be a better neighbor to our bears and prevent this type of incident from happening again.”

According to Telluride Municipal Code 7.04.230 and 7.12.030, "any refuse container that contains refuse that is attractive to bears or other wildlife shall be secured with a locking mechanism except when refuse is being deposited."

Failure to comply with the ordinance can result in a fine of $250 for the first offense and $500 for the second offense. A third offense will result in a summons to appear in municipal court, according to the news release.