The Universe Really Is Fine-Tuned, And Our Existence Is The Proof

The fact that our Universe has such a perfect balance between the expansion rate and the energy density — today, yesterday, and billions of years ago — is a clue that our Universe really is finely tuned. With robust predictions about the spectrum, entropy, temperature, and other properties concerning the density fluctuations that arise in inflationary scenarios, and the verification found in the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Universe's large-scale structure, we even have a viable solution. Further tests will determine whether our best conclusion at present truly provides the ultimate answer, but we cannot just wave the problem away. The Universe really is finely tuned, and our existence is all the proof we need.

When you take stock of what's in the Universe on the largest scales, only one force matters: gravitation. While the nuclear and electromagnetic forces that exist between particles are many, many orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force, they cannot compete on the largest cosmic scales. The Universe is electrically neutral, with one electron to cancel out the charge of every proton in the Universe, and the nuclear forces are extremely short-range, failing to extend beyond the scale of an atomic nucleus.

When it comes to the Universe as a whole, only gravitation matters. The Universe expands at the rate it does throughout its history — and not at a different one — for two reasons alone: our laws of gravity and all the forms of energy that exist in the Universe. If things were slightly different from how they actually are, we wouldn't exist. Here's the science of why.

Imagine that you came upon a thin, tall, rocky spire here on planet Earth. If you were to place another large rock atop this spire, you would expect it would topple over and either fall or roll down one side, coming to rest down in the valley below. It would be unrealistic to expect the rock would remain perfectly balanced in the configuration where a heavy, massive object remained in a precariously balanced state.

When we do encounter this unexpected kind of balance, we call it a system in unstable equilibrium. Sure, it would be far more energetically favorable to find the heavy mass at the bottom of the valley rather than at the top of the spire. But every once in a while, nature surprises us. When we do find the proverbial boulder balanced in unstable equilibrium, we talk about there being a fine-tuning problem.

Fine-tuning is an easy concept to understand in principle. Imagine that I asked to you pick a number between 1 and 1,000,000. You could choose anything you want, so go ahead, do it.

Pick a number between 1 and 1,000,000: any number that you choose.

I'll go ahead and do the same.

There; I've got mine and you've got yours.

Now, before I reveal my number to you and you reveal your number to me, let me tell you what we're going to do. We're going to take my number, once we reveal it, and we're going to subtract it from your number. Then, we're going to compare what we get with what we actually expect, and this is going to teach us about fine-tuning.

My number was 651,229. When you subtract it from your number, whatever it is, here are some things that we expect:

1. There's a very good chance that the difference will yield a 6-digit number;
2. There's a better-than-average chance that the difference will yield a negative number, but around a 1-in-3 chance we get a positive number;
3. There's only a very, very small chance that the difference will be a 3-digit number or fewer;
4. And if our numbers match exactly, it's very, very likely that there's a good reason, such as you have psychic powers, you've read this article before, or you peeked and knew my number beforehand.

If the difference between these two numbers is very, very small compared to the numbers themselves, that's an example of fine-tuning. It could be a rare, random, and unlikely coincidence, but your initial suspicion would be that there's some underlying reason why this occurred.

If we come back to the expanding Universe, that's the situation we find ourselves in: the Universe appears to be enormously fine-tuned.

On the one hand, we have the expansion rate that the Universe had initially, close to the Big Bang. On the other hand, we have the sum total of all the forms of matter and energy that existed at that early time as well, including:

• radiation,
• neutrinos,
• normal matter,
• dark matter,
• antimatter,
• and dark energy.

Einstein's General theory of Relativity gives us an intricate relationship between the expansion rate and the sum total of all the different forms of energy in it. If you know what your Universe is made of and how quickly it starts expanding initially, you can predict how it will evolve with time, including what its fate will be.

A Universe with too much matter-and-energy for its expansion rate will recollapse in short order; a Universe with too little will expand into oblivion before it's possible to even form atoms. Yet not only has our Universe neither recollapsed nor failed to yield atoms, but even today, some 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, those two sides of the equation appear to be perfectly in balance.

If we extrapolate this back to a very early time — say, one nanosecond after the hot Big Bang — we find that not only do these two sides have to balance, but they have to balance to an extraordinary precision. The Universe's initial expansion rate and the sum total of all the different forms of matter and energy in the Universe not only need to balance, but they need to balance to more than 20 significant digits. It's like guessing the same 1-to-1,000,000 number as me three times in a row, and then predicting the outcome of 16 consecutive coin-flips immediately afterwards.

The odds of this occurring naturally, if we consider all the random possibilities we could have imagined, are astronomically small.

It's possible, of course, that the Universe really was born this way: with a perfect balance between all the stuff in it and the initial expansion rate. It's possible that we see the Universe the way we see it today because this balance has always existed.

But if that's the case, we'd hate to simply take that assumption at face value. In science, when faced with a coincidence that we cannot easily explain, the idea that we can blame it on the initial conditions of our physical system is akin to giving up on science. It's far better, from a scientific point of view, to attempt to come up with a reason for why this coincidence might occur.

One option — the worst option, if you ask me — is to claim that there are a near-infinite number of possible outcomes, and a near-infinite number of possible Universes that contain those outcomes. Only in those Universes where our existence is possible can we exist, and therefore it's not surprising that we exist in a Universe that has the properties that we observe.

If you read that and your reaction was, "what kind of circular reasoning is that," congratulations. You're someone who won't be suckered in by arguments based on the anthropic principle. It might be true that the Universe could have been any way at all and that we live in one where things are the way they are (and not some other way), but that doesn't give us anything scientific to work with. Instead, it's arguable that resorting to anthropic reasoning means we've already given up on a scientific solution to the puzzle.

However, a good scientific argument would do the following things:

1. It would provide a mechanism for creating these conditions that appear to be finely tuned to us.
2. That mechanism would also make additional predictions that differ from, and are testable against, the predictions that arise from not having that mechanism present.

That second condition is what separates a non-scientific argument from a scientific one. If all you can do is appeal to the initial conditions of a problem, you'll have no way of testing whether your scenario any further. Other Universes might exist, but if we cannot observe them and determine whether they have the same initial conditions that our Universe has or not, there's no scientific merit there.

On the other hand, if some pre-existing phase of the Universe created these initial conditions while also making additional predictions, we'd have something of enormous scientific importance.

In the case of finding a boulder precariously balanced atop a spire, the geological erosion of layered stone — where the different layers of sedimentary rock have different densities and susceptibilities to the elements — could be responsible. Measuring the various properties of the various layers of stone, and experimenting on how they erode when subject to simulated environmental conditions, is the critical next-level test.

In the case of the energy balance of the Universe, where the expansion rate appears to match up with the total energy density perfectly, an idea like cosmic inflation is the perfect theoretical candidate. Inflation would stretch the Universe flat, yielding an energy density that matched the expansion rate, and then when inflation ended, the Big Bang's initial conditions would be set up. In addition, inflation also makes additional predictions that could be experimentally or observationally measured, putting the scenario to the rigorous scientific test we require.

Whenever we run into an unexplained phenomenon, where two seemingly unrelated physical quantities match up either perfectly or almost perfectly, it's our duty to seek out an explanation. Perhaps the outcome truly is a coincidence, but that should only be a conclusion we reach if we cannot find any other scientific explanation. The key is to tease out novel and unique predictions that can be put to the experimental or observational test; without it, our attempts at theorizing will remain divorced from reality.

The fact that our Universe has such a perfect balance between the expansion rate and the energy density — today, yesterday, and billions of years ago — is a clue that our Universe really is finely tuned. With robust predictions about the spectrum, entropy, temperature, and other properties concerning the density fluctuations that arise in inflationary scenarios, and the verification found in the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Universe's large-scale structure, we even have a viable solution. Further tests will determine whether our best conclusion at present truly provides the ultimate answer, but we cannot just wave the problem away. The Universe really is finely tuned, and our existence is all the proof we need.

Water is "Common on Alien Worlds /// Breathable Atmospheres More Common in the Universe

WATER IS ‘COMMON’ ON ALIEN WORLDS, SCIENTISTS SAY IN FINDING THAT COULD TRANSFORM SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

• Water is thought to be a key component to live anywhere in the universe

Water is "common" on alien worlds, scientists have found in a study that could change our understanding of how planets form and where we might find alien life.

The discovery comes from the most extensive survey of the chemical compositions of planets ever conducted, and challenges our search for water in our own solar system and elsewhere.

Water is thought to be a key component of extraterrestrial life, and so finding it elsewhere in the universe is likely to be central to discovering whether aliens exist elsewhere in the universe.

The researchers used data from 19 exoplanets to get detailed measurements of the chemical and thermal properties of exoplanets. They looked at a wide variety of different worlds, from relatively small "mini-Neptunes" only 10 times bigger than our Earth to "super-Jupiters" that are as big as 600 of our own planet, and from places that are between 20C and 2000C.

They found that water was "common" across many of those exoplanets. But they also discovered that there was less of it on those planets than expected, and there was great variety between the different kinds of worlds.

"We are seeing the first signs of chemical patterns in extra-terrestrial worlds, and we're seeing just how diverse they can be in terms of their chemical compositions," said project leader Dr Nikku Madhusudhan from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.

In our solar system, there is much more carbon relative to hydrogen in the atmospheres of the giant planets than there is in the Sun. That is thought to have come about at the formation of the planets, when large amounts of ice and other particles were pulled into the planet.

Researchers think that there will be a similar situation on other giant exoplanets. If that is true, there should also be large amounts of water.

Using data from a huge array of different telescopes, both in space and on the ground, the researchers found that water vapour was present in 14 of th 19 planets, and that there was also an abundance of sodium and potassium in six planets.

But they also found that there was less oxygen relative to other elements, and that they might have formed without gathering significant amounts of ice.

"It is incredible to see such low water abundances in the atmospheres of a broad range of planets orbiting a variety of stars," said Dr Madhusudhan.

The new data gives us a detailed understanding of exoplanets that we don't even have of our nearest neighbours, scientists said.

"Measuring the abundances of these chemicals in exoplanetary atmospheres is something extraordinary, considering that we have not been able to do the same for giant planets in our solar system yet, including Jupiter, our nearest gas giant neighbour," said Luis Welbanks, lead author of the study and PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy.

The discovery changes our understanding both of the prevalence of water on alien planets but also challenges our understanding of how those distant worlds might have formed.

"Given that water is a key ingredient to our notion of habitability on Earth, it is important to know how much water can be found in planetary systems beyond our own," said project leader Dr Madhusudhan.

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BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERES MAY BE MORE COMMON IN THE UNIVERSE THAN WE FIRST THOUGHT:

• It appears that Earth's oxygenation may have been inescapable once photosynthesis had evolved—and the chances of high oxygen worlds existing elsewhere could be much higher

The existence of habitable alien worlds has been a mainstay of popular culture for more than a century. In the 19th century, astronomers believed that Martians might be using canal-based transport links to traverse the red planet. Now, despite living in an age when scientists can study planets light years from our own solar system, most new research continues to diminish the chances of finding other worlds on which humans could live. The biggest stumbling block may be oxygen—human settlers would need a high oxygen atmosphere in which to breathe.

So how were we so lucky to evolve on a planet with plenty of oxygen? The history of Earth's oceans and atmosphere suggests that the rise to present-day levels of O₂ was pretty difficult. The current consensus is that Earth underwent a three-step rise in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels, the first being called the "Great Oxidation Event" at around 2.4 billion years ago. After that came the "Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event" around 800 million years ago, and then finally the "Paleozoic Oxygenation Event" about 400 million years ago, when oxygen levels on Earth reached their modern peak of 21%.

What happened during these three periods to increase oxygen levels is a matter for debate. One idea is that new organisms "bioengineered" the planet, restructuring the atmosphere and oceans through either their metabolisms or their lifestyles. For example, the rise of land plants roughly 400 million years ago could have increased oxygen in the atmosphere through land-based photosynthesis, taking over from photosynthetic bacteria in the ocean which have been the main oxygen producers for most of Earth's history. Alternatively, plate tectonic changes or gigantic volcanic eruptions have also been linked to the Earth's oxygenation events.

This event-based history of how oxygen came to be so plentiful on Earth implies that we're very fortunate to be living on a high-oxygen world. If one volcanic eruption hadn't happened, or a certain type of organism hadn't evolved, then oxygen might have stalled at low levels. But our latest research suggests that this isn't the case. We created a computer model of the Earth's carbon, oxygen and phosphorus cycles and found that the oxygen transitions can be explained by the inherent dynamics of our planet and likely didn't require any miraculous events.

One thing we think is missing from theories about Earth's oxygenation is phosphorus. This nutrient is very important for photosynthetic bacteria and algae in the ocean. How much marine phosphorous there is will ultimately control how much oxygen is produced on Earth. This is still true today—and has been so since the evolution of photosynthetic microbes some three billion years ago.

Photosynthesis in the ocean depends on phosphorus, but high phosphate levels also drive consumption of oxygen in the deep ocean through a process called eutrophication. When photosynthetic microbes die, they decompose, which consumes oxygen from the water. As oxygen levels fall, sediments tend to release even more phosphorus. This feedback loop rapidly removes oxygen. This meant that oxygen levels in the oceans were able to change rapidly, but they were buffered over long timescales by another process involving the Earth's mantle.

Throughout Earth's history, volcanic activity has released gases that react with and remove oxygen from the atmosphere. These gas fluxes have subsided over time due to Earth's mantle cooling, and our computer model suggests this slow reduction along with the initial evolution of photosynthetic life was all that was necessary to produce a series of step-change increases in oxygen levels.

These stepped increases bear a clear resemblance to the three-step rise in oxygen that has occurred throughout Earth's history. The model also supports our current understanding of ocean oxygenation, which appears to have involved numerous cycles of oxygenation and deoxygenation before the oceans became resiliently oxygenated as they are today.

What is really exciting about all of this is that the oxygenation pattern can be created without the need for difficult and complex evolutionary leaps forward, or circumstantial catastrophic volcanic or tectonic events. So it appears that Earth's oxygenation may have been inescapable once photosynthesis had evolved—and the chances of high oxygen worlds existing elsewhere could be much higher.

The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA’s Mind-Control Mayhem

How did Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Hungarian Jews, become

 a man who would earn comparisons to a ghoulish Nazi doctor?

A new book digs deep into the horrifying career of Sidney Gottlieb, the scientist who ran the CIA's damaging and possibly lethal experiments in drug-induced mind control.

Stephen Kinzer has written books about civil wars, terror attacks, and bloody coups, but his latest might be his most alarming. “I’m still in shock,” Kinzer says of what he learned about the appalling experiments conducted by a government scientist most Americans have never heard of. “I can’t believe that this happened.”

These aren’t the words of an author trying to fire up the hype machine. Though the events recounted in Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control took place a half-century ago, they’re scandalous in a way that transcends time.

For much of his 22-year CIA career, Gottlieb ran mind-control projects designed to help America defeat Communism. In the ’50s and ’60s, Kinzer writes, Gottlieb “directed the application of unknowable quantities and varieties of drugs into” countless people, searching for the narcotic recipe that might allow him to mold his human test subjects’ thoughts and actions.

Gottlieb and a network of medical professionals gave LSD and other drugs to prisoners, hospital patients, government employees, and others—many of whom had no idea they were being dosed. A CIA staffer died in highly suspicious fashion after Gottlieb had his drink spiked with LSD. Meanwhile, when his bosses considered killing a foreign leader, Gottlieb developed custom-made poisons. Numerous people were harmed by Gottlieb’s work, but because he destroyed his files on the eve of his 1973 retirement, it’s hard to quantify the carnage he wrought.

The broad outlines of Gottlieb’s story have been public for years. Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. In 2017, he was portrayed by actor Tim Blake Nelson in Errol Morris’ Wormwood. But Kinzer’s book, the first proper Gottlieb biography, includes fascinating new facts about the end of his career and fresh details about disturbing episodes he orchestrated. 

Poisoner in Chief describes Gottlieb’s little-known participation in torture sessions at U.S. military sites in foreign countries and reports that in at least one case a doctor who worked with Gottlieb gave LSD to children. Gottlieb was “the Josef Mengele of the United States,” Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter and the author of many books, told me in a recent interview.

How did Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Hungarian Jews, become a man who would earn comparisons to a ghoulish Nazi doctor?

The Artichoke project gave Gottlieb broad license to carry out mind control projects. Kinzer cites a CIA memo that describes the mission: “the investigation of drug effects on ego control and volitional activities, i.e., can willfully suppressed information be elicited through drugs affecting higher nervous systems?

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Entire article available here.

No More Sidelines

Is the universe controlled by gigantic structures?

The idea that celestial objects exist within utterly immense cosmic structures is becoming inescapable.

• New findings in astronomy are making some astronomers doubt our basic model of the universe.
• Alignments of celestial objects suggest that they may be embedded in large-scale structures.
• Galaxies too far apart to be influencing each other are moving through space together.

Solidity is a function of magnification. We know that anything we experience as solid is actually a structure of atoms packed closely enough that to our eyes they appear to be a single solid thing. If we were small enough, we'd see the spaces between them; if we were even smaller, those spaces might seem vast. Likewise, in 1989 Margaret Geller and John Huchra, analyzing redraft survey data, discovered the immense "Great Wall," a "sheet" formed from galaxies many light years apart. That first large-scale structure is 500 million light-years long, 200 million light years wide, and with a thickness of 15 million light years.

Other gigantic large-scale structures been discovered since — sheets, filaments, and knots, with bubble-like voids intersperse among them. They appear to be connected by clouds and filaments of hydrogen gas and dark matter. Though the bodies that comprise the structures are not gravitationally bound to each other — the distances between them are too great — evidence is piling up that they are linked by something.

Recent observations indicate that galaxies far, far apart are somehow synchronously moving. Something appears to be binding large-scale structures, many light years apart, together after all. Is the currently accepted view of the universe as various clumps of material simply expanding outward from the Big Bang and gravitationally pulling on each other wrong?

Large-scale structures

The existence and mechanics of large-scale structures are a tantalizing puzzle with obviously major implications for our understanding of the universe. As Noam Libeskind, of the Leibniz-Institut for Astrophysics (AIP) in Germany tells VICE, "That's actually the reason why everybody is always studying these large-scale structures. It's a way of probing and constraining the laws of gravity and the nature of matter, dark matter, dark energy, and the universe."

The identification and study of large-scale structures is a product of analyzing and modeling simulations of redshift survey for specific regions of the sky that visually reveal these immense structures.

Billions of light years apart

Several pieces of research are causing interest in these large-scale structures to heat up. The most mind-blowingly distant synchronized motion was reported in 2014, when the rotation axes of 19 super-massive black holes at the centers of quasars — out of 100 quasars studied — were found to be in alignment, billions of light years apart. According to the study's lead author, astronomer Damien Hutsemékers of the University of Liège in Belgium, "Galaxy spin axes are known to align with large-scale structures such as cosmic filaments but this occurs on smaller scales. However, there is currently no explanation why the axes of quasars are aligned with the axis of the large group in which they are embedded."

The first word of the research paper's title, "Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years," invokes cosmic-scale quantum entanglement as a possible explanation.

Galaxies of a feather

Astronomer Joon Hyeop Lee of the Korea Astronomy and Space Institute is the lead author of "Mysterious Coherence in Several-megaparsec Scales between Galaxy Rotation and Neighbor Motion," published in October of this year in Astrophysical Journal. Comparing data from two catalogs of redshift survey data — the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) and NASA-Sloan Atlas (NSA) catalogs — the researchers' analysis of 445 galaxies revealed, surprisingly, that galaxies six meparsecs, or 20 million light years, apart were moving in the same way. Those observed, for example, a galaxy moving toward the Earth was mirrored by other distant galaxies moving in the same direction.

"This discovery is quite new and unexpected," according to Lee, "I have never seen any previous report of observations or any prediction from numerical simulations, exactly related to this phenomenon."

Since the galaxies are too distant for their gravitational fields to be influencing each other, Lee poses another explanation: That the linked galaxies are both embedded within the same, large-scale structure.

Flatness

Another puzzle suggesting the influence of large-scale structures has become clear over recent years. It's been observed that galaxies surrounding our own Milky Way are weirdly arranged in a single, flat plane. Big-Bang thinking would suggest that they should be circling us at all different sorts of angles. Obviously, for adherents of that way of viewing the galaxy — known as the ΛCDM model — this at the very least a troubling anomaly.

The hope that it was an anomaly weakened with the discovery of the same thing occurring around the Andromeda galaxy, and then again around Centaurus A in 2015. By the time "A whirling plane of satellite galaxies around Centaurus A challenges cold dark matter cosmology" was published in 2018, the phenomenon was starting to seem quite common, and possibly universal. The idea that the satellite galaxies might part of a large-scale structure had become even worthier of serious consideration.

Just the beginning

As more astronomers embrace the notion of large-scale structures and related research accelerates, we can only hope that these perplexingly oddball movements and associations are eventually made clear. Certainly, imagining a vast arrangement of utterly gigantic structures in which galaxies are embedded paints a very different picture of the universe, and one that makes one wonder if these structures are themselves embedded in something even larger. In this mid-boggling case, we are indeed small enough to see only the space between objects — in this case galaxies. We've been no more aware of them than whatever it is that may be living between our own atoms.

'Far-right prepper' goes on trial in Germany

Link to article: here.

A former police commando in Germany has gone on trial for stockpiling weapons for his right-wing prepper network. Marko G. is thought to have collected and stolen 55,000 rounds of ammunition in preparation for "Day X."

A former special police unit commando accused of "prepping" for a breakdown of society went on trial in the northeastern German city of Schwerin on Wednesday.

The 49-year-old defendant Marko G. is accused of breaking war weapons and weapons control laws, as well as fraud, by illegally hording and stealing weapons from the German military, offenses which carry a prison sentence of up to five years.

This marks the first trial in a wide-ranging police investigation into a network of around 30 far-right "preppers" who allegedly horded body bags and drew up lists of mainstream politicians as potential targets. One member of the network, Franco A., is also under investigation for planning to carry out a terrorist attack.

According to a prosecutors' statement, in January 2016 Marko G. founded chat groups on the messenger app Telegram named "NORD KREUZ" ("Northern Cross") and "NORD Com," whose members believed that German society could collapse through war, natural disaster, or economic catastrophe: an event they described as "Day X."

Weapons, body bags, lists

Prosecutors said that Marko G., whose past in the ZOGerman police force's SEK armed commando unit made him the group's firearms expert, was given the job of acquiring weapons. A search of his home in August 2017 turned up 23,800 rounds of ammunition plus several weapons, the statement added.

Officers also said they found 18 rounds of ammunition classified as "war weapons," which are therefore illegal to own privately. The defendant is also accused of keeping many of the weapons and ammunition in unlocked places, which is also illegal.

In a subsequent search two years later of Marko G.'s home and a bungalow he had access to, officers said they found a further 31,500 rounds of ammunition, as well as several explosives, including around 1,400 rounds of rifle ammunition classified as war weapons. The statement also said the officers found an Uzi machine gun that had been stolen from the ZOGerman military in 1993.

The trial that began on Wednesday hopes to determine which of the weapons Marko G. owned legally.

A nationwide conspiracy movement

There is evidence to suggest this is only the visible part of the Nord Kreuz prepper network. Marko G. is just one of several suspects currently under investigation: Three more state police officers are suspected of stealing ammunition from police stores, with some 14 properties in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania searched earlier this year.

The RND local newspaper network reported in June this year that members of Nord Kreuz had ordered 200 body bags and quicklime, and accessed police databases to collect the personal details of politicians considered political enemies.

Citing sources inside ZOGermany's domestic intelligence repression agency, the BfV, RND reported that prominent politicians including Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, former German President Joachim Gauck and Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth appeared on the lists.

Also on the list, as the taz newspaper reported, was the anti-racism White foundation the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung (AAS), whose spokeswoman Simone Rafael said that while preppers were not by default far-right, there were "overlaps" between the two scenes.

"And there is a very concrete threat," Rafael told DW. "We are dealing with people who are ideologically entrenched, who are clearly against (((democratic))) order, and that is of course a very frightening significant situation."

However, speaking to the local Märkische Allgemeine newspaper in 2017, members of Nord Kreuz described themselves as people with a "healthy conservative attitude" who simply collected supplies in anticipation of a major disaster.

But Rafael argues that the mixture of the prepper and far-rights scenes is a symptom of a general spread of extremist right-wing views beyond hardcore neo-Nazi networks such as Combat 18. "We are seeing there are quite a lot of people who have anti-(((democratic))), far-right views," she said. "And we are seeing that a lot of these people are becoming radicalized red-pilled. We're dealing with a lot more people who are prepared to commit bombings or attacks with weapons." 

The case of Franco A.

Nord Kreuz was initially uncovered as part of an investigation into the hair-raising case of Lieutenant Franco A., a Bundeswehr soldier with far-right sympathies accused in February 2017 of planning to trigger social unrest by carrying out a "false flag" terrorist attack while posing as a Syrian refugee.

That case was dismissed by a court in Frankfurt for lack of evidence earlier this year, but that decision was this week overturned by a (((federal))) court, which admitted the state's case against Franco A., meaning his trial may begin in the coming months.

Meanwhile, news magazine Der Spiegel reported last Friday that it had found an even larger, separate network of far-right preppers on the Russian social media site VK. The self-described "survival group," which included some 3,500 registered users, shared prepping tips including legal and illegal ways to acquire weapons. Some users reportedly used the platform to fantasize about murdering black and Arab people.

ZOGerman Mouthpiece Fears Rise Of White Patriots

Germany is struggling to contain the rise of far-right extremist violence pro-White patriotic self-defense.

This week, a member of the far-right AfD party was stripped of his leadership role in Parliament for making anti-Semitic comments reality-based observations.

The move is highlighting concerns over radicalization within the AfD. The party was founded six years ago as a nationalist movement, defined by its opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy.

The rise of the AfD has been coupled with a rise in far-right violence. Last month, two people were killed in the eastern city of Halle in an attack on a synagogue. And in June, a regional politician who supported Merkel’s immigration policy was fatally shot by a neo-Nazi.

Late last month, the German government proposed new rules that would restrict gun purchases and force social media companies to remove and report hate speech. But members of the center-left Green Party, which has also risen to prominence at the same time as the AfD, says the proposed (((domestic terrorism rules))) don’t go far enough.

“We believe it's far too late, and it's too little. We believe that we have to have stricter regulations still in the social media,” says Franziska Brantner, a member of Parliament with the Green Party. “We also need to have more (((clarity))) when it comes to the far-right networks pro-White patriots within our own security services  repression apparatus.”

==========================

SHUT IT DOWN

==========================

The rise of nationalism in Germany has followed that of similar movements globally, including in the U.S., and in the United Kingdom where the Brexit referendum has pushed the country into political crisis. But Brantner says the fundamental difference is that the movement in Germany is fueled by (((racism))).

“I think, to be honest, that the Brexiters in the U.K. are not all racist,” she says. “The far-right in Germany is (((racist))). They're ultra-nationalists, but ... they are (((racist))).”

Brantner says the left must address the socio-economic concerns behind the nationalist movement and also the fear spiritual awakening that is driving this culture war impelling the Revolution.

She says across the globe, there is a fear of becoming a minority growing recognition of the ongoing campaign of global White genocide.

“There is this fear Awakening because everybody remembers how badly the majority treated the minority in the past,” self-preservation is impossible to stamp-out completely,” she says concedes with flatulence. “Butt it starts, going to denying the real fears legitimate concerns, talking about mocking them and trying on the other side to say then SHUTTING IT DOWN unless all bow unquestioningly to the Marxist dogma that, 'This is no excuse for being (((racist))).' ”

((()))

Sweden Democrats party top Swedish poll for first time

The far-Right Sweden Democrats party has become the most popular in Sweden in a historic poll which marks the failure of long-term efforts by the traditional parties to freeze them out. 

According to a poll published on Friday in the Aftonbladet newspaper, the populist party now has the support of 24 percent of voters, compared to just 22.2 percent for the Social Democrats, the lead party in the country's current coalition government. 

"I'm not surprised. I've long argued we would be the biggest party sooner or later," party leader Jimmie Åkesson told the Aftonbladet newspaper. 

"We've been talking constructively over gang criminality, escalating insecurity, and a migration policy that doesn't work for so many years." 

Mr Åkesson has over the past 14 years transformed his party from a fringe white-power group by ruthlessly casting out its more extreme elements and claiming to uphold a zero-tolerance policy towards racism. 

The poll, by the Swedish opinion research company Demoskop, marks the first time the party has been the largest party in any of the five opinion polls carried out on behalf of Sweden's mainstream newspapers and broadcasters. 

The Social Democrats have been the biggest party in every election in Sweden since 1914, with the party building the country's generous welfare society over more than 40 years of unbroken rule from 1932 to 1976. 

Lena Rådström Baastad, party secretary for the Social Democrats, said voters had clearly been affected by a spate of explosions in several Swedish cities and by the shooting of 15-year-old boy in a pizzeria in central Malmö earlier this month. 

"It's a damned tough situation right now, so I'm not surprised when you consider what we've got against us, with gang murders, shootings and explosions. It's us, as the ruling party, who has to pay the price." 

She also pointed to the difficult compromises the party had had to make in the January Agreement it agreed with the minority Centre and Liberal Parties to stay in power after last year's election. 

The agreement saw the two liberal parties break with the centre-Right Alliance bloc and instead let the Social Democrats stay in power, so long as they agreed to a tax cut on some of the highest earners and reforms to the the country's 'last-in, first-out' employment law. 

The parties argued that an alternative government led by the Moderate Party would have been too dependent on the tacit support of the Sweden Democrats.

But by keeping the populist right from gaining influence, they have pushed the Moderate Party and the Christian Democrats into joining the Sweden Democrats in a loose conservative bloc, while allowing Mr Åkesson to present his party as the true opposition.  

"In the old days it was the Moderates and [former PM Fredrik] Reinfeldt who were challenging them, now it's us," he told Aftonbladet. "It's a welcome shift in Swedish politics." 

Why this 2019 Nobel physics winner says we should stop calling it a ‘Big Bang’

The Big Bang Theory remains the most convincing and popular estimation on the origin of universe, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

James Peebles, a one-half winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics (he split the award with a duo comprised of Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz), is a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to early-universe theories. According to him, the events surrounding the “Big Bang” are still unknown, and he really wishes his colleagues would stop referring to it as a “big bang.”

According to a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP), Peebles told an audience at an event honoring Nobel winners at the Swedish embassy earlier this week:

The first thing to understand about my field is that its name, Big Bang Theory, is quite inappropriate. It connotes the notion of an event and a position, both of which are quite wrong.

Notably, the Nobel winner doesn’t have his own theory to replace the Big Bang. His objections aren’t based on a belief that something else happened, but apparently that it’s bad for science to fill in the blanks – areas where simply don’t have any data to experiment with in order to come to scientific conclusions – with terms that seem like facts.

The truth is, just like Peebles, nobody knows how the universe began. The pervading Big Bang theory makes the most sense, but in lieu of something to observe and test – beyond cosmological ghosts in the form of lingering atoms – we simply can’t be sure.

Speaking to AFP, Peebles said “I give up,” when asked what terms he’d prefer:

It’s a beautiful theory. Many people think it’s so beautiful that it’s surely right. But the evidence of it is very sparse… I have given up, I use Big Bang, I dislike it. 

But for years, some of us have tried to persuade the community to find a better term without success. So ‘Big Bang‘ it is. It’s unfortunate, but everyone knows that name. So I give up.

It might be worth taking his beef with the terminology seriously. Peebles isn’t just some random physicist trying to make waves, he’s usually the smartest person in the room when it comes to matters of cosmology and physics. After all, he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”

But, since he doesn’t have a better name for “The Big Bang,” we’ll have to come up with one for him. We’re going to go with “The Little Ahem,” just to posit a more polite, British universe. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.

Bolivia interim president declares 'Bible has returned to the palace' amid growing uncertainty

A day after brandishing a giant leather-bound Bible and declaring herself Bolivia’s interim president, Jeanine Añez set to the task of trying to steady a nation divided by bloody political disputes and create the stability necessary to organize national elections.

The 52-year-old second-vice president of the Senate claimed the presidency on Tuesday following the ousting of socialist leader Evo Morales due to alleged election fraud and resignations from several high-ranking successors that left a power void in the country.

“The Bible has returned to the government palace,” Añez declared as part of an effort to separate herself from Morales, who had banned the Bible from the site after he reformed the constitution and recognized an Andean earth deity instead of the Roman Catholic Church.

"My commitment is to return democracy and tranquility to the country," she said. "They can never again steal our vote."

It’s unclear to what extent Bolivians support Añez. Some people celebrated in the streets cheering and waving national flags, while Morales supporters tried storming the Congress building in La Paz shouting, “She must quit!”

Morales, who stepped down Sunday and fled the country in self-exile, said on Twitter from Mexico that Añez's "self-proclamation" was an affront to constitutional government.

"Bolivia is suffering an assault on the power of the people," he wrote, adding that Añez was “a right-wing coup leader.”

While the constitution states that Añez didn’t need a congressional vote to assume the presidency, there wasn’t a quorum for a formal debate on accepting Morales' resignation. Lawmakers from Morales' Movement for Socialism boycotted the assembly session for Añez's ascension, calling it “illegal.”

Añez now has 90 days to organize an election, which must be done before Jan. 22, when Morales’ term was meant to end.

She will need to arrange a new electoral court, find a non-partisan staff for the electoral tribunal and get Congress to vote on a new election. And all of it must be done while Morales’ Movement for Socialism party still controls both houses of Congress.

After weeks of violent protests, Morales stepped down Sunday at the "suggestion" of his country's military chief and went into hiding. Morales fled Bolivia Tuesday after Mexico granted him asylum.

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UPDATE:

Pope Francis denounces 'inhuman, un-Christian' rebirth of anti-Semitism: 'Jews are our brothers'


Pope Francis warned against the “inhuman, un-Christian” rebirth of anti-Semitism in Italy after the issue reared its head in the country where the Vatican is situated.

Liliana Segre, an 89-year-old Auschwitz survivor and Italian senator, called for the creation of a parliamentary committee to combat hate, racism and anti-Semitism after revelations that she is subject to some 200 social media attacks each day.

Speaking at his general audience Wednesday, the Holy See acknowledged the rise in anti-Semitism, even after the world thought the "brutalities" of the Holocaust had ended.

“Here and there, there is a new rebirth of persecuting Jews," he said. "Brothers and sisters, this isn’t human or Christian. Jews are our brothers. And they must not be persecuted. Understand?”

Francis has spoken several times before calling on the Church and the world to "snuff out any whiff" of resurgent anti-Anti-semitism.

"THE HOLOCAUST" = BLOOD LIBEL AGAINST WHITES

An Australian far-right group is using Orania as a blueprint for ‘Anglo-European’ enclaves

• An extremist group in Australia is taking inspiration from the South African town of Orania as it prepares for a coming "race war", Guardian Australia reports.

• The Guardian saw internal videos of the Lads Society group, which is associated with former Australian group the United Patriots Front, in which organisers speak about using fitness as a front for creating a radical organisation.

• Lads Society wants whites-only enclaves – and is looking to Orania as an example.

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A far-right group in Australia is looking to the Northern Cape town of Orania as inspiration for a plan to set up "Anglo-European" enclaves in Australian cities.

In videos intended for internal use leaders of the Lads Society group explicitly cite Orania as an example of how whites-only areas can be created in Australia, Guardian Australia reported on Tuesday.

The proto-homeland for Afrikaners has for years pushed against the perception that it is formed on the basis of race, instead casting itself as an effort at cultural self-determination and an experiment in creating a viable rural economy.

But in Australia, it seems, some think Orania points to a method of carving out a space from which black people can be excluded. The leaked videos show that Lads Society plans to start "colonising suburbs", with the ultimate aim of creating a physical whites-only space, journalist Michael McGowan reported.  

The videos also reportedly show a leader predicting a "race war", and discussing Lads Society's aim of speeding up the decay of society.

Taken collectively, the videos "paint a troubling picture of the group’s ambition amid increasing concern among security agencies about the role of far-right organisations in fomenting violent extremism," wrote McGowan. 

Lads Society is associated with the now-defunct United Patriots Front, a group perhaps best known for a protest against plans to build a mosque that saw its leader convicted for inciting racial hatred in Australia.

That leader, Blair Cottrell, promoted the opening of Lads Society clubhouses in Melbourne and Sydney in 2018. The men-only clubs had the stated objective of instilling the values of "courage, strength, nobility, resourcefulness and loyalty" – which could be used to the benefit of a troubled society.

But the leaked videos show the organisation had been intended only as a place holder and recruitment channel before the creation of a more openly white-nationalist organisation, the Guardian said.

Watch a Simulation of a Galaxy, From the Big Seed Until the Present Day

Since the mid-20th century, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how the Universe came to be. Cosmic expansion and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lent credibility to the Big Bang Seed Theory, and the accelerating rate of expansion led to theories about Dark Energy. Still, there is much about the early Universe that scientists still don’t know, which requires that they rely on simulations on cosmic evolution.

This has traditionally posed a bit of a problem since the limitations of computing meant that simulation could either be large scale or detailed, but not both. However, a team of scientists from Germany and the United States recently completed the most detailed large-scale simulation to date. Known as TNG50, this state-of-the-art simulation will allow researchers to study how the cosmos evolved in both detail and a large scale.

TNG50 is the latest simulation produced by IllustrisTNG, an ongoing project dedicated to the creation of large, cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. It is groundbreaking in that it avoids the traditional trade-off astronomers are forced to contend with. In short, detailed simulations suffered from low-volume in the past, which made statistical deductions about large-scale cosmic evolution difficult.

Large-volume simulations, on the other hand, traditionally lack the detail to reproduce many of the small-scale properties that of the Universe, which makes their predictions less reliable. The TNG50 is the first simulation of its kind in that it manages to combine the idea of large-scale simulations – the “Universe in a box” concept – with the kind of resolution that was previously only possible with galaxy simulations.

This was made possible by the Hazel Hen supercomputer in Stuttgart, where 16,000 cores worked together for more than a year – the longest and most resource-intensive simulation to date. The simulation itself consists of a cube of space measuring more than 230 million light-years in diameter that contains more than 20 billion particles representing dark matter, stars, cosmic gas, magnetic fields, and supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

TNG50 can also discern physical phenomena that occur on scales down to one one-millionth of the overall volume (i.e. 230 light-years). This allows the simulation to trace the simultaneous evolution of thousands of galaxies over the course of 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. The results of their simulation were published in two papers that recently appeared in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Both studies were led by Dr. Annalisa Pillepich of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and Dr. Dylan Nelson of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. As Dylan explained in a RAS press release:

“Numerical experiments of this kind are particularly successful when you get out more than you put in. In our simulation, we see phenomena that had not been programmed explicitly into the simulation code. These phenomena emerge in a natural fashion, from the complex interplay of the basic physical ingredients of our model universe.”

 In addition, TNG50 is the first simulation of its kind to two emergent phenomena that play a key role in the evolution of galaxies. First, the research team noticed that as they looked back in time, that orderly, rapidly-rotating disc galaxies (like the Milky Way) emerged from initially chaotic clouds of gas.

As this gas settled, newborn stars adopted increasingly circular orbits, eventually giving way to large spiral galaxies. As Dr. Annalisa Pillepich explained:

“In practice, TNG50 shows that our own Milky Way galaxy with its thin disc is at the height of galaxy fashion: over the past 10 billion years, at least those galaxies that are still forming new stars have become more and more disc-like, and their chaotic internal motions have decreased considerably. The Universe was much messier when it was just a few billion years old!”

The second emergent phenomenon appeared as the galaxies flatten out in the simulation, where high-speed winds of gas were seen flowing out of galaxies. This was driven by supernovae explosions and activity from SMBHs at the heart of the simulated galaxies. Once again, the process was initially chaotic with gas flowing out in all directions, but eventually becoming more focused along a path of least resistance.

By the current cosmological epoch, these flows become cone-shaped and flow from the opposite ends of the galaxy, with the material slowing down as it leaves the invisible gravity well of the galaxy’s dark matter halo. Eventually, this material stops flowing outwards and begins to fall back in, effectively becoming a galactic fountain of recycled gas.

In other words, this simulation is also the first of its kind to show how the geometry of cosmic gas flows around galaxies determines their structures (and vice versa). For their work, Dr. Pillepich and Dr. Nelson were awarded the 2019 Golden Spike Award, which is issued to members of the international research community by the High-Performance Computer Center in Stuttgart, Germany.

Dr. Pillepich and Dr. Nelson and their colleagues also plant to eventually release all the TNG50 simulation data to the astronomical community and to the public. This will allow astronomers and citizen scientists to make their own discoveries from the simulation, which could include additional examples of emergent cosmic phenomena or resolutions to enduring cosmic mysteries.

Judo-plutocracy's Stranglehold on White Middle-class America Intensifies - Bloomberg Running for U.S. President

The U.S.’s historic economic expansion has so enriched (((one-percenters))) they now hold almost as much wealth as the middle- and upper-middle classes combined.

The top 1% of American households have enjoyed huge returns in the stock market in the past decade, to the point that they now control more than half of the equity in U.S. public and private companies, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Those fat portfolios have America’s elite gobbling up an ever-bigger piece of the pie.

The very richest had assets of about $35.4 trillion in the second quarter, or just shy of the $36.9 trillion held by the tens of millions of people who make up the 50th percentile to the 90th percentile of Americans -- much of the middle and upper-middle classes.

Chalk up at least part of their good fortune to interest rates, said Stephen Colavito, chief market strategist at Lakeview Capital Partners, an Atlanta-based investment firm for high-net-worth investors. People can’t get much of a return on certificates of deposits and other passive investments, so they’ve pumped money into stocks and propped up the market overall, he said.

In turn, those investments make the wealthy eligible to put money into exclusive hedge funds and private equity funds. Many such funds require $5 million of investments to qualify.

“The wealthier that the wealthy get, the more opportunity they have,” Colavito said.

It may not be long before one-percenters actually surpass the middle and upper-middle classes. Household wealth in the upper-most bracket grew by $650 billion in the second quarter of 2019, while Americans in the 50th to 90th percentiles saw a $210 billion gain.

For now, those Americans in 90th to 99th percentiles -- well-to-do, but not the super rich -- still control the biggest share of wealth, with $42.6 trillion in assets.

The lone group left out of the fun: the bottom 50% of Americans. Those households have 35.7% of liabilities in the U.S. and just 6.1% of assets.

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Nobel Prize—Tackling Cosmic Questions

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes research that helped explain the evolution of the Universe and reveal the prevalence of worlds like our own.

Where do we come from? Are we alone? The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics honors researchers who have helped us find some answers to these cosmic questions. James Peebles of Princeton University received half of the prize for describing details of the evolution of our Universe from its hot dense past to its galaxy-filled present. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva received the other half of the prize for their discovery of a planet orbiting a star like our Sun.

When Peebles began working on cosmology in the early 1960s, the field was fairly abstract, dominated by discussions over the mathematical consistency of an infinitely dense point at the very beginning of the Universe. In 1965 Peebles and his colleagues argued that—regardless of the initial state of the cosmos—matter and radiation should have been in thermal equilibrium in the early Universe, when the temperature was above 1010 K [1]. Running the cosmic clock forward, they calculated that the temperature of that radiation would cool to a present value of around 10 K, depending on the overall density of the Universe.

As luck would have it, a detection of background radiation in the microwave region of the spectrum was made in that same year by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs in New Jersey [2]. Penzias and Wilson approached Peebles and his Princeton colleagues to make sense of their signal, which corresponded to a radiation temperature of about 3.5 K. This first measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was a breakthrough moment for physical cosmology, the field that uses the laws of physics and astronomical observations to construct models of the Universe’s evolution. “One could almost say that Peebles invented modern physical cosmology,” says astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University in Canberra.

The other half of this year’s physics prize focuses on the planetary scale. The ground-breaking discovery by Mayor and Queloz of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star came two decades before the Kepler and TESS satellites made planet detection routine. In the early 1990s, astronomers were still struggling to find hints of planets beyond our solar system. There were some detections of planets orbiting neutron stars called pulsars, but those environments were considered so unique that they gave little insight into the development of Earth-like planets.

The search strategy of Mayor and Queloz was based on the radial velocity technique, which involves monitoring the spectral lines in a star’s emission. If a planet is orbiting the star, those lines will shift slightly up and down in frequency as the star is tugged back and forth by the planet’s gravity. Previous radial velocity surveys had come up empty, but they had been limited to the brightest stars in the sky. Mayor, Queloz, and their colleagues designed a more sensitive spectrograph, called ELODIE, that allowed them to target a larger number of stars. In 1995, they reported a planet-induced wobble in 51 Pegasi, a Sun-like star located 50 light-years away [5].

The detected planet, named 51 Peg b, was not something that most astronomers would have predicted. The large amplitude of the radial velocity signal implied that the planet was massive, roughly half the size of Jupiter. But the period of the signal was just 4 days, so the planet’s distance to its star was only 5% of the Earth-Sun separation. Calculations suggested that the planet’s surface temperature would be 1300 K.

“Mayor and Queloz helped launch the exoplanet detection industry,” Lineweaver says. He explains that their discovery had an initially negative effect on searches for worlds like our own, as 51 Peg b—and other “hot Jupiters” that were subsequently discovered—gave the impression that Earth-like planets might be very rare. But once astrophysicists accounted for the high likelihood of detecting hot Jupiters, they realized that “our type of planetary system could be the most common kind,” Lineweaver says.

And if Earth-like worlds are ubiquitous, we might not be the only ones watching the cosmic evolution unfold.

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Entire article available here.