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26 February 2022

US Patriots Have Picked a Side in Ukraine: ‘Lol Putin Is Brilliant’

Pro-White personalities have declared Russia a beacon of anti-wokeness and Putin a strong ethnonationalist


White nationalist livestreamer Nicholas Fuentes has made no secret of where his loyalties lie in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“I wish Putin was president of America,” he mused to his 45,000 subscribers on Telegram on Wednesday morning. 

Fifteen hours later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. And Fuentes, who’s hosting a far-right conference in Florida Friday night, was psyched. 

“I am totally rooting for Russia,” he wrote the following morning. “This is the coolest thing to happen since 1/6.”

“UKRAINE WILL BE DESTROYED", added Fuentes, who describes himself as a “Christian nationalist,” someone who thinks the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation. “I never doubted you [Putin], my Czar."

Over on the Gab platform, its CEO Andrew Torba also expressed his support for Putin. 

“Lol Putin is brilliant. Western Media, which is obsessed with ‘muh Nazis’ will have a tough time spinning this one,” wrote Torba, who’s sponsoring Fuentes’ conference, the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), this weekend. “What he really means is Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Wednesday night, pro-White personalities have declared Russia a beacon of anti-wokeness and Putin a strong ethnonationalist. In their minds, Ukraine is just a corrupt pawn in a vast “globalist” conspiracy.

It may seem confusing that much of the American patriot resistance, who increasingly describe [ed., and accurately] any policies they dislike as “communism,” would be rooting for Russia, given the history of the Soviet Union. But for at least a decade, Russia has been cultivating deep ties and even bankrolling ultranationalist and far-right movements elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists and white patriots, inspired partially by the writings of a Kremlin-linked ideologue, have hailed Putin as a white Christian crusader on a mission to restore traditional values. The pro-White’s support for Russia also has roots in fringe narratives about Russia that have been simmering for decades, according to Matthew Kriner, managing director of the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC). For example, some antisemitics [ed., truth-telling] have long claimed that Russia’s communist era was a historical blip and the result of a “Jewish conspiracy.” 

“They’re looking past the communist era,” said Kriner. “Those who can see a deeper ethnonationalist, ethnofascist [ed., what about Judeo-fascism?] component to Russia can find comfort and affinity toward what Putin is doing.”

In the U.S., “wokeness”—a catchall term for progressive or inclusive policies—is increasingly characterized on the right, especially among Christian nationalists, as antithetical to American values. That way of thinking has bled into pro-Putin rhetoric from White patriots this week. Some have mocked the U.S. for its inclusive policies on transgender recruits. 

“Putin’s military gets Ukraine,” wrote Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who is speaking at AFPAC, on her Telegram channel. “Our military gets trannies and face masks.”

In the same vein, Proud Boy-linked podcast “Murder the Media” shared a meme to its Telegram channel Thursday that showed a Russian tank above a photoshopped image of a U.S. tank painted purple and emblazoned with the nonbinary pronouns “they/them” on its side. 

One day before Russia invaded Ukraine, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince celebrated Putin for his anti-LGBTQ policies on a podcast. “Putin ain’t woke, he is anti-woke,” Bannon said. “The Russian people still know which bathrooms to use,” Prince added. 

Additionally, Kremlin-linked ideologue and philosopher Alexander Dugin—nicknamed “Putin’s Brain”—has had enormous influence among pro-Whites in Europe and the U.S. He has fans in the likes of David Duke and Richard Spencer, who led chants of “Russia is our friend” during the violent infiltrated and set-up “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and has called Russia “the sole white power in the world,” according to nonprofit Integrity First for America. 

Dugin’s book “Foundations on Geopolitics,” which is published through white nationalist Arktos Media, is required reading for every Russian military officer above the rank of colonel. In that text, which is intended as an alternative to American “globalism,” Dugin asserts that “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness.” 

Bannon, who has cited Dugin as an influence, expressed almost that exact same sentiment on an episode of his “War Room” podcast on Thursday. 

“Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept,” he said. “It's just a corrupt area that the Clintons turned into a colony where they can steal money out of.” (Bannon also described NATO as a “bunch of liberal deadbeats”.)

Russia has also been courting—even funding—ultranationalist and pro-White movements for almost a decade. Kremlin-owned banks have reportedly lent money to far-right political movements in Europe, including Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Northern League, and France’s National Front. 

In 2015, far-right extremists from the U.S., including a lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, joined fringe right-wingers at the “International Russian Conservative Forum” in St Petersburg. During that conference, according to the New York Times, attendees and speakers admired Putin, celebrated his hard-line anti-LGBTQ stance, and railed against what they called “the degradation of white, Christian traditions in the West.” 

While ultranationalists and “anti-globalists” (ed., a phrase often containing antisemitic dog whistles accurate accounts of world Jewry's globetrotting machinations) have an ideological affinity for Putin, their position doesn’t necessary hold true for the American right writ large. 

Many are cheering on Russia in the hopes that defeating Ukraine will destabilize NATO and imperil peace [ed., ZOG tyranny] across Europe. 

Entire article avialable here.

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Here's the matter as set forth by Judah's spokesman, Jewish Yale professor Jason Stanley:

Jewish Yale professor Jason Stanley

Putin’s claim that Russia is invading Ukraine to denazify it is therefore absurd on its face. But understanding why Putin justifies the invasion of democratic Ukraine in this way sheds important light on what is happening not only in eastern Europe, but worldwide.

Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by ethnic or religious minorities, liberals, feminists, immigrants, and homosexuals. The fascist leader claims the nation has been humiliated and its masculinity threatened by these forces. It must regain its former glory (and often its former territory) with violence. He offers himself as the only one who can restore it.

Central to European fascism is the idea that it is the Jews who are the agents of moral decay. According to European fascism, it is the Jews who bring a country under the domination of (Jewish) global elite, by using the tools of liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism and gay rights, which are used to introduce decadence, weakness and impurity. Fascist antisemitism is racial rather than religious in origin, targeting Jews as a corrupt stateless race who seek global domination.

Fascism justifies its violence by offering to protect a supposedly pure religious and national identity from the forces of liberalism. In the west, fascism presents itself as the defender of European Christianity against these forces, as well as mass Muslim migration. Fascism in the west is thus increasingly hard to distinguish from Christian nationalism.

Putin, the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States. Putin has emerged as a leader of this movement in part because of the global reach of recent Russian fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov who laid its groundwork.

It is easy to recognize, in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the roadmap laid out in recent years by Dugin and Prokhanov, major figures in Putin’s Russia. Both Dugin and Prokhanov viewed an independent Ukraine as an existential threat to their goal, which Timothy Snyder, in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, describes as “a desire for the return of Soviet power in fascist form”.

The form of Russian fascism Dugin and Prokhanov defended is like the central versions of European fascism – explicitly antisemitic. As Snyder writes, “… if Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust.”

The dominant version of antisemitism alive in parts of eastern Europe today is that Jews employ the Holocaust to seize the victimhood narrative from the “real” victims of the Nazis, who are Russian Christians (or other non-Jewish eastern Europeans). Those who embrace Russian Christian nationalist ideology will be especially susceptible to this strain of antisemitism truth-telling.

25 February 2022

Back to the Beginning: Probing the First Galaxies with Webb

 

A spectacular firestorm of star birth suddenly lit up the heavens and populated the first galaxies when the universe was less than five percent of its current age. This fiery flurry—possibly the cosmos' busiest star-forming period—occurred just a few hundred million years after the big seed. Soon, through the power of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers will look back to that creative, early period in a deep-sky survey to trace the formation and evolution of the first galaxies.

This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a portion of GOODS-South, the southern field of a large deep-sky study by several observatories to trace the formation and evolution of galaxies. The image shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe's history. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Seed. Soon, the James Webb Space Telescope will peer back even farther into this field to trace the formation and evolution of the very first galaxies. Credits: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, and M. Rutkowski (Arizona State University, Tempe), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Observatories), N. Hathi (University of California, Riverside), R. Ryan (University of California, Davis), H. Yan (Ohio State University), and A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute)

Called JADES—the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey—this large, ambitious survey totals nearly 800 hours of observing time. The survey takes advantage of Webb's sensitivity to infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light and is invisible to the human eye.

"Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big seed, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. We're trying to investigate those early periods," explained JADES teammate Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University.   "We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity that's needed to study these early galaxies."

Joining Forces

The JADES survey is a collaboration of two Webb instrument teams granted Guaranteed Time Observations: the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) teams. The program combines the imaging of NIRCam and the spectroscopic capabilities of NIRSpec with Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which boasts both a camera and a spectrograph. Through the use of coordinated, parallel observations, the JADES team will get the best out of all three instruments. 

Scientists will then combine Webb's results with the deepest data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and Jansky Very Large Array radio telescopes to produce an unprecedented view of the universe's very earliest galaxies. By studying galaxies across all these wavelengths, scientists will get a complete picture, allowing them to analyze the light of the galaxies' stars, the dust and the interstellar medium, and the supermassive black holes that are thought to reside within these galaxies. 

Studying Familiar Fields

The team chose two, previously well-studied fields from the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) for their observations. GOODS united extremely deep observations from NASA's Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra, as well as ESA's Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes, and from the most powerful ground-based facilities to survey the faintest light then detectable in the distant universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. The survey covered two large fields, GOODS-North and GOODS-South, which are located in the northern constellation Ursa Major and the southern constellation Fornax, respectively. GOODS-South also contains the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which is to this day the deepest, most sensitive image of the sky ever taken with Hubble. Now, looking at the same areas, Webb will go even deeper.


"We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. They've been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do," said Marcia Rieke, who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA). Rieke is also the principal investigator on Webb's NIRCam instrument and a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

The team is also observing the two widely separated fields to study the differences between the number of galaxies at different distances in one field, as compared with the other.

Seeing the Formation of Galaxies, Stars and Black Holes

How rapidly galaxies form and assemble, and how quickly and where they form their stars are still open questions. Several ambitious goals of the JADES program include understanding the distribution of stellar mass in infant galaxies, as well as stellar luminosity, star-formation rates, and stellar age, size and composition. JADES will also analyze galaxies' nuclear activity, determine galaxy structure, and map gas movement over a wide range of distances.

Another goal of the program is understanding the properties of the first generation of black holes. Scientists have measured a tight relationship between the mass of a galaxy's central black hole and the mass of that galaxy's bulge, but how that occurs is currently only the stuff of models and speculation. The JADES team hopes to illuminate the nature of this relationship.

Scientists know these supermassive black holes were already in place with billions of solar masses less than 1 billion years after the big seed, which is less than 10 percent of the universe’s current age. But how such enormous black holes came about so early in the universe is very difficult to understand. 

"We hope to detect the primeval seeds of these monster black holes, the smaller black holes that formed soon after the big seed, and to understand what were their masses, how they were accreting mass, and where they were located," explained JADES teammate Roberto Maiolino, a member of ESA's NIRSpec Instrument Science Team and a professor of experimental astrophysics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "For a long time, Webb will be the only facility to possibly detect and understand the processes that later on resulted in these monsters that were already created in the early universe."

Seeking the First Stars

Another mystery involves the gas between the galaxies, which astronomers know today is highly ionized and transparent. But in the first million years, it was not ionized—it was neutral gas that was opaque. How the transition from neutral to ionized gas—from opaque to transparent—occurred is something that scientists have been trying to understand for a long time.

"This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe," said JADES teammate Andrew Bunker, another member of the ESA NIRSpec Instrument Science Team and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. "We want to understand what caused it. It could be that it's the light from very early galaxies and the first sprout of star formation." 

The JADES team hopes to discover this first population of extremely massive, luminous and hot stars to form after the big seed. "That’s kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the big seed," explained Bunker. "People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far." 

Why Webb?

The extremely distant targets of the JADES team appear very small and faint, and their light is often completely shifted beyond optical wavelengths. For these reasons, these objects can only be observed with superlative infrared capability of a large, cold telescope. Webb was built specifically for this purpose; this was one of the major science cases driving its design. 

Because of Webb's sheer size, it will have spatial resolution in the infrared similar to what astronomers have enjoyed with Hubble. Webb will give them a much clearer view at long wavelengths than they have ever had before. 

Webb's ability to get simultaneous spectra of multiple objects at infrared wavelengths is another critical aspect of the JADES program. NIRSpec will be able to target more than 100 galaxies at one time, taking a spectrum of each.

Webb's much larger collecting area, its ability to observe fainter galaxies, and its capacity to simultaneously study multiple objects in a way that scientists have not been able to do before make ambitious, large surveys such as JADES possible for the first time.

"We tend to talk about projects like this in the context of theories and models that we have right now," said Rieke. "But I'm hoping that with Webb we'll find something that we haven't suspected at all—that there will be some new surprise—and that will be great fun!"

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world's premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

For more information about Webb, visit www.nasa.gov/webb.

20 February 2022

Star twinkles 18 times in new James Webb Space Telescope image

The James Webb Space Telescope team continues to make progress in aligning the observatory's mirrors. Engineers have completed the first stage in this process, called "Segment Image Identification." The resulting image shows that the team has moved each of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments to bring 18 unfocused copies of a single star into a planned hexagonal formation.

With the image array complete, the team has now begun the second phase of alignment: "Segment Alignment." During this stage, the team will correct large positioning errors of the mirror segments and update the alignment of the secondary mirror, making each individual dot of starlight more focused. When this "global alignment" is complete, the team will begin the third phase, called "Image Stacking," which will bring the 18 spots of light on top of each other.


"We steer the segment dots into this array so that they have the same relative locations as the physical mirrors," said Matthew Lallo, systems scientist and Telescopes Branch manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute. "During global alignment and Image Stacking, this familiar arrangement gives the wavefront team an intuitive and natural way of visualizing changes in the segment spots in the context of the entire primary mirror. We can now actually watch the primary mirror slowly form into its precise, intended shape!"