A mechanical marvel of human ingenuity was plopped down on Mars by NASA last February. Its name, Perseverance, fits the Mars rover perfectly, for the robotic vehicle embodies a feat of scientific know-how, long-term dedication to public purpose, and a tight focus on teamwork. Think about the 20-year span of institutional tenacity required for myriad scientists and others to imagine, design, plan, construct, test and otherwise develop the project. And then they hurled this extraordinarily complex machine on a seven-month, 300-million-mile journey through space, navigating to a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, a 3.6-billion-year-old, dried-up Martian lakebed. Now Perseverance is probing the Red Planet's watery past for evidence of primordial life.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, during the same week of this WOW! achievement on Mars, millions of people in NASA's home city of Houston were also probing dried-up waterways: the faucets in their homes, businesses, and schools. On Valentine's Day, an Arctic cold front ripped through the state, and suddenly, basic infrastructure failed, and tap water in this sprawling metro became nonexistent or contaminated. Houstonians were left scrambling for essential, life-sustaining H2O.
They were not alone. Nearly 1,300 water systems across Texas were sputtering and failing at the same time. Worse, this calamitous crisis stemmed directly from the even bigger failure of another essential piece of modern infrastructure: the electric grid. During the weeklong deep freeze, almost all the Lone Star State's jury-rigged network of corporate-owned and -run power systems failed, leaving 4.5 million homes and businesses without electricity. In turn, this fiasco caused the pumps, pipes and pressure controls of hundreds of local water networks to freeze up and break down, cutting off potable water for days.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a GOP mediocrity who grossly mismanaged Texas' COVID-19 response (his slogan seems to be, "Failure is not an option; it's a promise") tried at first to blame Mother Nature. Well, it surely was a big winter storm ... but lots of states regularly maintain electricity and water through much deeper freezes.
What hit Texans was not nature, but an ongoing unnatural disaster. It was the state's reward for turning its government over to incompetents and right-wing ideologues who persistently disdain investment in public resources and community needs. For 25 years, a series of money-corrupted, corporate-coddling Texas governors and legislators have recoiled from even such minimal measures as requiring energy profiteers to weatherize people's crucial infrastructure. (This sort of corporate butt-kissing is what governors really mean when they puff themselves up and bluster that their state is "business-friendly.")
And their obsequious surrender of the public interest to moneyed powers pays off handsomely to them ... in bales of campaign cash they rake in from the profiteers. For example, the oil and gas giants that fuel the electric grid rewarded Abbott's six years of servility with a whopping $26 million in "thank-you" donations. The public's reward was hundreds of Texans killed in that one week of the grid crash and some $130 billion in economic losses from business shutdowns and homes flooded by burst pipes.
How embarrassing is it that the techno-advanced, engineering powerhouse of America has a growing crisis of water quality and delivery usually associated with impoverished nations? And the infrastructure collapse is not just in Texas. From our biggest cities like New York to isolated rural communities like those in the sprawling Navajo Nation, millions of us endure raw sewage, industrial chemicals, lead pipes, burst water mains, price gouging, cut-offs, boil emergencies, and other water disasters.
In March, Consumer Reports and The Guardian issued findings from a nine-month investigation of drinking water systems serving 19 million Americans. Of 120 systems analyzed, 118 had serious levels of toxic chemicals including lead, arsenic, and/or PFAS (a group of synthetic toxins) at dangerous levels. PFAS compounds are in our clothing, carpets, nonstick cookware, food containers, and thousands of other products. And now they're also in our water, seeping in from chemical factories and landfills. They are linked to a range of human health horrors including thyroid disease, cancers, and possibly learning delays in children. The Environmental Protection Agency sets no enforceable limit on PFAS in drinking water and suggests voluntary caps for a few chemicals — even as the compounds contaminate drinking water in more than 2,300 communities in 49 states. To learn more and see what's in your drinking water, go to EWG.org/tapwater/.
To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com
There’s water on Mars! Not to mention a nefarious evil liberal agenda. There’s a new Red Scare coming, America. Are you ready for it?
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Rick Santorum
Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t here to tell us where he would have stood on marriage equality. Luckily for us, conservative Republicans have been only too willing to invoke the late reverend’s name and character in the cause of “religious liberty.”
“Religious liberty,” of course, being the gloss right-wing politicians and pundits have tried to put on the privilege of florists, bakers, and — most controversially — government officials to discriminate against same-sex couples under the aegis of the First Amendment right to practice their religion.
Perhaps noting that his poll numbers were scraping rock bottom, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum thought he’d get in on the game. A few weeks ago, shortly before the last GOP debate, Santorum appeared on the program Marcus and Joni (which airs on the Christian television network Daystar), and drew comparisons between Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than let a gay couple get married on her watch, and — yes — MLK.
It’s possible that one reason Santorum is polling so low right now (0.5 percent right according to Real Clear Politics) is not that he fails to rattle off the conservative talking points — specious comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, ignorance of the concept of judicial review, a willful misunderstanding of civil liberties as they apply to LGBT people — it’s that he’s so damn boring when he does it.
Take a double dose of Red Bull, scaffold your eyelids open, and behold SantorumBot 3000 process moldy right-wing analogies to Nuremberg and civil rights leaders of the past, not to mention a tasteless invocation of the Columbine shooting (Kim Davis is like the girl who was killed because she believed in God, Santorum had said, except that isn’t what happened).
Santorum defended Davis, claiming that she should be “applauded” for her “courageous” actions and asserting that the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage is illegitimate since it violates biblical precepts.
“Clearly, the laws on marriage don’t follow the natural law, they don’t follow God’s law, so in Martin Luther King’s viewpoint, he would have said that this is a law that you have an obligation to resist and that’s what Kim Davis is doing,” he said. “She is standing up and saying, ‘I am not going to follow an unjust law.’”
Let us give thanks to far-right ideologues like Santorum: As long as they are on hand to tell us what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said and done, it’s almost like he’s still with us. Thank you, senator.
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-schooler who reassembled a digital clock in a pencil case and was arrested for his trouble, has become a flashpoint for conservative cranks who believe that the boy’s arrest and the subsequent backlash against the Irving, Texas police force and school officials responsible have all been part of a big fraud. Some theories are more elaborate than others.
Enter Donna Hearne, executive director of the Constitutional Coalition, whose mission is to educate “others to understand and know our Constitution, acknowledging absolutes as the basis for our laws and God as the giver of freedom, and researching issues through the lens of the Constitution.”
Hearne is a former Reagan appointee to the U.S. Department of Education, and is now an outspoken advocate against the Common Core — and when I say “outspoken,” I mean Hearne sees the Common Core as nothing less than a “long war” waged by “the progressive, autocratic elite to completely transfer all decisions concerning children from parents, teachers and school boards to themselves, and to completely transform America from a nation of responsible, moral, independent human beings endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to robots and servants of the state.”
Hearne, blogging in the Conservative Pundit Tuesday, said that liberals’ outpouring of support for Mohamed and condemnation of comments critical of Muslims, such of those of presidential candidate Ben Carson, is entirely misplaced:
Did the school board, the Irving police and Dr. Carson understand American’s founding principles as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence that there are certain truths that come from the Judeo-Christian God such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government is to secure these rights? Did they understand some of the basic tenants of Sharia law: Sharia trumps the Constitution? Sharia law condones female genital mutilation, honor killing, amputation, crucifixion, beheadings (all anti-life) and NO opposition voices or freedom of speech? Did they know that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims want Sharia law and of that 25 percent are okay with violence against Americans?
Whoa. If you think Hearne’s little sashay from discussing a teenage tinkerer in Texas to female genital mutilation (all in one paragraph) is a bit much, just wait. In distressingly quick fashion, she segues from the New York City school board’s decision to close schools for Muslim holidays to an Islamic plot to turn the U.S. into a “totalitarian slave camp.”
Just as quickly, she doubles back to her bête noire: the Common Core, which has undermined America by failing to teach children about their own heritage (“America’s Judeo-Christian foundations” and so forth) as well as the “dangers of civilization jihad.”
“Uninformed and ignorant citizens become slaves of the state,” Hearnes concludes. Her new self-published book is out now.
Michael Savage would like educated Catholics to take a good long look at this pope fella, or as he calls him, the “atheist” who “genuflects.” It seems like Savage is going to go off on a mirthless riff off a Seinfeld routine (“What’s the deal with the pontiff, huh?”), but it turns out this is just the opening salvo in Savage’s weekly performance of metastatic indignation — where each outrage feeds a new, unrelated outrage — each more nonsensical than the last.
No, the real target of Savage’s ire on his Savage Nation show last week was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the “liberal weasel Jew.”
“Everything about him sets off comedic shockwaves in me,” Savage says, identifying Sanders with the type of “atheist Jew” he has avoided all his life. “They hated America. They hated Christians. I know the type. I ran from them. They made me sick.”
He further accuses Sanders of being “a running dog of the Hillary Clinton camp,” a “warmup act,” because his progressive “nonsense” makes her look like a centrist by comparison.
This is all pretty tame, considering just a few weeks ago, Savage likened Pope Francis and Sanders to the Cambodian genocidal dictator Pol Pot. Savage claimed that the reforms they suggested would turn “street thugs in Baltimore” into a homegrown Khmer Rouge.
Sanders, he said, would end up “giving them a gun and a badge, telling them to go out and round up anybody with eyeglasses, and call them the enemy of the state and put them into internment camps, work camps, and they wound up with a mountain of skulls. […] That’s where this rhetoric leads, don’t you understand that?”
These include: the nefarious liberal agenda to foist phony climate change science upon the American public, the corrupting influence of President Obama on absolutely everything he touches, and the insidious Muslim plot to control and co-opt every branch of government — including those concerned with exploring space.
According to Limbaugh, the revelation of briny streams on the Martian surface was just an excuse for so-called “scientists” to trot out their theories about how Mars’ arid, lifeless surface is possibly attributable to an environmental calamity in the Red Planet’s past.
“I’m sorry folks, but that’s not science,” Limbaugh insists, shutting the experts down, “and that’s not even a good wild guess. How can there be a catastrophic event on Mars when there is nobody there to experience the catastrophe? How can there be a catastrophe on Mars when we can’t even prove it? All we can do is wild guess it?”
(This is the same limp canard creationists and climate change deniers wheel out when they want to dismiss the overwhelming body of geological, radiological, and biological evidence. Nobody was there, and so it can’t be known what happened. Talking snakes, on the other hand… but I digress.)
Limbaugh’s asinine aria (courtesy of some courageous transcribing from Media Matters) continues:
NASA wants to go to Mars. And Obama has turned NASA over to Muslim outreach, in case you’ve forgotten. NASA wants the money to go to Mars. It makes total sense in the world that they would time, NASA, the release of, “Look what we found! We found flowing water on Mars! On my god. there could be life! On my god, we gotta go we gotta go!” And here comes the movie [Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi film, The Martian]. They throw in climate change relationships just for a little dot the I, cross the T, and magic happens.
[…] NASA’s been converted to Muslim outreach. They want to go back to Mars. Hell, that’s fine. I mean, I’m not opposed to going to Mars. I’m big on exploring. The problem — everything that Obama touches has been corrupted and by corrupted, I mean converted to liberalism. Everything that exists here exists for the purpose of advancing the Obama agenda.
If Limbaugh really wants to go to exploring Mars, perhaps the Islamic-Obama-Space consortium can arrange a one-way ticket.
Using Salon‘s controversial decision to publish an op-ed by an admitted pedophile as a peg, Jones weaves together his most inspired conspiracy tapestry yet, threading together a “greatest hits” of our nation’s pet paranoias into an elaborate Grand Unified Big Bad Government Theory.
Jones really gets the band back together here: disease-causing vaccines, defense contractors that feed on children’s brains, Jerry Sandusky, transgender bathrooms, the pope (whom The Big Evil State has apparently blackmailed), the sale of baby body parts, public human sacrifices perpetrated by (who else?) the United Nations, “trendy” liberals, the welfare state, death panels, “torture and necrophilia dungeons,” — it’s all part of “an act of domination, an act of control” perpetrated by what he calls the Pot Bellied Pedophile Network (PBP).
The fact that Jones spends the segment wearing a clown mask and blood soaked gloves, speaking in an occasionally incomprehensible voice pretending to be a serial killer in charge of the PBP, is the most reasonable thing in evidence here.
“We’re not just gonna sexually abuse your children,” Jones growls in his masked-clown-as-Big-Evil-State persona, “We’re gonna forcibly inoculate them with deadly pathogens known to brain-damage ’em. We’re gonna rape their brains, rape their minds, and make you take care of em for decades. […] Because that’s what we like to do. And you’re so weak and pathetic you’ll do whatever you tell you.”
“Crawl in your hole and die. The Earth belongs to us,” he concludes. “Your children belong to us now. Submit to the New World Order. Submit to liberalism. Submit to trendiness. Give us full control!” And he signs off with a maniacal laugh.
Scientists scouring the Red Planet using NASA’S Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter say they’ve found direct chemical evidence of transient saltwater flowing on the surface today.
Granted, they haven’t caught the liquid in the act — and what they’ve detected looks less like salty water and more like watery salt. But nonetheless, the discovery published by the journal Nature Geoscience helps solve a long-standing Martian mystery and sheds light on the potential for life on our nearest planetary neighbor.
“This is the first time we’ve found flowing water on a planet that’s not ours,” said lead author Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech.
Scientists got a tantalizing hint that there could be liquid water on the surface back in 2011, when Alfred McEwen, lead scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, along with Ojha and other colleagues, discovered these strange dark streaks on Martian slopes that seem to grow and fade with the seasons. These “recurring slope lineae,” which can stretch up to a few meters, extend downward when it gets warm and then later shrink and fade, reappearing each Martian year.
“Ever since the discovery in 2011 … a number of us have been incredibly excited by the prospect of liquid water on Mars,” said Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary geologist at Caltech who was not involved in the paper. Nonetheless, she added, “we try to be cautious — it’s a big thing to say there’s liquid water on Mars today.”
Granted, Mars’ atmosphere is cold and thin — which means that any pure water that made it to the surface would either freeze or immediately evaporate, depending on the temperature. But a recent study by scientists using NASA’s Curiosity rover found that water might indeed be able to exist briefly on the surface — provided there were enough salts, such as perchlorates, dissolved in the liquid. These salts would keep the water from freezing or evaporating quite as easily and could actually serve to suck moisture back out of the air.
So could liquid water — very salty, briny water — really explain these strange dark streaks on Martian slopes?
Theoretically, the scientists could look for water by using the orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM. CRISM can look for different chemicals in a given spot on the surface by studying the telltale signature of dark bands they’ve left in the light. The problem is, it’s hard to check the light’s chemical fingerprint at the recurring slope lineae, or RSL, because, according to the study, “few locations exist in which RSL are wide or dense enough to fill even a single CRISM pixel.”
So researchers used a method where they focused on the handful of individual pixels that were mostly filled by the recurring slope lineae. They looked at four different spots with recurring slope lineae and discovered a strong fingerprint for hydrated salts — salts with water locked into the mineral structure, a clear sign that saltwater likely had flowed there. The hydrated salts included magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate.
The findings may further whet the appetite of astrobiologists looking to probe past habitable environments on the Red Planet, researchers said.
“I think it’s incredibly exciting, because when we look back at the broad scope of Mars history, it’s always in the past where there’s evidence for the most water,” Ehlmann said. “But if there’s liquid water even today, when Mars is supposedly at its driest … I think that says that there was probably liquid water for all of the last 4.5 billion years, just like there was on Earth. Not in the same quantity, but at least ephemerally, episodically, it’s there.”
Still, the water is so incredibly briny that it’s difficult to imagine microbes being able to survive with the harsh fluid.
In the meantime, where exactly the water comes from, how it’s released, and how it gets back into the soil to repeat the cycle every year remain open questions, the scientists said. Such questions could be answered by a future orbiting mission to Mars, Ehlmann added.
(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Portions of the Martian surface shot by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show many channels from 1 meter to 10 meters wide on a scarp in the Hellas impact basin, in this photograph taken January 14, 2011 and released by NASA March 9, 2011. REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/Handout
In a truly historic moment for science — and for the American space program — NASA spacecraft New Horizons has successfully flown by Pluto on a journey that began over nine years ago. And it’s sent back some photos.
Watch the elation of scientists as the probe continues its mission to the furthest reaches of our solar system, and appreciate this unprecedented look at a far-off world — and let the arguments rage on over whether it should be officially considered a “planet” or not.
