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Saturday 18 November 2023

NYC Council member who brought gun to rally will have charge dropped


NEW YORK — A gun possession charge against City Council member Inna Vernikov is set to be dropped because there was no proof the gun could fire, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office said Friday.

Vernikov, a Republican, was arrested in October the day after she was filmed wearing a gun at her waist while counterprotesting a pro-Palestinean rally outside Brooklyn College. Newly passed state gun laws specify that it is illegal to carry a gun at a protest.

But Gonzalez wouldn’t be able to prove the charge in this case, his office said.

“The firearm recovered by the NYPD in this case was unloaded and missing the recoil spring assembly, rendering it inoperable, according to the NYPD’s lab report,” spokesperson Oren Yaniv said in a statement. “In order to sustain this charge, it must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the weapon in question was capable of firing bullets. Absent such proof, we have no choice but to dismiss these charges.”

Yaniv said the case will formally be dropped at the next court date, which is currently scheduled for Jan. 24, but may be rescheduled to an earlier date. The decision was first reported Friday by The City.

Vernikov is Jewish and an outspoken advocate of Israel. In a statement provided first to POLITICO, she framed her gun-carrying counterprotest as a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel.

“I’m glad this is behind me and I look forward to the next two years working for my constituents,” she said. “Ever since Hamas has unleashed a massacre on the people of Israel on Oct. 7th, Jewish New Yorkers have been facing an unprecedented rise in hate and violence on our streets and on our college campuses. I will continue to be a fearless fighter against antisemitism and for the public safety of all New Yorkers.”

Vernikov declined to answer whether she had ever fired the gun before, and whether the spring had been removed.

A progressive Democratic colleague, City Council member Chi Ossé, blasted the way “VerniGlock received soft on crime treatment from the NYPD” in a lengthy statement posted to X.

“By failing to hold Council Member Vernikov and the NYPD officers who failed to arrest her on site accountable, we are setting a precedent allowing firearms at protests and college campuses,” he said.

Though she’s a Republican, Vernikov has often found herself aligned with Democratic Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. She met with Adams’ chief advisor, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, just a few days after her arrest — though the meeting had been previously scheduled.

Vernikov posted a photo of the two of them to X, writing, “I can say with unequivocal certainty that we have true friends in this administration.”

Vernikov’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, is also an ally of the mayor and hosted a campaign fundraiser for him in September.

Carrying a gun and counterprotesting against pro-Palestinean students, did not appear to hurt Vernikov politically in her southern Brooklyn district covering neighborhoods including Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach.

She won reelection last week with 67 percent of the vote.



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House GOP launches FDIC investigation


House Republicans on Friday said they were beginning an investigation into FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg and allegations of workplace misconduct at the agency, ramping up political pressure on the top bank regulator.

GOP lawmakers led by House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) told Gruenberg in a letter they will use the panel's "full arsenal" of oversight and investigative tools, including compulsory measures, "to ensure that our banking system remains safe and sound.”

"Chairman Gruenberg, the viability of your leadership is in question," they said.

The announcement followed Wall Street Journal reports that described a long-running toxic work environment at the FDIC and said Gruenberg and other agency leaders did little to address the behavior.

The House Republicans launching the investigation, including Reps. Bill Huizenga of Michigan and Andy Barr of Kentucky, told Gruenberg they were concerned that the FDIC under his leadership lacks the ability to address the problems revealed in the stories.

“Our concern is underscored by your nearly 20-year tenure in all aspects of leadership and management at the FDIC, including serving twice as chairman,” they said. “It has failed to instill the confidence the public needs to know their banking system is and will be safe and secure in the future.”

The FDIC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Gruenberg told lawmakers at oversight hearings this week that he was concerned by the initial WSJ revelations. The FDIC is launching its own review.



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Friday 17 November 2023

Tensions over Israel-Hamas war threaten to engulf CA Democratic convention


California Democrats will confront profound divides in their party over the Israel-Hamas war this weekend as fallout from the conflict threatens to engulf its convention in Sacramento.

Party officials have promised enhanced security in anticipation of demonstrations outside the convention hall and potential disruptions inside. But many attendees are approaching the event with already-frayed nerves. Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Los Angeles-area Democrat who co-chairs the Legislative Jewish Caucus, said he’s received calls from Jewish activists worried about their physical safety.

“Nobody wants to get punched in the face at the Democratic Party convention,” Gabriel said.

Democratic leaders and grassroots activists expect their gathering to have the same charged atmosphere that has overtaken college campuses, community demonstrations, and even the U.S. Capitol complex in the weeks after Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza. Tensions escalated Wednesday night after Capitol Police clashed with pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a chaotic melee.

Underneath the immediate anxieties of the weekend lies a more existential angst. The spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents has caused stalwart Democrats to reexamine their relationship with the party and longtime political allies. While some key parts of the party’s multiracial coalition are grateful for emphatic support for Israel from top Democratic leaders such as President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom, others have been deeply disappointed. Generational and ideological fissures could have tangible effects on next year’s elections, including the presidential race and California’s marquee Senate contest.

“The divide on this issue is really fundamental,” said Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-San Jose), who, at 28, is the state’s youngest legislator. “It's about the prioritization of taxpayer dollars, the philosophy of war and the military industrial complex. That runs very deep and that's why so many people feel very strongly about this one.”

The fissures among rank-and-file Democrats are less visible among most California elected officials, who are aligned with Israel and synced with the Biden administration’s vocal support of the country’s right to defend itself. The president has rejected calling for a cease-fire, which advocates say is necessary to prevent further carnage, though he has pressured Israel for brief pauses of military operations for humanitarian purposes.

Even without cues from Biden, some legislators have expressed their support for Israel in deeply personal terms. Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) tweeted photos of a 2018 trip he and other lawmakers took to the Israel-Gaza border, where they visited Nahal Oz, a kibbutz that was attacked on Oct. 7.

“They can tell first-hand stories about being there — how people have these safe rooms and bomb shelters,” said Marc Levine, a former Sonoma County Democratic assemblymember who is now a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, polls found Americans strongly backed Israel. One Quinnipiac survey showed sympathy for the Jewish state, which the pollster first started tracking more than 20 years ago, was at an all-time high. But there has been a marked shift as the war in Gaza continues, with a growing number of Americans saying Israel’s military response has been too heavy-handed. A majority now support a cease-fire, according to a recent survey by Reuters/Ipsos.

Younger Americans — who typically align closely with Democrats — have been especially critical of both Israel and Biden’s handling of the conflict. Perhaps the most visible signs of the generational split are on college campuses, where California students have led scores of protests against not just Hamas' initial attacks but also Israel's ongoing ground invasion of Gaza and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

Many protests have been peaceful. But California universities have reported threats of violence and harassment against students over their support for Israelis or Palestinians, most recently in a letter from UC leaders last week. Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped into the disputes Monday by calling on public college leaders to more decisively enforce campus safety policies to curb antisemitic and Islamophobic targeting of students over their beliefs.

On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee was evacuated after protesters calling for a cease-fire blocked the doors. A violent scuffle ensued, with Capitol Police and demonstrators blaming each other for the aggression.

Lee, the 28-year-old state lawmaker from San Jose, said his generation’s opposition to military intervention was shaped by the catastrophes of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“For a lot of people, all we remember of the war on terror is its failure,” he said.

The fault lines are also ideological. Moody Zahriya, a Palestinian American activist and former chair of the state party’s Arab American caucus, credited the party’s left flank with championing the Palestinian cause, even when Democratic politicians have not.

“They're the ones who have expressed very clearly that you can't be a progressive except on the Palestinians’ right to emancipation and freedom,” Zahriya said. With more and more Democrats self-identifying as progressives, “it's really important to show that the majority of progressives in California are not totally politically aligned with the Democrats that are elected in the Capitol.”

Zahriya said he feels at odds with the leaders of his party, most of whom have not supported a ceasefire, though his degree of frustration varies. While he is disappointed by Newsom and his hastily scheduled visitto Israel last month, he gives the governor credit for work he has done to combat Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination. But Zahriya believes Biden is permanently damaged in the eyes of Arab American voters, particularly after the president said he had “no confidence” in the death toll numbers put out by the Hamas-run government in Gaza.

“Gavin Newsom's perspective or his opinion didn't negate the Palestinian voice or existence,” Zahriya said. “I don't think people realize the mistake that Joe Biden made with his comments.”

Some advocacy groups want to see Biden pay a political price and are encouraging Muslim and Arab Americans not to vote in next year’s presidential election. The potential of withheld votes would not likely affect the outcome in deep-blue states like California but could be significant in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab American population.

The conflict could also cause ripples in California’s race for U.S. Senate. It has factored heavily into Rep. Barbara Lee’s campaign ever since she called for a cessation in military action the day after the Hamas attack.

Lee’s early call for a cease-fire has since prominently factored into her campaign for Senate, where she lags behind fellow California Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter. It is one of the biggest disagreements she has with her Democratic rivals, who do not support a cease-fire, and it gives her an opportunity to remind voters of her lone opposition to war in Afghanistan more than 20 years ago — a stance that made her a progressive darling.

The three representatives will be in Sacramento for the convention, where Democrats will be doling out coveted endorsements. It takes 60 percent of votes to secure the party’s backing and with three candidates in the race, it will be difficult to clear that threshold. The candidates, who will be out and about in the event hall hoping to charm the delegates, are expecting spirited encounters with convention-goers about the issue. All of the campaigns said the ruckus at the DNC has not changed their plans to attend.

The state party’s handling of the conflict has already fomented progressive frustration.

Progressive caucus Chair Fatima Iqbal-Zubair said she was blocked from using official party channels to disseminate a statement that condemned both the Hamas assault and Israeli abuses. Iqbal-Zubair faulted an official platform that she said is overly shaped by insiders aligned with party leaders.

“If our party can’t stand up for basic human rights, even when we’re being very even-handed, who are we as a party?” Iqbal-Zubair said.

A spokesperson said party communication — including those from caucuses — must be in line with its platform.

The war will loom over most of the weekend’s proceedings, even as state party rules will likely quell any fight about a formal resolution over the issue on the convention floor. That’s because no proposed language was introduced by the required deadline: 30 days ahead of the event.

But delegates expect tension over the Israel-Hamas conflict will likely spill into the convention hall in the form of protests and heated outbursts. Several protests and vigils on both sides are also expected to be held outside, near the state Capitol.

Party activists are famously farther to the left as a group than Democratic voters. But the anticipated friction at the convention reflects a broader unsettledness throughout the state.

A spate of unnerving crimes has put communities throughout California on edge. In Los Angeles, there have been a number of high-profile incidents, including a demonstration where a Jewish man died after an altercation with a pro-Palestinian demonstrator. In Palo Alto, a Muslim student at Stanford University was injured in a hit-and-run that is being investigated as a hate crime.

The volatile atmosphere has left Gabriel, the Los Angeles-area lawmaker, feeling deeply unnerved, noting his son’s Jewish preschool now has armed security and metal detectors. More hurtful, he said, was seeing people he once considered political allies react callously about the victims of the Hamas’ attack. But while he grapples with questions of the safety of Jews in his community, he said he has no doubts about his place in the Democratic Party.

“I must have been 10 years old before I figured out that being Jewish and being a Democrat were separate things,” Gabriel said. “They were so centrally linked in my upbringing. … There is absolutely zero percent chance I'm going to step away from this party and cede control of this party to people who have views that are opposed to ours.”

He has that in common with Zahriya, who still says the Democratic Party is the best political home for Palestinian Americans and their allies.

“There's no space in the Republican Party for them,” he said. “At least in the Democratic Party, we're able to have discourse. Maybe not support from officials, but at least have discourse and talk about our struggle.”

Blake Jones, Jeremy B. White and Dustin Gardiner contributed to this report. 



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What Eric Adams left out of his campaign donor disclosures


NEW YORK — Who’s raising money for Eric Adams? You won’t find the full answer in his campaign filings.

The New York City mayor disclosed far less about the people bundling donations for his 2021 bid than his rival candidates did that year. And he revealed fewer so-called intermediaries than when he first ran for Brooklyn borough president in 2013.

At best, the approach casts doubts on Adams’ commitment to transparency.

At worst, it masks activity by questionable contributors — a possibility that has placed Adams and his campaign in federal investigators’ crosshairs and led to the seizure last week of his electronic devices.

“It could be that you want to keep people who, for whatever reason, aren’t supposed to be raising money for you from being known,” said Basil Smikle, a former New York State Democratic Committee executive director who managed Adams opponent Ray McGuire’s campaign, in an interview.

Adams’ team stressed that they’re operating within the rules on intermediaries.

But federal authorities are now taking a fine-toothed comb to Adams’ campaign finances.

And there is overlap between their probe into whether his team colluded with the Turkish government to accept illegal foreign contributions and the flags raised by the New York City Campaign Finance Board. The board, as part of a routine audit, is scrutinizing suspected, unreported intermediaries, the city’s term for bundlers collecting campaign cash from multiple people that can then be used to earn public matching funds.

The May 2021 fundraising event with KSK Construction employees, for one, is being scrutinized by federal authorities as well as local auditors, The City reported.


“Public reporting of intermediaries provides the public with a more complete view of the role that money plays in city elections,” said Campaign Finance Board spokesperson Tim Hunter, stressing the importance of disclosing intermediaries — even as he declined to speak specifically about the routine audit of Adams’ bid.

Asked about their disclosures, Adams campaign attorney Vito Pitta said in a statement, “We follow the law to the letter. If someone does not meet the definition of an intermediary, it would be inaccurate to identify them as such.”

In 2021, Adams reported four intermediaries who raised $37,520 for his ultimately successful campaign for mayor — a fraction of the $10.8 million he brought in as a whole — according to Campaign Finance Board records.

Compare his disclosures to other candidates for mayor that cycle.

Kathryn Garcia’s filings showed 40 intermediaries who raised $270,630; Scott Stringer recorded 27 intermediaries raising $128,220, with one bundler meticulously reporting just $100 from five donors; and McGuire listed two intermediaries raising $138,630, even though he didn’t take public matching funds.

Or compare Adams’ 2021 campaign for mayor to his 2013 campaign for Brooklyn borough president, when he reported 26 intermediaries.

The lack of transparency opens the door for events like the one that KSK Construction hosted in Brooklyn in May 2021. The company and the Turkish American Business Network invited guests and asked them to donate, according to Gothamist, but nobody involved was listed as an intermediary. Any relative impact a well-connected bundler there may have had on Adams’ campaign isn’t reflected in his records.

KSK Construction is part of the investigation into whether Adams’ campaign conspired with the Turkish government and whether a so-called straw donor scheme helped it funnel in foreign cash, The New York Times reported.

Neither Adams nor his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, whose Brooklyn home was raided by the FBI on Nov. 2, have been charged or accused of wrongdoing.



Adams’ team stresses that their practice on intermediaries is technically above board and argues that campaign-hosted events helped to encourage smaller-dollar and first-time contributors.

“None of those inquiries were flagged as possible straw donors,” campaign spokesperson Evan Thies said of warnings from the Campaign Finance Board. “The inquiries were about possible unreported intermediaries, of which there were none required to be reported.”

The more opaque approach appears unique to Adams’ 2021 campaign.

Frank Carone, a Brooklyn power broker who served as Adams’ chief of staff, was disclosed in Campaign Finance Board records as an intermediary for Stringer in 2021 but not for Adams, though Carone is widely known to be a prolific Adams fundraiser.

Joel Eisdorfer, now a senior adviser to the mayor, was an intermediary for Adams’ 2017 borough president campaign but not for his mayoral one four years later.

Donors and fundraisers interviewed by POLITICO revealed a multitude of ways to legally avoid the requirement to list intermediaries and bundlers.

For example, there is a broad view that supporters hosting parties at their homes don’t have to be disclosed as intermediaries, though they must if they spend more than $500. Events where the bill is footed by the campaign or gatherings where contributors donate digitally rather than with physical checks also are seen as loopholes.


“It probably should be looked at,” New York City-based election lawyer Sarah Steiner said of updating the law. “It may be a case where technology outstrips statutory language.”

Even if it’s not legally required, being listed as an intermediary feels more open and in line with the spirit of the law, bundlers for other 2021 mayoral candidates told POLITICO.

“As a general matter, it seems it’s good for democracy if people know who is supporting the candidates and how significant the support is,” said Elizabeth Glazer, a former Bill de Blasio administration official disclosed by Kathryn Garcia’s 2021 campaign as an intermediary.

Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.



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We Have a UFO Problem. What We Don’t Have (Yet) Is a Serious Answer.


The U.S. government has studied UFOs on and off now for 80 years, dating back to the dawn of the “flying saucer” age in 1947, when an Idaho businessman flying near Mount Rainer reported seeing bright saucer-like objects moving through the skies at tremendous speeds. It was hardly the first time humans spotted strange things in the sky — just a few years earlier, World War II pilots over Europe reported being chased by glowing green balls that came to be known as “foo fighters” — but the “flying saucers” caught the public’s imagination and launched a fascination that continues to this day.

Back then, at the dawn of the Cold War, the Pentagon launched three successive secret programs — known as PROJECT SIGN, GRUDGE and BLUE BOOK — that ran for decades without ever solving the mystery of what UFOs actually are. Neither did a secret CIA study panel in the 1950s, congressional hearings in the ’60s, and other assorted efforts over the years. Nor, most recently, did a series of classified Pentagon projects in the 2000s and 2010s, sponsored by Harry Reid and run by Las Vegas business titan Robert Bigelow, known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program that was first reported by POLITICO and The New York Times in 2017.

Now, amid renewed public fascination and lawmaker interest in the years since AAWSAP was publicized, the Pentagon, the intelligence community and NASA have recommitted — albeit somewhat half-heartedly — to studying what the government now calls UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, a term it introduced both to decrease the giggle factor of UFOs as well to acknowledge the possibility that not every UFO is actually either flying or a physical object. Ironically, it’s the second such rebranding: It was actually the early Air Force efforts of GRUDGE and BLUE BOOK, in part, that helped to popularize the very term “UFO,” which was intended to reduce the giggle factor of “flying saucers” and make witnesses feel more comfortable coming forward to talk.

The truth across all those decades, military projects, commissions, reports and hearings is that the vast majority of UFO sightings are easily identified and dismissed. They’re a mix of confusion about ordinary astronomical events (the planet Venus represents a huge chunk of UFO sightings), normal aviation events (planes flying in formation at night that look to an observer like a giant triangular craft), or what the intelligence community in a recent report called “clutter,” e.g., sky trash.

But there’s always been a stubborn percentage of UFO and UAP sightings that can’t be dismissed as known phenomena or technology. Depending on the exact data set and timespan, the percentage of true “unknown unknowns” ranges from around 5 percent up to 20 percent. No one knows what those sightings actually are. Put another way: There appear to be true UFOs and UAPs, mysteries we can’t solve. In recent years, repeated congressional hearings have had Pentagon officials and experienced naval aviators testify they have encountered craft or phenomena that appear to defy known physics, technologies more advanced than anything the U.S. understands.


That feels like, to me, a subject worthy of serious study. And in a country that spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on national defense, homeland security and intelligence, it’s weird to me that the U.S. government doesn’t take these questions more seriously.

After having spent two years researching the government’s history with UFOs, what surprises —and disappoints — me is the ho-hum response of the military, government and intelligence community to actually solving the mystery of UFOs. The military efforts have always been low-level and low-budget — a handful of personnel, based for decades at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. They never received the scientific or investigative resources they asked for, and despite numerous proposed plans over the years for wider, better data collection and the deployment of more advanced instruments, the government always failed to act on them. Funding from NASA and the federal government to support what’s known as the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” has amounted to a mere pittance over the last 40 years —appropriations usually measured in the six or seven figures that, across decades, don’t even equal the cost of a single fighter jet — comparatively tiny sums that have frequently fallen victim to cheap congressional funding stunts as small-minded lawmakers question whether we should care about the rest of the universe at all.

To me, there’s a clear blueprint for what a serious governmental effort to study UAPs would look like — five hallmarks of a project that could deliver real advances and new knowledge about UFOs and UAPs.


First, the project needs to be removed from the realm of the military and intelligence. While some chunk of this conundrum is likely unknown technologies and thus national security-related, the most interesting answers probably will come around questions of science and our understanding of the world around us. The Pentagon’s approach across 80 years has been myopic in its focus on “Is this a threat or not?” The question that consumed the first decade of UFO studies in the 1940s and 1950s, at the dawn of the Cold War, was: Are UFOs secret Soviet craft being built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists? Once the military ruled out that possibility, it simply lost interest in finding other possible answers.

Second, any serious effort must be international and cooperative. Too often, we treat UFOs as if they’re a US-only fascination, but the truth is UFOs have appeared the world over and there’s surely much we have to learn from reports and sightings elsewhere. Relatedly, and third, it must be open and transparent. Too often, ufology — like The Washington Post slogan about democracy — dies in darkness. Government secrecy and international geopolitics have kept some of the most intriguing sightings from being solved. One of the most intriguing and famous sightings during the Cold War happened inside the Soviet Union — a September 1977 appearance in the sky of a bright, glowing jellyfish-shaped object, known as the Petrozavodsk phenomenon. It had puzzled Soviet scientists but was quickly solved by American military personnel, who recognized the light and shape as part of a Soviet ballistic missile test that had been hidden from Soviet scientists by their own government. As The Moscow Times wrote later, “It appears that the rigid compartmentalization of information in the Soviet Union prevented anyone in Russia from connecting the dots sooner.”

Fourth, we must build an effort that’s data-based and instruments-based. Our data on the UFO sightings people see and report is almost worthless; it’s too haphazard, incomplete, and unreplicable. This was one of the key messages of this summer’s congressional hearings. As Ryan Graves, the executive director of the organization Americans for Safe Aerospace, told the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs in July, “My recommendations would be to make that a sensor-centric operation in order to make it as objective as possible.” Instead, we should look to the model of efforts like the Galileo Project, led by Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb, to map and study the sky on a comprehensive, routine basis to establish a better baseline of what’s strange and what’s not. (Just in recent weeks, Galileo has started the first-ever UAP observatory on the roof of the Harvard astronomy building.) As Loeb said to me last week, “Trust in data. People are a waste of time.”



Finally, we need to build something long-term and sustainable; SETI and UFO efforts time and time again over the last eight decades have fallen apart because they’re small-scale, reliant on a single key person or two, and succumb to shifting priorities, funding and personnel. We shouldn’t expect quick answers and shouldn’t lose interest in a year or budget cycle or two.

So what would a serious UFO and UAP effort find? The truth is that there are important, meaningful and world-transforming answers we would likely uncover here even if we never discover an alien spacecraft from Alpha Centauri buzzing the USS Nimitz on a random Tuesday.

The spies and analysts who work in earthly intelligence always try to draw distinctions between secrets and mysteries; their realm and strength, they say, is primarily in uncovering secrets — knowable facts purposefully concealed from public view. (The capabilities of the latest Chinese hypersonic weapon, for example, is a secret; how the Egyptians built the pyramids is a mystery.) Much of the story and history of the popular culture, media and governmental focus on UFOs has been trying to understand where that critical line is between knowable secrets and unknown mysteries: How much of the UFO phenomena is attributable to secret human technology or visiting extraterrestrial activity versus simple physics, meteorology and astronomy that we just don’t yet fundamentally understand?

UFOs and UAPs surely continue to confound us, in part, because we know so little about the world around us. As much as we now know about meteorology, astronomy, the heavens and physics, it’s worth remembering how new (and still evolving) much of that knowledge truly is. Most of the core principles we have uncovered about physics, time, space and astronomy have been discovered in just a human lifetime or two. In fact, before you even get to the mysteries of space, much of our understanding of our own planet is startlingly new in historic terms.

Western scientists have only known about the existence of gorillas, our closest living relative, for about 150 years; before 1847, reports of their sightings were dismissed as stories of a mythical creature akin to a yeti or a unicorn. The first dinosaur was discovered and identified in 1824, and it’s effectively only been in my lifetime that we’ve come to recognize they were wiped out in an asteroid collision and that many dinosaurs were feathered. Giant squids existed as a myth for thousands of years, traceable to Aristotle and ancient Greece, until a French ship actually caught one in 1861, and it wasn’t until 2004 that biologists actually spotted one in its natural habitat. My high school geology teacher, Mr. McGraw, would remind us that the theory of plate tectonics — now widely understood as the way the entire Earth moves — wasn’t even proven when he himself was a student. We still know less about the bottom of the oceans than we do the surface of the moon. “There is a tendency in 20th-century science to forget that there will be a 21st-century science,” J. Allen Hynek, one of the world’s most influential astronomers and ufologists said, “and, indeed, a 30th-century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different.”

In 2022, ufologist Jacques Vallée — now 82, the author of a dozen books on “the phenomenon,” and after investigating some 500 cases personally — told WIRED he still wonders what UFOs really are and is more convinced than ever the prophecy he wrote in his diary as a teen will now likely come true: “I will probably die without seeing any solution to this immense problem.”


The truth is that there is almost certainly not one single answer to the mystery of UFOs or UAPs. The truly “unexplained” cases — that is, the cases that actually puzzle military personnel and experienced scientists, not counting all those that are easily dismissed as mistaken planes, Venus or the like — is almost surely a pie chart made up of various-sized slices of four (or more!) answers, ranging from the mundane and terrestrial to the truly extraordinary.

The first two categories of “unsolved” sightings are probably true UFOs and surely have human, terrestrial explanations: They’re as-yet-unidentified advanced military technologies, e.g., drones from Russia, China and Iran, or “sky clutter,” trash and weird stuff that floats around unnoticed and we don’t generally bother monitoring. This is how we ended up this past winter shooting down the Chinese spy balloon — then, once we knew what to look for, realizing there had been other such spy balloons — and then, once we were paying attention to strange things, ended up in quick succession using quarter-million-dollar missiles and the world’s most advanced fighter jets to shoot down three more “UFOs” that might very well have been nothing more threatening than a weather balloon from an Illinois hobbyist club, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade.


The other two categories of “unsolved” cases are the UAPs, that is, phenomena we don’t yet understand — as-yet-unknown or little-understood meteorological, astronomical and atmospheric phenomena, like ball lightning, plasma, St. Elmo’s Fire, and a whole bunch of other weird and wonderful quirks of our universe that we need to solve and identify. For instance, scientists are still trying to figure out what “ball lightning” really is; it seems to be responsible for some puzzling UAP sightings over the years and has been a mystery since the time of the Greeks. A 2019 paper in the journal Optik by Russian scientist Vladimir Torchigin theorized that ball lightning might be light photons trapped in spheres of air, akin to a very weird soap bubble.

And then we get to the fourth category where, I believe, the most extraordinary mysteries lie. These answers will only emerge as our knowledge of physics itself evolves and lets us look anew at what’s happening in our world that we don’t understand — inter-dimensional or time-traveling visitors, wormholes, extraterrestrials or something even weirder, what one official once called the astronomical truths that are “stranger than the strangest fiction.” It’s easy here, again, to think we know more than we do. As Harvard’s Loeb points out in his recent book Interstellar, when French nun Lucile Randon died earlier this year, the world’s oldest person at aged 118, the entire understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics had occurred during her lifetime.

Imagine what we will learn about physics in the next human lifespan — or the next 500 years or the next 10,000 years if we have the chance. Just this summer, for example, scientists found for the first time that the universe around us is roiled by gravitational waves that bend space-time. Italian astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli has a new book arguing for the possibility of “white holes,” a theory that attempts to answer what happens at the center of a black hole; he theorizes the black hole “bounces,” almost like a basketball, time is reversed and everything that the black hole swallowed then reemerges. We’ve never seen a “white hole,” but as he points out, black holes existed only as a theory until relatively recently. (As late as 2000, when he was beginning a new academic role, Rovelli recalls his boss asking him if he really thought black holes existed at all.)


We need to be humble about how much weirder the world and universe around us likely is. As British biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote nearly a century ago, “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

I believe our government should be more interested in this “queerer world” than it is — in part, because this quest for understanding will help us recognize why protecting and prolonging human civilization matters.

This, to me, is an important part about the search to solve UAPs: The hope, optimism and wonder that can come from what we have to learn here still. We have so much left to learn, if we have the chance and can manage our way through the next fraught period of human existence. The lifespan of the average species on Earth is about five million years, meaning that if we take care of ourselves and our planet (big “ifs” to be sure), we may have not just hundreds or thousands of years of advancing knowledge ahead of us, but millions. Perhaps, somewhere along that way, there will be a fundamental principle or discovery that will render most UAPs banal —or, conversely and perhaps even more likely, there’s a fundamental principle or discovery yet to be made that will render UAPs truly extraordinary, visitors from the future, past, far-away, or even other dimensions, science that we can’t even contemplate today.

Determining the line between science fiction and science fact has always been the core of the UFO story, a key part of what’s attracted generations of both amateur and serious ufologists to study the sky. As Philip Morrison, one of the inventors of the SETI field, said, “Either we’re alone in the universe or we’re not, and either possibility boggles the mind.”




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Thursday 16 November 2023

New Hampshire sets Jan. 23 primary, putting Dems out of compliance


CONCORD, N.H. — There’s finally a date for New Hampshire’s 2024 presidential primaries: Jan. 23.

The long-awaited announcement from Secretary of State David Scanlan on Wednesday firms up Republicans’ nominating calendar and officially puts the state out of compliance with Democrats’ preferred voting order.

“New Hampshire has held the first-in-the-nation presidential primary election for over 100 years.” Scanlan said at the State House in Concord, flanked by both the Republican and Democratic state party chairs. “And we will vigorously defend it.”

Based on the GOP calendar, Jan. 23 was the date widely expected. It’s just over a week after Iowa’s Jan. 15 caucuses — enough time for New Hampshire to bask in the flood of post-Iowa campaigning. And it’s more than a week before South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 3, keeping in line with New Hampshire law that requires the Granite State hold its primary a week before any similar contest.

President Joe Biden and top Democrats wanted South Carolina — a more diverse state that propelled him to the nomination in 2020 — in the leadoff spot for their 2024 calendar. New Hampshire was supposed to vote second on a shared date with Nevada.

But Scanlan and other Republicans who control state government long said they wouldn’t bend to Democrats’ demands.

“Using racial diversity as a cudgel in an attempt to rearrange the presidential nominating calendar is an ugly process,” Scanlan said. “Diversity is not the real issue at play in this debate. At stake is who gets to determine the nominee of a party: the elites on a national party committee by controlling the nominating calendar, or the voters."

Biden didn’t put his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot in anticipation that the state would hold an unsanctioned Democratic contest. His campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, wrote in a letter to state Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley that while the “president wishes to participate” in the primary, he’s “obligated” to follow the DNC calendar he set in motion. Biden’s allies in the state are now running a write-in campaign on his behalf.

But Biden could still lose the now-officially unofficial early contest to a longshot candidate like Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) or Marianne Williamson, both of whom filed for the primary ballot and are campaigning in the state. A loss here would be an embarrassment for Biden en route to his likely renomination. And based on Democratic Party rules passed last year, the state could lose half its delegates if it goes through with an unsanctioned primary.

One other consequence of Democrats moving South Carolina up: Scanlan is shifting New Hampshire’s primary back to January after two cycles of February voting. The 2020 presidential primary was on Feb. 11. In 2016, it was Feb. 9. But for three cycles before that it was in January.

While many observers long expected Jan. 23 to be the date, Scanlan’s announcement now gives the GOP field a firm goalpost.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose sixth-place finish in New Hampshire’s 2016 presidential primary ended his campaign that year, told reporters last week that an earlier contest isn’t a problem.

“No one’s been here more than me, so it’s not like I’m running out of time to make an impression,” Christie said after a town hall in Merrimack last week. “It’s not like the people in New Hampshire won’t have a sufficient [amount of] time to look at me, whether [the primary is] Jan. 23, Jan. 30, Feb. 6.”



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False electors in Nevada who aided Trump in 2020 are under investigation


The attorney general of Nevada is quietly investigating Republican activists and operatives who falsely pledged the state’s six electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In recent weeks, investigators have questioned witnesses about the attempts of the so-called alternate electors to present themselves as viable representatives of the states’ voters, according to three people familiar with the probe. Investigators have also asked about documents those people prepared as part of the effort.

The probe, which until now has not been publicly reported, is the latest sign of potential legal jeopardy for the Republicans who, amid Trump’s bid to cling to power, posed as electors in states that Biden won. False electors in Georgia and Michigan are already facing criminal charges, and an investigation is underway in Arizona.

In Nevada, six Republicans, including state GOP chair Michael McDonald, signed fake certificates on Dec. 14, 2020, falsely declaring themselves to be the state’s duly appointed Electoral College representatives. Trump and his allies then invoked that slate of false electors, as well as similar slates in six other states, as they tried to block Congress’ certification of the election results on Jan. 6, 2021.


Joe Gloria, who was Clark County registrar of voters when Trump’s allies in Nevada tried to reverse the election, told POLITICO that a state investigator asked him questions earlier this month about the fake elector scheme. Another person who was questioned and who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive probe also said investigators asked for details about the fake electors and documents they prepared. And a third person briefed on the probe — also granted anonymity because of its sensitivity — confirmed it is active.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, declined to comment through a spokesperson. Of the six Nevada false electors, four did not respond to requests for comment, one declined to comment and one could not be reached.

Ford has previously sent mixed messages about the potential for a state investigation into the false electors’ actions. In May, he suggested no criminal charges were likely.

“As you all know, I have been silent on Nevada’s fake electors, except to say that the matter was on our radar,” he said in testimony to the state’s legislature. “With it on our radar, we ascertained that current state statutes did not directly address the conduct in question — to the dismay of some, and I’m sure, to the delight of others.”

In that hearing, he testified in favor of a proposal to ban people from acting as fake electors, the Nevada Independent reported. The bill passed through the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature and was vetoed in June by its Republican governor, Joe Lombardo.

Then, in September, Ford appeared to change his tune. “I’ve never said that we’re not going to prosecute,” he told 8 News Now. “It is not that I’ve said that I can do nothing. What I have said, and I’ve been precise with my wording on purpose, is we don’t have statutes in this state that directly address the issue.”

The status of Ford’s probe — including whether he will seek indictments — is unclear. It’s also not clear whether Ford is investigating anyone outside Nevada.

One of the state’s false electors, Jim DeGraffenreid, was in touch with Kenneth Chesebro — a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and a chief architect of the fake elector scheme — in the days before the activists signed the fake certificates, according to the House Jan. 6 select committee report.



“URGENT—Trump-Pence campaign asked me to contact you to coordinate Dec. 14 voting by Nevada electors,” read the subject line of an email that DeGraffenreid sent Chesebro. Chesebro pleaded guilty in Georgia last month to a single felony count after being charged alongside Trump and 17 others with a racketeering conspiracy to overturn the election.

In Nevada and in other states, the people who acted as false electors said at the time that they were doing it as part of a contingency plan because of lawsuits Trump’s team brought challenging the election outcome. But after courts rejected those lawsuits, Trump used the existence of the false electors to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, to block the certification of the results on Jan. 6. Chesebro similarly noted that pro-Trump members of Congress could invoke the false electors as a rationale for upending the results.

On the day that the six Nevada activists met and signed the false paperwork, the state’s Republican Party praised them. “History made today in Carson City, Nevada, @McDonaldNV leads our electors in casting Nevada's 6 electoral votes for the winner of Nevada, @realDonaldTrump and @Mike_Pence!"the party tweeted on Dec. 14, 2020.

In addition to McDonald and DeGraffenreid, the other Nevada Republicans who claimed to be electors for Trump were Jesse Law, the head of the Clark County Republican Party; Durward James Hindle III; Eileen Rice; and Shawn Meehan. Meehan declined to comment. Rice could not be reached. The other four did not respond.

Beyond Nevada, Trump allies posed as electors in December 2020 in six other states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and New Mexico. Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, brought charges against the fake electors there in July. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, charged three of Georgia’s false electors in her racketeering case. And Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general of Arizona, told CNN last week that she is investigating fake electors from her state.



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