Category: Veterans – Patriotism

‘It could happen tomorrow’: Experts know disaster upon disaster looms for West Coast

USA Today

‘It could happen tomorrow’: Experts know disaster upon disaster looms for West Coast

Joel Shannon, USA TODAY – December 16, 2022

Brown pelicans fly in front of the San Francisco skyline Aug 17, 2018.
Brown pelicans fly in front of the San Francisco skyline Aug 17, 2018.

It’s the elevators that worry earthquake engineering expert Keith Porter the most.

Scientists say a massive quake could strike the San Francisco Bay Area at any moment. And when it does, the city can expect to be slammed with a force equal to hundreds of atomic bombs.

Porter said the shaking will quickly cut off power in many areas. That means unsuspecting people will be trapped between floors in elevators without backup power. At peak commute times, the number of those trapped could be in the thousands.

To escape, the survivors of the initial quake will need the help of firefighters with specialized training and tools.

But their rescuers won’t come – at least not right away. Firefighters will be battling infernos that could outnumber the region’s fire engines.

Running water will be in short supply. Cellphone service may not work at all. The aftershocks will keep coming.

And the electricity could remain off for weeks.

“That means people are dead in those elevators,” Porter said.

‘Problems on the horizon’

The situation Porter described comes from his work on the HayWired Scenario, a detailed look at the cascading calamities that will occur when a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area’s Hayward Fault, including the possibility of widespread power outages that will strand elevators.

The disaster remains theoretical for now. But the United States Geological Survey estimates a 51% chance that a quake as big as the one described in HayWired will occur in the region within three decades.

It’s one of several West Coast disasters so likely that researchers have prepared painstakingly detailed scenarios in an attempt to ready themselves.

‘SUPERIONIC’: Scientists discover the Earth’s inner core isn’t solid or liquid

The experts who worked on the projects are highly confident the West Coast could at any moment face disasters with the destructive power to kill hundreds or thousands of people and forever change the lives of millions more. They also say there’s more that can be done to keep individuals – and society – safer.

“We’re trying to have an earthquake without having one,” Anne Wein told USA TODAY. Wein is a USGS researcher who co-leads the HayWired earthquake scenario and has worked on several other similar projects.

Such disaster scenarios are massive undertakings that bring together experts from various fields who otherwise would have little reason to work together – seismologists, engineers, emergency responders and social scientists.

That’s important because “it’s difficult to make new relationships in a crisis,” Wein said.

Similar projects aimed at simulating a future disaster have turned out to be hauntingly accurate.

The Hurricane Pam scenario foretold many of the devastating consequences of a major hurricane striking New Orleans well before Hurricane Katrina hit the city.

More recently, in 2017, the authors of “The SPARS Pandemic” called their disaster scenario “futuristic.” But now the project now reads like a prophecy of COVID-19. Johns Hopkins University even issued a statement saying the 89-page document was not intended as a prediction of COVID-19.

“The SPARS Pandemic” imagined a future where a deadly novel coronavirus spread around the world, often without symptoms, as disinformation and vaccine hesitancy constantly confounded experts’ efforts to keep people safe.

The “SPARS scenario, which is fiction, was meant to give public health communicators a leg up … Think through problems on the horizon,” author Monica Schoch-Spana told USA TODAY.

At the time that SPARS was written, a global pandemic was thought of in much the same way experts currently describe the HayWired earthquake: an imminent catastrophe that could arrive at any time.

‘It could happen tomorrow’

Disaster scenario researchers each have their own way of describing how likely the apocalyptic futures they foresee are.

“The probability (of) this earthquake is 100%, if you give me enough time,” seismologist Lucy Jones will often say.

Earthquakes occurring along major faults are a certainty, but scientists can’t predict exactly when earthquakes will happen – the underground forces that create them are too random and chaotic. But researchers know a lot about what will happen once the earth begins to shake.

Earthquakes like HayWired are “worth planning for,” Porter said. Because “it could happen tomorrow.”

“We don’t know when,” Porter said. But “it will happen.”

Wein says we’re “overdue for preparedness.” You might say we’re also overdue for a major West Coast disaster.

The kind of earthquake described in HayWired historically occurs every 100-220 years. And it’s been more than 153 years since the last one.

Farther south in California, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how at risk Los Angeles is for The Big One – the infamous theoretical earthquake along the San Andreas fault that will devastate the city. But a massive magnitude 7.5 earthquake has about a 1 in 3 chance of striking the Los Angeles area in the next 30 years, the United States Geological Survey estimates.

A 2008 scenario said a magnitude 7.8 quake could cause nearly 2,000 deaths and more than $200 billion in economic losses. Big quakes in Los Angeles are particularly devastating because the soil holding up the city will turn into a “bowl of jelly,” according to a post published by catastrophe modeling company Temblor.

Another scenario warns that a stretch of coast in Oregon and Washington state is capable of producing an earthquake much more powerful than the ones California is bracing for. Parts of coastline would suddenly drop 6 feet, shattering critical bridges, destroying undersea communication cables and producing a tsunami.

Thousands are expected to die, but local leaders are considering projects that could give coastal residents a better chance at survival.

It too “could happen at any time,” the scenario says.

Earthquake scenarios often focus on major coastal cities, but West Coast residents farther inland also have yet another disaster to brace for.

“Megastorms are California’s other Big One,” the ARkStorm scenario says. It warns of a statewide flood that will cause more than a million evacuations and devastate California’s agriculture.

Massive storms that dump rain on California for weeks on end historically happen every few hundred years. The last one hit around the time of the Civil War, when weeks of rain turned portions of the state “into an inland sea.”

‘Decades to rebuild’

Whether the next disaster to strike the West Coast is a flood, an earthquake or something else, scenario experts warn that the impacts will reverberate for years or longer.

“It takes decades to rebuild,” Wein said. “You have to think about a decade at least.”

A major West Coast earthquake isn’t just damaged buildings and cracked roads.

It’s weeks or months without running water in areas with millions of people. It’s mass migrations away from ruined communities. It’s thousands of uninhabitable homes.

Depending on the scenario, thousands of people are expected to die. Hundreds of thousands more could be left without shelter. And those impacts will be a disproportionately felt.

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‘SURREAL’: Wildfire burning near iconic California coastal highway prompts evacuations

California already has a housing and homelessness crisis, and Nnenia Campbell said the next disaster is set to magnify inequalities. Campbell is the deputy director of the William Averette Anderson Fund, which works to mitigate disasters for minority communities.

Campbell doesn’t talk about “natural disasters” because there’s nothing natural about the way a major earthquake will harm vulnerable communities more than wealthy ones.

Human decisions such as redlining have led to many of the inequities in our society, she said. But humans can make decisions that will help make the response to the next disaster more equitable.

Many of those choices need to be made by local leaders and emergency management planners. Investing in infrastructure programs that will make homes in minority communities less vulnerable to earthquakes. Understanding how important a library is to unhoused people. Making sure all schools are built to withstand a disaster. Keeping public spaces open, even during an emergency.

But individuals can make a difference as well, Campbell said. You can complete training that will prepare you to help your community in the event of an emergency. Or you can join a mutual aid network, a group where community members work together to help each other.

Community support is a common theme among disaster experts: One of the best ways to prepare is to know and care about your neighbors.

If everyone only looks out for themselves in the next disaster, “we are going to have social breakdown,” Jones said.

What you can do

Experts acknowledge you’ll want to make sure you and your family are safe before being able to help others. Fortunately, many disaster preparedness precautions are inexpensive and will help in a wide range of emergency situations.

Be prepared to have your access to electricity or water cut off for days or weeks.

For electricity, you’ll at least want a flashlight and a way to charge your phone.

While cell service will be jammed immediately after a major earthquake, communications will likely slowly come back online faster than other services, Wein said. (And when trying to use your phone, text – don’t call. In a disaster, text messages are more reliable and strain cell networks less.)

To power your phone, you can cheaply buy a combination weather radio, flashlight and hand-crank charger to keep your cell running even without power for days.

A cash reserve is good to have, too, Jones said. You’ll want to be able to buy things, even if your credit card doesn’t work for a time.

Preparing for earthquakes specifically is important along the West Coast, too, experts said. Simple things like securing bookshelves can save lives. Downloading an early warning app can give you precious moments to protect yourself in the event of a big quake. Buying earthquake insurance can protect homeowners. And taking part in a yearly drill can help remind you about other easy steps you can take to prepare.

There’s even more you could do to ready yourself for a catastrophe, but many disaster experts are hesitant to rely on individuals’ ability to prepare themselves.

Just as health experts have begged Americans to use masks and vaccines to help keep others safe during the pandemic, disaster scenario experts believe community members will need to look out for one another when the next disaster strikes.

Telling people to prepare as if “nobody is coming to help you” is a self-fulfilling prophesy, Jones said.

For now, policymakers hold the real power in how prepared society will be for the next disaster. And there are many problems to fix, according to Porter, including upgrading city plumbing, because many aging and brittle water pipes will shatter in a major earthquake, cutting off water to communities for weeks or months.

“Shake it, and it breaks,” Porter said.

Getting ready for the next big earthquake means mundane improvements like even stricter building codes, emergency water supply systems for firefighters and retrofitting elevators with emergency power.

The elevator change could prevent thousands of people from being trapped when the big San Francisco earthquake comes.

“A lot of that suffering can be avoided,” Porter said.

Woman With Dementia at 59 Shares the Symptoms Her Doctors Dismissed as Stress

Best Life

Woman With Dementia at 59 Shares the Symptoms Her Doctors Dismissed as Stress

Zachary Mack – December 15, 2022

The first signs of age-related illness such as cognitive decline can be challenging to spot, unlike cardiovascular disease or other primarily physical ailments such as diabetes. But the problem can be particularly challenging to identify when it starts progressing at a younger age, especially as it can often get mistaken for other issues. Unfortunately, such was the case for one 59-year-old woman in the U.K. who was recently diagnosed with dementia after doctors first dismissed her symptoms as stress. Read on to see how she first noticed the condition and what she’s doing about it now.

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A woman diagnosed with dementia in her 50s says doctors first dismissed her symptoms as stress.

The pressures of everyday life can sometimes take a toll on our mental clarity and well-being. But for Jude Thorp, a 59-year-old mother of two living in Oxford, England, it became clear that something was seriously wrong when she first started noticing a change in her abilities while on the job, The Independent reports.

After years of experience in a career in theater, Thorp realized she had more difficulty completing simple tasks or focusing on her work. She soon noticed she was also repeating questions, forgetting important conversations, feeling fatigued, and having difficulty coming up with the right words during conversations.

Despite the changes, Thorp didn’t seek medical attention until her wife convinced her to book an appointment with a specialist in November 2016. But upon examination, she said her doctors quickly wrote her symptoms off as the result of stress and said “she had too much going on” in her life.

“Imagine, you know, just being told that you’re a bit daft,” she told The Independent, describing it as a “humiliating” experience. “That was my first time going to the doctors for something serious in my life, and it was horrendous, and afterward they said there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Thorp was eventually diagnosed with young-onset dementia.

Despite her first experiences, Thorp says she continued to visit different specialists over the following years. But it wasn’t until doctors performed a lumbar puncture and she underwent an MRI scan that she finally received a diagnosis of early-onset dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease in January 2021, The Independent reports.

According to the Mayo Clinic, young-onset dementia is the term used to describe anyone under the age of 65 who begins showing signs of the condition. In the case of Alzheimer’s, the health organization says that five to six percent of people with the disease develop it in middle age—meaning that there could be anywhere between 300,000 to 360,000 people in the U.S. living with the condition.

Doctors say early-onset dementia has multiple causes but can be difficult to spot or diagnose.

Early-onset dementia can be caused by a number of conditions, including frontotemporal dementia (FTD), vascular dementia, or Lewy body dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Society. However, the foundation says atypical Alzheimer’s disease is the most likely cause for anyone who begins experiencing their first symptoms between the ages of 30 and 60.

Different forms of the condition can manifest with varying sets of signs. They include posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), which can make it difficult to interpret visual information such as reading a sentence or gauging distances; logopenic aphasia, which can make it hard to find the right words while speaking or taking long pauses mid-sentence; and dysexecutive Alzheimer’s disease that can make planning more difficult and lead to inappropriate behavior in social situations, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify these problems as early-onset dementia in middle-aged people. “Complaints about brain fog in young patients are very common and are mostly benign,” David S. Knopman, MD, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told The New York Times in an interview. “It’s hard to know when they’re not attributable to stress, depression, or anxiety or the result of normal aging. Even neurologists infrequently see patients with young-onset dementia.”

Getting the correct diagnosis can help you treat and manage early-onset dementia.
At doctors appointment physician shows to patient shape of brain with focus on hand with organ. Scene explaining patient causes and localization of diseases of brain, nerves and nervous system
At doctors appointment physician shows to patient shape of brain with focus on hand with organ. Scene explaining patient causes and localization of diseases of brain, nerves and nervous system

Despite the challenges in identifying it, correctly diagnosing early-onset dementia can be absolutely vital. Besides being able to rule out any other treatable causes for the symptoms, knowing what they’re facing can help someone get the appropriate care and planning started so they can focus on improving their quality of life, according to the Mayo Clinic.

For Thorp, the diagnosis first felt like a heavy burden—especially when she had to break the news to her two young daughters. But she said the process ultimately brought her to a better place. “You have to mourn, you have to be cross or angry or upset. I mean, that’s part of grieving for something, isn’t it? But for me, I’m so lucky that I’ve got this diagnosis because I can still live well with it,” she told The Independent.

Since identifying her dementia, Thorp has been put in touch with support groups and found new fulfillment in charity work and outreach about the disease. “I think accepting a diagnosis of anything allows you to blossom in a way. And I think it’s really important that life can be rich,” she said. “I think it’s about living your best life and doing what you can.”

DeSantis blasted for ‘Orwellian’ vaccine investigation

Yahoo! News

DeSantis blasted for ‘Orwellian’ vaccine investigation

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – December 15, 2022

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at a news conference in Miami.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference in Miami on Dec. 1. (Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire)

One day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a push to investigate alleged harms caused by coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, criticized the move as a pointless exercise that would only undermine public confidence in efforts to boost and maintain protection against the circulating pathogen.

“We have a vaccine that, unequivocally, is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives,” Fauci said Wednesday on CNN. “What’s the problem with vaccines?”

The problem is vaccines have become part of America’s polarized politics. Since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines late in the Trump administration, skepticism of the established medical science has become a kind of creed for many conservatives, as well as for some on the far left. Political disagreements about lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements have hardened into antipathy toward the vaccines themselves.

Seizing on rare adverse side effects and diminishing effectiveness — the result of new variants and low booster uptake — vaccine critics have dismissed inoculation as ineffective and potentially dangerous.

Some have also embraced outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines as a form of government and corporate control.

An anti-vaccination activist at a rally holds a sign that reads: No mandates. My body, my choice.
Anti-vaccination activists at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in January. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

During a pandemic-related hearing in the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland progressive, called the proposed grand jury an “Orwellian” development. “These actions are transparently designed to falsely suggest that coronavirus vaccines, and not the coronavirus itself, are dangerous,” he said Wednesday.

DeSantis, who is widely expected to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, played open to those concerns on Tuesday, when he announced he would call for Florida’s Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” He is also seeking “further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida.”

Such deaths are rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose vaccine surveillance statistics indicate that 17,868 people — or 0.0027% of vaccine recipients — died after their shots. Those reports unquestionably include thousands of deaths that happened after vaccination but had nothing to do with the vaccines themselves.

Vaccine skeptics have often used reports of supposed side effects — such as those to a vaccine database that does not require confirmation — to exaggerate supposed dangers. And such critics invariably downplay the fact that vaccines are exceptionally effective at stopping serious and critical COVID-19 illness, which has killed more than 6.6 million people globally.

A health care worker administers an injection to someone sitting in a car.
A health care worker administers a COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-through site in Miami in December of last year. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

And with online misinformation and partisan politics exercising strong pressures on the American public, vaccine fears have been easily exploited, leading to low uptake among Republicans. As a consequence, heavily Republican areas have had higher death rates than Democratic ones.

In Florida, more than 83,000 people have died from COVID-19, and cases there have been rising recently. DeSantis, who has decried what he describes as “Faucism” (the echoes of “fascism” are difficult to miss), downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic from the start, though he has also been credited for opening schools and other businesses well before Democratic counterparts, some of whom remained in a cautious crouch well into 2021.

Earlier this year, DeSantis clashed with former President Donald Trump for supporting vaccination, refusing to say whether he had received a booster shot. Trump shot back by calling DeSantis “gutless.”

DeSantis has also regularly attacked Fauci in personal terms. “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” he said earlier this year of Fauci, who has been the face of the pandemic for both the Trump and Biden administrations. (He was eventually sidelined by the former in favor of experts closer in line with DeSantis’s views.)

In late 2021, DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo has had no experience with infectious diseases and has routinely attacked vaccination and masking. “With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Ladapo said after Tuesday’s event.

Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaking from a podium as Gov. Ron DeSantis looks on.
Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, with DeSantis looking on, in Brandon, Fla., in November 2021. (Chris O’Meara/AP)

The announcement by DeSantis comes days after new Twitter owner Elon Musk attacked Fauci on Twitter, calling for his prosecution. A supporter of DeSantis, Musk has argued that prior to his ownership, Twitter executives suppressed information on the coronavirus that presumably undermined public health messaging.

Last week, he invited Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — an outspoken critic of pandemic precautions — to Twitter’s headquarters. Bhattacharya, who has advised DeSantis in the past, will be on the governor’s new public safety committee, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (a co-author, with Bhattacharya, of the pro-reopening Great Barrington Declaration) and Bret Weinstein, a quasi-celebrity on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web with no professional experience in vaccinology.

“I’m not sure what they’re trying to do down there,” Fauci said in the Wednesday CNN interview. Though he is about to retire after four decades of federal service, he is likely to face calls to testify from House Republicans, who continue to accuse him of making misleading statements on masks, vaccines and the origins of the coronavirus.

As his retirement has approached, Fauci has been increasingly vocal and defiant about the challenges revealed by the nation’s faltering coronavirus response, which has left more than a million people dead in the U.S.

In a New York Times essay, Fauci lamented the role that “disinformation and political ideology” have played in sowing doubt about masks, vaccines and other measures.

The silhouette of Dr. Anthony Fauci against a blue background.
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Dec. 9 during a virtual event to urge Americans to get vaccinated ahead of the holiday season. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Rep. Adam Kinzinger in final House floor speech says ‘limited government’ for GOP now means ‘inciting violence against government officials’

Business Insider

Rep. Adam Kinzinger in final House floor speech says ‘limited government’ for GOP now means ‘inciting violence against government officials’

Bryan Metzger – December 15, 2022

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at a January 6 committee meeting on December 1, 2021.
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at a January 6 committee meeting on December 1, 2021.Stefani Reynolds for The Washington Post via Getty Images
  • GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger spoke on the House floor for the last time, having declined re-election.
  • He condemned his own party on Thursday, saying it has “embraced lies and deceit.”
  • He also criticized Democrats for boosting election-denying candidates in GOP primaries this year.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois spoke on the House floor for the final time on Thursday after declining to seek re-election.

Kinzinger, a member of the January 6 committee and one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection following the Capitol riot, has emerged as a key critic of the GOP from within the party.

In his farewell speech, Kinzinger declared that “our democracy is not functioning” and said Republicans have “embraced lies and deceit.” Despite not mentioning Trump by name, he made numerous references to the assault on the Capitol.

“Republicans once believed that limited government meant lower taxes and more autonomy,” he said. “Today, limited government means inciting violence against government officials.”

He also criticized the leadership of the Republican National Committee, which used the phrase “legitimate political discourse” as it moved to censure him and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming for their participation in the January 6 committee.

“Our leaders today belittle, and in some cases justify attacks on the US Capitol as ‘legitimate political discourse,'” Kinzinger added. “We shelter the ignorant, the racist, who only stoke anger and hatred to those who are different than us.”

Kinzinger also criticized Democrats for helping to boost election-denying candidates in Republican primaries this year in order to produce weaker general-election nominees, a controversial tactic that some top Democrats publicly defended.

“To my Democratic colleagues, you must too bear the burden of our failures. Many of you have asked me: where are all the good Republicans? ” he said. “Over the past two years, Democratic leadership had the opportunity to stand above the fray.”

“Instead, they poured millions of dollars into the campaigns of MAGA Republicans, the same candidates Biden called a national security threat, to ensure these good Republicans did not make it out of their respective primaries,” Kinzinger continued. “This is no longer politics as usual. This is not a game.”

Dictionary.com announces word of the year: ‘woman’

The Guardian

Dictionary.com announces word of the year: ‘woman’

Erum Salam – December 14, 2022

<span>Photograph: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock</span>
Photograph: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock

The website Dictionary.com has named its word of the year for 2022: woman.

In a statement, the website said: “Our selection of woman … reflects how the intersection of gender, identity and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.”

Related: Biden signs landmark law protecting same-sex and interracial marriages

It also said: “Searches for the word woman on Dictionary.com spiked significantly multiple times in relation to separate high-profile events, including the moment when a question about the very definition of the word was posed on the national stage.”

That was a reference to a supreme court confirmation hearing in March, when the nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was asked by Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, to define the word woman.

Jackson said: “No I can’t.”

Soon after, Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the court.

Searches for woman increased by 1,400% after the hearing, Dictionary.com said, the highest spike for the word this year.

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of woman is “an adult female person”.

Other key moments that led to the word being chosen included the supreme court voting to overturn Roe v Wade and thereby revoke the constitutional right to abortion; the death of Queen Elizabeth II; tennis player Serena William’s retirement announcement; freedom protests led by women in Iran; and more.

Referring to the supreme court abortion decision, Dictionary.com said: “Unsurprisingly, it resulted in both polarization and galvanization. That dynamic played out in November’s midterm elections, which upended trends and expectations.

“The outcome has been attributed in part to an electorate, and particularly women, voting in reaction to the Dobbs ruling. The election also added to the ranks of the nation’s women governors, resulting in what will be a record number of women – 12 – serving as governors in 2023.”

Dictionary.com’s senior director of editorial, John Kelly, said that to qualify as word of the year, a word must see “a significant increase in searches” and “capture the major cultural themes and trends in language” for the 12 months in question.

In 2022, shortlisted words included inflation, quiet quitting, democracy, the Ukraine flag emoji and Wordle – the last a popular word game bought by the New York Times.

In 2021, Dictionary.com named allyship as its word of the year. Previous words of the year were pandemic (2020), existential (2019), misinformation (2018), complicit (2017), xenophobia (2016), identity (2015), exposure (2014), privacy (2013), bluster (2012), tergiversate (2011), and change (2010).

Are We in the West Weaker Than Ukrainians?

Nicholas Kristof – December 14, 2022

Three women in military fatigues try on boots in a room with gray walls and a stack of black shoe boxes in the corner.
Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

“We will beat the Ukrainian out of you so that you love Russia,” a Russian interrogator told one torture survivor I spoke to in Ukraine, before he whipped her and raped her. That seems a pretty good summation of Vladimir Putin’s strategy.

It isn’t working in Ukraine, where Putin’s atrocities seem to be bolstering the will to fight back. That brave woman triumphed over her interrogators, albeit at horrific personal cost.

But I worry that we in the West are made of weaker stuff. Some of the most momentous decisions the United States will make in the coming months involve the level of support we will provide Ukraine, and I’ve had pushback from some readers who think President Biden is making a terrible mistake by resolutely helping Ukraine repel Russia.

A woman named Nancy protested on my Facebook page that I was more interested in securing Ukraine’s border than the American border. She argued that we should focus on our own challenges rather than Ukraine’s.

“We’re over our head in debt but funding a war that we shouldn’t be involved in,” she said. “Enough is enough.”

Polls find American support for aid to Ukraine still robust but slipping, especially among Republicans. And almost half of Americans want the United States to push Ukraine “to settle for peace as soon as possible,” even if it loses territory — a finding that must gladden Vladimir Putin’s heart.

The exhaustion with Western support for Ukraine may continue to gain ground in the coming months as people grow weary of high energy prices and, in the case of some European countries, possible rolling power cuts.

So let me make the case, to Nancy and others, for why we should continue to provide weaponry to Ukraine.

The fundamental misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some progressives on the left) is that we’re doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We are holding Ukraine’s coat as it is sacrificing lives and infrastructure in ways that benefit us, by degrading Russia’s military threat to NATO and Western Europe — and thus to us.

“They’re doing us a favor; they’re fighting our fight,” Wesley Clark, the retired American general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. “The fight in Ukraine is a fight about the future of the international community.”

If the war ends in a way favorable to Russia, he argues, it will be a world less safe for Americans. One lesson the world would absorb would be the paramount importance of possessing nuclear weapons, for Ukraine was invaded after it gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s — and Russia’s nuclear warheads today prevent a stronger Western military response.

“If Ukraine falls, there will certainly be a wave of nuclear proliferation,” Clark warned.

For years, military strategists have feared a Russian incursion into Estonia that would challenge NATO and cost lives of American troops. Ukrainians are weakening Russia’s forces so as to reduce that risk.

More broadly, perhaps the single greatest threat to world peace in the coming decade is the risk of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that escalates into a war between America and China. To reduce that danger, we should help Taiwan build up its deterrent capacity — but perhaps the simplest way to reduce the likelihood of Xi Jinping acting aggressively is to stand united against Russia’s invasion. If the West falters and allows Putin to win in Ukraine, Xi will feel greater confidence that he can win in Taiwan.

Putin has been a destabilizing and brutal bully for many years — from Chechnya to Syria, Georgia to Moldova — partly because the world has been unwilling to stand up to him and partly because he possesses a powerful military force that Ukraine is now dismantling. Aside from energy, Russia’s economy is not substantial.

“Putin and Russia are weak,” Viktor Yushchenko, a former Ukrainian president who challenged Russia and then was mysteriously poisoned and disfigured, told me. “Russia is a poor country, an oil appendage to the world, a gas station.”

The world owes Ukraine for its willingness to finally stand up to Putin. If anything, I’d like to see the Biden administration carefully ratchet up the capabilities of the weaponry it supplies Ukraine, for it may be that the best way to end the war is simply to ensure that Putin finds the cost of it no longer worth paying.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone backing peace negotiations is craven, fatigued or myopic. Gen. Mark Milley and other Pentagon officials are understandably worried that the Ukraine conflict could spiral out of control into a nuclear war. That’s a legitimate concern, and it’s always good to peer through the fog of war for off-ramps. But bowing to nuclear blackmail and rewarding an invasion would create their own risks for many years to come, and on balance those dangers seem greater than those of maintaining the present course.

In arguing for the West to stand with Ukraine, I’ve emphasized our national interest in doing so. But we have values at stake as well as interests, for there is also a moral question to face.

When one nation invades a neighbor and commits murder, pillage and rape, when it traffics in thousands of children, when it pulverizes the electrical grid to make civilians freeze in winter — in such a blizzard of likely war crimes, neutrality is not the high ground.

Let’s not let Russia beat the Ukrainian out of us: The world could use a spinal transplant from brave Ukrainians.

Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a columnist since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. 

Iranian soccer player sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini

Insider

Iranian soccer player sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini

Barnaby Lane – December 13, 2022

Amir Nasr-Azadani of Iran
YouTube/20Minutos
  • An Iranian soccer player has been sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini, according to Iran Wire.
  • Amir Nasr-Azadani was arrested in November in relation to the killing of a police colonel.
  • He has been accused of “waging war against God” and will be hanged.

An Iranian professional soccer player has been sentenced to death after protesting against the death of Mahsa Amini, according to Iran Wire.

Amir Nasr-Azadani, 26, was arrested in November in relation to the killing of a police colonel and two volunteer militia members.

He has been accused of “waging war against God” and will be hanged, according to Iran Wire.

FIFPRO, the international soccer players union, said in a statement on Monday that it was “shocked and sickened” by the news.

“We stand in solidarity with Amir and call for the immediate removal of his punishment,” it said.

There have been widespread protests in Iran since the September death of 22-year-old Amini, who died in custody after being detained by morality police on suspicion of breaking the country’s strict rules around head coverings.

Witnesses accused police officers of forcing her into a van and beating her.

Nasr-Azadani last played for Persian Gulf Pro League side Tractor, but has not played professionally since his last appearance in November 2017.

According to Iran Wire, he is one of 28 Iranians who have been sentenced to death for their parts in the protests.

Among those are three children, who have all been accused of “corruption on Earth.”

According to the BBC’s Persian service, the three children were physically tortured during their detention.

On December 8, Iran conducted its first execution in relation to the protests.

The Guardian reported that Mohsen Shekari was executed after being accused of blocking a street and wounding a member of the pro-regime Basij militia in September.

State media published a video of what it said was Shekari’s confession, which showed him with a bruising on his face.

Human rights groups, including the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights, have said Shekari was tortured and forced to confess.

The group’s director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, called for a strong international reaction to Shekari’s death “otherwise we will be facing daily executions of protesters.”

Chinese Rocket Stage Now a Cloud of Orbital Debris After Disintegrating in Space

Gizmodo

Chinese Rocket Stage Now a Cloud of Orbital Debris After Disintegrating in Space

Passant Rabie – December 13, 2022

China’s Long March-5B Y3 rocket carried the Wentian lab module to China’s space station in July.
China’s Long March-5B Y3 rocket carried the Wentian lab module to China’s space station in July.

On November 12, China’s Long March 6A rocket broke apart after launch, scattering debris in low Earth orbit. Now, reports suggest that the disintegrated upper stage of the rocket has grown to a cloud of 350 pieces of space debris.

The rocket launched at 5:52 p.m. ET on November 11 from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China, carrying the Yunhai 3 environmental monitoring satellite.

Shortly after delivering the satellite to low Earth orbit, the upper stage of the Long March 6A rocket broke apart, the South China Morning Post reported at the time. The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracked 50 pieces of space debris resulting from the rocket’s break up at an estimated altitude of 310 miles to 435 miles (500 to 700 kilometers), the squadron announced on November 13.

Nearly a month later, experts are still tracking the disintegrated pieces from the rocket. “There are now 350 debris objects cataloged from the Nov 12 disintegration of a Chinese rocket stage (CZ-6A Y2), in sun-sync orbit,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote on Twitter based on ongoing tracking by the Space Defense Squadron.

China has been reckless with its rockets before, but the Long March 6A rocket breakup wasn’t meant to happen. The rocket’s upper stage was supposed to reenter Earth’s atmosphere in one piece, and burn up during reentry. It’s not clear what went wrong to cause the rocket to break up before its reentry.

The rocket breakup sent debris flying near Starlink’s internet satellites, but Chinese officials are claiming that pieces of the rocket will not threaten other low Earth orbit assets. “As far as we know, the relevant incident will not affect the Chinese space station or the International Space Station,” Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, is quoted in the South China Morning Post as saying during a press conference.

As of last year, more than 27,000 pieces of space debris were being tracked in orbit by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network, with lots of smaller pieces also floating around undetected.

More: Science Satellite Dodges Threatening Space Junk on Just 8 Hours Notice

How nuclear fusion works, and why it’s a big deal for green energy that scientists made a ‘breakthrough’

Business Insider

How nuclear fusion works, and why it’s a big deal for green energy that scientists made a ‘breakthrough’

Paola Rosa-Aquino – December 12, 2022

David Butow / Contributor
Engineers work at the National Ignition Facility in California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.David Butow / Contributor
  • Scientists produced a nuclear fusion reaction that created a net energy gain, preliminary results suggest.
  • The Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement about the finding on Tuesday.
  • Fusion energy advocates say it’s a step forward in clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.

Scientists have reportedly made a “breakthrough” in their quest to harness nuclear fusion.

The US Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement regarding the milestone in fusion energy research on Tuesday, the the Financial Times reported.

For the first time, researchers created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than they put into it, FT and the Washington Post reported.

The experiment, conducted within the last two weeks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, generated 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120% more than the 2.1 megajoules put into creating it, FT reported, citing preliminary data.

“Scientifically, this is the first time that they showed that this is possible,” Gianluca Sarri, a physicist at Queen’s University Belfast, told New Scientist. “From theory, they knew that it should happen, but it was never seen in real life experimentally.”

What is fusion energy and why is it a big deal?
This illustrationdepicts a capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.
This illustration shows how lasers heat a target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Nuclear fusion works by forcing together two atoms — most often hydrogen — to make a heavier one — like helium.

This explosive process releases massive amounts of energy, the Department of Energy explains. Fusion is the opposite of fission, the reaction that powers nuclear reactors used commercially today.

Fusion occurs naturally in the heart of the sun and the stars, providing these cosmic objects with fuel.

Since the 1950s, scientists have been trying to replicate it on Earth in order to tap into what nuclear energy advocates suggest is clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion generates four times more energy per kilogram than the fission used to power nuclear plants, and nearly 4 million times more energy than burning oil or coal.

What’s more, unlike fossil fuels, fusion doesn’t release carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that’s the main driver of climate change — into the atmosphere. And unlike nuclear fission, fusion doesn’t create long-lived radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy.

A view of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, in Leningrad, Russia on September 14, 2022.
A view of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, in Leningrad, Russia on September 14, 2022.Sezgin Pancar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

But so far, nuclear fusion hasn’t solved our energy problems on a grand scale.

What Tuesday’s ‘breakthrough’ announcement means for the future

Tuesday’s announcement is likely a huge step forward in nuclear fusion energy, but applying the technology at commercial scale is likely still years away.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist, pointed out that the process the Department of Energy uses requires tritium, a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

“It may yet yield important information that is ultimately transformative. We don’t know yet,” Prescod-Weinstein tweeted on Monday. “Being able to do this once a day with a laser does not at all mean that this mechanism will scale!”

Investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have poured billions into clean energy startups trying to make fusion commercially viable, and Tuesday’s announcement is likely to continue that trend.

What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?

CBS News

What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?

Haley Ott – December 12, 2022

What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?

Scientists, governments, and companies from around the world have been increasingly investing in a potential source of energy that could provide unlimited, clean power to everyone on Earth: nuclear fusion. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission, the process used in today’s nuclear power plants, which splits atoms apart.

U.S. Department of Energy was expected to announce in mid-December a major breakthrough in the quest to harness the power of nuclear fusion. The Financial Times reported that scientists at the government-run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California had managed for the first time ever to create more energy in a fusion reactor than was required to drive the process — a “net energy gain.”

U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, said if confirmed it “could be a game changer for the world” in the bid to create sustainable electricity. 

The interior of the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak in the United Kingdom is shown with a superimposed plasma. / Credit: EUROfusion
The interior of the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak in the United Kingdom is shown with a superimposed plasma. / Credit: EUROfusion

In fusion, two atomic nuclei are combined to create a heavier nucleus, and the process releases energy. The reaction takes place in a state of matter called plasma, which is distinct from liquids, solids or gasses.

In the sun, nuclei collide at hot enough temperatures to overcome the electric repulsion that would normally keep them apart. When they are very close together, the attractive nuclear force between them becomes stronger than the electric repulsion, and they are able to fuse. The gravity of the sun ensures that nuclei are kept close enough together to increase their chances of colliding.

If humans can harness the power of fusion on an industrial scale, it could help create a virtually limitless source of clean energy on earth, with the power to generate four million times more energy than burning coal or oil, according to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

That is the goal of a multinational, multibillion-dollar project called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, which is under construction in southern France.

Scientists believe fusion plants would be much safer than today’s nuclear fission plants — if the process can be mastered.

Parts of the ITER tokamak are prepared for assembly, August 3, 2022. / Credit: Haley Ott/CBS News
Parts of the ITER tokamak are prepared for assembly, August 3, 2022. / Credit: Haley Ott/CBS News

“It can’t run away. It’s a very difficult reaction to sustain; it needs to be driven. Whereas fission can run on a chain reaction, and it has to be controlled,” Tim Luce, the head of science at ITER, told CBS News.

Fusion also creates much less radioactive byproduct than fission, and what it does leave behind is “not water soluble — they won’t get into the food supply, the water supply,” Luce said.

Some concepts for fusion reactors being developed today will use two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, for fuel.

Deuterium can be easily and cheaply extracted from sea water. Tritium, which does not exist abundantly in nature, could potentially be produced by a reaction between fusion-generated neutrons and lithium. It is also a byproduct of the nuclear fission process used in power plants around the world today.

Scientists have already managed to produce fusion reactions, but not without using more energy to trigger the process than they were able to produce through it.

Assuming scientists are able to achieve “net energy” — producing more energy than they use to create the fusion reaction — other things will still need to fall in place for fusion to become a secure, viable energy source for the world.

“We must also prepare the path broadly for fusion commercialization, going well beyond R&D,” Dr. Scott C. Hsu, lead fusion coordinator in the Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Innovation at the U.S. Department of Energy, said in a Senate hearing last month.

“This includes public engagement and energy justice, diverse workforce development, a regulatory framework that engenders public trust and supports timely deployment, market identification, attracting investment and commercialization partners, export controls, nuclear nonproliferation, cybersecurity, international coordination, building critical supply chains and manufacturing capabilities, and waste disposition,” Hsu said.