Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Sixty Years Ago, the U.S. Exploded A Nuclear Bomb in Outer Space
by James Felton
July12, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) On July 9, 1962, crowds gathered on the beaches of Honolulu, Hawaii, and watched as the US detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space.

Known as Starfish Prime, the explosion was part of a series of high-altitude nuclear tests known somewhat innocuously as "Operation Fishbowl". Five nuclear devices were set off during the tests, with Starfish being the largest at approximately 1.4 megatons (the equivalent in terms of energy discharge of 1.4 million tons of TNT being detonated all at once).

After the bomb was detonated some 400 kilometers (249 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, and auroras were seen across the sky as electronics began to fail.

"At Kwaialein, 1400 miles to the west, a dense overcast extended the length of the eastern horizon to a height of 5 or 8 degrees," one eyewitness of the event said, as recorded in a military report.

"At 0900 RC a brilliant white flash burned through the clouds rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast. From its surface extruded great white fingers, resembling cirro-stratus clouds, which rose to 40 degrees above the horizon in sweeping arcs turning downward toward the poles and disappearing in seconds to be replaced by spectacular concentric cirrus like rings moving out from the blast at tremendous initial velocity, finally stopping when the outermost ring was 50 degrees overhead. "
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/60-years-ag ... ace-64400

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That is not the Sun.
Image credit: US Gov/Public domain
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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caltrek wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 10:26 pm Sixty Years Ago, the U.S. Exploded A Nuclear Bomb in Outer Space
by James Felton
July12, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) On July 9, 1962, crowds gathered on the beaches of Honolulu, Hawaii, and watched as the US detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space.

Known as Starfish Prime, the explosion was part of a series of high-altitude nuclear tests known somewhat innocuously as "Operation Fishbowl". Five nuclear devices were set off during the tests, with Starfish being the largest at approximately 1.4 megatons (the equivalent in terms of energy discharge of 1.4 million tons of TNT being detonated all at once).

After the bomb was detonated some 400 kilometers (249 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, and auroras were seen across the sky as electronics began to fail.

"At Kwaialein, 1400 miles to the west, a dense overcast extended the length of the eastern horizon to a height of 5 or 8 degrees," one eyewitness of the event said, as recorded in a military report.

"At 0900 RC a brilliant white flash burned through the clouds rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast. From its surface extruded great white fingers, resembling cirro-stratus clouds, which rose to 40 degrees above the horizon in sweeping arcs turning downward toward the poles and disappearing in seconds to be replaced by spectacular concentric cirrus like rings moving out from the blast at tremendous initial velocity, finally stopping when the outermost ring was 50 degrees overhead. "
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/60-years-ag ... ace-64400

Image
That is not the Sun.
Image credit: US Gov/Public domain
Its beautiful when pics like these pop out of the archives.
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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India Turns 75: Fast Facts About the Unusual Constitution Guiding the World’s Most Populous Democracy
by Deepa Das Acevedo
August 2022

Introduction:
(The Conversation) India will celebrate its 75th birthday on Aug. 15, 2022.

Its independence from British colonial rule followed a complex process, including Partition: the division of India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Partition displaced tens of millions of people and caused loss of life and property that remains in living memory for many.

India’s future remained unresolved for over two years after Partition. While the country attained its independence on Aug. 15, 1947, it only became a fully sovereign republic with its own head of state on Jan. 26, 1950.

Between those dates, the 299 men and women of India’s Constituent Assembly worked to imagine their emerging country and to inscribe their vision and foundational legal principles in a national constitution. The outcome of their efforts is a remarkable document that remains a source of both inspiration and contention today.
In addition to further describing India’s Constitution, the remainder of the article also makes interesting comparisons with the constitutions of other countries.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/india-turn ... cy-188096
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Voyager 2 Celebrates 45 Years Exploring Edge of Solar System and Beyond
by Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
August 19, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) On August 20, 1977, Voyager 2 was launched into space. Its twin, Voyager 1, would be launched 16 days later. Together, they’d bring a new understanding of the gas giant planets in the Solar system and would become the first human-made objects to leave the heliosphere behind and enter interstellar space. Forty-Five years on, the Voyager program is NASA's longest-lived mission, a testament to the spirit of exploration, and an extraordinary scientific and technical success.

The tech part of the mission is one of the most mind-blowing aspects when we think about it. The technology on the Voyager probes is ancient. They record data on an eight-track tape player. The amount of memory they can store is about 3 million times less than your standard modern cellphones. And, speaking of cell phones, you can forget good signal in interstellar space: The spacecraft transmit data roughly 38,000 times slower than 5G.

That connection comes via NASA’s Deep Space Network and Voyager 2 can only be contacted from an antenna outside Canberra in Australia. There was a bit of apprehension when, in 2020, the antenna had to be off for many months to get refurbished, but the spacecraft was there to say hello again once contact was re-established.
Further extracts:

Voyager 1 is currently 23.5 billion kilometers (14.6 billion miles) from Earth. Voyager 2, despite launching earlier, was on a longer and slower orbit that allowed it to visit Uranus and Neptune, so it is a bit behind, currently at 19.5 billion kilometers (12.1 billion miles) from Earth. It is truly extraordinary how the two spacecraft continue to do cutting-edge science.

Many of the onboard systems had to be switched off as the nuclear power of the spacecraft is steadily reducing, but as long as it keeps on the essential stuff on, the mission will continue. The spacecraft each carry a Golden Record, which includes images and natural sounds from Earth as well as music.
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/voyager-2-c ... ond-64962
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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The Curry Trap: How a Continent’s Worth of Food Got Mashed Into One Word
by Anmol Irfan
September – October Issue of Mother Jones

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) In August 2021, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten penned a piece that mentioned his profound dislike for Indian food, which according to him was defined by a single spice: “curry.” The response was immediate and fierce; Mindy Kaling questioned the article’s point while Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi called it ignorant and racist. The same summer, BuzzFeed reposted a video by food vlogger Chaheti Bansal calling for the term “Indian curry” to be canceled altogether. “There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100 km,” Bansal asserted, “and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularized by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes.”

Of course, as Weingarten was schooled, “curry” is not a single spice: While the curry leaf is used as an ingredient in some South Asian dishes, curry powder is a varying mixture of spices, one that is rarely found in Indian households. According to Top Chef contestant and cooking teacher Amirah Islam, the word “curry” may have derived from the Tamil word “kari,” which means spiced sauce. When the Portuguese invaded India in the 15th century, they began using the word “carree” to describe broths poured over rice.

Two centuries later, British colonizers began reworking local dishes to their palates and referring to all of them as curries. Indian merchants capitalized on the situation by commercializing curry powder and selling it to the British, who began using it in their versions of Indian dishes. Later, curry became linked to harmful stereotypes, like the term “curry-muncher.”

“Curry is a term that became popularized via colonialism,” says Anita Mannur, author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and a professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. “If colonialism is a system of power, part of that power comes from the ability to name, simplify, and take away complexity. So shorthands enter lexicons—and curry is one of those.”

Since the early 1900s, Punjabi people have made up a large share of South Asian immigrants into the United States, and North Indian cuisine—or Mughlai cuisine, as it is known in India—has dominated the South Asian food scene in the West.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2022/ ... diaspora/
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Remembering One of Humanity’s Worst Catastrophe’s—77 Years On
by John Steinbach
August 21, 2022

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 77 years ago, marked the crucial turning point in the history of the 20th century. By the end of World War II, Europe, the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire lay in ruins, and the United States was in a position of unprecedented power with sole possession of the Bomb.

Unfortunately, the U.S. used this power to launch the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and initiated a nuclear build-up that has impoverished the entire world and brought us to the brink of nuclear oblivion. The question remains: Why did the U.S. government decide to initiate the Cold War with the atomic bombings instead of pursuing a course of diplomacy and negotiated settlement?

There is broad consensus among serious historians that the atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war with Japan. By 1945 Japan was a destroyed and starving nation desperately seeking a negotiated surrender and the Soviet Union was preparing to enter the Pacific war in early August, eliminating the need for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. For the Truman administration, the use of the Bomb served two purposes: a demonstration of the terrible power of the split atom to be held against the entire world, and a means to deny the Soviet Union a major role in the post-war settlement.

On August 6 at 8:15 a.m. (August 5, 7:15 p.m. EDT), Hiroshima was annihilated in a flash by a single uranium bomb. Three days later, on August 9, and one day after the Soviets entered the Pacific war, Nagasaki was likewise eradicated by a plutonium bomb. More than 200,000 Japanese civilians and Korean laborers were slaughtered unnecessarily to expedite the promotion of U.S. foreign policy throughout the world.

But to truly understand the decision to use the Bomb and initiate the Cold War, it is crucial to understand who benefited the most. The big winners were the claque of corporations which stood to “make a killing” if the U.S. were to initiate a massive nuclear build-up and launch a Cold War.
Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/author/johnsteinbach/
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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It Didn’t Start With Rump: the Decades Long Saga of How the republican party Went Psychotic
by David Corn
September October 2022 Issue

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) In May, during an Aspen Institute conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the audience, “I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment…This country needs a strong Republican Party. And we do. Not a cult. But a strong Republican Party.” Her comments echoed a sentiment that Joe Biden had expressed during the 2020 campaign: If Donald Trump were out of the White House, the GOP would return to normal and be amenable to forging deals and legislative compromises.

Both Pelosi and Biden have bolstered the notion that the current GOP, with its cultlike embrace of Trump and his Big Lie, and its acceptance of the fringiest players, is a break from the past. But was the GOP’s complete surrender to Trumpism an aberration? Or was the party long sliding toward this point? About a year ago, I set out to explore the history of the Republican Party, with this question in mind. What I found was not an exception, but a pattern. Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections. Trump assembling white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and others who formed a violent terrorist mob on January 6 is only the most flagrant manifestation of the tried-and-true GOP tactic to court kooks and bigots. It’s an ugly and shameful history that has led the Party of Lincoln, founded in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery, to the Party of Trump, which capitalizes on racism and assaults democracy.

In my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, I lay out this sordid history in great detail. But even a highlight reel makes it clear that the GOP has bowed to, depended on, and promoted far-right extremists and conspiracists for the past 70 years. Trumpism is the continuation, not a new version, of Republican politics.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... nt-crazy/
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