“Earth saw a lot of commotion when its magnetic poles flipped 42,000 years ago.
Scientists have known about the flip since the late 1960s. Earth’s magnetic poles aren’t static – they’re generated by electric currents from the planet’s liquid outer core, which is constantly in motion. As of late, Earth’s magnetic North pole has wandered considerably on a path toward northern Russia.
But for the most part, scientists didn’t think the last pole flip had a major environmental impact. Sure, the planet’s magnetic field got weaker, allowing more cosmic rays to penetrate the atmosphere, but plant and animal life wasn’t known to have been greatly affected.
A new study now suggests a more dramatic phenomenon occurred: The additional cosmic rays may have depleted ozone concentrations, opening the floodgates for more ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere. Shifting weather patterns may have expanded the ice sheet over North America and dried out Australia, prompting the extinction of many large mammal species. A solar storm, meanwhile, might have driven ancient humans to seek shelter in caves.
As competition for resources grew, our closest extinct human relative, Neanderthals, may have died out.”
…
“Not all researchers are convinced by Turney and Cooper’s analysis. Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told The Guardian that although the Laschamps excursion could have contributed to Neanderthals’ demise, it’s hard to know exactly when they died out.
“They did survive longer and ranged more widely than just Europe, and we have a very poor fix on the timing of their final disappearance across swathes of Asia,” Stringer said.
James Channell, a geologist at the University of Florida, told NPR that historical records of ice cores dating back 42,000 years don’t indicate a global climate crisis. Still, he added, “there does appear to be a linkage” between the extinction of large mammals and the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field.
At the very least, the new study offers a hint about what could happen if magnetic north and south flip again.”
“The claim that we need a national industrial policy because U.S. manufacturing is in decline is usually based on two trends: the fall in both U.S. manufacturing employment and the sector’s declining share of total U.S. economic output (measured by gross domestic product). Each of these trends, however, started decades ago. And neither tells you anything about the productive capacity of the nation overall or the vitality of the industries being targeted by the industrial policy.
As Lincicome shows, the reduction in manufacturing employment is occurring in every industrialized nation, including those countries with economies more centered on manufacturing than the United States. It’s also occurring in nations with longstanding trade surpluses in goods, and even in those countries that already have aggressive industrial policies. The real reason for a decline in manufacturing employment is mostly due to labor-saving technologies that raise worker productivity. In fact, anyone who wants to understand this reality ought to visit contemporary steel mills. They look nothing like mills of the past, as they’re automated, clean and employ highly skilled and well-paid workers.
The decrease in the share of GDP generated by manufacturing is mostly the result of the fact that our modern economies are increasingly service economies. That’s consumers’ choice. This trend, too, exists in all developed countries.”
…
“U.S. manufacturing continues to be at or near the top of most categories, including output, exports and investment. Industrial capacity is also growing, and industry-specific data show strengths where it counts (durable, high-value-added goods).”
“Far from being a gateway to rampant fraud, when done correctly mail-in balloting is more secure than in-person voting. Even after an election in which 46 percent of votes were cast by mail—a huge increase that threatened to overwhelm election offices—there is nothing more than anecdotal evidence of problems with the process. In places where mail-in voting has been the norm for years, like Oregon, there is scant evidence of fraud.
Despite what critics claim, “no-excuse absentee voting still must undergo the same rigorous process to ensure ballots are legitimate, including ballot tracking measures and signature verification,” write Hyden and Greenhut (a Reason columnist) in the new R Street study. “These safeguards are highly effective, too.””
“According to data from Australia collected over the past two decades, advertising revenue for newspapers has plunged 32 percent over that time, while circulation has remained largely the same. The overall advertising market has actually grown. Almost the entirety of the revenue loss for Australian newspapers has been the loss of classified advertising. It’s been almost completely eliminated in the Australian print media because the technological efficiencies of internet searches make online classified systems much for useful for consumers. There’s no reason for classified advertising in newspapers to exist any longer. Online is better. If you need proof, watch Saturday Night Live’s recent parody advertisement about the nearly pornographic fascination some people have with searching for houses on Zillow.
This is all about the historically common disruption that new technologies cause in the marketplace. Newspapers are no longer the best at serving up advertising to consumers, so that market went elsewhere. After engines were invented, horses stopped being the most efficient way to travel. After electricity was invented, candles stopped being the most efficient artificial source of light.
Newspapers and media outlets have no moral right to claim this money for themselves. The advertising industry money should go to where it’s most effective. But because media outlets have been unable to replace the lost advertising, they’ve resorted to lobbying the government with claims that preserving newspapers is pivotal to the survival of democracy, riding on the current populist criticism of the size of tech companies.”
“Hours after a U.S. military drone killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, one of the most powerful men in Iran, the head of field operations for the border in Washington state gathered her senior staff on an emergency conference call.
It was the first Friday in 2020 — still a holiday for many — and director Adele Fasano spoke from home about the email she’d just received from U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters advising “heightened vigilance” following the airstrike.
She instructed assistant directors of field operations and area port directors to institute “heightened security measures.” When the call ended, the Seattle CBP office circulated a “high threat alert” memo among management outlining new criteria for enhanced vetting of cross-border travelers.
The message to rank-and-file agents was clear: Target travelers with ties to Iran, Lebanon and Palestine.
During the next 48 hours, 277 people — dozens of them American citizens or legal permanent residents — would be stopped and held for secondary screenings as they tried to cross into the U.S. from Canada. Many said they were held for more than six hours. Some were denied access to medicine or questioned about their relatives. Most had no idea why they were stopped, though they had their suspicions.
One Iranian American, held for six hours overnight at the Pacific Highway crossing, likened the scene to “a modern-day version of Japanese internment camps.””
“Neighborhoods matter. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz found in 2016 that moving to a wealthier neighborhood not only increased the likelihood that kids would go to college, but also increased earnings by roughly 31 percent by the time they’d reached their mid-20s.
Part of what has kept Kennetha out of living in Franklin is exclusionary zoning. Single-family zoning, which means it’s illegal to build anything other than single-family homes, is prevalent in the suburb. Single-family homes are more expensive than apartments, townhomes, or duplexes, and that makes rent costly, too. Houses in Franklin go for an average price of $550,000, far above the average in Nashville of $335,000.
In some parts of Franklin, it is illegal to have a property smaller than 2 acres. And even in its “mixed residential district” — which allows for duplexes and multiplexes — the town has ordained minimum lot sizes that force builders to make units larger than they otherwise might have. And the bigger the apartment, the more expensive it is.”
“China had become the second-largest export market for American-made cars by 2017, the last full year before Trump’s trade war began. After a series of tit-for-tat tariff increases between the U.S. and China, however, American automotive exports to China fell by more than one-third. Higher tariffs on imported car parts from China raised costs for automakers in America, while China’s retaliatory tariffs on American-made cars hiked prices and reduced demand in China.
To avoid those costs and to evade increased uncertainty, some carmakers began shifting their supply chains—but not in the direction the White House was hoping.
BMW, for example, shifted much of the production of its X3 sport-utility vehicle from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to China after reporting that tariffs had cut the company’s American profits by about $338 million in 2018. The higher costs imposed by the trade war caused Tesla to announce that it was “accelerating construction” of a new plant in Shanghai.
Overall, the number of American automating jobs peaked in September 2018, shortly after Trump’s trade war began, and then declined during 2019 and 2020.
The signing of the “phase one” trade deal with China did little to stop or reverse those shifts. Even though China pledged to increase its purchases of American-made vehicles and car parts as part of the agreement, exports are still lagging well behind their pre-trade war totals, according to the PIIE report.”
…
“Trump believed that hiking tariffs would reduce America’s imports from China, allowing the gap between the value of those imports and the value of America’s exports to fall. What he failed to grasp, however, is that many of those imports—especially when it comes to manufactured goods—are materials necessary for making the items that American companies end up exporting back to China: like cars.
Higher costs imposed on imports ended up slowing American exports—and thus the trade deficit actually grew. Meanwhile, companies could avoid the cost of Trump’s tariffs by shifting production out of the United States, and some chose to do that.
Biden, so far, seems unwilling to remove Trump’s tariffs. By announcing a misguided “Buy American” policy for government procurement, Biden is also expanding on some of the Trump administration’s protectionist manufacturing policies.
If the past few years are any indication, all Biden will likely accomplish by this is to further erode America’s industrial base by trading away automaking jobs in exchange for the appearance of “toughness.””
“The fundamentals of the war have remained unchanged since nearly the beginning. The Taliban insurgency can and will outlast the U.S. occupation and the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul is too corrupt and weak to establish itself as a sovereign.
…
“The fact that we have failed to defeat the Taliban or to effectively establish a new government after almost 20 years of trying strongly suggests it is an unachievable mission and, far from a reason to stay longer, is in fact a compelling reason to leave as soon as possible.”
…
“policymakers have to come to grips with the fact they don’t have many policy tools to effectively manipulate the treatment of Afghans in Afghanistan. Human rights protections have improved for many Afghans during the U.S. occupation, including respect for women’s rights. But even after nearly two decades of efforts on the ground, the United Nations still ranks Afghanistan 153rd out of 160 countries for gender equality. In a 2017 index, Afghanistan tied with Syria for the worst place in the world to be a woman.
If U.S. policymakers are serious about adopting policies that can protect Afghans under threat, they should welcome Afghans to American shores. The first step is to restart the refugee program that was effectively cancelled by President Donald Trump. Biden said he wants to welcome 125,000 refugees, but he hasn’t taken the first step—authorizing an additional 62,500 this year—even though the presidential determination is sitting on his desk waiting for his signature. Biden could permit entry to 40,000 Afghans a year if he wanted to.
A second step would be to allow Americans to privately sponsor refugees at their own expense. Such a program could be modeled on America’s experience with private sponsorship for Jews fleeing the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and on how Canada runs its very successful system today. The Biden administration could start the pilot program and enlist veteran groups who have been at the forefront of arguing for their Afghan comrades to find refuge in America.
That leads us to the Special Immigration Visa (SIV) program for Afghans who were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government. These folks risked their lives to help American forces and the Taliban will show them no mercy if it takes over. But the SIV is mired in bureaucracy, preventing many deserving applicants from coming here. Biden should give the SIV program a kick in the pants to immediately welcome the roughly 17,000 Afghan employees of the U.S. and their roughly 50,000 family members.
The U.S. could also help European and Asian countries settle Afghan refugees within their borders. Many Afghan refugees want to go to Europe where their family members are living and nothing is stopping the Biden administration from working with the Europeans to facilitate such a humanitarian migration.
Unfortunately, the government probably won’t organize itself in time to help Afghans in these ways. The last, desperate option that the Biden administration will have to consider is paroling Afghan refugees into the United States. Under presidential authority, Biden could fly refugees directly from Afghanistan or surrounding countries to the island of Guam and process them there for entry to the U.S. They could immediately start working and building new lives for themselves.
This is what the United States did for many Kurds during the 1990s after the U.S. government asked them to rebel against Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq and then abandoned them to be slaughtered by the Iraqi government.
Biden’s parole authority is the same that President Gerald Ford had when he decided to process about 111,000 Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. At the time, a young senator named Joe Biden said, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” The success of the Vietnamese in the United States should have changed Biden’s mind in the intervening decades.
Simply put, the United States has lost the war in Afghanistan. By pushing past the May 1 withdrawal date, Biden is merely delaying the inevitable. Afghanistan and its people are unlikely to be much better off by maintaining a small military presence there for a few months longer. Offering refuge to Afghans fleeing abuse would be a constructive human rights policy. Extending a lost war won’t be.”
“The controversy goes something like this: In a viral Tiktok, an alleged former classmate of Rachael Kirkconnell, a frontrunner on this season’s competition, posed a question. “Girlieee, remember when you bullied me in high school for liking black guys???” That was certainly inconvenient for Kirkconnell, who is currently on national television dating Matt James, the franchise’s first black bachelor.
Next came the customary uprooting of every supposedly unsavory detail about her life. A 60-second TikTok by @feministmama parsed through it all: Kirkconnell liking an Instagram photo with a woman wearing a MAGA hat, pictures of her costumed in American Indian attire, social media posts in support of law enforcement. As Harrison mentioned above, the user also dedicated a big chunk to Kirkconnell’s dad’s voting history and political involvement, as if she is somehow responsible for that. (I was under the impression that we don’t define women by the decisions made by their fathers and husbands.)
Then came the pictures of Kirkconnell at a 2018 Antebellum-themed fraternity party thrown by Kappa Alpha Order at Georgia College and State University, where students gathered on a plantation in Old South debutante-esque attire. The theme is beyond distasteful. Indeed, I’ve written over and over and over again that such displays are offensive. But no one knows whether Kirkconnell even understood the cultural significance of the event when she attended it as a college student, nor did anyone wait for her response before concluding she should be banished from public life.
“It’s 2021,” remarks @feministmama in that viral video. “Let’s hold public figures accountable for their actions.”
Kirkconnell is not running for president. She is not even running for the town council, or for the local school board. She is a contestant on a trashy dating competition where the most influence she’ll have is via which products she may choose to endorse on Instagram, should anyone still want to work with her. It is a bit rich that anyone would devote such energy to cancelling contestants on The Bachelor, of all things, considering that the show thrives on bringing out the worst aspects of its cast members in order to maximize that reality TV drama.
“I would say that you have to be really careful about what you are doing on social media,” said James, the Bachelor himself, in a conversation with Entertainment Tonight. “Rumors are dark and nasty and can ruin people’s lives. So I would give people the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully [Rachael] will have her time to speak on that.”
But the controversy is no longer really about Kirkconnell: It is Harrison, who is not credibly accused of participating in or abetting racist behavior at all, who faces cancellation.
“I haven’t heard Rachael speak on this yet, and until I actually hear this woman have a chance to speak, who am I to say any of this?” he told Rachel Lindsay, the franchise’s first black Bachelorette. “I saw a picture of her at a sorority party five years ago, and that’s it. I’m not defending Rachael [Kirkconnell]—I just know that 50 million people did that in 2018. That was a type of party that a lot of people went to.”
He continued: “My guess? These girls got dressed and went to a party and had a great time. They were 18-years-old. Does that make it okay? I don’t know, Rachel [Lindsay], you tell me…but where is this lens we’re holding up and was that lens available and were we all looking through it in 2018?”
That lens is constantly changing. And, in a big way, it should—society has a knack for sharpening broad consensus on morality and justice as hindsight kicks in. But often that justice is retroactive, and it increasingly leaves no room for apologies.
Harrison is trying anyway. After releasing an initial apology, he agreed on Saturday to leave the network for an unspecified period of time. “To the Black community, to the BIPOC community: I am so sorry,” he said in a groveling statement posted on Instagram. “My words were harmful. I am listening, and I truly apologize for my ignorance and any pain it caused you. The historic season of The Bachelor should not be marred or overshadowed by my mistakes or diminished by my actions. To that end, I have consulted with Warner Bros. and ABC and will be stepping aside for a period of time and will not join for the After the Final Rose special.”
To sum things up: Merely objecting to the speed and fairness of someone else’s cancellation is now itself grounds for canceling. What will the next standard be?”
“Biden wants to prohibit production and sale of “assault weapons” and require that current owners either surrender their firearms to the government or follow the same tax and registration requirements that apply to machine guns. Yet he concedes that the 1994 federal “assault weapon” ban, which expired in 2004, had no impact on the lethality of legal firearms.
The problem, according to Biden, was that manufacturers could comply with the law by “making minor modifications to their products—modifications that leave them just as deadly.” But there is no way around that problem, since laws like these are based on “military-style” features, such as folding stocks, threaded barrels, and bayonet mounts, that have nothing to do with a weapon’s destructive power.
Even if the government could eliminate all guns with those features, would-be mass shooters would have plenty of equally lethal alternatives. Several of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history were carried out with weapons that would not be covered by Biden’s ban.
Biden also would ban “high-capacity magazines,” which politicians generally define as magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Americans own millions of those; they are standard for many of the most popular handguns and rifles.
The rationale for the 10-round limit is that the need to switch magazines can create a “critical pause” during which a mass shooter might be overpowered or his victims might escape. But as a federal judge noted when he ruled against California’s ban on “large-capacity magazines” in 2019, that restriction also can create a “lethal pause” for a crime victim “trying to defend her home and family”—a far more common situation.”