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Ed Webb

Stephen Hawking aliens theory doesn't scare planet hunters / The Christian Science Moni... - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...y-doesn-t-scare-planet-hunters

aliens hawking empire Columbus

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • renowned astrophysicist Dr. Hawking suggests that with 100 billion galaxies in the universe it seems “perfectly rational” that aliens exist. While they are most probably microorganisms or basic animals, he suggests the threat posed by intelligent life forms, if they exist, could make reaching out to them “a little too risky.”
  • “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach,” he said. “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the native Americans.”
Ed Webb

Guest Post: The Flag, the Military, and Patriotism | The Angry Staff Officer - 0 views

angrystaffofficer.com/...ag-the-military-and-patriotism

patriotism civ-mil opinion protest US USA politics

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • what Washington Post columnist Alex Nowrasteh calls “Patriotic Correctness.” A less kind definition is chicken hawk
  • In a nation where the people actually had a relationship with their military, such obtuse displays wouldn’t be held up as paragons of third-party virtue, they’d be mocked for the shameless appropriation they are. Just a generation ago, the American people understood their military wasn’t a faultless bastion of American virtue; it was an honorable, if fallible institution much the same as churches, courts, and medicine–it wasn’t an abstraction, it was a real thing, worthy of respect and the occasional mocking. It’s an unhealthy pathological consequence of the AVF that we can longer treat the military the same.
  • Military service is just one occupant in the pantheon of national service. It is not necessarily better or more noble than the Peace Corps, Public Health Service, or Merchant Marine. In fact, the material benefits may often be better in the military than other forms of service; disregarding the sacrifices born by others or dismissing them as “just civilians” is mil-splaining at its worst. Only in a police state, where the military and state power are paramount, do those instruments have a lock on “the flag.”
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  • But public sports are hardly such events; they are not martial ceremonies or only mimic them to the extent the public doesn’t understand its military. When did football stadiums of all places become sacrosanct venues of patriotic virtue? Why is a token display by a player more worthwhile than the surely thousands of fans not standing (and who likely don’t know the words)? Revelations about the Pentagon’s “paid patriotism” since 9/11 pile irony on top of this situation.
  • We should applaud those who stand up against injustice or policy errors, especially those who do so at cost to themselves. Doing so says more about belief in America’s potential, the potential to right wrongs and do well by the people than feckless, questioning support of the state. Such an act is intrinsically patriotic no matter how unpopular.
Ed Webb

Native Americans being left out of US coronavirus data and labelled as 'other' | US new... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cans-left-out-coronavirus-data

US USA statistics pandemics nativeamericans publichealth

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Native Americans are being left out of demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the US, raising fears of hidden health emergencies in one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.
  • about 80% of state health departments have released some racial demographic data, which has already revealed stark disparities in the impact of Covid-19 in black and Latinx communities. But of those states, almost half did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label “other”.
  • In states that do categorize Native Americans in the demographic results, early data indicates dramatically disproportionate rates of infection and death
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  • Communities of color are not more susceptible to coronavirus, but because of years of unequal access to healthcare, clean water and nutritious food, they are at greater risk of developing complications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Native Americans experience diabetes three times more than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, and have the highest rates of asthma. Before the pandemic, the federal health system serving Native Americans was already chronically underfunded.
  • “We are a small population of people because of genocide. No other reason,” said Echo-Hawk. “If you eliminate us in the data, we don’t exist. We don’t exist for the allocation of resources.”
  • in January, the CDC released its most comprehensive study to date on race and maternal mortality rates, but American Indians and Alaskan Natives were not included. When the Urban Indian Health Institute did its own research, it found Native women living in cities were 4.5 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women.
  • According to some studies, Native Americans have a 50% chance of being listed as the wrong race on medical records, as well as birth and death certificates.
  • The Indian Health Services (IHS), a chronically underfunded federal healthcare system that serves 2.5 million tribal citizens in 37 states, has been publishing testing results daily during the coronavirus outbreak.
  • “Health disparities are nice words for systematic racism … it’s the residual effects of the founding of this country,” social demographer Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Cheyenne) told the Guardian. But Rodriguez-Lonebear said it was not enough to just include Native Americans in demographic data; the data also needs to include tribal affiliation. For tribal governments, she said, “being able to identify who your citizens are in these big data sets is so vital to being able to understand the impact of the virus on your tribe”.
  • Unlike states and counties, tribes cannot rely on healthcare systems to tell them when their citizens are sick or dying and must collect the data themselves
  • The only public national coronavirus database reporting tribal affiliation is being run by the independent Native newspaper, Indian Country Today, whose team of 16 people has been adding the positive Covid-19 cases and deaths they can verify to a daily report on their website.
  • “With what we’re seeing right now, there will absolutely be a gross undercount of the effects of Covid on American Indian and Alaska Native peoples,” she said. “We have an opportunity to prepare for the next wave.”
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