Tucker: How local (((leaders))) failed their cities

ZOG's appointed commissars are incompetent, racist, parasitic, self-serving, anti-White hacks:

DON'T FUCK WITH TUCK

Netanyahu and Gantz said forming ZOGovernment; Blue and White (a/k/a Fake Opposition) "collapses"

Likud incumbent will hand over to Blue and White rival in September 2021 under reported deal; angry Lapid heads to opposition; Gantz set to be Knesset speaker till unity pact done

Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz is set to partner Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a unity government, serving initially as foreign minister but then taking over from Netanyahu as prime minister in September 2021, according to a reported deal taking shape amid immense political drama in Israel on Thursday afternoon.

Gantz’s decision to join forces with Netanyahu immediately led to the collapse of Blue and White, with the party’s No. 2 Yair Lapid rejecting the move and apparently heading into opposition with others from his Yesh Atid component of Blue and White. “Gantz chose Netanyahu over Lapid,” Channel 12 reported succinctly.

Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem faction both filed a formal request to break away from Blue and White late on Thursday afternoon, leaving only Gantz’s Israel Resilience Party to join forces with Netanyahu’s Likud. Lapid had reportedly told Gantz he preferred that Israel go to fourth elections rather than see Blue and White partner Netanyahu in power.

The coalition is reportedly likely to constitute 78-79 MKs — Likud, Gantz’s Israel Resilience, Labor, Yamina, Shas and United Torah Judaism — according to Channel 12. That would leave Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Ya’alon’s Telem, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, Meretz and the mainly Arab Joint List in opposition. However, various other fluctuations are deemed possible, with Yoaz Hendel and Zvi Hauser from Telem, for instance, said to be weighing joining the coalition.

The unity deal was taking shape as the Knesset met to vote for a new speaker, following Likud speaker Yuli Edelstein’s resignation on Wednesday.

Gantz offered himself as the sole candidate for the Knesset speaker’s job, which he is set to hold only for a brief period while the terms of the unity coalition are finalized. He will then serve as foreign minister for the first 18 months of the emergency unity government, under the terms of the reported deal, before succeeding Netanyahu as prime minister.

It was not clear what post Netanyahu would fill at that stage. The prime minister has been indicted in three corruption cases, in a trial that was supposed to begin last week but has been postponed to May amid the coronavirus crisis.

After a bitter fight with Likud over the speaker’s job, Blue and White had been set to see its MK Meir Cohen voted in, which would give the party control of the parliamentary agenda.

But Gantz’s imminent partnership with Netanyahu blew that plan out of the water, tearing a rift in the center of Blue and White, and paving the way to a unity government headed by Netanyahu.

According to Hebrew media reports, Lapid told his Yesh Atid faction that Gantz “decided to break up Blue and White to crawl into Bibi’s government. It’s unfathomable.” ❓

Yesh Atid’s Meir Cohen, who until hours earlier was set to become the next Knesset speaker, told Channel 12: “We did not oppose unity, certainly not in such an hour. But we thought that we should first and foremost insist on democracy… on integrity. All these were rudely quashed today by those who were in a rush [to join the government]. It could have been different.” ❓

As the unity deal took shape, Cohen withdrew his candidacy for speaker, and members of Yesh Atid would not be voting for Gantz as speaker, a Yesh Atid official told The Times of Israel.

Instead, Gantz was set to receive the support of the entire right-wing bloc, ensuring his victory.

Yoav Kisch, a Likud MK, used the debate preceding the vote on a speaker to praise Gantz for his “courageous” move in partnering with Netanyahu in this period of the coronavirus crisis.

Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg, by contrast, warned Gantz from the podium: “You’ll end up a rug under the feet of an alleged crook, an inciter and racist… We’re standing here in shock trying to comprehend the depth of the deception… the disaster you’re inflicting on millions of voters [who backed] the left-democratic bloc… who sought an alternative [to Netanyahu].

She wailed: “What have you done, Benny Gantz? How can you do this to the millions of voters who supported you?”

Sources close to Gantz told Channel 12 on Thursday afternoon that a unity agreement between his Israel Resilience faction and Likud was not a done deal, but he wanted to leave the option open — something that would not be possible if Yesh Atid’s Cohen was appointed speaker.

The emerging coalition will include the Labor party, which will split from the Meretz party, the channel said. Gantz will only be Knesset speaker for a brief time and once a unity government is formed and he is appointed foreign minister, the speakership will return to Likud.

Fellow former IDF chief of staff MK Gabi Ashkenazi — No. 4 in the collapsed Blue and White party — will reportedly be the defense minister, and MK Chili Tropper will be the justice minister.

Netanyahu and Gantz had discussed the possibility of setting up an emergency government to tackle the coronavirus Wednesday, taking a rare actual step toward a much-touted unity coalition.

In recent days, Likud and Blue and White had clashed over the latter’s bid to call a Knesset vote to replace Yuli Edelstein as parliament speaker. Likud had warned that if Edelstein were replaced, that would be the end of unity talks.

On Wednesday morning Edelstein resigned as speaker rather than call the vote on his own successor, as ordered by the High Court two days earlier.

On Thursday, the Knesset Arrangements Committee approved Labor MK Amir Peretz’s request to convene the plenum at 4 p.m. for a vote on the next Knesset speaker, in accordance with a separate High Court ruling late Wednesday.

After Wednesday night’s phone conversation between them, Netanyahu and Gantz said in a joint statement that they had agreed that negotiators from their two parties would resume coalition talks on Thursday.

“Against the backdrop of the escalating coronavirus [crisis] and the president’s appeal [for unity], the two instructed their teams to return to the negotiating table tomorrow in order to examine the possible formation of a national emergency government,” both parties said.

Even though Netanyahu and Gantz have talked up the option of unity for the last two weeks, negotiations between their parties had failed to move forward.

Gantz was tasked on March 16 with forming a government after 61 lawmakers backed him as prime minister, and given 28 days to do so.

Despite having the backing of 61 MKs for the premiership, Gantz was stuck with no straightforward path to a government, with members of his party objecting to cooperating with the Arab-led Joint List even in a minority government. His Blue and White ruled out that option Tuesday, according to several Hebrew media reports.

Blue and White didn’t have any alternative route to a government, since all the other parties in Netanyahu’s right-wing religious bloc refused to break their loyalty to the premier by even holding negotiations on the matter.

The centrist party had publicly vowed not to join a government headed by Netanyahu, though it had said it could serve alongside another Likud chairman should Netanyahu step aside. But Likud leaders have rallied behind Netanyahu despite the allegations against him.

Blue and White had also expressed opposition to joining an “emergency government” with Likud just to battle the pandemic, believing it would be sidelined in such a coalition and preferring instead to let Netanyahu handle the crisis alone, for better or worse.

Netanyahu tweeted Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic was a crucial time in which leadership and national responsibility had to be exercised, claiming the disagreements between the rivals regarding the specifics of a unity government were small and could be overcome.

“The citizens of Israel need a unity government that would act to save their lives and livelihoods,” he said, addressing Gantz. “This isn’t time for fourth elections. Let’s meet now and form a government today. I am waiting for you.”

He repeated the plea on Wednesday, tweeting that “we need to set this aside. We are one nation and one people and the order of the day is unity. I am calling for an immediate national unity government to deal with the crisis.”

After seeming to soften his position in recent days, Gantz said Tuesday he was demanding to go first as prime minister in a rotating premiership deal.

“I have an expectation and a demand for a unity government headed by me,” he told activists from his party who had demonstrated outside his house, calling on him to form a unity coalition rather than a minority government propped up by the Joint List.

Jews Living In America Don't Care That Israel's (((Democracy))) Is Falling Apart

There’s a disconcerting, and indefensible, ‘no comment’ from every major U.S. Jewish group, politician and public intellectual on Netanyahu’s palace coup. The coronavirus crisis isn’t the only reason

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at the 2019 AIPAC conference, Washington D.C., March 25, 2019.

Benjamin Netanyahu is opportunistically seizing the coronavirus crisis, as he would any other crisis, to cement his grip on power.

In recent days, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies – despite being defeated in the March 2 elections – have shut down Israel’s court system ahead of the prime minister’s corruption trial, began tracking citizens using counterterrorism methods without any parliamentary oversight, and blocked the Knesset from even convening.

His opponent Benny Gantz has the numbers needed to form a government; Netanyahu, while evidently little more than a caretaker premier, has pushed forward, without a mandate, illiberal, and undeterred, with what is essentially a palace coup.

This is the first time in Israeli history that an outgoing minority government has blocked their replacements from implementing the will of the voters. And yet, due to the acute coronavirus crisis at home and a long-running unwillingness to too harshly criticize Israeli leadership, the American and broader diasporic Jewish community has been disconcertingly quiet in response, failing to condemn Netanyahu’s obvious ZOGification of Israel.

The Zionist Academy Awards

This continued willingness to give Israeli leaders like Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt is a mistake. Our influential diaspora must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time and, in this case, address the coronavirus in our various homes while refusing to any longer stand by as Netanyahu takes every opportunity to erode Israel’s democratic norms.

Popular media has for years predicted an American Jewish split from an increasingly-right-wing Israel. Left-wing American Jews and Israeli Likudniks are generally portrayed as incompatible factions waging a war from seemingly opposite sides.

But American Jews remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel, despite the Jewish State’s rightward turn. As of early 2020, some 80 percent consider themselves "pro-Israel," while nearly 70 percent are emotionally “attached” or “very attached” to the Jewish State. Almost 60 percent consider themselves "pro-Israel but critical of Israeli policy."

Indeed, there is a political chasm between Israel’s long-governing right-wing and the American Jewish community: U.S. Jews cite Netanyahu’s support for President Trump, increasing religious right-wing influence, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as their main reasons for criticizing the same Jewish State of which they still consider themselves supporters.

American Jews, who are overwhelmingly politically liberal, would not support a Netanyahu-like government in Washington; why would they support one in Jerusalem?

But Netanyahu’s evangelism of fear, his securing of Israel’s Jewish identity by vilifying everywhere else as dangerous, plays well in Israel. He has for years galvanized support by pushing an "us-versus-them" security narrative, raising the Holocaust and the threat of a nuclear Iran to tap into Jewish Israelis’ security concerns. Once in office, his government has pursued bigoted measures that amount to segregation.

He has also paid significant attention to projecting strength abroad –something for which Israelis yearn – courting autocrats in every corner of the world, including those in Hungary, Russia, Chad, and Azerbaijan, to demonstrate Israel’s global success.

Given all of this, it seems that American Jewish and, indeed, Zionist leaders would be quick to distance themselves from Netanyahu. And yet, despite our professed liberalism, American Jews have kept normalizing this illiberal prime minister, repeatedly inviting him to speak, albeit if by videoconference, at mainstream events like AIPAC.

It was, therefore, unsurprising that Netanyahu’s coronavirus maneuvering was met mostly with silence.

Neither the American Jewish Committee nor American Jewish Congress criticized Israel’s prime minister. Instead, the latter’s most recent public statement "praises Israel for staying true to its values and showcasing its humanitarian convictions." Even the politically liberal Union for Reform Judaism has so far stayed silent. (The Israel Policy Forum and Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah are notable exceptions here.)

American Jewish Zionist politicians and public intellectuals have been just as disappointing. There has been nothing from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Eliot Engel or from mainstream Jewish media torchbearers like The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and The New York Times’s Bari Weiss.

This silence, while perhaps a result of more general concern over the coronavirus, is stark, and evidence of the diaspora’s continued unwillingness to truly condemn Netanyahu, lest that criticism be construed as anti-Zionist or otherwise delegitimizing of Israel.

Netanyahu’s sermons of fear seem to have left a mark on a Jewish diaspora comprising families who each have their own tragic histories of anti-Semitism: He’s helped instill within our community the false belief that too vociferous criticism of his leadership or any Israeli leader will in some way undermine the Jewish State’s existence; the diaspora fears doing precisely that, lest anti-Semitism abroad get so bad abroad that we ever need our Israeli safe haven.

But Israelis themselves know that castigating Netanyahu, or any leader for that matter, does not undermine Israel’s existence.

Israel’s preeminent and usually reluctant-to-comment-on-politics historian Yuval Noah Harari recently declared that Netanyahu "under pretext of fighting corona, he has closed the Israeli parliament, ordered people to stay in their homes, and is issuing whatever emergency decrees he wishes. This is called a dictatorship."

Meanwhile, Israeli protesters, violating Health Ministry orders against gatherings of more than 10 people, turned out in Jerusalem to demand that the Knesset be allowed to meet. 600,000 Israelis joined an online protest to signal their opposition to Netanyahu's actions.

The time for respectability politics – epitomized by years of liberal Zionists expressing "concern" with Netanyahu without taking meaningful action – is over. American and diaspora Jews more broadly would be wise to follow these Israelis’ lead and more vocally denounce Netanyahu’s (((illiberalism))) before it’s too late. Perhaps it already is. 

The same Forces that made Biden the overnight presumptive Democratic nominee now making him the overnight presumptive President-elect

Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN

Donald Trump starts 2020 in the worst polling position since Harry Truman

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Early life and education

Harry Enten was raised in a Jewish family^[1][5][6][7] in the Riverdale neighborhood of The Bronx, New York City.^[4] Harry was introduced to politics as a child when his father, a judge, took him into the polling booth to help pull the levers for elections. He attended Riverdale Country School. He is the nephew, by marriage, of singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka.^[6]

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(CNN) Poll of the week: A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump 52% to 43% in a general election matchup.

An average of all polls this month puts Biden's advantage at a similar 7 points.

What's the point: For all intents and purposes, the general election campaign is underway. Yes, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is still running, but he has no realistic path to winning the Democratic nomination. That means that it's Biden vs. Trump.

And the President starts out in a very unusual place for an incumbent: behind. Trump is the first incumbent president to be trailing at this point in the general election cycle (i.e. late March in the election year) since Harry Truman in 1948.

Now, we're still more than half a year away from the election. It would be easy to dismiss Biden's advantage as meaningless. To do so, however, would be a mistake in my opinion.

Polling at this point in the general election cycle when an incumbent is running is correlated with the ultimate outcome. A candidate in Biden's position would win the popular vote about two-thirds of the time if historical trends hold.

Moreover, there's something to be said about the (((consistency of Biden's edge))). Despite the ever-shifting news cycle, Biden's lead in the average of polls has been between 5 and 10 points throughout the last year. In other words, Trump's general election polling has stayed stable, just like his approval ratings.

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UPDATE:

WHORE PUPPET  Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, piles on:

(CNN)  In the past five days, two of the most prominent non-partisan political analysts in the country have released new projections that show presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a clear edge over President Donald Trump in the Electoral College map.

"The President is an underdog now in his bid for a second term," wrote Stu Rothenberg, founder of the Rothenberg Political Report, in a column published late last week. "That doesn't mean he can't win. It simply means that he is in a more difficult place than he was before, in part because Democrats have united behind a consensus candidate who has potentially broad appeal."

Space Wasn't Always A Big Place

There are few things we can conceive of that are as mind-bogglingly large as space is. Our observable Universe, out to the deepest recesses of space that we can possibly see, takes us out some 46 billion light-years in all directions. From the Big Bang Seed until now, our Universe has expanded while gravitating at the same time, giving rise to stars and galaxies spread across the expanse of outer space. All told, there are presently some 2 trillion galaxies present within it.

And yet, if we go back in time, we learn that not only was our Universe a much smaller place, but that in the earliest stages, it wasn't impressively large at all. Space may not always have been a big place, and it's only the fact that our Universe has expanded so thoroughly and relentlessly that makes us see it as so big and empty today.

If we look at the Universe today, there's no denying the enormity of its scale. Containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 billion stars, our Milky Way galaxy stretches for over 100,000 light-years in diameter. The distances between the stars is enormous, with the closest star to our Sun (Proxima Centauri) located some 4.24 light-years away: over 40 trillion kilometers distant.

While some stars are clumped together in groups, either in multi-star systems or star clusters of various types, the majority are like our Sun: single stars that are relatively isolated from all the others within a galaxy. And once you go beyond our own galaxy, the Universe becomes a much sparser place indeed, with only a small fraction of the Universe's volume actually containing galaxies. Most of the Universe, as far as we can tell, is devoid of stars and galaxies entirely.

Our Local Group, for example, contains another large galaxy: Andromeda, located 2.5 million light-years away from us. A number of significantly smaller galaxies are present as well, including the Triangulum galaxy (the Local Group's 3rd largest), the Large Magellanic Cloud (#4), and about 60 other much smaller galaxies, all contained within about 3 million light-years of ourselves.

Beyond that, galaxies are found clumped and clustered together throughout the Universe, with a cosmic web consisting of large galaxy clusters connected by galaxy-dotted filaments. The Universe came to be this way because it not only expanded and cooled, but because it gravitated as well. The initially overdense regions preferentially attracted matter and gave rise to the structures we see; the underdense regions gave up their matter to the denser ones, becoming the great cosmic voids that dominate the majority of the Universe's volume.

All told, our observable Universe is truly enormous today. Centered on any observer — including ourselves — we can objects as far away as 46.1 billion light-years in any direction. When you add it all up, that equates to a volume of 4.1 × 1032 cubic light-years. With even two trillion galaxies in the Universe, that means each galaxy, on average, has about 2 × 1020 cubic light-years of volume to itself.

If the galaxies were all evenly spaced throughout the Universe, and they most definitely are not, you could put your finger down on a galaxy and draw a sphere around it that was approximately 6 million light-years in radius and never hit another galaxy. Our location in the Universe has hundreds of times the density of galaxies that we expect on average. In between the galaxy groups and clusters in the Universe lies the majority of its volume, and it's mostly empty space.

But the reason the Universe is this large today is because it's expanded and cooled to reach this point. Even today, the Universe continues to expand at a tremendous rate: approximately 70 km/s/Mpc. At the farthest reaches of the Universe, 46.1 billion light-years away, the amount of Universe that we can observe grows by an additional 6.5 light-years with each year that passes by.

That means if we extrapolate in the opposite direction in time — looking back as far as we like into the past — we'll find the Universe as it was when it was younger, hotter, and smaller. Today, the Universe extends for 46 billion light-years in all directions, but that's because it's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang Seed, and our Universe contains a specific mix of dark energy, matter, and radiation in various forms.

If we went back to when the Universe was just 3 billion years old (about 20% of its current age), we'd find that it was only about 9 billion light-years in radius (just 0.7% of its current volume).

And we don't have a problem looking back to see galaxies and galaxy clusters when the Universe was that young; the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, has taken us back much farther than that. At this time, galaxies were smaller, bluer, lower in mass and less evolved, on average, as the Universe hadn't had enough time to form the largest, most massive structures of all.

The Universe, in this early stage, is much denser overall than it is today. The number of matter particles remains the same over time, even as the Universe expands, meaning that the Universe at age ~3 billion years is about 150 times denser than the Universe is today, at age ~13.8 billion years. Instead of about 1 proton's worth of mass per cubic meter, there are closer to 100 protons' worth. However, we can go back to much earlier times and find a Universe that's not only smaller and denser, but dramatically different as well.

If we go back to when the Universe was just 100 million years old — less than 1% of its present age — things start to look dramatically different. The very first stars had started forming only recently, but there were no galaxies yet, not even one. The Universe is about 3% of its present scale at this time, meaning that it has just 0.003% its present volume, and 40,000 times its present density. The Cosmic Microwave Background is hot enough, at this time, to boil liquid nitrogen.

But we can go much farther back in time, and discover an even smaller Universe. The light from the Cosmic Microwave Background that we see was emitted when the Universe was only 380,000 years old: when it was more than a billion times denser than it is today. If you drew a circle around our local supercluster today, Laniakea, it would encapsulate a much larger volume than the entire observable Universe did back in those early, hot, dense stages.

It means that if we went back to a time where the Universe was approximately a decade old, ten years after the Big Bang Seed first occurred, the entire observable Universe — containing all the matter we have making up 2 trillion galaxies (and more) today — would be no bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.

It means that if we went back to a time when a mere one second had passed since the Big Bang Seed, back when the last of the early Universe's antimatter (in the form of positrons) was annihilating away, the entire observable Universe would only be about 100 light-years in diameter.

And it means that in the very early stages of the Universe, back when only perhaps a picosecond (10-12 seconds) had passed since the Big Bang Seed, the entire observable Universe could fit inside a sphere no bigger than the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun. The entire observable Universe, back in the Big Bang Seed's early stages, was smaller than the size of our Solar System.

You might think that you could take the Universe all the way back to a singularity: to a point of infinite temperature and density, where all its mass and energy concentrated into a singularity. But we know that's not an accurate description of our Universe. Instead, a period of cosmic inflation must have preceded and set up the Big Bang Seed.

From evidence in today's Cosmic Microwave Background, we can conclude there must have been a maximum temperature that the Universe reached during the hot Big Bang Seed: no more than about 5 × 1029 K. Although that number is enormous, it's not only finite, it's well below the Planck scale. When you work out the mathematics, you find a minimum diameter for the Universe at the start of the hot Big Bang Seed: around 20 centimeters (8"), or around the size of a soccer ball.

It's true that we don't know how large the unobservable part of the Universe truly is; it may be infinite. It's also true that we don't know how long inflation endured for or what, if anything, came before it. But we do know that when the hot Big Bang Seed began, all the matter and energy that we see in our visible Universe today  all the stuff that extends for 46.1 billion light-years in all directions  must have been concentrated into a volume of around the size of a soccer ball.

For at least a short period of time, the vast expanse of space that we look out and observe today was anything but big. All the matter making up entire massive galaxies would have fit into a region of space smaller than a pencil eraser. And yet, through 13.8 billion years of expansion, cooling, and gravitation, we arrive at the vast Universe we occupy a tiny corner of today. Space may be the biggest thing we know of, but the size of our observable Universe is a recent achievement. Space wasn't always so big, and the evidence is written on the Universe for all of us to see.

How the Cosmic Dark Ages Snuffed Out All Light

The recent discovery of some of the first galaxies in the universe illuminates the darkest era in cosmic history.

Darkness isn’t always the absence of light. It can also be the inability of light to get very far.

And just as the brightest headlight can be blocked by a thick fog, the first stars in the universe were shrouded by their immediate surroundings. Astronomers call this time period the cosmic dark ages, and they are slowly unraveling the mystery of how and when it ended.

The obvious challenge is that astronomers rely on light. Without it, direct observational evidence of anything is hard to come by. Even so, new findings, presented in January at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, show the earliest direct evidence to date of the time when the cosmic fog lifted, allowing light from the infant universe to travel unimpeded.

What Made the Fog?

When light encounters matter, a number of things can happen. The light can bounce back off as if the matter were a mirror, or the light can pass straight through as if through glass, or in some special cases it can get absorbed. The special cases occur when the energy of the light corresponds exactly to an energy transition in the atom it is encountering. When that happens, the atom absorbs a photon of light and uses that energy to boost the energy of its own electron.

In the first moments after the Big Bang Seed, there were no atoms around. Light still couldn’t travel far, however, because it ricocheted off free electrons at every turn. Then the first hydrogen atoms formed, and the photons no longer bounced around. What’s more, most photons’ energies didn’t correspond exactly to a hydrogen transition, so they were free to shoot off into the universe. That’s why the cosmic microwave background, which dates from this time, is often called a “snapshot” of the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang Seed.

Fast forward another few hundred million years. Hydrogen gas fills the universe. As the gas clumps together under the effect of gravity, the first stars are born. But here’s the catch: Since the stars and the gas are made of the same stuff, much of the light emitted by the stars is at just the right energy to be reabsorbed by the hydrogen surrounding them. The photons never make it out of their cosmic neighborhood. To earthbound astronomers looking back today, the stars are obscured in a fog of hydrogen.

How Did the Fog Lift?

More time passes. Galaxies continue to form stars, and the stars continue to shine. Occasionally, a photon has enough energy to entirely dislodge the electron in the hydrogen atom, ionizing the atom. This ionized hydrogen doesn’t have any electrons, and so it doesn’t absorb light. As a result, starlight is free to zoom past it.

Given enough time, the photons will ionize most of the hydrogen surrounding a galaxy, clearing the fog entirely and allowing starlight to begin its long journey across the universe to us.

“Imagine a blast wave through that cloud of gas, but it’s not sound,” said Jon Willis, an astronomer at the University of Victoria. “It’s photons, and those photons are basically making a bigger and bigger ionized bubble of gas until you get to the point where the photons can actually escape.”

The cosmic epoch in which this took place is known as the epoch of reionization. Astronomers think that it concluded around 1 billion years after the Big Bang Seed — an important milestone in the early universe. “There is this wonderful physical transition when this veil of neutral hydrogen is lifted,” said Willis. “This is the period when the astrophysics of the stuff we see today is just getting started.”

But reionization was far from an instantaneous process. “Reionization doesn’t happen all over the universe at exactly the same time,” said Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin who was involved in the new research on the cosmic dawn. “It’s probably a little bit patchy.” 

What We Can See

Finkelstein and his colleagues observed a cluster of three galaxies in the early universe that were emitting light of just the right energy to knock an electron from a hydrogen atom. (This light, called Lyman-alpha radiation, is emitted in the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but by the time it travels through the expanding universe to reach us, it stretches into the infrared.)

Using the results of the Cosmic Dawn Survey, which scanned some of the darkest parts of the sky for infrared light, they narrowed in on a region that appeared especially bright. They then zoomed into this region using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

“A lot of studies have reported trouble finding Lyman-alpha at that time,” Finkelstein said. “The difference here is we found multiple galaxies with strong emissions all clustered in the same region.” These strong emissions are the earliest direct evidence of starlight from a cluster of galaxies ionizing enough hydrogen to be able to break through, around 680 million years after the Big Big Bang Seed.

Astronomers are still trying to narrow down the window of time in which reionization occurred, as well as exactly how it occurred. While the prevailing theory is that starlight caused it, a competing idea is that the light from supermassive black holes was responsible.

“Once we know in detail when reionization happened, or how it evolved with time, then that can constrain very tightly models of exactly what kinds of forces powered reionization,” said Finkelstein. If it was starlight, questions still remain about the sources of that light: Did it come from the brightest and most massive galaxies, or from lots of tiny galaxies?

A new generation of telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, is expected to take to the sky over the next few years to try and answer those questions. What’s more, they’ll be able to detect wavelengths that weren’t absorbed by the early hydrogen gas, which current telescopes cannot see. “It’s only a veil if you look at the wavelength where the hydrogen is absorbing,” explained Willis.

And once we see through that veil, who knows what secrets about the early universe could be waiting? “There were incredible things going on,” said Willis. “It’s just that the photons found it difficult to get from them to us.”

How do you build a universe?

First of all you need some of the world’s finest physicists and then you have to combine this with a hugely powerful supercomputer.

Coronavirus silver lining: NBA suspends season after Rudy Gobert tests positive for coronavirus

After taking the initial step to play games in empty arenas, the NBA issued a statement on Wednesday night that all games will be suspended until further notice after a Utah Jazz player, reportedly Rudy Gobert, tested positive for the coronavirus.

Racist-Apartheid-Theocratic-Zionist Israel: RATZI

RATZIS OUT!

Professor says ‘popular organizing’ is key to opposing the ‘entrenchment of apartheid’ in Israel

Donald Trump recently unveiled a highly controversial US-Israeli plan for Palestine. As The Canary reported, this proposed: a major Israeli land-grab in the occupied West Bank; the continued takeover of occupied Jerusalem; leaving Palestine unarmed; and rejecting the rights of Palestinian refugees.

Prof Greg Shupak – author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media – spoke to The Canary about this plan. And he explained why the “overwhelming majority of Palestinian society will never accept” it.

“A plan to cement the colonization of Palestine and to entrench apartheid”

Shupak began by saying:

What the so-called ‘deal of the century’ calls for is nothing less than total Palestinian surrender. As the Palestine Centre for Human Rights points out, it would see the Palestinians end up with “a mirage of a state that has limited autonomy and lacks geographical integrity or sovereignty over its lands and resources” thanks to a plan that “legitimizes Israeli crimes and deprives Palestinians of their legal and political rights, and sets [the] foundation for a new type of apartheid.” It’s a plan to cement the colonization of Palestine and to entrench apartheid—a plan for a ‘third Nakba‘, in the words of Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy.

As The Canary reported previously:

The ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in 1948 when over 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their land during the creation of Israel. Palestinians call this the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).
These refugees and their descendants now number around five million and are scattered across the region. 

Shupak continued:

Donald Trump, it’s important to note, didn’t conjure the design out of thin air: it’s the logical culmination of the ‘peace process’ nurtured by the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama, under which Israel deepened its foothold across all of historic Palestine. If realized, the ‘deal’ would also be a major step toward, if not the culmination of, the goal that’s long been central to [the ethno-nationalist political movement of] Zionism: maximum land with the minimum possible number of Arabs.

Palestinians won’t back a plan with “zero redemptive features”

Shupak also insisted that:

The US and Israel are hoping that a sector of the Palestinian elite can be bribed into signing away Palestinian national rights. Thus far, even that has failed: the Trump administration and its Middle East proxies couldn’t get any Palestinians to attend a conference in Bahrain that was intended to work toward buying off Palestinian capitalists. In the unlikely event that the US and company find a couple of Palestinian millionaires to endorse the ‘deal of the century’, it won’t matter because the overwhelming majority of Palestinian society will never accept the attempt to foist this on them. The Palestinians have engaged in steadfast resistance to colonization for more than a hundred years and they’re not going to waste that on a series of Bantustans.

According to South African History Online, Bantustans were areas “established by the Apartheid Government” in order to move most Black people “to prevent them from living in the urban areas of South Africa”. This, the site said, “was a strategy to push all Blacks out and have them isolated from South Africa”.

Every aspect of it is problematic. It would allow Israel to permanently annex land it has acquired through force of arms in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It would require the Palestinian refugees to renounce their right of return – a right enshrined in UN Resolution 194 – and would consecrate American recognition of Jerusalem as the supposed capital of Israel. The plan calls for Palestinian demilitarization and disarmament without asking anything similar of Israel. The ‘deal of the century’ is a plan for the population transfer and denationalization of 350,000-400,000 Palestinians. It provides no reparations to Gaza for Israel making it literally unlivable with US support. The plan, in short, has zero redemptive features.

The US and Israel as colonialist bedfellows

Shupak also spoke about the ‘colonial mindset’ behind the plan, saying:

There is no doubt that influential sectors of the US establishment regard Palestinians as sub-human, so prejudice against them runs deep in America even as support for the Palestinian cause gains traction, particularly among young people. A ‘colonial mindset’ does indeed permeate the US ruling class – how could it be otherwise given that the US itself is, like Israel, a settler colony rooted in the dispossession of the Indigenous population? Accordingly, even a lot of the US media criticism of the ‘deal of the century’ is premised on the assumption that Palestinians must acquiesce to crucial US-Israeli demands. 

Yet it’s not only a matter of a ‘colonial mindset’ but also of material US interests in Israeli colonialism. Israel is a useful attackdog for the US that has helped weaken and often outright destroy leftist and nationalist movements and governments at odds with American imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This was true of the US-Israeli animus toward Nasser’s Egypt and it’s true of Israel’s bombings of Syria today. Furthermore, the US’s lavish military aid to Israel often functions as a subsidy to the US defence industry when Israel uses the money to buy weapons from American firms. The American ruling class is also deeply enmeshed with Israel’s. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple all have significant investments in Israel and a vested interest in resolving the Palestinian question once and for all in a manner that favors Israel.

Partners in a regressive coalition

Shupak added that there are other factors behind the plan too, stressing:

Similarly, it’s true that religious fundamentalists—evangelicals in particular—are part of Trump’s base and they’re not unhappy with the ‘deal of the century.’ However, it would be a mistake to read the plan as purely a bid for Trump to fire up his supporters for the 2020 election. A crucial plank in the Trumpian gambit is getting the US-allied dictatorships in the Middle East on board and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have thus far signalled an openness to Trump’s scheme. The reason the US wants buy-in from Arab states is not only because Israel would be greatly strengthened by a regional agreement to the extinguishing of Palestinian national rights (though it’s not as if the US-allied Arab governments have done much for the Palestinians lately anyway). It is also because the Trump administration wants to foster an open embrace of these parties to facilitate neoliberal trade agreements between Israel and the pro-US Arab dictatorships and, probably more importantly, so that they can all be part of a grand, anti-Iran coalition, the seeds of which have long been in place.

A meaningful settlement in Palestine requires “popular organizing”

Shupak concluded:

I’m deeply skeptical about the usefulness of outside brokers in generating a just solution. I think the hope lies in Palestinian resistance and international solidarity movements such as BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions]. It’s not for me to decide exactly what a settlement would entail but the terms that seem to me to be crucial include: the right of Palestinian refugees to return; an end to military occupation; democracy and equal rights for all ethno-religious groups rather than ethno-nationalism and apartheid; ideally socialism too but perhaps that’s getting too far ahead of myself. It’s a steep task to make that achievable but popular organizing has the capacity to change the balance of power away from imperialism and colonialism and toward liberation for all peoples of the region.

EXPOSED: Charlie Kirk Want’s 50 Million Immigrants in under 10 years

JUDEO-PLUTOCRATIC TOOL

Charlie Kirk believes solely in the stock market, the GDP and the “free market”. He has been heard time and time again advocating for an “unlimited” number of immigrants to come into the US to compete with Americans over jobs, saturating wages in the process.

Here we have Charlie Kirk advocating for the US to take in 50 million immigrants in under 10 years.

This sort of immigration policy is suicidal. The president of the United States has continuously advocated for Kirk and his horrible immigration policy that goes against everything Trump stood for during his victorious 2016 election.

In a second clip, Charlie Kirk is heard constructing a new slogan of sorts, the “Big wall, big door” policy, a policy that entirely ignores immigrant voting patterns and the incalculable other consequences too vast to list here. Charlie Kirk simply wants unlimited immigration into the US.

Charlie Kirk ignores immigrant voting patterns and advocates “big door” immigration policy.

He wants unlimited immigration!